by Adam Hall
Once they’d seen the freighter and landed near it I wouldn’t be so exposed, but while they were still airborne they’d be checking this outcrop and for the moment I wanted to remain unseen. I didn’t know what kind of orders Loman would give me when our mission ended a few minutes from now: it was just possible he’d ask me to observe the activities of the opposition at the site of their objective in case there was anything we could usefully tell London.
He would probably leave it to me, when the time came, to decide whether I should expose my presence and hope to live as long as the first implemented interrogation or crawl from here to the open desert and cut a vein. All London would require was that the opposition shouldn’t learn anything from me and that was easy enough to arrange.
The noise was very loud now and the rocks were trapping the echoes. I pulled my legs up a bit more and managed to crawl another inch into the narrowing gap. Something was in here with me but I didn’t know what: something alive and I suppose sheltering as I was from the throbbing sky outside. Telepathy at its lowest level is emotional and I was aware of fear, not my own but another creature’s. There wasn’t anything more for me to fear because neither I nor the mission were any longer under attack.
The camouflage was highly-developed and only the glint of a gold-ringed eye gave it away. It was about two feet in front of me and almost on a level with my face: probably I’d driven it in here unknowingly when I’d stowed the canopies and provisions and it had been afraid to clamber across the strange terrain they’d formed on the rocky floor. Its forefeet were splayed on each side of the scaly bulk of its body and its head was lifted to watch me, the black iris glistening within the ring of gold. It kept utterly still, afraid of me because visually I menaced it gigantically, almost filling the niche, and possibly afraid of the helicopters: it had no sense of hearing but it was probably picking up the vibrations in the rock.
I had positioned the transceiver so that I could use it if I wanted to, and I ought to tell Loman the situation even though he couldn’t do anything about it.
Tango.
The form of the pointed head was prehistoric: it was a descendant of the lizards that had been here before man.
Tango. Tango.
The motors chopped heavily at the air and I was tempted to move my head and take a look but there wasn’t any point; they were military desert-reconnaissance aircraft making an area sweep at low altitude and there wouldn’t be anything in their shape or colour that could tell us anything we didn’t already know. The chance of their catching the movement if I turned my head was one in a thousand but I might just as well not risk it.
Teach me, my small and ancient friend, how to keep still.
I didn’t call up base again because it was obvious now that Loman had decided to keep radio silence. I got a lot of squawk and tried two channels and came back and found them quite close at 6 MHz.
113: ihtafidou bi kasdikoum i - la mitine oua sabina degre.
The volume of sound from their rotors was making the frame of the transceiver vibrate and I could feel it under my fingers. Shadows swept across the mouth of the niche where I was lying, and the lizard appeared to move slightly but I knew it hadn’t: it was just the shift of the light-contrasts as the shadow passed over us.
120 - 121 - 122: an-zi-lou mina oulou-ouikoum hata miyate mitra.
They obviously had a group captain above and to the rear of the line keeping them in order. It occurred to me that I was being gratuitously masochistic about this because at any moment the observer in the machine nearest these rocks and the site of Tango Victor was going to call up and report seeing the freighter. That would be the precise instant, if we wanted to be particular about it, when the mission would end. But I couldn’t resist listening-in because I always like to know what people are doing.
Ali: ha-l’-laka a-ne toufahissa hadihi a sokhr mini djhatika?
T a-ya-b.
Dust began blowing in: their rotors were creating a wave of turbulence across a twenty-five kilometre front, whirling a cloud of pulverized quartz into the air and letting it fall as they passed. The light became amber-tinted and the colours of the lizard deepened.
104: sahihou al kasd.
The stink of kerosene.
Head lifted, a golden eye staring.
If the vultures eat the lizards and the lizards eat the snails, what do the snails eat?
The note of their engines held steady.
I waited for one of them to break the line and land near the freighter. The others would follow, gathering in a swarm. It was going to be very noisy here.
It had been the weather that had beaten us: the wind. There hadn’t been enough for Chirac so he’d been forced to circle for height till after dawn and they’d seen him and it wasn’t anyone’s fault and for a moment I felt sorry for Loman because the little bastard had done his best, put his ferret into the field and set up a makeshift base with an operator to man the set even though the poor little bitch couldn’t hold a gun and he’d seen me through the access lines and kept me in touch with London, done all he could and now the whole thing had gone grinding into the dust and he wasn’t a man to take a failed mission in his stride, not Loman.
The note of their engines was steady.
And quieter now.
Kerosene.
Kerosene and the dust settling and the brightness coming back into the light while I lay prone watching the reflections in the dark unwinking eye, while I lay surprised and not quite understanding, listening to the thrum of the rotors passing towards the west, while I lay with weakness flooding into me as the tension came off and the nerves lost their tone, the sound from the sky dying away until, as I lay listening, silence came.
Switch.
Tango.
Can get quite worked up when your base won’t answer then I remembered and spun it back to 7 and called him again. Still wouldn’t bloody well answer. They’ve been off the air for over two minutes now well don’t panic there’s no action needed but why don’t they answer they’re my base and this is my lifeline.
