by Len Deighton
I slept fitfully, awakened sometimes by oncoming vehicles that forced us off the track, and at other times by falling weightless through terrible dreams. The sun dropped out of sight and there was only the tunnel that our headlights bored through the limitless night.
‘My fellow will be waiting,’ said Percy. His voice was cold and distant in the manner that all men’s voices assume at night. ‘He’ll have camels – if we need them.’
‘Not for me,’ said Mann. ‘I’m trying to give them up.’ He laughed loudly, but Percy didn’t join in. Soon after that I must have gone to sleep.
‘You can put both the USA and China into the continent of Africa and still have room to rattle them about,’ said Percy Dempsey. He was driving.
‘I know some people in Vermont who wouldn’t like that,’ said Mann.
Dempsey gave a perfunctory laugh. Ahead of us the road stretched as straight as a ruler into the heat haze. Only the occasional drifts of sand made Dempsey moderate the speed. ‘A convoy … parked, by the look of it.’ Dempsey’s eyes seemed myopic and watery when he was reading the newspaper, or one of his favourite Simenons, but here in the desert his eyesight was acute and he could interpret smudges on the horizon long before Mann or I could see them. ‘Not trucks … buses,’ he added. ‘Too early for a brew-up.’
The gargantuan trailer-trucks rolled south to Timbuktu in convoy, enough drivers in each rig to eat and sleep in relays. When they did stop, it was usually for only as long as it took to boil water for the very strong and very sweet infusion of mint tea that the desert Arab needs even more than sleep. But as we got nearer I saw that Percy was correct. These were the same giant chassis, the wheels as high as a man, but they were buses – fitted with chromium trim, and dark-tinted window-glass, and their coachwork bore the name and address of a German tourist agency. A small orange tent by the side of the track was marked with a sign ‘Damen’, but there was no similar facility for the men, most of whom were arranging themselves into a group for a photo.
‘Don’t stop,’ said Mann.
‘Might have to,’ said Percy. ‘If they are in trouble and we pass by without helping, there will be hell to pay.’ He slowed as we passed the two buses until a middle-aged man in a white dust-coat waved us on with a gesture to show that all was well.
‘A sign of the times,’ said Percy. ‘English kids come on these treks in ancient Bedford army lorries.’
It was the better part of an hour before we reached the map reference where Percy’s man awaited us. It was ferociously hot as we got out of the car to inspect the place where the Bekuvs’ Land Rover had left the track and headed west across the open desert. The tyre tracks were still visible in the soft sand but there was a substratum of hard baked ground that in places had cracked to make pans – depressions – that were sometimes half a mile wide.
We transferred to the waiting Land Rover, and Percy’s man continued south with our rented car. It was better that it should pass the next police-point on time. The movements of Percy’s Arab and this battered Land Rover would not be so assiduously reported.
‘Go slow,’ ordered Mann. ‘His tyres are the same as ours.’
‘Less worn,’ said Percy. ‘And there is one that looks brand new.’
‘Well, I don’t want to be crawling round in the sunshine, examining tyre tracks with my vest-pocket microscope,’ said Mann.
‘Do you have a microscope?’ said Percy. ‘Some of these desert flowers are worth looking at under a glass.’ There was no telling how much of it was serious and how much was mockery.
We left the flat hard ground, which the road-builders had chosen, and the going changed to the gravelly surface of the ‘reg’ and then to rough ‘washboard’, which made the suspension judder. Percy accelerated until he found the speed at which the corrugations seemed to smooth out, and we made good speed for over an hour until we encountered the first patches of soft sand. Percy sped through them to begin with, and each time found hard surface before getting bogged down; but our luck couldn’t last for ever, and eventually he had to engage the four-wheel drive and crawl to safety.
