by Adam Hall
The hangar was a single-span stressed-iron unit, an item of ex-war stock with the original camouflage design showing faintly through the silver heat-reflecting paint. There weren’t many lamps burning inside and for a moment I didn’t see the glider because its matt night-blue finish gave it the same tone as the shadows on the corrugated walls.
Chirac put his hands on his hips.
‘Et voila! Mais queue vache, hein? What a cow! But it will fly very well, and that is what we need.’
Much bigger than I’d expected: a three-seater pod-and-boom design, shoulder-wing, straight dihedral, very large chord, ugly to look at because of the lump at the front end and the almost black paint.
‘Have you flown this type?’
‘Mon Dieu, there isn’t another like this! The Algerians used it for radio-observer drops during the war, then the Meteo converted it for research on thermal currents, then Anglo-Beige put different mainplanes on it. for low-altitude surveys, and now look what we do, we make trappe beneath the cabin and paint it like this! Tout simplement, he is a cow! But I can fly anything, mon ami, even a cow, so we shall go well up there, don’t worry please.’
He fished for his Gauloises and lit up and remembered the fire-risk and said merde and scuffed the thing out. I wished he were a degree less nervy.
I’d expected a lot of interest from the drilling-crews but the only people in the hangar were the three riggers doping the fabric of the new trap-door and a man in flying-gear coming across to us from the far end.
‘What’s our cover-story for this flight, Chirac?’
‘Comment?’
‘What’s the official reason for our using this glider?’
‘Oh yes, I will tell you that. It was being flown for Anglo-Belge on a magnetic-rock survey a few days before, but the wind becomes too low, you see, so it was force-landed on the nearest airstrip, which was this place. Now we are going to take it back to Anglo.’
‘Why at night?’
‘The wind is good right now.’
‘Why the blue paint?’
‘Ecoutez, mon ami, who the hell asks to know a thing like this?’ He jerked a thumb towards the main camp. ‘That drill does not stop, never, day and night, you see, unless it breaks or it strikes oil, and then they are even more busy than always, you un’erstand? When they work they have no time to think of different things, and when they stop work they are too damn fatigue to do anything but sleep. They do not wish to ask about the planeur.’ He turned as the man in the flying-gear came up. ‘Pierre, je to presente Monsieur Gage, l’Anglais dont je t’ai parle. This is Pierre Batagnier, who will fly the airplane that will tow us.’
Small compact man, more flesh on him than Chirac, much less nervy about the eyes. We shook hands and he went over to the riggers.
‘Alors, Michel, tu es pret?’
Ten minutes, the man said, and it would take longer than that to warm his engines.
Chirac got the map and spread it across a crate and the pilot joined us. ‘Okay, now listen please. Pierre will tow us to the north-east of here until three thousand metres of altitude, and that will bring us somewhere by the third Philips radio beacon at this blue mark here. This is because it is a normal route made by airplanes across the drilling-complex from South 4 to the Anglia-Beige Roches Vertes II, so nobody will think it strange to hear us go that way, you see? After this point we will slip the cable, and Pierre will return here alone.’
I kept thinking of base.
‘Now we shall be for ourselves, and we will make a circle to bring us east of the Algerian platinum-prospecting camp right here, and then we will go down maybe a hundred metres at a fifteen-degree angle of glide to make a good speed for our final run to the target area, you un’erstand?’
Kept thinking of the arabesque room below the dome, some kind of association, mustn’t ignore, think later.
‘And now we will cross the No. 2 Philips radio tower, the blue mark here, at maybe a hundred kph of airspeed, using these red marks for our bearings. They are Petrocombine South 5, South 6 and the Anglo Roches Brunes B drilling camps, and we shall see their lights on the derricks. We will gain the target area maybe sixty minutes from when we have begun, here at the radio tower. So it is at this point you must start to make the figures for dead-reckoning on the ordinateur Sony, you un’erstand?’
“What’s this distance here: Philips tower to target?’
‘Ninety-seven kilometres. Of course we will go a little more far than this in actual air-distance, because of our angle of glide, but that will depend of the winds we will find as we make our approach.’
The arabesque room and the way she’d been holding the gun at me when I’d gone in. Some kind of association. Important? Something overlooked?
‘Now please tell me if there is anything you will wish me to repeat, about this thing.’
‘You’ve made it clear enough. The wind-factor governs the situation at both ends of the flight, is that it?’
Cellulose. Dope-nail-varnish. Sense of smell strongly associative. Dismiss.
‘C’est Va. If there is no wind when we will make the circle over this complex here, we must make a less big angle of glide, not to lose too much altitude. And if there is no wind near the end of our approach to the target area, I must stay much higher so that I have my chance to get back here, or anyway so that I come down somewhere not far from any water and people, you know?’ He began folding the map. ‘Of course when I tell you “no wind” like that, I mean any wind that is not good enough to go higher. B’en, je crois que c’est tout.’
Batagnier straightened up.
‘Allons-y?’
‘Allons-y.’
