“I imagine you have. He’s still got thirty-five miles to cover and it’ll take him some time to feel his way down. It’ll be dusk by then, pret’ near dark. I doubt he’ll have much by way of landing lights.”
“A pair of headlights I imagine,” Lime said. “Don’t make any more calls on this frequency until I get back to you.”
“Step it up a little,” he told the driver.
“Can I use the headlights?”
“God no.”
Lime and Orr were belly-down in the brush along the wadi bank when the PBY came lumbering down onto the piste, the jeep dirt track that ran alongside the dry river. A car sat in the road with its headlights stabbing forward; Ben Krim’s pilot was guiding by the headlights but it was a tricky maneuver because the closer he got to the ground the more blinding the headlights would be in his eyes. But the pilot would be good. Sturka used only experts.
Two of Orr’s commandos had slithered toward the car that was lighting up the plane’s landing strip. If the driver was sitting in the car they were to wait; if he was outside they were to plant the bleeper on the car. He would have to get out to meet Ben Krim and turn over the parcel.
That would be Corby or Renaldo in the car. He’d have with him one of those tape-recorder-transmitter devices to broadcast the next set of instructions to the Americans—where to deliver the Washington Seven.
It was Ben Krim’s job to report to Sturka’s man—give him the firsthand report on the landing of the Seven in Geneva—and collect the recorder-transmitter, and fly back to El Djamila to deposit the Catalina, and drive to Algiers, and book a flight to Madrid or Paris or Berlin where he would set up the transmitter on another tiresome little clock device so that Ben Krim would be halfway back to Algiers by the time the thing broadcast its message to the world.
Lime was only mildly interested in what the instructions would be. At any rate Ben Krim would be picked up when he flew back to El Djamila and Gilliams’ people would analyze the tape.
In the meantime the car was bugged and Lime would be following Corby or Renaldo back to Sturka’s lair.
It was going to work. He felt it for the first time: the positive knowledge that he had Sturka.
In the night silence he watched the PBY make its superb landing-roll to a stop within a hundred feet of the waiting headlights. The lights clicked off. Someone got out of the car and walked toward the airplane, and Benyoussef Ben Krim climbed down from the dimly lit cockpit to meet the courier. Through the Mark Systems glasses Lime watched the two shadows flow together in the dusk.
The meeting was brief. There was enough light to make out silhouettes, and Lime was fairly sure that was Cesar Renaldo. Not big enough for Corby nor lean enough for Sturka himself.
A curious question occurred to him. What if it had been Sturka? Arrest him on the spot and search for the others? Or, having him in hand, let him go so he could lead you back to them? With Renaldo Lime didn’t care, would let him go; Lime didn’t want Renaldo, not personally. But suppose it had been Sturka?
Renaldo get back in the car, started it up, switched on his lights, drove along the piste making a little curve to get around the PBY, drove almost a mile and stopped in the distance to make a U-turn, his headlights glaring with starlike twinkles across the flat clarity of the bled. Ben Krim was back in the plane and the pilot had one engine running; using a lot of rudder brakes he was turning the ungainly craft around in its own length on the ground. The plane stood still for a moment while the second engine burst into chatter and then it began to roll, searchlights booming from the nacelles, red and white wingtip lights winking.
Lime was looking at the place where Renaldo’s car had been sitting and his brain was working again. A car, he thought. Not a jeep, not a Land Rover. A car. One of those old diesel-powered Mercedes sedans, it was. Humpbacked and round.
So they were holed up on or near a road. Not a piste. It confirmed another expectation.
Lime watched the plane go away and the car drive up the desert track to the northeast, and then he tapped Orr on the shoulder and said, “Okay, let’s go.”
“We going to follow him? I mean he’ll see our lights. It’s getting too dark to travel without lights.”
“No need to follow him,” Lime said.
“Because he’s bugged?”
“Because I know where he’s going.”
They walked to the Land Rover and Lime cranked up the scrambler. “Gilliams?”
“Yes sir.”
“Get me a caravan.”
“What?”
It was one of the advantages of having limitless dollars and limitless armies to command.
The camel caravans of North Africa were a tradition going back a thousand years; they were more than a method of transportation: they were a way of life, a self-perpetuating institution. Each caravan numbered anywhere from a dozen to two hundred camels and made one trip a year but the trip was of a year’s duration: they started somewhere along the Niger with a cargo of pelts and salt and dried meat and handicrafts, they traveled slowly north trading on the way—trading cargo and camels as well—and six months later they reached the Atlas Mountains and picked up a new cargo of manufactured things, dates, kerosene, gunpowder; then they turned around and went back. A caravan was a home: you were born and lived and died in the caravan.
There was usually a caravan around here. It was near the northern terminus. No matter what route they had taken to get here from the south they all converged on the string of foothill towns south of Algiers. It was no great feat for Gilliams to locate one west of Touggourt, and no difficulty to hire its services. Everything was for sale or for hire.
The caravan was in motion less than two hours after Lime’s call. At the same time Lime’s little convoy of Land Rover and truck set out overland, heading across the bled to rendezvous with it.
The fact that Renaldo was driving an ordinary automobile had pinpointed the hiding place for Lime. There was only one passable road from the wadi. It went northeast as far as the old Foreign Legion post at Dzioua and then turned due east to cross ninety miles of broken country to Touggourt and the main highway to Biskra.
The Legion fort was still in use as a district admin headquarters. But for every full-dress fortress there had once been a string of outpost bomas at one-day’s-ride intervals. Thirty miles southeast of Dzioua was a small boma which had been abandoned after World War II. Once or twice in the fifties Lime had visited the place and found evidence someone had been there: bandit fellagha or FLN guerrillas. Conceivably Sturka had used it as a rallying point even in those days. It sat on a two-hundred-foot height and commanded an excellent field of view—or of fire—and it was within a few hundred feet of the present road. It was an ideal place to hold Fairlie—impossible to approach unseen.
The American planeloads and helicopter-loads of personnel had landed at Touggourt, sixty miles from the boma, and they would be ready by the time Lime joined the camel train. There was a doctor, there were several pints of AB-negative blood, there were dozens of sharpshooters and communications people and gadgets. Lime was going to need speed and firepower. He couldn’t sneak inside Sturka’s fortress by stealth or subterfuge.
The risk was enormous: the risk to Fairlie. If it failed Lime would be condemned as a murdering blunderer. Probably they would find a way to put him away for the rest of his life, if they let him live. But everything entailed risk. He could leave Sturka strictly alone and see what happened if he cooperated in turning the Washington Seven loose into asylum. But there was no way to force Sturka to keep his word and release Fairlie; so that risk was equally high. In a way it was better odds to attack—because the people with Sturka weren’t professionals, they weren’t trained to kill without thought, and all he really had to worry about was keeping Sturka away from Fairlie until he could get to Fairlie. The rest of them wouldn’t instinctively know what to do and in their confusion he had a good chance to break through.