Royal Sahara.
Mais qu'est-ce-que vous avez, m'sieu'?
Rien, un petit accident sur la route.
II vous Taut des soins?
Non, c'est fait. Du sommeil, c'est tout.
In Room 37, air-conditioning, wonderfully cooclass="underline" I turned it off and opened the window and let the heat in, like opening an oven door, get used to it, be worse out there in Longitude 8°3′ by Latitude 30°4′, start adapting and don't bloody well gripe.
Sleep.
Loman dragged me out of dreams of flying glass and Corinne swathed in bandages, it's the strain on the arms she was saying.
03.45.
'No. Were you?
'No.'
He sounded relieved about this because it had been the tags on Fyson that had led to the bomb thing and he didnt' want his executive blown from under him before he could mount the op.
'I'm speaking from base. We shall need a little more time to set up the radio, so the next rdv is for 15.00 hours tomorrow at theAuberge Yasmina, rue des Singes. Please repeat.'
Straight out of the bloody book, that's Loman for you.
I said I've got that and the thing went dead with a rather pettish click.
The Arab screamed, lurching backwards till he struck the wall and crouched there with his withered brown hands flung out in protection, the scarecrow body shaking under the robes, the old eyes staring in terror and the mouth fixed in the scream that was dying now, its energy exhausted.
Then hideously he began again, the sound shrilling out of until quick heels came tapping and a needle flashed and he collapsed like a sack of bones, whimpering.
Ibal f-al Sma, u-tez kbiz Ili khal Sams…
The nurse tried to lift him and I got up.
'Puis-je vous aider?'
'Okay,' the big man said.
He lifted the Arab and stood with him in his arms.
'There were magnetic storms,' the girl said, 'it is often the way.' She led the big man through the passage and into a room on the other side as footsteps neared, hurrying. The scream had woken the place up.
Mountains in the sky, and great birds darkening the heavens…
The driller came back and said: 'Holy cats. Enough to make you knock off the booze!' He sat down, the sweat shining on his big red face and along his arms as he took packet of Gauloises and offered me one. 'Giving it up?' He scratched a match for himself. 'Magnetic storms my arse they're checking the bread supplies down at the research station, you know that? Everybody know it's ergot. You been here long, buster?'
'Not long.'
'He ain't the only case, there's others. Six months ago there was an outbreak in Mali, thousand miles south of here. You heard of ergot?'
'Grain fungus.'
'That's it. There was a case in France, remember? Half a village went loco. You with the Petrocombine outfit?'
'Attached.'
'I'm Bob Vickers, South 5.'
'Charles Gage.'
He had a hand like an earth-shovel.
'We've got trouble. Smashed a core-drill on a fault, four thousand deep.'
The nurse came back and told him to put his cigarette out and began work on my dressings.
'Okay, dolly. You free tonight?'
Another truck drummed past the building, heading south to Camp 4. The windows vibrated and sand flew against the glass. They'd woken me at dawn, the trucks: this was the last oasis-town before the drilling complex nearer the frontier.
'What happened to you, Charlie?'
'I ran off the road.'
'Join the club. Mine was a horned viper — see that?'
He showed me the fang-marks.
'Can you pull this sleeve off, please?'
The clinical smell of Dermo-Cuivre.
You busters hit any oil yet down at South 4?'
'Would I tell you?'
His laugh boomed like a cannon.
'You can relax, Charlie, I'm a godless bum. If my contract ends before they get that drill out I'm moving right over to Anglo-Belge, okay? Bob Vickers works for the highest bidder.'
He picked up theTribune that lay on top of the pile.
'How long will this take?'
'Perhaps a little time.' Her smile was quick but there was a flicker to the olive-brown eyes: the Arab had unnerved her. 'There are many pieces of glass.'
They'd been cutting their way out as the organism rejected them and I'd come here because I didn't want the lacerations to start opening up again later when the mission was running and the stress came on.
'How long have you got to live?'
'You mean me?'
'With a horned viper bite.'
His laugh boomed again and a spoon tinkled in a beaker. 'Holy cats, that was four days ago. I'm just here for the routine blood-test, so take your time.'
She irrigated again and another fragment rang into the enamel bowl. The windows of the Chrysler had been given a shrapnel effect by the blast.
At 09.00 this morning on Radio Tunis I'd heard that Loman had put immediate smoke out. By the sources quoted I knew he must have reached half a dozen major night-desks via the Embassy signals-room and his story was accepted on the principle that to a jaded night-editor looking for a last-minute flash, one rumour was as good as another.
An “official enquiry” had 'established that Mr C. W. Gage, a British geophysical consultant on business in Tunis, had narrowly escaped being the innocent victim of an error on the part of “certain political activists” when the car he was hiring exploded in the street. The enquiry led to the discovery that the man — so far un-named — who had hired the car immediately prior to Mr Gage was a known member of the fanatical United Arab Front organization, and it was therefore “confidently believed” that this man had been the intended victim.
It was routine cover.
I don't know what the actual figures are but a big percentage of people in my trade finish up at the wrong end of a bang and even the public has an idea that a law-abiding citizen can get into his car quite often without being blasted into Christendom. The classic statement to the press is that “he didn't have an enemy in the world” and it won't always wash with the public and it won't ever wash with the background monitoring sections of the major intelligence networks because they automatically send for pictures and if they recognize the face they want to know what X was doing in Tunis or Cairo or Bonn and there'll be a directive for someone to find out.
So today they'd pick up the radio story and tomorrow they'd be looking at my picture in Washington and Moscow and Peking and pressing the buzzer and saying go and see if you can find out what the London lot are doing in North Africa.
The smoke Loman had put out wouldn't provide total cover but it was the best he could do and he'd done it. The only thing that worried me, by its implications, was the fact that today he'd have to do the same thing again because Radio Tunis had also reported that the body of another Englishman had been found floating in the harbour late last night and that his name was Fyson.
TheAuberge Yasmina was a decaying French Colonial residence with gilded cupolas and a forecourt buried under the shade of rotting palms where I could hear rats running. The sun's rays penetrated only in places, making pools of light on the crumbling mosaic floor.
The door hung open and I went inside. After the glare of the street it seemed almost dark in here but I could see a figure, robed in white and motionless in the middle of the hall.
'Ahlah ou sahlan.'
By the angle of his head I saw that he was looking slightly away from me, and because the stranger's footstep had worried him I answered quickly: Saha. Ala slametek. In North Africa they are only just beginning to control sandfly trachoma.