by Adam Hall
For another minute I lay with my eyes open, pinned to the earth’s surface in infinite solitude. It was the sameness of this terrain that appalled: if there had been a range of higher dunes within sight, or a rock or a tree, any kind of feature to break the facelessness here, I could have related with it and arrived at some kind of orientation: I could have noted that it was on my left or on my right, in front of me or behind; and there could have been the idea that if I set out to reach it I might find other features becoming visible beyond it as l approached.
There was nothing.
Nothing to see, nothing to hear. The silence was absolute.
During the night the low wind had died, and my sleeping-bag was only half-covered by drifts of sand; but my tracks to and from the high dune had disappeared. This was the desert, and if a man chose to disturb the perfection of these primeval sands, let it be shown that his passing shall leave no trace.
I drank from one of the five-litre bidons and pressed the sides before screwing the cap on. The sun was a diameter above the horizon and I thought of opening for reception but Loman would only order a change of frequency for daytime conditions and ask if I’d sighted the objective and that wasn’t a question I wanted to hear put into words.
I hadn’t been delaying things since first light but there was a marked reluctance to go and find out the worst: and I could do that by going to the dune over there and climbing it. We don’t mind if London’s policy is to send us in with only a minimum of data but we always know that at any stage of an operation it can take us beyond the point of no return: and that point could already be behind me now.
Edwards had been in this position eighteen months ago in Yugoslavia: in the thick of a direct Control-to-field signals exchange in the final phase of the mission he’d found out by accident that if he failed to reach the objective he’d automatically become expendable - and he’d kicked. We didn’t expect to see him back in London for at least ten years if he were lucky but he’d infiltrated a CIA courier line and did a fast deal with a batch of strict shut documentation and got a flight out of Zagreb with a party of chess-players on a cultural exchange and asked to see Parkis the minute he reached the Bureau and Parkis had flayed him alive and then fired him.
The point Edwards had been trying to make was that it’s all right if an executive fouls up a job and Control throws him to the dogs before he can do any more damage, but it’s not all right for the Bureau to send him out on a Curtain thing without telling him there’s a high risk of his becoming expendable automatically because the mission’s been planned like that.
There’s no middle line we can take on this one. The complexities of an intelligence operation don’t even have a static design: its pattern shifts as the mission progresses, and values are changed hourly. Control can put a man in the field on a routine bugging stint at a pre-summit convention and the whole thing can suddenly hot up and he’s out there trying to handle something so big that if he drops it he won’t survive and all you can blame the Bureau for is not pulling him out for the sake of his own skin.
But that isn’t what the Bureau is for.
Parkis had given us the picture after he’d fired Edwards: Parkis doesn’t like unrest among the ferrets. During the end-phase of the mission it had been decided that the only way to get Edwards right through to the objective was by cutting him off from most of his escape lines and letting the opposition think that no one would attempt this brand of the impossible unless he were a lunatic. To an extent it came off because they withdrew a lot of surveillance and Edwards got through to the signals room of the Hungarian Embassy and was closing on the objective - his actual mission was a cipher-bust near the centre of the Yugoslavian network –when he’d seen what London had done to his escape lines and panicked and got out.
We don’t like Parkis but we thought he was right. All we ask is that the Bureau doesn’t plan a mission that depends on an expendable executive. That, in certain cases, would amount to murder.
In my case there was a fact among the unknown background data that I knew must exist and that I had tacitly accepted when Loman had given me final briefing at the Yasmina. It was obvious, and it was this: if I failed to reach Tango Victor I couldn’t expect to be pulled out of the area. The entry in the book wouldn’t read Mission Failed but Executive Deceased. In most cases it comes to the same thing but there’s a technical nuance because the failure of a big operation creates a lot of depression at the Bureau and it makes the whole thing look a bit better if it can be shown that the executive lost his life in the attempt: it means that no one can say he wasn’t trying hard enough.
London wanted me to find an aeroplane and examine its cargo and if I couldn’t do it they’d want to make it very difficult for anyone else to do it. They’d taken great pains to put me down here in strict hush and if I couldn’t find the objective they wouldn’t allow Loman to make any noise pulling me out.
Understood and accepted.
But it seemed a long way to the top of the dune.
They were Zeiss 22-50’s but I didn’t use them until I’d turned full-circle and looked for the freighter with the naked eye because if I had to use a 22 magnification to pick it up it would mean it was a day’s march distant and the sun was already hot on my skin.
From the low area among the dunes I had looked and seen nothing and from this height I looked and saw nothing but it was infinitely worse: down there the piled waves of sand had limited my range of vision but from here I could see for fifty miles in every direction and still there was nothing. It was a dun-brown seascape, an area so vast that it had no end until it met the sky itself. The silence of it alone was diminishing to the spirit, adding lifelessness to endlessness: the semblance of a seascape, because of this, was only partial: there was no sound here of the wave’s leap or the hiss of spindrift. Silence and stillness together cast the mind beyond the thought of death and held it in awe of this place where life itself had never been.
