Flyaway

by Desmond Bagley

  'Thirty-five years.'

  'Then please stay. I'd like to talk to you. It's nice to be able to talk to someone again in my own language. I have very little French and M'sieur Bailly has no English at all.' He was a damned liar; Bailly was taking in every word. Kissack said, 'Have another beer, Mr Byrne — that is, if you're not in a hurry.'

  Byrne appeared to hesitate, then said, 'I'm going no place. All right, I'll have another beer. You want to pick my brains, that's the payment.'

  'Good,' said Kissack enthusiastically, and signal led for a waiter. 'You'll be able to fill me in on local colour — it's hard for Bailly to get it across.'

  'I'll do my best,' said Byrne modestly.

  The waiter took the order and I gave him my empty glass. Kissack said casually, 'Ever come across a man called Bill-son?'

  'Know of him. Never did get to meet him.'

  'Ah!' Kissack was pleased. 'Do you know where he is?'

  'He's dead, Mr Kissack,' said Byrne.

  'Are you sure of that?'

  'Well, I can't say I am,' admitted Byrne. 'There was no death certificate. But I reckon he's dead, all right.'

  Kissack frowned. 'How do you know?'

  'Hell!' said Byrne. 'He must be. His airplane crashed over forty years ago. You don't suppose he's still walking across the desert like the children of Israel?'

  Kissack said in a choked voice, That's not the Billson I meant.'

  'No?' said Byrne. 'I thought you were still on the airplane kick.' The waiter put a beer in front of him and he picked it up.

  'Your Billson,' said Kissack softly. 'When did that happen?'

  'Was in 1936 during the London to Cape Town Air Race.' He shrugged. 'And he's not my Billson.'

  'Do you know where that aeroplane is?'

  'Nobody knows where it is,' said Byrne. 'I told you — the desert hides things. Hell, you could hide an air fleet in three million square miles.' He drank some beer. 'Not that I wouldn't be interested in it if someone found it.'

  'You wouldn't be looking for it?' asked Kissack.

  'Why in hell would I be doing that? I've better things to do with my time. When that airplane is found it'll be in a goddamn nasty part of the desert, else it would have shown up by now. I've better things to do than risk my neck like that.'

  Kissack put his hand to his breast pocket. From it he extracted a piece of paper which he unfolded and laid on the table. It was one of Byrne's leaflets. 'I'm unable to read this myself but Bailly translated it for me,' he said, 'I found it remarkably interesting.'

  'Yeah, I suppose a reporter might.'

  'And you still say you're not looking for that aeroplane?'

  'Not specifically — no.' Byrne pointed to the leaflet. 'That's something I distribute every three-four years — more in hope than anything else. I told you, I was a flier during the war. Flying in North Africa, too. I'm interested in desert airplanes, especially since I put one there myself. Might write a book about them.'

  'A scholarly monograph, no doubt,' said Kissack sarcastically. 'Some Aspects of Air Disasters in the Sahara.'

  'I know it sounds nutty,' said Byrne. 'But it's my hobby. Most folks' hobbies seem nutty to someone or other. Ever thought how crazy stamp collecting is?'

  'Expensive, too,' said Kissack. 'Ten camels must be worth a lot of money.'

  'Might seem so to you' Byrne shrugged. 'I breed them.' He grinned at Kissack. 'Get them at cost price, as you might say. And it ain't much, spread over three or four years.'

  Kissack wore a baffled look. The yarn Byrne was spinning was just mad enough to be true. He took a deep breath, and said, 'The man I'm looking for is Paul Billson.'

  'Paul Billson.' Byrne tasted the word along with some beer. 'Paul Billson.' he shook his head. 'Can't say I've heard of him. Any relation?'

  1 don't know,' said Kissack flatly. He prodded the leaflet with his forefinger. 'Get any results from that?'

  'Not so far. Just the same goddamn list I got last time I put it out'

  Kissack looked at him for a long time wordlessly. Byrne stirred, and said, 'Anything more you'd like to know?'

  'Not for the moment,' said Kissack.

  Byrne stood up. 'Well, you know where to find me again if you want me. Up near Timia. Nice to have visited with you, Mr Kissack. Hope I've been of help.' He nodded pleasantly to Bailly. 'Bonjour, M'sieur Bailly.'

