by Adam Hall
The compass gave 14° - 194° for the elongation and I noted it and took the pad with me and it was like walking out of the shade into a molten gold wall. This was the eastern face and a lot of heat was coming off it because of seven or eight hours’ pre-zenith absorption. I could feel the sweat drying on me as fast it came through the pores: there was no moisture when I passed a hand across my face.
I made my way clockwise.
Lizards scuttled across the broken shale on the ground they were quite big, a foot long, one of the Iguanidae, and they didn’t go far from where I passed, but froze with their angular heads lifted to watch me. Possibly they had never seen man before and their caution was primitively learned, the mistrust of an alien creature so large that it blotted out the sun.
South face and turning west.
The general configuration was oblong and the angles were clearly defined: the material was so hard that erosion hadn’t rounded it. The sun and the night frosts had loosened the strata into laminations and the wind had worked at the result; in places the weathering force had left horizontal necks and the weight of the unsupported rock had brought it down so that now it leaned on the main structure in irregular buttresses, making shade. In these areas there were more lizards than nearer the open and I supposed their one enemy was the vulture.
No. 2 Fighter-Reconnaissance had said there weren’t any other rocks within seven miles of this group. I thought about that for a minute and then gave it up.
West to north.
They watched me with their gold-ringed eyes. A pair of them turned their heads slowly as I passed, only one of them flashing into the crevice behind them with its long tail scattering the group of snail-shells in the hollow where they fed. At night there would sometimes be moisture here.
I thought seven miles.
If Loman got the precise bearing from the RAF we might work out the chances but they were almost nil: from this morning’s trek the immediate reckoning was a minimum of fourteen hours by day, leaving out the factor of diminishing energy in terms of progressive fatigue. And the thing was self-cancelling because the more water I carried the more I’d use up.
North to camp.
My hand reached for the beaker and I stopped it and led it to the transceiver switch.
Tango.
Tango receiving.
Pencil ready?
Yes.
Overall shape: oblong. Elongation 14° - 194°. Direction clockwise. Five paces. Right-angle to left. Seven paces. Right-angle to right.
Pauses while he drew the shape.
Could you, mon ami, have made an error of seven miles?
Twenty-one paces. Oblique angle right: one-four-oh degrees. Six paces.
Two bastions of rock seven miles apart. Near one of them, a crashed plane.
Oblique angle right: one-two-oh degrees. Sixteen paces. Angle eight-oh. Fourteen paces.
A crashed plane confidently assumed to be visible at a distance of four hundred and eighty-five yards in a direction precisely established by air photograph.
Angle left: one-six-oh. Ten paces. Angle right: one-five-oh. Six paces.
Question: why is the plane not visible?
Make a straight-line return to the starting-point.
Bit of-bad luck, mon ami. We not only missed the target by seven miles but we made the drop so close to the wrong group of rocks that I naturally thought they Six paces?
What? I made it seven.
All right. The join isn’t precise but no matter.
He loved things on paper. Loman loved things on paper. Also he loved things being precise. He loved to get things exact and it tended to blind him to reality and he didn’t even give a thought to the fact that if you have to pace out a rock configuration with your boots kicking through rubble and the heat trying to knock you down and the sand giving way when you need to measure your paces correctly you won’t finish up exactly where you started. You’d do it here, all right, but you wouldn’t necessarily do it on paper. And that was where it really counted. Bloody Loman would tell you that.
Steady. Anger - heat - sweat - thirst. Don’t forget where you are.
Not his fault. I was having to wait, that was all. He was looking at the photograph now, looking at the sketch and then at the photograph. Taking his time.
Christ I can’t go seven miles.
Fourteen hours’ minimum through that blinding furnace and finish up delirious and the last drop gone.
The definition on the air photograph wasn’t too clear because they’d blown it up to the point where the grain would start fogging so he probably wouldn’t be able to match the narrow end of the formation where the pacing went six and six and five, all short runs, but the overall shape ought to give him an answer.
Sweat in my eyes. In the shade here it wasn’t evaporating so fast. Pronounced heartbeat: quite regular and perfectly normal in these conditions. Thud-thud-thud.
Looking at the photograph, then at the sketch. The girl watching him. I didn’t know if he’d got juxtaposed stills of the terrain surrounding the target area and I wasn’t going to ask him because that’d be another nasty one if both outcrops had much the same shape at this degree of blow-up. The girl watching him.
You there, Diane?
Yes.
How’s tricks?
All right.
Lovely day, isn’t it?
Yes.
Tried to say it with a smile, couldn’t make it. Nerves in her voice, nothing explicit, just a tenseness. I suppose she knew the score, worked out what we were doing, didn’t like it, none of us did. Rotten having to wait.
He said
Those are the right ones.
Shut my eyes and said:
Oh that’s good.
I’m going to ask those people to confirm everything for us, the scale, orientation, and particularly the distance and bearing of Tango Victor from the rocks. Someone might have made a slip.
Just what we need.
It’s a possibility we have to consider.
