The Tango Briefing q-5

by Adam Hall

Sweat in my eyes. In the shade here it wasn't evaporating so fast. Pronounced heart-beat: quite regular and perfectly normal in these conditions. Thud-thud-thud.

  Looking at the photograph, then at the sketch. The girl watching him. I didn't know if he'd got juxtaposed stills of the terrain surrounding the target area and I wasn't going to ask him because that'd be another nasty one if both outcrops had much the same shape at this degree of blow-up. The girl watching him.

  You there, Diane?

  Yes.

  How's tricks?

  All right.

  Lovely day, isn't it?

  Yes.

  Tried to say it with a smile, couldn't make it. Nerves in her voice, nothing explicit, just a tenseness. I suppose she knew the score, worked out what we were doing, didn't like it, none of us did. Rotten having to wait.

  He said

  Those are the right ones.

  Shut my eyes and said:

  Oh that's good.

  I'm going to ask those people to confirm everything for us, the scale, orientation, and particularly the distance and bearing of Tango Victor from the rocks. Someone might have made a slip.

  Just what we need.

  It's a possibility we have to consider.

  How long will it take, Loman?

  Perhaps thirty minutes.

  Kaifra — Tunis — Crowborough — London. No delay at all from Kaifra to the Embassy because he'd use the radio and the signals room in Tunis would use their own. Crowborough — London was the slow bit, by normal telephone.

  I want to be out there longer than that.

  He still hadn't told me to get moving and I didn't like it: he sounded too bloody relaxed. The panic had gone because we knew now that we were at least in the target area but he still ought to be worried because the aeroplane had disappeared.

  You're camped in the shade at present?

  Yes.

  I want you to stay there for the moment. I'm in signals and London is monitoring.

  Didn't like it all and the sweat was running into my eyes, what was he in signals for at this phase?

  For Christ sake fill me in, Loman.

  I just want you to stay at your base so that I can call you immediately if I need to. I take it you'd prefer not to carry the transceiver about in the full sun.

  I know that bit.

  Five-second pause.

  Chirac has reported.

  He all right?

  Oh yes. But he didn't find the wind he needed, so he had to circle for several hours to gain enough height to make a final run-in through dead air. He came down in agassitwenty kilometres from South 5 and they picked him up in a half-track.

  Oh Christ, there'd been some kind of security leak, smell it a mile off. He wasn't relaxed at all, he was just over-correcting again.

  Did he report by phone?

  Yes. He hadn't been able to begin his final run-in until shortly after dawn, and he says he was observed by an aircraft at considerably higher altitude.

  Worse than I'd thought.

  What area, Loman?

  Quite a long pause. Didn't want to worry his executive. All the worrying was meant to be done at Local Control.

  Not far from the point of drop. He puts it at something like fifteen kilometres from there. He was flying in the dark for most of the time and couldn't even see the No. 1 Philips tower or the Roches Brunes derrick.

  I couldn't see why Loman had to get into signals with Control. And I was beginning to think I didn't want to know. You don't bring in London on a local security leak unless the whole thing's been bust wide open.

  What was the aircraft registration?

  He couldn't read it.

  Too high?

  Yes.

  I had to think how exactly to say it.

  Loman, have we still got a mission?

  It was a bloody awful thing to ask your director in the field and I knew that but I wanted the answer.

  Let us hope so.

  There was a faint crackling noise somewhere. Not from the set. I looked past the edge of the canopy.

  Quiller.

  Hear you.

  What is that noise?

  Lizard, cracking a snail open.

  He didn't bother to answer.

  I looked out from the canopy across the blaze of sand, for an instant seeing it, then seeing it vanish.

  Loman, I want to go out there.

  Not yet.

  While I'm fresh. Let me go and look for the bloody thing. It must be there somewhere.

  Certainly it must. But we have to wait for London.

  Bloody London, gets on your tits.

  Switching oft transmit.

  Very well, but stay open to receive.

  Had to drink some water, then I lay on my back and decided not to think about the aircraft that had been observing Chirac only fifteen kilometres from the point of drop, Loman's headache, not mine, though of course when the crunch came I'd be right in it, like that poor bloody snail

  Slept.

  Tango.

  Check: 13.19. Switch.

  Tango receiving.

  I have London's signal. Monitoring liaison with Algiers informs that five squadrons of desert-reconnaissance helicopters are to search a prescribed area of which your own position is approximately the centre.

  I watched the lizard. It had found another one and the crackling noise began.

  When do they start?

  They are already airborne.

  12: SANDSTORM

  I stood watching them.

  They were quite high, about five hundred feet, but their shape and their flight were unmistakable: they drifted in circles, their wings held like black hoods to trap the air. From this distance I couldn'tsee their heads but theywere watching me: despite their feigned disinterest I was the focal point of their circling.

  I hadn't noticed them before but they'd probably been somewhere overhead since early this morning, attracted by the movement of the dot that had been making its laborious way among the dunes towards the rock outcrop. Their patient observation heightened my feeling of vulnerability and I had the urge to go back to the refuge that thirty minutes ago I'd been sharing with the lizards.

  Nobody likes being watched, and this was particularly unpleasant because I was being assessed as potential carrion.

  I moved again, trying not to drag my feet and leave tracks. The heat of the sun was like a weight on my back, pushing me down rather than forward, and its light struck upwards against my face, reflecting from the sand. I knew that the water-flask was still a quarter full and was tempted to drink, but when I'd broken camp and pushed everything into the shade I'd noticed that one of thebidons was already empty. In the last ten hours I'd used half the water-supply, pouring it into my body as you pour water on a fire.