The pilot went back through the hangar, shouting for some ground-staff, and one of the riggers trotted after him. A minute later a Koffman starter banged and the engine took over, then the second one fired.
I checked the time: 23.51.
‘My stuff’s already on board?’
‘You can see it from inside the cabin, not through the trappe.’
I climbed in and checked the set-up. They’d taken out the centrally-disposed third seat and made the drop-trap in the floor below it, accommodating the ‘chute immediately forward of the polyester container to keep the loads balanced: I would be sitting beside the pilot and the weight of a third man was transferred to the supplies and transceiver. The ripcord was linked to the fuselage by a tension breakaway for automatic opening and release, so that all the pilot had to do was drop the trap and the rest of the operation would go into sequence.
The hangar had begun drumming and I saw a tow-truck moving across and turning and backing up. Chirac was calling to me above the noise and I pulled the hook-release ring to let them link up the cable.
I climbed out and they tilted the mainplane horizontal and began towing. The pod design formed a sound-box and the noise was like an empty crate being trundled on roller-skates, and the whole structure flexed so badly that Chirac had to keep shouting orders to the driver of the truck to break up the periodicity. A gust of sand stung our faces as Batagnier’s twin-engined Fauconnet gunned up and swung its tail, rolling towards the airstrip. The tow-truck made a diagonal line across its wake and left the glider in position fifty yards behind it.
Watching Chirac as he directed the preliminaries to takeoff it occurred to me that he was the key man in the Bureau’s attempt to have Tango Victor’s cargo examined at first hand: and to a certain extent Loman had been justified in persuading me that we weren’t taking over a wrecked operation with orders to clean up the mess, but were setting up our own mission with a specified objective.
Someone in London had said: we want a mercenary flier to do us a night-drop in the Sahara, someone who’ll keep to his contract, a man who doesn’t mind risking a stray shot if the money’s right.
It wouldn’t have been difficult to find a man like Chirac in a region where there were more airstrips than oases and where working-conditions were tough and the pay commensurate, but when they s
aw his record and learned that he was an ex-champion sailplane pilot they seized the chance and refined the mission and bumped up his insurance to half a million francs to cover the increased risk and told him to get himself a glider.
The access had been revamped in a big way and the fact that the Minister had decided to sting the Treasury for that amount of loot made it clear that the Bureau had told him it had a chance of paying off. From this data I was certain of two things: the opposition was monitoring all aircraft movement in this area by every means including listening-posts, and they were doing it in the hope of tracking me in to the target area and neutralizing me at the site of the objective.
Priority requirement: silence. The silence of these wings across the starlit dunes, our passage having no trace on the screens of the acoustic scanners dispersed among the oases between Sid Ben Ali and Kaifra and the complex of drilling camps.
Strict hush.
The sand blew back from the Fauconnet as Batagnier ran up the revs and tested for mag-drop and the ground-crews by the glider turned their backs to it, hanging on to the wing-tips. Then the roaring died and the props idled and I saw Chirac turn and look in my direction, lifting a hand.
Give it to London then, give them a bit of credit. They’d been prepared to drop someone in from a powered aircraft and risk the opposition picking it up and going in for a kill in the final phase of the penetration: a crude and bloody business that always costs more lives for fewer results whenever they’re driven to mounting this kind of operation with the opposition already in the field. They do it on the principle that when the objective is high priority and there’s even a ten per cent chance of the executive’s coming out alive with the stuff they want it’s worth this brand of brute frontal attack on the target that might offer a chance of knocking out the opposition in the target area itself. They do it when they’re desperate.
They’d been desperate but they’d seen Chirac as the key to something more controlled and they’d worked on it and come up with a design that at least made sense on paper and the delay in planning had brought them right up against the clock and they’d had to shake the whole network with panic directives but give them this: they’d got a bit of elegance into the mission at last, a bit of class, sent for a top kick like Loman and told him to pick his own executive for the field and set the thing up and make it succeed, bring off a classic.
I anticipate success. Complete success. You understand?
All right you little bastard we’ll give it a go.
They’d turned the glider to line up with the runway and I walked into the carbon-monoxide airstream that was coming from the Fauconnet. Chirac was getting into his parachute and one of the ground-crew was holding mine ready for me - and when I was settled into it Chirac passed me some goggles.
‘You will need these, if there will be a sandstorm.’
I slung them round my neck. The rigger was helping me to adjust the ‘chute-harness and we pulled it too tight and a flash of pain burned in the nerves of my shoulder where the ricochet of the sixth bullet had left bruising.
‘Ca va, mon ami?’
‘Oui.’
I dropped my flight-bag into the cabin and climbed aboard and buckled the restraint-belt. Chirac called something to the ground-crew, I didn’t catch what, then he followed me in and settled his feet on the rudder-bar and checked the four instruments: airspeed-indicator, spirit cross-level, compass and variometer.
He raised his hand.
‘Allons-y!’
The rigger stood away and lifted both arms in a signal to Batagnier and then walked to the wing-tip, waiting. The revs went up and the airstream began fluttering at the hood of the glider as the Fauconnet rolled cautiously, taking up the slack in the towline. A jerk came as it tautened.
