He looked at his watch.
In the background silence the tick of the instrument-panel chronometer was insistent, its illuminated dial sharply defined. There were four minutes to go.
'You'd better brief me.'
'Yes.'
He shifted his position on the observer's seat as he opened the map, and the Alouette moved slightly on its suspension. I rummaged in the rations box and found some dehydrated honey tablets and peeled one off the strip.
'Chirac will be using a flight pattern designed to confuse the acoustic observation posts as much as possible. You will go from here to the Petrocombine South 5 drilling camp and overfly the airstrip, setting course for this point here in theRoches Vertes complex and then flying for three kilometres along the scheduled air route from Ghadamis to El Oued across the Algerian desert. You will then proceed at 203° direct to the target area.'
I checked it twice and asked him where thelistening-posts were meant to be.
'From local intelligence we know there are four posts in this line from South 5 to No. 2 Philips radio tower. There may be others farther west.'
I looked up from the map.
'What d'you think our chances are, Loman?'
He must have been expecting it but tried to look surprised.
'Of doing what?'
'Reaching the target area without bringing a whole pack of tags or interceptors into the air.'
I'd made my point and he had the grace to give me a straight answer without pretending to consider the actual odds.
'Unpromising.'
I suppose he was spiritually exhausted or physically over the edge of fatigue because he suddenly sagged, his hands resting loosely on the spread map and his pale eyes closing for a moment.
'That is the only possible flight pattern we can use.'
'Taking us within seven kilometres of this end listening post.' I'd begun sweating. 'What d'you imagine their effective range is? About fifty?'
'Perhaps.'
He was sitting perfectly still and I knew he was waiting for me to blow up in his face but I wasn't going to do it because it wouldn't help us and Christ we needed help and a new question was coming into my mind and I tried to get rid of it before it could do any harm, before it could bring down the last few bricks of the mission that still appeared to be standing. But it wouldn't go.
Question. When does a director in the field start losing his sense of proportion? When does the strain of watching the slow demolition of his plans begin to tell on him and take him beyond the point where reason can only be ignored with fatal results?When does he break?
Perhaps it is when he finishes up sitting in a helicopter on the edge of the Sahara in the early hours of a sleepless night and awaiting the dawn of a hopeless day, his hands lying unnerved on a map where the only uncharted feature is the ruin he knows is there but refuses to recognize: those last few tumbled bricks of the thing he was trying too hard to build.
I wouldn't expect a man like Loman to abandon a mission if success or even survival looked unattainable. I would expect him to keep on working at it, no longer for what he could make of it but for its own sake, once it had gone beyond the stage where any useful purpose remained. I would expect him to become obsessive, to make a shrine of it: and I would expect him to regard his executive in the field as a natural sacrifice.
'Loman,' I said, 'when did you get London's directive on this end-phase?'
He was now genuinely surprised, couldn't follow me.
'Just before 03.00 hours.'
I didn't think he'd actually lie about a thing like that. I didn't think he'd lost his reason: I just thought reason was now being subjugated to the point where he might have me killed off for nothing.
'Have they been given total intelligence on the disposition of those listening-posts?'
Then he saw what I meant.
'I'm sorry, Quiller. The objective has to be destroyed. London insists.'
'For what reason?'
Because you can ask questions if you think your life is being moved into a specific hazard: they don't bind your hands behind you and drive you blindfold against the cannon.
'There are two reasons,' Loman said. He sounded perfectly calm and I thought this is how they sound when their fantasies have had to take control of them to save them from the reality they can't any longer face. 'It requires several days of exposure to the ultra-violet rays in sunlight to alter the atomic structure of Zylon-K-Gamma and render it harmless. If anyone attempted to move the cargo in that aeroplane, not knowing what it was, enough gas could be spilled to wipe out the population of Kaifra, particularly since theGhibli is a south wind. The United Kingdom would be responsible. Secondly a nuclear explosion would not only change the atomic structure of the gas instantaneously, but would obliterate the aeroplane: and this is essential. It will be known that a new BCW weapon was being manufactured in the UK long after the banning of such weapons by the Geneva Convention, and even though it was done clandestinely it can only be embarrassing and the Government will have to explain how it was allowed to occur. This is bad enough. It would be disastrous at this moment when Israel and the Arab world confront each other if it were also known that a consignment of chemical warfare gas had been flown from the UK to North Africa. Allow meto borrow the old cliche of a spark in a powder barrel.'
I watched his reflection in the glass of the black-dialled chronometer. He was looking at me, waiting. His face was as calm as his speech had been: reaction-concealment was second nature to him and that was why I was worried when he'd suddenly sagged a few minutes ago.
He would remain perfectly calm, I assumed, after his mind had slipped its focus. He would give careful and cogent reasons for driving his executive headlong against the cannon.
Decision necessary: stay with the mission or get out. Trust this efficient and merciless little bastard all the way or take a step back and see him for what he might be: an intelligence director turned psychopath.
Chirac, a dark figure against the pale flank of the dune,waiting. The chronometer ticking in the quietness, the face of Loman reflected on the dial, waiting.
Do what he says and do it even if you know it's likely to kill you, even if you know he'll never grieve. Or save yourself, tell him no.
The scream of a ferret in the dark.
Or refusal.
19: EPITAPH
The slam of the wind and the known world gone, the sky on the ground and the sand overhead, spinning. Sink rate rising.
Tumbling now and a lot of noise and the collar of his flying-suit flapping because the zip had pulled open when I'd jumped. Chirac had lent it to me. helping me on with it in the pre-dawn cold. A good man, Chirac, a man I'd like to see again and probably never would.Adieu, mon ami.
It was a low level drop at low speed and the conditions were different from the first time: he'd only given me two hundred feet to do it and that wasn't much, even over sand, but he said there was rising ground towards the north-east, the remains of an eroded escarpment, and it could conceivably bounce our acoustic irradiation and fox the scanners, you never know your luck. You've got to try everything when you haven't got a hope in hell, everything.
Blood pooling in the head, the eyes swollen, the air noise very loud and the terminal velocity coming up close to a hundred knots so pull the thing, lying awkwardly face up but there's not much room left sopull it.