The Tango Briefing q-5

by Adam Hall

  There was bright flamelight now and a lot of noise. Hassan was screaming and trying to roll over but he was a torch and the petrol was still flooding across the roadway and making a sea of fire and I had to keep clear as I went for the fourth man. The one who'd been standing near Hassan wasn't making any noise and I think the initial burst of flame had asphyxiated him and sent him down without any chance of getting away. I saw Diane still standing near the front of the Fiat and starting to move for the ambulance and then I was coming up on the fourth man and having to dodge because he'd begun pumping his gun as a reflex action and the stuff was going into the roadway and sending up clods of tar before he saw me and swung round and I felt the blast of three successive shots as I went low and got his legs.

  Sudden rattling almost as loud as the gun itself as the aim went wild and the shells began hitting the Fiat behind me, sharpness of cordite in the lungs and somewhere in the middle of everything the unmistakable sounds of Hassan dying and then my hands closed and I dragged the fourth man off balance with his feet kicking upwards, split-second image of his face terrified in the flamelight then I chopped once and took the gun and slung it skittering across the sandy road and finished him and started back towards the ambulance.

  Fell against something.

  Oh Christ someone saying, fumes very strong, myself saying it, get up but my hands slid, part of the Fiat, front end, couldn't get up.

  The effort demanded hadn't been great but total resources had been called upon suddenly and factors like oxygen needs and blood supply to the muscles and brain had become involved, bad enough if I'd kept up the effort till the organism rediscovered its rhythm but worse because the relative falloff in terms of effort was precipitous: all I was having to do now was move from the flame area to the ambulance and it didn't take much doing and reaction was getting time to set in.

  Roaring and the red light blinding, hello we'll have to watch that won't we, hitting something again, bumpers, up but I couldn't then bloody well try again or you'll burn alive, a sleeve of the white coat catching you're in for it now if you don't take an interest but the fumes choking and the heat fierce look out that's the wrong way, this way or you'll fry andget that coatoff, get it off.

  Lights through the dark, the billowing dark of the smoke and the lights flooding through it, greenish and very clear and not the orange-red colour of the fire, somebody moving a car coming nearer, the ambulance why don't youbloody well get up. Yes better now, the air more breathable. The stars spinning headlong across the roof of the night andlook where you're going for Christ sake, that's better, steady now there's no need to panic, everything's under control.

  Door swung and I pitched in and slammed it.

  She drove hard and just before we left the area I saw them lying there, three of them blackening, one of them still trying to crawl through the dying flames. This was satisfactory and it had been easier for them, even this, than what they would have done to her, and later to me.

  She drove well but the sobbing wouldn't stop and she had to keep straightening up from the wheel, her tears bright in the back-glow from the headlamps. She hadn't seen anything like that before and the spasms kept shaking her and when I could manage it I said all right, I'll drive now.

  'Sorry I'm late.'

  'We've only just got here ourselves.'

  I thought it was civil of them. They were both in their flying-suits, one short, one tall, no indication of rank or service branch, strictly incognito, but the Mk XI Marauder outside on the tarmac had the standard roundels on it: I'd seen it in the docking bay when I'd driven into the airport.

  I suppose they felt they shouldn't go on looking at me like this without asking something about it because the short one said:

  'Have you had an accident?'

  'Not really.'

  It annoyed me because I hadn't had time to clean up since the petrol tank thing and I didn't have any time now so they could keep their bloody remarks to themselves.

  'Are you Mr Gage?'

  'Yes.'

  ,'Would you like some coffee?'

  'Yes '

  We were in the bar alongside the Metropolitan Departure gate: they'd been waiting here because they couldn't miss me when I came through the main doors of the building, and their own coffee hadn't long arrived.

  We sat down at the little table and I said don't wait for me so they started stirring and the short one said:

  'Lovely weather, isn't it?'

  There weren't many people around: the boy making the coffee behind the bar, a holy man wrapped in hisgandourah and his dreams in the corner by the Kodak stand, a young French couple perched half-asleep on a pile of baggage, a clerk in a fez coming through the doors and crossing the hall. There was no sound of any flying.

  Thoughts not a hundred per cent coherent because the pressure had come off, total energy output in progress fifteen minutes ago and now I was waiting for a cup of coffee and the nerves were having to adjust. But present situation comfortable and that was a help and besides she'd have reached base by now: I'd dropped her as near as it had been possible without exposing the image of the ambulance all over the place, no this one's Diane, our youngest, we've just had a call from her today, as a matter of fact, from Tunisia, she sounded quite homesick but otherwise fit. Yes, isn't she pretty?

  Satisfactory.

  'What?' I asked him.

  'I said the weather's nice.'

  'Yes. The trouble is it brings the insects out and you get them all over the windscreen, one firefly after another.'

