The Tango Briefing

9: DROP

There was only the wind's sound.

Sometimes it changed, subtly or grossly, as. Chirac searched the heights for their currents. The air rushed inaudibly over the wings and the sound was not from there but from imperfections in the streamlining of the cabin: the landing-gear housing, the flanges of the hood-runners, the edge of the drop-trap.

A sibilance came from them, a whistling through the teeth, then as we swung to meet the wind and headed into it the sound changed to a low fluting, eerie and musical, then died to a whisper as we drifted across the current, the long wings lying against it.

'South-west,' said Chirac, listening to the sounds. 'Maybe ten knots.'

A head-wind for our flight-path. That was why we'd come here. But he could have been wrong about the prevailing air-movement and it was reassuring to have his forecast confirmed.

'We can go straight in?'

'Not yet. In a little time. I want to know more.'

He sat listening, touching the controls a degree and bringing them back, feeling the air as sensitively as if his hands were spread open against it, his fingers sifting it for information. Below us the landmarks turned slowly, the lights of the three camps revolving inside the greater orbit of the radio tower.

00.46.

Nerves all right but a thought insisting, a reminder of the margin of error that no one had wanted to talk about, neither Loman nor Chirac nor I myself.

I'd asked Loman about the duration and he'd said flexible and I'd asked Chirac what the chances were and he'd said fifty-fifty, and it meant the same thing: with the target at this distance and the run-in made by dead-reckoning the margin of error for dropping me with accuracy was critically wide and the break-off point was anywhere on the invisible circle drawn around the mission objective where I couldn't survive long enough to do any good.

Ignore.

The wind whispered past the Perspex hood and above us the starfields turned, their vastness diminishing us, making of us a mote of dust adrift in the dark.

Altitude 2900, must keep to facts.

Keep to the facts, in any case, that don't add up to despair: it's too soon for that.

The starboard wing lifting and our weight shifting and the air desolate in its crying, the sound the winter wind makes under the doors. The nose going down and a scream coming into the sky, dying awayas we climb suddenly, the squab seat pressing up and the harness creaking, a shelf of air where we hover and then slide away, circling, the wind plaintive, its voice the voice of the mad Arab, whimpering…mountains in the sky…and great birds darkening the heavens…

The air cold, a blade of it cutting across my face from the crack in the hood-runner. My whole body cold, and stiff with its bruises and in no mood shortly to be hurled from its minuscule shelter among the stars.

'Very well.'

A certain philosophy in his tone, a note of fatalism, no time left for the little Gallic ironies, none of themon ami as we swung through the figures on the compass scale towards the south-west, our final flight-line.

'Are you going in?'

He said yes and I unzipped the case of the Sony.

Weight shifting as he began flattening the curve.

Still visible No. 3 tower. Coming into view: No. 2 tower and the white-light markers of South 5, South 6 and the Roches Brunes camps.

'You will begin to compute when we will pass over the No. 2 radio beacon, you know?'

'Understand. I want your value for the head-wind.'

'Eight knots.'

Noted.

Also noted: eight knots estimated average and not reassuring to spell it out like that but this was the main factor in the margin error, his inability to know to what extent our airspeed would be true and to what extent it would be expressed by the wind in the pitot-head. From his experience of this region he could say that in this season and at this hour a ten-knot wind at three thousand metres above the platinum camps would indicate a wind of eight knots average along our course to the target area but what he couldn't say was that this indication was reliable enough to let him drop me within the prescribed limits of the objective.

If we flew into this precise degree of head-wind he would drop me right in the centre of the ring but if there were an error of two kph on either side he'd drop me so wide that there wouldn't be a hope of locating Tango Victor before my supplies ran out.

The harness creaked as he moved the control-column and I watched the angle of glide go down to fifteen degrees. The soft rushing of the air rose until the sound was like the hissing of a steam-valve and the whole of the airframe began shivering as the stringers took the strain.

