The Tango Briefing

'O'Brien. Then Fyson.'

'Then me.'

'That wasn't your fault.'

'I walked straight into surveillance.'

'You could hardly avoid it.'

'Do you think that our presence in the field is theonly reason why they believe Tango Victor came down within a hundred miles of Kaifra?'

In a moment he said:

'I would like to.'

I'd never seen Loman like this before: within hours of throwing the mission into gear he was uncertain on major aspects that London should have cleared for him before sending either of us into the field. Everything about this operation stank of panic and I didn't like it because I was the ferret and the ferret's always the first to go when the whole thing blows apart.

'Who have you got lined up?'

He stopped moving about.

'Lined up?'

'If I come a mucker.'

I felt the girl watching me from near the radio.

'No one,' Loman said.

'With a thing as shaky as this — '

'I anticipate success.' His tone had risen a fraction and he controlled it at once. 'Complete success. You understand?' He was wiping his face again. 'Had there been no chance of complete success I would have refused to direct the mission, regardless of pressure. I am asking you to proceed with every confidence, both in me and in the constant support we shall have from London.'

I was learning something about Loman: the higher the stress the more he talked like a schoolmistress.

'All right. Tell me about access, will you?'

He began moving again at once. I'd pushed the briefing into the final phase and he wouldn't have to worry any more about the background aspects: the area where he was critically uncertain.

'You will rendezvous with a French pilot tonight as soon as he contacts meto say he's ready. His name is Gaston Chirac and he was engaged in combat flying during the Algerian war. Since then he has flown for the oil-companies in desert survey work and knows the area thoroughly; he was also the world sailplane champion three years ago when he raised the altitude record to forty-six thousand feet. There is only one way of sending you into the target area without either surveillance or active obstruction and that is by glider.'

'And parachute?'

'And of course parachute. Since this is a night-drop, both will be dull black, to ensure that you go in unseen as well as unheard. The take-off is arranged for 23.00 hours. The rock outcrop you saw on the reconnaissance photographs is approximately five hundred yards from the aeroplane and can be used as a landmark even by starlight; it may also conceivably offer partial shade during the day, though that is less certain. Your equipment will comprise the second transceiver, a 35mm reflex camera with flash, and of course desert survival gear.'

'What's the estimated duration?'

He'd been pacing towards me and he turned away when I said that and it needn't have meant anything but I thought, it did because my nerves were getting into tune as the deadline approached and they could catch vibrations that I'd miss at other times.

'Flexible.' I didn't hear anything in his tone because he'd make bloody sure of that. 'Forty-eight hours at the most you'llhave rations and water for that period, plus reserves. The task itself is not exacting: we are asked for photographs of the plane and its cargo. At the same time you will be reporting in precise detail by radio onwhat you discover, and your report will go directly on to tape in this room.'

So that if I didn't survive, all they'd lose were the photographs. That was all right.

I left the map and went over to the carved teak table and looked at the second transceiver. There was a recessed button that the other one didn't have.

'Manual destruct?'

'Yes. Ten-second fuse.'

'Acid?'

'Explosive.'

'Safe range?'

'Five yards.'

He paused for a moment and said: 'In any case it's purely a refinement: the worst you'll have to contend with in the desert will be the heat. The more difficult phase of this operation is getting you to the jump-off point without attracting surveillance or obstructive action. We must therefore take every possible care.'

Near the edge of the retina an object is invisible: but movement can be seen. At the actual edge of the retina not even movement shows itself: but it triggers a reflex and the eyes will turn quickly to bring the moving object into central vision for inspection.

Static objects have no automatic interest unless their shape is significant, but to all animals movement has its own primitive significance: it may be signalling the presence of food in the form of. prey or of danger in the form of a predator. In man, whose prey is killed and processed for him, the perception of movement serves as a warning alone, until the movement can be explained.

Unexplained movement is always suspect.

The rendezvous with Chirac had been fixed for 21.00 hours ata redjem seven kilometres along the road to Garaa Tebout and I was getting into the Mercedes when the visual reflex was stimulated and I turned my head and looked away again and pulled the seat-belt tight and got the engine going and thought Christ, they didn't even let Fyson die in peace.

Loman had told me he'd got here from Tunis with no tags and he couldn't have made a mistake about that because on those long straight stretches through the olive groves he would have seen a tag a mile away. I'd got here clean too and it was nothing to do with the girl because there'd been no surveillance when I'd gone to our base: that's a trip when you treble-check. So it was impossible that anyone knew I'd holed-up in Kaifra: if you forgot about Fyson.

Fyson had known I was coming here and they wouldn't have had to do very much because his nerves had been shot and he didn't carry a 9-suffixand they'd only had one question for him so it was easy and Loman wasn't being funny when he said the most difficultstage of this operation was getting me to the jump-off without someonetrying to stop me.

I turned the 220 and drove under the lights of the hotel marquee and looked round to see if there were anything coming and took the east road through the tunnel of overhanging palms and checked the mirror and kept the speed steady at thirty, a little more, such a nice evening for a drive.

The slipstream didn't cool anything: it just circulated the heat. There were gnats already sticking to the windscreen and I used the wiper jets and the screen went silver and slowly dark again. The roads in Kaifra are sanded over in places: theGhibli blows it from the south and nobody feels like sweeping it away so it's left for the wheeled traffic to break up the drifts and scatter the sand towards the edge of the road.

I didn't like the way Loman had said the estimated duration of my work in the target area was “flexible”. After two seconds he'd put it at forty-eight hours' maximum but that didn't mean anything more than that I'd forced him into an obligatory answer. There are always unknown factors in any target area whether it's the office of the Cuban Minister for Defence or the off-limits research and development section of a Japanese electronics complex under government contract or a square mile of sand in the Sahara, but the director in the field makes a point of mounting a model operation on paper before he sets the real one running: and people like Loman and Egerton and Mildmay do it with a slide-rule and a stop-watch and a blueprint of the area.

That word “flexible” simply meant that on this operation the director in the field didn't know how long it should take me to do the work once I'd gained access and it pointed to the same thing that all the other features pointed to: those bastards in London were sending me in with almost no preparation and once I was there I'd have to carry the whole of the load. The 'constant support from London' he'd talked about was strict cock because there'd be nothing London could do if I mucked it right in the middle of the job.