The Tango Briefing

17: MARAUDER

They were Unicorn Brand but that was all I knew about them. The important thing was that they were British made and therefore likely to have fewer duds among them than a Continental make, so that the odds against this kind of operation succeeding were considerably lower even though it was a strictly one-shot set-up without a hope of another go.

The oxygen carrier might have been anything, potassium chlorate, manganese dioxide or possibly lead oxide, with the usual sulphur for the flame-burst medium mixed with dextrin, powdered glass and so on for the binding and striking agents. The actual splint would have been treated with sodium silicate or ammonium phosphate as an impregnation against afterglow and although in this climate it was tinder dry I decided to throw directly into the fuel tank orifice while ignition was still in progress rather than wait for the flame to become established because the air rush could blow it out.

There was an area of danger during the actual setting-up of the operation. I had gone to lean against the Fiat instead of the Citroen GT because there wasn't a hinged panel over the petrol cap: a panel would have made a noise springing open and I would have had to stand slightly away from the bodywork to give it room, which would have exposed my hands and the panel itself. With nothing more than the half-turn cap to take off it had been a pushover even with my hands behind me and no one had seen what I was doing because finger movement alone was necessary, the forearm and wrist remaining perfectly still.

The area of danger had involved the petrol cap itself once I'd removed it: I couldn't put it into my pocket without their seeing it, so I'd had to leave it wedged between my spine and the body panel in order to leave my hands free to get the matches and strike them; and the whole operation would have been abortive if for any reason I'd had to lean away from the car because the petrol cap would have dropped with quite a lot of noise.

There'd been a certain amount of strain on the nerves because the fact was that two lives and the end-phase of a priority mission were now depending on a blob of chemicals literally as small as a match head and this resulted in quite normal but dangerous purpose tremor when the time came to bring out the matches: my fingers weren't steady as I struck the first one and I had to get over this by considering a simple enough fact: that if nothing at all had depended on doing this thing properly I could have done it at the very least a dozen times with perfect success. In other words I was on an odds-on favourite at twelve to one so there wasn't any real need to worry.

I think my fingers had been quite steady again in the instant before I struck the second match but there wasn't time to give it any attention. The operation was now in final sequence and almost automatic: the match had to be moved through a hundred and eighty degrees laterally and downwards approximately forty degrees from the horizontal and the eye would pick up the target at once because it was well defined as a dark hole in a light-coloured panel. The actual timing was critical but presented no physical problem: all I had to do was swing half round with my right hand moving downwards during the ignition phase, allowing almost two full seconds for the manoeuvre — more than twice as long as I needed for the muscular commands and responses.

The ignition was normal and I waited for the oxygen release from the carrier and the formation of sulphur dioxide with heat increase before I turned and threw the match into the fuel orifice. At this stage the chemical process was becoming rapid and the final oxygen release almost explosive and I got clear and let the petrol cap drop to the roadway.

Hassan didn't have any time to react. The mental process involving the sequence of surprise, suspicion, comprehension and physical avoidance commands was much too long and I doubt if he'd done more than assume the startle posture, head forward and shoulders hunched, before the fumes caught. He was standing, in effect, directly in front of a flame-thrower.

The timing of the main explosion wasn't important. Both Hassan and one of his men were in the immediate flame area and were thus technically out of action as soon as I threw the match. My target was the man standing seven or eight feet away towards the Citroen GT and I went for him in the same movement that got me clear of the explosion.

He didn't have a chance and I knew that. His surprise phase would last much longer than it would take me to reach him: two seconds ago the night had been quiet and he had been party to a situation affording him absolute power and he was now faced visually with a conflagration that covered seventy-five per cent of his static field of view and mentally with a reversal of concepts difficult to accept without a sense of unreality. He was moving instinctively into a half crouch when I spun the sub-machine-gun to break his hold on it and flung it clear and dropped him and went for the other man.

There was bright flamelight now and a lot of noise. Hassan was screaming and trying to roll over but he was a torch and the petrol was still flooding across the roadway and making a sea of fire and I had to keep clear as I went for the fourth man. The one who'd been standing near Hassan wasn't making any noise and I think the initial burst of flame had asphyxiated him and sent him down without any chance of getting away. I saw Diane still standing near the front of the Fiat and starting to move for the ambulance and then I was coming up on the fourth man and having to dodge because he'd begun pumping his gun as a reflex action and the stuff was going into the roadway and sending up clods of tar before he saw me and swung round and I felt the blast of three successive shots as I went low and got his legs.

