'Hassan.'
I was still leaning against the side of the Fiat and I didn't straighten up when he came over to me. I was dead beat, he could see that. I said:
'The woman doesn't know anything.'
'You have said this, but we will see.'
'Let her go and I'll tell you everything I know.'
He laughed, just a quick flash of his teeth in the brown skin, and turned his head to look at Diane, the cigarette flattened between his fingers as he raised it and drew the smoke out, the glow of its tip reflected like a spark in his eye and then dying.
They would use a cigarette like this one. Probably one of those in the pack he'd pulled out just now. What is the longitude, what is the latitude, or she will not see anything again, the glowing tip against the amethyst, tell us. They would use other things; they would be selective, efficient.
'You will tell us everything you know,' he said, 'in any case.'
He'd laughed because I'd said something at last that he couldn't take seriously: if they let her go I'd tell them less, in the end, not more; and he knew that. Anyway the whole thing was academic because he was a professional and he knew that any man can be reduced to a gibbering loon if they take it far enough and it doesn't need more than an hour. The only drawback is that he might not be, at that stage, too articulate.
'You can't say I didn't try, Hassan.'
He turned to me, his teeth flashing again.
'You tried,' he said, nodding his dark head, 'yes.'
He dropped his cigarette end, putting his black pointed shoe on it, the loose sand gritting. Then he stood watching the roadway, listening.
The three men hadn't moved for minutes. Most of the time they watched me but turned their heads now and then to see what Hassan was doing, one of them staring at Diane until he saw me watching him, one of them looking sometimes along the road's perspective. Their sub-machine-guns had fallen away from the aim since Hassan had told me off for speaking in English but this was normal for the situation: they were standing at ease, in the military sense, to avoid the onset of syncope that sends our guardsmen toppling with such embarrassment at the Trooping of the Colours. Their guns could swing up and fire within a tenth of a second and at this range the shells would go through me and through both sides of the Fiat and there wasn't anything I could do about it: Hassan was running an efficient little cell and this trap was man-tight.
Near the end of the avenue a dome turned white and then darkened again as headlights swept across the building, and Hassan's thin dark body stiffened, straightening. We could hear the car but it wasn't coming in this direction and he relaxed after a while, shifting his feet and getting the packet of cigarettes, pulling one out.
'Don't worry, Hassan, he'll get here.'
He put the cigarette between his lips.
'Oh yes,' he nodded, 'he’ll get here.'
'Can I have one of those?'
He came over to me and I got some matches out, striking one for him. When he'd lit up he held the packet out to me and I took a cigarette, putting the tip between my lips and striking another match. It occurred to me, in one of those stray thoughts that pass through our minds at unlikely moments, that it wasn't a very easy death I was giving him.
17: MARAUDER
They were Unicorn Brand but that was all I knew about them. The important thing was that they were British made and therefore likely to have fewer duds among them than a Continental make, so that the odds against this kind of operation succeeding were considerably lower even though it was a strictly one-shot set-up without a hope of another go.
The oxygen carrier might have been anything, potassium chlorate, manganese dioxide or possibly lead oxide, with the usual sulphur for the flame-burst medium mixed with dextrin, powdered glass and so on for the binding and striking agents. The actual splint would have been treated with sodium silicate or ammonium phosphate as an impregnation against afterglow and although in this climate it was tinder dry I decided to throw directly into the fuel tank orifice while ignition was still in progress rather than wait for the flame to become established because the air rush could blow it out.
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.