The Tango Briefing

18: CHRONOMETER

Receiving you.

Shook him a bit: he was having to think.

Q-Quaker high Rharbi imp trans mat awheel.

Dation?

Croydon indigo.

I'd had to get him on the Embassy wavelength and use speech-code because this thing hadn't got an auto scrambler. Chirac had either left my KW 200 °CA in the desert or brought it back for Loman to pick up and whichever it was he'd know I couldn't use it so he would have shut down that wavelength while he was in signals with London through the Embassy.

UMF?

I asked one of them and he said twelve minutes.

Synchronize please.

Double-oh two nine.

Plus twelve.

UMF double-oh four one.

He didn't say anything for a minute and I left him to it and looked down at the lights of a village as we began turning. The pilot had agreed we ought to set our course for Malta because that was where he'd told Kaifra he was going. Then we'd turn back and make a loop across the desert and go in from the south.

'Are we off their screens?'

'I don't know their range at Kaifra but fifty miles ought to be good enough because there's no other traffic.'

He was in the navigator's seat, the tall one. They were both cheerful enough but we all knew it was going to be a real swine and some of the jokes had got a bit thin since we'd taken off.

I watched the glow of the village and the white dome of a mosque reflecting the starlight as we came round in the turn.

I suppose we needn't have taken the trouble to head for Malta before we got off their screens but the Ahmed cell was badly up against it and they might decide to go into the control tower and ask questions at gun-point.

Loman was still sulking. He'd been thinking everything was all right because when I dropped her I told her I was going to the airport to keep the rendezvous and pick up the device and now he knew everything was all wrong because I ought not to be somewhere over Rharbi at ten thousand feet and he was having to face an entirely new pattern of hazards at zero notice. Well, that was what he was for.

'Feeling the cold?'

'We're not going to be stuck up here forever. '

'Frankly I wish we were.'

He laughed but we didn't join in. They'd jibbed at first but I said they'd got to try so they'd worked things out and the pilot had said all right we'll have a go but this dolly weighs sixty-three thousand pounds with the amount of fuel she'll have on board at our ETA and if we can't pull up she'll drag half the strip into the desert, so long as those oil-drilling chaps don't mind.

It occurred to me that base might have gone off the air.

Hear me?

Hear you.

Is Fred all right?

Perfectly.

Reprimand in his tone and he could bloody well keep it. Fred was the standard speech-code name for any third member of an active cell and I wanted to know how she was because the last time I'd seen her there'd been tears running down her sooty little face and if anyone of us survived this trip I'd see those scaly bastards wrote her off the books before they did anything else.

My eyes kept shutting and the navigator said something and I missed it and got my head up again.

'What?'

'Isthere any chance of a flarepath on that strip?'

'No. They don't night-fly.'

'I see.' He said it rather stiffly.

'You've got landing-lights, haven't you?'

'Fortunately, yes.'

He didn't like me any more than Loman did but I couldn't help that. I think he was trying to find an excuse to call up the Air Ministry through Malta and get official permission for the captain to hazard his ship but he couldn't do it in front of me because it'd be embarrassing: they'd been ordered to make this rdv with an over-ranking contact and that meant that whether they were pilot officers or air-vicemarshals they still had to do what I told them, otherwise they'd have turned me down flat about the South 6 thing and I knew that.

Quaker.

Hear you.

Friday Croydon indigo.

Roger.

I gave them back the headset.

Friday was rdv so he'd meet me at South 6 and presumably I wouldn't have to lug these rotten things as far as base and that was something.

Then I suppose I just went to sleep because there wasn't anything else I had to do. She was rolling about in the flames and I was trying to pull her clear and he was saying we'll be down in three minutes so you'd better get into this thing.

'What thing?'

He was rigging some fabric stays across the freight-locker section and I gave him a hand because even if we didn't hit anything we were going to turn on an awful lot of deceleration on a strip that short and I didn't want to go through the front window.

'Have you got room to turn round?'

'Just about.'

'Okay, then turn round and squat down with your back to it.'

The pilot moved the flaps and we began running through eiderdowns and they were both rather young considering their responsibilities so I said:

'I'm sorryabout this.'

