The Tango Briefing q-5

by Adam Hall

  Tonelessly he said: 'This is Quiller, the executive in the field.'

  I think she came forward a pace to greet me, I don't remember, and then I supposed stopped, seeing I didn't move.

  Fair hair and a young face, the mouth surprised and the eyes waiting, uncertain of me, the stance defensive, the bare arms hanging loose but the hands tensed, a slight girl, a girl out of a fashion magazine, thin-bodied in a fisherman's vest and slacks and sandals, this summer's gear for Brighton or the Broads and all the rage and oh Christ a mission to run and this child caught in its machinery.

  When I could, I looked at Loman.

  There was nothing in my tone either; we'd both of us been trained, long ago, out of our habits; but he knew what was in my mind.

  'How long has she been operating on priority missions?'

  He stood with his hands tucked neatly behind him, head on one side but still not looking at me, maybe prepared for me to blow up in his face and get it over, maybe deciding on policy not to answer me till I forced him.

  'Long enough,' the girl said, 'to know how to do it.'

  Her eyes were steady now, no longer uncertain of me. She stood with her arms folded and her chin lifted a fraction.

  Loman spoke suddenly. I suppose the anger in her voice had encouraged him.

  'When I direct a mission I choose first-class people and if this radio operator has my approval then you can have every confidence in her.'

  He couldn't even make it sound right.

  My mind had partially blanked off and I couldn't think of anything useful to say: he and I both knew what the situation was and there wasn't anything to talk about. Professional instinct was still functioning, though, and I crossed the uneven mosaic to the window and pulled down the venetian blind and fixed the catch.

  'Keep it shut.'

  She said

  'I like the view.'

  It was very quiet here: the post-meridian heat of the August sun was lying like a dead-weight on the town and we were among the few people who weren't deep in a siesta. No sound came from outside this room, no sound at all.

  Loman took out his damp silk handkerchief and wiped his polished face. The sweat trickled on me as the organism tried to reduce the body-temperature. I didn't move. I was beginning to lose the fine-tuned sense of direction, of shape, of purpose, the thing we call mission-feel that develops by infinite degrees as we go forward, step by step, into the area where we have committed ourselves to unknown tasks in the teeth of unknown hazards: the sense that tells us, at every step, that it's now toolate to turn back.

  This I was beginning to lose.

  'Loman. It's no go.'

  He made an impatient gesture but said nothing.

  I didn't look at the girl. It wasn't her fault.

  Under the big dome my voice echoed strangely.

  'You'd better signal London. Get some professional staff.'

  He was standing perfectly still, a listening bird, his small eyes bright and his neat head tilted. I knew there wasn't anything he could say because it was beyond him now: there wasn't time to get anyone capable from London and it wasn't his fault but I was getting fed-up.

  'I can get killed this way, Loman. We all can. For nothing. Just because those incompetent bastards in London have taken on a job that's got to be done so fast that we can't even hope to survive for as long as it takes to do it. This isn't an intelligence operation, it's a suicide pact.'

  Loman could think quite fast but he couldn't talk while he was doing it and he didn't talk now so I shut up and let him get on with it because this was his pigeon: when the director in the field sends the executive in there's got to be a professional set-up. We didn't have one.

  I suppose he'd thought of a dozen angles of attack in those few seconds and obviously the one he chose was the one he thought was right and he was wrong.

  'I think you're showing an unreasonable bias towards — '

  'Isthat so?' I was really very fed-up. 'We've been called in by a panic directive to clear up the wreck of an operation that went off half-cocked and killed one man and blew another and by a bit of luck I missed a bomb and last night they picked Fyson out of Tunis harbour and it'd be nice to think that when they grilled him he didn't break but the last time I saw him alive his nerve had gone so they wouldn't have had any trouble. How safe's our base now, Loman? And all you can do about it is pick a kid out of school who leaves her radio in direct sight of a building at fifty yards' optical range even through low-powered glasses and doesn't pull the blind down because she likes the view.'

  In ten seconds he looked at me and said:

  'She is an efficient radio operator. Highly efficient'

  When I turned she was watching me, angry because of what I'd said about her, frightened because of what I'd said about Fyson.

  'All right she's an efficient radio operator but who's going to look after her if I'm in the desert and you have to leave base for five minutes?'

  Before he could answer she said:

  'I can look after myself.'

  'How?'

  She drew very fast and I hit the thing before she'd finished and it spun high and chipped plaster off the wall and curved down and skittered across the mosaic.

  'You have to be faster than that.'

  Loman said bleakly:

  'I would undertake to man the base personally at all times.'

  'Good of you.'

  I went over and picked the gun up and wiped the plaster off and checked for damage and gave it back to her, a half-pound six-shot.25 standard lightweight, wouldn't stop a mouse.

  'And leave the safety-catch off. There's no point in a fast draw if the trigger's locked.'

  She took it but wouldn't look at me, her eyes were down and she was breathing fast, the heat and of course the frustration. I must have bruised her hand but she didn't let herself nurse it, a point for that but one point wasn't enough to qualify her for running the radio liaison of a mission with the death-roll rising before we were even on our marks.

