The Tango Briefing

by Adam Hall

  Chapter 18

  CHRONOMETER

  Receiving you.

  Shook him a bit: he was having to think.

  Q-Quaker high Rharbi imp trans mat awheel.

  Dation?

  Croydon indigo.

  I’d had to get him on the Embassy wavelength and use speech-code because this thing hadn’t got an auto scrambler. Chirac had either left my KW 2000CA in the desert or brought it back for Loman to pick up and whichever it was he’d know I couldn’t use it so he would have shut down that wavelength while he was in signals with London through the Embassy.

  UMF?

  I asked one of them and he said twelve minutes.

  Synchronize please.

  Double-oh two nine.

  Plus twelve.

  UMF double-oh four one.

  He didn’t say anything for a minute and I left him to it and looked down at the lights of a village as we began turning. The pilot had agreed we ought to set our course for Malta because that was where he’d told Kaifra he was going. Then we’d turn back and make a loop across the desert and go in from the south.

  ‘Are we off their screens?’

  ‘I don’t know their range at Kaifra but fifty miles ought to be good enough because there’s no other traffic.’

  He was in the navigator’s seat, the tall one. They were both cheerful enough but we all knew it was going to be a real swine and some of the jokes had got a bit thin since we’d taken off.

  I watched the glow of the village and the white dome of a mosque reflecting the starlight as we came round in the turn.

  I suppose we needn’t have taken the trouble to head for Malta before we got off their screens but the Ahmed cell was badly up against it and they might decide to go into the control tower and ask questions at gun-point.

  Loman was still sulking. He’d been thinking everything was all right because when I dropped her I told her I was going to the airport to keep the rendezvous and pick up the device and now he knew everything was all wrong because I ought not to be somewhere over Rharbi at ten thousand feet and he was having to face an entirely new pattern of hazards at zero notice. Well, that was what he was for.

  ‘Feeling the cold?’

  ‘We’re not going to be stuck up here forever. ‘

  ‘Frankly I wish we were.’

  He laughed but we didn’t join in. They’d jibbed at first but I said they’d got to try so they’d worked things out and the pilot had said all right we’ll have a go but this dolly weighs sixty-three thousand pounds with the amount of fuel she’ll have on board at our ETA and if we can’t pull up she’ll drag half the strip into the desert, so long as those oil-drilling chaps don’t mind.

  It occurred to me that base might have gone off the air.

  Hear me?

  Hear you.

  Is Fred all right?

  Perfectly.

  Reprimand in his tone and he could bloody well keep it. Fred was the standard speech-code name for any third member of an active cell and I wanted to know how she was because the last time I’d seen her there’d been tears running down her sooty little face and if anyone of us survived this trip I’d see those scaly bastards wrote her off the books before they did anything else.

  My eyes kept shutting and the navigator said something and I missed it and got my head up again.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Is there any chance of a flarepath on that strip?’

  ‘No. They don’t nightfly.’

  ‘I see.’ He said it rather stiffly.

  ‘You’ve got landing-lights, haven’t you?’

  ‘Fortunately, yes.’

  He didn’t like me any more than Loman did but I couldn’t help that. I think he was trying to find an excuse to call up the Air Ministry through Malta and get official permission for the captain to hazard his ship but he couldn’t do it in front of me because it’d be embarrassing: they’d been ordered to make this rdv with an over-ranking contact and that meant that whether they were pilot officers or air-vice marshals they still had to do what I told them, otherwise they’d have turned me down flat about the South 6 thing and I knew that.

  Quaker.

  Hear you.

  Friday Croydon indigo.

  Roger.

  I gave them back the headset.

  Friday was rdv so he’d meet me at South 6 and presumably I wouldn’t have to lug these rotten things as far as base and that was something.

  Then I suppose I just went to sleep because there wasn’t anything else I had to do. She was rolling about in the flames and I was trying to pull her clear and he was saying we’ll be down in three minutes so you’d better get into this thing.

  ‘What thing?’

  He was rigging some fabric stays across the freight-locker section and I gave him a hand because even if we didn’t hit anything we were going to turn on an awful lot of deceleration on a strip that short and I didn’t want to go through the front window.

  ‘Have you got room to turn round?’

  ‘Just about.’

  ‘Okay, then turn round and squat down with your back to it.’

  The pilot moved the flaps and we began running through eiderdowns and they were both rather young considering their responsibilities so I said:

  ‘I’m sorry about this.’

  ‘Oh that’s okay. It’s just that these dollies are so terribly expensive and we’re always being told about the tax-payers money.’

  The noise was pretty hellish because of the surface and the reversed thrust and I thought the nose-leg must have folded back on impact but the angle was still roughly horizontal. Then the brakes came on and I was pressed backwards into the fabric sling like a pea in a catapult and one of them was shouting to the other one, something about distance but I couldn’t hear the rest of it. A lot of low-pitch vibration coming in as the airframe took the strain, smell of hot rubber, be awkward if we hit a bad patch and the lockers burst open, not that anything could go off but we’d been to a lot of trouble getting it here, vibration starting to hammer and someone yelling won’t make it and I thought oh Christ can’t we ever get anything right, the front leg taking the brunt of the shocks and everything trying to shake loose in the flight compartment, of course they’d known it would be like this and that’s why they’d looked at me as if I was barmy when I told them we’d got to do it.