Sudden rattling almost as loud as the gun itself as the aim went wild and the shells began hitting the Fiat behind me, sharpness of cordite in the lungs and somewhere in the middle of everything the unmistakable sounds of Hassan dying and then my hands closed and I dragged the fourth man off balance with his feet kicking upwards, split-second image of his face terrified in the flamelight then I chopped once and took the gun and slung it skittering across the sandy road and finished him and started back towards the ambulance.

Fell against something.

Oh Christ someone saying, fumes very strong, myself saying it, get up but my hands slid, part of the Fiat, front end, couldn't get up.

The effort demanded hadn't been great but total resources had been called upon suddenly and factors like oxygen needs and blood supply to the muscles and brain had become involved, bad enough if I'd kept up the effort till the organism rediscovered its rhythm but worse because the relative falloff in terms of effort was precipitous: all I was having to do now was move from the flame area to the ambulance and it didn't take much doing and reaction was getting time to set in.

Roaring and the red light blinding, hello we'll have to watch that won't we, hitting something again, bumpers, up but I couldn't then bloody well try again or you'll burn alive, a sleeve of the white coat catching you're in for it now if you don't take an interest but the fumes choking and the heat fierce look out that's the wrong way, this way or you'll fry andget that coatoff, get it off.

Lights through the dark, the billowing dark of the smoke and the lights flooding through it, greenish and very clear and not the orange-red colour of the fire, somebody moving a car coming nearer, the ambulance why don't youbloody well get up. Yes better now, the air more breathable. The stars spinning headlong across the roof of the night andlook where you're going for Christ sake, that's better, steady now there's no need to panic, everything's under control.

Door swung and I pitched in and slammed it.

She drove hard and just before we left the area I saw them lying there, three of them blackening, one of them still trying to crawl through the dying flames. This was satisfactory and it had been easier for them, even this, than what they would have done to her, and later to me.

She drove well but the sobbing wouldn't stop and she had to keep straightening up from the wheel, her tears bright in the back-glow from the headlamps. She hadn't seen anything like that before and the spasms kept shaking her and when I could manage it I said all right, I'll drive now.

'Sorry I'm late.'

'We've only just got here ourselves.'

I thought it was civil of them. They were both in their flying-suits, one short, one tall, no indication of rank or service branch, strictly incognito, but the Mk XI Marauder outside on the tarmac had the standard roundels on it: I'd seen it in the docking bay when I'd driven into the airport.

I suppose they felt they shouldn't go on looking at me like this without asking something about it because the short one said:

'Have you had an accident?'

'Not really.'

It annoyed me because I hadn't had time to clean up since the petrol tank thing and I didn't have any time now so they could keep their bloody remarks to themselves.

'Are you Mr Gage?'

'Yes.'

,'Would you like some coffee?'

'Yes '

We were in the bar alongside the Metropolitan Departure gate: they'd been waiting here because they couldn't miss me when I came through the main doors of the building, and their own coffee hadn't long arrived.

We sat down at the little table and I said don't wait for me so they started stirring and the short one said:

'Lovely weather, isn't it?'

There weren't many people around: the boy making the coffee behind the bar, a holy man wrapped in hisgandourah and his dreams in the corner by the Kodak stand, a young French couple perched half-asleep on a pile of baggage, a clerk in a fez coming through the doors and crossing the hall. There was no sound of any flying.

Thoughts not a hundred per cent coherent because the pressure had come off, total energy output in progress fifteen minutes ago and now I was waiting for a cup of coffee and the nerves were having to adjust. But present situation comfortable and that was a help and besides she'd have reached base by now: I'd dropped her as near as it had been possible without exposing the image of the ambulance all over the place, no this one's Diane, our youngest, we've just had a call from her today, as a matter of fact, from Tunisia, she sounded quite homesick but otherwise fit. Yes, isn't she pretty?

Satisfactory.

'What?' I asked him.

'I said the weather's nice.'

'Yes. The trouble is it brings the insects out and you get them all over the windscreen, one firefly after another.'

