by Adam Hall
The rain had eased and visibility looked workable but I stopped reviewing the local data and noted the angle of the door-lever and the disposition of the fire extinguishers and made a few mental practice runs with the seat-belt release because Chuck was a bit worried and not talking any more.
Bright flash.
The thunder was still rolling when we began going in with the first of the approach lights nicking out of sight below the fuselage.
Gear-down light on.
Flaps at full.
500.
‘Whisky, you are cleared to land’
‘Roger.’
200.
Another flash lit the cockpit.
I could feel the heat of the tropical night seeping into the cabin. A haze of lights drifted past 100.
One bounce.
The blades of the ceiling fan droned above my head.
I could smell creosote on the moist air, or something like creosote; maybe it was the stuff in the little bowls: they’d lifted the bed and stood its legs in the little bowls and then poured the stuff in, almost to the brim. The boy at the desk downstairs had said it was against the centipedes.
I opened the 8X50s a fraction on the fulcrum and re-focused. Chuck Lazenby had told me where to buy them after we’d got into Manaus. The trouble was they misted up every thirty seconds and I had to keep wiping them.
Chuck had said he’d earned a crate of beer for bringing the Beech in through that storm and I’d spent half an hour with him getting some more data on the environs while he got slowly drunk: the flight in had worried him more than he admitted.
In the circular field of vision I could see their heads, below in the courtyard. Sometimes they disappeared as they moved, then came back into view: the foreground images were complex and consisted of the Indian screen across the lower half of my window, the uprights of the veranda and the leaves of the fan-palms in the courtyard. With the lowering sun throwing oblique light across the hotel I needed this much cover to haze out any glint from the lenses.
There were five men down mere, and a woman.
The girl sat more or less in the middle of them.
Satynovich Zade had come through on the noon plane, still with no baggage. ;I saw Ferris a few yards behind him but we made no contact at any time: he was booked in at the Hotel Amazonas. He stayed at the airport long enough to see me lock on to Zade and then got a taxi.
Zade was one of the faces I had in the 8X50s, blurred and merging with the leaves. He was sitting next to the woman, very relaxed, his dark glasses occasionally swinging upwards and turning slowly to scan the first-storey verandas At these times I kept the binoculars perfectly still.
We had come the four miles to Lagofondo in separate boats from Manaus harbour. I had told the Indian boy to keep half a mile distant because the risk of Zade’s getting lost was now almost nil: the terrain on each side of the river was thick jungle where according to Chuck Lazenby only a lunatic would go on his own. On the river, nearly seven miles wide in this area, the small-boat traffic provided adequate cover.
Lagofondo was at me neck of a tributary: a cluster of water-front cane-and-thatch dwellings along the steep bank where the jute reeds had been hacked away to make room, with a banana grove and some farm buildings and a church. The hotel had been a German mission house during the rubber boom; it had started to rot when the slump came and had then been repaired and was starting to rot again.
A mosquito whined close and I waited for the silence, then hit the side of my head, bringing blood away on my fingers. I put the field glasses up again.
They were sitting in the shade of the palms: everyone here sat in the shade. The thermometer in the hall had been at 103° when I checked in, and the boy at the desk said it was cooler after the rain. An hour ago I had been sitting in the courtyard myself, talking to a Dutchman who was here collecting Indian artifacts for a mail order line he was running in Canada. I hadn’t once looked at the group of people on the other side of the fountain: 1 didn’t want to see them but I wanted them to see me, to establish the image. Zade and another man had been drinking pisco sours and the rest had asked for mineral water. They had talked now and then, but with an effort, and always led by Zade. They bad talked about the Amazon and its insects, mostly in English with strong accents.
Sometimes I had heard the soft frightened tones of the girl.
I watched her now. She was centred in the field of vision: pale, fair haired, sitting perfectly still and looking up at the others only when they spoke directly to her. The woman spoke to her more often than the others. Her name was Shadia.
I moved the glasses.
They had that vague familiarity of faces seen before only in photographs: I’d seen the photographs in London and Ferris had shown me some more on the plane between Los Angeles and Washington four days ago.
Sabri Sassine: undercover operator for the Turkish Dev-Genc, released from gaol in the Argentine. Carlos Ramirez: mercenary terrorist, explosives expert. Francisco Ventura: freelance saboteur and sometime Black September assassin, Ilyich Kuznetski: another freelance with the Simplon Tunnel bombing on his record and a gaol shoot-out in Rome. Satynovich Zade: currently wanted by the Dutch police for a political assassination reportedly undertaken for the PLA.
I didn’t know who the woman was.
I knew who the college girl was.
She was sipping some water as I watched her.