  Bailly grunted.

  As we drove away from the hotel I said, 'Well, now we know.'

  'Yeah,' said Byrne laconically. After a while he said, That guy gives me a real creepy feeling.'

  'Why should he be looking for Paul? He must have written him off as dead.'

  'It must have come as a hell of a shock to him,' said Byrne. 'He knocks off Paul, then the whole goddamn Sahara is flooded with questionnaires about crashed airplanes — and coming from Niger, for God's sake! He must have been a confused boy.'

  'But he was quick off the mark.' I thought about it. 'Good thing we didn't bring Paul into town.' I laughed. That was a crazy yarn you spun him.'

  'It won't hold him long,' said Byrne. 'He'll ask around and find I've never done a damnfool thing like that before. I'm hoping he'll go up to Timia — that'll give us some space between us. If he wastes his time on Timia we'll be the other side of Bilma before he finds out he's lost us.'

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  We drove east out of Agadez for about five miles, then left the track to rendezvous with Hamiada at the place appointed. Hamiada had already made camp and had a tent erected. We stayed there the night and slept early in preparation for an early start to cross the Tenere. Next morning I gave Billson the jeans and shirts I had bought 'You can't wander around the Sahara in a business suit,' I said. 'You'd better wear these. I think they'll fit.'

  He rejected them and I said, 'Paul, you're a damned fool! Kissack, back there, has your description and he knows what you're wearing.' I shrugged. 'But please yourself.'

  Paul changed his clothing fast.

  I noticed that Hamiada had cut a lot of acacia branches which he tied in bundles and put in the back of the truck. When I asked Byrne about this he said, 'If we want hot food we have to have fuel.' He nodded towards the east 'There's nothing out there.'

  Hamiada left, taking the camels and going back to Timia. We went in the opposite direction, at first due east, and then curving to the north-east. For the first fifty miles it wasn't too bad; the track was reasonably good and we were able to hold an average speed of about thirty miles an hour. But then the track petered out and we were on rough ground which gradually gave way to drifts of sand, and finally, the sand dunes themselves.

  'So this is what you call an erg,' I said.

  Byrne laughed shortly. 'Not yet.' He indicated a crescent-shaped dune we were passing., 'These are barchan dunes. They're on the move all the time, driven by the wind. Not very fast — but they move. All the sand is on the move, that's why there's no track here.'

  Presently the isolated barchan dunes gave way to bigger sand structures, rolling hills of sand. The mountains of the Air had long disappeared below the horizon behind us. Byrne drove skilfully, keeping to the bottom of the valleys and threading his way among the dunes. I wondered how he knew which way to go, but he didn't seem worried. As we went he discoursed on the different types of sand.

  'This ain't too bad,' he said. 'At least you can stop without getting into trouble. Fech-fech is the worst.'

  'What's that?'

  'Sometimes you get times of high humidity — high for the desert, anyway. At night in winter the moisture freezes out of the air and forms dew on the surface of the sand. That makes a hard crust on the top with soft sand underneath. Driving on that is okay if you keep moving, but if you stop you're likely to break through and go down to your axles.' He paused and said reflectively, 'Don't bother a camel none, though.'

  Another time he said, 'A few years ago I was up north, round about Hassi-Messaoud where the oil-wells are. I came across a big truck — could carry a hundred tons. Russian,
it was; used for carrying oil rigs about. The guys who were driving it were Russians, too, and they showed me how it worked. It had eight axles, sixteen big balloon tyres and you could let air out and pump air in by pressing buttons in the cab. They reckoned that with a full load they could jiggle things so that the weight on the ground per square inch was no more than that of a camel. A real nice toy it was.'

  'Ingenious.'

  'Yeah.' He laughed. 'But they were sloppy about it. They had five of the tyres on wrong way around. Anyway, a few weeks later I heard what happened to it. They were driving along and decided to stop for the night. So they stopped, had something to eat, and went to sleep. But they stopped on fech-fech and during the night the truck broke through. The Russians were sleeping underneath it and it killed them both. They never did get it out.'

  A nice illustrative and macabre story of the dangers of the desert. Byrne said, 'Lousy stinkpots! Never have liked them except when I'm in a hurry, like now.'

