The dark oblong shape of the Renault was standing under the palms, glow of a Gauloise, threw my flight-bag in and pulled the door shut.
'Go very fast, will you?'
8: AIRBORNE
I set the door-lock and got the belt adjusted.
He glanced at me.'Ca va?'
'Ca va.'
I suppose I was bleeding again.
He swung through the main intersection and accelerated hard along the South 4 highway and I pulled down the passenger visor and angled it to line up the mirror, negative.
Chirac flicked the stub through the window.
'I heard some shots just now.'
'So did I.'
He laughed cannily and shut the window and pushed the vents open and there wasn't so much noise.
'Do you expect we shall be followed?'
'It's on the cards.'
'Comment?'
'C'est possible.'
Two of the stars on the south horizon were beginning to glow red and I watched them.
'Do I go fast enough?'
'Not if you can go any faster.' There was 140 kph on the clock and the engine was running at peak. with valve-bounce creeping in. 'How long will it take to reach the airstrip?'
'Maybe ten minutes, a little more.'
London was panicking but I didn't have to try cutting actual seconds off the schedule: it was just that if the man with the gun had got into his car he might have seen the Renault when we'd left the Mosque.
Mirror negative.
I could see now that the two red lights were stationary ahead of us and if it was some kind of breakdown I hoped it wasn't blocking the road because we wanted a clear run. There were three lights now and when I'd considered all the other possible explanations I voted for the idea that there were two vehicles halted on the road about a mile in front of us: a few seconds ago I'd felt my weight shifting slightly to one side and my elbow had been pressed gently against the door panel so we must have taken an almost indefinable curve and the visual effect had been to reveal one of the second vehicle's rear-lamps by parallax.
'Is that a truck?'
'I would expect so, yes.'
'If it's a breakdown, just keep on going.'
'Okay.'
We were coming up on the lights very fast and he began flickering the heads as a warning and I wondered whether he'd be able to judge how much room there was to go past at this speed before it was too late to do anything about it. Chirac was all right but there was a bit too much garlic-and-Gauloises philosophy about him, the thing is to die like a man, so forth, absolute balls because whether you die like a man or the back end of a pantomime horse you're going to stop breathing when it happens.
There were some other lights, white ones, moving around in the ravine below the road and then I got it and stopped worrying and sat back and watched him put the Renault through the gap between the edge of the road and the police car and ambulance standing on the other side. Nobody tried to slow us: they were all busy down in the ravine, two of them carrying a stretcher.
'There was an accident,' Chirac said.
'It looks like it.'
He reached for the blue packet and manoeuvred a cigarette out one-handed. 'Some people drive too fast,mon ami.'
It looked like a false sunrise as we topped the dunes a mile from South 4 camp, the brilliance of the derrick-lamps lifting into the sky and flaring there among the stars.
We were already running parallel with a wire guard-fence hung at intervals with notices: Defense d'Entrer — Defense de Fumer — Danger du Mort. Trucks moved beyond the fence, unloading sections of piping, and the derrick lamps shone down on storage tanks and a fleet of jeeps and half-tracks
'The drill is down to four thousand metres,' Chirac said as we began slowing, 'and last week they make a core-drilling and bring up oil in the sandstone, so it will be not long now before they strike. But like I tell you, they are a lousy outfit, so maybe the oil will be lousy too.'
The two guards checked our papers with the gates still closed, then gave us passes and let us through and Chirac drove at the regulation 20 kph past the living-quarters to the south end of the airstrip where the windsock was hanging limp a hundred yards from the hangar. From here the immediate skyline was a frieze of pumping-units, rigs, hutments and vehicles, with the towering derrick and radio masts rising behind them. The steady drone of the diesels sounded from the rotary table half a mile away but here it was relatively quiet and I could hear voices from inside the security-zone where the first stages of the pipeline were being set up.
The hangar was a single-span stressed-iron unit, an item of ex-war stock with the original camouflage design showing faintly through the silver heat-reflecting paint. There weren't many lamps burning inside and for a moment I didn't see the glider because its matt night-blue finish gave it the same tone as the shadows on the corrugated walls.
Chirac put his hands on his hips.
'Et voila! Mais queue vache, hein? What a cow! But it will fly very well, and that is what we need.'
Much bigger than I'd expected: a three-seater pod-and-boom design, shoulder-wing, straight dihedral, very large chord, ugly to look at because of the lump at the front end and the almost black paint.
'Have you flown this type?'
'Mon Dieu,there isn't another like this! The Algerians used it for radio-observer drops during the war, then the Meteo converted it for research on thermal currents, then Anglo-Beige put different mainplanes on it for low-altitude surveys, and now look what we do, we maketrappe beneath the cabin and paint it like this!Tout simplement, he is a cow! But I can fly anything,mon ami, even a cow, so we shall go well up there, don't worry please.'
He fished for his Gauloises and lit up and remembered the fire-risk and saidmerde and scuffed the thing out. I wished he were a degree less nervy.
I'd expected a lot of interest from the drilling-crews but the only people in the hangar were the three riggers doping the fabric of the new trap-door and a man in flying-gear coming across to us from the far end.
'What's our cover-story for this flight, Chirac?'
'Comment?'
'What's the official reason for our using this glider?'
'Oh yes, I will tell you that. It was being flown for Anglo-Belge on a magnetic-rock survey a few days before, but the wind becomes too low, you see, so it was force-landed on the nearest airstrip, which was this place. Now we are going to take it back to Anglo.'
'Why at night?'
'The wind is good right now.'
'Why the blue paint?'
'Ecoutez, mon ami,who the hell asks to know a thing like this?' He jerked a thumb towards the main camp. 'That drill does not stop, never, day and night, you see, unless it breaks or it strikes oil, and then they are even more busy than always, you un'erstand? When they work they have no time to think of different things, and when theystop work they are too damnfatigue to do anything but sleep. They do not wish to ask about theplaneur.' He turned as the man in the flying-gear came up.'Pierre, je to presente Monsieur Gage, l'Anglais dont je t'ai parle. This is Pierre Batagnier, who will fly the airplane that will tow us.'
Small compact man, more flesh on him than Chirac, much less nervy about the eyes. We shook hands and he went over to the riggers.
'Alors, Michel, tu es pret?'
Ten minutes, the man said, and it would take longer than that to warm his engines.
Chirac got the map and spread it across a crate and the pilot joined us. 'Okay, now listen please. Pierre will tow us to the north-east of here until three thousand metres of altitude, and that will bring us somewhere by the third Philips radio beacon at this blue mark here. This is because it is a normal route made by airplanes across the drilling-complex from South 4 to the Anglia-Beige Roches Vertes II, so nobody will think it strange to hear us go that way, you see? After this point we will slip the cable, and Pierre will return here alone.'