'Oh that's okay. It's just that these dollies are so terribly expensive and we're always being told about the tax-payers money.'

The noise waspretty hellish because of the surface and the reversed thrust and I thought the nose-leg must have folded back on impact but the angle was still roughly horizontal. Then the brakes came on and I was pressed backwards into the fabric sling like a pea in a catapult and one of them was shouting to the other one, something aboutdistance but I couldn't hear the rest of it. A lot of low-pitch vibration coming in as the air-frame took the strain, smellof hot rubber, be awkward if we hit a bad patch and the lockers burst open, not that anything could go off but we'd been to a lot of trouble getting it here, vibration starting to hammer and someone yellingwon't make it and I thought oh Christ can't we ever get anything right, the front leg taking the brunt of the shocks and everything trying to shake loose in the flight compartment, of course they'd known it would be like this and that's why they'd looked at me as if I was barmy when I told them we'd got to do it.

Hit my shoulder when they dropped me through and a hand caught at me and then there was a dreadful quietness and there was Loman sitting sideways on the front seat with his arm hooked across the squab and his pale eyes watching me and I said we got down all right did we?

'Yes.'

He didn't look very pleased.

I absorbed the environment: Chrysler. I was on the back seat with a rug over me.

Zenith: 00.56. The ETA had been 00.41. I don'tlikegaps in the timing.

'What happened?'

'In what precise way?'

Talked like a schoolmistress. He was very rattled.

'To the aircraft.'

'They wrote off the undercarriage.'

'Isthat all?'

'It's quite sufficient.'

There was an engine starting up somewhere but I couldn't see anything. We were parked alongside the hangar and the echo was coming back, sounded like a chopper. I listened to it and Loman didn't talk: he'd stopped looking at me now and sat watching the road that ran from the main gates of the camp to the south end of the airstrip where the windsock drooped against the starfields.

'Is it for me?'

'What?'

'That chopper'

'Yes.' He sounded edgy, even for Loman.

I suppose the waiting was getting on his nerves. The Ahmed cell had seen the Marauder go up and it wouldn't be long before they heard it had come down all over the South 6 strip instead of Malta and they'd get here as fast as they could. Loman knew they were on to it because if there'd been no one getting in my way at Kaifra Airport I would have left there by road.

The helicopter was being warmed up, a comfortablethropthrop-throp from its rotor, aurally hypnotic, my head going down, then she said London wanted to know the position, her voice about normal. not still upset or anything.

Loman said he'd send it direct.

Situ Croydon indigo point skygo redmins point Q-Quaker able light-time standby ending point object present go conditters point Tango out…

I thought he was being a bit optimistic but I suppose he was worried about getting a blast if he sounded too doubtful: they were already having to absorb the Marauder switch into their thinking and it didn't take much to send them hysterical. The whole of this area was on the plotting table at the Bureau and they'd just received a situation signal and in spite of Loman's optimism they knew we were in a distinct red sector because the Marauder had made a lot of noise coming down and every opposition cell would have been alerted: they'd got me out of the plane before anyone had come along to see what had made the crump but quite a gang of day-shift drillers had gone down the airstrip from the living-quarters and the crew were still there explaining about engine trouble and forced landing conditions and all that cock and it wouldn't be long before every camel-driver in Kaifra knew that a foreign military aircraft had gone into South 6 by night.

London would be sweating because what ought to have happened was that I should have taken the device by road from the airport to base for Loman to brief me on it and what had happened was that I'd arranged for us both to be sitting here with the thing on our lap and hoping to Christ nobody found us before we got airborne. At the first sign of an adverse party in this area Loman would quietly melt into the middle distance because the director in the field is never actually meant to operate in the field but only from local base, on the double principle that he's not trained in unarmed combat and if a mission blows up there has to be someone to take home the pieces and have them analysed to the hope that one fine day someone's going to profit from the lesson.

Loman would take the device with him because it was expensive and injurious and that would leave me on my own to do what I could but I wasn't in a condition to do very much and although he'd told them that Q-Quaker was able they wouldn't think much of my chances. So London was having the sweats.

Tango.

Tango receiving.

Embassy wants a repeat on 'redmins'.

They can have it.

She went off the air.

'Is that my end of the blower you've got there?'

