Line of Succession

by Brian Garfield

  The Lear had oil company markings and he hoped that would appease Sturka’s bunch if they saw it go by overhead. He had a strong feeling they were right down there somewhere—almost near enough to touch.

  There was a road outside Guerara, a paved secondary road that went in an absolutely straight line across seventy miles of plateau to the main highway at Berriane. It made a fine landing strip for the Lear; they buzzed it once to make sure there was no traffic and the pilot set down easily on the pavement, wandering with a bit of wind drift because the road had a high crown.

  The chief of the A-team unpacked the fold-up motorbike from the seemingly endless stockpile of gadgetry the CIA teams always carried, and went putt-putting off with an agent riding behind him on the fender, east toward Guerara, a palmtree-shadowed village a mile away. From the air they had spotted half a dozen vehicles there and Lime had specified two of them he wanted: a Land Rover and a truck.

  Twenty minutes. The sun went down with a splash of color and the Land Rover came up over the rise into view. The truck was a two and one half ton Weyland with hooped canvas over its rear bed; it was war surplus—something Monty’s army had left behind in wreckage after El Alamein.

  Lime didn’t ask the CIA chief how he had obtained the two vehicles and the CIA chief didn’t volunteer the information. His name was Orr, he was a wiry Texan with close-cropped iron-gray hair, and there wasn’t a doubt in the world he had once been in the paratroops or the Green Berets.

  Lime spread the map on the hood of the Land Rover, on top of the spare tire, and talked for five minutes. Orr listened and nodded. When Lime got into the Land Rover with one of the agents for a driver, Orr gathered the rest of his men in the truck and they set out eastward in close-formation convoy. In the road behind them the Lear was taxiing off to the side to wait in case Lime needed it again.

  They drove through the village and the stares of Arabs followed them until they were beyond the palms. Lime twisted around in the seat to crank up the battery-powered scrambler transceiver they had manhandled off the plane. It took him three or four minutes to make contact.

  “Gilliams?”

  “Yes sir, sir.” Gilliams sounded in good spirits.

  “He still in the air?”

  “Yes sir he sure is. Starting his descent just a few minutes ago. Right where you guessed he’d go.”

  “We’re on the ground. It should take us ten minutes or so to get there, another five or ten minutes to get in position. Have we got enough time?”

  “I imagine you have. He’s still got thirty-five miles to cover and it’ll take him some time to feel his way down. It’ll be dusk by then, pret’ near dark. I doubt he’ll have much by way of landing lights.”

  “A pair of headlights I imagine,” Lime said. “Don’t make any more calls on this frequency until I get back to you.”

  “Step it up a little,” he told the driver.

  “Can I use the headlights?”

  “God no.”

  Lime and Orr were belly-down in the brush along the wadi bank when the PBY came lumbering down onto the piste, the jeep dirt track that ran alongside the dry river. A car sat in the road with its headlights stabbing forward; Ben Krim’s pilot was guiding by the headlights but it was a tricky maneuver because the closer he got to the ground the more blinding the headlights would be in his eyes. But the pilot would be good. Sturka used only experts.

  Two of Orr’s commandos had slithered toward the car that was lighting up the plane’s landing strip. If the driver was sitting in the car they were to wait; if he was outside they were to plant the bleeper on the car. He would have to get out to meet Ben Krim and turn over the parcel.

  That would be Corby or Renaldo in the car. He’d have with him one of those tape-recorder-transmitter devices to broadcast the next set of instructions to the Americans—where to deliver the Washington Seven.

  It was Ben Krim’s job to report to Sturka’s man—give him the firsthand report on the landing of the Seven in Geneva—and collect the recorder-transmitter, and fly back to El Djamila to deposit the Catalina, and drive to Algiers, and book a flight to Madrid or Paris or Berlin where he would set up the transmitter on another tiresome little clock device so that Ben Krim would be halfway back to Algiers by the time the thing broadcast its message to the world.

  Lime was only mildly interested in what the instructions would be. At any rate Ben Krim would be picked up when he flew back to El Djamila and Gilliams’ people would analyze the tape.