The going became softer and softer until we were threading our way through a series of dunes. The tracks skirted the higher sandhills, but even so the Land Rover was careering about like a roller-coaster ride. The prevailing east wind made the upward side of each dune a gentle slope but the far side was sometimes precipitous. Yet there was no alternative to accelerating over the brink. No one spoke, but it was becoming obvious that only a marginal difference of sand, or a momentary carelessness on Percy’s part, would leave us stuck at either the top or the bottom of one of these dunes. We had surmounted one of the gentlest slopes as I heard the sand jamming against the underside of the Land Rover and then Percy wrenched at the steering so that we slithered to the valley of the dune in a sideslip that covered us in a storm of flying sand. We stopped at a steep angle with Mann cursing and rubbing his sore head. Even through the brown swirling dust I could see what had made Percy swerve. There, not fifty yards away, was another Land Rover – empty and abandoned. Even before the sand settled, Mann was out of the car and following the still visible tracks that the others had left. Red Bancroft had abandoned her shoes, and a man – Professor Bekuv – had stumbled and fallen leaving a long scar in the smooth sand.
We followed the tracks for fifty yards or so, and then they were replaced by wide shallow troughs, ridged with an even pattern of lines. Mann was the first to recognize the strange spoor. ‘A dune buggy!’ He hurried forward until he found a place where the softly inflated tyres had ballooned in the ridge of the next dune. ‘No doubt about it – a dune buggy.’ The curious little cars that Californians used for cavorting on beaches were the only vehicles that could outrun a Landrover in country like this.
‘A dune buggy?’ said Percy.
‘Lightweight open vehicle,’ I said. ‘Moulded body, four wheels, specially made soft tyres with a very wide tread and a canvas top to shield you from the sun … roll-bar for protection, can be used to mount a heavy machine-gun …’
‘What are you talking …’ said Mann and then he raised his eyes to the ridge of the next dune, and he saw them too.
There were three men in the dune buggy. I studied them carefully for signs of their origin or allegiance. They had the very dark skin of the sort you see in the far south. Protecting their heads from the high sun they wore the howli, and their robes were ragged and dirty but had once been the boubou style of Mauritania far to the west. Their faces were impassive, but the man in the rear seat gave an imperious wave of the AKMS machine-pistol he was holding. Obedient to it we scrambled up the burning-hot sand.
They were patrolling, and, after walking another half hour, we caught sight of where they’d come from. It was bleached almost to the colour of the pale sand that surrounded it, a great fortress complete with crenellated walls and watch-towers. Ever since the Romans, armies had built such fortified encampments to dominate the caravan trails, wells and desert tracks. The French had built more, and used the Foreign Legion to man them. But there was no flag flying from the mast of this fort, only a tangle of shortwave aerials; dishes, rods, spirals, arrays, loops and frames, more antennae than I’d ever seen before in one place.
At first sight I had not realized the size of the fortress, but nearly an hour later, when we had still not reached its massive doors, I could see that its ramparts were as high as a six-storey building. Finally we reached it, and the Arabs herded us through the main entrance.
There were two sets of doors, and looking up I saw daylight through the sort of openings from which boiling oil was poured on to besieging knights. The second set of doors opened on to a courtyard. Parked there were more dune buggies and beyond them a helicopter. It looked like the little Kamov two-seater gun-ship that had chased Bekuv down the road on the day he defected, and shot up the car with the Arab boy in it. Now its blades had been removed, and a couple of mechanics were tinkering with the rotor linkage. But most of the court
yard was occupied by two huge radio telescopes, the dishes about sixty feet across. Bekuv was there, parading round the equipment and touching the controls and the wiring and the bowl-edge with the sort of tactile awe that most men reserve for very old cars or very new mistresses.
‘Jesus Christ!’ said Mann softly as he saw the radio telescopes and realized what they’d been used for. He called to Bekuv, ‘Hey there, Professor. Are you all right?’
Bekuv looked at us for a long time before replying. Then he said, ‘Come here.’ It was a command. We shuffled over to him.
‘Why didn’t you tell us?’ said Mann. ‘Why didn’t you say you’d set up this tracking station to milk the communications satellites. Was it your idea?’
Mann was unable to keep the admiration out of his voice, and Bekuv smiled in appreciation. He handed Mann a water flask that was hanging on the back of his seat. Mann drank some and passed it to Dempsey and then on to me. The water was warm and heavily chlorinated, but it was a welcome relief after our long walk through the sand.
