Free The Levanter by Eric Ambler Page B

are rarely able to set limits to their aspirations, but he was one of the exceptions. A threat to no one with the power to destroy him, he had accordingly survived.
    Although I would have preferred someone lazier and less alert to deal with, I could have had worse taskmasters than Dr. Hawa. It was clear, from the moment of his promotion, that ministerial office agreed with him. He seemed to smoke fewer cigarettes and was often quite relaxed and amiable. On occasion, over a game of backgammon and with a glass or two of my best brandy inside him, he would even make jokes that were not also gibes. Of course, he could still be unpleasant. When, for the first time, it became evident that the Howell companies abroad were beginning to make worthwhile profits out of the exclusive agencies granted to us under the agreement, I had to listen to bitter sarcasms and veiled threats. Naturally, I had figures to prove that on balance we were still well in the red, but he was invariably difficult about figures. His were always unassailably accurate and complete; everyone else’s were either irrelevant or cooked.
    He had other quirks that made him hard to handle. For instance, you had to be careful with ideas for new projects. It was most dangerous to discuss a possible development with him unless you had already made up your mind that it was something you really wanted. If he liked a new idea he would seize upon it, and after that there was no escape. Almost before you were back in your office there would be a Ministry press release going out announcing the new wonder. From then on, whether you liked it or not, you were committed.
    That, in fact, was how this whole miserable business over the dry batteries started. Dr. Hawa forced me into it.
    It was the same with the electronics project. Under an arrangement made by Dr. Hawa’s Ministry with a trade mission from the GDR, we had to set up a plant to assemble electronic components manufactured in East Germany. We produced telecommunications equipment of various kinds, including highly specialized stuff for the army, as well as small radio and television sets. They gave me an Iraqi manager who had received special training in East Germany to run the plant, but the whole setup was wrong from our point of view. Being labour intensive it was economically unsound anyway, and the military contracts, on which I had thought we might possibly have made money, were dished out to us on a cost-plus basis which was ruinous. With the electronics it was all we could do to break even.
    But the dry-battery project was much worse. That cost me more than money; that became a nightmare.
    Don’t misunderstand, please. I am not blaming Dr. Hawa for everything that happened; I should have been quicker on my feet. What I am saying is that, far from having cunningly planned the battery operation, as some of those scavengers who call themselves reporters have hinted, I tried hard to stop it going forward, not only before it began but afterwards, too.
     
    The thing started purely by accident. It was the year after the Six-Day War with Israel.
    All government ministries everywhere have to send out lots of pieces of paper; it is in the nature of the beasts. One of the pieces regularly sent out by the Ministry of Industrial Development was a list of bulk commodities held in government warehouses and available for purchase. Normally, the list was of no immediate business interest to me, but I used to glance at it sometimes, for old times’ sake, to see what they were asking for tobacco. That was how I came to see this rather unusual item. In one of the Latakia warehouses there were sixty metric tons of manganese dioxide.
    It gave me an idea. Although the ceramics factory was doing extremely well, with production and sales both going up nicely, our stocks, particularly of tile, were building up a trifle faster than we could move them. I had been looking for other lines to manufacture so as to diversify a bit. This stuff