  In the meantime the car was bugged and Lime would be following Corby or Renaldo back to Sturka’s lair.

  It was going to work. He felt it for the first time: the positive knowledge that he had Sturka.

  In the night silence he watched the PBY make its superb landing-roll to a stop within a hundred feet of the waiting headlights. The lights clicked off. Someone got out of the car and walked toward the airplane, and Benyoussef Ben Krim climbed down from the dimly lit cockpit to meet the courier. Through the Mark Systems glasses Lime watched the two shadows flow together in the dusk.

  The meeting was brief. There was enough light to make out silhouettes, and Lime was fairly sure that was Cesar Renaldo. Not big enough for Corby nor lean enough for Sturka himself.

  A curious question occurred to him. What if it had been Sturka? Arrest him on the spot and search for the others? Or, having him in hand, let him go so he could lead you back to them? With Renaldo Lime didn’t care, would let him go; Lime didn’t want Renaldo, not personally. But suppose it had been Sturka?

  Renaldo get back in the car, started it up, switched on his lights, drove along the piste making a little curve to get around the PBY, drove almost a mile and stopped in the distance to make a U-turn, his headlights glaring with starlike twinkles across the flat clarity of the bled. Ben Krim was back in the plane and the pilot had one engine running; using a lot of rudder brakes he was turning the ungainly craft around in its own length on the ground. The plane stood still for a moment while the second engine burst into chatter and then it began to roll, searchlights booming from the nacelles, red and white wingtip lights winking.

  Lime was looking at the place where Renaldo’s car had been sitting and his brain was working again. A car, he thought. Not a jeep, not a Land Rover. A car. One of those old diesel-powered Mercedes sedans, it was. Humpbacked and round.

  So they were holed up on or near a road. Not a piste. It confirmed another expectation.

  Lime watched the plane go away and the car drive up the desert track to the northeast, and then he tapped Orr on the shoulder and said, “Okay, let’s go.”

  “We going to follow him? I mean he’ll see our lights. It’s getting too dark to travel without lights.”

  “No need to follow him,” Lime said.

  “Because he’s bugged?”

  “Because I know where he’s going.”

  They walked to the Land Rover and Lime cranked up the scrambler. “Gilliams?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Get me a caravan.”

  “What?”

  It was one of the advantages of having limitless dollars and limitless armies to command.

  The camel caravans of North Africa were a tradition going back a thousand years; they were more than a method of transportation: they were a way of life, a self-perpetuating institution. Each caravan numbered anywhere from a dozen to two hundred camels and made one trip a year but the trip was of a year’s duration: they started somewhere along the Niger with a cargo of pelts and salt and dried meat and handicrafts, they traveled slowly north trading on the way—trading cargo and camels as well—and six months later they reached the Atlas Mountains and picked up a new cargo of manufactured things, dates, kerosene, gunpowder; then they turned around and went back. A caravan was a home: you were born and lived and died in the caravan.

  There was usually a caravan around here. It was near the northern terminus. No matter what route they had taken to get here from the south they all converged on the string of f
oothill towns south of Algiers. It was no great feat for Gilliams to locate one west of Touggourt, and no difficulty to hire its services. Everything was for sale or for hire.

  The caravan was in motion less than two hours after Lime’s call. At the same time Lime’s little convoy of Land Rover and truck set out overland, heading across the bled to rendezvous with it.

  The fact that Renaldo was driving an ordinary automobile had pinpointed the hiding place for Lime. There was only one passable road from the wadi. It went northeast as far as the old Foreign Legion post at Dzioua and then turned due east to cross ninety miles of broken country to Touggourt and the main highway to Biskra.

  The Legion fort was still in use as a district admin headquarters. But for every full-dress fortress there had once been a string of outpost bomas at one-day’s-ride intervals. Thirty miles southeast of Dzioua was a small boma which had been abandoned after World War II. Once or twice in the fifties Lime had visited the place and found evidence someone had been there: bandit fellagha or FLN guerrillas. Conceivably Sturka had used it as a rallying point even in those days. It sat on a two-hundred-foot height and commanded an excellent field of view—or of fire—and it was within a few hundred feet of the present road. It was an ideal place to hold Fairlie—impossible to approach unseen.

