'He's leaving it late,' someone said, 'you know that?'
'He knows what he's doing. Shuddup and get the job done.'
I checked my watch at 11:39 when we'd shifted more than half the cylinders, making five trips with the jeep fully loaded.
The two Arabian pilots had moved: they were standing with Klaus as we passed him on the final run. One of them was laughing, the sound carrying on the wind. They looked at their ease, hands on their hips and their heads thrown back as Klaus slapped their arms, telling them in his terrible French that they were heroes: I caught snatches of it – 'You will have streets named after you… You will go down in history as the saviours of Islam…'
It was not good news. This was not good news.
Unless he was wildly exaggerating, this concerned more than just a megadeath in a football stadium. It concerned Midnight Two, something big enough to earn them a place in history.
The mental sense of powerlessness is ennervating: my legs felt weak, my arms incapable. I needed help with my last cylinder as I staggered with it onto the Pan Am plane.
'You all right?
'Bloody things weigh a bit, that's all.' The cabin was swinging across my eyes, and I had to hold on to a bulkhead to steady myself.
The men were shouting at the entrance to the cabin, behind the flight deck.
'How many more?'
'Three.'
'Look sharp, then.'
I moved back to give them room.
'Okay, that one on top of those two.'
They moved about. I could hear them. I couldn't see them any more, because I'd slid down on my haunches behind the stack of cylinders: I think I was in one of the forward galleys, because there was a curtain drawn half across, and the smell of coffee. It was comfortable here with my back against a panel, and I closed my eyes.
Voices came from outside the cabin, speaking in French. Because of the curtain I couldn't hear them clearly.
They're on a suicide run, and now you're going with them.
Shut up.
You're out of your fucking mind.
Shuddup and leave me alone.
The wind blows across the desert, across the clay of the dried lake bed, flinging sand against the windows of the cabin. I listen to it.
I look at my watch.
It is 11:57. We have three minutes left.
Then I can hear voices again, this time speaking an Arab tongue. They come from inside the plane. Then there is the soft rushing of the jets, and vibration comes into the airframe. I can feel it against my back.
Now there is a roaring, the sound of huge power. The big metal cylinders begin a discordant tintinnabulation as the cabin trembles, and then it dies away as the wings lift and we are borne into the sky.
Chapter 23: AIRBORNE
01:13.
It was the first thing I looked at, took an interest in, when I opened my eyes: the watch on my wrist. We had been airborne an hour and thirteen minutes.
I had slept. The decision had been made for me by the subconscious when the beta-wave levels had been phased out by shock, by the accumulated shock of the mission that we file under the simple name of mission fatigue. It is not simple.
I felt quite good, felt refreshed, clear-headed again. Thought came easily now, and I was becoming aware of what had happened. But there were certain troubling aspects, because the decision my subconscious had made for me was totally illogical.
I could hear them talking up there on the flight deck through the open door, the two pilots. They were speaking a language I didn't know, presumably Farsi. I couldn't hear any specific words, wouldn't have understood them in any case.
Totally illogical, then, the decision that had been made, that I was stuck with. I could either have stayed where I was on the ground or I could have stayed on board the plane and taken off with it. If I'd stayed on the ground I could have joined the tanker crew or the freighter crew and hitched a flight back to Algiers. They wouldn't have recognised me, had never seen me before, would have accepted me as one of the team. Once in Algiers, communication, immediate communication: telephone Cone and tell him the situation, let him signal London and tell them to alert and inform Pan American Airlines. But there wouldn't have been anything they could do. Flight 907 would by then have been airborne for more than two hours, invisible in the night, untraceable, on its way to the unknown target, Midnight Two. If it hadn't already reached there, if there weren't already headlines running through the press.
It would have been an exercise in total futility, calling up my director in the field and having him signal London and all that tra-la, an exercise in total bloody futility. All it would have done would be to put the matter down in the records: Mission unsuccessful, executive safe.
So there wouldn't have been any point in staying on the ground in the desert. It wouldn't have achieved anything. But there'd been no point in taking off on board this aeroplane either because I was in a strictly shut-ended situation. I had no argument that would persuade the Iranians to put this aircraft down somewhere and call the whole thing off, and if I got control of them I couldn't put it down anywhere myself: I'd had no training on anything half this size and it'd have to be brought in like a feather on the breeze or we'd blow up the airport.
Teddy bear.
The subconscious, then, is not always reliable, is not always so bloody clever. You would do well to remember that, my good friend. It can send you to your bloody doom.
Teddy bear on the floor. Dropped I suppose by one of the children when they'd all been herded through the exits. Or was it perhaps a naughty teddy bear, that would blow my head off if I picked it up, blow the whole plane to bits? But it wasn't worth worrying about: the stuff in these forty-eight cylinders we'd stacked in here was measurable in mega-teddy-bear power.
There were two kinds of labels on them, both in red and white and with the skull-and-crossbones symbol. At least four of the cylinders contained Trinitrotoluene and carried another vignette, an explosive flash in red. There might be more of these in the stack; I didn't know, because the labels weren't all visible. The labels on the other cylinders read Nitrogen Tetraoxide and carried four symbols: the skull-and-crossbones, the explosive flash, a man's head with a gas mask on the face, and a coat on a hanger symbolising protective clothing.
As an explosive, nitrogen tetraoxide is dramatically potent. When Geissler had put me under the strobe in the garage last night I'd repeated the story Samala had told me. An airman dropped a nine-pound socket from a spanner inside a Titan silo, and it punched a hole in the skin of a fuel cell and started a leak. There was a 750-ton steel door on the silo and when that fuel went off it sent it two hundred feet straight up in the air and dropped it a thousand feet away.