01.42.
Eight minutes to the drop.
Of course it was just conceivable that Control had picked up a trace of the marksman. There was a ten-tenths flap on in London so they'd have alerted the whole network for data monitoring and there must have been signals coming in from both hemispheres for analysis.
There aren't many telescopic rifles among the European intelligence networks because it's a device used specifically for assassination and there's not nearly so much fuss caused with a little cyanide in the toothpaste. The long gun demands a relatively sophisticated set-up and a couple of years ago when Parkis had directed themodus operandi of a neutralization thing it had taken him three weeks to line it all up including requisition of premises, covert communication channels, access and egress, target movement monitoring and the technical demands of the gun itself in terms of range, angles of fire, appropriate ammunition, so forth. But if it's a special case and there's enough time for these preliminaries and the eye at the scope has been trained into the international class there's an overwhelming advantage because the terminal act can be performed impersonally and without the risk of retaliation: once the instructions have been confirmed by Control or even Local Control the target has only to pass through the selected point in his travel pattern and he knows nothing more.
Parkis had used Tomlinson for that one, winkled him out of a duck shoot on Lord Kenfield's estate and put him into an executive jet at Gatwick with a Remington.410 across his knees and a street map of Kronstadt to read. He had a rotten cold but it didn't affect his performance, just the one shot, and it broke up a cell we'd been trying to getat for nearly three years.
01.45.
Five minutes.
The thing was that if our overseas units picked up anything about a known marksman last seen with a ticket for Tunis or Jerba and passed it for routine analysis in London there'd be an immediate hit when London told them I'd been under a gun. They'd know it was almost certainly the same one that had worried Fyson in Sidi Ben Ali but even a random signal with some new information in it could link up with existing data and put a name to the man and there's a saying at the Bureau that stands up rather welclass="underline" once you can blow the man you can blow the cell.
Four.
Airstream variable and therefore unpleasant because windspeed variation could make a mess of what I was doing on the Sony and I could come down anywhere.
'Now, please?'
'Seventy-six.'
He wanted to count up for distance and I wanted to count down for time which was a bit more logical but he'd stuck his heels in about it and said he didn't feel comfortable 'working backwards' so I let it go.
Three.
'Ninety-one point eight-five.' He watched the instruments.
'Repeat the briefing, please.'
His voice had gone dull suddenly.
'Free the belt. Slide back the hood. Wait for the order. Jump and look out for the leading edge.'
'Very well.'
Didn't really seem necessary but he'd dropped people before and he knew his onions: at the last minute when you're thinking about the imminent free fall you can cock the whole thing up by getting your feet caught in the belt or bashing your head on the hood you forget to open, do it by numbers and it's foolproof.
'Where shall I put this thing?'
'Leave it on the seat.'
Dull, toneless, because she was pretty and one was five, the other seven.
01.48.
'Ninety-three point six-five kilometres.'
'Bien.'
Two minutes.
I didn't have anyone,nothing of value, no next of kin, but that kind of comfort's really an intellectual pursuit because we've all got a skin and that's what the organism says we've got to save, yelling its bloody head off, couldn't care less about the insurance.
'Ninety-five point six-seven.'
'Okay.'
One minute.
The night seemed vast.
The stars gave a sense of orientation but only in one plane and all they did was show which way was down and that was where I was going, down through the dark to the endless night-lying waves of sand, of silence.
The 8 looks so like a 9 and they're side by side. Slipshod maintenance, dead flies in the pitot-head. A change in the wind.
Ignore.
'Ninety-six point two.'
'Very well.'
Twenty-eight seconds.
The old feeling that we were arriving somewhere. Difficult, here where the night was as vast as it had been before and the dark as featureless, to understand that our journey together was over. No control tower or platform or jetty or gates, nothing to mark a junction or a terminal, only the dark and the delicate pointer going its rounds.
Tick-tick-tick.
'Ninety-six point five.'
'So. Be ready then.'
He brought the column back just a little.
Level flight.
Ten seconds.
We had agreed that at this point I would stop computing. Ten seconds represented a quarter of a kilometre and that much distance could be critical if I dropped wide but if I went on computing to zero as a refinement it wouldn't allow for the time I needed for getting out.
Tick-tick-tick.
French keen on shaking hands, frustrating for him, control-column too sensitive, no go the niceties. I hit the belt clip.
Tick-tick.
Hood back and a blast of air roaring.
Leave the Sony on the seat.
Altitude 75 metres.
Tick.
Good luck Chirac.
Adieu!
Free fall.
10: TANGO
One, two, three.
Blood in the head and the stars swinging below me
Less horizontal buffeting, more vertical.
Four, five, six.
Free fall velocity rising very fast.
Air less cold.
Seven, eight, nine.
Pull it.
Crack of the pilot 'chute.
Then the jerk and the drag and oh Christ -
Blackout.
Swinging gently.
Couldn't quite relate anything yet.
Nearly did it again and thought I'm not going to and the pain didn't stop but at least I stayed conscious. It had been the shoulders, that was all, the bruising on the pavement in Tunis and then the ricochet of the.44 tonight and then the awful wrenching from the harness because I'd been more or less upside down when the main canopy had filled and the fall velocity had been braked from more than a hundred kph to less than fifteen and the pain had overcharged the nerve channels and that was that.
Still very uncomfortable, feeling of being on fire, inability to concentrate on other things but the forebrain functioning well enough to alert the organism and I began looking downwards so that I'd see the sand coming up and have a chance of relaxing the muscles because if I hit it the wrong way I'd pass out again and I had a lot to do.
No particular visual definition yet: a certain lightness below, with darker areas, but could be illusory.
I could make out the figures on the dial of my watch without needing the phosphorescence, not much point in wanting to know the time but it helped me to feel I was getting back into some kind of control over things. Time was important: ask London.