  After a while the sand dunes levelled off into a plain of sand, and presently Byrne said, 'The Tree!' On the far horizon ahead was a black dot which might well have been an optical illusion — a speck of dust on the eyeball — but which proved to be a solitary wide-spreading thorn tree. There was a well near the tree and the ground all about was Uttered with the olive-shaped pellets of camel dung. There were also several skeletons of camels, some still covered with hide, mummified in the dry, hot desert air.

  Byrne said, 'We'll stop here for something to eat — but not near the well. Too many biting bugs.'

  As we drove past, Paul, behind me, said, 'There's someone standing by the tree.'

  'So there is,' said Byrne. 'Just one man. That's unusual here. Let's go see who he is.'

  'He pulled over the wheel and we stopped just by the tree. The man standing there was not a Targui because he wore no veil and his skin was darker, a deep rich brown. He was shorter than the average Targui and not as well dressed. His gandoura was black and his head cloth in ill array.

  Byrne got out and talked to the man for a few minutes, then came back to the truck. 'He's a Teda from the Tibesti. He's been hanging around here for three days waiting for someone to come along. He's heading east and he can't do the next stretch alone.'

  'How did he g et here?'

  'Walked. Only just made it, too. Did the last two days without water. Do you mind if we give him a lift as far east as we're going?'

  It's your truck,' I said. 'And you're the boss.'

  Byrne nodded and waved to the man, who came over to the Toyota. He was carrying a shaggy goatskin bag which Byrne said was a djerba, used for holding water. Byrne tapped the bag and asked a question, pointed to the well. The man answered and then, at a command from Byrne, emptied the contents of the bag on the ground.

  'It's okay to drink that stuff if you have to,' said Byrne. Hut not unless. An addax antelope fell into the well a few years ago and it's been no goddamn good since.'

  As we drove away I said, 'What's his name?'

  'He didn't say. He said his name used to be Konti.'

  I frowned. 'That's a funny thing to say.'

  'Not really,' said Byrne. 'It means he's a murderer.' He seemed unperturbed.

  I twisted around to look at the man in the back of the truck, whose name used to be Konti. 'What the hell…'

  'It's okay,' said Byrne. 'He won't kill us. He's not a professional murderer. He probably killed somebody in a blood feud back home and had to take it on the lam. Maybe he reckons it's now safe to go back or he's got word his family has paid the blood money.'

  He stopped the truck about a mile the other side of the Tree. 'This will do.' We got out. From the back of the truck Byrne took what appeared to be a length of metal pipe. 'Help me fill this.'

  There was a brass cap on the top which he unscrewed. I held a funnel while Byrne filled the contraption with water from a jerrican. As he did so he said, 'This is a volcano — the most economic way of boiling water there is.'

  It was simple, really, consisting of a water jacket, holding about two pints, around a central chimney. Byrne poked a lighted spill of paper into a hole in the bottom, added a few twigs of acacia and, when the fire had taken hold of those, popped in a handful of pellets of dried camel dung which he had picked up near the tree. They burned fiercely, but with no smell. Within five minutes we had boiling water.

  We lunched on bread and cheese and mint tea, our murderer joining in. 'Ask him his name,' I said. 1 can't keep on referring to him as the man who used to be Konti.'

  As Byrne talked to the man Paul said, 'I'm not going to ride with any murderer. Nobody asked me if he could come along.'

  Byrne stopped abruptly and turned to Paul. Then you'll walk the rest of the way, either forward or back.' He jerked his head. 'He's probably a better man than you. And the reason you weren't asked is that I don't give a good goddamn what you like or what you don't like. Got it?' He didn't wait for a reply but went back to talking in guttural tones.

  I looked at Paul, whose face was as red as a boiled beet. I said softly, 'I told you to walk carefully around Byrne. You never learn, do you?'

  'He can't talk to me like that,' he muttered.

  'He just did,' I pointed put. 'And what the hell are you going to do about it? I'll tell you — you're going to do nothing, because Byrne is the only thing standing between you and being dead.'

  He lapsed into a sulky silence.