So the tall one got the envelope out and gave it to me and I opened it and looked at the three photographs, mug-shot coverage with two profiles and a full face, and began tearing them up while they drank their coffee.

Everyone still looked all right, but the clerk in the fez had gone into the phone-box near the check-out counter and it occurred to me that they could have been his headlights I'd seen in the mirror when I'd turned into the car park.

I drank my coffee. It was hot and bitter and I could taste the caffeine and I needed its heat and its alkaloid and I took it into my mouth slowly, as if it were ambrosia. They talked to each other about nothing in particular, a wonderful place to bring their wives, all those stars and palm-trees, talked to each other as if I weren't there or wouldn't be interested, letting me drink in peace, perhaps, and gather my strength.

Presumably without significance: a lot of people would come here to the airport to use the phones, the post office wasn't open at this time of night.

'How big's this thing?'

'I'm sorry?'

'This thing you've got for me. How big is it?'

I was getting fed-up because one or two bits of glass were trying to work out and I smelt of singed hair and they were obviously wondering where the hell I'd been and I wasn't going to tell them, none of their bloody business.

Then they were talking in short embarrassed sentences and the penny dropped and I pulled my sleeve up higher, looking at my watch, after all they'd got their orders and they'd brought something pretty deadly for me in the Marauder.

'We could go and look at it,' the short one said. 'I expect you've been told it's flashpoint-zero freight.'

'Well, I didn't think it was a piss-pot.'

They shut up for a bit and I finished my coffee, wondering how far he'd been, Ahmed, from the scene of the fire when I'd left there: he'd been on his way and the ambulance was a distinctive vehicle and I hadn't been feeling bright enough to worry too much about headlights in the mirror so long as they didn't come any closer.

I didn't know what he looked like, Ahmed.

Incipient torpor and I was aware of it objectively, didn't feel at all like making an effort but there was a lot to do and I jerked my head up and thought watch it you're not safe.

'Let's go and look at it then.'

They said all right and we got up and they paid and the padded nylon legs of their flying-suits made a faintzoop, zoop, zoop as we walked through the hall.

The clerk in the fez had left the telephone-box and was crossing towards the main doors. I didn't know whether he looked like a clerk in a fez, Ahmed.

It was better in the fresh air and I lost the dangerous urge to fall asleep as the caffeine began working on the nerves. There was a police guard on the Marauder, a young Tunisian with a peaked cap and white gauntlets and a holstered pistol, very smart and rather self-conscious because he wasn't used to being on special duty. We walked into the smell of kerosene and hot alloys and PVC and the short one climbed aboard so I assumed he was the pilot and the tall one ushered me on to the metal step and followed me up.

The flight cabin was roomier than I'd expected, with a chart-table and an astrodome and two freight lockers: the Marauder Mk XI was a modified version of the original Mk IX short-range bomber and Tactical Air Command used it for the kind of work that the standard models would have jibbed at.

'Shut that door, will you?'

'Right.'

The pilot opened the lockers and brought out two black rectangular containers with top and end grips and brass combination locks, one of them looking lighter than the other by the way he handled them. Both had Bostik airtight sealing with rip-wire opening provision but there weren't any labels and I assumed it was because anyone in charge of this cargo would know what it was without having to read about it.

I picked them up one at a time. The smaller one was very heavy, about four times the weight of a medium portable typewriter but not much bigger.

'What are they?'

'M'mm? Not sure, actually.'

'Oh for Christ's sake can't you — '

'No, we can't. Awfully sorry.'

Typical armed services security attitude, so bloody coy about everything, of course theyknew what this cargo was. In any case I didn't want more than three guesses because in London-to-base signals exchanges it was called a 'device' so these were obviously two components of one unit and you'd have to fit them together before they'd work. The only thing I didn't really know was why Control was sending me a nuclear bomb with no prior instructions.

'I'll bring the car over.'

'Fair enough.'

They slid the door back for me and I climbed down and began walking across the tarmac and saw a pair of headlights just dimming out among the trees on the far side of the car park where the ambulance was. Three more cars had got here since I'd arrived and I could see movement along the road from the town: a string of vehicles using only their sidelights. So he did in fact look like a clerk in a fez, Ahmed, and he'd called in the whole of his reserves and there wasn't a hope of getting that device as far as base, not a hope in hell.