Quiller Solitaire

by Adam Hall

  Chapter 22: FLIGHT 907

  Figures moved through the haze.

  I was in cover, concealed by a stack of crates. The time on my watch was 11:14. I still had my goggles on. Others were wearing them too, as they worked in the blowing sand.

  The last of the passengers were coming off the Pan Am plane. The Nemesis team was herding them into a huge group, two hundred of them, perhaps more; it looked a full complement. Their voices came thinly through the night. The flarepath had blacked out as soon as the plane had come to a halt and then turned, facing the way it had come. The generator was idling now.

  This was a dry lake bed, not salt but clay, with a fine powdering of sand on the surface. It felt hard under my boots, brick hard. There were three other planes on the ground, smaller than the Pan Am jet. I recognised one of them as the company plane we'd flown from Berlin to Algiers. Klaus would have landed here in that, with Maitland and some of the guards. The second aircraft was a twin-engined freighter with no insignia. It would have brought these stores here, the crates. Not quite stores -they had markings on them, and lettering in French, with the skull and crossbones prominent on the cylinders where they showed through the slats. Most of them contained explosives; some contained gas.

  The third aircraft was a tanker, and its generators were throbbing as the Pan Am plane took on the last of its fuel. It was going to take off again, and I knew when. It would take off at midnight.

  Midnight One.

  It was a time and a place, Midnight One. There was another time and another place in the Nemesis schedule: Midnight Two.

  That would be the target.

  Voices came on the wind, the passengers complaining, asking questions. I could hear children crying. Six guards stood at intervals with assault rifles levelled at the hip. Floodlights washed over the crowd, over their pale faces. I saw Klaus, standing halfway between the Pan Am jet and its passengers, fifty yards from where I was now. He was shouting orders, his arms waving with the precision of a traffic cop's. Maitland was nearer the jet, talking to the two Iranians, their figures floodlit by the lights of the tanker. A camouflaged jeep was on the move, providing liaison.

  We're going to make the headlines, you know. They'll be interrupting television programmes, all over the world.

  I tried the radio from time to time, got nothing. If I could raise Cone he might be able to alert the Algerian Air Force in time for them to intercept the Pan Am jet before Midnight Two, before it reached the target. It would be the final chance, if I could reach him. So I tried, every few minutes, but the generators were throwing out too much interference. There wasn't, quite clearly, anything else I could do.

  There's a Pan Am flight reported missing, Cone had told me. It took off from Berlin at 6:17, and went off the screens twenty minutes later.

  So it had been airborne for nearly four hours, airborne and off the radar screens. When it had landed here and the jets had whined into silence and the forward passenger door had come open, Dieter Klaus himself had greeted the first two men off the plane, throwing his arms around them. They would be the hijackers who had gone on board in Berlin.

  There would have been no way to get Flight 907 off the screens except by losing altitude over water and getting below the radar, and that was what the pilot had been ordered to do: follow the English Channel and turn south across the Bay of Biscay and then East across Morocco into the Sahara. Morocco would have picked up the jet on its screens but wouldn't have been able to identify it.

  The sand blew against my goggles; the air was cold against my face. They would be coming across here very soon now, to start loading the cylinders onto the Pan Am plane.

  Two men were standing near the company jet. I think one of them was the pilot. Another man was crouching below the belly of the freighter, checking the undercarriage: perhaps it had been a bumpy landing. The tanker had people around it, watching the fuel going into the airliner. If I could break cover without attracting attention and go across there and get into any one of the aircraft I could send a Mayday call giving the position of Flight 907 and reporting it as hijacked, alerting the Algerian Air Force. But they couldn't put any aircraft down here before midnight unless they had a base nearer than Algiers.

  Tried the radio again and drew blank.

  So I had successfully infiltrated Nemesis, the target opposition network, and I had stayed with it all the way to the operation zone and I was there now, watching the steadily running procedures as the time ran out towards zero, but there was nothing I could do to stop them. So Solitaire was going to be the first mission I couldn't bring home, couldn't follow right through to the end phase, signal London and tell them to pick up that bit of chalk and put it on the board: Mission accomplished.

  But I'd had to give it a try and I'd had to go it alone: there'd been no choice. I hadn't known what I was going into, but I know that in any ultrasensitive situation you can't send in support without risking confusion in the field, and sometimes I can persuade London to understand this: I'd got that clown Thrower recalled on that very point. In Algiers my director in the field couldn't have given me more than half a dozen people at the most at such short notice, and even if they hadn't been seen dropping out of the sky all over the place they couldn't have got this close, as close as one man could come – had come. And even if London could have raised a whole bloody platoon and armed it to the teeth there'd have been a war on down here the minute they landed, and half those passengers over there would have been caught in the cross-fire and there still wouldn't have been any guarantee that the Pan Am plane wouldn't take off on schedule at Midnight One.

  There'd been no choice.

  11:22.

  The wind blew cold, penetrated my bomber jacket, penetrated to the spine, because there were going to be headlines, yes, after all.