The woman was talking to her now but I couldn’t hear the words intelligibly. The accent was Polish. I moved the field glasses and studied her again, wiping the condensation off the lenses and steadying them with my elbows on my knees. I am a bad judge of people’s age but she looked thirty-five. Sun-tan, auburn hair hanging loose, very pale blue eyes that hardly ever moved: when she wanted to look at something she turned her head, in the way of a cat Possibly she had been taken on as a chaperon for Pat Burdick but these men were terrorists and if they wanted to search the girl they would do that and if they wanted to rape her they would do that: I didn’t think the woman was a chaperon. More probably she was the current partner of one of the men but in half an hour’s constant surveillance I hadn’t seen who he was: she hadn’t touched any of them, or sat particularly close. Ten minutes ago Zade had said something to her in Polish and she had cut in quickly, turning away, and there’d been a short silence among the group.
I moved the field glasses again to watch Ramirez.
Above my head the fan droned rhythmically: the blades were out of balance and the electric motor was vibrating with each revolution. It produced a warm draught, but the sweat went on running down my face and steaming the lenses.
I wondered again what they were asking of the Defense Secretary.
He would know by now, They would have presented their terms.
The fact was that Burdick could have called in security or investigatory or counter-espionage agencies and he hadn’t done that and I could see only one obvious reason: he’d been ordered not to. If this were the standard hostage-and-demands situation then the United States Secretary of Defense was at present under the orders of the five men down there in the courtyard, so long as his daughter was alive.
There was of course a difference in the standard pattern but it didn’t affect the situation as such: in this case the hostage hadn’t been kidnapped. Pat Burdick was studying insects along the Amazon with a few companions and probably writing home and probably sending photographs as evidence. Only two people had known the truth and one was Finberg and he was dead. The other was James Burdick.
This difference in the standard pattern was crucial. If the group had seized their hostage and concealed her whereabouts there would be nothing Burdick could do for them: the FBI and the counter-terrorist department of the CIA would have been mobilized and the group’s demands would have been made public and Burdick would not have been allowed to meet them.
The demands wouldn’t be for money. They would be for something only Burdick and a few men in similar positions could
supply: military information, arms, technological data, access to ultra-secret documents or blueprints or designs. Pressure to supply them, in whole or in part, could be applied to the Defense Secretary only if he alone knew that his daughter’s life was in jeopardy and that these demands were being made.
According to the Bureau intelligence, passed to the executive by his director in the field, Burdick alone knew.
London doesn’t pass out disinformation to the people in the field. It doesn’t tell you much but when it tells you something then you can believe it.
The glasses were misted up again and I lowered them and wiped them with the corner of my handkerchief. I could feel a swelling on my scalp above the ear: the blood on my fingers had been my own, drawn out by a female mosquito. There hadn’t been time to ask for malaria shots but the incubation period would see me ‘through the mission if the chances of survival were good enough, I didn’t think they were.
This was the end-phase and there was the target: the Kobra rendezvous. When I reported to Ferris in a few minutes from now he was going to throw me the final directive and I knew what it was.
I steadied the field glasses again. The right shoulder was still inclined to ache if I kept it still too long: it had taken most of the impact when I’d hit the ground in the alley in New York. One of the group - Sassine - was moving about restlessly and I wanted to keep them all in sight in case anyone thought of coming up here to my room. They shouldn’t do, because security was total: they’d never seen me before and I’d made no specific surveillance of them except from my room and behind adequate cover. But I had believed security to be total when the wall had blown out in Phnom Penh.
Note in passing: James Burdick could say nothing to anyone because his daughter’s life was in hazard. The converse must also be true: his daughter had been warned that if she tried to leave the group or seek the help of the police she would bring about her father’s killing.
I watched them for another fifteen minutes and then signalled Ferris.
Code-intro. No bugs.
I made my report and he started putting questions: did it look as if any exchange were to be made here in Brazil; did it look as if they were waiting for other members of the Kobra cell; did it look as if they felt on top of the situation they had created; so forth, No, no and yes.
He was silent for half a minute.
They’ve still got the road up,’ he said at last, ‘Have they?’
Directive. He’d been in signals with London, This is really quite big. Quite substantial,’
Egerton’s word for it I began worrying.
The phase had only just opened and there wasn’t much I could do: to get as close to the target as this I’d had to present a frank image and rely on cover and this was very limiting. There hadn’t been time to get any leverage, any kind of counter-force that we could apply against the group as a whole: Satynovich Zade was clearly the top kick and I’d obviously go for him as soon as I could arrange something workable but it’d have to be a hundred per cent effective because a stalemate wouldn’t be good enough - they still had the girl in their hands.
I thought I could get at Zade and keep him alive and use him to argue with but it might take hours or even days because a lot would depend on luck.
They told me,’ I said, ‘that it was substantial. What are you trying to do, for Christ’s sake-put the fear of — 8 There’s nothing to worry about,’ he said.
I shut up.
It had just sounded so bloody silly to remind me the mission was ‘substantial’ because Egerton used that kind of word where people like Parkis or Sargent would say ‘hot-war level’ or ‘Minister’s priority’ or whatever term they picked on to express something that was going to make a lot of waves, win or lose.
But Ferris doesn’t ever say anything bloody silly and he’d just told me he’d been in signals with London through the consulate in Manaus and London had instructed him to remind me that we weren’t on just another field exercise and that meant they wanted me to do something difficult, and what Egerton really wanted me to understand was that it was going to be worth it.