Chirac was peeling some silver paper.
‘You want some gum?’
I shook my head and he put the strip into his mouth and flicked the paper into the air current and slid the hood shut as the Fauconnet gunned up and we began rolling. A haze of sand came flying. against the Perspex and the man at the wing-tip broke his run and fell away as the speed rose and the vibration hammered under our seats and Chirac felt the resistance coming into the controls and brought the stick back gently, feeling his way, gently again until the vibration died out and the sand-haze cleared and the mission was airborne.
The first derrick-light came into view on the starboard side. Chirac couldn’t see it from his seat but he noticed me watching the light and said above the windrush:
‘South 5.’
He’d clipped a chart on the facia but never looked at it.
When the light came abreast of us north-east I checked the time at 00.13 hours. The silver-painted storage tanks were distinct and I could see a truck on the move.
Ahead of us we could see the navigation lights of the Fauconnet and the short bright flames from its exhaust-stubs. Its engine noise was steady, drumming at the hood above us, and the smell of exhaust gas had seeped into the cabin.
South 6.
00.27.
Altitude 1300 metres.
The detail was less distinct: the ash-grey sheen to the west of the drilling-tower could have been storage tanks or the semi-domed roofs of the living-quarters. We were now picking up No. 2 Philips radio beacon, its red warning-lamp shifting slowly across the desert floor as we overflew it.
The air was cool.
Monoxide and spearmint and above our heads the stars in their millions flowing peacefully across the curve of the Perspex. Course north-east.
Overflying the Roches Vertes drilling-camps at two thousand metres I thought I heard a change in the Fauconnet’s engine-noise: a slight increase in volume and pitch. I waited for Chirac to remark on it but he said nothing and I looked at the instruments.
Airspeed unchanged at 110.
Angle of climb unchanged at 18°.
They were the only two that would reflect the altered note of the Fauconnet ahead of us but they remained constant. Batagnier hadn’t increased his speed and he hadn’t pushed up his angle of climb and I didn’t like it.
Red light moving below, very distant on the starboard side.
No. 3 Philips tower.
Impossible to tell whether a new sound had come into the immediate area. There should only be one source: the 1000V twin-engined Fauconnet.
No mirrors, either inside the cabin or outrigged in nacelles.
The blindspot rearwards of this pod-and-boom design was rather large. The air was cold now but I was beginning to sweat because London had done their best but it might not be good enough, not quite good enough. If their decision to charter a glider for final access to the target area meant that the opposition had set up listening-posts to monitor aircraft movement in this region, then the sound of the Fauconnet was at this moment being registered on their scanners. There hadn’t been anything we could do about that: Chirac had ordered this course north-east from South 4 because it was an established airlane across the drilling-complex and if we’d made any kind of circuit to avoid the camps our sound would still have been picked up and we would have been immediately suspect.
The probability that they were picking us up now was all right because they wouldn’t investigate every aircraft movement across this region provided it followed a routine pattern: what they were listening for was unusual traffic and especially an unscheduled flight from any of the strips near Kaifra in the direction of the open desert. Each post would essentially have its own facility for the immediate investigation of suspect aircraft movement: a machine standing by with its engine warmed and a pilot ready for takeoff.
The danger wasn’t there. It was in the possibility that our own operation had been penetrated without our knowledge. It had been necessary to engage people outside our own cell and although Chirac and Batagnier must have been screened it wouldn’t have been advisable to let the ground-staff at South 4 know that this flight had a clandestine aspect, even though there had been no secrecy about the takeoff.<
br />
London had done its best but if the change in the engine-note of the tow-plane was in fact an illusion created by the additional noise of another aircraft flying behind us the mission would end here, two thousand metres above the desert and a hundred kilometres from the target: Tango Victor.
The aft structure of the glider provided a blindspot big enough to conceal a bomber, The glider itself provided a blindspot for the Fauconnet even if it carried outside mirrors. If there were a third aircraft now flying a north-east course towards No. 3 Philips tower only the pilot of that aircraft would know.
‘Chirac.’
‘J’ecoute.’
‘Have you noticed any change in the engine-note?’
‘When?’
‘A minute ago.’
‘Oh yes - he went into coarser pitch.’
‘He’s got variable props?’
‘But yes. And we are quite high now.’
‘I see. Have you got any spare gum?’
Altitude 3000.
Chirac watched the instruments.
Thirty seconds later the Fauconnet began levelling off.
I couldn’t see the No. 3 tower light any more from starboard: over the past ten minutes it had been drifting slowly out of sight towards our midline as Batagnier changed course to overfly it directly.
The engine-noise was flattening to a steady drone as he throttled back to compensate for the increase of speed at level flight.
It was now very cold in the cockpit.
‘You will please check your seat-belt.’
He went on watching the instruments.
I checked and reported.
‘Very well.’
He pulled the release and the cable snaked away and the force of the deceleration thrust me hard against the belt as the nose went down. I caught sight of the tow-plane once more, quite small as it wheeled against the horizon to retrace its course, then we were drifting, alone in the night sky.