by Adam Hall
Stop.
Yes, that’s the one. I’ve got it now.
An ash-grey smudge on the photograph.
Tango Victor.
Somewhere below me now but very difficult to believe because Loman had said flexible and Chirac had said fifty-fifty and that meant the margin of error was horribly wide and although the wreck of the twin-prop short-haul freighter was certainly within a few kilometres of the point where I was due to come down I might never reach it, never see it, because this was the desert.
Look, they don’t do this to you without thinking about it first: even those arthritic old tarts in London aren’t as bad as that. When they send a ferret down the hole they don’t tell him much but they’ve done it with me so often that I’ve managed to pick up the odd clue about the way they think. It wasn’t lack of planning in the advanced pre-briefing phases that had left us with a critical margin of error at the access point, and it wasn’t indifference to the question of my survival or otherwise that had let them send me out here where the chance of life was small. They just had to do what they could.
This was the best they could do, not the worst. This was all they could do, instead of nothing.
They hadn’t been able to turn this one down. I think they’d probably tried but the pressure had been too great and they’d been forced to set up the op. I’d only known it to happen twice before since I’d been at the Bureau and in each case the decision-making had been at Prime Minister level.
He wished to inform me personally that your mission is the key to a critical situation of the highest international proportions.
If he didn’t talk like a bloody schoolmistress he could have put it rather more concisely. This one’s shit-or-bust.
We call it a one-shot mission and it means if you don’t pull it off the first time you don’t get another go. You can refuse it if you like but if you accept it you’ve got to play it their way and put up with panic directives and dodgy communications and makeshift access lines and do what you can with what you’ve got and somehow get in there and do the job and bring back the goods. It means more than just the increased risk of your losing your life: it means that if you can’t complete the mission it’s the last chance anyone’s going to get. There are various factors governing this but the most common one is time.
Time governed the Tango mission. In London they’d been pushed for time but they’d set it running as best they could and provided superlative access lines right into the target area: my final approach to the objective was being made invisibly and in perfect silence. The margin of error was deadly but if they’d narrowed it the invisibility and the silence would have had to go: we would have brought a powered aircraft and searched the area with flares and landing-lights and made a direct drop on to the target but I wouldn’t have had five minutes to work in before the opposition arrived.
The margin of error had been unavoidable. That didn’t make it any narrower: but it made it more acceptable.
Air spilling from the canopy. Its dark fabric was spread above me, filling the sky. I couldn’t see the supply ‘chute but I believed it was there, following me down, had to believe it was there because if it wasn’t I would already have begun to die.
The senses were coming back and I had the impression that each swing was taking me more and more to one side: the canopy was restless and I could hear the rising sibilance of the airstream through the suspension lines. There was a lateral force operating and this must be the south wind, the Ghibli, that Chirac said he hoped to find blowing when he made his attempt to reach the South 4 strip. It didn’t feel very strong; I wished for him that it would be enough.
Warmth was touching my face and I looked down. The heat of the sands was rising and I reached for the lines and held them, waiting, seeing nothing but knowing that land was near.
Important to remain conscious.
The chances were that I’d hit sand and the impact would be cushioned but if Chirac’s dead-reckoning had been accurate enough to bring me down on a radius of five hundred yards from the centre of the target area I could hit the rock outcrop and if a spur caught one of my shoulders I’d flake out again and that would be dangerous.
The canopy. above me had been blocking my view and when I hit ground and the nylon collapsed I must get an immediate visual fix on the supply ‘chute. I would be able to see it while it was still airborne because when I’d bailed out the airspeed had been 99 kph and Chirac was going to wait five seconds before he released and with a wind-factor common to both drops the supply ‘chute would come down approximately a hundred and fifty metres from where I landed. But if I didn’t see it before it struck ground and the canopy collapsed it would be hidden by the dunes: and I wouldn’t know its direction.
With our bearing of 225° from the radio tower we’d flown with Pegasus directly ahead, and I could see the constellation now but Chirac had made a right-hand bank when I’d jumped and I didn’t know if he’d resumed his course before levelling up to make the second drop or if he’d simply pulled out of the turn and levelled at a tangent. If I didn’t see where the supply ‘chute came down it would mean a search in the dark among the dunes with no certainty of ever finding it.
Warm air against my skin.
The lines whispering: I could feel their fine vibration.
Sudden inundation of optical stimuli and the world filled with contrasts - the far horizon-line where the stars met the rim of the earth and the rising undulations of the dunes blotting it out as I pulled on the lines to break the impact and then went limp and rolled once on my shoulder with the harness wrenching, dragged the release and tried to get up, couldn’t.
Everything kaleidoscopic and the pain like a furnace roaring in my bones, try to see where it is, most important, the high stars sliding down the wall of night and sand in my mouth, get up, not really important yes very, spitting the sand out, a dark shape moving over there where there’s nothing, nothing to mark it, the canopy lowering, lowering, yes got it, the roaring and the red of stars flying, fall this way then, this way, fall with your head towards it and remember, remember when you wake, your head is towards it, the black sand bursting against my face.
