The Land Rover bounced across rocks and gullies, its headlights heaving wildly around; Lime gripped his seat and smoked furiously and began to sweat.
WEDNESDAY,
JANUARY 19
4:15 A.M.North African Time She was lying in a rowboat drifting on a placid lake. A blue sky and a pleasantly warm sun, glass-calm water with only enough current to keep the boat moving gently along. There was no one else; everything was soundless. She didn’t raise her head to look but she knew that the lake emptied into a deep tunnel and that sooner or later the boat would drift into that tunnel and carry her cozily into its warm darkness.
“… Peggy. Hey.”
“Whum?”
“Come on come on. Do I got to slap your face?”
“All right—all right.” She was awake now; she threw the blanket back. “Time’s it?”
“Little after four.”
“Four in the morning?”
“Sometheen wrong with the pig. You got to look at him.”
The words brought her sharply to her senses. “What’s the matter with him?” She was reaching for the veil and robe.
“I don’ know. He just doesn’t look too good.”
She remembered her watch and took it downstairs with her into the cellar corridor.
Alvin had a worried face. He had the door open and Peggy eeled in past him.
Fairlie looked like a corpse. She held the watch crystal to his nostrils and after a moment the crystal fogged slightly. Tested his pulse—it was down, way down.
Oh shit. “You’d better get Sturka.”
Cesar left. She heard his heavy tread on the stair. Not that Sturka could do anything, she thought. She beckoned to Alvin. “I think we ought to try to get him on his feet. Walk him back and forth.”
“You mean like when people take an overdose of sleeping pills?”
“I don’t know anything else to do. Is there any coffee?”
“I’ll have a look. You want me to make some?”
“Yes.”
Alvin left and she heaved Fairlie into a sitting position: slid his feet off the cot and turned him, got her shoulder under his arm and tried to lift him to his feet. But the angles were wrong and she fell asprawl across him and got untangled and tried it again.
It still didn’t work. He was limp and it was going to take two of them to walk him. She left him propped against the wall and waited for the others.
Alvin returned with half a cup of coffee. “I put some more on. This is cold.”
“That’s all right. Let’s try and get it down him. You hold his head.”
She didn’t have to open his mouth; his jaw hung slack. She tipped his head back. “Hold him that way.” Poured a little coffee in to see if he would swallow it.
Sturka’s voice made her jump. “What’s the matter with him?”
“Bad reaction to the drugs,” she said. She looked over her shoulder, filled with anger. “Too much drugs.”
“Well never mind that right now. I think we have visitors.”
Cesar appeared in the doorway behind Sturka. Alvin said, “What kind of visitors?”
Peggy was trying to get coffee down Fairlie. “Hold his head still damn it.”
Cesar said, “Some kind of camel caravan.”
Alvin was suspicious. “Traveling at night?”
“Sometimes they do,” Sturka said. “But I don’t trust it. Let’s go.” He pointed to Cesar. “You out to the back. You know your post.”
Cesar went. Peggy watched Fairlie’s Adam’s apple move up and down when he swallowed. It was a good sign she thought. Then she heard Sturka say, “Bring him upstairs.”
Alvin said dubiously, “We’ll have to carry him.”
“Then carry him.” Sturka had an ugly AK submachine gun slung across his back; he flicked it into his hand and went nimbly into the corridor. Peggy heard him go up the stairs—softly and quickly, two steps at a time.
The movement wouldn’t hurt Fairlie but she wanted to get the rest of the coffee into him first. She motioned Alvin to hold his head again and lifted the cup to Fairlie’s pale lips.
4:28 A.M.North African Time Lime edged through the rubble feeling his way with his feet before he put his weight on them. Starlight fell on the pale crumbled walls; he kept to the deep shadows. When he looked back he couldn’t see the four men behind him and that was good.
He heard someone moving through the wreckage beyond the stucco wall that stood more or less intact against the sky. It loomed just ahead of him, one corner broken off raggedly by a forgotten Italian bomb. It was significant that he could hear the man’s approach; it meant the man didn’t really expect anyone to be out here. The rest of them would be at the opposite end of the building looking out through rifle slits, watching the camel train wind past. Sturka had sent one man to the back because of the possibility the camel train was a diversion—which it was.
There was only one way to do this kind of thing: fast and simply. Get up as close as possible and then rush them, overrun them before they could react against Fairlie.
No subtleties, no elaborate schemes. Just attack. He had to assume Sturka had only three or four comrades; he was relying on his hostage, not his military strength. Lime had to assume there weren’t more than half a dozen of them and that he could overwhelm that many instantly.
He stood with his back to the stucco wall and listened to the man approach the doorway beside him. At the back of his neck the short hairs prickled. He had the sound of his heartbeat in his ears. He let his breath trickle out slowly through his mouth; he fought a cough down.
The man had stopped just inside the door. Lime couldn’t wheel into sight to silehce the man without alarming him. It was probably Corby or Renaldo and either of them might be able to sense the presence of alien beings in the silent wreckage. If so it would draw the man outside and that was what Lime needed.…
The pulse throbbed at his throat. Distantly he could hear the caravan trudging past, the flipflop of camel hoofs across the stones down below the hill.
Stupid bravado, he thought. It would have made sense to send a younger man on point. But Chad Hill was an innocent and he didn’t know any of the others, they were strangers and if mistakes were made it was better to make them himself.…
His elbows and knees were abraded raw: he had come the last two hundred yards on his belly. He settled the knife in his fist.
Movement: the shift of a leather sole on gritty earth. The man was coming out. Lime could hear his breathing.
He stood poised, motionless, down to his raw quivering nerve ends.
He sensed it before he saw it. He timed the man’s breathing; he waited for the man to exhale a breath and then he wheeled into the doorway. Clapped his hand over the man’s mouth and used the knife. Once in Oran he had stabbed into a man who had just taken a deep breath and the scream had echoed a mile.
The man’s body went taut. Lime released the knife and got a grip on the man to keep him from turning.
Renaldo, he thought.
He lowered the body without sound. Stepped outside and made hand motions.
Stealth now, but there would be discovery and soon they would have to move ever so fast. The four sharpshooters slipped in past him, stepped across Renaldo’s body, went prowling ahead like sharks, rifles out ahead of them. Lime fell in behind Orr, lifting the .38 out of the clamshell. Lime was the only one armed with lethal ammunition. It had to be that way. Total authority, and total responsibility. Nobody got killed unless Lime did the killing.
There had been lights before—probably kerosene lamps—but there were none now. That was to be expected; Sturka would have extinguished all lamps.