'No,' he said.

I believed the little bastard. He'd told Chirac to leave my transceiver in the desert when he'd picked me up because I'd need it again and there wasn't any point in dropping it a second time in an area where there were rocks that could bust it up.

'Are you sending me back there, Loman? '

'We don't know yet.'

'Oh yes you bloody well do.'

Throp-throp-throp.

01.17.

Chirac shut off and the rotor began slowing above our heads. I hadn't taken a lot of notice when I'd come aboard but I had a look around now and saw that the little necessities of life were here all right: two parachutes and the two black containers.

'What's in that thing?'

'Cous-cous, mon ami.'

'I'm not hungry.'

'You will be,' Loman said. He sat peering through the curved Perspex like a goldfish in a bowl. From what I could see of it we were ina gassi between low dunes.

'Where are we?'

'In agassi.'

'I know that.'

Chirac set the fuel taps at off. 'We are ten kilometres from Petrocombine South 5 and eleven kilometres from Kaifra.'

I tried to think where that was, but any kind of mental effort induced a kind of grey-out and I gave it up because it didn't seem to be anywhere in particular.

'Why here, Loman?'

'It's neutral ground.' He'd stopped peering through the Perspex bubble and was watching me critically. 'You have three hours in which to get some sleep, so I suggest you do that.'

He looked so depressed that I felt sorry for him, as far as you can feel sorry for a man like Loman.

'All right.' I wanted to ask him a few things because it was now 01.18.55 on the Zenith and he was going to let me sleep till 04.18.55 and that meant he'd got me lined up for a dawn drop unless Control threw us a new one during the night; but if he was in the mood to give me any answers I didn't want to have to work them out, singing in the ears, a sensation of floating, the tick-tick-tick of the chronometer near my head. 'Loman.'

'Yes?'

'Have we still got a mission running?'

All I heard as his voice went faint was something about London and I suppose he was saying depends on.

First stage, second stage and detonator.

He showed me three times: annular clamp, by-pass conduit, main body-locking with three-start threads. It was easy enough but I didn't object to the repetitions because you had to do it properly or the thing wouldn't go off.

'It's essential that no sand enters these threads.'

'Noted. How powerful is this model?'

'It has the equivalent of one hundred tons of trinitrotoluene. The Americans have used similar devices in the Sahara for blasting wells, but this one has been modified for a groundburst operation, reducing fall-out and giving a low Mach wave with a relatively small residual radiation range.'

'In figures?'

'One thousand yards. In still air with low humidity you will be safe at one mile, and should set the timer accordingly.'

So it was a mini but the soot-black finish and the castellated retaining nuts and the knowledge that it would bring down the Post Office Tower at one blow gave it a potent aspect. It was so very quiet, standing on its flat end with the three of us crouched around it.

'Pouf!'said Chirac,'hein?'

He turned away and opened the polyester picnic box and took out the Thermos ofcous-cous. There was no meat with it and we used two of the plastic bowls. Loman said he'd eaten not long before we'd made the rdv at South 6 and so had Chirac probably but you'll get a Frenchman joining you at any time and in any place and with whatever kind of menu but especially an hour before dawn in the Sahara if it'scous-cous.

I'd slept for most of the allotted period but Loman had been talking to London quite a bit and I'd partly heard some of the panic: a lot of the trouble was that the signals had had to go from here to Kaifra to Tunis to Crowborough to London and back and had involved three automatic scramblers and two codes and the normal telephone delay between Crowborough and Control, but most of the panic was over the need to liaise the Bureau's international monitoring facilities with the controller running the mission and to do it within the few hours left before dawn. The local situation here was known and the risks calculated, but additionally London was using what amounted to a scanner that would pickup any event internationally that might have a bearing on the end-phase of the Tango mission: if for example the president of the United Arab Republic happened to be assassinated at any given moment then London would get the news almost immediately through the monitoring facilities and Control might realize straight awaythat an Egyptian cell operating in Kaifra could conceivably get orders to cease all action.