Bekuv watched Mann all the time, studying his badly bruised face and the plaster – dirtier now – that could be seen under the brim of his hat. Bekuv’s eyes were wide and glaring, or perhaps I was just being wise after the event. ‘I thought you were dead,’ he told Mann. ‘I thought they shot you at the airport.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry about that,’ said Mann. He sat down on a broken packing-case and closed his eyes. The hike through the soft sand had exhausted him.
Bekuv said, ‘I was right not to trust you. My wife guessed that there was no chair at New York University … she guessed that you were telling me all lies …’
‘… and she arranged with Moscow that you could come back here,’ said Mann. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, we know all that. But why did you want to come back here?’
‘She said I was to dismantle the apparatus and shred all my records,’ said Bekuv.
‘But you’re not going to do that, are you?’ I said.
‘No,’ said Bekuv. ‘I’m going to continue my work. Last night I got signals from Tau Ceti.’
‘Well, that’s wonderful,’ I said, feigning enthusiasm.
‘Who’s Tau Ceti?’ said Mann.
‘It’s a star,’ I told him. ‘Professor Bekuv picked up signals from it last year.’
‘Is that right?’ said Mann.
‘So you read those books I loaned you,’ Bekuv said.
‘And your lectures and the notes,’ I said. ‘I read everything.’
Bekuv waved a hand in the air and gabbled some fast Arabic. I couldn’t follow it except to guess that he was telling the guards to take Mann and Percy Dempsey away somewhere. Bekuv took my arm and led me to the main building of the fortress. The walls were a yard thick and might have been here for centuries.
‘How old is this place?’ I asked, more in order to keep him affable than because I wanted to know. He reached into his pocket and brought out a handful of stone arrowheads of the sort that the nomad children sell in the southern villages.
‘Roman,’ he said. ‘There must have been some sort of fort here ever since. We have water, you see. The siting leaves a lot to be desired but we have the only water for a hundred miles.’ He pushed open the huge, iron-studded door. Inside, the fort was dark and even more bizarre. Shafts of hard Saharan sunlight stood like buttresses against the gaps in the shuttered windows. There was a huge staircase dappled with light that came from the broken parts of the roof, sixty feet above our heads. But the room into which Bekuv went was equipped as a modern office: a sleek desk, three easy chairs, Lenin on the wall and enough books to require the small folding step-ladder. There was another door. Bekuv walked across the room to close it but before he did so, I caught a glimpse of the gleaming grey racks of radio equipment that amplified the signals from the radio telescopes.
Bekuv sat down. ‘So you have read everything.’
‘Some of it was too technical for me.’
‘Last night I received signals from Tau Ceti.’
‘What kind of signals?’
Bekuv smiled. ‘Well, I don’t mean a news bulletin or a sports report. Contact would be a more scientific description. I always said that the first interplanetary exchange would be some clear suggestion of number and order expressed in electrical activity close to 1,420 megacycles.’
‘Yes, I remember,’ I said. ‘The hydrogen atom spinning round its nucleus vibrates at 1,420,405,752 times a second. The idea of those immense clouds of hydrogen, floating through the galaxy and humming at that same wavelength in the electromagnetic spectrum … that captured my imagination, Professor. If I’d met someone like you when I was young, I might have chosen science.’
Bekuv was pleased with me. ‘And remember, I said near to 1,420 megacycles. On that exact wavelength you can hear nothing but the hum.’
‘And you sent a reply?’
‘A series of binary digits – pulses and silences to represent ones and zeros – which are schematic representations of the atomic form of carbon and oxygen. At worst it will be interpreted as a sign that there is some intelligence here. At best it will tell them the environment in which we live.’
‘Brilliant.’
Bekuv looked at his watch. He was excited to the point of agitation. ‘We are preparing for tonight. Both telescopes will be working. One will be aimed at Tau Ceti, and the other at the open sky near to it. Both telescopes feed their reception back into the computer next door. That compares both streams of material, and cancels everything that is arriving from both telescopes. That’s how I get rid of all the background crackle and the cosmic mess. Only Tau Ceti’s signals are delivered to the output.’ He picked up a long paper roll of computer read-out. It was a maze of incomprehensible symbols. ‘This was processed only three hours ago. No matter what anyone might say, there is a regular pattern to the pulses from Tau Ceti.’
