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?'
'Not really.'
It annoyed me because I hadn't had time to clean up since the petrol tank thing and I didn't have any time now so they could keep their bloody remarks to themselves.
'Are you Mr Gage?'
'Yes.'
,'Would you like some coffee?'
'Yes '
We were in the bar alongside the Metropolitan Departure gate: they'd been waiting here because they couldn't miss me when I came through the main doors of the building, and their own coffee hadn't long arrived.
We sat down at the little table and I said don't wait for me so they started stirring and the short one said:
'Lovely weather, isn't it?'
There weren't many people around: the boy making the coffee behind the bar, a holy man wrapped in hisgandourah and his dreams in the corner by the Kodak stand, a young French couple perched half-asleep on a pile of baggage, a clerk in a fez coming through the doors and crossing the hall. There was no sound of any flying.
Thoughts not a hundred per cent coherent because the pressure had come off, total energy output in progress fifteen minutes ago and now I was waiting for a cup of coffee and the nerves were having to adjust. But present situation comfortable and that was a help and besides she'd have reached base by now: I'd dropped her as near as it had been possible without exposing the image of the ambulance all over the place, no this one's Diane, our youngest, we've just had a call from her today, as a matter of fact, from Tunisia, she sounded quite homesick but otherwise fit. Yes, isn't she pretty?
Satisfactory.
'What?' I asked him.
'I said the weather's nice.'
'Yes. The trouble is it brings the insects out and you get them all over the windscreen, one firefly after another.'
So the tall one got the envelope out and gave it to me and I opened it and looked at the three photographs, mug-shot coverage with two profiles and a full face, and began tearing them up while they drank their coffee.
Everyone still looked all right, but the clerk in the fez had gone into the phone-box near the check-out counter and it occurred to me that they could have been his headlights I'd seen in the mirror when I'd turned into the car park.
I drank my coffee. It was hot and bitter and I could taste the caffeine and I needed its heat and its alkaloid and I took it into my mouth slowly, as if it were ambrosia. They talked to each other about nothing in particular, a wonderful place to bring their wives, all those stars and palm-trees, talked to each other as if I weren't there or wouldn't be interested, letting me drink in peace, perhaps, and gather my strength.
Presumably without significance: a lot of people would come here to the airport to use the phones, the post office wasn't open at this time of night.
'How big's this thing?'
'I'm sorry?'
'This thing you've got for me. How big is it?'
I was getting fed-up because one or two bits of glass were trying to work out and I smelt of singed hair and they were obviously wondering where the hell I'd been and I wasn't going to tell them, none of their bloody business.
Then they were talking in short embarrassed sentences and the penny dropped and I pulled my sleeve up higher, looking at my watch, after all they'd got their orders and they'd brought something pretty deadly for me in the Marauder.
'We could go and look at it,' the short one said. 'I expect you've been told it's flashpoint-zero freight.'