by Adam Hall
Another vehicle was coming in from the side with its coloured lights flashing and the siren going – it had seen the Mercedes and the speed it was doing and was coming across the tarmac to intercept, but either our driver had lost too much steering because of the rear wheel or he decided to make an oblique attack, because we swerved to the left and hit the vehicle at the front end and I saw it start rolling and the mirror on that side was lit up suddenly with an orange light and a second later we heard the dull thump of the explosion.
Shots from somewhere, from behind or from a new source of attention, and another tyre burst and the tread began howling against the underneath of the wing and the stink of burning rubber came into the car and as we swerved again and hit something and span full circle the whole thing took off and I smashed my hand down on the gun to my left and it roared and I felt for the man's throat and made the kill as the other man brought his gun up and fired wild and I went in very close and used a heel-palm and drove the nose bone upwards into the brain as Ibrahimi screamed something and I saw the flash of a blade and blocked it and started forming a tiger claw but the car was barrelling now and everything span across the vision-field and we smashed into something again and the doors burst open and I hit ground and rolled with Ibrahimi on top of me, forced him away and began dragging him clear as the tank went up and the whole of the night caught fire.
Chapter 21: SAHARA
'Where is it?'
He began falling again and I jerked him upright.
'Twenty-six degrees three minutes north,' I said, 'by zero two degrees one minute west. Where is it?'
He didn't answer.
The light of the burning limousine coloured the wall of the hangar. Smoke was rolling, black smoke, and the emergency vehicles were moving in it, becoming lost in it. The smell of burning rubber was on the air, a sickening smell. The limousine, the mess, wasn't close: I'd run with this bastard for what had seemed a long time, possibly minutes, dragging him sometimes when he fell, pulling him up again, running again, cursing him in French, Ibrahimi, my last link with Nemesis, with the mission, with any hope of doing something to stop the headlines.
'What?
I thought he'd said something, wasn't sure, there was a certain amount of dizziness coming and going, pain everywhere, understandable.
Centre knuckle to the median nerve.
'Where is it?
The fix.
It was all I had left.
He reacted to the nerve strike, opened his eyes and looked at me, but didn't see me, his eyes not focusing. Then I saw the blood: it had started dripping from the edge of his padded jacket, and when I pulled the zip down I saw it had been pooling inside, black in the moonlight, soaking. I suppose it had been friendly fire: the wild shot from the hit man on the right, opened an artery. I put my mouth close to his ear and asked him softly, 'Where is that position, Ibrahimi? It's in the desert somewhere, isn't it? In the Sahara?'
Gunshot.
They hadn't been able to get one of the guards out of the Mercedes, then, perhaps neither of them, and their bullets were blowing up in the heat.
'Tell me, Ibrahimi, where it is.'
His head lolled as consciousness slipped, then he jerked it up again and opened his eyes and looked at me with more focus, with a lot of effort. Then he spoke, but it was nothing to do with the fix.
'Help me to pray.'
Bastard. He was dying, knew where that position was, perhaps knew something I could do to save a lot of other people from dying, stop the headlines.
Was he going to pray for them!
A night breeze was moving the smoke still rolling from the Mercedes, bringing it across the huge mouth of the hangar, some of it clouding inside and bringing the sickening reek of rubber.
'Help me,' Ibrahim! said.
'What?
'I must pray.'
So must we all. But I got him by the shoulders and lowered his body until he was doubled over with his hands on the concrete in front of him and his brow resting between them. I think he was too far gone to worry about facing east or west. He began speaking in Arabic, while the blood formed a pool around his spread fingers.
Making his peace with Allah. A luxury. I will tell you this – it was a luxury. We don't all get the chance to make what peace we can before it comes.
I got my handkerchief and held it against my face, but the stink of the smoke came through. I wondered how long he'd be, Ibrahimi, I hadn't got all night. There was blood on my hands, I noticed, but didn't know whether it was mine or his.
Then Ibrahimi rolled sideways, and I got him onto his back and put his hands across his chest and went along to the end of the hangar where I'd seen some sort of office when we'd come in here, not with doors or windows or anything, just some desks and a lot of paper and coffee mugs and a black plastic telephone on the wall.
