Tango.
Can get quite worked up when your base won't answer then I remembered and spun it back to 7 and called him again. Still wouldn't bloody well answer. They've been off the air for over two minutes now well don't panic there's no action needed but why don't they answer they're my base and this is my lifeline.
Tango — Tango.
It was her voice, soft and precise.
I said
Where the hell have you been?
Loman hates that: he likes you to make a point of replying with the code for the mission, not his day today, the sweat running into my eyes because we'd confirmed these were the right rocks and the freighter must be near them and they'd put sixty choppers across the area and they hadn't seen it so it couldn't be here after all.
I'm sorry. We were monitoring the helicopters.
So was I.
Then Loman came on.
Tone rather light, rather correct.
Quiller.
Hear you.
Where are the aircraft at present?
They've gone.
They overflew your position?
It wasn't really a question. Diane spoke Arabic and she'd monitored their frequency so she'd heard them telling each other to 'check those rocks' and she would have told Loman so he knew bloody well they'd overflown my position. He just didn't understand it and I knew what that meant: he'd got confirmation from London.
I was still lying prone and there wasn't any more need so I crawled backwards out of the niche but stayed in the shade, my shoulders against the rockface. There was a scuttling sound and I turned my head and saw it had gone. Then I shut my eyes because the panic was over and I wanted to think.
Did they overfly your position?
I ought to be helping the poor little sod.
Yes. Slow speed, low altitude, took their time, couldn't miss it. You've had confirmation from No. 2 Fighter-Recco, is that it?
Pause.
Yes. There has been no error of any kind.
Didn't make sense.
There must have been, Loman.
You and I have confirmed that the rock outcrop where you are now is in fact the rock outcrop in the photograph. The RAF has just confirmed by signal that the object in the photograph is a crashed aeroplane and that it is lying on the sand at a distance of four hundred and eighty-five yards — four eight five — from the outcrop with a bearing of two hundred degrees — two-double-oh.
Vaguely I thought no wonder he's been worrying about my mental condition but he can think again now because a hundred and twenty men of the Algerian Air Force couldn't see the thing either.
You do it for me then, Loman. You work it out. That's what you're for.
After a bit he said:
Stay on receive.
I shut my eyes again.
There wasn't anything he could do anyway. Get a pencil and paper but there weren't any figures, no way of checking. Talk to the girl but what could she do? Any of us do?
Beware.
Not quite a word: the shape of a thought. The fine grains hitting the side of the box in the low wind. More scuttling now, maybe I was stuck right outside one of their dens and they couldn't get home. It had sounded like the sand when it had pattered against the polyester box in the low wind, with the folds of the 'chute canopy still showing where the sand hadn't yet drifted. I'd made a mental note at the time, warning myself that the desert wasn't like other places.
Of course he'd go straight into signals again with London and ten minutes from now they'd have a full-scale emergency meeting in session at the Bureau and I hoped it'd keep fine for them.
No one else could have got here first. We knew there were at least two other networks with a crash-priority interest in Tango Victor but there hadn't been time for them to get here and anyway we'd have had a flash about it from Controclass="underline" if the opposition beats another cell to the post in the end-phase of a mission then everyone gets to know about it, don't worry. And theycouldn't have taken the wreck away, even by a concerted chopper lift, without making so much noise and leaving so much mess that the rest of us would have just taken a look and gone off home.
Stuttering. They were quite big things, heavy when they ran although they ran like a flash. They bothered me, wouldn't let me alone, the sound of the sand pattering against the side of the box, the low wind slowly covering the nylon 'chute, a mental note, the desert hides things, beware.
Someone was saying oh… my… Christ… in a kind of measured tone, perhaps not aloud, just inside my head, and I opened my eyes and looked through the scratched sunglasses to the blaze of the dunes out there. Then I hit the transmit.
Tango.
She answered straight away so I knew he couldn't be in signals with London and I suppose it made sense because this problem wasn't for Control, it was strictly local. He'd been using his time thinking.
He came on and I said
Can you get hold of a met.record for this area covering the last three days?
He didn't ask why, so perhaps he'd been thinking on much the same lines as I had. He just said he'd contact the airfield at Kaifra. The phone was obviously working now because he was back in a few minutes and said yes, there'd been a sandstorm two days ago, particularly severe.
13: OBJECTIVE
The tube went in and I pushed, leaning on it.
When I pulled it out the sand ran into the hole it had made, filling it. There wasn't anything pointed I could use: the end of the tube was blunt and therefore not very efficient as a boring tool but it was all I had. It was one of the sections of telescopic tubing among the survival gear, meant to hold up fabric and make it a shelter.
I pushed it in again, six feet away, and leaned on it.
Skin perfectly dry. Cooling had stopped.
I'd have to watch that because heat stroke develops quite rapidly: the body temperature starts rising soon after the stage where the sweat evaporates without having time to cool the skin. Quickened pulse, loss of consciousness, death.
I drank again to replace some of the sweat but the water was hot and gave no sensation of quenching the thirst: it was just liquid going into the organism. I was having to calculate now and we were running it close: one more litre was left for working with, and one reserve litre for staying alive during sleep. I could go another ninety minutes at this rate on a litre but that didn't have anything to do with it because the heat explosion would begin a long time before then unless I could take some rest.
They had come back and their shadows drifted across the flank of the dune as I pushed the tube in and struck nothing. Pull it out. Two paces and try again.
It must be this one, this dune, or the one on the far side of my No. 2 camp. I'd brought a canopy and three lengths of tubing to make shade, and the 200 °CA had been left on receive. In the last two hours I'd taken four equally-spaced rest periods of fifteen minutes. Loman had come on the air to tell me 1: that the Algerian squadrons would refuel west of here and disperse to their home stations without making a return sweep and 2: that Chirac had confirmed that even a medium sandstorm could bury an aircraft the size of Tango Victor.
Chirac had pointed out that the freighter had probably hit the sand with the undercarriage up to avoid flipping over and in any case would have gouged a deep trough until the aerofoil had started planing. This would leave the tip of the rudder only two metres or so from the ground and the main structure considerably lower. The 35mm Nikons hadn't been able to register this because they'd been almost vertically above, but from ground level it couldn't have been easy to see even before the sandstorm had blotted it out.