The Tango Briefing q-5

by Adam Hall

  There was the bare possibility they were holding off, letting me run while they could do it without any risk of losing me: the road from the hotel to the town centre and the main intersection was approximately 1.5 k's and it was the only route you could take if you wanted to link up with the major highway north to Garaa Tebout or south to the complex of drilling-camps so they'd be virtually certain I'd be using that stretch. The awkward thing was that I couldn't avoid it. The Mosque Hamoud Pasha was half a kilometre from the oasis road and Chirac was on his way there so I shifted the stick and got rolling because it was the only thing left to do.

  The coloured lights of the marquee sent rainbows flowing across the bonnet of the 220 as I swung past the steps and took the east road between the overhanging palms, mirror-check negative.

  High degree of cognitive dissonance, most unpleasant. I was expecting lights to come into the mirror and they didn't and it threw me. Something was missing from the equation and I couldn't see what it was unless it could simply be that they were so monumentally disorganized that they didn't know how to operate. It would be nice to think that.

  Forty on the clock and I left it there: the road was sandy in places and the crown finished in a ragged edge of macadam within a foot of the palm-trunks. The mirror was hazed over now with the dust I was sending up but if lights moved into it I would see them.

  There were buildings at intervals standing back from the road, the small white-domed winter residences of retired merchants and date-farmers, and they vanished as the windscreen went and I smashed the flat of my hand against the crazed glass and broke a hole in it but I'd been driving blind for two seconds and in those forty yards the Mercedes had drifted off-course and the nearside tyres were over the edge of the macadam and I had to let her go another foot and then bring the wheel round to force the front tyre back across the edge before I could get any kind of stability.

  I was slumped low by now and the second shot hit the roof and it banged like a tin drum and I knew the trunks of the palms were getting in his way but there were a lot of gaps in them so I kept low and sighted through the wheel and the hole in the granulated screen but it was very awkward and we began swinging wide again and I suddenly felt cold because if the drifting got worse and I hit a tree and finished up stationary he'd take his time and pick me off when I tried to get out and if I stayed where I was he'd come up close and make it a certainty.

  The speed had risen a fraction but it didn't affect things very much: it was just a question of how steady the target was when he lined up the next shot and I didn't like this because if I tried to jazz the thing around to spoil his aim I increased the risk of crashing it and giving him a sitter.

  Very close and glass flew and I felt the sudden air-rush from the hole in the windscreen so it was the rear side-window he'd smashed. The two windows on the other side were still all right so he was firing from a position well above the horizontal and the explosive shattering of the glass had covered the noise of the secondary impact on the inside panel of the door.

  Almost certain the observer at the Royal Sahara had picked up the telephone when he'd seen me getting back into the 220 but this ambush must have been set up before tonight because it carried communications and it wouldn't have been any use without them: this marksman had been installed as soon as they'd established that my travel-pattern included the only road between the hotel and the major intersection in the town centre, but they'd waited for tonight.

  I'd used this route six times since I'd arrived in Kaifra and they'd waited for the seventh and given him the signal that I was just leaving the hotel and he'd gone up to the roof and checked his magazine and the 220 was rocking again as the third shot smashed into the door-pillar and pain stabbed into my scalp but there was no concussion: it was a group of metal splinters and not a ricochet of the shell itself.

  This would be the long gun they'd used for the breaking of Fyson's nerve and this time they wanted to kill with it and there wasn't anything I could do except keep all four wheels on the road and hope to survive.

  He wasn't an international. He was trained and experienced because the target was now traversing at right-angles at twenty feet per second and the only lighting was back-glare from the headlamps and there were trees at intervals across his field of fire but if he'd been an international the first shot would have neutralized: there's a conceit among the top-flight professionals like Molinari and Kuo and Tomlinson that they only ever use one bullet for each assignment.

  This man'sforte was fast use of the automatic reloader: by the dull thump of the last shell after the ricochet had left it almost inert I'd say he was using something like a.44 Magnum, a brush-country weapon with enough power to drive its ammunition through a six-inch pine tree in full sap, and he'd been firing with a controlled rhythm that had kept him on the target throughout the period of three or four seconds following his first shot. I couldn't tell how long he'd be able to maintain fire and I didn't want to give myself any false hopes because it could be anything up to a twelve-shot rotary magazine and he was working at roughly one per second and if he had nine shells left he'd be using the last one while I was still in murderously close range at a hundred and eighty feet.

  A hole appeared in the scuttle three inches forward of the windscreen and both the aural and visual effects resembled those from a blow with a pickaxe and it confirmed what I'd thought about the size of this gun: it was really quite big.

  He'd overcorrected but this time the error was dangerously narrow: the third shell had hit the rear window approximately forty-eight inches from my head and this one had drilled the hole in the scuttle eighteen inches in front of me and it would have worried me but there were so many factors in play and one of them was the possibility that he hadn't seen where the shell had gone in because it hadn't made so much of a mess as the one that had smashed the window.

  I could feel him thinking.