Pale fire.
Blue, pale blue fire before my eyes.
A ring of it, a rosary, an annulus of luminescent blue.
The two pointers at right-angles, their blue, it doesn’t take, their blue light trisecting the ring of fire, take long for the brain to seize when it wakes on what it can find, familiar things to facilitate recall, twelve and three, the underside of my wrist lying turned towards my eyes, three o’clock.
Your head is towards it.
Over there. It came down over there.
Three o’clock and all’s well, we have the means to survive.
Got up and it happened again and I became very frustrated and spat out the sand, hanging on all fours like a dog and thinking this won’t do at all, where’s your dignity, now get up and stay there and don’t turn.
Over there.
Note carefully. The high dune to the left, curving to the unequal sided V where it joins the next, the lower one, and the bright star five degrees above it to the right. Observe and absorb.
I had a reference. The gap in the dunes and a star. It was the only known shape here where I was a stranger: it was a kind of temporary home.
It took time to get there. Over an hour. It was more like three hundred metres instead of a hundred and fifty and the directional error was ten degrees and the dunes were dark. I took the parachute with me because later it would make extra shade and I couldn’t leave it behind, the idea wasn’t actually to litter the desert with landmarks, but it took a bit of dragging. I couldn’t fold it and the sand kept getting in it but it did a good enough job wiping out my tracks.
There was a light wind blowing, blowing from Diphda in the south, is it enough for your needs, mon ami? It had blown sand already against the container on that side and the ‘chute was almost covered. The desert hides things from you:
beware.
A rip-string and I pulled it, opening the polyester like a sardine-tin, putting the lid on its back and scooping sand in before the wind could lift it. The 2000CA was on top and I took it out and stood it on the lid and pulled up the telescopic aerial, not hurrying, just a routine movement of the hands and perfectly confident, Loman. was experienced and the only time he’d ever lost a base was in Bangkok and we weren’t there when it was blown and besides she had a gun, the big Colt that Chirac had lent me, hold it with both hands if you want to and be ready for the recoil. And anyway I’d asked Loman not to leave base because one gun wouldn’t be enough if she were alone and they raided the place, feet on the stairs and the door kicked open and the first one going down but after that she’d lose her head and just go on pumping the thing wild with her eyes shut and they’d reach her before the sixth.
Chrome of the aerial shining, the low wind moving its tip.
3 MHz.
Channel 2.
Mike.
Tango.
It sounded strange, a human voice in so desolate a place.
Tango. Tango.
The same stars, these same stars, would be there above the gilded cupolas where the rats ran among the rotting palms. The town would be asleep.
Eyes closing and I opened them again quickly and took a breath, steadying. Fifty-six hours ago I’d got off the plane from Tokyo and the metabolic clock was still trying to get the time right, a feeling of not quite being here, of not being anywhere, just afloat on some kind of tide.
Tango. Tango.
A domed ceiling and a cracked mosaic floor, three faded Arabesque screens and the shabby appurtenances of a fifth-class hotel.
The other end of the lifeline.
What frequencies would you use in this area?
7 MHz for daytime propagation conditions, 3 MHz at night.
Tango. Tango.
The sand blown by the wind, its fine grains hitting the side of the polyester box with a dry whispering, the only answer.
Already in the past hour the sand had almost covered the spread of nylon: in the starlight I could just make out the few dark folds that remained. Soon it would cover the harness, then the box, and then if I went an sitting here like this, like a man in prayer, it would cover me as well, a desiccated mendicant forgotten by his gods as he intoned for their deaf ears the mystic word, until he was buried, grain upon grain, beneath his sins.
Tango. Tango.
One of them would be there. Loman might have had to leave base to contact Chirac or use a phone if the wire had come adrift again on the junction-board or he could have gone down there to the hall to fix it but in that case Diane would be manning the transceiver, and would answer.
The wind gusted, scattering the sand.
A faint gleam on the aerial and the chrome rims of the dials. It was a good-looking set: a matt-black case with a neutral grille and the controls tapered and finely-knurled, the on-off switch recessed so that a chance movement wouldn’t activate it. The illuminated dials were dark.
No adequate excuses. Flight-disorientation, the blast-wave, the general wear-and-tear of getting here alive. Not really adequate.
I put the switch to the “on” position and checked the frequency again at 3 MHz.
Tango.
Tango. Base receiving.
A good signal, loud and clear.
I’m down.
Are you in the target area?
I don’t know.
He waited and I didn’t say anything so he came in again.
Do you have any problem?
Not really.
He waited again.
I wasn’t being very communicative. You’re supposed to volunteer a bit of information, not leave your director to tease it out of you. Thing was, I wanted to go to sleep now.
Was the drop made successfully as concerns bearings?
