'Final check,' I said quietly when I'd gathered the guys round. The and Tony will spend the day in the OP. Depending on what we find, we may decide that the op should go down tomorrow night. If there's any problem, we may have to wait until the night after.
Either way, we'll want the support party forward soon after dark tomorrow.'
'Tonight,' Tony interrupted.
'As you were. Tonight. I'm talking about tonight, Tuesday. For Christ's sake — I'm losing track of the days.
Cancel all that.'
I pressed the light button on my watch for a check.
'It's now 0400 on Tuesday. If possible, the op Will go down tonight. If everything looks OK, we'll call the three of you forward once it's dark.' I jabbed a finger at Pat, Whinger and Norm. 'Stew, you'll be our backmarker. Hold the fort here. OK?'
'Sure.'
'Whinger, get a sitrep back to the Kremlin as soon as you've got an aerial sorted. Tell them we have eyes on the target area and everything's hunky-dory. And euerybody, go easy on the water. It's going to get hot as hell when.the sun rises, and we don't know how long we're going to be herel OK, all?'
Getting no answer except a couple of grunts, I said, 'Right — we're off. Pat and Norm, you help us carry the stuff forward for the OP. Then back here. Let's go.'
We settled our bergens and rifles on our backs, slung the other bundles about us, and began to move off.
'Give 'em hell,' said Whinger.
'I'll wait till you're in the front line with us,' I told him. 'Then you personally can stand up on top of a dune and fre the first shot to start the battle.'
SEVEN
On the side of a dune facing the camp we found a hollow fronted by a couple of scrubby thorns. By cutting a few more bushes elsewhere and bringing them across to reinforce the natural thicket, we made a small enclosure. At the same time we deepened the hollow by digging, and used bags filled with sand to make walls inside the thorns.
A rectangular gap left in the front wall gave us a view forward into the camp, and a cam-net stretched across the top, with more thorn branches scattered on it, completed the basis of our hide. The dune gave us natural protection from the rear, its disadvantage being that we couldn't see anyone coming from that direction. We reckoned, though, that the little hill was in direct line-of-sight from the LUP, so that the backup party could watch our rear for us.
We'd almost finished building when a sudden noise from the direction of the camp made us freeze. The first blast of it — a kind of screeching groan — lasted such a short time and cut off so abruptly, almost like a dog's bark, that we couldn't make out what had caused it.
'Jesus!' exclaimed Pat. 'What the fuck was that?'
Before anyone could answer the sound came again.
This time it kept going for several seconds, and Tony let out a gasp, half relief, half amusement.
'Not Jesus,' he said. 'Allah. It's the muezzin, giving the first call to prayer.'
We were at least two hundred metres from the perimeter wire, and the sound was coming from somewhere beyond it; yet the volume of the amplified voice was such that it blasted past us like a gale of wind, and we felt sure the guys in the LUP, a kilometre behind us, must be hearing it too. So it proved: they told us later that the grating, metallic, undulating chant of 'Allah akhbar! Allah akhbar!' carried way past them and on into the desert to the south.
'Sounds like he's underwater, poor bugger,' said Pat.
'That's just their crummy electronics,' Tony told him. 'The old mullah'll be up a tower someplace. We'll see the mosque as soon as it gets light.'
'Come on, guys,' I interrupted. 'Don't piss about.
Never mind the mullah. We need to get tidied up here.'
In the eastern sky the dawn glow was coming up fast.
It would,have been good to carry on working and perfect our camouflage, but time had run out. From previous stints near the equator I knew how quickly the light would strengthen as the sun rose. The Libyans might have eyes on the desert, and I wasn't going to risk any movement after dawn.
'Away you go,' I told Pat and Stew. 'You don't want to be caught with your pants down.'
'R.ight then. Good luck.'
'Same to you. We'll see you tonight.'
Off they went, walking backwards round the side of the dune and whisking away their tracks with strips of hessian. A few minutes later they called on the radio to say that they were back in the LUP, and that they had eyes on the back of our mound.
Tony and I settled down for a day of observation. For me, breakfast consisted of cold spaghetti in tomato sauce, washed down by a brew of powdered lemonade.
Tony had his favourite corned beef hash and pineapple slices, eaten together. We'd been planning to work alternate shifts — two hours on, two off- but found that, despite the fact that we'd had practically no sleep, neither of us felt tired. Our excitement supercharged us, and we both watched eagerly as dawn revealed the secrets of our objective.
The perimeter fence was just as the CIA man had described it: three metres of weldmesh, topped by an outward-sloping overhang of barbed wire. Every hundred metres there was a floodlight atop a slender pole, but several of the bulbs were out of action, and useful pools of darkness lay between the illuminated stretches. The goon-towers — built into the fences several hundred metres apart — might have been run up for a film about some German prison camp in World War Two: primitive wooden boxes on stilts, once painted white but now peeling, with wide-eaved flat roofs to give shade and the sides open to the air. There was one at the corner of the wire, slightly to our left, and another in the middle of the south fence to our right. This second tower stood beside a wide gate, also made of mesh, and the rough track Gus had indicated ran away from it towards the range in the southeast.
The important thing for us was our discovery that the towers weren't manned. Nor was there any patrol on the wire. With our binoculars we scanned every tower for signs of infra-red lamps or microwave dishes or TV cameras, but saw nothing; the whole system looked too primitive for any such high-tech devices.
'As the guy told us,' I said, 'they're not expecting any threat coming out of the sand.'
We'd positioned ourselves opposite the office cure accommodation block, and our binos gave us a brilliant view of it: a scruffy, off-white building, two storeys tall, with patches of discoloration staining its walls, air- conditioning units under every window, and long, dirty, tapering streaks beneath them where condensation had been dripping doyen over the years. The front entrance was in the middle of the wall facing us, a flight of five or six semi-circular steps leading up to its plain porch.
The door we became more interested in was at the side, to the left as we looked. Soon after six o'clock it opened from the inside, and some kind of jingli, or servant, began going in and out. The guy, who was quite old and had frizzy grey hair, wore a khaki shirt and trousers, but no shoes.
'Could be our best entry point,' said Tony quietly.
'Out of sight of most of the camp. Besides, the perimeter light opposite it is down.'
'Just thinking that. The tradesman's entrance.'
The window of the room in which our target was supposed to work was at the top left of the building.
When we had arrived on site the room had been dark but that was hardly surprising, as it was already four o'clock by then.
As the light strengthened the perimeter lights went out, but the single red lamp on the comms tower continued to glow. Then, at about six-thirty, the sun came over the eastern horizon and low rays blazed across the camp from our right. From the scribbled notes and plans I'd made during our brief in London, I soon identified the compound's main features: the approach road coming in from the north, the guardroom, the headquarter block, the tall mast marking the comms centre, the armoury, wired offiri its own secure enclosure inside the perimeter, the fuel station, down- near the wire to our right, and the mosque, gleaming white, with an onion dome and huge loudspeakers sprouting from the corners of a balcony round its tower.