  Loman was still thinking but he couldn’t find what he wanted: an argument that could keep me with him. It was too late now for an easy trap like the one he'd used on me before.

  'She was head of signals at the Embassy in Tunis and monitoring the Egyptian-Israeli frontier-incident reports direct for London. She has fluent French, Italian and Arabic with five dialects.'

  I looked at the radio, its facia striped by the shadows of the sunblind. It was a KW 200 °CA single-sideband transceiver with four channels on the dial and an auto-scrambler.

  'What's your frequency coverage?'

  Her head came up.

  '3.0 to 19 mc/s.'

  'Channels?'

  'Four preset crystal controlled.'

  'Receiver sensitivity?'

  'Better than one microvolt for one watt output.'

  'What frequencies would you use in this area?'

  '7 MHz for daytime propagation conditions, 3 MHz at night.'

  'How long have you worked with this type?'

  'Over two years.'

  'Did you choose it because of that?'

  'No. Because it's perfect for the conditions here.'

  I nodded and turned away.

  Loman was watching me. I felt him watching.

  She was all right on the radio and she knew how the thing worked but if I went out there a hundred miles deep into the desert I'd be like a diver with a lifeline. My lifeline would be the radio liaison facility and if it were put out of action I'd fry out there like a louse. Worse: the mission would end at the same time and in the same place,objective unaccomplished.

  Loman said

  'Arrangements have been made to jump you in rather soon.'

  'How soon?'

  'Tonight.'

  This was the argument he'd been looking for.

  The nearer you get to the brink of a mission the faster you want to go: it's a kind of target attraction and you don't want to pull out and the little bastard knew this and now he'd thrown me the dead
line and it was close. In a matter of hours I could be out there in the silence of the sands and alone with the objective: the broken-winged smudge on the desert floor that no one had been closer to than sixty-five thousand feet.

  Tango Victor.

  I looked at the girl.

  'Did you volunteer for this kind of work.'

  'Yes.'

  'You know it's dangerous?'

  'Yes.'

  'What makes you want to do it?'

  'The interest. And the danger.'

  'Would you say you had a strong sense of survival?'

  'Pretty strong, yes. I'd fight like hell.'

  I told Loman he could brief me.

  5: MOHAMED

  She hit the set open.

  Tango to Embassy.

  Loman was restive again, thinking with his feet. He'd got me to the jump-off point and there weren't any more doubts: tonight the mission would start running.

  Tango to Embassy.

  'What time.' he asked me, 'did you hear it?'

  '09.00 on Radio Tunis.'

  Embassy to Tango. Receiving you.

  'No details? Just that he was found in the harbour?'

  'An Englishman named Fyson. A police enquiry has begun.'

  Stand by, please.

  She gave him the mike.

  This is for London, Liaison 9. F Freddie absent believe other hand believe may pip-squeak first. No: pip-squeak. Near smoke negative please delegate. Q Quaker home on TJ-TK-S1-102 repeat TJ-TK-S1-102. Queries? Tango out.

  I'd spread the map on the bed and he came over and began briefing me.

  'I told you that after Tango Victor had taken-off from the UK there was a suspected false signature found on a Customs and Excise declaration form. It was discovered that the pilot had knowingly taken-off without proper freight inspection. Twenty-four hours later a report went in to D.I6 in London that the Algerian Air Force was in the process of mounting a ground-search by five squadrons of its desert-reconnaissance branch along this twenty-kilometre band from Oran here on the Mediterranean coast to Alouef, south of this upland here, the Plateau de Tademait. It was described as the usual "routine exercise".

  'Was there any monitoring liaison at that stage?'

  Customs, Special Branch, D.I.6 and the Bureau were very disparate organizations.

  'No. Monitoring liaison began when a telephone call from a Frenchwoman in Tripoli was received at the airfield where Tango Victor's pilot was based — incidentally his name is Holt. The Special Branch was then called in and it was recognized that the twenty-kilometre band on the map here in fact straddled the proposed course of the freighter overland south of the Mediterranean. It seems that Holt diverted his flight to Tripoli without informing anyone, landing for an overnight stop in order to visit an acquaintance who lives there — the woman who telephoned the airfield in the evening of the next day. Evidently he had told her that he was to fly back to the UK after seeing her, and she phoned to make sure he'd arrived safely. It was of course only from that point in time that anyone in London knew that Holt's course across Algeria had been Tripoli-Alouef, not Oran-Alouef.'

  The picture was coming up and I did a visual check on the map and saw that a line drawn from Tripoli to Alouef would pass through our target-area: Longitude 8°3′ by Latitude 30°4′.

  'This was why the Algerian Air Force was unable to find the wreck and why the RAF succeeded. The recent actions against O'Brien, Fyson and yourself make it clear that the opposition realizes that we know where the plane is and that they're anxious to reach it before we do.'

  'You think they're overlooking the obvious?'

  He turned away from the map and walked neatly up and down. 'No. I think they don't rate their chances very high.'