  Byrne finished his interrogation and turned back to me. 'He says it's okay for you to call him Konti now. I don't speak his lingo well, but he has some Arabic — and I was just about right. He killed a man three years ago in the Tibesti and ran away. He's just learned that the blood money has been paid so he's going back.' He paused. 'Blood camels, really; there's not much hard cash in the Tibesti.'

  'How many camels are worth a man's life?'

  'Five.'

  'Half a 1930s aeroplane,' I commented.

  'You could put it that way,' he said. 'The change of name is a pure ritual, of course. You know what he'd do when he ran away? He'd kill an antelope, take a length of its large intestine, and pull it on to his feet like socks. Then he'd jump up and down till it broke. Symbolic breaking of the trail, you see.'

  'Weird,' I said.

  'Yeah; funny people, the Teda. Related to the Tuareg but a long ways back.' He looked up at the sun. 'Let's go. I want to be the other side of Fachi before nightfall.'

  We pressed on and entered an area where again there were large dunes, some of them several hundred feet high. I realized that Byrne was doing all the driving and offered to spell him but he rejected the idea. 'Later, maybe; but not now. You'd get us stuck. There's an art in driving in soft sand, and you have to hit these rises at just the right angle.' Once I glimpsed an animal with large ears scurrying over the edge of a dune. Byrne said it was a fennec. 'Desert fox. Gets its moisture from eating insects and jerboas. Jerboas make water right in their own bodies. Least, that's what a guy told me who was out here studying them. That fennec wouldn't show himself in daytime in summer; too goddamn hot.'

  Fachi was a small, miserable oasis a little over a hundred miles from the Tree of Tenere. The people were Negroid and the women wore rings in their noses. 'These people are Fulani,' said Byrne with an edge of contempt in his voice. The Tuareg don't like 'em, and they don't like the Tuareg. We're not staying here — they'd steal us blind.'

  We stopped only long enough to fill the water cans and to buy a goat kid which Byrne efficiently lulled and butchered, then we went on for ten miles and camped just as the sun was setting. We cooked a meal, then ate and slept, and were on our way again at dawn next day.

  We drove mile after rolling mile among the dunes and sometimes over them when there was no other recourse. Once I said to Byrne, 'How the devil do you know which way to go?'

  'There's an art in that, too,' he said. 'You've got to know what the prevailing wind was during the last few months. That sets the angle of the dunes and you can tell your direction by that. It don't
change much from year to year but enough to throw you off and get you lost. And you keep an eye on the sun.'

  It was nearly midday when we rose over the crest of a dune and Byrne said, 'There's the azelai'

  'What?'

  'The salt caravan Mokhtar is taking to Bilma. He's two days out of Fachi.'

  That gave me a clue as to the difference between the speed of a camel and that of a Toyota. 'How long from Agadez to Bilma?'

  'Four weeks. Two or three weeks in Bilma to rest up, then back again with the salt. Best part of three months for the round trip.'

  The caravan consisted of about three hundred camels and perhaps twenty camel drivers. 'Fifty of these are mine,' said Byrne, and hailed Mokhtar. He came towards the truck with the slow, lazy saunter of the Tuareg, looked at me in surprise, and then laughed and said something to Byrne who chuckled and said, 'Mokhtar thinks I've got a convert. He wants to know if I'm setting up in competition with the Prophet.'

  He examined his animals and expressed satisfaction at their condition, and then we went on, and the caravan, plodding its slow three-miles-an-hour pace, was soon left behind.

  It was at about three that afternoon when the offside front tyre burst and the steering-wheel slewed violently in Byrne's hands. 'Goddamn!' he said, and brought us to a halt.

  There was a whipcrack at my ear and the windscreen shattered. I had. been shot at in Korea and I knew a bullet when I heard one, even without the evidence of the broken windscreen. 'Everyone out,' I yelled. 'We're under fire.'

  I jerked at the door handle and jumped out. The bullet had come from my side, so I ran around the truck to get into cover. As I did so a fountain of sand spurted a yard ahead of me. Paul was still in the truck, not being quick enough off the mark, and I found Byrne hauling him out. I discovered that I was holding the Walther pistol in my hand although I couldn't remember drawing it The shooting was still going on, sharp cracks in the dead, dry air. I judged it to be a rifle. But no bullets were coming anywhere near us. Byrne nudged me. 'Look!' He pointed upwards to the dune behind us.