How long will it take, Loman?
Perhaps thirty minutes.
Kaifra - Tunis - Crowborough - London. No delay at all from Kaifra to the Embassy because he’d use the radio and the signals room in Tunis would use their own. Crowborough - London was the slow bit, by normal telephone.
I want to be out there longer than that.
He still hadn’t told me to get moving and I didn’t like it: he sounded too bloody relaxed. The panic had gone because we knew now that we were at least in the target area but he still ought to be worried because the aeroplane had disappeared.
You’re camped in the shade at present?
Yes.
I want you to stay there for the moment. I’m in signals and London is monitoring.
Didn’t like it all and the sweat was running into my eyes, what was he in signals for at this phase?
For Christ sake fill me in, Loman.
I just want you to stay at your base so that I can call you immediately if I need to. I take it you’d prefer not to carry the transceiver about in the full sun.
I know that bit.
Five-second pause.
Chirac has reported.
He all right?
Oh yes. But he didn’t find the wind he needed, so he had to circle for several hours to gain enough height to make a final run-in through dead air. He came down in a gassi twenty kilometres from South 5 and they picked him up in a half-track.
Oh Christ, there’d been some kind of security leak, smell it a mile off. He wasn’t relaxed at all, he was just overcorrecting again.
Did he report by phone?
Yes. He hadn’t been able to begin his final run-in until shortly after dawn, and he says he was observed by an aircraft at considerably higher altitude.
Worse than I’d thought.
What area, Loman?
Quite a long pause. Didn’t want to worry his executive. All the worrying was meant to be done at Local Control.
Not far from the p
oint of drop. He puts it at something like fifteen kilometres from there. He was flying in the dark for most of the time and couldn’t even see the No. 1 Philips tower or the Roches Brunes derrick.
I couldn’t see why Loman had to get into signals with Control. And I was beginning to think I didn’t want to know. You don’t bring in London on a local security leak unless the whole thing’s been bust wide open.
What was the aircraft registration?
He couldn’t read it.
Too high?
Yes.
I had to think how exactly to say it.
Loman, have we still got a mission?
It was a bloody awful thing to ask your director in the field and I knew that but I wanted the answer.
Let us hope so.
There was a faint crackling noise somewhere. Not from the set. I looked past the edge of the canopy.
Quiller.
Hear you.
What is that noise?
Lizard, cracking a snail open.
He didn’t bother to answer.
I looked out from the canopy across the blaze of sand, for an instant seeing it, then seeing it vanish.
Loman, I want to go out there.
Not yet.
While I’m fresh. Let me go and look for the bloody thing. It must be there somewhere.
Certainly it must. But we have to wait for London.
Bloody London, gets on your tits.
Switching oft transmit.
Very well, but stay open to receive.
Had to drink some water, then I lay on my back and decided not to think about the aircraft that had been observing Chirac only fifteen kilometres from the point of drop, Loman’s headache, not mine, though of course when the crunch came I’d be right in it, like that poor bloody snail Slept.
Tango.
Check: 13.19. Switch.
Tango receiving.
I have London’s signal. Monitoring liaison with Algiers informs that five squadrons of desert-reconnaissance helicopters are to search a prescribed area of which your own position is approximately the centre.
I watched the lizard. It had found another one and the crackling noise began.
When do they start?
They are already airborne.
Chapter 12
SANDSTORM
I stood watching them.
They were quite high, about five hundred feet, but their shape and their flight were unmistakable: they drifted in circles, their wings held like black hoods to trap the air. From this distance I couldn’t see their heads but they were watching me: despite their feigned disinterest I was the focal point of their circling.
I hadn’t noticed them before but they’d probably been somewhere overhead since early this morning, attracted by the movement of the dot that had been making its laborious way among the dunes towards the rock outcrop. Their patient observation heightened my feeling of vulnerability and I had the urge to go back to the refuge that thirty minutes ago I’d been sharing with the lizards.
Nobody likes being watched, and this was particularly unpleasant because I was being assessed as potential carrion.
I moved again, trying not to drag my feet and leave tracks. The heat of the sun was like a weight on my back, pushing me down rather than forward, and its light struck upwards against my face, reflecting from the sand. I knew that the water-flask was still a quarter full and was tempted to drink, but when I’d broken camp and pushed everything into the shade I’d noticed that one of the bidons was already empty. In the last ten hours I’d used half the water-supply, pouring it into my body as you pour water on a fire.
The desert is not like other places. The slaking of the increased thirst puts back only fifty per cent of the water lost in the cooling process, and in this degree of heat my cooling process was breaking down because the sweat was being evaporated the instant it reached the skin. In one hour I was generating seven or eight hundred calories and my sweat was ridding me of less than five.
Sometimes their shadows drifted near me as they crossed the sun.
At the four hundred and eighty-fifth pace I stopped.
Long. 8°3’ by Lat. 30°4’.
The sands were smooth.