I tried dialling direct but it didn't work. God knows what the problem was but it took minutes and the girl got stuffy and I had to keep my patience and it wasn't easy, because I didn't think I could do anything but I knew that if I could do anything it would have to be fast.
'Yes?'
This was the board for Solitaire: I hadn't had to go through the link unit because I was alone.
'Give me Control.'
They knew who I was. Only the executive for the mission ever signals the board direct: it's his, it belongs to him.
'Control.'
Shatner.
'Need' – I tried again, straightening up, getting things clear – 'I need a DIF.'
It was the bang on the head I'd got in the underground garage at Tegel Airport, I suppose, plus coining out of the limousine like that, pig out of a barrel, left me dizzy.
'He's in Algiers,' Shatner said.
'Cone?'
'Yes.'
It followed. The only information London had had when I'd broken off communication with my DIF last night in the stolen Volvo was that I'd be at the rendezvous in Algiers, so that was where they'd sent him.
I got one of the plastic ball-points and used the back of a lading bill printed in French.
'Number?'
Shatner gave it to me and I repeated it and wrote it down in big figures because there was only moonlight here, coming in through the open doors, moonlight and the glow of the fire from the other end of the hangar.
'We're still running,' I said, and put the receiver back on the hook.
He'd have liked to debrief me but I hadn't got time; he'd have to wait until Cone signalled his report after I'd talked to him.
A yellow-painted jeep went hounding past the far end of the hangar with its emergency lights going. I wouldn't have thought there'd be any more need for rushing about; there were some bodies to get out of the Mercedes, that was all. But perhaps it was in the way or something, and they'd have to shift it. I wasn't worried that they'd start looking for me: they hadn't known how many people there'd been in the limousine and no one had seen me getting clear with Ibrahimi or they would have followed us into the hangar before now.
Local calls should work and I dialled the number direct again.
Three rings.
'Yes?'
'Executive.'
He was at a safe-house, then, not a hotel: we hadn't gone through a switchboard. A safe-house or a sleeper's place, somewhere secure. That would help.
'Debrief?' Cone asked me.
'No. Write this down.' I gave him the fix. 'It's somewhere in the Sahara. I want you to have me dropped there. Can you do that?'
'When?
'As soon as you can. It's fully urgent.'
It meant he'd got to break every rule in the book if he had to, just get me the plane. Cone would do that. I'd been right, I'd been so right to get rid of that clown Thrower.
'Where are you?
I told him.
'Can I phone you there?'
I gave him the number, got it wrong, not easy to read under the scratched plastic cover, gave it to him again, made sure, because this was the lifeline n
ow for Solitaire.
I've got that,' Cone said. 'Give me the picture.'
'It's not a Lockerbie thing. It's much bigger. There are two Iranian pilots involved. I don't know what this fix means. It could even be a target zone but I can't think why. If it is, you'll know what happened to me, be in the papers, headlines, have – you'll have to -'
'What's your condition?' Cone cut in.
I pulled myself upright; I'd been lolling all over the bloody desk, papers on the floor, everything swinging round. I could not afford this.
'I'm operational,' I said. 'A few dizzy spells, there was a car smash. Listen, that fix could be totally remote, I mean that's the Sahara down there, so – so listen, if -' swinging again and I had to wait. 'Listen, I want a two-way radio, you got that? I'll stay in contact as long as I can, but if – if you can't raise me by first light tomorrow you'd better send a search plane over the zone, I don't fancy dying of thirst out there.' I held on to the edge of the desk and waited again, and the roof of the hangar swung down and tilted away again and I brought my weight underside and slowed the breathing, deepened it, and it helped. 'Give me water rations for twenty-four hours, torch, the radio, hard tack, flares, the usual things for a desert drop, gloves, goggles, all right?
'Yes. Have you lost any blood?'
'No. You got a map there, Sahara?'
'Yes. I'm with an AIP.'
Agent-in-place. He'd know the territory, use the map, locate the bearing, adduce the range we'd need for the plane, the fuel capacity.