  Hit my shoulder when they dropped me through and a hand caught at me and then there was a dreadful quietness and there was Loman sitting sideways on the front seat with his arm hooked across the squab and his pale eyes watching me and I said we got down all right did we?

  ‘Yes.’

  He didn’t look very pleased.

  I absorbed the environment: Chrysler. I was on the back seat with a rug over me.

  Zenith: 00.56. The ETA had been 00.41. I don’t like gaps in the timing.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘In what precise way?’

  Talked like a schoolmistress. He was very rattled.

  ‘To the aircraft.’

  ‘They wrote off the undercarriage.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘It’s quite sufficient.’

  There was an engine starting up somewhere but I couldn’t see anything. We were parked alongside the hangar and the echo was coming back, sounded like a chopper. I listened to it and Loman didn’t talk: he’d stopped looking at me now and sat watching the road that ran from the main gates of the camp to the south end of the airstrip where the windsock drooped against the starfields.

  ‘Is it for me?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That chopper’

  ‘Yes.’ He sounded edgy, even for Loman.

  I suppose the waiting was getting on his nerves. The Ahmed cell had seen the Marauder go up and it wouldn’t be long before they heard it had come down all over the South 6 strip instead of Malta and they’d get here as fast as they could. Loman knew they were on to it because if there’d been no one getting in my way at Kaifra Airport I would have le
ft there by road.

  The helicopter was being warmed up, a comfortable throp-throp-throp from its rotor, aurally hypnotic, my head going down, then she said London wanted to know the position, her voice about normal. not still upset or anything.

  Loman said he’d send it direct.

  Situ Croydon indigo point skygo redmins point Q-Quaker able light-time standby ending point object present go conditters point Tango out..

  I thought he was being a bit optimistic but I suppose he was worried about getting a blast if he sounded too doubtful: they were already having to absorb the Marauder switch into their thinking and it didn’t take much to send them hysterical. The whole of this area was on the plotting table at the Bureau and they’d just received a situation signal and in spite of Loman’s optimism they knew we were in a distinct red sector because the Marauder had made a lot of noise coming down and every opposition cell would have been alerted: they’d got me out of the plane before anyone had come along to see what had made the crump but quite a gang of day-shift drillers had gone down the airstrip from the living-quarters and the crew were still there explaining about engine trouble and forced landing conditions and all that cock and it wouldn’t be long before every camel-driver in Kaifra knew that a foreign military aircraft had gone into South 6 by night.

  London would be sweating because what ought to have happened was that I should have taken the device by road from the airport to base for Loman to brief me on it and what had happened was that I’d arranged for us both to be sitting here with the thing on our lap and hoping to Christ nobody found us before we got airborne. At the first sign of an adverse party in this area Loman would quietly melt into the middle distance because the director in the field is never actually meant to operate in the field but only from local base, on the double principle that he’s not trained in unarmed combat and if a mission blows up there has to be someone to take home the pieces and have them analysed to the hope that one fine day someone’s going to profit from the lesson.

  Loman would take the device with him because it was expensive and injurious and that would leave me on my own to do what I could but I wasn’t in a condition to do very much and although he’d told them that Q-Quaker was able they wouldn’t think much of my chances. So London was having the sweats.

  Tango.

  Tango receiving.

  Embassy wants a repeat on ‘redmins’.

  They can have it.

  She went off the air.

  ‘Is that my end of the blower you’ve got there?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  I believed the little bastard. He’d told Chirac to leave my transceiver in the desert when he’d picked me up because I’d need it again and there wasn’t any point in dropping it a second time in an area where there were rocks that could bust it up.

  ‘Are you sending me back there, Loman? ‘

  ‘We don’t know yet.’

  ‘Oh yes you bloody well do.’

  Throp-throp-throp.

  01.17.

  Chirac shut off and the rotor began slowing above our heads. I hadn’t taken a lot of notice when I’d come aboard but I had a look around now and saw that the little necessities of life were here all right: two parachutes and the two black containers.

  ‘What’s in that thing?’

  ‘Cous-cous, mon ami.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘You will be,’ Loman said. He sat peering through the curved Perspex like a goldfish in a bowl. From what I could see of it we were in a gassi between low dunes.

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘In a gassi.’

  ‘I know that.’

  Chirac set the fuel taps at off. ‘We are ten kilometres from Petrocombine South 5 and eleven kilometres from Kaifra.’

  I tried to think where that was, but any kind of mental effort induced a kind of grey-out and I gave it up because it didn’t seem to be anywhere in particular.

  ‘Why here, Loman?’

  ‘It’s neutral ground.’ He’d stopped peering through the Perspex bubble and was watching me critically. ‘You have three hours in which to get some sleep, so I suggest you do that.’

  He looked so depressed that I felt sorry for him, as far as you can feel sorry for a man like Loman.

