You'll understand what I'm talking about, Maitland had said, tomorrow. We're going to make the headlines, you know.
If that wreckage were identified as belonging to Flight 907 there would be headlines, yes, tomorrow. But Klaus had talked about conventional explosives, had wanted a nuclear warhead. It couldn't have been anything to do with Flight 907.
At 10:05 Scalfaro looked at the INS reading. 'I'm gonna use partial flaps to bring the speed down to 120, okay? Gonna drop you off at 9,000 feet, okay with you?'
I said it was.
'We'll be over the drop zone in ten minutes. You better get all that stuff hooked on.'
I got the military knapsack and the water-bottles from behind the seat and buckled them to the chute harness. 'Will there be sand blowing down there?'
'Maybe some.' He looked through the dome. 'Maybe a little, sure. We didn't see too many lights back there in Adrar, but then it's a pretty small place, couple of thousand people. Could be some blowing sand, though.'
I got the goggles out of the knapsack and slung them round my neck.
At 10:12 Scalfaro looked down through the dome again. 'It's none of my business, but you know what you're doing?'
'Not necessarily.'
'Tell ya something, my friend, you're going to be lonely down there.'
I looked through the Perspex, saw nothing below, just a waste of darkness. 'What about wind currents,' I asked him, 'between here and the ground?'
'There shouldn't be any, this time of the year and at night. You won't be drifting much.'
10:14 on the clock.
The roar of the Titan turbofan was muted as Scalfaro brought the throttle back another notch. He had his head turned to watch me.
'You feel okay?'
He'd noticed me lurch a bit on the tarmac at Dar-el-Beida, wanted to know what the problem was, told him my shoes were pinching, none of his bloody business.
'Feel fine,' I said.
'Okay.' He slid the canopy back and the windrush slammed across our heads. 'Go for it!'
Drifting.
The sound of the plane had died away minutes ago, and there was just the whisper of the shrouds above me. The air was freezing against my face.
The starfields were brilliant in the dome of the night sky. Below me the darkness wasn't totaclass="underline" the moon was spreading its light across a vast ochre-coloured haze: the Sahara.
I felt isolated, minuscule.
Tell ya something, my friend, you're going to be lonely down there. And earlier Scalfaro had said when we'd boarded the plane, Maybe you're just crazy, I dunno. But I mean, where you're going, a hundred and sixty miles from Adrar, there's just desert. There's just sand, is all, the Sahara. I mean that's all you'll be too -just another grain of sand down there. I just hope you know what you're doing.
Perhaps. Perhaps not. It was all I'd got left of Solitaire, the fix, 26°03' north by 02°01' west, a point in the night, in the desert. And now I was there.
Drifting.
I looked at the glow of my watch-face again. I'd dropped six minutes ago, with a minute left before I hit ground. The ochre colour was lighter now, by a degree. Fine sand was pricking the left side of my face, and I put my goggles on and took a quick look above me. The moon's rim had lost its sharpness: there was sand blowing, close to ground level.
I looked down, waiting, as the desert rose against me in the final seconds of the drop and I sensed zero and pulled on the lines to break the impact and saw shapes in the distance through the blowing sand and felt hard ground under my boots.
It was fifteen minutes since I'd come down, and I had walked something like a mile across the violet-red clay surface in the moonlight, the fine sand blowing against my goggles and the scene ahead of me shifting as the wind came in gusts, so that the shapes out there took on substance and vanished again. Sometimes I could hear voices calling.
I'd tried to signal Cone on the radio but there was nothing but squelch. There was a power generator running somewhere, jamming the set.
I walked more slowly, trying to identify the shapes ahead of me, and heard another sound coming in now, a faint whistling. I stopped, trying to identify it, then without warning the generator was gunned up and the whole scene took on brilliance as a flarepath bloomed across the desert floor and lights flooded from the sky and I dropped into a crouch as the massive shape of an aircraft came drifting through the haze and settled onto the ground with a roar as it reversed thrust and I saw the blue and white Pan Am insignia on the tail.
Chapter 22: FLIGHT 907
Figures moved through the haze.
I was in cover, concealed by a stack of crates. The time on my watch was 11:14. I still had my goggles on. Others were wearing them too, as they worked in the blowing sand.
The last of the passengers were coming off the Pan Am plane. The Nemesis team was herding them into a huge group, two hundred of them, perhaps more; it looked a full complement. Their voices came thinly through the night. The flarepath had blacked out as soon as the plane had come to a halt and then turned, facing the way it had come. The generator was idling now.
This was a dry lake bed, not salt but clay, with a fine powdering of sand on the surface. It felt hard under my boots, brick hard. There were three other planes on the ground, smaller than the Pan Am jet. I recognised one of them as the company plane we'd flown from Berlin to Algiers. Klaus would have landed here in that, with Maitland and some of the guards. The second aircraft was a twin-engined freighter with no insignia. It would have brought these stores here, the crates. Not quite stores -they had markings on them, and lettering in French, with the skull and crossbones prominent on the cylinders where they showed through the slats. Most of them contained explosives; some contained gas.
The third aircraft was a tanker, and its generators were throbbing as the Pan Am plane took on the last of its fuel. It was going to take off again, and I knew when. It would take off at midnight.
Midnight One.
It was a time and a place, Midnight One. There was another time and another place in the Nemesis schedule: Midnight Two.
That would be the target.
Voices came on the wind, the passengers complaining, asking questions. I could hear children crying. Six guards stood at intervals with assault rifles levelled at the hip. Floodlights washed over the crowd, over their pale faces. I saw Klaus, standing halfway between the Pan Am jet and its passengers, fifty yards from where I was now. He was shouting orders, his arms waving with the precision of a traffic cop's. Maitland was nearer the jet, talking to the two Iranians, their figures floodlit by the lights of the tanker. A camouflaged jeep was on the move, providing liaison.
We're going to make the headlines, you know. They'll be interrupting television programmes, all over the world.