The Tango Briefing

4: KAIFRA

At 19.15 I checked out of the Hotel Africa and went across where the Chrysler was parked. It had been Loman on the telephone. 'I have just talked to London and we have another directive urging us to hurry.'

'The opposition's making progress?'

'That is the inference.'

'Then we'll hurry.'

Now that I'd let him sell me the mission I wanted to bring off and that sand-covered wreck out there had suddenly become personal to me: Tango Victor was mine.

'It is now 18.51 and I've booked you on Tunis Air Flight 16 to Jerba, depart 19.45, and instructed Avis to have a car standing by for you at your ETA, 20.30. I shall take the later fight at 21.15 to Jerba and proceed independently to Kaifra. At Kaifra you are booked in at the Hotel Royal Sahara Room 37, and I shall telephone you as soon as I arrive. My ETA Jerba is 22.00. In this season the Jerba-Kaifra route can be driven in five hours and this will be quicker than trying for air connection to Garaa Tebout, because Tunis Air don't fly there in any case. Do you have any questions?'

'What are you doing about Fyson?'

'He's been withdrawn from the mission, as I told you.'

'But I mean his nerves are shot.'

'I see. Then I'll send a doctor along.'

We hung up.

So at 19.15 I checked out of the Hotel Africa and went across to where the Chrysler was parked and they said later at the hospital that the glass had been the worst trouble because some very small fragments had got stuck in my face and they'd been difficult to find.

There weren't any bones broken but they were worried by various signs of physiological shock that were still hanging about, and the bruises where I'd been flung across the pavement. I didn't remember much, but there'd been no actual retrogressive amnesia: I checked on that right away. I was just walking towards the Chrysler and then the senses went partially dead through overloading: very bright flash, a lot of noise, smell of burnt aromatic nitro compounds and the feel of the pavement sliding around under me.

They'd made a silly mistake, that was all. They wouldn't have risked installing an ignition detonator linkage right outside in the street: they'd had to put something quick onboard and it was probably a rocking activator and a bus had passed close and the slipstream had rocked the Chrysler enough to trigger the thing at the wrong time, three or four seconds too early.

Loman came as soon as I rang him and found me in the casualty room with bowls and bandages and blood everywhere.

'Listen, get me out of here and fix another plane.'

Speech sounded a bit sloppy because the mouth had got cut up by the glass and it had begun puffing.

'Do they want to keep you under observation?'

'Yes, there's the odd bit of glass left in but it'll work itself out, they know that. And for Christ's sake signal Fyson.'

He knew what I meant. There'd been no tags on me since I'd left London — every routine check I'd made had come up negative — but when I'd called on Fyson in his room I'd walked right into a red sector because they'd had him under surveillance and he didn't know and now we'd have to tell him.

'They're established agents,' Loman said

'Of course.'

Because they had a dossier on me. Fyson had blown his cover and thought he'd got clear but they'd tagged him from Sidi Ben Ali to Tunis and put static surveillance on him and when I'd shown up they'd checked their data and said yes this one's for neutralizing. But they'd only had forty-five minutes to find and fix the car and rig the bang and that could be why they'd mucked it.

The nurse came back with another hypodermic and I said not now and left it to Loman, it was his job, and he was signing some kind of form accepting responsibility when I got my flight-bag and took a taxi and double-checked for ticks all the way along the Khaireddine Pacha because we didn't want any trouble down at our base and I had to get there clean.

The taxi seemed to be swerving a bit down the long perspective of the eucalyptuses, either because of the crosswind or because the driver kept looking at me in the mirror and trying to pluck up the courage to ask me what brand of razor I used because he didn't want one, or maybe it was the hangover from the blast-wave upsetting the semi-circular canals: there was still some head-noise.

But I could focus all right and there were no tags and the airport was negative and at 21.15 I was airborne on Flight 917 with Loman's ticket and the girl was asking me what I wanted to drink.

There was a flight on the board at Jerba scheduled in at 22.35 and I knew Loman would be on that one because of the hurry directive from Control: he wouldn't hang around in Tunis with his executive already homed in at base.

They had a Mercedes 220 lined up and it had an air-conditioner but I didn't switch it on: the day's heat still pressed down on the island from a stifling sky but there wouldn't be any encapsulated environment for me in the desert so I let the organism start adapting as we ran through Houmt Souk and took the causeway to Zaizis.

Starlight and the black plumage of date-palms rushing overhead, the screen pocked and silvered by the death of insects and the heat corning on progressively as the road ran south until I had to start breathing consciously to keep awake.

Hit something once, a bump and the lights swinging and thewheel floating and more difficult, quite a job, much more difficult than I'd thought, than it should be, to keep traction and pull her back straight, worried me and we slowed, of course they'd been perfectly right, twenty-four hours' observation, it was just that those fidgety pimps in London wouldn't give us a break.

