The moment they heard the turbofans, Ulm, Doyle, and Jones were out of the blast shelter and into the dusk air, straining for a glimpse of them.
It was Jones who first spotted the lead ship as it passed across the ebbing sun, pulling round in a wide bank to line up on Qena’s main runway.
The Pathfinders watched in silence as the aircraft, with their capacity to carry even more than their own giant Galaxies, slipped from the skies as effortlessly as eagles. Even without radar or the luxury of voice communication, the Soviets had picked Qena out of the desert like it was JFK.
‘Some sight, huh?’ Doyle said. The Pathfinders’ intelligence officer scratched his head. ‘Never thought I’d live to see it.’
The three of them watched the first An-124 cannon past their position, brakes smoking, engines in full reverse as the crew struggled to slow its enormous rolling mass.
Jones followed the progress of the second aircraft down the runway. ‘Us and Ivan — it still don’t feel right.’
‘At least, we’re out of the wilderness,’ the intelligence officer said.
‘Well, pardon my French, sir, but this ain’t exactly fucking Disneyland.’
Ulm wandered away from them, down to the taxi-way. The lead Condor, still a hundred and fifty yards away, dwarfed him.
‘What’s eating the boss?’ Jones asked.
‘What do you think?’ Doyle said. ‘Working with Ivan scares the shit out of him, too.’
The first An-124 slewed round to face the anti-blast shelter that had been designated as the Soviets’ storage area. It braked sharply, shivering with the vibration. Thirty feet above the surface of the tarmac a door opened and a telescopic ladder deployed to the ground. Shabanov was silhouetted briefly in the doorframe. He had swapped his clean, pressed uniform for combat fatigues. Poking above the camouflage smock was the prized blue and white T-shirt of Spetsnaz.
Shabanov pounded down the steps and came to attention before the American.
‘It begins, Elliot.’
‘Sure.’ Ulm found himself shouting over the Condor’s idling turbofans. ‘How was the flight?’
‘A textbook deception. The identification transponders worked flawlessly.’
Behind Shabanov, the visor nose of the An-124 was lifting slowly over the cockpit. Under the glare of floodlights in the Condor’s roof, the cavernous interior was bathed in brightness. Already, soldiers strained against the first Mi-24J. The Condor’s ramp had no sooner hit the ground than the helicopter gunship was rolled onto the tarmac.
An officer barked orders and the Mi-24 was wheel-ed into the hangar, followed shortly by another. There were two more Mils in the second Condor. The rest of the floor-space in both aircraft was taken up with the building materials Shabanov required for his dummy camp in the desert.
Ulm jabbed a finger in the direction of the helicopter. ‘So that’s the Mi-24J. Don’t look so special to me.’ In fact, it looked much like any other recent edition of the Hind, the helicopter the Soviets made infamous during the Afghan war.
‘Outwardly the same,’ Shabanov said. ‘But inside, a new animal.’
‘Yeah?’
Ulm had asked Doyle to make enquiries on the Mi-24J before they left Kirtland, but nobody at the Pentagon knew anything about it. It was that new.
‘It marries the rotors, engines, dynamics, fire-control system, and avionics of the new Mi-38 tank-buster with the Mi-24 airframe. The result, a fifty per cent improvement in performance. The Mil design bureau is very proud of it. They believe it will perform well.’
‘It has to earn the right to fly into Lebanon,’ Ulm said.
‘True.’ Shabanov looked around him. ‘Where are the Sikorskys?’
‘In the hangars, fuelled up and ready to go. Man, I’d forgotten how much helos hate sand. This kind of sand, anyway.’
‘Give me an hour to stow the equipment,’ Shabanov said. ‘Then we hold a briefing for all the men.’
There were children dressed in rags playing noisily on the steps when Girling arrived at the apartment block in Medinat-Al-Sahafeen, a poor district on the edge of the city.
As soon as they spotted him, the children swarmed around his legs, tugging at the hem of his jacket and the cloth of his trousers. Though there were only six of them, they made the noise of a school playground, hands outstretched for his money.
Girling dug into his pockets and distributed his change amongst them. They ran off into the dust squealing with pleasure.
He knocked on the apartment door. Above him, evening light streamed through a hole in the roof. There was a shuffle from within and the door opened.
Girling’s mother-in-law was dressed in a helaliya, a sombre all-over garment popular amongst Egyptian country-women. Her kohl-lined eyes widened slightly, the only outward show of surprise she allowed herself. In the few times Girling had met her, she had never once addressed a word to him. Custom forbade communication with strangers, and especially ‘agnabis, in the remote village of her birth. Though her husband was from a simple family himself, neither tradition nor religion had ever placed any constraints upon his behaviour. He had never been afraid to speak his mind.
Girling took a step inside and his mother-in-law retreated behind a door off the living-room. He heard her whispers and the gruff response they elicited. There was the metallic creak of bed springs. It seemed he had interrupted Mohammed Hamdi’s late afternoon sleep.
Girling walked into the sitting-room. It contained one or two heavy, ornate pieces of furniture, Egyptian copies of French late-nineteenth-century designs. There was lace everywhere — over the tables, the chair-backs, and in front of the windows. There was a portrait of Mona on a small table beside him. It made him feel as if he were in a funeral parlour.
In the short time they had lived together in Egypt, Mona had brought him here just once. Her father never made any bones about his dislike for him. And for his part, Girling had never made any special effort to turn his view around. Out of deference to the two men she loved, Mona considered it best they should be kept apart.
After her death, it was only natural that her parents should look after Alia. It was natural, too, that they should form a strong attachment to their grand-daughter in the long months of his recuperation. Stansell warned him that they might choose to take the law into their own hands. And so it was that, as soon as he was able, he came to pay his respects and thank them for looking after his baby daughter. He knew from the furtive looks they gave him that Stansell was right, that they were planning to keep her. A week later, on his way to the airport, he arrived without warning. He told them he was taking little Alia home, to England. It had been an undignified, painful occasion. He could still remember the look of rage on Mohammed Hamdi’s face and the sound of his wife’s wailing behind the closed door of her bedroom as he carried his daughter to the waiting taxi. Because Mona had loved her father deeply, Girling was sad that he had had to act so drastically. But he felt that he had had no choice.
Girling replaced the picture of his wife a moment before he heard the scrape of the old man’s slippers on the bare floor behind him.
Three years before, Mohammed Hamdi had been a big man, with a barrel chest, great, strong arms and the largest pair of hands Girling had ever seen. Now, one look revealed the extent to which the cancer had him in its grip.
From behind their thick pebble glasses, two piercing brown eyes held Girling in a reproachful stare. The look of Mona in those eyes suddenly made Girling’s heart go out to the man.
‘You know there is only one reason in the world that stops me from throwing you out of this house, don’t you?’