I tried the radio from time to time, got nothing. If I could raise Cone he might be able to alert the Algerian Air Force in time for them to intercept the Pan Am jet before Midnight Two, before it reached the target. It would be the final chance, if I could reach him. So I tried, every few minutes, but the generators were throwing out too much interference. There wasn't, quite clearly, anything else I could do.
There's a Pan Am flight reported missing, Cone had told me. It took off from Berlin at 6:17, and went off the screens twenty minutes later.
So it had been airborne for nearly four hours, airborne and off the radar screens. When it had landed here and the jets had whined into silence and the forward passenger door had come open, Dieter Klaus himself had greeted the first two men off the plane, throwing his arms around them. They would be the hijackers who had gone on board in Berlin.
There would have been no way to get Flight 907 off the screens except by losing altitude over water and getting below the radar, and that was what the pilot had been ordered to do: follow the English Channel and turn south across the Bay of Biscay and then East across Morocco into the Sahara. Morocco would have picked up the jet on its screens but wouldn't have been able to identify it.
The sand blew against my goggles; the air was cold against my face. They would be coming across here very soon now, to start loading the cylinders onto the Pan Am plane.
Two men were standing near the company jet. I think one of them was the pilot. Another man was crouching below the belly of the freighter, checking the undercarriage: perhaps it had been a bumpy landing. The tanker had people around it, watching the fuel going into the airliner. If I could break cover without attracting attention and go across there and get into any one of the aircraft I could send a Mayday call giving the position of Flight 907 and reporting it as hijacked, alerting the Algerian Air Force. But they couldn't put any aircraft down here before midnight unless they had a base nearer than Algiers.
Tried the radio again and drew blank.
So I had successfully infiltrated Nemesis, the target opposition network, and I had stayed with it all the way to the operation zone and I was there now, watching the steadily running procedures as the time ran out towards zero, but there was nothing I could do to stop them. So Solitaire was going to be the first mission I couldn't bring home, couldn't follow right through to the end phase, signal London and tell them to pick up that bit of chalk and put it on the board: Mission accomplished.
But I'd had to give it a try and I'd had to go it alone: there'd been no choice. I hadn't known what I was going into, but I know that in any ultrasensitive situation you can't send in support without risking confusion in the field, and sometimes I can persuade London to understand this: I'd got that clown Thrower recalled on that very point. In Algiers my director in the field couldn't have given me more than half a dozen people at the most at such short notice, and even if they hadn't been seen dropping out of the sky all over the place they couldn't have got this close, as close as one man could come – had come. And even if London could have raised a whole bloody platoon and armed it to the teeth there'd have been a war on down here the minute they landed, and half those passengers over there would have been caught in the cross-fire and there still wouldn't have been any guarantee that the Pan Am plane wouldn't take off on schedule at Midnight One.
There'd been no choice.
11:22.
The wind blew cold, penetrated my bomber jacket, penetrated to the spine, because there were going to be headlines, yes, after all.
The refuelling crew were hauling the flexible pipe away from the last Pan Am wing tank and stowing it on their plane, and the jeep started up and drove across to where Klaus was standing. He must have been a touch pissed off, Herr Klaus, had been expecting a nuke to play with, but it hadn't arrived. He was answering a question from the driver of the jeep, nodding emphatically, and some of the guards piled aboard. The jeep would turn, I believed, and head in this direction, towards the stack of crates that were giving me cover. It was time for the cargo to be loaded into the airliner.
I waited.
It seemed, somewhere in the shadows of my mind, that I had been waiting a long time for this moment to come, longer than hours, longer than days, as if in the past I'd been given a glimpse of the shape of things to come. I think this was because I'd just realised that there might be something, after all, that I could do to bring Klaus down before he could reach his target, Midnight Two, wherever it was.
A woman screamed somewhere among the crowd of passengers, having got to the point of hysteria, I suppose, and understandably. The scream touched my nerves, for an instant froze them, because I knew quite well that if I started to do what had come into my mind there'd be no calling it off, no chance of getting back.
Carpe diem.
I went on waiting.
Seize, yes indeed, the day.
My cover was good, here: the crates were stacked higher than a man, and I could move with freedom. Personal cover was also satisfactory: most people here were in black bomber jackets like mine: it had been the fashion of choice when we'd set out from Algiers for a winter's night in the desert. Three or four of the men on the jeep wore goggles, as I did, against the discomfort of the blowing sand; and we all wore padded gloves, de rigueur. I wouldn't have been noticed in the front row of the chorus: someone would have to tell you I was the fourth from the left, just above the bald-headed violinist.
In the distance the jeep turned and gunned up, its headlights swinging towards the stack of crates.
I didn't move.
You won't get out of this alive.
Shut up.
It's a suicide run, you know that.
Christ's sake shuddup.
Then the jeep slid to a halt on the dry sand and the men dropped off it with a clatter of combat boots and started work on the crates with their jemmies, breaking away the slats to get at the cylinders, two of them moving around to the sides, so I kicked at the slats of the nearest crate and prised them away and hauled one of the cylinders out and stooped and got it onto my shoulder and joined the chorus line, lurching with it across to the jeep, another man beside me, the one just above the red-haired lady with the trombone, the sweat running on me because I was committed now and beyond the point of no return, because if I could get this far I stood a chance of bringing the mission home.
That or the other thing: finis, finito.
I slid the cylinder onto the back of the jeep and found a spare tyre lever and went back to the crates and worked on the slats and dragged another cylinder out. There were two Arabs here but the rest were German, by their speech.
'Remember the orders,' one of them said, 'and don't throw these bloody things around. Knock 'em together a bit too hard and we're goners, kerbooom, so for Christ's sake be careful.'