Through midnight at Remada and slowing again to seventy-five along the sandy track to Bj Djeneiene to avoid the turn-off at the Libyan frontier, the bruises burning now and the eyes trying to sort out the fast-incoming data without losing focus through fatigue: but the mirror was clear and if Loman didn't pick up a tag we'd have a safe base to jump from in the south.

Kaifra 02.50.

Sandy streets buried among dark massed palms, a few naked bulbs at the crossings, the headlights swinging over the humped shapes of Arabs sleeping below white walls, a mosque with a candle burning, the wind dead and the heat thick on the air and the nerves uncertain, a longing for sleep.

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 cool: 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.

He said I should go up and I passed him and then heard Loman's voice from the stairs.

'All right, Quiller.'

As we climbed, our shoes grating on chips of marble that had broken away from the mosaic, the hot afternoon light blazed through coloured glass so that rainbow patterns flowed across Loman's shoulder as he led the way up.

'Theyrun it as a small hotel, but we're alone here except for one or two staff. The heat's too much for the tourists in Kaifra and this is the dead season.'

'What's our cover?'

'Radio liaison with Petrocombine's South 4 camp for supplies and emergency signals.'

By the time we reached the top floor we were sweating hard and he was wiping his face because this wasn't the Hotel Royal Sahara and there wasn't a lift and there wasn't any air-conditioning. Our weight set the passage vibrating invisibly and flakes of plaster drifted like orange-blossom from the frescoed walls.

The radio base was at the end of the building and I followed Loman in. From the size of the domed ceiling we were now underneath one of the great gilded cupolas I'd seen from the street. Faded arabesque screens, cracked mosaic floor and the minimal mod. cons. of a fifth-category package-deal hotel: bed, washbasin, curtained shower.

'This is Diane Bowman, our radio operator.'

There wasn't anything in his tone.

He made it sound just like a casual introduction. But he didn't look at me: at least he had the grace to look away as he showed me how far things had gone towards perdition, how desperately he'd been driven by London to rig up this mission they'd asked for, to rig the thing up with no time for selective staffing or initial briefing and no established access facilities and not a hope in hell of doing anything more than send this whole operation staggering blindly on till it finished both of us.

Tonelessly he said: 'This is Quiller, the executive in the field.'

I think she came forward a pace to greet me, I don't remember, and then I supposed stopped, seeing I didn't move.

Fair hair and a young face, the mouth surprised and the eyes waiting, uncertain of me, the stance defensive, the bare arms hanging loose but the hands tensed, a slight girl, a girl out of a fashion magazine, thin-bodied in a fisherman's vest and slacks and sandals, this summer's gear for Brighton or the Broads and all the rage and oh Christ a mission to run and this child caught in its machinery.

When I could, I looked at Loman.

There was nothing in my tone either; we'd both of us been trained, long ago, out of our habits; but he knew what was in my mind.

'How long has she been operating on priority missions?'

He stood with his hands tucked neatly behind him, head on one side but still not looking at me, maybe prepared for me to blow up in his face and get it over, maybe deciding on policy not to answer me till I forced him.

'Long enough,' the girl said, 'to know how to do it.'

Her eyes were steady now, no longer uncertain of me. She stood with her arms folded and her chin lifted a fraction.

Loman spoke suddenly. I suppose the anger in her voice had encouraged him.

'When I direct a mission I choose first-class people and if this radio operator has my approval then you can have every confidence in her.'

He couldn't even make it sound right.

My mind had partially blanked off and I couldn't think of anything useful to say: he and I both knew what the situation was and there wasn't anything to talk about. Professional instinct was still functioning, though, and I crossed the uneven mosaic to the window and pulled down the venetian blind and fixed the catch.

'Keep it shut.'

She said

'I like the view.'

It was very quiet here: the post-meridian heat of the August sun was lying like a dead-weight on the town and we were among the few people who weren't deep in a siesta. No sound came from outside this room, no sound at all.

Loman took out his damp silk handkerchief and wiped his polished face. The sweat trickled on me as the organism tried to reduce the body-temperature. I didn't move. I was beginning to lose the fine-tuned sense of direction, of shape, of purpose, the thing we call mission-feel that develops by infinite degrees as we go forward, step by step, into the area where we have committed ourselves to unknown tasks in the teeth of unknown hazards: the sense that tells us, at every step, that it's now toolate to turn back.

This I was beginning to lose.

'Loman. It's no go.'

He made an impatient gesture but said nothing.

I didn't look at the girl. It wasn't her fault.

Under the big dome my voice echoed strangely.

