Year of the Golden Ape

274 Pages·2001·1.1 MB·English

by  Colin Forbes

Colin Forbes
Year of the Golden Ape
Pan Books
in association with Collins

For Jane
First published 1974 by William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd
This edition published 1975 by Pan Book Ltd,
Cavaye Place, London SW10 9PG
in association with William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd
19 18 17 16 IS 14 13 12
© Colin Forbes 1974
ISBN 0 330 24627 5
Made and printed in Great Britain by
Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or
otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the
publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which
it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser

Contents
Part One: The terrorists
Part Two: The hi-jack
Part Three: The San Francisco experience
Part one The terrorists

1

In January two major assassinations took place in the Middle East. The new,
thirty-year-old King of Saudi Arabia was murdered as he made love to one of his
numerous wives, skewered through the back so savagely as he lay prone that the
knife blade penetrated the body of the girl beneath him, piercing her heart. An
alleged cousin promptly assumed nominal power and issued a statement that he
would not rest until Arab troops patrolled the streets of Jerusalem. The statement
reassured everyone east of Suez - it showed that the King's heart was in the right
place, that he was bent on the extinction of the State of Israel.
But the significant figure in this drama was the man who planned it. Sheikh
Gamal Tafak immediately took over the posts of Oil and Finance Minister from
his predecessor, who with so many other moderates had fled the country for his
life. Tafak, a brilliant fanatic, sincerely believed that to recover Palestine for the
Arabs, the oil weapon which chance had placed in their hands must be wielded
ruthlessly. It was from this moment that the power of the sheikhs was really
exerted against the West.
The oil tap was turned off in January - at the height of a savage European winter
- and Tafak himself visited western capitals to inform his nervous hosts that this
time, unlike in 1973, there would be no concessions ...
'The West must no longer support Israel with so much as a glass of water,' he
informed European foreign ministers. 'Until this condition is fulfilled we are
cutting the flow of oil to Europe and America by fifty per cent. We are declaring
a state of blockade...'
Tafak was in London when the gentle, statesmanlike President of Egypt was
assassinated, beaten to death with rifle butts as he slept, by the urgent
hammerblows of young soldiers under the direct orders of Colonel Selim Sherif
who personally emptied his revolver into the already dying president. Within
hours Col Sherif was proclaimed as the new President of Egypt. He reassured the
Cairo mob with a speech from a balcony.
The traitor who sat down with our enemies at the same table is dead. In the West
they call us apes - we will now show them the real power of the ape...'
Sheriff's reference was to an article by an exasperated Washington correspondent
who had dubbed certain autocratic sheikhs as 'golden apes, gold piling up in their
treasuries while their people still roam the desert. . .' Sherif, a clever
propagandist, seized on the phrase and broadened it to include the entire Arab
nation.
What the West had most feared had happened. The moderate Arab leaders who
had struggled valiantly to ease their way forward to cooperation with the rest of
the world had been swept aside, buried. As so often happens when vast power is
there for the taking, the extremists had climbed into the saddle. In London,
shortly after Col Sheriffs balcony speech, Sheikh Gamal Tafak made his own
speech at a City of London banquet - much to the consternation of his hosts.
This time there will be no favoured nations as in 1973. The whole of the West
must suffer as we are suffering in Palestine -where an alien race oppresses our
people, steals their land, turning them into refugees who are stateless persons
without a country, without hope...'
The Year of the Golden Ape had begun...

2

By March the new fifty per cent oil cut was squeezing the life out of Europe,
America and Japan. The price had climbed to thirty dollars a barrel. Gold, the
bellwether of international disaster, was approaching the five hundred dollars an
ounce level. And Sheikh Gamal Tafak was flying back to Jeddah from
Washington, having told the Americans that he could offer no hope of a respite
yet.
For some people it was a nightmare, for others a dream - the destruction of
Israel. For Gamal Tafak, a handsome man with dark hair and a dark fringe of
beard, it was a dream close to realisation. In only a few months the Arab armies -
under the overall command of Col Sherif - would advance and overwhelm the
enemy, occupying his country. The occupation would have to be followed by
stern measures - to persuade three million Israelis to leave Palestine for ever.
The key to Tafak's plan was to immobilise the West at the critical moment, to
make it impossible for them to supply fresh arms to Israel when she was on the
point of extinction. As he looked down from the jetliner, now passing over the
Aegean, Tafak thought how curious it was - that the plan which would make him
the most famous Arab of the twentieth century depended at this stage on two
Europeans - an Englishman - and a Frenchman...