My shadow alone moved, turning as I turned, its giant pointer lying curved across the dunes.
An instant’s hesitation of the hands, fear of confirming the negative findings of the naked eye, then I raised the binoculars and adjusted the focus to infinity. The red of the spectrum refracted at the edge of the field to leave a glowing ring, and through it passed the flow of images, repeated until they became meaningless: one sand-dune looked like another, and here they were spread in their millions.
After two minutes I had to lower the glasses, mesmerized. The agoraphobia still played in my senses, a hovering dread of exposure that I couldn’t quite keep away as I stood here in the middle of the empty earth beneath the empty sky, a gooseflesh feeling of vulnerability: I was a creature without shelter, without a hiding-place, caught in a trap where the vastness of freedom itself imprisoned me.
I prefer the more natural haunts of my kind, the sooty warrens of the city streets, to this cosmic waste where the grains of sand are unimaginably many.
I turned twice more, full-circle.
At least there would be no more effort needed, now that this point was reached. The reckoning had been wrong, that was all. Somewhere between the Philips tower and the zeros lining up on the computer there had been a mistake made in the figures. The margin of error, mon ami, is even larger than we’d thought.
There was no point in organizing a day’s march: by the law of averages I would be as likely to move away from the wreck of the freighter as towards it. I had a compass but I didn’t know the bearing. If I set off at random the odds against success were precisely three hundred and sixty to one.
Onset of lassitude, euphoria almost. Pain coming back, normal reaction, nothing important to do, can concentrate on the discomfort, crouched on the sand with my back to the heat and the light, here endeth the mission, you can’t win them all. A vague sense of wonder that the sun was perfectly silent, sending this degree of heat over so much distance, you’d expect to hear a roaring, however faint, here where silence could be broken by a g
rain of sand hitting the side of a box.
My shadow humped before me, an insubstantial Buddha.
Try again I’ve tried then bloody well try again.
Lurching about, it’s the sand, you can’t ever get your balance. The red ring flaring at the edge of the field and the dunes flowing through, full-circle. Negative. Take a rest.
A kind of sleep, timeless and with no dream-element recalled, teeming images but so disconnected as to have no significance, then on my feet again and wandering about feeling stronger physically but not really determined about anything, the organism taking care of itself, getting the wind up because the box down there wasn’t very big, forty-eight hours plus reserves and that’s our lot.
Kept bumping my forehead against the eyepieces, sweat running down, awareness of sand in the boots and a thirst beginning, a certain amount of cerebration continuing: the parallax factor critically important because a near dune could block medium-field gaps, be an interesting thing to work out given a man of certain height standing upon a dune of a certain height and given a million dunes, the nearest of them concealing the gaps between those more distant, what proportion of the terrain can he actually observe, and what proportion is hidden from him?
To hell with academic problems: concentrate on the one thing that could just conceivably drag the mission back on its feet and yes, you snivelling little perisher, save our skin.
Parallax.
By lateral movement the observer exposes to view the gaps between distant dunes hitherto concealed by those in the foreground. By bodily rotation he increases this extension of view a hundredfold. Put it like that and it looks fair enough but the wreck isn’t necessarily visible in one of the gaps, it can be lying on its belly full-square behind the highest dune of them all and you can practise your lateral movement and bodily rotation till the heat knocks you flat on your face.
The red ring flaring, the sand flowing through. The shadows changing as I turned from the sun through the south to the west. The sun hanging there in its roaring silence and pouring the sky ablaze across the eastern wastes of the earth until its tide lapped about me, burning.
They are there, the gaps you couldn’t see before: you’re looking at them now but can you tell which they are? You expect to find any difference between one thing and another in this region of the damned where the sun and the wind have driven away identity?
Turn. Keep turning.
Of course this wasn’t the only dune in the Sahara and I got off it and tried another one because a kind of madness was setting in and although I knew about it I decided to ignore it because the organism had taken over a long time ago but it was going to be hard work: it was saying if we don’t find the wreck and finish this job they won’t ever pull us out and we’ll die here so we’re going to climb every dune in the desert till we see it, come on.
Climbed one of them twice, found my own tracks still there, getting rather dodgy, four times down there for a drink of water, not very slaking because it was warm.
The sands flowing like opaque flood-water through the vision-field, the gaps dipping like the lines on an electrocardiograph.
Turn. Keep turning.
Stop.
21°.
Now go down, go down and drink. And open up.
Tango.
Tango receiving.
I want to confirm that I am in fact in the target area.
You’ve seen the plane?
No. But I’ve sighted a rock. It should be the shale outcrop. According to the RAF people there’s no other rock visible within seven miles of the objective and even on dead-reckoning Chirac couldn’t have dropped me so wide.
He considered.
I would agree. How far away are you?
It’s difficult to tell because the air’s so clear. I’d say about two miles: it looks like one but I’ve doubled it.
What bearing is it?
Twenty-one degrees.
