'Well, I didn't think it was a piss-pot.'
They shut up for a bit and I finished my coffee, wondering how far he'd been, Ahmed, from the scene of the fire when I'd left there: he'd been on his way and the ambulance was a distinctive vehicle and I hadn't been feeling bright enough to worry too much about headlights in the mirror so long as they didn't come any closer.
I didn't know what he looked like, Ahmed.
Incipient torpor and I was aware of it objectively, didn't feel at all like making an effort but there was a lot to do and I jerked my head up and thought watch it you're not safe.
'Let's go and look at it then.'
They said all right and we got up and they paid and the padded nylon legs of their flying-suits made a faintzoop, zoop, zoop as we walked through the hall.
The clerk in the fez had left the telephone-box and was crossing towards the main doors. I didn't know whether he looked like a clerk in a fez, Ahmed.
It was better in the fresh air and I lost the dangerous urge to fall asleep as the caffeine began working on the nerves. There was a police guard on the Marauder, a young Tunisian with a peaked cap and white gauntlets and a holstered pistol, very smart and rather self-conscious because he wasn't used to being on special duty. We walked into the smell of kerosene and hot alloys and PVC and the short one climbed aboard so I assumed he was the pilot and the tall one ushered me on to the metal step and followed me up.
The flight cabin was roomier than I'd expected, with a chart-table and an astrodome and two freight lockers: the Marauder Mk XI was a modified version of the original Mk IX short-range bomber and Tactical Air Command used it for the kind of work that the standard models would have jibbed at.
'Shut that door, will you?'
'Right.'
The pilot opened the lockers and brought out two black rectangular containers with top and end grips and brass combination locks, one of them looking lighter than the other by the way he handled them. Both had Bostik airtight sealing with rip-wire opening provision but there weren't any labels and I assumed it was because anyone in charge of this cargo would know what it was without having to read about it.
I picked them up one at a time. The smaller one was very heavy, about four times the weight of a medium portable typewriter but not much bigger.
'What are they?'
'M'mm? Not sure, actually.'
'Oh for Christ's sake can't you — '
'No, we can't. Awfully sorry.'
Typical armed services security attitude, so bloody coy about everything, of course theyknew what this cargo was. In any case I didn't want more than three guesses because in London-to-base signals exchanges it was called a 'device' so these were obviously two components of one unit and you'd have to fit them together before they'd work. The only thing I didn't really know was why Control was sending me a nuclear bomb with no prior instructions.
'I'll bring the car over.'
'Fair enough.'
They slid the door back for me and I climbed down and began walking across the tarmac and saw a pair of headlights just dimming out among the trees on the far side of the car park where the ambulance was. Three more cars had got here since I'd arrived and I could see movement along the road from the town: a string of vehicles using only their sidelights. So he did in fact look like a clerk in a fez, Ahmed, and he'd called in the whole of his reserves and there wasn't a hope of getting that device as far as base, not a hope in hell.
18: CHRONOMETER
Receiving you.
Shook him a bit: he was having to think.
Q-Quaker high Rharbi imp trans mat awheel.
Dation?
Croydon indigo.
I'd had to get him on the Embassy wavelength and use speech-code because this thing hadn't got an auto scrambler. Chirac had either left my KW 200 °CA in the desert or brought it back for Loman to pick up and whichever it was he'd know I couldn't use it so he would have shut down that wavelength while he was in signals with London through the Embassy.
UMF?
I asked one of them and he said twelve minutes.
Synchronize please.
Double-oh two nine.
Plus twelve.
UMF double-oh four one.
He didn't say anything for a minute and I left him to it and looked down at the lights of a village as we began turning. The pilot had agreed we ought to set our course for Malta because that was where he'd told Kaifra he was going. Then we'd turn back and make a loop across the desert and go in from the south.
'Are we off their screens?'
'I don't know their range at Kaifra but fifty miles ought to be good enough because there's no other traffic.'
He was in the navigator's seat, the tall one. They were both cheerful enough but we all knew it was going to be a real swine and some of the jokes had got a bit thin since we'd taken off.
I watched the glow of the village and the white dome of a mosque reflecting the starlight as we came round in the turn.
I suppose we needn't have taken the trouble to head for Malta before we got off their screens but the Ahmed cell was badly up against it and they might decide to go into the control tower and ask questions at gun-point.
Loman was still sulking. He'd been thinking everything was all right because when I dropped her I told her I was going to the airport to keep the rendezvous and pick up the device and now he knew everything was all wrong because I ought not to be somewhere over Rharbi at ten thousand feet and he was having to face an entirely new pattern of hazards at zero notice. Well, that was what he was for.
'Feeling the cold?'
'We're not going to be stuck up here forever. '
'Frankly I wish we were.'
He laughed but we didn't join in. They'd jibbed at first but I said they'd got to try so they'd worked things out and the pilot had said all right we'll have a go but this dolly weighs sixty-three thousand pounds with the amount of fuel she'll have on board at our ETA and if we can't pull up she'll drag half the strip into the desert, so long as those oil-drilling chaps don't mind.
It occurred to me that base might have gone off the air.
Hear me?
Hear you.
Is Fred all right?
Perfectly.
Reprimand in his tone and he could bloody well keep it. Fred was the standard speech-code name for any third member of an active cell and I wanted to know how she was because the last time I'd seen her there'd been tears running down her sooty little face and if anyone of us survived this trip I'd see those scaly bastards wrote her off the books before they did anything else.
My eyes kept shutting and the navigator said something and I missed it and got my head up again.
'What?'
'Isthere any chance of a flarepath on that strip?'
'No. They don't night-fly.'
'I see.' He said it rather stiffly.
'You've got landing-lights, haven't you?'
'Fortunately, yes.'
He didn't like me any more than Loman did but I couldn't help that. I think he was trying to find an excuse to call up the Air Ministry through Malta and get official permission for the captain to hazard his ship but he couldn't do it in front of me because it'd be embarrassing: they'd been ordered to make this rdv with an over-ranking contact and that meant that whether they were pilot officers or air-vicemarshals they still had to do what I told them, otherwise they'd have turned me down flat about the South 6 thing and I knew that.
Quaker.
Hear you.
Friday Croydon indigo.
Roger.
I gave them back the headset.
Friday was rdv so he'd meet me at South 6 and presumably I wouldn't have to lug these rotten things as far as base and that was something.