'Then fix me up,' I said.
'Might take a bit of time.'
'I've got to reach that zone before midnight.'
Midnight One.
In a moment he said, 'How long can you stay there by that phone?'
'As long as I have to.'
'Do all I can,' he said. 'But you'd better know this: I'm not sure whether it's to do with a Lockerbie thing or not. There's a Pan Am flight reported missing, Berlin to New York.'
Mother of God.
'What sorta girls they got there?'
I said I didn't know.
'So what you go there for?'
He was a Sicilian, Giovanni Scalfaro, spoke some kind of French, some kind of English, no German, sucked on some kind of chewing-gum which I suspected was laced, he flew dope, it was his living.
'To meet friends,' I said. We were talking about the Safari Club in Tenerife, where I sometimes go between missions.
'You go there to meet friends,' Giovanni Scalfaro said, 'and you don't know what sorta girls they got there?'
Our heading was 28 degrees west of south, with the moon high above the domed Perspex cockpit cover and the Sahara below.
'The friends I meet there,' I said, 'aren't that sorta girls.'
We were an hour from the dropping point.
'Then what sorta girls are they?'
I've been given to understand that some Sicilians are like this.
But he was my friend, Giovanni Scalfaro. He could help me to save Solitaire, stop the headlines. If it wasn't too late.
I'd asked Cone about Pam Am Flight 907.
'It took off from Berlin at 6:17,' he'd said, 'and went off the screens twenty minutes later. The flight plan was New York via London. No radio contact since, still nothing on the screens. Pan Am have alerted their Emergency Procedures Information Centre and they're waiting for reports of wreckage.'
I didn't understand.
The object of this operation, Willi Hartman had told me in Berlin, is to place a bomb on board an international flight scheduled by one of the major US airlines.
Last night, when it had looked as if Nemesis had planned something bigger than a Lockerbie, I'd thought that Inge Stoph must have got it wrong when she'd told Willi about their plans. She smoked grass, and could have been high when she'd said that, wanted to shock him, Willi.
It didn't fit. The two Iranian pilots didn't fit into any plan for a Lockerbie operation. It signifies that they will die, the Arab at the palace had told me, before they sleep again. But it had been a Pan Am plane and they hadn't been flying it; we hadn't left Khatami behind in Berlin: he was here in Algeria. Nothing else fitted – Midnight One, the bearing, the zone somewhere in the Sahara – nothing.
It could be a coincidence.
I don't believe in them.
When I looked at the clock on the instrument panel again it read 22:00 hours – 10 p.m. I would be dropping in fifteen minutes.
It's 850 miles,' Cone had told me when he'd telephoned the hangar. 'The Aero L39 cruises at 454 mph at 16,400 feet.' The smoke had been rolling through the doorway, tinged with the glow from the fire. I'd thrown tarpaulins over Ibrahimi's body in case anyone came through there on a routine security check; then I'd holed up in an empty crate until the phone rang. 'He's using tip-tanks and reserves, so he can drop you over the zone and swing back and put down in Adrar to refuel. There's an airstrip there.'
We'd taken off at 8:16. Cone had been very fast, hotting up all the telephone wires in Algiers. The agent in place would have known the territory, where to find couriers, interpreters, weaponry, locksmiths, how to pull strings at the embassies, where to find transport, boats, planes, pilots, how to hire them, how much to pay.
Ten minutes ago, Giovanni Scalfaro had pointed downwards and to port. 'Adrar,' he'd said. There'd been a few lights, that was all. Now we were flying across darkness below, into the wastes of the Sahara. It would be like dropping, I thought, into mid-ocean.
'Did you hear,' I asked the Sicilian, 'about the Pan Am flight?'
He swung his head to look at me – 'Yes!' – and crossed himself.
'There's nothing been found yet?'
'Wait,' he said, 'I ask Rome,' and moved a hand to the radio.
Rome said there'd been some wreckage sighted in the North Sea, but it hadn't been identified. Pan Am Flight 907 hadn't come back on the screens, hadn't resumed radio contact.
