by Adam Hall
‘It’s the only way of dispersing the gas.’ He checked his watch and looked back at the diffused glow on the horizon. ‘The heat of a nuclear reaction is required.’
I finished the cous-cous in the bowl and Chirac went to dish me out some more but I shook my head.
‘Is there any protein?’
Loman fished in the box and gave me a square packet and I peeled the skin off and ate it slowly: by the taste, it was mainly processed soya. I said:
‘You know some Arabs found that aeroplane, don’t you?’
‘Of course they didn’t.’ Still upset because I’d spoken to him like that in front of Chirac.
‘What did they die of then, those Arabs in the clinic?’
‘Nerve-gas.’
He wanted me to ask him how they could have been exposed to the gas without finding the freighter and I wasn’t going to: Loman had the knack of making you as petty-minded as he was. I said:
‘Some of the drillers think it was ergot. There’s a medical unit testing the bread supplies. The nurses at the clinic say it was a magnetic storm.’
He waited long enough to let Chirac see that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.
‘The properties of Zylon-4-Gamma are peculiar. By its nature it is humid and - as you discovered - heavier than air; and in addition it is given pronounced surface-adhesive characteristics by the manufacturing laboratory, enhancing its effectiveness as a weapon of war. When Tango Victor came down and a gas cylinder was damaged on impact, some of the gas remained in the aircraft, but some was evidently released by overspill and formed the characteristic bubble. This was invisible, freely afloat at ground level and of course subject to the influence of winds. It seemingly was blown across the caravan track between Ghadamis and Kaifra, since within twenty kilometres of Kaifra there were fourteen Arabs found dead, also their camels, also sundry birds of prey that had flown down to feed. The Arabs who died in the clinic had inhaled considerably less than their companions, and were able to reach Kaifra.’
So that was why I was still here.
Their situation had been different from mine: they’d been caught in the open desert and couldn’t escape but I’d been caught in a confined space, and could. They hadn’t known where the gas was and they could have run deeper into it when they’d tried to run clear; inside the freighter I’d known where the stuff was and I’d known where to run to get away from it. There’d been other factors in play: moving slowly under the open sky, as they’d been doing all their lives, they’d been taken utterly by surprise and must have thought in terms of a visitation by fiends at the behest of a disapproving Allah, their fear transfixing them. My mind had already been conditioned to think in terms of a toxic gas, and inhalation had been blocked immediately by reflex as I’d started to get clear.
“Isn’t there any kind of gas-mask available?’
‘You would have been given one, in that event. So would the crew of the aeroplane.’
Their situation had been different from mine and from the Arabs’: they’d been conditioned to the risk of a toxic gas leak but the crash landing had slowed their escape, either because they’d been partly stunned or the door had become jammed, possibly both.
‘Who’s been making this bloody stuff?’
Loman said nothing so I left it. There wasn’t anything new he could tell me about that gas: when I went back inside Tango Victor I’d know what to expect.
‘Where was it being delivered?’
‘This is not the time to discuss -‘
‘I will go away, mes amis.’ Chirac opened the starboard door and swung his feet through the gap.
‘There is no need, Chirac There’s nothing to discuss in any case.’
‘Comme meme, I shall stretch the legs.’
He dropped through and I watched his dark compact figure moving away against the starlit flank of the dune.
‘Algeria,’ I said, ‘or Egypt.’
Quickly: ‘You’ve identified a cell of the UAR network?’
‘Yes.’
It’d be a signal for London.
‘There are probably more than one.’
‘More than one Egyptian cell?’
‘Yes.’
I finished the protein and screwed up the paper and flicked it through the doorway. ‘This gas was made in Britain, was it?’
‘Clandestinely, of course.’
‘By private initiative?’
‘Certain members of an otherwise reputable laboratory have been interviewed by Special Branch. Unfortunately the laboratory had been placed under government contract, and although the production of this gas was made in secret by criminal elements, you can imagine what would happen to the reputation of the UK itself if Tango Victor were found by - shall we say - an ill-wisher.’
‘And what’s going to happen to the reputation of the United Arab Republic when we tell everyone they’ve been buying BCW material within six months of the Geneva banning?’
He turned slowly to look at me.
‘What reputation? The difference is there. In any case it won’t occur. The UK will tell nobody, since the gas was unfortunately made in England and any accusation would of course boomerang.’
‘There’ll be a public trial for the people who made the stuff.’
‘Unavoidably. The image of the UK will receive a certain degree of damage. Regrettably, a criminal element has been manufacturing and selling a deadly chemical warfare material. Nothing more. We shall hope to avoid the disastrous outcome of much more serious revelations.’
‘You mean those poor bastards in the clinic have officially died of ergot in the bread supplies.’
‘You would oblige me by remembering that.’
‘And the outbreak in Mali? What was the death roll?’
‘Three hundred.’
‘Jesus. An outsize bubble on the move. Was it lobbed there?’
‘There’s an Algerian missile site in the south Sahara and the gas was being tested for the United Arab Republic.’
‘In vivo.’