  So the tall one got the envelope out and gave it to me and I opened it and looked at the three photographs, mug-shot coverage with two profiles and a full face, and began tearing them up while they drank their coffee.

  Everyone still looked all right, but the clerk in the fez had gone into the phone-box near the check-out counter and it occurred to me that they could have been his headlights I'd seen in the mirror when I'd turned into the car park.

  I drank my coffee. It was hot and bitter and I could taste the caffeine and I needed its heat and its alkaloid and I took it into my mouth slowly, as if it were ambrosia. They talked to each other about nothing in particular, a wonderful place to bring their wives, all those stars and palm-trees, talked to each other as if I weren't there or wouldn't be interested, letting me drink in peace, perhaps, and gather my strength.

  Presumably without significance: a lot of people would come here to the airport to use the phones, the post office wasn't open at this time of night.

  'How big's this thing?'

  'I'm sorry?'

  'This thing you've got for me. How big is it?'

  I was getting fed-up because one or two bits of glass were trying to work out and I smelt of singed hair and they were obviously wondering where the hell I'd been and I wasn't going to tell them, none of their bloody business.

  Then they were talking in short embarrassed sentences and the penny dropped and I pulled my sleeve up higher, looking at my watch, after all they'd got their orders and they'd brought something pretty deadly for me in the Marauder.

  'We could go and look at it,' the short one said. 'I expect you've been told it's flashpoint-zero freight.'

  'Well, I didn't think it was a piss-pot.'

  They shut up for a bit and I finished my coffee, wondering how far he'd been, Ahmed, from the scene of the fire when I'd left there: he'd been on his way and the ambulance was a distinctive vehicle and I hadn't been feeling bright enough to worry too much about headlights in the mirror so long as they didn't come any closer.

  I didn't know what he looked like, Ahmed.

  Incipient torpor and I was aware of it objectively, didn't feel at all like making an effort but there was a lot to do and I jerked my head up and thought watch it you're not safe.

  'Let's go and look at it then.'

  They said all right and we got up and they paid and the padded nylon legs of their flying-suits made a faintzoop, zoop, zoop as we walked through the hall.

>   The clerk in the fez had left the telephone-box and was crossing towards the main doors. I didn't know whether he looked like a clerk in a fez, Ahmed.

  It was better in the fresh air and I lost the dangerous urge to fall asleep as the caffeine began working on the nerves. There was a police guard on the Marauder, a young Tunisian with a peaked cap and white gauntlets and a holstered pistol, very smart and rather self-conscious because he wasn't used to being on special duty. We walked into the smell of kerosene and hot alloys and PVC and the short one climbed aboard so I assumed he was the pilot and the tall one ushered me on to the metal step and followed me up.

  The flight cabin was roomier than I'd expected, with a chart-table and an astrodome and two freight lockers: the Marauder Mk XI was a modified version of the original Mk IX short-range bomber and Tactical Air Command used it for the kind of work that the standard models would have jibbed at.

  'Shut that door, will you?'

  'Right.'

  The pilot opened the lockers and brought out two black rectangular containers with top and end grips and brass combination locks, one of them looking lighter than the other by the way he handled them. Both had Bostik airtight sealing with rip-wire opening provision but there weren't any labels and I assumed it was because anyone in charge of this cargo would know what it was without having to read about it.

  I picked them up one at a time. The smaller one was very heavy, about four times the weight of a medium portable typewriter but not much bigger.

  'What are they?'

  'M'mm? Not sure, actually.'

  'Oh for Christ's sake can't you — '

  'No, we can't. Awfully sorry.'

  Typical armed services security attitude, so bloody coy about everything, of course theyknew what this cargo was. In any case I didn't want more than three guesses because in London-to-base signals exchanges it was called a 'device' so these were obviously two components of one unit and you'd have to fit them together before they'd work. The only thing I didn't really know was why Control was sending me a nuclear bomb with no prior instructions.

  'I'll bring the car over.'

  'Fair enough.'

  They slid the door back for me and I climbed down and began walking across the tarmac and saw a pair of headlights just dimming out among the trees on the far side of the car park where the ambulance was. Three more cars had got here since I'd arrived and I could see movement along the road from the town: a string of vehicles using only their sidelights. So he did in fact look like a clerk in a fez, Ahmed, and he'd called in the whole of his reserves and there wasn't a hope of getting that device as far as base, not a hope in hell.

  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 200 °CA 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?'

  'Isthere any chance of a flarepath on that strip?'

  'No. They don't night-fly.'

  '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-vicemarshals 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 sorryabout 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 waspretty hellish because of the surface and the reversed thrust a
nd 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 aboutdistance but I couldn't hear the rest of it. A lot of low-pitch vibration coming in as the air-frame took the strain, smellof 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 yellingwon'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'tlikegaps 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.'

  'Isthat 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 left there by road.