Tango - Tango.
It was her voice, soft and precise.
I said
Where the hell have you been?
Loman hates that: he likes you to make a point of replying with the code for the mission, not his day today, the sweat running into my eyes because we’d confirmed these were the right rocks and the freighter must be near them and they’d put sixty choppers across the area and they hadn’t seen it so it couldn’t be here after all.
I’m sorry. We were monitoring the helicopters.
So was I.
Then Loman came on.
Tone rather light, rather correct.
Quiller.
Hear you.
Where are the aircraft at present?
They’ve gone.
They overflew your position?
It wasn’t really a question. Diane spoke Arabic and she’d monitored their frequency so she’d heard them telling each other to ‘check those rocks’ and she would have told Loman so he knew bloody well they’d overflown my position. He just didn’t understand it and I knew what that meant: he’d got confirmation from London.
I was still lying prone and there wasn’t any more need so I crawled backwards out of the niche but stayed in the shade, my shoulders against the rockface. There was a scuttling sound and I turned my head and saw it had gone. Then I shut my eyes because the panic was over and I wanted to think.
Did they overfly your position?
I ought to be helping the poor little sod.
Yes. Slow speed, low altitude, took their time, couldn’t miss it. You’ve had confirmation from No. 2 Fighter-Recco, is that it?
Pause.
Yes. There has been no error of any kind.
Didn’t make sense.
There must have been, Loman.
You and I have confirmed that the rock outcrop where you are now is in fact the rock outcrop in the photograph. The RAF has just confirmed by signal th
at the object in the photograph is a crashed aeroplane and that it is lying on the sand at a distance of four hundred and eighty-five yards - four eight five - from the outcrop with a bearing of two hundred degrees - two-double-oh.
Vaguely I thought no wonder he’s been worrying about my mental condition but he can think again now because a hundred and twenty men of the Algerian Air Force couldn’t see the thing either.
You do it for me then, Loman. You work it out. That’s what you’re for.
After a bit he said:
Stay on receive.
I shut my eyes again.
There wasn’t anything he could do anyway. Get a pencil and paper but there weren’t any figures, no way of checking. Talk to the girl but what could she do? Any of us do?
Beware.
Not quite a word: the shape of a thought. The fine grains hitting the side of the box in the low wind. More scuttling now, maybe I was stuck right outside one of their dens and they couldn’t get home. It had sounded like the sand when it had pattered against the polyester box in the low wind, with the folds of the ‘chute canopy still showing where the sand hadn’t yet drifted. I’d made a mental note at the time, warning myself that the desert wasn’t like other places.
Of course he’d go straight into signals again with London and ten minutes from now they’d have a full-scale emergency meeting in session at the Bureau and I hoped it’d keep fine for them.
No one else could have got here first. We knew there were at least two other networks with a crash-priority interest in Tango Victor but there hadn’t been time for them to get here and anyway we’d have had a flash about it from Control: if the opposition beats another cell to the post in the end-phase of a mission then everyone gets to know about it, don’t worry. And they couldn’t have taken the wreck away, even by a concerted chopper lift, without making so much noise and leaving so much mess that the rest of us would have just taken a look and gone off home.
Stuttering. They were quite big things, heavy when they ran although they ran like a flash. They bothered me, wouldn’t let me alone, the sound of the sand pattering against the side of the box, the low wind slowly covering the nylon ‘chute, a mental note, the desert hides things, beware.
Someone was saying oh … my … Christ … in a kind of measured tone, perhaps not aloud, just inside my head, and I opened my eyes and looked through the scratched sunglasses to the blaze of the dunes out there. Then I hit the transmit.
Tango.
She answered straight away so I knew he couldn’t be in signals with London and I suppose it made sense because this problem wasn’t for Control, it was strictly local. He’d been using his time thinking.
He came on and I said
Can you get hold of a met record for this area covering the last three days?
He didn’t ask why, so perhaps he’d been thinking on much the same lines as I had. He just said he’d contact the airfield at Kaifra. The phone was obviously working now because he was back in a few minutes and said yes, there’d been a sandstorm two days ago, particularly severe.
Chapter 13
OBJECTIVE
The tube went in and I pushed, leaning on it.
When I pulled it out the sand ran into the hole it had made, filling it. There wasn’t anything pointed I could use: the end of the tube was blunt and therefore not very efficient as a boring tool but it was all I had. It was one of the sections of telescopic tubing among the survival gear, meant to hold up fabric and make it a shelter.
I pushed it in again, six feet away, and leaned on it.
Skin perfectly dry. Cooling had stopped.
I’d have to watch that because heat stroke develops quite rapidly: the body temperature starts rising soon after the stage where the sweat evaporates without having time to cool the skin. Quickened pulse, loss of consciousness, death.