Altitude 2850–2840 — 2830.

Airspeed 95 — 105–115.

Time 00.51.

No. 2 beacon dead ahead of us, a crimson glow.

I turned my watch to the underside of my wrist and used the left hand to steady the Sony on my knees, the right hand to operate it.

Speed still rising through 140–145 — 150.

Airstream very loud, a lot of vibration.

The light on the tower was moving slowly towards the edge of the blindspot below us and he couldn't leave it much longer.

'Be ready, please.'

'Ready.'

Angle of glide fourteen degrees: he was anticipating and realized it and corrected to fifteen.

'Listen now, please. I am going to trim the angle to two degrees in a few seconds. Then I will tell you when we will pass over the tower. It is then you must begin computing.'

'Understood.'

He brought the column back and the red light vanished.

Quite a lot of pressure from the seat.

Wind-noise decreased.

Angle 2°.

Compass: 225°.

'Begin computing.'

'Her name is Monique.'

'I expect she's pretty.'

'Oh yes, I think.'

The inconsistency still on my mind.

In Tunis they'd rigged a bang and got it wrong and didn't try again. In Kaifra they'd set up observation and put a tag on me to find out where I was going and that was all they'd wanted to do because if they'd meant to neutralize they'd have used two men instead of one. To this extent I could penetrate their thinking because they had my dossier and therefore they were professionals and would follow procedures known to me. Then they'd tried to kill again, this time with a long gun, and that was inconsistent.

'Also I have two children, you know? They are boys.'

'How old are they?'

'Jean-Paul has five year old, and Georges has seven.'

I hadn't been able to give it to London to work out so I'd have to tell him as soon as I called up base. He didn't know I'd been shot up but someone might have found the Mercedes by now and half the town would know about it and he'd pick it up before very long and then I suppose he'd just wet himself and assume they'd junked my cadaver and he wouldn't be able to phone the airstrip staff at South 4 because of the strict hush conditions so now he'd be hopping up and down in front of the base transceiver desperate for a signal and crossing himself at thirty-second intervals.

'I have got a snapshot, you know, of those three, that I made a long time before. But I can not fetch it now.'

He couldn't move, couldn't move even a hand to get to his pocket, hadn't moved for twenty-nine minutes, just sat with the control-column watching the angle of glide and the compass while I punched the Sony for him every time the second hand passed the top of the dial.

Airstream steady.

'Sixty-four.'

'Okay.'

Two theories: the opposition had an undisciplined cell or their signals were inefficient and the inconsistency was by accident and not design, or there were two cells operating and they were in conflict on the question of policy. In either case it indicated pressure: their Controls were putting out panic directives as fast as London.

01.31.

Dropping in nineteen minutes.

'I will tell you of something quite amusing. It was on the same day when I make the altitude record that Georges is barn, you know that? The flight formy planeur had been arranged, and I went up after I come from the hospital to see my new son. I feel so light, you know, so happy, that I always think it is that fact which helps me go so high up.'

'You felt inspired.'

'C'est exactement ca! I find the thunder cloud at one thousand metres and I fly up with it until twelve thousand, and then find the wave lift waiting for me, and the sky is the limit! The feeling was quite like anoxia, you know, but of course I had the mask on a long time before. So I wanted to have him christened «Icare», yousee, but my wife says «Georges» is more convenient, because she has an uncle of this name.'

01.42.

Eight minutes to the drop.

Of course it was just conceivable that Control had picked up a trace of the marksman. There was a ten-tenths flap on in London so they'd have alerted the whole network for data monitoring and there must have been signals coming in from both hemispheres for analysis.

