Quiller.
Hear you.
Can you give me an approximate configuration?
Of these rocks?
Yes.
Stand by.
I switched off to save the batteries.
He'd begun thinking straight but it was going to be a nasty five minutes because there weren't many answers to the question and this was the one with the built-in dead-end to the mission.
The compass gave 14° — 194° for the elongation and I noted it and took the pad with me and it was like walking out of the shade into a molten gold wall. This was the eastern face and a lot of heat was coming off it because of seven or eight hours' pre-zenith absorption. I could feel the sweat drying on me as fast it came through the pores: there was no moisture when I passed a hand across my face.
I made my way clockwise.
Lizards scuttled across the broken shale on the ground they were quite big, a foot long, one of theIguanidae, and they didn't go far from where I passed, but froze with their angular heads lifted to watch me. Possibly they had never seen man before and their caution was primitively learned, the mistrust of an alien creature so large that it blotted out the sun.
South face and turning west.
The general configuration was oblong and the angles were clearly defined: the material was so hard that erosion hadn't rounded it. The sun and the night frosts had loosened the strata into laminations and the wind had worked at the result; in places the weathering force had left horizontal necks and the weight of the unsupported rock had brought it down so that now it leaned on the main structure in irregular buttresses, making shade. In these areas there were more lizards than nearer the open and I supposed their one enemy was the vulture.
No. 2 Fighter-Reconnaissance had said there weren't any other rocks within seven miles of this group. I thought about that for a minute and then gave it up.
West to north.
They watched me with their gold-ringed eyes. A pair of them turned their heads slowly as I passed, only one of them flashing into the crevice behind them with its long tail scattering the group of snail-shells in the hollow where they fed. At night there would sometimes be moisture here.
I thought seven miles.
If Loman got the precise bearing from the RAF we might work out the chancesbut they were almost niclass="underline" from this morning's trek the immediate reckoning was a minimum of fourteen hours by day, leaving out the factor of diminishing energy in terms of progressive fatigue. And the thing was self-cancelling because the more water I carried the more I'd use up.
North to camp.
My hand reached for the beaker and I stopped it and led it to the transceiver switch.
Tango.
Tango receiving.
Pencil ready?
Yes.
Overall shape: oblong. Elongation 14°- 194°. Direction clockwise. Five paces. Right-angle to left. Seven paces. Right-angle to right.
Pauses while he drew the shape.
Couldyou, mon ami, have made an error of seven miles?
Twenty-one paces. Oblique angle right: one-four-oh degrees. Six paces.
Two bastions of rock seven miles apart. Near one of them, a crashed plane.
Oblique angle right: one-two-oh degrees. Sixteen paces. Angle eight-oh. Fourteen paces.
A crashed plane confidently assumed to be visible at a distance of four hundred and eighty-five yards in a direction precisely established by air photograph.
Angle left: one-six-oh. Ten paces. Angle right: one-five-oh. Six paces.
Question: why is the plane not visible?
Make a straight-line return to the starting-point.
Bit of-bad luck,mon ami. We not only missed the target by seven miles but we made the drop so close to the wrong group of rocks that I naturally thought they -
Six paces?
What? I made it seven.
All right. The join isn't precise but no matter.
He loved things on paper. Loman loved things on paper. Also he loved things being precise. He loved to get things exact and it tended to blind him to reality and he didn't even give a thought to the fact that if you have to pace out a rock configuration with your boots kicking through rubble and the heat trying to knock you down and the sand giving way when you need to measure your paces correctly you won't finish up exactly where you started. You'd do it here, all right, but you wouldn't necessarily do it on paper. And that was where it really counted. Bloody Loman would tell you that.
Steady. Anger — heat — sweat — thirst. Don't forget where you are.
Not his fault. I was having to wait, that was all. He was looking at the photograph now, looking at the sketch and then at the photograph. Taking his time.
Christ I can't go seven miles.
Fourteen hours' minimum through that blinding furnace and finish up delirious and the last drop gone.
The definition on the air photograph wasn't too clear because they'd blown it up to the point where the grain would start fogging so he probably wouldn't be able to match the narrow end of the formation where the pacing went six and six and five, all short runs, but the overall shape ought to give him an answer.
Sweat in my eyes. In the shade here it wasn't evaporating so fast. Pronounced heart-beat: quite regular and perfectly normal in these conditions. Thud-thud-thud.
Looking at the photograph, then at the sketch. The girl watching him. I didn't know if he'd got juxtaposed stills of the terrain surrounding the target area and I wasn't going to ask him because that'd be another nasty one if both outcrops had much the same shape at this degree of blow-up. The girl watching him.
You there, Diane?
Yes.
How's tricks?
All right.
Lovely day, isn't it?
Yes.
Tried to say it with a smile, couldn't make it. Nerves in her voice, nothing explicit, just a tenseness. I suppose she knew the score, worked out what we were doing, didn't like it, none of us did. Rotten having to wait.
He said
Those are the right ones.
Shut my eyes and said:
Oh that's good.
I'm going to ask those people to confirm everything for us, the scale, orientation, and particularly the distance and bearing of Tango Victor from the rocks. Someone might have made a slip.
Just what we need.
It's a possibility we have to consider.
How long will it take, Loman?
Perhaps thirty minutes.
Kaifra — Tunis — Crowborough — London. No delay at all from Kaifra to the Embassy because he'd use the radio and the signals room in Tunis would use their own. Crowborough — London was the slow bit, by normal telephone.
I want to be out there longer than that.
He still hadn't told me to get moving and I didn't like it: he sounded too bloody relaxed. The panic had gone because we knew now that we were at least in the target area but he still ought to be worried because the aeroplane had disappeared.
You're camped in the shade at present?