'You'd better signal London. Get some professional staff.'

He was standing perfectly still, a listening bird, his small eyes bright and his neat head tilted. I knew there wasn't anything he could say because it was beyond him now: there wasn't time to get anyone capable from London and it wasn't his fault but I was getting fed-up.

'I can get killed this way, Loman. We all can. For nothing. Just because those incompetent bastards in London have taken on a job that's got to be done so fast that we can't even hope to survive for as long as it takes to do it. This isn't an intelligence operation, it's a suicide pact.'

Loman could think quite fast but he couldn't talk while he was doing it and he didn't talk now so I shut up and let him get on with it because this was his pigeon: when the director in the field sends the executive in there's got to be a professional set-up. We didn't have one.

I suppose he'd thought of a dozen angles of attack in those few seconds and obviously the one he chose was the one he thought was right and he was wrong.

'I think you're showing an unreasonable bias towards — '

'Isthat so?' I was really very fed-up. 'We've been called in by a panic directive to clear up the wreck of an operation that went off half-cocked and killed one man and blew another and by a bit of luck I missed a bomb and last night they picked Fyson out of Tunis harbour and it'd be nice to think that when they grilled him he didn't break but the last time I saw him alive his nerve had gone so they wouldn't have had any trouble. How safe's our base now, Loman? And all you can do about it is pick a kid out of school who leaves her radio in direct sight of a building at fifty yards' optical range even through low-powered glasses and doesn't pull the blind down because she likes the view.'

In ten seconds he looked at me and said:

'She is an efficient radio operator. Highly efficient'

When I turned she was watching me, angry because of what I'd said about her, frightened because of what I'd said about Fyson.

'All right she's an efficient radio operator but who's going to look after her if I'm in the desert and you have to leave base for five minutes?'

Before he could answer she said:

'I can look after myself.'

'How?'

She drew very fast and I hit the thing before she'd finished and it spun high and chipped plaster off the wall and curved down and skittered across the mosaic.

'You have to be faster than that.'

Loman said bleakly:

'I would undertake to man the base personally at all times.'

'Good of you.'

I went over and picked the gun up and wiped the plaster off and checked for damage and gave it back to her, a half-pound six-shot.25 standard lightweight, wouldn't stop a mouse.

'And leave the safety-catch off. There's no point in a fast draw if the trigger's locked.'

She took it but wouldn't look at me, her eyes were down and she was breathing fast, the heat and of course the frustration. I must have bruised her hand but she didn't let herself nurse it, a point for that but one point wasn't enough to qualify her for running the radio liaison of a mission with the death-roll rising before we were even on our marks.

Loman was still thinking but he couldn’t find what he wanted: an argument that could keep me with him. It was too late now for an easy trap like the one he'd used on me before.

'She was head of signals at the Embassy in Tunis and monitoring the Egyptian-Israeli frontier-incident reports direct for London. She has fluent French, Italian and Arabic with five dialects.'

I looked at the radio, its facia striped by the shadows of the sunblind. It was a KW 200 °CA single-sideband transceiver with four channels on the dial and an auto-scrambler.

'What's your frequency coverage?'

Her head came up.

'3.0 to 19 mc/s.'

'Channels?'

'Four preset crystal controlled.'

'Receiver sensitivity?'

'Better than one microvolt for one watt output.'

'What frequencies would you use in this area?'

'7 MHz for daytime propagation conditions, 3 MHz at night.'

'How long have you worked with this type?'

'Over two years.'

'Did you choose it because of that?'

'No. Because it's perfect for the conditions here.'

I nodded and turned away.

Loman was watching me. I felt him watching.

She was all right on the radio and she knew how the thing worked but if I went out there a hundred miles deep into the desert I'd be like a diver with a lifeline. My lifeline would be the radio liaison facility and if it were put out of action I'd fry out there like a louse. Worse: the mission would end at the same time and in the same place,objective unaccomplished.

Loman said

'Arrangements have been made to jump you in rather soon.'

'How soon?'

'Tonight.'

This was the argument he'd been looking for.

The nearer you get to the brink of a mission the faster you want to go: it's a kind of target attraction and you don't want to pull out and the little bastard knew this and now he'd thrown me the deadline and it was close. In a matter of hours I could be out there in the silence of the sands and alone with the objective: the broken-winged smudge on the desert floor that no one had been closer to than sixty-five thousand feet.

Tango Victor.

I looked at the girl.

'Did you volunteer for this kind of work.'

'Yes.'

'You know it's dangerous?'

'Yes.'

'What makes you want to do it?'

'The interest. And the danger.'

'Would you say you had a strong sense of survival?'

'Pretty strong, yes. I'd fight like hell.'

I told Loman he could brief me.