There aren't many telescopic rifles among the European intelligence networks because it's a device used specifically for assassination and there's not nearly so much fuss caused with a little cyanide in the toothpaste. The long gun demands a relatively sophisticated set-up and a couple of years ago when Parkis had directed themodus operandi of a neutralization thing it had taken him three weeks to line it all up including requisition of premises, covert communication channels, access and egress, target movement monitoring and the technical demands of the gun itself in terms of range, angles of fire, appropriate ammunition, so forth. But if it's a special case and there's enough time for these preliminaries and the eye at the scope has been trained into the international class there's an overwhelming advantage because the terminal act can be performed impersonally and without the risk of retaliation: once the instructions have been confirmed by Control or even Local Control the target has only to pass through the selected point in his travel pattern and he knows nothing more.

Parkis had used Tomlinson for that one, winkled him out of a duck shoot on Lord Kenfield's estate and put him into an executive jet at Gatwick with a Remington.410 across his knees and a street map of Kronstadt to read. He had a rotten cold but it didn't affect his performance, just the one shot, and it broke up a cell we'd been trying to getat for nearly three years.

01.45.

Five minutes.

The thing was that if our overseas units picked up anything about a known marksman last seen with a ticket for Tunis or Jerba and passed it for routine analysis in London there'd be an immediate hit when London told them I'd been under a gun. They'd know it was almost certainly the same one that had worried Fyson in Sidi Ben Ali but even a random signal with some new information in it could link up with existing data and put a name to the man and there's a saying at the Bureau that stands up rather well: once you can blow the man you can blow the cell.

Four.

Airstream variable and therefore unpleasant because windspeed variation could make a mess of what I was doing on the Sony and I could come down anywhere.

'Now, please?'

'Seventy-six.'

He wanted to count up for distance and I wanted to count down for time which was a bit more logical but he'd stuck his heels in about it and said he didn't feel comfortable 'working backwards' so I let it go.

Three.

'Ninety-one point eight-five.' He watched the instruments.

'Repeat the briefing, please.'

His voice had gone dull suddenly.

'Free the belt. Slide back the hood. Wait for the order. Jump and look out for the leading edge.'

'Very well.'

Didn't really seem necessary but he'd dropped people before and he knew his onions: at the last minute when you're thinking about the imminent free fall you can cock the whole thing up by getting your feet caught in the belt or bashing your head on the hood you forget to open, do it by numbers and it's foolproof.

'Where shall I put this thing?'

'Leave it on the seat.'

Dull, toneless, because she was pretty and one was five, the other seven.

01.48.

'Ninety-three point six-five kilometres.'

'Bien.'

Two minutes.

I didn't have anyone,nothing of value, no next of kin, but that kind of comfort's really an intellectual pursuit because we've all got a skin and that's what the organism says we've got to save, yelling its bloody head off, couldn't care less about the insurance.

'Ninety-five point six-seven.'

'Okay.'

One minute.

The night seemed vast.

The stars gave a sense of orientation but only in one plane and all they did was show which way was down and that was where I was going, down through the dark to the endless night-lying waves of sand, of silence.

The 8 looks so like a 9 and they're side by side. Slipshod maintenance, dead flies in the pitot-head. A change in the wind.

Ignore.

'Ninety-six point two.'

'Very well.'

Twenty-eight seconds.

The old feeling that we were arriving somewhere. Difficult, here where the night was as vast as it had been before and the dark as featureless, to understand that our journey together was over. No control tower or platform or jetty or gates, nothing to mark a junction or a terminal, only the dark and the delicate pointer going its rounds.

Tick-tick-tick.

'Ninety-six point five.'

'So. Be ready then.'

He brought the column back just a little.

Level flight.

Ten seconds.

We had agreed that at this point I would stop computing. Ten seconds represented a quarter of a kilometre and that much distance could be critical if I dropped wide but if I went on computing to zero as a refinement it wouldn't allow for the time I needed for getting out.

Tick-tick-tick.

French keen on shaking hands, frustrating for him, control-column too sensitive, no go the niceties. I hit the belt clip.

Tick-tick.

Hood back and a blast of air roaring.

Leave the Sony on the seat.

Altitude 75 metres.

Tick.

Good luck Chirac.

Adieu!

Free fall.