Oh yes. Put the little bastard out of his misery or he’ll keep you talking all bloody night. On Chirac’s reckoning I’m somewhere near the target, but it’s too dark here to see anything. There aren’t any rocks on the skyline. Going to take a dekko in the morning.
Silence again.
Are you perfectly fit?
What?
Are you in a fit physical condition?
Of course I am.
Bloody sauce. Resented that. I told him:
Listen: there’s a telescopic rifle in Kaifra. Christ sake watch out for it. And the Mercedes is a write-off.
He was thinking about this.
We heard some shots.
Kaifra was a small-oasis town and you’d hear the stuff coming out of .44 Magnum wherever you were.
They were the ones.
You are not wounded?
No. Another thing is that I think there’s more than one network trying to penetrate our operation. Been working a few things out and there’s one or two inconsistencies.
He considered this.
You’re talking about their apparent indecisiveness during the pre-jump phase?
Their inconsistency.
Yes. This has already been the subject of signals with Control but we’re glad to have you confirm.
A pat on the head for a good little ferret, dear Lord you banish me unto the wilderness and the only company you can find for me is Loman’s.
One star, the bright star that had guided me here, was going on and off at intervals and I took note of it.
When will you start looking for the objective?
At dawn.
Not before?
Rather quick.
It’s too dark. Instructions?
On, off. On, off.
It wasn’t the star doing it. I was doing it myself. The star was lying exactly on the horizon and my head kept going down, fatigue, reaction setting in, so the star looked as if it were going on and off.
Silence. He was sulking.
No instructions.
Tango out.
Quick fade of the image: the dome and the arabesque screens.
Mike back into the recessed clip and the switch down and next time don’t forget to turn the bloody thing on when you want to call up base, save a lot of worry, I thought they’d had it, both of them, thought we’d all had it.
‘Loman could do the worrying now. He’d got his executive into the field but the bearings were all to hell and we’d got to cool our heels for another three hours before we could get moving again and in three hours the opposition could make up a lot of ground. There’d been no security blackout for the takeoff from the South 4 strip: London could have sent in a unit of screened ground-staff with a pre-arranged access to facilities but even then there would have been people at South 4 who knew that a glider had gone up, and short of requesting Petrocombine’s co-operation in treating the event as a paramilitary secret it would have been impossible to keep the thing hush. The opposition cells would be routinely combing the area for items of intelligence and if they picked up the news that a glider had been towed airborne they’d want to know where it had landed and if they drew blank at all the local airstrips they’d assume there’d been a desert drop and they’d send for a direction-finding unit, fully urgent, because radio would be the only means of communication between the field and base.
Once the opposition set up a D/Fing operation in a town as small as Kaifra I’d give our base twenty-four hours before it was blown.
There was a sleeping-bag in the container and I unrolled it and threw it down but it was no go: I’d have to make an effort, some kind of effort, to find out if I’d come down anywhere near the target. This before I could sleep.
Even if there were only a thin chance of locating the freighter’s wreckage before first light it was worth having a go because in the night’s cool the sweat-loss and water-intake would be less than a tenth of the quantities produced by the day’s heat.
There was another thing: psychologically I’d been homing-in on the target since they’d shown me the picture of it in London. The smudge on the photograph had bec
ome the subject of intellectual attraction and I felt its influence on me now, stronger than before because it was closer.
It was impossible to judge how far I stood from the nearest dune: I could only see it in two dimensions, its dark spine humped against the stars and breaking the distant skyline. It was less than a thousand yards away but the desert is like the ocean: the chance of death by isolation is immeasurably greater, and values become changed. Go a thousand yards in the dark and you may never come back.
There was a torch among the supplies, with some spare batteries, but I wouldn’t use light for a marker: you learn to conserve, to know the sudden pricelessness of ordinary things. There was a tin mug and I put it upside down on the tip of the aerial and waited for the wind to send it ringing; then I walked to the dune and climbed it.
In the photographs, taken from the near-vertical, the definition of the shale upthrust had been vague, but I would expect a stratified configuration at ground-level in this region, like the rocks near Kaifra, sharp and broken and sloping, distinct from the curvilinear dunes. But I saw nothing like that, though I twice turned full circle. The skyline was uniformly smooth.
Then I began shouting and turned again, my voice going into the distant dark and dying there. Twenty or thirty feet high, the squadron-leader had said, so there’d be an echo from them if they weren’t too far away.
Tang-o … Tang-o Vic-tor …
My feet burying deeper as I turned.
My eyes closed so that I could listen better.
Shouting, turning under the dome of stars.
Tang-o … Vic-tor …
Dying away.
All I could see from the height where I stood, all I could hear, was the margin of error, wide as the endless dunes.
Chapter 11
SIGNAL
A sense of frightening exposure.
Last night there had been the stars, their names known and their order long ago established by the ancients. Now there was nothing. A map had been replaced by a blank sheet of paper. In the dark it had been possible to believe that when morning came I might see familiar shapes, however far away: buildings or trees. Morning had come and I saw nothing.