  The refuelling crew were hauling the flexible pipe away from the last Pan Am wing tank and stowing it on their plane, and the jeep started up and drove across to where Klaus was standing. He must have been a touch pissed off, Herr Klaus, had been expecting a nuke to play with, but it hadn't arrived. He was answering a question from the driver of the jeep, nodding emphatically, and some of the guards piled aboard. The jeep would turn, I believed, and head in this direction, towards the stack of crates that were giving me cover. It was time for the cargo to be loaded into the airliner.

  I waited.

  It seemed, somewhere in the shadows of my mind, that I had been waiting a long time for this moment to come, longer than hours, longer than days, as if in the past I'd been given a glimpse of the shape of things to come. I think this was because I'd just realised that there might be something, after all, that I could do to bring Klaus down before he could reach his target, Midnight Two, wherever it was.

  A woman screamed somewhere among the crowd of passengers, having got to the point of hysteria, I suppose, and understandably. The scream touched my nerves, for an instant froze them, because I knew quite well that if I started to do what had come into my mind there'd be no calling it off, no chance of getting back.

  Carpe diem.

  I went on waiting.

  Seize, yes indeed, the day.

  My cover was good, here: the crates were stacked higher than a man, and I could move with freedom. Personal cover was also satisfactory: most people here were in black bomber jackets like mine: it had been the fashion of choice when we'd set out from Algiers for a winter's night in the desert. Three or four of the men on the jeep wore goggles, as I did, against the discomfort of the blowing sand; and we all wore padded gloves, de rigueur. I wouldn't have been noticed in the front row of the chorus: someone would have to tell you I was the fourth from the left, just above the bald-headed violinist.

  In the distance the jeep turned and gunned up, its headlights swinging towards the stack of crates.

  I didn't move.

  You won't get out of this alive.

  Shut up.

  It's a suicide run, you know that.

  Christ's sake shuddu
p.

  Then the jeep slid to a halt on the dry sand and the men dropped off it with a clatter of combat boots and started work on the crates with their jemmies, breaking away the slats to get at the cylinders, two of them moving around to the sides, so I kicked at the slats of the nearest crate and prised them away and hauled one of the cylinders out and stooped and got it onto my shoulder and joined the chorus line, lurching with it across to the jeep, another man beside me, the one just above the red-haired lady with the trombone, the sweat running on me because I was committed now and beyond the point of no return, because if I could get this far I stood a chance of bringing the mission home.

  That or the other thing: finis, finito.

  I slid the cylinder onto the back of the jeep and found a spare tyre lever and went back to the crates and worked on the slats and dragged another cylinder out. There were two Arabs here but the rest were German, by their speech.

  'Remember the orders,' one of them said, 'and don't throw these bloody things around. Knock 'em together a bit too hard and we're goners, kerbooom, so for Christ's sake be careful.'

  'He's leaving it late,' someone said, 'you know that?'

  'He knows what he's doing. Shuddup and get the job done.'

  I checked my watch at 11:39 when we'd shifted more than half the cylinders, making five trips with the jeep fully loaded.

  The two Arabian pilots had moved: they were standing with Klaus as we passed him on the final run. One of them was laughing, the sound carrying on the wind. They looked at their ease, hands on their hips and their heads thrown back as Klaus slapped their arms, telling them in his terrible French that they were heroes: I caught snatches of it – 'You will have streets named after you… You will go down in history as the saviours of Islam…'

  It was not good news. This was not good news.

  Unless he was wildly exaggerating, this concerned more than just a megadeath in a football stadium. It concerned Midnight Two, something big enough to earn them a place in history.

  The mental sense of powerlessness is ennervating: my legs felt weak, my arms incapable. I needed help with my last cylinder as I staggered with it onto the Pan Am plane.

  'You all right?

  'Bloody things weigh a bit, that's all.' The cabin was swinging across my eyes, and I had to hold on to a bulkhead to steady myself.

  The men were shouting at the entrance to the cabin, behind the flight deck.

  'How many more?'

  'Three.'

  'Look sharp, then.'

  I moved back to give them room.

  'Okay, that one on top of those two.'

  They moved about. I could hear them. I couldn't see them any more, because I'd slid down on my haunches behind the stack of cylinders: I think I was in one of the forward galleys, because there was a curtain drawn half across, and the smell of coffee. It was comfortable here with my back against a panel, and I closed my eyes.

  Voices came from outside the cabin, speaking in French. Because of the curtain I couldn't hear them clearly.

  They're on a suicide run, and now you're going with them.

  Shut up.

  You're out of your fucking mind.

  Shuddup and leave me alone.

  The wind blows across the desert, across the clay of the dried lake bed, flinging sand against the windows of the cabin. I listen to it.

  I look at my watch.

  It is 11:57. We have three minutes left.

  Then I can hear voices again, this time speaking an Arab tongue. They come from inside the plane. Then there is the soft rushing of the jets, and vibration comes into the airframe. I can feel it against my back.

  Now there is a roaring, the sound of huge power. The big metal cylinders begin a discordant tintinnabulation as the cabin trembles, and then it dies away as the wings lift and we are borne into the sky.

  Chapter 23: AIRBORNE

  01:13.

