Yes.
I want you to stay there for the moment. I'm in signals and London is monitoring.
Didn't like it all and the sweat was running into my eyes, what was he in signals for at this phase?
For Christ sake fill me in, Loman.
I just want you to stay at your base so that I can call you immediately if I need to. I take it you'd prefer not to carry the transceiver about in the full sun.
I know that bit.
Five-second pause.
Chirac has reported.
He all right?
Oh yes. But he didn't find the wind he needed, so he had to circle for several hours to gain enough height to make a final run-in through dead air. He came down in agassitwenty kilometres from South 5 and they picked him up in a half-track.
Oh Christ, there'd been some kind of security leak, smell it a mile off. He wasn't relaxed at all, he was just over-correcting again.
Did he report by phone?
Yes. He hadn't been able to begin his final run-in until shortly after dawn, and he says he was observed by an aircraft at considerably higher altitude.
Worse than I'd thought.
What area, Loman?
Quite a long pause. Didn't want to worry his executive. All the worrying was meant to be done at Local Control.
Not far from the point of drop. He puts it at something like fifteen kilometres from there. He was flying in the dark for most of the time and couldn't even see the No. 1 Philips tower or the Roches Brunes derrick.
I couldn't see why Loman had to get into signals with Control. And I was beginning to think I didn't want to know. You don't bring in London on a local security leak unless the whole thing's been bust wide open.
What was the aircraft registration?
He couldn't read it.
Too high?
Yes.
I had to think how exactly to say it.
Loman, have we still got a mission?
It was a bloody awful thing to ask your director in the field and I knew that but I wanted the answer.
Let us hope so.
There was a faint crackling noise somewhere. Not from the set. I looked past the edge of the canopy.
Quiller.
Hear you.
What is that noise?
Lizard, cracking a snail open.
He didn't bother to answer.
I looked out from the canopy across the blaze of sand, for an instant seeing it, then seeing it vanish.
Loman, I want to go out there.
Not yet.
While I'm fresh. Let me go and look for the bloody thing. It must be there somewhere.
Certainly it must. But we have to wait for London.
Bloody London, gets on your tits.
Switching oft transmit.
Very well, but stay open to receive.
Had to drink some water, then I lay on my back and decided not to think about the aircraft that had been observing Chirac only fifteen kilometres from the point of drop, Loman's headache, not mine, though of course when the crunch came I'd be right in it, like that poor bloody snail
Slept.
Tango.
Check: 13.19. Switch.
Tango receiving.
I have London's signal. Monitoring liaison with Algiers informs that five squadrons of desert-reconnaissance helicopters are to search a prescribed area of which your own position is approximately the centre.
I watched the lizard. It had found another one and the crackling noise began.
When do they start?
They are already airborne.
12: SANDSTORM
I stood watching them.
They were quite high, about five hundred feet, but their shape and their flight were unmistakable: they drifted in circles, their wings held like black hoods to trap the air. From this distance I couldn'tsee their heads but theywere watching me: despite their feigned disinterest I was the focal point of their circling.
I hadn't noticed them before but they'd probably been somewhere overhead since early this morning, attracted by the movement of the dot that had been making its laborious way among the dunes towards the rock outcrop. Their patient observation heightened my feeling of vulnerability and I had the urge to go back to the refuge that thirty minutes ago I'd been sharing with the lizards.
Nobody likes being watched, and this was particularly unpleasant because I was being assessed as potential carrion.
I moved again, trying not to drag my feet and leave tracks. The heat of the sun was like a weight on my back, pushing me down rather than forward, and its light struck upwards against my face, reflecting from the sand. I knew that the water-flask was still a quarter full and was tempted to drink, but when I'd broken camp and pushed everything into the shade I'd noticed that one of thebidons was already empty. In the last ten hours I'd used half the water-supply, pouring it into my body as you pour water on a fire.
The desert is not like other places. The slaking of the increased thirst puts back only fifty per cent of the water lost in the cooling process, and in this degree of heat my cooling process was breaking down because the sweat was being evaporated the instant it reached the skin. In one hour I was generating seven or eight hundred calories and my sweat was ridding me of less than five.
Sometimes their shadows drifted near me as they crossed the sun.
At the four hundred and eighty-fifth pace I stopped.
Long. 8°3′ by Lat. 30°4′.
The sands were smooth.
Loman hadn't received confirmation from No. 2 Fighter Reconnaissance before I'd left camp: I'd told him I wanted a last chance to find Tango Victor before the helicopters got here. But I knew now that I should have waited, because give or take a few yards I was standing where the smudge had been on the photograph. Somewhere they'd made an error: the scale had lost a nought or the bearing had been inverted and this wasn't where the smudge was at all.
The wreck of Tango Victor was across the dunes there, or a thousand yards the other side of the rocks, not far away, ten minutes on foot in normal conditions. Here the conditions weren't normal and it could take me an hour or five hours to find it because the dunes were higher than I was and in some places I couldn't see more than a hundred yards: I was moving through a maze.
A bird's-eye view was the only way and five squadrons had been mustered and refuelled at the nearest airfield to these rocks: Fort Thiriet was a hundred and thirty kilometres distant and the helicopters had been deployed in a sweep formation of sixty aircraft on a twenty-five kilometre front to the immediate north of the Areg Tinrhales and they were heading this way while I stood and cursed some stupid bloody clerk in uniform who'd finished the mission for us before it began.
The pressure was finally on and there was nothing I could do about it. There was data streaming in so fast that I couldn't deal with it: the overall picture they never like giving us was coming up under the hypo. The Chirac security leak had been bad luck and not his fault but it had revealed the importance of the objective in the eyes of the opposition: all they'd been informed was that a camouflaged sailplane had been observed over the open desert at dawn today, but an entire arm of the Algerian Air Force had been assembled across the country and deployed from FortThiriet, an airfield right onthe Libyan border.