As soon as he arrived back at the apartment, Girling went to the phone. Referring to Stansell’s little black book, he dialled in the second of the two numbers, the one listed for Mr Lazan’s place of work. At that time of night, past eleven thirty, he didn’t expect anyone to answer, but there might just be…
There was a click as the call connected… an answering machine.
The woman’s voice, very smooth, almost robotic, talked to him in a language he did not understand, before switching to English.
‘You have reached the Israeli Embassy. There is no one here currently to…’
Girling gently replaced the receiver.
‘Gotcha!’ he said.
CHAPTER 11
Sergeant Jones worked his tongue between his teeth. It had ceased to feel like a tongue, more like the crust of a dried-out swamp bed back home. They had been jogging for just over four hours. One tenth of the time allowed to them. And already halfway. But for the water situation, it wasn’t so bad.
Shabanov’s last little surprise before they boarded the helicopters had been to restrict each pair to just one water bottle. One fucking bottle between two men. To compensate for this, each team was supplied with a map that supposedly marked all the wells in that section of the Eastern Desert. Some swap.
In the darkness, they had missed the first well. Bitov wanted to turn back for it, but Jones persuaded the Russian otherwise. Now he was beginning to regret it.
He was thirsty as hell, but he tried to convince himself he’d been thirstier. Their situation could have been worse, he told himself. The bottle was still half full and the sun wouldn’t be up for another half-hour or so; and the next well wasn’t so far off now, probably around twenty-five kilometres.
On paper, sixty kilometres was good progress. But in a few hours the heat would descend on them and they would have no choice but to hole up for the rest of the day. In this sort of terrain and with daytime temperatures rising a hundred and thirty degrees Fahrenheit, marching by night was the only option.
The terrain here was flat. They had managed to skirt around the mountains so far, but the map indicated that towards the end of the journey there was a solid ridge between them and the air base. And there was no way around it. They would have to go over the top. Half-way in one tenth of the time wasn’t beginning to sound so good after all.
Jones kept one eye on Bitov’s outline, a little to his left and in front. He was impressed by the Russian’s stamina, but then Bitov was no ordinary man. Six foot five and built like an armoured personnel carrier, he was the ugliest son of a bitch Jones had ever seen. He was damned if he was going to let the Ivan get the better of him.
Suddenly Bitov stopped.
They dropped onto their haunches. Jones scanned the skyline for movement, but could see nothing.
The Russian turned his head to the wind. Whatever was bothering him, it was off towards the west.
‘There!’ Bitov said softly.
Jones heard only his heart pounding against his ribs.
‘Two of them, I think,’ Bitov said.
Now Jones heard the deep wok-wok of the blades. He peered against the night, but they were too far away, at least five miles off.
‘What are they?’
Bitov shrugged. ‘Too far for identification.’
There were Mils and Sikorskys out looking for them that night. Jones’s mind worked against the fatigue. The difference was critical.
‘It’s OK, they are far from here,’ Bitov said. He started to march again. ‘Let’s go.’
Jones stayed down. He heard the helos’ change of direction. Those turboshafts were distinctive now. They were headed straight for their position at a hundred and ninety-five miles per hour. He picked himself off the ground, drove his feet through the sand, and launched himself at Bitov. He hit the Russian at waist height, his two hundred and twenty-five pounds knocking the starshina to the ground.
Bitov reacted instinctively. He swung his arm round and grasped Jones’s face between thumb and finger, the claw of his left hand.
‘Don’t fight me and don’t stand, whatever you do,’ Jones snarled. ‘Just start digging. We’ve got about a minute and a half before those helicopters are on us.’
Bitov wasted vital seconds as he contemplated Jones’s distorted face in the vice-like frame of his fingers. Then he released his grip.
Jones’s fingers tore into the sand. He linked both hands and shifted pounds at a time, in great scoops. It took Bitov vital extra seconds before he began to copy the American, the fingers of his good hand partially aided by the mutilated stump of the other.
‘They will never see us, Jones.’
‘Wrong,’ Jones panted. ‘Those are our MH-53Js and unlike your birds, they carry FLIR — Forward Looking Infra-Red. Worse, they just picked us up.’
‘From eight kilometres? Impossible.’
‘We stand out like two virgins in a whorehouse against this cold desert floor,’ Jones said.
Bitov stopped digging long enough to hear the surge in sound.
‘Dig! You big son of a bitch!’ Jones shouted. ‘I don’t want to end up a passenger on this operation.’
As Bitov tore into the sand again, he ripped a nail clean off a finger on his good hand. He ignored the pain. He knew now what Jones was trying to do.
Jones pushed the starshina into the hole.
‘Hold your breath and trust me,’ the American said, throwing his bush hat over Bitov’s face. He heaped the sand on top of the Russian’s body, praying that the grains, cooled by the bitter-chill tempera-ture of the night, were enough to fool the Sikorsky’s heat-sensor.
Jones saw two shadows moving against the stars. From their engines, the helos were now less than two miles away, easily within identification range. They seemed impossibly close already, when he hurled himself into his hole and shovelled the sand over himself. Jones took a last, deep lungful of air and pressed back into his makeshift grave. He heaped sand over his face and the grains poured into his ears and up his nose. He fought an overpowering urge to break free from his claustrophobic tomb and plunged his arm into the cool sand beside him. As he lay in his barrow, Jones felt every minute rock particle vibrate against his skin as the rotors beat the ground above him.
Jones’s lungs were at bursting point when at last he felt the change in tempo as the MH-53s began their climb-out. He no longer cared which way the FLIR turrets were pointing when he punched out of his grave.
Bitov followed a moment later coughing up dust.
The sound of the Jollies receded to the west. Jones guessed that the FLIR operator would be doing some fast talking, trying to convince his crewmates that he really had picked up two human signatures on his TV FLIR display. The others would be berating him for confusing a couple of desert foxes for soldiers. There would be a few jokes. Some asshole would wise-crack something about it being easy, mistaking animals for special forces.
‘How did you know?’ Bitov asked.
‘You learn that kind of thing in the Pathfinders,’ Jones said.
They took a drink and resumed their trek across the desert, settling back into the monotony of the march. For Jones the action would have provided a welcome distraction, but for the shortage of water. He shook the bottle. The unexpected expenditure of energy had pushed up their water needs. He had had no choice but to sanction double rations. They were dangerously low now.
He went back to a detailed examination of the sores in his mouth and tried to forget about their predicament.