He was looking at the photograph and its annotations.
Then you should find the aeroplane almost directly in your path when you head for the outcrop. Its bearing from there is two hundred degrees.
I’ll make my heading twenty. Change frequency?
Yes, to 7 MHz. Please repeat.
I repeated and asked for twin-synchro and we ended.
Then I did what I knew I would do: I went to the top of the dune and put up the Zeiss and looked again at the distant tip of rock. My life had depended on sighting this single landmark, and I wanted to be sure I hadn’t dreamed up a mirage.
Their mass had been thrust upwards from the earth’s crust to leave them standing reared and angular against the sky, their strata sloping at twenty or so degrees from the horizontal and their base littered with brittle fragments that had broken off. In several places a whole shoulder of rock had foundered, making an angled arch and giving shade, and under one of these I made my camp.
The flooring was the canopy of the supply ‘chute and the roof was provided by my own, propped and draped with the help of the telescopic tubing that was part of the survival gear.
Lizards had run from the area of shade, skittering so fast across the sand that they seemed to float on its surface. I watched them, encouraged by the evidence of life in this region where I’d thought that nothing could hope to live.
For an hour I slept, in the heat of the noon. The distance had been nearer two miles than one and I’d had to make two trips, each time bringing a parachute and half the gear and provisions: four hours’ work including rests in the shade of the rocks before I set up camp. Earlier, even when it had been cooler, this degree of effort would have been beyond me: it had been the sight of the tip of rock, the knowledge that it was there, that had given me the strength.
At 12.34 hours I made a signal.
He had to be told, before I decided what kind of effort was needed. Effort used up water and it used it up very fast. He had to be told, although there wasn’t much he could do about it. The first thing was to get him to believe it.
Can I have that bearing again, from the rocks to the freighter?
Two hundred.
I checked the compass. The bearing was lined up directly with the tracks I’d left.
What’s the distance from the rocks to the plane?
Four hundred and eighty-five yards.
He wasn’t going to like it.
Loman, I’m at the rock outcrop now. I’ve pitched camp.
I had to wait for him to re-check the annotations on the photograph. No change of tone.
Your heading was twenty degrees?
Yes.
You must have passed close to the aeroplane.
Not close enough to see it.
Then the poor bastard shut up for a bit.
I looked across the blazing sands to the point where my tracks vanished. There were big areas between the dunes and they didn’t have the regular formation I’d seen at the point of drop: the rocks would deflect the wind here, setting up turbulence. But I had a clear view for more than five hundred yards and the bearing was correct and I ought to be looking straight at the wreck of the freighter. I was looking at an unbroken waste of sand.
Loman came in.
Quiller.
Hear you.
Do these rocks show any signs of ferrous oxidization?
He was dead scared but he didn’t show it in his voice. He showed it in his thinking: he’d got the blown-up photograph m front of him with the distances marked and he should have worked this one out for himself and instead of that he was panicking. I told him: No. And it wouldn’t make any difference, Loman. The compass could be affected up to fifteen degrees and I’d still be able to see a twin-engined freighter less than five hundred yards away. Pause.
You are quite sure.
Christ, d’you think I’m just guessing?
I was bloody annoyed because they’d said it was a picture of a plane that had crash-landed at Longitude 8°3’ by Latitude 30°4’ and now I was here on the spot and I couldn’t help
thinking how much effort we’d all made just to prove they were wrong.
Even Loman was thrown.
I don’t understand.
Join the club.
After a while he said: How was the drop?
Routine.
I knew what he was driving at but I wasn’t in the mood to give him any help: let him stay on this tack and I’d blast his head off, that was all.
Did you bring all your provisions with you from the point of drop?
Yes.
And both parachutes?
Yes.
It was exhausting work.
A bit thirst-making.
There’s been no kind of accident? No water-spillage?
No.
He saw I wasn’t going to co-operate so he just put it on the line, didn’t like having to do it, wasn’t his way.
How would you describe your general condition, physical and mental?
Not too bad. Bit of sunburn.
His tone went dull: overcorrection.
I would appreciate a more precise answer.
So I thought he ought to have one.
Listen, Loman, the drop was a right bastard and I’ve just shifted a hundred and seventy kilos through two miles of soft sand in the direct sun but if you think I’m too far gone to be able to see a whole bloody aeroplane against a neutral background at five hundred yards you’re wasting your time. Who was the executive you were running last -Dewhurst or someone?
Quite a long time went by. I don’t think he was sulking or anything: he’d got a damn sight too much on his plate and he was going to have a lot more unless he could do something about it and that didn’t leave any time for making mental notes to the Bureau to the effect that certain executives appeared to require supplementary refresher courses in Norfolk.
Quiller.
Hear you.
Can you give me an approximate configuration?
Of these rocks?
Yes.
Stand by.
I switched off to save the batteries.
He’d begun thinking straight but it was going to be a nasty five minutes because there weren’t many answers to the question and this was the one with the built-in dead-end to the mission.