  The desert is not like other places. The slaking of the increased thirst puts back only fifty per cent of the water lost in the cooling process, and in this degree of heat my cooling process was breaking down because the sweat was being evaporated the instant it reached the skin. In one hour I was generating seven or eight hundred calories and my sweat was ridding me of less than five.

  Sometimes their shadows drifted near me as they crossed the sun.

  At the four hundred and eighty-fifth pace I stopped.

  Long. 8°3′ by Lat. 30°4′.

  The sands were smooth.

  Loman hadn't received confirmation from No. 2 Fighter Reconnaissance before I'd left camp: I'd told him I wanted a last chance to find Tango Victor before the helicopters got here. But I knew now that I should have waited, because give or take a few yards I was standing where the smudge had been on the photograph. Somewhere they'd made an error: the scale had lost a nought or the bearing had been inverted and this wasn't where the smudge was at all.

  The wreck of Tango Victor was across the dunes there, or a thousand yards the other side of the rocks, not far away, ten minutes on foot in normal conditions. Here the conditions weren't normal and it could take me an hour or five
hours to find it because the dunes were higher than I was and in some places I couldn't see more than a hundred yards: I was moving through a maze.

  A bird's-eye view was the only way and five squadrons had been mustered and refuelled at the nearest airfield to these rocks: Fort Thiriet was a hundred and thirty kilometres distant and the helicopters had been deployed in a sweep formation of sixty aircraft on a twenty-five kilometre front to the immediate north of the Areg Tinrhales and they were heading this way while I stood and cursed some stupid bloody clerk in uniform who'd finished the mission for us before it began.

  The pressure was finally on and there was nothing I could do about it. There was data streaming in so fast that I couldn't deal with it: the overall picture they never like giving us was coming up under the hypo. The Chirac security leak had been bad luck and not his fault but it had revealed the importance of the objective in the eyes of the opposition: all they'd been informed was that a camouflaged sailplane had been observed over the open desert at dawn today, but an entire arm of the Algerian Air Force had been assembled across the country and deployed from FortThiriet, an airfield right onthe Libyan border.

  There'd been no time to put out even a token announcement of a “routine exercise” and this fact alone meant either that Libyan Intelligence was fully aware of the situation or that the Algerian government was so anxious to locate Tango Victor that it had risked embarrassment at high level between the two countries.

  In addition to this was the indication that it was their last throw and that they were confident of locating the objective before anyone else: because if they failed, and if an opposing network succeeded, they would have made it obvious that their search had been for the crashed freighter, whose cargo was so politically explosive that the armed forces of two countries had been called in to assist the intelligence services.

  The Bureau itself was intensely active and within a matter of days had brought its support communications to the pitch where half an hour ago Local Control could give me full details on the desert-reconnaissance operation including the precise area and width of sweep.At the same time the entire network was under general monitoring and if Analysis Section thought I'd be interested to know that an attempt had been made to assassinate General Chen Piao or that a missile-to-missile device had just come off the drawing-boards in Smolensk or that the Brazilian Minister for the Interior had handed in his resignation three weeks after accepting the post they'd pass it to Control for Local Control and the executive in the field and I'd get it almost as fast as a phone-call from London to Crowborough onthe priority line.

  I wouldn't get it in so many words. The original data would go through filters until the essence was extracted and made available. Even if support communications hadn't been energized then general monitoring would have reported sudden air movement in Algeria by desert-reconnaissance units and Analysis would have jumped onit straight away because they had Algeria as thelocale of one of the listed ops currently running.

  Behind me, as I stood here isolated in the desert wastes, was an organization striving to inform, direct and support me as I went deeper into the mission and closer to the target area; but now that I was here there was nothing they could do for me, and nothing I could do for them.

  Loman had predicted a forty-five minute deadline for the arrival of the Algerian squadrons in this area and there were fifteen minutes to go in terms of their ETA. In terms of the actual mission my time ran out to zero as I stood here listening for their rotors, because even if I climbed the nearest dune and saw Tango Victor deadin front of me it was no go. London wanted photographs and a full radioed report of the freighter's cargo and fifteen minutes wasn't long enough for me to go back for the transceiver and bring it here.

  The sands were quiet.

  My shadow' lay prone, a spirit felled by the heat.

  Something in my mind was trying to attract my attention and I was aware of it but unable to read its significance: it was like a sound heard but not identified. I let all thought subside, leaving the way open, while my body and its senses remained where they were as my mind ranged, released, finding images for me: the low wind and the pattering of the sand on the side of the box, the folds of the parachute half-covered, and the unexpected word in my head- beware — without either reason or coherence.

  Drawn blank.

  I turned back towards the rock outcrop and the sand hissed faintly across my boots. Halfway there I stopped and drank the rest of the water and left the cap of the flask dangling on its lanyard. Then the sky became gradually filled with infinitesimal vibrations, so faint that I thought the sound was only in my head, but as it strengthened I began moving faster and when I was certain what it was I broke into a clumsy run through the sand's obstructive softness, worried now that I'd left it too late to reach shelter before they came.

  There seemed to be no particular direction to the sound: it was a steady thrumming under the sky as if the air itself had started to vibrate, to shake with some kind of cosmic disturbance. The vultures had broken their circling flight and were drifting southwards, driven away by the noise. It was loudening quickly now and for a moment I didn't see the helicopters because I'd been looking for them too high. They were detaching themselves from the skyline and growing bigger and I went into the niche I'd made for myself among the stowed 'chute canopies and lay flat with my legs drawn up, and waited.

  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 legsup 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.