Not in terms of any reward, of course: apart from a living wage and a bit extra for roses for Moira we don’t ask any reward for doing something we couldn’t live without doing even though we know it’s going to kill us in the end. Egerton meant in terms of making the necessary effort.
Bloody London for you: they think that when you’ve finally got the target in your sights and you’re set up to go in and get the objective you’re either too dead-beat or too ready to chicken out if the going gets rough.
Gut-think: not precisely true.
Egerton was a worried man, that was all. The red light was on the board and he was sitting up there in Signals with his legs hooked over that crate of stuff they hadn’t unpacked yet and his shoes covered in clay from down there in the street and he was developing purpose-tremor: with the executive on the target and ‘substantial’ considerations in the balance he didn’t want anything to go wrong. So he’d sent his little ferret a shot in the arm.
‘I’m not worrying,’ I told Ferris.
‘Of course you’re not.’
Ramirez had moved and I watched his head vanish and reappear beyond a gap in the leaves. I wasn’t using the field glasses because I had the phone in one hand and wouldn’t be able to control their movement: any terrorist in the international class is constantly sensitive to surveillance and will catch the glint of a lens if care isn’t used, ‘Just give me a directive,’ I said.
I didn’t want to stay on the phone too long because that group down there could split up at any minute and I’d need to keep track of them as long as I could.
‘Yes,’ I heard Ferris saying. ‘We want you to get the objective for us as soon as you can do it safely.’
The girl,’ I said.
He didn’t answer right away. I could hear something like static from his end: he was probably in the wireless room at the consulate, and not at the Hotel Amazonas. Conceivably he was getting stuff direct from Control while he had me on the line. I didn’t know, and I wasn’t going to ask because if he wanted me to know then he’d tell me.
‘No,’ he said in a moment, ‘not the girl. We want the whole group.’
In a couple of seconds I said:
‘You want the whole of the Kobra cell.’
There are always a lot of repeats when a major directive is being put on the line, especially when it’s being done on the phone. It’s not a time for mistakes.
The whole cell,’ Ferris said, ‘yes.’
Another mosquito was whining faintly near my head, but I didn’t think, for the moment, about swatting it ‘Alive?’ I asked Ferris.
He answered straight away because he’d expected the question and had already got a directive on it.
‘That’s immaterial. But if you can get the girl out, everyone would appreciate it,’
Chapter 13
SHADIA
‘The damned creature was twenty feet long, can you imagine?’
Van de Jong broke some bread.
‘Who came out of it?’ I asked him.
He’d come to join me for dinner at my table and it suited my book: he was a compulsive talker so I didn’t have to listen, and he provided good cover. The solitary image is always suspect They both came out of it, of course! He does it for the tourists, when there are any. Listen to me - the anaconda does not crush its victim. It merely throttles it. So all this fellow does is to keep the coils away from his throat. In any case, man is not its habitual prey, so it is just confused when a man comes to wrestle with it, you see.’ He gave a laugh, showing a gold tooth. ‘But it is fun to watch. You should see it I will take you tomorrow.’
The Kobra cell was across the room: the five men and the woman they called Shadia. The Burdick girl was sitting in the corner with someone on each side of her. They were eating, but seemed more to be waiting.
The Indian boy came to our table again.
‘Voce precisa alguma coisa?’
‘Nada. Tudo esta bem.’
We were eating paiche with farinha and de Jong was on his third rum punch: he had so far made three jokes about the ulcer I was using as an excuse for not drinking.
The Burdick girl looked pale in the light of the oil lamps. She didn’t talk very often but sometimes I could make out a few of the words. The woman was asking her about life in an American college and the answers were token and desultory: ‘It’s okay, I guess,’ and ‘you can get into a whole lot of subjects,’ mat kind of thing. The Kobra policy was consistent: it was public knowledge mat Pat Burdick was on an expedition in Brazil with selected companions, and she could even be seen there if anyone were interested. The conversation I had so far overheard was about the Amazon, insects, and American college life: all subjects appropriate to the cover. The party wasn’t keeping to its quarters upstairs, but was eating openly in public, and I assumed that if anyone went over to the table in the corner and said excuse me but aren’t you Pat Burdick she would say yes, I am.
I didn’t intend to do that.
‘It is different with those damned piranhas, my friend. Have you seen them at work?’
I said I hadn’t.
It had taken me a long time to analyse the data inherent in the directive Ferris had given me. London doesn’t tell you more than you need to know for your health but it can’t stop you forming your own conclusions.
They are not so big,’ said de Jong, ‘but when they are in a feeding frenzy they can pick a hundred-pound animal down to the bones, can you imagine?’ He speared his fish steak with his fork. ‘Of course, I suppose we avenge ourselves!’ His laughter was attracting some attention among the group of animal trappers near the bar, and someone laughed in response. He seemed to like this, and raised his glass of rum.
The big ceiling fans stirred the air above our heads, and sent the flypapers twisting. The nights were cooler here: the thermometer by the desk was down to 97° and they’d thrown open the double doors to let the air in through the mosquito screens.