I didn't think it would happen. Nor did London and that was why London was having the sweats. I wasn't long out of sleep but it didn't take a lot of brain-think to see that Loman was now driven to mounting a last desperate throw, because the Marauder thing had made it clear to. every local opposition cell that I was still very much in business and therefore the UK was still certain that Tango Victor was somewhere in this area. Chirac had made the short hop from South 6 to the gassi here without picking up a tag from any one of the airfields around Kaifra but when we took-off for the open desert we'd be running a gauntlet of ground observers and acoustic units.

Loman had said I'd need something like forty minutes after the drop to set up the device in safety and trigger it and if Chirac could fly me into the target zone and leave me with that amount of time to work in without drawing in a whole pack of opposition agents I thought he'd be bloody lucky.

'What's that glow?' asked Loman.

'The moon rising.' Chirac spooned hiscous-cous.

'Why is it diffused like that?'

'It is a sandstorm over there.'

'Will it affect your mission?'

'Pas du tout.It is two hundred miles away and moving to the west. I have been watching it and there will not be any trouble.'

Loman drew the spigots and freed the clamp and boxed the device into its separate containers. I decided not to look at my watch so frequently: it was becoming a habit and it was a sign of nerves. If we took off at the appointed time we would do it in eleven minutes from now.

'So what does London say?'

Loman didn't look at me. He doesn't like briefing you until there's precisely time enough left to give you the whole story without leaving an interval before the go, and he's perfectly right because it allows a psychological sag and you'll start mulling over the things and asking silly questions but I couldn't help that. There were things I wanted to know and he was going to tell me.

'London?' he said blandly.

'That place with the clock.'

'The end-phase has been approved.'

'Oh come on, Loman, give me the bloody information.'

Voice rather sharp and Chirac flicked a look at me and I was very annoyed because my nerves were more touchy than I'd thought and that's always dangerous and I'd have to do something about it. It was the snivelling little organism, that was all, saying we don't want to go back there with all those horrid birds and that nasty gas, always worrying about its skin instead of the job in hand.

Loman went on sulking for half a minute and then said:

'The objective has to be obliterated.'

He meant I'd got to go and blow up the freighter.

'Why?'

There was no technical problem: he wasn't obliged to say anything that couldn't be said in front of Chirac and I could do what I liked about that.

'It's the only way of dispersing the gas.' He checked his watch and looked back at the diffused glow on the horizon. 'The heat of a nuclear reaction is required.'

I finishedthe cous-cous in the bowl and Chirac went to dish me out some more but I shook my head.

'Is there any protein?'

Loman fished in the box and gave me a square packet and I peeled the skin off and ate it slowly: by the taste, it was mainly processed soya. I said:

'You know some Arabs found that aeroplane, don't you?'

'Of course they didn't.' Still upset because I'd spoken to him like that in front of Chirac.

'What did they die of then, those Arabs in the clinic?'

'Nerve-gas.'

He wanted me to ask him how they could have been exposed to the gas without finding the freighter and I wasn't going to: Loman had the knack of making you as petty-minded as he was. I said:

'Some of the drillers think it was ergot. There's a medical unit testing the bread supplies. The nurses at the clinic say it was a magnetic storm.'

He waited long enough to let Chirac see that I didn't know what the hell I was talking about.

'The properties of Zylon-4-Gamma are peculiar. By its nature it is humid and — as you discovered — heavier than air; and in addition it is given pronounced surface-adhesive characteristics by the manufacturing laboratory, enhancing its effectiveness as a weapon of war. When Tango Victor came down and a gas cylinder was damaged on impact, some of the gas remained in the aircraft, but some was evidently released by overspill and formed the characteristic bubble. This was invisible, freely afloat at ground level and of course subject to the influence of winds. It seemingly was blown across the caravan track between Ghadamis and Kaifra, since within twenty kilometres of Kaifra there were fourteen Arabs found dead, also their camels, also sundry birds of prey that had flown down to feed. The Arabs who died in the clinic had inhaled considerably less than their companions, and were able to reach Kaifra.'

So that was why I was still here.

Their situation had been different from mine: they'd been caught in the open desert and couldn't escape but I'd been caught in a confined space, and could. They hadn't known where the gas was and they could have run deeper into it when they'd tried to run clear; inside the freighter I'd known where the stuff was and I'd known where to run to get away from it. There'd been other factors in play: moving slowly under the open sky, as they'd been doing all their lives, they'd been taken utterly by surprise and must have thought in terms of a visitation by fiends at the behest of a disapproving Allah, their fear transfixing them. My mind had already been conditioned to think in terms of a toxic gas, and inhalation had been blocked immediately by reflex as I'd started to get clear.