‘How otherwise would its precise effect be known? But in fact the Mali batch was too powerful: the intention was to induce an incapacitating state of anxiety for a period of a few days. The batch in Tango Victor is less lethal but still too strong. What Egypt would be seeking is of course the convenient dilution providing this effect, enabling her to take over control in Tel Aviv without casualties and therefore without too great an international motion of censure.’
He looked at his watch.
In the background silence the tick of the instrument-panel chronometer was insistent, its illuminated dial sharply defined. There were four minutes to go.
‘You’d better brief me.’
‘Yes.’
He shifted his position on the observer’s seat as he opened the map, and the Alouette moved slightly on its suspension. I rummaged in the rations box and found some dehydrated honey tablets and peeled one off the strip.
‘Chirac will be using a flight pattern designed to confuse the acoustic observation posts as much as possible. You will go from here to the Petrocombine South 5 drilling camp and overfly the airstrip, setting course for this point here in the Roches Vertes complex and then flying for three kilometres along the scheduled air route from Ghadamis to El Oued across the Algerian desert. You will then proceed at 203° direct to the target area.’
I checked it twice and asked him where the listening-posts were meant to be.
‘From local intelligence we know there are four posts in this line from South 5 to No. 2 Philips radio tower. There may be others farther west.’
I looked up from the map.
‘What d’you think our chances are, Loman?’
He must have been expecting it but tried to look surprised.
‘Of doing what?’
‘Reaching the target area without bringing a whole pack of tags or interceptors into the air.’
I’d made my point and he had the grace to give me a straight answer with
out pretending to consider the actual odds.
‘Unpromising.’
I suppose he was spiritually exhausted or physically over the edge of fatigue because he suddenly sagged, his hands resting loosely on the spread map and his pale eyes closing for a moment.
‘That is the only possible flight pattern we can use.’
‘Taking us within seven kilometres of this end listening post.’ I’d begun sweating. ‘What d’you imagine their effective range is? About fifty?’
‘Perhaps.’
He was sitting perfectly still and I knew he was waiting for me to blow up in his face but I wasn’t going to do it because it wouldn’t help us and Christ we needed help and a new question was coming into my mind and I tried to get rid of it before it could do any harm, before it could bring down the last few bricks of the mission that still appeared to be standing. But it wouldn’t go.
Question. When does a director in the field start losing his sense of proportion? When does the strain of watching the slow demolition of his plans begin to tell on him and take him beyond the point where reason can only be ignored with fatal results? When does he break?
Perhaps it is when he finishes up sitting in a helicopter on the edge of the Sahara in the early hours of a sleepless night and awaiting the dawn of a hopeless day, his hands lying unnerved on a map where the only uncharted feature is the ruin he knows is there but refuses to recognize: those last few tumbled bricks of the thing he was trying too hard to build.
I wouldn’t expect a man like Loman to abandon a mission if success or even survival looked unattainable. I would expect him to keep on working at it, no longer for what he could make of it but for its own sake, once it had gone beyond the stage where any useful purpose remained. I would expect him to become obsessive, to make a shrine of it: and I would expect him to regard his executive in the field as a natural sacrifice.
‘Loman,’ I said, ‘when did you get London’s directive on this end-phase?’
He was now genuinely surprised, couldn’t follow me.
‘Just before 03.00 hours.’
I didn’t think he’d actually lie about a thing like that. I didn’t think he’d lost his reason: I just thought reason was now being subjugated to the point where he might have me killed off for nothing.
‘Have they been given total intelligence on the disposition of those listening-posts?’
Then he saw what I meant.
‘I’m sorry, Quiller. The objective has to be destroyed. London insists.’
‘For what reason?’
Because you can ask questions if you think your life is being moved into a specific hazard: they don’t bind your hands behind you and drive you blindfold against the cannon.
‘There are two reasons,’ Loman said. He sounded perfectly calm and I thought this is how they sound when their fantasies have had to take control of them to save them from the reality they can’t any longer face. ‘It requires several days of exposure to the ultra-violet rays in sunlight to alter the atomic structure of Zylon-K-Gamma and render it harmless. If anyone attempted to move the cargo in that aeroplane, not knowing what it was, enough gas could be spilled to wipe out the population of Kaifra, particularly since the Ghibli is a south wind. The United Kingdom would be responsible. Secondly a nuclear explosion would not only change the atomic structure of the gas instantaneously, but would obliterate the aeroplane: and this is essential. It will be known that a new BCW weapon was being manufactured in the UK long after the banning of such weapons by the Geneva Convention, and even though it was done clandestinely it can only be embarrassing and the Government will have to explain how it was allowed to occur. This is bad enough. It would be disastrous at this moment when Israel and the Arab world confront each other if it were also known that a consignment of chemical warfare gas had been flown from the UK to North Africa. Allow me to borrow the old cliché of a spark in a powder barrel.’
I watched his reflection in the glass of the black-dialled chronometer. He was looking at me, waiting. His face was as calm as his speech had been: reaction-concealment was second nature to him and that was why I was worried when he’d suddenly sagged a few minutes ago.