I drank again to replace some of the sweat but the water was hot and gave no sensation of quenching the thirst: it was just liquid going into the organism. I was having to calculate now and we were running it close: one more litre was left for working with, and one reserve litre for staying alive during sleep. I could go another ninety minutes at this rate on a litre but that didn’t have anything to do with it because the heat explosion would begin a long time before then unless I could take some rest.
They had come back and their shadows drifted across the flank of the dune as I pushed the tube in and struck nothing. Pull it out. Two paces and try again.
It must be this one, this dune, or the one on the far side of my No. 2 camp. I’d brought a canopy and three lengths of tubing to make shade, and the 2000CA had been left on receive. In the last two hours I’d taken four equally-spaced rest periods of fifteen minutes. Loman had come on the air to tell me 1: that the Algerian squadrons would refuel west of here and disperse to their home stations without making a return sweep and 2: that Chirac had confirmed that even a medium sandstorm could bury an aircraft the size of Tango Victor.
Chirac had pointed out that the freighter had probably hit the sand with the undercarriage up to avoid flipping over and in any case would have gouged a deep trough until the aerofoil had started planing. This would leave the tip of the rudder only two metres or so from the ground and the main structure considerably lower. The 35mm Nikons hadn’t been able to register this because they’d been almost vertically above, but from ground level it couldn’t have been easy to see even before the sandstorm had blotted it out.
Probe and try again, two paces.
The chance of hitting the rudder or the aerial mast was remote. According to Chime’s reckoning the mainplanes, tailplane and fuselage would be at least two metres from the surface. I’d once been in Arizona when the wind had reached seventy and the whole desert had got up and blown across the sky and it had taken us a day to dig out the half-tracks.
Push and lean and pull out.
I didn’t know anything about falling over till my shoulder began blazing. I couldn’t seem to get up because the whole weight of the sky was pressing on me. Heart hammering a lot, throbbing behind my eyes, get in the shade, crawl there if it’s all you can do, but get there.
Sand in the teeth, gritty, and my hands burning, using them as forefeet, clumsy, going too slow, have to hurry, pool of shade, prone.
He called up at 16.31 hours, waking me.
No, I said.
Slight moisture on the skin and the pulse back to normal but I knew it’d start again within ten minutes of going back into that furnace.
He wanted details.
I’m using a metal probe, area focus the same as before.
It seemed to have taken me a long time to say it and now I was out of breath. He didn’t answer straight away.
How much longer can you go on working there?
I don’t know.
My hand just reached for the flask: I hadn’t actually decided to drink.
I am only asking for an approximate idea, of course.
He had to say it again before I registered.
There’s water for about an hour’s work. But I’m starting get - starting to get - heat stroke symptoms.
Quite a long pause.
Would you be able to remain under shade until nightfall?
My head swung up suddenly and my’ eyes opened.
You mean you could drop more provisions?
No.
The pulse had quickened and there was an almost immediate increase in sweating. But he’d said no and it was the first time it had actually been admitted that this was a strictly shut-ended mission unless I could find the objective.
I propped the mike on my knee, heavy to hold, cost water.
Take all - it’d take all the water I’ve got, waiting till dark.
It would be cooler then. You could work
No go. Thing is to press on. Tango out.
Only way to shut him up. Not a thing he could do, not even drop more water. He’d have to signal Control and tell them the score: the executive in the field has a limited
number of hours to live, am I to abandon?
I got up and went out and the slam of the direct heat nearly knocked me down and I staggered a bit and then got some kind of rhythm going. The tube was stuck in the sand where I’d left it, too hot now, blister your hand, so I kicked it over and got hold of the other end and began walking to the part of the dune where I’d halted operations. About halfway there I tripped over his foot.
It took a little time because he might be able to tell me things by the way he was lying, face down and with his feet towards the end of the dune. I worked slowly, trying to get all the data the situation could provide. My tracks had a slight curve in them: I’d made a detour on my way from the canopy without meaning to, and this was why I hadn’t tripped over him when I’d gone in to rest. I turned him over.
He had died in terror.
The hands flung out as he’d fallen, perhaps running too hard, running like hell away from the wreck of the freighter, running in terror. His face showed that much. He had died screaming.
Not far away there was something black showing in the sand: my feet had brought it to the surface; it lay at the edge of my tracks. It was plumage and as I pulled it upwards the wing rose, scattering sand, and then the gross black body with its bald head dangling, the hooked beak agape. The bird, like the man, had died screaming.
There was another, so near the man that in moving his body, turning it over, I had exposed part of its wing. The heat didn’t seem so bad now and I was moving more quickly, a sense of purpose reviving the organism. I made a direct line to the end of the dune where his feet had pointed, and tripped again, dislodging a peaked cap from a man’s head. His body was in the same attitude: he’d been running away from the freighter. His face had the same expression.
A third vulture was lying at the foot of the dune. I was kicking into the thing before I knew it. I didn’t stop to examine it because the renewed strength in me was pushing me onwards and the fourth time I drove the tube into the sand it struck metal.
Distance 485 yards. Bearing 200°. Longitude 8° 3’ by Latitude 30°4’.