  ‘All right.’ I wanted to ask him a few things because it was now 01.18.55 on the Zenith and he was going to let me sleep till 04.18.55 and that meant he’d got me lined up for a dawn drop unless Control threw us a new one during the night; but if he was in the mood to give me any answers I didn’t want to have to work them out, singing in the ears, a sensation of floating, the tick-tick-tick of the chronometer near my head. ‘Loman.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Have we still got a mission running?’

  All I heard as his voice went faint was something about London and I suppose he was saying depends on.

  First stage, second stage and detonator.

  He showed me three times: annular clamp, by-pass conduit, main body-locking with three-start threads. It was easy enough but I didn’t object to the repetitions because you had to do it properly or the thing wouldn’t go off.

  ‘It’s essential that no sand enters these threads.’

  ‘Noted. How powerful is this model?’

  ‘It has the equivalent of one hundred tons of trinitrotoluene. The Americans have used similar devices in the Sahara for blasting wells, but this one has been modified for a groundburst operation, reducing fall-out and giving a low Mach wave with a relatively small residual radiation range.’

  ‘In figures?’

  ‘One thousand yards. In still air with low humidity you will be safe at one mile, and should set the timer accordingly.’

  So it was a mini but the soot-black finish and the castellated retaining nuts and the knowledge that it would bring down the Post Office Tower at one blow gave it a potent aspect. It was so very quiet, standing on its flat end with the three of us crouched around it.

  ‘Pouf!’ said Chirac, ‘hein?’

  He turned away and opened the polyester picnic box and took out the Thermos of cous-cous. There was no meat with it and we used two of the plastic bowls. Loman said he’d eaten not long before we’d made the rdv at South 6 and so had Chirac probably but you’ll get a Frenchman joining you at any time and in any place and with whatever kind of menu but especially an hour before dawn in the Sahara if it’s cous-cous.

  I’d slept for most of the allotted period but Loman had been talking to London quite a bit and I’d partly heard some of the panic: a lot of the trouble was that the signals had had to go from here to Kaifra to Tunis to Crowborough to London and back and had involved three automatic scramblers and two codes and the normal telephone delay between Crowborough and Control, but most of the panic was over the need to liaise the Bureau’s international monitoring facilities with the controller running the mission and to do it within the few hours left before dawn. The local situation here was known and the risks calculated, but additionally London was using what amounted to a scanner that would pick up any event internationally that might have a bearing on the end-phase of the Tango mission: if for example the president of the United Arab Republic happened to be assassinated at any given moment then London would get the news almost immediately through the monitoring facilities and Control might realize straight away that an Egyptian cell operating in Kaifra could conceivably get orders to cease all action.

  I didn’t think it would happen. Nor did London and that was why London was having the sweats. I wasn’t long out of sleep but it didn’t take a lot of brain-think to see that Loman was now driven to mounting a last desperate throw, because the Marauder thing had made it clear to. every local opposition cell that I was still very much in business and therefore the UK was still certain that Tango Victor was somewhere in this area. Chirac had made the short hop from South 6 to the gassi here without picking up a tag from any one of the airfields around Kaifra but when we took-off for the open desert we’d be running a gauntlet of grou
nd observers and acoustic units.

  Loman had said I’d need something like forty minutes after the drop to set up the device in safety and trigger it and if Chirac could fly me into the target zone and leave me with that amount of time to work in without drawing in a whole pack of opposition agents I thought he’d be bloody lucky.

  ‘What’s that glow?’ asked Loman.

  ‘The moon rising.’ Chirac spooned his cous-cous.

  ‘Why is it diffused like that?’

  ‘It is a sandstorm over there.’

  ‘Will it affect your mission?’

  ‘Pas du tout. It is two hundred miles away and moving to the west. I have been watching it and there will not be any trouble.’

  Loman drew the spigots and freed the clamp and boxed the device into its separate containers. I decided not to look at my watch so frequently: it was becoming a habit and it was a sign of nerves. If we took off at the appointed time we would do it in eleven minutes from now.

  ‘So what does London say?’

  Loman didn’t look at me. He doesn’t like briefing you until there’s precisely time enough left to give you the whole story without leaving an interval before the go, and he’s perfectly right because it allows a psychological sag and you’ll start mulling over the things and asking silly questions but I couldn’t help that. There were things I wanted to know and he was going to tell me.

  ‘London?’ he said blandly.

  ‘That place with the clock.’

  ‘The end-phase has been approved.’

  ‘Oh come on, Loman, give me the bloody information.’

  Voice rather sharp and Chirac flicked a look at me and I was very annoyed because my nerves were more touchy than I’d thought and that’s always dangerous and I’d have to do something about it. It was the snivelling little organism, that was all, saying we don’t want to go back there with all those horrid birds and that nasty gas, always worrying about its skin instead of the job in hand.

  Loman went on sulking for half a minute and then said:

  ‘The objective has to be obliterated.’

  He meant I’d got to go and blow up the freighter.

  ‘Why?’

  There was no technical problem: he wasn’t obliged to say anything that couldn’t be said in front of Chirac and I could do what I liked about that.