Hear you.
What is that noise?
Lizard, cracking a snail open.
He didn't bother to answer.
I looked out from the canopy across the blaze of sand, for an instant seeing it, then seeing it vanish.
Loman, I want to go out there.
Not yet.
While I'm fresh. Let me go and look for the bloody thing. It must be there somewhere.
Certainly it must. But we have to wait for London.
Bloody London, gets on your tits.
Switching oft transmit.
Very well, but stay open to receive.
Had to drink some water, then I lay on my back and decided not to think about the aircraft that had been observing Chirac only fifteen kilometres from the point of drop, Loman's headache, not mine, though of course when the crunch came I'd be right in it, like that poor bloody snail
Slept.
Tango.
Check: 13.19. Switch.
Tango receiving.
I have London's signal. Monitoring liaison with Algiers informs that five squadrons of desert-reconnaissance helicopters are to search a prescribed area of which your own position is approximately the centre.
I watched the lizard. It had found another one and the crackling noise began.
When do they start?
They are already airborne.
12: SANDSTORM
I stood watching them.
They were quite high, about five hundred feet, but their shape and their flight were unmistakable: they drifted in circles, their wings held like black hoods to trap the air. From this distance I couldn'tsee their heads but theywere watching me: despite their feigned disinterest I was the focal point of their circling.
I hadn't noticed them before but they'd probably been somewhere overhead since early this morning, attracted by the movement of the dot that had been making its laborious way among the dunes towards the rock outcrop. Their patient observation heightened my feeling of vulnerability and I had the urge to go back to the refuge that thirty minutes ago I'd been sharing with the lizards.
Nobody likes being watched, and this was particularly unpleasant because I was being assessed as potential carrion.
I moved again, trying not to drag my feet and leave tracks. The heat of the sun was like a weight on my back, pushing me down rather than forward, and its light struck upwards against my face, reflecting from the sand. I knew that the water-flask was still a quarter full and was tempted to drink, but when I'd broken camp and pushed everything into the shade I'd noticed that one of thebidons was already empty. In the last ten hours I'd used half the water-supply, pouring it into my body as you pour water on a fire.
The desert is not like other places. The slaking of the increased thirst puts back only fifty per cent of the water lost in the cooling process, and in this degree of heat my cooling process was breaking down because the sweat was being evaporated the instant it reached the skin. In one hour I was generating seven or eight hundred calories and my sweat was ridding me of less than five.
Sometimes their shadows drifted near me as they crossed the sun.
At the four hundred and eighty-fifth pace I stopped.
Long. 8°3′ by Lat. 30°4′.
The sands were smooth.
Loman hadn't received confirmation from No. 2 Fighter Reconnaissance before I'd left camp: I'd told him I wanted a last chance to find Tango Victor before the helicopters got here. But I knew now that I should have waited, because give or take a few yards I was standing where the smudge had been on the photograph. Somewhere they'd made an error: the scale had lost a nought or the bearing had been inverted and this wasn't where the smudge was at all.
The wreck of Tango Victor was across the dunes there, or a thousand yards the other side of the rocks, not far away, ten minutes on foot in normal conditions. Here the conditions weren't normal and it could take me an hour or five hours to find it because the dunes were higher than I was and in some places I couldn't see more than a hundred yards: I was moving through a maze.
A bird's-eye view was the only way and five squadrons had been mustered and refuelled at the nearest airfield to these rocks: Fort Thiriet was a hundred and thirty kilometres distant and the helicopters had been deployed in a sweep formation of sixty aircraft on a twenty-five kilometre front to the immediate north of the Areg Tinrhales and they were heading this way while I stood and cursed some stupid bloody clerk in uniform who'd finished the mission for us before it began.
The pressure was finally on and there was nothing I could do about it. There was data streaming in so fast that I couldn't deal with it: the overall picture they never like giving us was coming up under the hypo. The Chirac security leak had been bad luck and not his fault but it had revealed the importance of the objective in the eyes of the opposition: all they'd been informed was that a camouflaged sailplane had been observed over the open desert at dawn today, but an entire arm of the Algerian Air Force had been assembled across the country and deployed from FortThiriet, an airfield right onthe Libyan border.
There'd been no time to put out even a token announcement of a “routine exercise” and this fact alone meant either that Libyan Intelligence was fully aware of the situation or that the Algerian government was so anxious to locate Tango Victor that it had risked embarrassment at high level between the two countries.
In addition to this was the indication that it was their last throw and that they were confident of locating the objective before anyone else: because if they failed, and if an opposing network succeeded, they would have made it obvious that their search had been for the crashed freighter, whose cargo was so politically explosive that the armed forces of two countries had been called in to assist the intelligence services.
The Bureau itself was intensely active and within a matter of days had brought its support communications to the pitch where half an hour ago Local Control could give me full details on the desert-reconnaissance operation including the precise area and width of sweep.At the same time the entire network was under general monitoring and if Analysis Section thought I'd be interested to know that an attempt had been made to assassinate General Chen Piao or that a missile-to-missile device had just come off the drawing-boards in Smolensk or that the Brazilian Minister for the Interior had handed in his resignation three weeks after accepting the post they'd pass it to Control for Local Control and the executive in the field and I'd get it almost as fast as a phone-call from London to Crowborough onthe priority line.
I wouldn't get it in so many words. The original data would go through filters until the essence was extracted and made available. Even if support communications hadn't been energized then general monitoring would have reported sudden air movement in Algeria by desert-reconnaissance units and Analysis would have jumped onit straight away because they had Algeria as thelocale of one of the listed ops currently running.
Behind me, as I stood here isolated in the desert wastes, was an organization striving to inform, direct and support me as I went deeper into the mission and closer to the target area; but now that I was here there was nothing they could do for me, and nothing I could do for them.
Loman had predicted a forty-five minute deadline for the arrival of the Algerian squadrons in this area and there were fifteen minutes to go in terms of their ETA. In terms of the actual mission my time ran out to zero as I stood here listening for their rotors, because even if I climbed the nearest dune and saw Tango Victor deadin front of me it was no go. London wanted photographs and a full radioed report of the freighter's cargo and fifteen minutes wasn't long enough for me to go back for the transceiver and bring it here.