  We were very close, he and I. Not close friends but close enemies. The total energy of his brain was devoted to the intricate equations governing our shared situation: speed of target in traverse, speed and extent of movement laterally as the target wavered, horizontal angle of fire, vertical angle of fire and the incomputable factors presented by the configuration of the palm-trees and the movement of the light from the headlamps, so forth. And the result of this mental energy was being expressed by the flight of the cylindrical objects whose accuracy was linking us closer and closer together, moving us nearer the point at which there would come profound personal involvement as the intention in this man's brain exploded in my own.

  The more difficult phase of this operation is getting you to the jump-off point without attracting surveillance or obstructive action.

  Put it like a schoolmistress but when it came to the crunch the terms were simpler: flesh and blood and a bullet, the will to live and the urge to kill, the moment of truth.

  Oh Christ he was close and I felt the air-wave across my eyes and the force smashed the facia and sent splinters whining past my face as we drifted badly because of the shock and I tried to pull her straight and for the first time cursed him, being afraid and needing to diminish him by names. The trees swung and the lights sent their shadows lurching as the tyres lost their hold on the sandy surface and the back end broke away and I brought it straight and used the throttle for traction and got it and piled it on.

  Five.

  He'd brought down the error from forty-eight inches to less than one and he'd done it in two shots and I sat waiting for it, listening to the whistle of the wind through the can in the screen and watching the dips and hollows of the road as the lights pooled shadows there and then swept them away, his image in my mind, a dark face pressed to the gun, its eye brilliant in the light on the road ahead of me that was gathered by the telescopic lens and focused on the pupil, thrown on the screen of the retina for interpretation by the brain: higher and to the right — fire.

  Six and the impact and a ricochet and fine glass fragments shivering in
the air from the instruments and then a shoulder-blow as the shell doubled and I took the last of its inertia and the wheel jerked and I lost it, the lot, spinning once over the loose sand and rocking across the edge of the macadam with the vibration shaking the granules from the frame of the screen and the windrush sending them past me in a stream of flying hail as the flank of the 220 struck across a tree-trunk and we pitched the other way and found the road and bounced there with a tyre bursting and a headlight blacking out.

  Lost it again and we spun with the last of the screen fragments shaking awayand falling across me while I dragged the manual into low to kill off the rest of the speed but the front end wouldn't respond and a palm-trunk ripped a wheel panel off and left the front fender creased backwards and howling on the tyre with its shrill note rising as I got traction in low and brought her back on to the road and shifted the lever and took the speed up again through the early range with the stink of heated rubber fouling the air.

  The howling noise was very loud, marking my passage through the night, but if I slowed he'd take his time and set up the final shot and I kept up the speed, drifting crabwise with the burst tyre dragging and the one headlight slanting away from the road. Something important was trying to get my attention but brain-think was at a discount and the oasis road came up before I realized that it was a six-shot and he was changing magazines.

  Half a kilometre from the Mosque Hamoud Pasha the front tyre melted through and burst and a lot of the howling stopped but the steering was very awkward now and it was really a question of howlong it would take him to get into his car and come up on me with a full magazine.

  The dark oblong shape of the Renault was standing under the palms, glow of a Gauloise, threw my flight-bag in and pulled the door shut.

  'Go very fast, will you?'

  8: AIRBORNE

  I set the door-lock and got the belt adjusted.

  He glanced at me.'Ca va?'

  'Ca va.'

  I suppose I was bleeding again.

  He swung through the main intersection and accelerated hard along the South 4 highway and I pulled down the passenger visor and angled it to line up the mirror, negative.

  Chirac flicked the stub through the window.

  'I heard some shots just now.'

  'So did I.'

  He laughed cannily and shut the window and pushed the vents open and there wasn't so much noise.

  'Do you expect we shall be followed?'

  'It's on the cards.'

  'Comment?'

  'C'est possible.'

  Two of the stars on the south horizon were beginning to glow red and I watched them.

  'Do I go fast enough?'

  'Not if you can go any faster.' There was 140 kph on the clock and the engine was running at peak. with valve-bounce creeping in. 'How long will it take to reach the airstrip?'

  'Maybe ten minutes, a little more.'

  London was panicking but I didn't have to try cutting actual seconds off the schedule: it was just that if the man with the gun had got into his car he might have seen the Renault when we'd left the Mosque.

  Mirror negative.

  I could see now that the two red lights were stationary ahead of us and if it was some kind of breakdown I hoped it wasn't blocking the road because we wanted a clear run. There were three lights now and when I'd considered all the other possible explanations I voted for the idea that there were two vehicles halted on the road about a mile in front of us: a few seconds ago I'd felt my weight shifting slightly to one side and my elbow had been pressed gently against the door panel so we must have taken an almost indefinable curve and the visual effect had been to reveal one of the second vehicle's rear-lamps by parallax.

  'Is that a truck?'

  'I would expect so, yes.'

  'If it's a breakdown, just keep on going.'

  'Okay.'

  We were coming up on the lights very fast and he began flickering the heads as a warning and I wondered whether he'd be able to judge how much room there was to go past at this speed before it was too late to do anything about it. Chirac was all right but there was a bit too much garlic-and-Gauloises philosophy about him, the thing is to die like a man, so forth, absolute balls because whether you die like a man or the back end of a pantomime horse you're going to stop breathing when it happens.