He would remain perfectly calm, I assumed, after his mind had slipped its focus. He would give careful and cogent reasons for driving his executive headlong against the cannon.
Decision necessary: stay with the mission or get out. Trust this efficient and merciless little bastard all the way or take a step back and see him for what he might be: an intelligence director turned psychopath.
Chirac, a dark figure against the pale flank of the dune, waiting. The chronometer ticking in the quietness, the face of Loman reflected on the dial, waiting.
Do what he says and do it even if you know it’s likely to kill you, even if you know he’ll never grieve. Or save yourself, tell him no.
The scream of a ferret in the dark.
Or refusal.
Chapter 19
EPITAPH
The slam of the wind and the known world gone, the sky on the ground and the sand overhead, spinning. Sink rate rising.
Tumbling now and a lot of noise and the collar of his flying-suit flapping because the zip had pulled open when I’d jumped. Chirac had lent it to me. helping me on with it in the pre-dawn cold. A good man, Chirac, a man I’d like to see again and probably never would. Adieu, mon ami.
It was a low level drop at low speed and the conditions were different from the first time: he’d only given me two hundred feet to do it and that wasn’t much, even over sand, but he said there was rising ground towards the north-east, the remains of an eroded escarpment, and it could conceivably bounce our acoustic irradiation and fox the scanners, you never know your luck. You’ve got to try everything when you haven’t got a hope in hell, everything.
Blood pooling in the head, the eyes swollen, the air noise very loud and the terminal velocity coming up close to a hundred knots so pull the thing, lying awkwardly face up but there’s not much room left so pull it.
Canopy deployed.
Pendulous oscillation setting in and I tried to control it with the shroud lines but couldn’t, hadn’t the strength, because the opening shock had jerked me upright like a puppet and the harness webbing had bitten into old bruises and all I could do was hang in the air getting my breath, nausea threatening because of the oscillation, fight it.
Swing, swing, swing.
Cheer up, the worst is over, so forth.
Very queasy and I got hold of a line, two lines, pulled on them, an improvement, going almost straight down like a shuttle-cock. Don’t think about the ground: it’s not going to be comfortable so we’ll just settle for that and shut up about it.
I caught sight of the supply ‘chute three times during the drop, lower than I was because I’d shoved it overboard before I’d jumped, and not bad timing: it was nearer the rock outcrop, almost on top of it.
It would have been nice, yes, if Chirac could have landed me in his Alouette and waited for the estimated forty minutes while I fiddled with the thing and then taken me away before the bang went off, a civilized approach to the end-phase of a mission, a taxi for the executive in the field. But the listening-posts were going to pick us up on their scanners unless the rising ground to the north-east diffused our sound-wake enough to fox them, and there was a chance they’d take us for a prospecting crew or one of the Algerian desert-reconnaissance machines.
But if Chirac put her down they’d get an immediate fix on our position and I wouldn’t have time to set up the bang before we got smothered in ticks. No go.
Sand coming up fast don’t think about it.
The first light of the day was spilling across the horizon, touching the tips of the rocks with rose and colouring the crests of the dunes and leaving the last of the night pooled in the hollows. Chirac had done his homework and the timing had been precise. With the opposition cells alerted by the Marauder’s switch to South 6 we couldn’t hope to repeat a night approach by sailplane
: this time we had to go right into the target area with a zero margin of error so that I could set up the device as soon as I landed, trigger it and leave an escape-delay on the detonator sufficient to get me clear.
Nor could we nightfly the mission all the way because dead-reckoning was out of the question: it would demand a margin of error and we couldn’t afford one. Chirac had to see the rock outcrop, home in on it and overfly, and do it without altering speed so that the doppler factor would remain constant on the scanners. Nor could we fly by daylight all the way without being seen, even if we flew at dune level the south.
So Chirac had flown through the last of the dark with an ETA of dawn plus one over the target area and he’d got it spot on.
I could still hear him, heading south-west for Ghadamis on a decoy run before he turned back to Kaifra.
Estimate five seconds to go, relax or you’ll break a joint.
I tried to turn bodily but it set up the first swing of an oscillation and I didn’t want to land at an angle so I stopped. In any case there was no problem: the supply ‘chute had been close to the rocks when I’d last sighted it.
The decision had been made rather formally. He is like that, Loman. Even when the chances of a successful end-phase are almost nil and he’s staring straight into the brick dust as the mission collapses he remains rather formal.
The situation, Quiller, is simply this. Even if we have only a one per cent chance of completing our mission, London would appreciate our making the attempt.
Then he’d got out of the observer’s seat and dropped on to the sand and walked away in the direction opposite from Chirac’s, to stand there with his back to me. His gesture was symbolic, accurate and characteristic: he couldn’t go far from the helicopter because if I accepted the end-phase we’d have to take off in three minutes, so he went as far as he could and indicated by turning his back that he was to all intents and purposes out of sight. The final decision was to be my own and no pressure was to be put on me by my director in the field, even by his presence.