"Isn't there any kind of gas-mask available?'

'You would have been given one, in that event. So would the crew of the aeroplane.'

Their situation had been different from mine and from the Arabs': they'd been conditioned to the risk of a toxic gas leak but the crash landing had slowed their escape, either because they'd been partly stunned or the door had become jammed, possibly both.

'Who's been making this bloody stuff?'

Loman said nothing so I left it. There wasn't anything new he could tell me about that gas: when I went back inside Tango Victor I'd know what to expect.

'Where was it being delivered?'

'This is not the time to discuss — '

'I will go away,mes amis.' Chirac opened the starboard door and swung his feet through the gap.

'There is no need, Chirac There's nothing to discuss in any case.'

'Comme meme,Ishall stretch the legs.'

He dropped through and I watched his dark compact figure moving away against the starlit flank of the dune.

'Algeria,' I said, 'or Egypt.'

Quickly: 'You've identified a cell of the UAR network?'

'Yes.'

It'd be a signal for London.

'There are probably more than one.'

'More than one Egyptian cell?'

'Yes.'

I finished the protein and screwed up the paper and flicked it through the doorway. 'This gas was made in Britain, was it?'

'Clandestinely, of course.'

'By private initiative?'

'Certain members of an otherwise reputable laboratory have been interviewed by Special Branch. Unfortunately the laboratory had been placed under government contract, and although the production of this gas was made in secret by criminal elements, you can imagine what would happen to the reputation of the UK itself if Tango Victor were found by — shall we say — an ill-wisher.'

'And what's going to happen to the reputation of the United Arab Republic when we tell everyone they've been buying BCW material within six months of the Geneva banning?'

He turned slowly to look at me.

'What reputation? The difference is there. In any case it won't occur. The UK will tell nobody, since the gas was unfortunately made in England and any accusation would of course boomerang.'

'There'll be a public trial for the people who made the stuff.'

'Unavoidably. The image of the UK will receive a certain degree of damage. Regrettably, a criminal element has been manufacturing and selling a deadly chemical warfare material. Nothing more. We shall hope to avoid the disastrous outcome of much more serious revelations.'

'You mean those poor bastards in the clinic have officially died of ergot in the bread supplies.'

'You would oblige me by remembering that.'

'And the outbreak in Mali? What was the death roll?'

'Three hundred.'

'Jesus. An outsize bubble on the move. Was it lobbed there?'

'There's an Algerian missile site in the south Sahara and the gas was being tested for the United Arab Republic.'

'In vivo.'

'How otherwise would its precise effect be known? But in fact the Mali batch was too powerful: the intention was to induce an incapacitating state of anxiety for a period of a few days. The batch in Tango Victor is less lethal but still too strong. What Egypt would be seeking is of course the convenient dilution providing this effect, enabling her to take over control in Tel Aviv without casualties and therefore without too great an international motion of censure.'

He looked at his watch.

In the background silence the tick of the instrument-panel chronometer was insistent, its illuminated dial sharply defined. There were four minutes to go.

'You'd better brief me.'

'Yes.'

He shifted his position on the observer's seat as he opened the map, and the Alouette moved slightly on its suspension. I rummaged in the rations box and found some dehydrated honey tablets and peeled one off the strip.

'Chirac will be using a flight pattern designed to confuse the acoustic observation posts as much as possible. You will go from here to the Petrocombine South 5 drilling camp and overfly the airstrip, setting course for this point here in theRoches Vertes complex and then flying for three kilometres along the scheduled air route from Ghadamis to El Oued across the Algerian desert. You will then proceed at 203° direct to the target area.'

I checked it twice and asked him where thelistening-posts were meant to be.

'From local intelligence we know there are four posts in this line from South 5 to No. 2 Philips radio tower. There may be others farther west.'

I looked up from the map.

'What d'you think our chances are, Loman?'

He must have been expecting it but tried to look surprised.

'Of doing what?'