  There were some other lights, white ones, moving around in the ravine below the road and then I got it and stopped worrying and sat back and watched him put the Renault through the gap between the edge of the road and the police car and ambulance standing on the other side. Nobody tried to slow us: they were all busy down in the ravine, two of them carrying a stretcher.

  'There was an accident,' Chirac said.

  'It looks like it.'

  He reached for the blue packet and manoeuvred a cigarette out one-handed. 'Some people drive too fast,mon ami.'

  It looked like a false sunrise as we topped the dunes a mile from South 4 camp, the brilliance of the derrick-lamps lifting into the sky and flaring there among the stars.

  We were already running parallel with a wire guard-fence hung at intervals with notices: Defense d'Entrer — Defense de Fumer — Danger du Mort. Trucks moved beyond the fence, unloading sections of piping, and the derrick lamps shone down on storage tanks and a fleet of jeeps and half-tracks

  'The drill is down to four thousand metres,' Chirac said as we began slowing, 'and last week they make a core-drilling and bring up oil in the sandstone, so it will be not long now before they strike. But like I tell you, they are a lousy outfit, so maybe the oil will be lousy too.'

  The two guards checked our papers with the gates still closed, then gave us passes and let us through and Chirac drove at the regulation 20 kph past the living-quarters to the south end of the airstrip where the windsock was hanging limp a hundred yards from the hangar. From here the immediate skyline was a frieze of pumping-units, rigs, hutments and vehicles, with the towering derrick and radio masts rising behind them. The steady drone of the diesels sounded from the rotary table half a mile away but here it was relatively quiet and I could hear voices from inside the security-zone where the first stages of the pipeline were being set up.

  The hangar was a single-span stressed-iron unit, an item of ex-war stock with the original camouflage design showing faintly through the silver heat-reflecting paint. There weren't many lamps burning inside and for a moment I didn't see the glider because its matt night-blue finish gave it the same tone as the shadows on the corrugated walls.

  Chirac put his hands on his hips.

  'Et voila! Mais queue vache, hein? What a cow! But it will fly very well, and that is what we need.'

  Much bigger than I'd expected: a three-seater pod-and-boom design, shoulder-wing, straight dihedral, very large chord, ugly to look at because of the lump at the front end and the almost black paint.

  'Have you flown this type?'

  'Mon Dieu,there isn't another like this! The Algerians used it for radio-observer drops during the war, then the Meteo converted it for research on thermal currents, then Anglo-Beige put different mainplanes on it for low-altitude surveys, and now look what we do, we maketrappe beneath the cabin and paint it like this!Tout simplement, he is a cow! But I can fly anything,mon ami, even a cow, so we shall go well up there, don't worry please.'

  He fished for his Gauloises and lit up and remembered the fire-risk and saidmerde and scuffed the thing out. I wished he were a degree less nervy.

  I'd expected a lot of interest from the drilling-crews but the only people in the hangar were the three riggers doping the fabric of the new trap-door and a man in flying-gear coming across to us from the far end.

  'What's our cover-story for this flight, Chirac?'

  'Comment?'

  'What's the official reason for our using this glider?'

  'Oh yes, I will tell you that. It was being flown for Anglo-Belge on a magnetic-rock survey a few days before, but the wind becomes too low, you see, so it was force-landed on the ne
arest airstrip, which was this place. Now we are going to take it back to Anglo.'

  'Why at night?'

  'The wind is good right now.'

  'Why the blue paint?'

  'Ecoutez, mon ami,who the hell asks to know a thing like this?' He jerked a thumb towards the main camp. 'That drill does not stop, never, day and night, you see, unless it breaks or it strikes oil, and then they are even more busy than always, you un'erstand? When they work they have no time to think of different things, and when theystop work they are too damnfatigue to do anything but sleep. They do not wish to ask about theplaneur.' He turned as the man in the flying-gear came up.'Pierre, je to presente Monsieur Gage, l'Anglais dont je t'ai parle. This is Pierre Batagnier, who will fly the airplane that will tow us.'

  Small compact man, more flesh on him than Chirac, much less nervy about the eyes. We shook hands and he went over to the riggers.

  'Alors, Michel, tu es pret?'

  Ten minutes, the man said, and it would take longer than that to warm his engines.

  Chirac got the map and spread it across a crate and the pilot joined us. 'Okay, now listen please. Pierre will tow us to the north-east of here until three thousand metres of altitude, and that will bring us somewhere by the third Philips radio beacon at this blue mark here. This is because it is a normal route made by airplanes across the drilling-complex from South 4 to the Anglia-Beige Roches Vertes II, so nobody will think it strange to hear us go that way, you see? After this point we will slip the cable, and Pierre will return here alone.'

  I kept thinking of base.

  'Now we shall be for ourselves, and we will make a circle to bring us east of the Algerian platinum-prospecting camp right here, and then we will go down maybe a hundred metres at a fifteen-degree angle of glide to make a good speed for our final run to the target area, you un'erstand?'