'We will pray,' Scalfaro said. 'We will pray for them.'
You'll understand what I'm talking about, Maitland had said, tomorrow. We're going to make the headlines, you know.
If that wreckage were identified as belonging to Flight 907 there would be headlines, yes, tomorrow. But Klaus had talked about conventional explosives, had wanted a nuclear warhead. It couldn't have been anything to do with Flight 907.
At 10:05 Scalfaro looked at the INS reading. 'I'm gonna use partial flaps to bring the speed down to 120, okay? Gonna drop you off at 9,000 feet, okay with you?'
I said it was.
'We'll be over the drop zone in ten minutes. You better get all that stuff hooked on.'
I got the military knapsack and the water-bottles from behind the seat and buckled them to the chute harness. 'Will there be sand blowing down there?'
'Maybe some.' He looked through the dome. 'Maybe a little, sure. We didn't see too many lights back there in Adrar, but then it's a pretty small place, couple of thousand people. Could be some blowing sand, though.'
I got the goggles out of the knapsack and slung them round my neck.
At 10:12 Scalfaro looked down through the dome again. 'It's none of my business, but you know what you're doing?'
'Not necessarily.'
'Tell ya something, my friend, you're going to be lonely down there.'
I looked through the Perspex, saw nothing below, just a waste of darkness. 'What about wind currents,' I asked him, 'between here and the ground?'
'There shouldn't be any, this time of the year and at night. You won't be drifting much.'
10:14 on the clock.
The roar of the Titan turbofan was muted as Scalfaro brought the throttle back another notch. He had his head turned to watch me.
'You feel okay?'
He'd noticed me lurch a bit on the tarmac at Dar-el-Beida, wanted to know what the problem was, told him my shoes were pinching, none of his bloody business.
'Feel fine,' I said.
'Okay.' He slid the canopy back and the windrush slammed across our heads. '
Go for it!'
Drifting.
The sound of the plane had died away minutes ago, and there was just the whisper of the shrouds above me. The air was freezing against my face.
The starfields were brilliant in the dome of the night sky. Below me the darkness wasn't total: the moon was spreading its light across a vast ochre-coloured haze: the Sahara.
I felt isolated, minuscule.
Tell ya something, my friend, you're going to be lonely down there. And earlier Scalfaro had said when we'd boarded the plane, Maybe you're just crazy, I dunno. But I mean, where you're going, a hundred and sixty miles from Adrar, there's just desert. There's just sand, is all, the Sahara. I mean that's all you'll be too -just another grain of sand down there. I just hope you know what you're doing.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. It was all I'd got left of Solitaire, the fix, 26°03' north by 02°01' west, a point in the night, in the desert. And now I was there.
Drifting.
I looked at the glow of my watch-face again. I'd dropped six minutes ago, with a minute left before I hit ground. The ochre colour was lighter now, by a degree. Fine sand was pricking the left side of my face, and I put my goggles on and took a quick look above me. The moon's rim had lost its sharpness: there was sand blowing, close to ground level.
I looked down, waiting, as the desert rose against me in the final seconds of the drop and I sensed zero and pulled on the lines to break the impact and saw shapes in the distance through the blowing sand and felt hard ground under my boots.
It was fifteen minutes since I'd come down, and I had walked something like a mile across the violet-red clay surface in the moonlight, the fine sand blowing against my goggles and the scene ahead of me shifting as the wind came in gusts, so that the shapes out there took on substance and vanished again. Sometimes I could hear voices calling.
I'd tried to signal Cone on the radio but there was nothing but squelch. There was a power generator running somewhere, jamming the set.
I walked more slowly, trying to identify the shapes ahead of me, and heard another sound coming in now, a faint whistling. I stopped, trying to identify it, then without warning the generator was gunned up and the whole scene took on brilliance as a flarepath bloomed across the desert floor and lights flooded from the sky and I dropped into a crouch as the massive shape of an aircraft came drifting through the haze and settled onto the ground with a roar as it reversed thrust and I saw the blue and white Pan Am insignia on the tail.