  It was the first thing I looked at, took an interest in, when I opened my eyes: the watch on my wrist. We had been airborne an hour and thirteen minutes.

  I had slept. The decision had been made for me by the subconscious when the beta-wave levels had been phased out by shock, by the accumulated shock of the mission that we file under the simple name of mission fatigue. It is not simple.

  I felt quite good, felt refreshed, clear-headed again. Thought came easily now, and I was becoming aware of what had happened. But there were certain troubling aspects, because the decision my subconscious had made for me was totally illogical.

  I could hear them talking up there on the flight deck through the open door, the two pilots. They were speaking a language I didn't know, presumably Farsi. I couldn't hear any specific words, wouldn't have understood them in any case.

  Totally illogical, then, the decision that had been made, that I was stuck with. I could either have stayed where I was on the ground or I could have stayed on board the plane and taken off with it. If I'd stayed on the ground I could have joined the tanker crew or the freighter crew and hitched a flight back to Algiers. They wouldn't have recognised me, had never seen me before, would have accepted me as one of the team. Once in Algiers, communication, immediate communication: telephone Cone and tell him the situation, let him signal London and tell them to alert and inform Pan American Airlines. But there wouldn't have been anything they could do. Flight 907 would by then have been airborne for more than two hours, invisible in the night, untraceable, on its way to the unknown target, Midnight Two. If it hadn't already reached there, if there weren't already headlines running through the press.

  It would have been an exercise in total futility, calling up my director in the field and having him signal London and all that tra-la, an exercise in total bloody futility. All it would have done would be to put the matter down in the records: Mission unsuccessful, executive safe.

  So there wouldn't have been any point in staying on the ground in the desert. It wouldn't have achieved anything. But there'd been no point in taking off on board this aeroplane either because I was in a strictly shut-ended situation. I had no argument that would persuade the Iranians to put this aircraft down somewhere and call the whole thing off, and if I got control of them I couldn't put it down anywhere myself: I'd had no training on anything half this size and it'd have to be brought in like a feather on the breeze or we'd blow up the airport.

  Teddy bear.

  The subconscious, then, is not always reliable, is not always so bloody clever. You would do well to remember that, my good friend. It can send you to your bloody doom.

  Teddy bear on the floor. Dropped I suppose by one of the children when they'd all been herded through the exits. Or was it perhaps a naughty teddy bear, that would blow my head off if I picked it up, blow the whole plane to bits? But it wasn't worth worrying about: the stuff in these forty-eight cylinders we'd stacked in here was measurable in mega-teddy-bear power.

  There were two kinds of labels on them, both in red and white and with the skull-and-crossbones symbol. At least four of the cylinders contained Trinitrotoluene and carried another vignette, an explosive flash in red. There might be more of these in the stack; I didn't know, because the labels weren't all visible. The labels on the other cylinders read Nitrogen Tetraoxide and carried four symbols: the skull-and-crossbones, the explosive flash, a man's head with a gas mask on the face, and a coat on a hanger symbolising protective clothing.

  As an explosive, nitrogen tetraoxide is dramatically potent. When Geissler had put me under the strobe in the garage last night I'd repeated the story Samala had told me. An airman dropped a nine-pound socket from a spanner inside a Titan silo, and it punched a hole in the skin of a fuel cell and started a leak. There was a 750-ton steel door on the silo and when that fuel went off it sent it two hundred feet straight up in the air and dropped it a thousand feet away.

  It was 1:32 when I checked my watch again. The time was important, because I would very soon have to do something definitive.

  The empty cabin made a soundbox
for the soft rush of the jets. The lights had been left on in here, turned low on the rheostat. Something was rolling on the floor, pinging against one of the cylinders, and I picked it up. It was a lipstick, and I put it onto the counter of the galley, and bent again to pick up the teddy bear – freeze – but it was all right, nothing happened, and I sat him on the counter too, with a sense, I suppose, of restoring order while I sipped my coffee and thought things out and eventually reached conclusions, deadly conclusions.

  Solitaire was in the end-phase, and if all went reasonably well I could bring it home, though only metaphorically. I would remain somewhere in the Atlantic, distributed piecemeal on its surface to be plucked at by fish – and I say this without bitterness, because I'd rather have them than the worms. In the end-phase of a mission when we realise the executive's status is terminal it's rather like drowning, in that we look back over the events that led us here, and at this particular moment I found myself thinking of that clown Thrower and hoping that Shatner would learn from his mistake and not send him out again unless it was to direct a shadow who could work comfortably with a bloody schoolmaster. I also thought of Helen Maitland, and hoped that one day she would shatter the self-image she'd been stuck with, and start fresh again; and as I considered these things I came to know what was happening: I was putting off the moment when I must set in motion the necessary procedures, because they would bring my death, and the sweat was crawling on me and the adrenalin was firing the motor nerves as I drained the cup with the Pan Am crest on it and put it into the sink.

  Polaris had been high on the starboard side when I'd checked our heading through one of the windows and the time was now 1:46, so we were somewhere west of Morocco and over the Atlantic.