‘Quite a dream, Professor.’
‘Don’t deny any man his dream, my friend.’
‘You deserve an honest reply, Professor,’ I told him. ‘You don’t seem to understand the dangerous position you’re in. You’re an embarrassment to the US Government and a threat to one of the most audacious pieces of Soviet electronic eavesdropping I’ve ever heard of. You’ve helped Moscow set up this place to tap the US communications satellites stationed over the Atlantic. Getting material from the commercial and government satellites and, unless I’m guessing wrongly, from fedsat, the one that carries all the secret diplomatic material and the CIA priority data between the USA and Europe. You must have given Moscow everything from Presidential phone-calls to the Daily Yellows that Langley sends to London, Bonn and Paris.’
‘It was a compromise,’ said Bekuv. ‘All scientists compromise with power … ask Leonardo da Vinci, ask Einstein. I wanted the electronic silence of the Sahara – it’s the “coldest” place in the world, to use the jargon of electronics. And the only way I could sell the idea to the Ministry was by telling them that here we could get far enough west to “see” your satellites.’
I went to the window. The sun was blood-red and plunging to earth, and there came the breath of wind that so often comes with sunset. It stirred the sand, and made clouds of dust that rolled across the desert like tumbleweed. ‘The party’s over, Professor,’ I said. ‘The hijacking of the airliner, the killing of a US Senator, the treachery and death of his assistant – what kind of priority do you think this is getting in Washington … it’s just a matter of time before they find this place. Moscow’s triumph suddenly becomes a liability, and Moscow will want to snap their fingers and have this place disappear. And have you disappear with it.’
‘Well, not even Moscow can snap its fingers and make a place like this disappear overnight.’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that, Professor Bekuv.’
‘What do you mean?’ he said. I waited a long time, watching the sun sink. The desert sky was as clear as crystal and the stars were packed together like spilled sugar. It was possible to believe him. O
n a night like this it was possible to believe anything. ‘I mean the radio signals might be faked,’ I said brutally. ‘Experts – scientific experts, ready to concede their own little compromise, like Leonardo da Vinci – might have designed a series of signals that are the sort you’d like to hear. One of the Soviet Air Force’s flying electronic laboratories could probably maintain the right altitude, and circle the place that would be on your direct line of sight to Mars or Tau Ceti or Shangri-La.’
‘No.’
‘And out there in the desert, Professor, there are a couple of big desert buses. When they stop, they put up little tents and mark them ladies’ toilet, but there are no ladies to be seen anywhere. The passengers are all fighting-fit men in their middle twenties. And there is the address of a German travel agency on the side of the bus, and if you know Berlin street addresses you know it’s on that side of the wall without the advertising or the voting booths. They just might be waiting to come in here and sweep up the debris.’
‘What exactly are you saying?’
‘I’m saying get out of here, Professor.’
‘And go to America or to Britain with you?’
‘For the time being, just get out of here.’
‘You mean well,’ said Bekuv. ‘I must thank you for that … warning.’
‘And for God’s sake, don’t transmit any kind of signal that an aircraft could home on.’
He wiped his nose again. He had one of those viral infections that are common in the desert; the mucous membrane is inflamed by the sand and dust in the air, and once it starts it’s difficult to shake off. ‘That is where I have to be, and this is what I have to do,’ he said. His voice was hoarse now and his nose clogged. ‘All my life has been leading up to this moment, I realize that now.’
‘You have a life of achievement ahead of you,’ I coaxed him.
‘I have nothing ahead of me. My own people want only that part of my expertise that they can use for the military. I am only interested in pure science – I’m not interested in politics – but in my country to be apolitical is considered only one step away from being a fascist. No man, woman or child is permitted to live their life without political activity … and for a real scientist that is not possible. Your people were no better … I trusted you, and you humiliated me with the forged papers appointing me to a non-existent chair in a university that had never heard of me, and didn’t wish to hear of me. My son wants to be a jazz singer and my wife has betrayed me.’ He sneezed. ‘Betrayed me with another woman. It’s comical, isn’t it? It is the true tragedy of my life that my tragedies are comical.’
