'When?
'As soon as you can. It's fully urgent.'
It meant he'd got to break every rule in the book if he had to, just get me the plane. Cone would do that. I'd been right, I'd been so right to get rid of that clown Thrower.
'Where are you?
I told him.
'Can I phone you there?'
I gave him the number, got it wrong, not easy to read under the scratched plastic cover, gave it to him again, made sure, because this was the lifeline now for Solitaire.
I've got that,' Cone said. 'Give me the picture.'
'It's not a Lockerbie thing. It's much bigger. There are two Iranian pilots involved. I don't know what this fix means. It could even be a target zone but I can't think why. If it is, you'll know what happened to me, be in the papers, headlines, have – you'll have to -'
'What's your condition?' Cone cut in.
I pulled myself upright; I'd been lolling all over the bloody desk, papers on the floor, everything swinging round. I could not afford this.
'I'm operational,' I said. 'A few dizzy spells, there was a car smash. Listen, that fix could be totally remote, I mean that's the Sahara down there, so – so listen, if -' swinging again and I had to wait. 'Listen, I want a two-way radio, you got that? I'll stay in contact as long as I can, but if – if you can't raise me by first light tomorrow you'd better send a search plane over the zone, I don't fancy dying of thirst out there.' I held on to the edge of the desk and waited again, and the roof of the hangar swung down and tilted away again and I brought my weight underside and slowed the breathing, deepened it, and it helped. 'Give me water rations for twenty-four hours, torch, the radio, hard tack, flares, the usual things for a desert drop, gloves, goggles, all right?
'Yes. Have you lost any blood?'
'No. You got a map there, Sahara?'
'Yes. I'm with an AIP.'
Agent-in-place. He'd know the territory, use the map, locate the bearing, adduce the range we'd need for the plane, the fuel capacity.
'Then fix me up,' I said.
'Might take a bit of time.'
'I've got to reach that zone before midnight.'
Midnight One.
In a moment he said, 'How long can you stay there by that phone?'
'As long as I have to.'
'Do all I can,' he said. 'But you'd better know this: I'm not sure whether it's to do with a Lockerbie thing or not. There's a Pan Am flight reported missing, Berlin to New York.'
Mother of God.
'What sorta girls they got there?'
I said I didn't know.
'So what you go there for?'
He was a Sicilian, Giovanni Scalfaro, spoke some kind of French, some kind of English, no German, sucked on some kind of chewing-gum which I suspected was laced, he flew dope, it was his living.
'To meet friends,' I said. We were talking about the Safari Club in Tenerife, where I sometimes go between missions.
'You go there to meet friends,' Giovanni Scalfaro said, 'and you don't know what sorta girls they got there?'
Our heading was 28 degrees west of south, with the moon high above the domed Perspex cockpit cover and the Sahara below.
'The friends I meet there,' I said, 'aren't that sorta girls.'
We were an hour from the dropping point.
'Then what sorta girls are they?'
I've been given to understand that some Sicilians are like this.
But he was my friend, Giovanni Scalfaro. He could help me to save Solitaire, stop the headlines. If it wasn't too late.
I'd asked Cone about Pam Am Flight 907.
'It took off from Berlin at 6:17,' he'd said, 'and went off the screens twenty minutes later. The flight plan was New York via London. No radio contact since, still nothing on the screens. Pan Am have alerted their Emergency Procedures Information Centre and they're waiting for reports of wreckage.'
I didn't understand.
The object of this operation, Willi Hartman had told me in Berlin, is to place a bomb on board an international flight scheduled by one of the major US airlines.
Last night, when it had looked as if Nemesis had planned something bigger than a Lockerbie, I'd thought that Inge Stoph must have got it wrong when she'd told Willi about their plans. She smoked grass, and could have been high when she'd said that, wanted to shock him, Willi.
It didn't fit. The two Iranian pilots didn't fit into any plan for a Lockerbie operation. It signifies that they will die, the Arab at the palace had told me, before they sleep again. But it had been a Pan Am plane and they hadn't been flying it; we hadn't left Khatami behind in Berlin: he was here in Algeria. Nothing else fitted – Midnight One, the bearing, the zone somewhere in the Sahara – nothing.
It could be a coincidence.
I don't believe in them.
When I looked at the clock on the instrument panel again it read 22:00 hours – 10 p.m. I would be dropping in fifteen minutes.
It's 850 miles,' Cone had told me when he'd telephoned the hangar. 'The Aero L39 cruises at 454 mph at 16,400 feet.' The smoke had been rolling through the doorway, tinged with the glow from the fire. I'd thrown tarpaulins over Ibrahimi's body in case anyone came through there on a routine security check; then I'd holed up in an empty crate until the phone rang. 'He's using tip-tanks and reserves, so he can drop you over the zone and swing back and put down in Adrar to refuel. There's an airstrip there.'
We'd taken off at 8:16. Cone had been very fast, hotting up all the telephone wires in Algiers. The agent in place would have known the territory, where to find couriers, interpreters, weaponry, locksmiths, how to pull strings at the embassies, where to find transport, boats, planes, pilots, how to hire them, how much to pay.
Ten minutes ago, Giovanni Scalfaro had pointed downwards and to port. 'Adrar,' he'd said. There'd been a few lights, that was all. Now we were flying across darkness below, into the wastes of the Sahara. It would be like dropping, I thought, into mid-ocean.
'Did you hear,' I asked the Sicilian, 'about the Pan Am flight?'
He swung his head to look at me – 'Yes!' – and crossed himself.
'There's nothing been found yet?'
'Wait,' he said, 'I ask Rome,' and moved a hand to the radio.
Rome said there'd been some wreckage sighted in the North Sea, but it hadn't been identified. Pan Am Flight 907 hadn't come back on the screens, hadn't resumed radio contact.
'We will pray,' Scalfaro said. 'We will pray for them.'
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?'