The Tango Briefing q-5

by Adam Hall

  He'd known they were serious, because of O'Brien.

  'How long did it take them,' I asked him, 'to blow you?'

  'Three days. I know it doesn't sound — '

  'Don't worry. Loman says you did bloody well.'

  Loman hadn't said anything of the sort.

  'Pissing me about.' He managed a faint grin. 'He wouldn't say a thing like that, even if I'd — 'he shrugged with a hand and said — 'but they're very active, you know. I couldn't get much sleep because we didn't even have a safe-house.'

  'They know the plane's there?'

  'They know it's in the area, the rough area.'

  'Because you were there? You and O'Brien? Or d'you think they've got info from the UK?'

  From what Loman had told me about the Special Branch I thought there must have been some arrests, but the link with Algeria was plain enough because of Tango Victor's course and there could be some signal lines out.

  Fyson had become quiet and I knew I was pushing him too hard.

  'It doesn't — '

  'No, I'm okay.' With another effort he said: 'The Algerian Air Force did a search about a week ago. Didn't Loman tell you?'

  'He hasn't briefed me yet, not fully.'

  Loman had made the rdv in Tunis because of the airport, I knew that. He hadn't been certain of me and it would have been quicker to bring someone else in London-Tunis direct than from down south in Kaifra where there was probably only an airstrip. Otherwise he'd have made our rdv in Kaifra straight away.

  'It might have been the sandstorm,' said Fyson. 'It can cover things in minutes, then uncover them again.'

  'Loman can tell me that part of the thing.' I didn't want to drain the last of his strength before I'd put the only few questions that were important. 'Listen, did you get an actual sight of the opposition?'

  'Nothing recognizable.' He was trying to pour himself another drink and I did it for him and he bit on to it and looked better and said: 'There was always that bloody gun, you see — I kept catching sunlight on it and once I just walked Into range and he chipped some brickwork away. It slows you up, doesn't it?'

  'D'you know if — '

  Then the phone rang.

  It was right next to him and after a kind of jerk he just slid off the chair and the glass smashed before I could catch it and try to prop him up and answer the damned thing at the same time, it was very awkward.

  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 seven
ty-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.