'Reaching the target area without bringing a whole pack of tags or interceptors into the air.'

I'd made my point and he had the grace to give me a straight answer without pretending to consider the actual odds.

'Unpromising.'

I suppose he was spiritually exhausted or physically over the edge of fatigue because he suddenly sagged, his hands resting loosely on the spread map and his pale eyes closing for a moment.

'That is the only possible flight pattern we can use.'

'Taking us within seven kilometres of this end listening post.' I'd begun sweating. 'What d'you imagine their effective range is? About fifty?'

'Perhaps.'

He was sitting perfectly still and I knew he was waiting for me to blow up in his face but I wasn't going to do it because it wouldn't help us and Christ we needed help and a new question was coming into my mind and I tried to get rid of it before it could do any harm, before it could bring down the last few bricks of the mission that still appeared to be standing. But it wouldn't go.

Question. When does a director in the field start losing his sense of proportion? When does the strain of watching the slow demolition of his plans begin to tell on him and take him beyond the point where reason can only be ignored with fatal results?When does he break?

Perhaps it is when he finishes up sitting in a helicopter on the edge of the Sahara in the early hours of a sleepless night and awaiting the dawn of a hopeless day, his hands lying unnerved on a map where the only uncharted feature is the ruin he knows is there but refuses to recognize: those last few tumbled bricks of the thing he was trying too hard to build.

I wouldn't expect a man like Loman to abandon a mission if success or even survival looked unattainable. I would expect him to keep on working at it, no longer for what he could make of it but for its own sake, once it had gone beyond the stage where any useful purpose remained. I would expect him to become obsessive, to make a shrine of it: and I would expect him to regard his executive in the field as a natural sacrifice.

'Loman,' I said, 'when did you get London's directive on this end-phase?'

He was now genuinely surprised, couldn't follow me.

'Just before 03.00 hours.'

I didn't think he'd actually lie about a thing like that. I didn't think he'd lost his reason: I just thought reason was now being subjugated to the point where he might have me killed off for nothing.

'Have they been given total intelligence on the disposition of those listening-posts?'

Then he saw what I meant.

'I'm sorry, Quiller. The objective has to be destroyed. London insists.'

'For what reason?'

Because you can ask questions if you think your life is being moved into a specific hazard: they don't bind your hands behind you and drive you blindfold against the cannon.

'There are two reasons,' Loman said. He sounded perfectly calm and I thought this is how they sound when their fantasies have had to take control of them to save them from the reality they can't any longer face. 'It requires several days of exposure to the ultra-violet rays in sunlight to alter the atomic structure of Zylon-K-Gamma and render it harmless. If anyone attempted to move the cargo in that aeroplane, not knowing what it was, enough gas could be spilled to wipe out the population of Kaifra, particularly since theGhibli is a south wind. The United Kingdom would be responsible. Secondly a nuclear explosion would not only change the atomic structure of the gas instantaneously, but would obliterate the aeroplane: and this is essential. It will be known that a new BCW weapon was being manufactured in the UK long after the banning of such weapons by the Geneva Convention, and even though it was done clandestinely it can only be embarrassing and the Government will have to explain how it was allowed to occur. This is bad enough. It would be disastrous at this moment when Israel and the Arab world confront each other if it were also known that a consignment of chemical warfare gas had been flown from the UK to North Africa. Allow meto borrow the old cliche of a spark in a powder barrel.'

I watched his reflection in the glass of the black-dialled chronometer. He was looking at me, waiting. His face was as calm as his speech had been: reaction-concealment was second nature to him and that was why I was worried when he'd suddenly sagged a few minutes ago.

He would remain perfectly calm, I assumed, after his mind had slipped its focus. He would give careful and cogent reasons for driving his executive headlong against the cannon.

Decision necessary: stay with the mission or get out. Trust this efficient and merciless little bastard all the way or take a step back and see him for what he might be: an intelligence director turned psychopath.

Chirac, a dark figure against the pale flank of the dune,waiting. The chronometer ticking in the quietness, the face of Loman reflected on the dial, waiting.

Do what he says and do it even if you know it's likely to kill you, even if you know he'll never grieve. Or save yourself, tell him no.

The scream of a ferret in the dark.

Or refusal.