Loman hadn’t received confirmation from No. 2 Fighter Reconnaissance before I’d left camp: I’d told him I wanted a last chance to find Tango Victor before the helicopters got here. But I knew now that I should have waited, because give or take a few yards I was standing where the smudge had been on the photograph. Somewhere they’d made an error: the scale had lost a nought or the bearing had been inverted and this wasn’t where the smudge was at all.
The wreck of Tango Victor was across the dunes there, or a thousand yards the other side of the rocks, not far away, ten minutes on foot in normal conditions. Here the conditions weren’t normal and it could take me an hour or five hours to find it because the dunes were higher than I was and in some places I couldn’t see more than a hundred yards: I was moving through a maze.
A bird’s-eye view was the only way and five squadrons had been mustered and refuelled at the nearest airfield to these rocks: Fort Thiriet was a hundred and thirty kilometres distant and the helicopters had been deployed in a sweep formation of sixty aircraft on a twenty-five kilometre front to the immediate north of the Areg Tinrhales and they were heading this way while I stood and cursed some stupid bloody clerk in uniform who’d finished the mission for us before it began.
The pressure was finally on and there was nothing I could do about it. There was data streaming in so fast that I couldn’t deal with it: the overall picture they never like giving us was coming up under the hypo. The Chirac security leak had been bad luck and not his fault but it had revealed the importance of the objective in the eyes of the opposition: all they’d been informed was that a camouflaged sailplane had been observed over the open desert at dawn today, but an entire arm of the Algerian Air Force had been assembled across the country and deployed from Fort Thiriet, an airfield right on the Libyan border.
There’d been no time to put out even a token announcement of a “routine exercise” and this fact alone meant either that Libyan Intelligence was fully aware of the situation or that the Algerian government was so anxious to locate Tango Victor that it had risked embarrassment at high level between the two countries.
In addition to this was the indication that it was their last throw and that they were confident of locating the objective before anyone else: because if they failed, and if an opposing network succeeded, they would have made it obvious that their search had been for the crashed freighter, whose cargo was so politically explosive that the armed forces of two countries had been called in to assist the intelligence services.
The Bureau itself was intensely active and within a matter of days had brought its support communications to the pitch where half an hour ago Local Control could give me full details on the desert-reconnaissance operation including the precise area and width of sweep. At the same time the entire network was under general monitoring and if Analysis Section thought I’d be interested to know that an attempt had been made to assassinate General Chen Piao or that a missile-to-missile device had just come off the drawing-boards in Smolensk or that the Brazilian Minister for the Interior had handed in his resignation three weeks after accepting the post they’d pass it to Control for Local Control and the executive in the field and I’d get it almost as fast as a phone-call from London to Crowborough on the priority line.
I wouldn’t get it in so many words. The original data would go through filters until the essence was extracted and made available. Even if support communications hadn’t been energized then general monitoring would have reported sudden air movement in Algeria by desert-reconnaissance units and Analysis would have jumped on it straight away because they had Algeria as the locale of one of the listed ops currently running.
Behind me, as I stood here isolated in the desert wastes, was an organization striving to inform, direct and support me as I went deeper
into the mission and closer to the target area; but now that I was here there was nothing they could do for me, and nothing I could do for them.
Loman had predicted a forty-five minute deadline for the arrival of the Algerian squadrons in this area and there were fifteen minutes to go in terms of their ETA. In terms of the actual mission my time ran out to zero as I stood here listening for their rotors, because even if I climbed the nearest dune and saw Tango Victor dead in front of me it was no go. London wanted photographs and a full radioed report of the freighter’s cargo and fifteen minutes wasn’t long enough for me to go back for the transceiver and bring it here.
The sands were quiet.
My shadow’ lay prone, a spirit felled by the heat.
Something in my mind was trying to attract my attention and I was aware of it but unable to read its significance: it was like a sound heard but not identified. I let all thought subside, leaving the way open, while my body and its senses remained where they were as my mind ranged, released, finding images for me: the low wind and the pattering of the sand on the side of the box, the folds of the parachute half-covered, and the unexpected word in my head - beware - without either reason or coherence.
Drawn blank.
I turned back towards the rock outcrop and the sand hissed faintly across my boots. Halfway there I stopped and drank the rest of the water and left the cap of the flask dangling on its lanyard. Then the sky became gradually filled with infinitesimal vibrations, so faint that I thought the sound was only in my head, but as it strengthened I began moving faster and when I was certain what it was I broke into a clumsy run through the sand’s obstructive softness, worried now that I’d left it too late to reach shelter before they came.
There seemed to be no particular direction to the sound: it was a steady thrumming under the sky as if the air itself had started to vibrate, to shake with some kind of cosmic disturbance. The vultures had broken their circling flight and were drifting southwards, driven away by the noise. It was loudening quickly now and for a moment I didn’t see the helicopters because I’d been looking for them too high. They were detaching themselves from the skyline and growing bigger and I went into the niche I’d made for myself among the stowed ‘chute canopies and lay flat with my legs drawn up, and waited.