Jean Jules LeCat was forty-two years old, a man with a violent past, an
unpromising present and a hopeless future. He was intelligent enough to know
this, so he was relieved when he was approached secretly by Sheikh Gamal
Tafak's right-hand man in Algiers, Ahmed Riad, one week after his unexpected
release from the Santé prison in Paris. Riad offered him two hundred thousand
dollars to carry out a massacre.
'The English adventurer, Winter, will nominally be in control of the operation,'
Riad explained, 'but you will kill the hostages. We do not think Winter is capable
of such detachment...'
'He is not,' LeCat replied. 'We worked together for two years in the
Mediterranean before I was betrayed and ended up in the Santé. I know Winter.
He is squeamish . ..'
To the average person the proposal might have sounded barbaric, but to LeCat it
was a highly dangerous operation Riad had proposed and one to be undertaken
because the compensation was so high. His violent past made him view the
transaction clinically.
LeCat was the product of a brief liaison between an Arab girl and a French army
captain before the Second World War. When the child was born in Constantine,
Algeria, LeCat took his son away from the girl who was glad to receive a few
hundred francs on condition she never saw the child again. Applying for leave,
Jules LeCat, the father, took the baby back to France.
Its birth was registered in Toulon where LeCat persuaded a girl friend to pretend
to be his wife. A cosmopolitan girl, she was amused by the deception - especially
as LeCat's estranged wife was at that moment living in Bordeaux. A doctor,
apiednoir, was bribed to provide the requisite documentation, and Jean Jules
LeCat became a French citizen.
Brought up by an aunt in Algiers, who was never told the truth - Jules LeCat's
real wife conveniently got herself killed in a motor accident shortly after the
registration of the birth - the boy went into the Army in 1950 when he was
seventeen. His rapid promotion came years later during the ferocious fighting in
Algeria when the Arabs were struggling for their independence.
It was an experience which suited his nature. At twenty-seven he became skilled
at locating terrorists, at laying traps for them, at torturing information out of the
men he caught. He was quickly promoted to captain, his father's old rank. 'To
trap a terrorist you must iearn to think like him' was one of his favourite sayings.
Later, he added a new maxim. 'You must become a terrorist...'
His father died at the height of the terrible war, and on his deathbed he made a
bad mistake. He told Jean Jules the truth about his origins. 'Your mother was an
Arab girl out of the Casbah...'
He got no further because Jean Jules, proud of his French citizenship, despising
the men he captured and tortured as no more than animals, slapped the dying
man hard with the back of his hand. Jean Jules had been two days without sleep
and there was still blood on his jacket from a savage engagement in the hills.
When he recovered from the shock of what his father had told him, the old man
lay dead. He called the doctor, who signed the death certificate without a second
thought; after all, the patient had been dying.
LeCat became even more savage in his battles with the terrorists; from then on
he used his skill as an explosives expert to lace the hillsides with boobytraps. No
farm building, no outhouse, not even an animal's drinking trough was safe to
touch. His commanding officer was impressed with his subordinate's ferocity.
'LeCat, you seem determined to kill every Arab in north Africa...'
'Then, mon colonel, there will be no terrorists left,' LeCat replied.
When De Gaulle decided to give Algeria independence and the OAS, a secret
organisation pledged to keep Algeria French, revolted, LeCat joined it. His
maxim, 'You must become a terrorist', came true. He became one. Had there
been two dozen men like him in Algeria, De Gaulle might have failed. LeCat
turned half Algiers into a minefield, but only half... When the end came he fled
to Egypt to survive.
Speaking fluent Arabic - as well as French and English - LeCat merged with his
Egyptian background, changing his name and telling everyone how he had
worked against the OAS. He earned a little money - and the friendship of certain
Arabs, including a certain Ahmed Riad - by going to Tel Aviv and spying on the
Israelis. He also earned a reputation for being a good man to send on a killing
party.
For ten years LeCat drifted, living in the Middle East, in Quebec, in America,
engaged in various criminal activities, never staying anywhere so long that he
was caught. In 1972 he returned to the Mediterranean where he joined the
Englishman, Winter, in smuggling operations. For two years he had a profitable
existence, then he was arrested in Marseilles, tried for smuggling and serious
assault against the police, sentenced to a long term of imprisonment in the Santé
prison in Paris.
Released later under mysterious circumstances, he came out of prison to be met
by an Algerian who provided him with an air ticket to Algiers, a sum of money,
and the address of a café where he met Ahmed Riad.
Riad explained the nature of the vast operation to create an incident which would
outrage the West. What Riad did not explain was the ultimate plan whereby
Sheikh Gamal Tafak, exploiting the outcry from the West, would persuade every
Arab oil producer to cut the oil flow a second time - and this time to zero. Then,
with the West hamstrung, the way would be open for the final, annihilating
attack on Israel.
It was in March, in what came to be known as the Year of the Golden Ape, that
LeCat put into operation the first part of the plan to create the terrible incident
which would appal and outrage the West. He went about organising the
production of a nuclear device.

On March 10, France, like so many other countries, was half-paralysed by the
huge Arab oil cut when Jean-Philippe Antoine, a small, self-contained man of
thirty-five, walked confidently along a street in Nantes in western France.
Stopping, he glanced up and down the street, then pressed the bell on a dentist's
front door. The door opened a few inches, a pair of eyes stared at him. The
Frenchman's confidence cracked.
'For God's sake, let me in ...'
The pair of eyes disappeared and the door opened wider, just wide enough for
him to step inside. Standing in the hallway, Antoine blinked in the gloom. At ten
o'clock on a March morning it was still only half-light inside the old house; the
lamp had not been turned on as an energy-saving measure. The front door closed
behind him, the key turned in the lock. Antoine's lips trembled as he gazed at the
short, wide-shouldered man who had let him in.
'Surely we should hurry?' Antoine demanded. 'Which way do I go?'
'You are nervous?' LeCat lit a Gitane and for a few seconds Antoine caught sight
of his face in the match-flame; a cruel face, hardened by grim experience few
men have to endure in their lifetime, a moustache curved down almost to the
comers of a wide mouth, the eyes half-closed against the match-flame, eyes
which calmly studied Antoine who had not replied. 'Oui, you are nervous, my
friend. Go down the hall and through the doorway. The man who is waiting there
will take you to the car.'
'I've changed my mind...' The effort the words caused Antoine made them come
out in a near-hysterical rush. 'I can't go on with this thing.'
'But you have to ...' LeCat blew smoke through his nose. 'You see, they are dead
already - in there ...'
Gesturing towards a half-open door leading off the hall, LeCat gripped Antoine's
arm. 'Give me everything in your pockets and then move!' He took the identity
card Antoine extracted from his pocket, grabbed the wallet, replaced the card
inside it. He took a key-ring, a notebook, a pen. 'Now, that ring on your finger...'