  He'd got the point but I didn't expect him to fill anything in for me: this was a briefing session at Local Control, not a planning operation in London. But there was an equation that didn't work out and it worried me: the opposition couldn't have overlooked the obvious point that if they wanted to reach Tango Victor the best thing to do would be to follow us in and make an over-kill on the spot. Loman thought they weren't too sanguine about this and maybe he was right.

  There was a theory I liked even less: they could have killed off O'Brien and Fyson and attempted to kill me toobecause they knew where Tango Victor, was lying. And we had to be held off while they tried to reach it. This would explain the hurry directive from London.

  'What are the chances of another desert-recco exercise?'

  He stopped pacing and looked at the wall and I knew this was something that needled him.

  'That's quite impossible to deduce.' He was trying to make up his mind whether to block me off here and avoid overloading or cover the situation for me and he couldn't reach a decision standing still so he got into motion again. 'The opposition may conceivably include factions other than Algerian. We shouldn't discount Libya or Egypt or the United Arab Front organization. Nor should we discount the effects of internecine shifts of policy. The lack of a second search by the Algerian Air Force — this time over the target area — does not necessarily indicate that they know where the aeroplane came down: it could be due to a reluctance on the part of the newly-formed government in Algeria to mount an «exercise» so close to the Tunisian and Libyan borders. The assassination of King Hamouda and the seizure of power by the generals has left North African relationships rather delicate for the time being.'

  I looked at the map. If we could read it properly it could answer most of the questions.

  'What made the opposition think the plane came down near the Tunisian border?'

  He looked at me with his shoulders drooping suddenly.

  'O'Brien. Then Fyson.'

  'Then me.'

  'That wasn't your fault.'

  'I walked straight into surveillance.'

  'You could hardly avoid it.'

  'Do you think that our presence in the field is theonly reason why they believe Tango Victor came down within a hundred miles of Kaifra?'

  In a moment he said:

  'I would like to.'

  I'd never seen Loman like this before: within hours of throwing the mission into gear he was uncertain on major aspects that London should have cleared for him before sending either of us into the field. Everything about this operation stank of panic and I didn't like it because I was the ferret and the ferret's always the first to go when the whole thing blows apart.

  'Who have you got lined up?'

  He stopped moving about.

  'Lined up?'

  'If I come a mucker.'

  I felt the girl watching me from near the radio.

  'No one,' Loman said.

  'With a thing as shaky as this — '

  'I anticipate success.' His tone had risen a fraction and he controlled it at once. 'Complete success. You understand?' He was wiping his face again. 'Had there been no chance of complete success I would have refused to direct the mission, regardless of pressure. I am asking you to proceed with every confidence, both in me and in the constant support we shall have from London.'

  I was learning something about Loman: the higher the stress the more he talked like a schoolmistress.

  'All right. Tell me about access, will you?'

  He began moving again at once. I'd pushed the briefing into the final phase and he wouldn't have to worry any more about the background aspects: the area where he was critically uncertain.

  'You will rendezvous with a French pilot tonight as soon as he contacts meto say he's ready. His name is Gaston Chirac and he was engaged in combat flying during the Algerian war. Since then he has flown for the oil-companies in desert survey work and knows the area thoroughly; he was also the world sailplane champion three years ago when he raised the altitude record to forty-six thousand feet. There is only one way of sending you into the target area without either surveillance or active obstruction and that is by glider.'

  'And parachute?'

  'And of course parachute. Since this is a night-
drop, both will be dull black, to ensure that you go in unseen as well as unheard. The take-off is arranged for 23.00 hours. The rock outcrop you saw on the reconnaissance photographs is approximately five hundred yards from the aeroplane and can be used as a landmark even by starlight; it may also conceivably offer partial shade during the day, though that is less certain. Your equipment will comprise the second transceiver, a 35mm reflex camera with flash, and of course desert survival gear.'

  'What's the estimated duration?'

  He'd been pacing towards me and he turned away when I said that and it needn't have meant anything but I thought, it did because my nerves were getting into tune as the deadline approached and they could catch vibrations that I'd miss at other times.

  'Flexible.' I didn't hear anything in his tone because he'd make bloody sure of that. 'Forty-eight hours at the most you'llhave rations and water for that period, plus reserves. The task itself is not exacting: we are asked for photographs of the plane and its cargo. At the same time you will be reporting in precise detail by radio onwhat you discover, and your report will go directly on to tape in this room.'

  So that if I didn't survive, all they'd lose were the photographs. That was all right.

  I left the map and went over to the carved teak table and looked at the second transceiver. There was a recessed button that the other one didn't have.

  'Manual destruct?'

  'Yes. Ten-second fuse.'

  'Acid?'

  'Explosive.'

  'Safe range?'

  'Five yards.'

  He paused for a moment and said: 'In any case it's purely a refinement: the worst you'll have to contend with in the desert will be the heat. The more difficult phase of this operation is getting you to the jump-off point without attracting surveillance or obstructive action. We must therefore take every possible care.'

  Near the edge of the retina an object is invisible: but movement can be seen. At the actual edge of the retina not even movement shows itself: but it triggers a reflex and the eyes will turn quickly to bring the moving object into central vision for inspection.