Then I suppose I just went to sleep because there wasn't anything else I had to do. She was rolling about in the flames and I was trying to pull her clear and he was saying we'll be down in three minutes so you'd better get into this thing.
'What thing?'
He was rigging some fabric stays across the freight-locker section and I gave him a hand because even if we didn't hit anything we were going to turn on an awful lot of deceleration on a strip that short and I didn't want to go through the front window.
'Have you got room to turn round?'
'Just about.'
'Okay, then turn round and squat down with your back to it.'
The pilot moved the flaps and we began running through eiderdowns and they were both rather young considering their responsibilities so I said:
'I'm sorryabout this.'
'Oh that's okay. It's just that these dollies are so terribly expensive and we're always being told about the tax-payers money.'
The noise waspretty hellish because of the surface and the reversed thrust and I thought the nose-leg must have folded back on impact but the angle was still roughly horizontal. Then the brakes came on and I was pressed backwards into the fabric sling like a pea in a catapult and one of them was shouting to the other one, something aboutdistance but I couldn't hear the rest of it. A lot of low-pitch vibration coming in as the air-frame took the strain, smellof hot rubber, be awkward if we hit a bad patch and the lockers burst open, not that anything could go off but we'd been to a lot of trouble getting it here, vibration starting to hammer and someone yellingwon't make it and I thought oh Christ can't we ever get anything right, the front leg taking the brunt of the shocks and everything trying to shake loose in the flight compartment, of course they'd known it would be like this and that's why they'd looked at me as if I was barmy when I told them we'd got to do it.
Hit my shoulder when they dropped me through and a hand caught at me and then there was a dreadful quietness and there was Loman sitting sideways on the front seat with his arm hooked across the squab and his pale eyes watching me and I said we got down all right did we?
'Yes.'
He didn't look very pleased.
I absorbed the environment: Chrysler. I was on the back seat with a rug over me.
Zenith: 00.56. The ETA had been 00.41. I don'tlikegaps in the timing.
'What happened?'
'In what precise way?'
Talked like a schoolmistress. He was very rattled.
'To the aircraft.'
'They wrote off the undercarriage.'
'Isthat all?'
'It's quite sufficient.'
There was an engine starting up somewhere but I couldn't see anything. We were parked alongside the hangar and the echo was coming back, sounded like a chopper. I listened to it and Loman didn't talk: he'd stopped looking at me now and sat watching the road that ran from the main gates of the camp to the south end of the airstrip where the windsock drooped against the starfields.
'Is it for me?'
'What?'
'That chopper'
'Yes.' He sounded edgy, even for Loman.
I suppose the waiting was getting on his nerves. The Ahmed cell had seen the Marauder go up and it wouldn't be long before they heard it had come down all over the South 6 strip instead of Malta and they'd get here as fast as they could. Loman knew they were on to it because if there'd been no one getting in my way at Kaifra Airport I would have left there by road.
The helicopter was being warmed up, a comfortablethropthrop-throp from its rotor, aurally hypnotic, my head going down, then she said London wanted to know the position, her voice about normal. not still upset or anything.
Loman said he'd send it direct.
Situ Croydon indigo point skygo redmins point Q-Quaker able light-time standby ending point object present go conditters point Tango out…
I thought he was being a bit optimistic but I suppose he was worried about getting a blast if he sounded too doubtfuclass="underline" they were already having to absorb the Marauder switch into their thinking and it didn't take much to send them hysterical. The whole of this area was on the plotting table at the Bureau and they'd just received a situation signal and in spite of Loman's optimism they knew we were in a distinct red sector because the Marauder had made a lot of noise coming down and every opposition cell would have been alerted: they'd got me out of the plane before anyone had come along to see what had made the crump but quite a gang of day-shift drillers had gone down the airstrip from the living-quarters and the crew were still there explaining about engine trouble and forced landing conditions and all that cock and it wouldn't be long before every camel-driver in Kaifra knew that a foreign military aircraft had gone into South 6 by night.
London would be sweating because what ought to have happened was that I should have taken the device by road from the airport to base for Loman to brief me on it and what had happened was that I'd arranged for us both to be sitting here with the thing on our lap and hoping to Christ nobody found us before we got airborne. At the first sign of an adverse party in this area Loman would quietly melt into the middle distance because the director in the field is never actually meant to operate in the field but only from local base, on the double principle that he's not trained in unarmed combat and if a mission blows up there has to be someone to take home the pieces and have them analysed to the hope that one fine day someone's going to profit from the lesson.
Loman would take the device with him because it was expensive and injurious and that would leave me on my own to do what I could but I wasn't in a condition to do very much and although he'd told them that Q-Quaker was able they wouldn't think much of my chances. So London was having the sweats.
Tango.
Tango receiving.
Embassy wants a repeat on 'redmins'.
They can have it.
She went off the air.
'Is that my end of the blower you've got there?'
'No,' he said.
I believed the little bastard. He'd told Chirac to leave my transceiver in the desert when he'd picked me up because I'd need it again and there wasn't any point in dropping it a second time in an area where there were rocks that could bust it up.
'Are you sending me back there, Loman? '
'We don't know yet.'
'Oh yes you bloody well do.'
Throp-throp-throp.
01.17.
Chirac shut off and the rotor began slowing above our heads. I hadn't taken a lot of notice when I'd come aboard but I had a look around now and saw that the little necessities of life were here all right: two parachutes and the two black containers.
'What's in that thing?'
'Cous-cous, mon ami.'
'I'm not hungry.'
'You will be,' Loman said. He sat peering through the curved Perspex like a goldfish in a bowl. From what I could see of it we were ina gassi between low dunes.
'Where are we?'
'In agassi.'
'I know that.'
Chirac set the fuel taps at off. 'We are ten kilometres from Petrocombine South 5 and eleven kilometres from Kaifra.'
I tried to think where that was, but any kind of mental effort induced a kind of grey-out and I gave it up because it didn't seem to be anywhere in particular.
'Why here, Loman?'
'It's neutral ground.' He'd stopped peering through the Perspex bubble and was watching me critically. 'You have three hours in which to get some sleep, so I suggest you do that.'
He looked so depressed that I felt sorry for him, as far as you can feel sorry for a man like Loman.
'All right.' I wanted to ask him a few things because it was now 01.18.55 on the Zenith and he was going to let me sleep till 04.18.55 and that meant he'd got me lined up for a dawn drop unless Control threw us a new one during the night; but if he was in the mood to give me any answers I didn't want to have to work them out, singing in the ears, a sensation of floating, the tick-tick-tick of the chronometer near my head. 'Loman.'