He could rule out the Sahara proper. The plane hadn’t gone that far when they’d used it to carry Fairlie. And the Sahara was less a hiding place than a trap—there were too few places to hide. Sturka might be in the outback but he wouldn’t be too far from avenues of flight. Somewhere down here in the bled within pragmatic distance of a decent road and a place to land and take off in an airplane if you had to. Bedouin country perhaps but not the Tuaregs’ desert. Possibly even a farm in the Tell.
The wadi Binaud had pinpointed—the riverbed oasis where he’d picked up the Catalina last week—was east of Ghardaïa and north of Ouargla: arid plains around there, like parts of Arizona and New Mexico—hardpan clay earth that supported boulders and scrub brush, the occasional stunted tree, enough broken ground and cut-banks to conceal armies. Sturka had operated there before with the efficiency of an Apache Indian war chief and he would feel comfortable there.
Lime kept remembering the number of times he had gone looking for Sturka in that country: looking but never finding.
He had one or two advantages now he hadn’t had then. Electronic surveillance had become more sophisticated. He didn’t have to function in quite so much secrecy now. And he had almost unlimited manpower to draw upon. Gilliams had pulled every CIA man in North Africa into it, from Dakar to Cairo. There was the crew Lime had brought with him and then there were the Early Birds—the A-team killer squads Satterthwaite had sent from Langley. Lime had insisted the Early Birds be armed, in addition to their normal issue, with tranquilizer-dart bullets obtained from a Kenyan game preserve. The darts were fired by standard rifle cartridges; the chemical was M-99, a morphine derivative. The tranquilizer would take effect almost instantly and render the victim unconscious for fifteen or twenty minutes. It was standard procedure in wild-game protection; whether it had ever been used before in a quasi-military operation Lime didn’t know and didn’t care.
The objective was to get Fairlie out alive; what happened to the kidnappers was secondary but they couldn’t afford to leave half a dozen corpses strewn across the Algerian landscape. Algiers wouldn’t stand still for that and a fair number of opportunistic capitals—Peking, Moscow, the Third World towns—would join in the condemnations. Rescuing a VIP was one thing, starting a pocket battle on foreign soil was another. If it happened, the United States would survive it as she had survived Laos and the Dominican Republic and dozens of others, but it was better to avoid it if you could.
Lime lacked interest in the complexities of international relations but Satterthwaite had made it fairly clear to him that a gaffe in Algeria might cost the United States the nuclear bases in Spain which both Brewster and Fairlie had been trying mightily to protect before all this idiocy had erupted. Spain was not a NATO member, never had been. Overt American arrogance in Algeria would be too close to home; Perez-Blasco would have to turn away from Washington and that was to be avoided. So it was better to use drugged darts than bullets.
He hoped they were somewhere in the bled. It would be so much easier without witnesses. If they were holed up in the middle of one of the towns there would be no way to make it neat.
The chief dilemma was how to get Fairlie away from them. If you attacked them frontally they would use him as a shield.
It had to be played by ear and at any rate he had to find them first.
When they landed at Bou Saada the Catalina was still in the air, still being tracked southward.
“West of El Meghaier,” the radio man explained to Lime. “Still maintaining altitude.”
Lime left the radio shack and walked across the tarmac to the little gathering of aircraft—the Lear, the charter turboprop with the CIA people aboard, the Early Birds’ helicopters.
Lime beckoned Gilliams over and showed him the map. “I think Ben Krim’s heading for the same wadi where Binaud picked up the plane last week. Now that Catalina cruises at about a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. The Lear can do three times that speed. I want to be at that wadi before Ben Krim gets there. I’ll want half a dozen of the A-team men with me. The rest of you had better rendezvous at Touggourt and wait for word from me. Have you got a portable scrambler set?”
“Transceiver? There’s one in each helicopter.”
“Have one put aboard the Lear for me.”
“All right Mr. Lime. But what happens if you’re guessing wrong? You’re out there in some Godforsaken wadi.”
“If we don’t get there ahead of Ben Krim we’ve got no way to track his contact. There’s a town called Guerara about ten miles from the wadi—I’ll have to commandeer a car there.”
“If they’ve got one.” Gilliams looked dubious. “You know those bled towns. A camel and four jackasses.”
“Something else is worrying you. What?”
“Maybe your pilot can land that Lear down there and maybe he can’t. But there ain’t no for-real airplane runways around there. He’ll probably never take it off.”
“Then we’ve cost ourselves an airplane haven’t we.”
The killer boys were trooping on board the jet with their rifles and knapsacks. Lime collected Chad Hill and went up the boarding stairs. Somebody closed the door after them and as Lime was buckling into his seat he felt the engines begin to whine and vibrate.
The Lear had oil company markings and he hoped that would appease Sturka’s bunch if they saw it go by overhead. He had a strong feeling they were right down there somewhere—almost near enough to touch.
There was a road outside Guerara, a paved secondary road that went in an absolutely straight line across seventy miles of plateau to the main highway at Berriane. It made a fine landing strip for the Lear; they buzzed it once to make sure there was no traffic and the pilot set down easily on the pavement, wandering with a bit of wind drift because the road had a high crown.
The chief of the A-team unpacked the fold-up motorbike from the seemingly endless stockpile of gadgetry the CIA teams always carried, and went putt-putting off with an agent riding behind him on the fender, east toward Guerara, a palmtree-shadowed village a mile away. From the air they had spotted half a dozen vehicles there and Lime had specified two of them he wanted: a Land Rover and a truck.
Twenty minutes. The sun went down with a splash of color and the Land Rover came up over the rise into view. The truck was a two and one half ton Weyland with hooped canvas over its rear bed; it was war surplus—something Monty’s army had left behind in wreckage after El Alamein.
Lime didn’t ask the CIA chief how he had obtained the two vehicles and the CIA chief didn’t volunteer the information. His name was Orr, he was a wiry Texan with close-cropped iron-gray hair, and there wasn’t a doubt in the world he had once been in the paratroops or the Green Berets.
Lime spread the map on the hood of the Land Rover, on top of the spare tire, and talked for five minutes. Orr listened and nodded. When Lime got into the Land Rover with one of the agents for a driver, Orr gathered the rest of his men in the truck and they set out eastward in close-formation convoy. In the road behind them the Lear was taxiing off to the side to wait in case Lime needed it again.
They drove through the village and the stares of Arabs followed them until they were beyond the palms. Lime twisted around in the seat to crank up the battery-powered scrambler transceiver they had manhandled off the plane. It took him three or four minutes to make contact.
“Gilliams?”
“Yes sir, sir.” Gilliams sounded in good spirits.
“He still in the air?”
“Yes sir he sure is. Starting his descent just a few minutes ago. Right where you guessed he’d go.”
“We’re on the ground. It should take us ten minutes or so to get there, another five or ten minutes to get in position. Have we got enough time?”