  The American planeloads and helicopter-loads of personnel had landed at Touggourt, sixty miles from the boma, and they would be ready by the time Lime joined the camel train. There was a doctor, there were several pints of AB-negative blood, there were dozens of sharpshooters and communications people and gadgets. Lime was going to need speed and firepower. He couldn’t sneak inside Sturka’s fortress by stealth or subterfuge.

  The risk was enormous: the risk to Fairlie. If it failed Lime would be condemned as a murdering blunderer. Probably they would find a way to put him away for the rest of his life, if they let him live. But everything entailed risk. He could leave Sturka strictly alone and see what happened if he cooperated in turning the Washington Seven loose into asylum. But there was no way to force Sturka to keep his word and release Fairlie; so that risk was equally high. In a way it was better odds to attack—because the people with Sturka weren’t professionals, they weren’t trained to kill without thought, and all he really had to worry about was keeping Sturka away from Fairlie until he could get to Fairlie. The rest of them wouldn’t instinctively know what to do and in their confusion he had a good chance to break through.

  The Land Rover bounced across rocks and gullies, its headlights heaving wildly around; Lime gripped his seat and smoked furiously and began to sweat.

  WEDNESDAY,

  JANUARY 19

  4:15 A.M. North African Time She was lying in a rowboat drifting on a placid lake. A blue sky and a pleasantly warm sun, glass-calm water with only enough current to keep the boat moving gently along. There was no one else; everything was soundless. She didn’t raise her head to look but she knew that the lake emptied into a deep tunnel and that sooner or later the boat would drift into that tunnel and carry her cozily into its warm darkness.

  “… Peggy. Hey.”

  “Whum?”

  “Come on come on. Do I got to slap your face?”

  “All right—all right.” She was awake now; she threw the blanket back. “Time’s it?”

  “Little after four.”

  “Four in the morning?”

  “Sometheen wrong with the pig. You got to look at him.”

  The words brought her sharply to her senses. “What’s the matter with him?” She was reaching for the veil and robe.

  “I don’ know. He just doesn’t look too good.”

  She remembered her watch and took it downstairs with her into the cellar corridor.

  Alvin had a worried face. He had the door open and Peggy eeled in past him.

  Fairlie looked like a corpse. She held the watch crystal to his nostrils and after a moment the crystal fogged slightly. Tested his pulse—it was down, way down.

  Oh shit. “You’d better get Sturka.”

  Cesar left. She heard his heavy tread on the stair. Not that Sturka could do anything, she thought. She beckoned to Alvin. “I think we ought to try to get him on his feet. Walk him back and forth.”

  “You mean like when people take an overdose of sleeping pills?”

  “I don’t know anything else to do. Is there any coffee?”

  “I’ll have a look. You want me to make some?”

  “Yes.”

  Alvin left and she heaved Fairlie into a sitting position: slid his feet off the cot and turned him, got her shoulder under his arm and tried to lift him to his feet. But the angles were wrong and she fell asprawl across him and got untangled and tried it again.

  It still didn’t work. He was limp and it was going to take two of them to walk him. She left him propped against the wall and waited for the others.

  Alvin returned with half a cup of coffee. “I put some more on. This is cold.”

  “That’s all right. Let’s try and get it down him. You hold his head.”

  She didn’t have to open his mouth; his jaw hung slack. She tipped his head back. “Hold him that way.” Poured a little coffee in to see if he would swallow it.

  Sturka’s voice made her jump. “What’s the matter with him?”

  “Bad reaction to the drugs,” she said. She looked over her shoulder, filled with anger. “Too much drugs.”

  “Well never mind that right now. I think we have visitors.”

  Cesar appeared in the doorway behind Sturka. Alvin said, “What kind of visitors?”

