There was an area of danger during the actual setting-up of the operation. I had gone to lean against the Fiat instead of the Citroen GT because there wasn't a hinged panel over the petrol cap: a panel would have made a noise springing open and I would have had to stand slightly away from the bodywork to give it room, which would have exposed my hands and the panel itself. With nothing more than the half-turn cap to take off it had been a pushover even with my hands behind me and no one had seen what I was doing because finger movement alone was necessary, the forearm and wrist remaining perfectly still.
The area of danger had involved the petrol cap itself once I'd removed it: I couldn't put it into my pocket without their seeing it, so I'd had to leave it wedged between my spine and the body panel in order to leave my hands free to get the matches and strike them; and the whole operation would have been abortive if for any reason I'd had to lean away from the car because the petrol cap would have dropped with quite a lot of noise.
There'd been a certain amount of strain on the nerves because the fact was that two lives and the end-phase of a priority mission were now depending on a blob of chemicals literally as small as a match head and this resulted in quite normal but dangerous purpose tremor when the time came to bring out the matches: my fingers weren't steady as I struck the first one and I had to get over this by considering a simple enough fact: that if nothing at all had depended on doing this thing properly I could have done it at the very least a dozen times with perfect success. In other words I was on an odds-on favourite at twelve to one so there wasn't any real need to worry.
I think my fingers had been quite steady again in the instant before I struck the second match but there wasn't time to give it any attention. The operation was now in final sequence and almost automatic: the match had to be moved through a hundred and eighty degrees laterally and downwards approximately forty degrees from the horizontal and the eye would pick up the target at once because it was well defined as a dark hole in a light-coloured panel. The actual timing was critical but presented no physical problem: all I had to do was swing half round with my right hand moving downwards during the ignition phase, allowing almost two full seconds for the manoeuvre — more than twice as long as I needed for the muscular commands and responses.
The ignition was normal and I waited for the oxygen release from the carrier and the formation of sulphur dioxide with heat increase before I turned and threw the match into the fuel orifice. At this stage the chemical process was becoming rapid and the final oxygen release almost explosive and I got clear and let the petrol cap drop to the roadway.
Hassan didn't have any time to react. The mental process involving the sequence of surprise, suspicion, comprehension and physical avoidance commands was much too long and I doubt if he'd done more than assume the startle posture, head forward and shoulders hunched, before the fumes caught. He was standing, in effect, directly in front of a flame-thrower.
The timing of the main explosion wasn't important. Both Hassan and one of his men were in the immediate flame area and were thus technically out of action as soon as I threw the match. My target was the man standing seven or eight feet away towards the Citroen GT and I went for him in the same movement that got me clear of the explosion.
He didn't have a chance and I knew that. His surprise phase would last much longer than it would take me to reach him: two seconds ago the night had been quiet and he had been party to a situation affording him absolute power and he was now faced visually with a conflagration that covered seventy-five per cent of his static field of view and mentally with a reversal of concepts difficult to accept without a sense of unreality. He was moving instinctively into a half crouch when I spun the sub-machine-gun to break his hold on it and flung it clear and dropped him and went for the other man.
There was bright flamelight now and a lot of noise. Hassan was screaming and trying to roll over but he was a torch and the petrol was still flooding across the roadway and making a sea of fire and I had to keep clear as I went for the fourth man. The one who'd been standing near Hassan wasn't making any noise and I think the initial burst of flame had asphyxiated him and sent him down without any chance of getting away. I saw Diane still standing near the front of the Fiat and starting to move for the ambulance and then I was coming up on the fourth man and having to dodge because he'd begun pumping his gun as a reflex action and the stuff was going into the roadway and sending up clods of tar before he saw me and swung round and I felt the blast of three successive shots as I went low and got his legs.
Sudden rattling almost as loud as the gun itself as the aim went wild and the shells began hitting the Fiat behind me, sharpness of cordite in the lungs and somewhere in the middle of everything the unmistakable sounds of Hassan dying and then my hands closed and I dragged the fourth man off balance with his feet kicking upwards, split-second image of his face terrified in the flamelight then I chopped once and took the gun and slung it skittering across the sandy road and finished him and started back towards the ambulance.
Fell against something.
Oh Christ someone saying, fumes very strong, myself saying it, get up but my hands slid, part of the Fiat, front end, couldn't get up.
The effort demanded hadn't been great but total resources had been called upon suddenly and factors like oxygen needs and blood supply to the muscles and brain had become involved, bad enough if I'd kept up the effort till the organism rediscovered its rhythm but worse because the relative falloff in terms of effort was precipitous: all I was having to do now was move from the flame area to the ambulance and it didn't take much doing and reaction was getting time to set in.
Roaring and the red light blinding, hello we'll have to watch that won't we, hitting something again, bumpers, up but I couldn't then bloody well try again or you'll burn alive, a sleeve of the white coat catching you're in for it now if you don't take an interest but the fumes choking and the heat fierce look out that's the wrong way, this way or you'll fry andget that coatoff, get it off.
Lights through the dark, the billowing dark of the smoke and the lights flooding through it, greenish and very clear and not the orange-red colour of the fire, somebody moving a car coming nearer, the ambulance why don't youbloody well get up. Yes better now, the air more breathable. The stars spinning headlong across the roof of the night andlook where you're going for Christ sake, that's better, steady now there's no need to panic, everything's under control.
Door swung and I pitched in and slammed it.
She drove hard and just before we left the area I saw them lying there, three of them blackening, one of them still trying to crawl through the dying flames. This was satisfactory and it had been easier for them, even this, than what they would have done to her, and later to me.
She drove well but the sobbing wouldn't stop and she had to keep straightening up from the wheel, her tears bright in the back-glow from the headlamps. She hadn't seen anything like that before and the spasms kept shaking her and when I could manage it I said all right, I'll drive now.
'Sorry I'm late.'
'We've only just got here ourselves.'
I thought it was civil of them. They were both in their flying-suits, one short, one tall, no indication of rank or service branch, strictly incognito, but the Mk XI Marauder outside on the tarmac had the standard roundels on it: I'd seen it in the docking bay when I'd driven into the airport.
I suppose they felt they shouldn't go on looking at me like this without asking something about it because the short one said:
'Have you had an accident?'