The Tango Briefing

So that was why I was still here.

Their situation had been different from mine: they'd been caught in the open desert and couldn't escape but I'd been caught in a confined space, and could. They hadn't known where the gas was and they could have run deeper into it when they'd tried to run clear; inside the freighter I'd known where the stuff was and I'd known where to run to get away from it. There'd been other factors in play: moving slowly under the open sky, as they'd been doing all their lives, they'd been taken utterly by surprise and must have thought in terms of a visitation by fiends at the behest of a disapproving Allah, their fear transfixing them. My mind had already been conditioned to think in terms of a toxic gas, and inhalation had been blocked immediately by reflex as I'd started to get clear.

"Isn't there any kind of gas-mask available?'

'You would have been given one, in that event. So would the crew of the aeroplane.'

Their situation had been different from mine and from the Arabs': they'd been conditioned to the risk of a toxic gas leak but the crash landing had slowed their escape, either because they'd been partly stunned or the door had become jammed, possibly both.

'Who's been making this bloody stuff?'

Loman said nothing so I left it. There wasn't anything new he could tell me about that gas: when I went back inside Tango Victor I'd know what to expect.

'Where was it being delivered?'

'This is not the time to discuss — '

'I will go away,mes amis.' Chirac opened the starboard door and swung his feet through the gap.

'There is no need, Chirac There's nothing to discuss in any case.'

'Comme meme,Ishall stretch the legs.'

He dropped through and I watched his dark compact figure moving away against the starlit flank of the dune.

'Algeria,' I said, 'or Egypt.'

Quickly: 'You've identified a cell of the UAR network?'

'Yes.'

It'd be a signal for London.

'There are probably more than one.'

'More than one Egyptian cell?'

'Yes.'

I finished the protein and screwed up the paper and flicked it through the doorway. 'This gas was made in Britain, was it?'

'Clandestinely, of course.'

'By private initiative?'

'Certain members of an otherwise reputable laboratory have been interviewed by Special Branch. Unfortunately the laboratory had been placed under government contract, and although the production of this gas was made in secret by criminal elements, you can imagine what would happen to the reputation of the UK itself if Tango Victor were found by — shall we say — an ill-wisher.'

'And what's going to happen to the reputation of the United Arab Republic when we tell everyone they've been buying BCW material within six months of the Geneva banning?'

He turned slowly to look at me.

'What reputation? The difference is there. In any case it won't occur. The UK will tell nobody, since the gas was unfortunately made in England and any accusation would of course boomerang.'

'There'll be a public trial for the people who made the stuff.'

'Unavoidably. The image of the UK will receive a certain degree of damage. Regrettably, a criminal element has been manufacturing and selling a deadly chemical warfare material. Nothing more. We shall hope to avoid the disastrous outcome of much more serious revelations.'

'You mean those poor bastards in the clinic have officially died of ergot in the bread supplies.'

'You would oblige me by remembering that.'

'And the outbreak in Mali? What was the death roll?'

'Three hundred.'

'Jesus. An outsize bubble on the move. Was it lobbed there?'

'There's an Algerian missile site in the south Sahara and the gas was being tested for the United Arab Republic.'

'In vivo.'

'How otherwise would its precise effect be known? But in fact the Mali batch was too powerfuclass="underline" the intention was to induce an incapacitating state of anxiety for a period of a few days. The batch in Tango Victor is less lethal but still too strong. What Egypt would be seeking is of course the convenient dilution providing this effect, enabling her to take over control in Tel Aviv without casualties and therefore without too great an international motion of censure.'

He looked at his watch.

In the background silence the tick of the instrument-panel chronometer was insistent, its illuminated dial sharply defined. There were four minutes to go.

'You'd better brief me.'

'Yes.'

He shifted his position on the observer's seat as he opened the map, and the Alouette moved slightly on its suspension. I rummaged in the rations box and found some dehydrated honey tablets and peeled one off the strip.

'Chirac will be using a flight pattern designed to confuse the acoustic observation posts as much as possible. You will go from here to the Petrocombine South 5 drilling camp and overfly the airstrip, setting course for this point here in theRoches Vertes complex and then flying for three kilometres along the scheduled air route from Ghadamis to El Oued across the Algerian desert. You will then proceed at 203° direct to the target area.'

I checked it twice and asked him where thelistening-posts were meant to be.

'From local intelligence we know there are four posts in this line from South 5 to No. 2 Philips radio tower. There may be others farther west.'

I looked up from the map.

'What d'you think our chances are, Loman?'

He must have been expecting it but tried to look surprised.

'Of doing what?'

'Reaching the target area without bringing a whole pack of tags or interceptors into the air.'

I'd made my point and he had the grace to give me a straight answer without pretending to consider the actual odds.

'Unpromising.'

I suppose he was spiritually exhausted or physically over the edge of fatigue because he suddenly sagged, his hands resting loosely on the spread map and his pale eyes closing for a moment.

'That is the only possible flight pattern we can use.'

'Taking us within seven kilometres of this end listening post.' I'd begun sweating. 'What d'you imagine their effective range is? About fifty?'

'Perhaps.'

He was sitting perfectly still and I knew he was waiting for me to blow up in his face but I wasn't going to do it because it wouldn't help us and Christ we needed help and a new question was coming into my mind and I tried to get rid of it before it could do any harm, before it could bring down the last few bricks of the mission that still appeared to be standing. But it wouldn't go.

Question. When does a director in the field start losing his sense of proportion? When does the strain of watching the slow demolition of his plans begin to tell on him and take him beyond the point where reason can only be ignored with fatal results?When does he break?

Perhaps it is when he finishes up sitting in a helicopter on the edge of the Sahara in the early hours of a sleepless night and awaiting the dawn of a hopeless day, his hands lying unnerved on a map where the only uncharted feature is the ruin he knows is there but refuses to recognize: those last few tumbled bricks of the thing he was trying too hard to build.

I wouldn't expect a man like Loman to abandon a mission if success or even survival looked unattainable. I would expect him to keep on working at it, no longer for what he could make of it but for its own sake, once it had gone beyond the stage where any useful purpose remained. I would expect him to become obsessive, to make a shrine of it: and I would expect him to regard his executive in the field as a natural sacrifice.

'Loman,' I said, 'when did you get London's directive on this end-phase?'

He was now genuinely surprised, couldn't follow me.