  Peggy was trying to get coffee down Fairlie. “Hold his head still damn it.”

  Cesar said, “Some kind of camel caravan.”

  Alvin was suspicious. “Traveling at night?”

  “Sometimes they do,” Sturka said. “But I don’t trust it. Let’s go.” He pointed to Cesar. “You out to the back. You know your post.”

  Cesar went. Peggy watched Fairlie’s Adam’s apple move up and down when he swallowed. It was a good sign she thought. Then she heard Sturka say, “Bring him upstairs.”

  Alvin said dubiously, “We’ll have to carry him.”

  “Then carry him.” Sturka had an ugly AK submachine gun slung across his back; he flicked it into his hand and went nimbly into the corridor. Peggy heard him go up the stairs—softly and quickly, two steps at a time.

  The movement wouldn’t hurt Fairlie but she wanted to get the rest of the coffee into him first. She motioned Alvin to hold his head again and lifted the cup to Fairlie’s pale lips.

  4:28 A.M. North African Time Lime edged through the rubble feeling his way with his feet before he put his weight on them. Starlight fell on the pale crumbled walls; he kept to the deep shadows. When he looked back he couldn’t see the four men behind him and that was good.

  He heard someone moving through the wreckage beyond the stucco wall that stood more or less intact against the sky. It loomed just ahead of him, one corner broken off raggedly by a forgotten Italian bomb. It was significant that he could hear the man’s approach; it meant the man didn’t really expect anyone to be out here. The rest of them would be at the opposite end of the building looking out through rifle slits, watching the camel train wind past. Sturka had sent one man to the back because of the possibility the camel train was a diversion—which it was.

  There was only one way to do this kind of thing: fast and simply. Get up as close as possible and then rush them, overrun them before they could react against Fairlie.

  No subtleties, no elaborate schemes. Just attack. He had to assume Sturka had only three or four comrades; he was relying on his hostage, not his military strength. Lime had to assume there weren’t more than half a dozen of them and that he could overwhelm that many instantly.

  He stood with his back to the stucco wall and listened to the man approach the doorway beside him. At the back of his neck the short hairs prickled. He had the sound of his heartbeat in his ears. He let his breath trickle out slowly throug
h his mouth; he fought a cough down.

  The man had stopped just inside the door. Lime couldn’t wheel into sight to silehce the man without alarming him. It was probably Corby or Renaldo and either of them might be able to sense the presence of alien beings in the silent wreckage. If so it would draw the man outside and that was what Lime needed.…

  The pulse throbbed at his throat. Distantly he could hear the caravan trudging past, the flipflop of camel hoofs across the stones down below the hill.

  Stupid bravado, he thought. It would have made sense to send a younger man on point. But Chad Hill was an innocent and he didn’t know any of the others, they were strangers and if mistakes were made it was better to make them himself.…

  His elbows and knees were abraded raw: he had come the last two hundred yards on his belly. He settled the knife in his fist.

  Movement: the shift of a leather sole on gritty earth. The man was coming out. Lime could hear his breathing.

  He stood poised, motionless, down to his raw quivering nerve ends.

  He sensed it before he saw it. He timed the man’s breathing; he waited for the man to exhale a breath and then he wheeled into the doorway. Clapped his hand over the man’s mouth and used the knife. Once in Oran he had stabbed into a man who had just taken a deep breath and the scream had echoed a mile.

  The man’s body went taut. Lime released the knife and got a grip on the man to keep him from turning.

  Renaldo, he thought.

  He lowered the body without sound. Stepped outside and made hand motions.

  Stealth now, but there would be discovery and soon they would have to move ever so fast. The four sharpshooters slipped in past him, stepped across Renaldo’s body, went prowling ahead like sharks, rifles out ahead of them. Lime fell in behind Orr, lifting the .38 out of the clamshell. Lime was the only one armed with lethal ammunition. It had to be that way. Total authority, and total responsibility. Nobody got killed unless Lime did the killing.

  There had been lights before—probably kerosene lamps—but there were none now. That was to be expected; Sturka would have extinguished all lamps.