It was four fifteen the next morning when we left the hotel in Adrar. Mann and Percy were in the Land Rover. I followed in the VW bus with Johnny, an extra driver from ‘Dempsey’s Desert Tours’. We drove through the market-place in the gloom of desert night. It was damned cold, and the drivers wore scarves and woolly hats. The big trucks that cross the desert in convoy, loaded with dried fish and oranges, were nearly ready to move off. One of the drivers waved us past. Desert travellers have survival in common; never knowing when you might need a friend.
We turned south. I followed the rear lights of the Land Rover. The road was hard sand, and we maintained a good speed past the roughly painted signs that pointed to distant villages. In places, loose sand had drifted on to the track, and I braked each time the Land Rover rear lights bounced; but the drift had not yet built up into the humps that tear an axle in half.
The gun-metal sky lightened and glowed red along the horizon until, like a thermic lance, the sun tore a white-hot hole in it. This road skirted the edges of the Sahara’s largest sand-seas. To the west the horizon rolled like a storm-racked ocean, but to the east the land was flat and featureless, as grey and as hard as concrete. Sometimes we passed herds of moth-eaten camels, scratching for a bite of thorn-bush or a mouthful of scrub. The route south was marked by small cairns of stones. Often there was a solitary Arab riding astride some wretched beast, so small and bowed that the rider’s feet almost touched the ground. Once an Arab family were rearranging the burdens upon the saddles of their three camels. We saw no motor traffic.
We were three hours out of Adrar by the time we reached the end of the track. Six dented oil-drums blocked the way, and a sun-bleached wooden sign indicated that we should follow the tyre tracks in a diversion from the marked route.
The Land Rover bumped off the hard verge with a flurry of sand as the wheels slipped into a soft patch. My smooth tyres took hold and then followed slowly along the pattern of tracks. I kept close behind the others, lining up our vehicles to simplify the problems of winching, for there was little doubt that I would be the one who got stuck. Their four-wheel drive would get them out of this kind of sand.
The detour was marked each hundred metres or so by an old oil-drum. Some of them had been blown over, and rolled far away from their original positions. Two were almost buried in drifting sand. It was easier to watch the tyre tracks.
After about eight kilometres the Land Rover stopped. Mann got out and walked back to me. It was fully light now and even with sun-glasses I found myself squinting into the light reflecting from the sand. It was still early morning, but now that we’d stopped I felt the heat of the sun and smelt the warm rubber, evaporating fuel and Mann’s after-shave lotion.
‘How far was that last drum?’ asked Mann.
‘A couple of hundred metres.’
‘Right and I don’t see another ahead. You stay here. I’ll mosey around a little.’
‘What about these tyre tracks?’ I asked.
‘Famous last words,’ pronounced Mann. ‘Tracks like those can lead you out there into that sand-sea, and finally you get to the place where they turn around and head back again.’
‘Then why tracks?’
‘An old disused camp for oil prospectors, or a dump for road gangs.’ He kicked at one of the tyre marks.
‘These tracks look fresh,’ I said.
‘Yeah,’ said Mann. He kicked one of the ridges of impacted sand. It was as hard as concrete. ‘So do the tank tracks you find in southern Libya – and they’ve been there since Rommel.’
I looked at my watch.
Mann said, ‘I hope the diversion is well marked on the highway to the south of here, or that Russian cat will come wheeling past us while we’re stuck out here in this egg-timer factory.’
It was then that Percy Dempsey got out of the Land Rover and limped back to join us. He was a curious figure in his floppy hat, cardigan, long baggy shorts and gaiters.
‘Jesus!’ said Mann. ‘Here comes Miss Marple.’
‘I say – old chap,’ said the old man. He had difficulty remembering our names. Perhaps that was because we changed them so often. ‘Mr Antony, I mean. Are you wondering about the road ahead?’
‘Yes,’ I said. My name was Antony; Frederick L. Antony, tourist.
Dempsey blinked. His face was soft and babyish as old men’s faces sometimes are. Now that he had taken off his sun-glasses, his blue eyes became watery.
Mann said, ‘Don’t get nervous, Auntie. We’ll dope it out.’
‘The oil-drum markers continue along this track,’ said the old man.
‘How do you know that?’ said Mann.
‘I can see them,’ said the old man.
‘Yeah!’ said Mann. ‘So how come I can’t see them, and my buddy here can’t see them?’
‘I used my binoculars,’ said the old man apologetically.
‘Why the hell didn’t you say you had binoculars?’ said Mann.
‘I offered them to you just outside Oran. You said you weren’t planning a trip to the opera.’
‘Let’s go,’ said Mann. ‘I want to make camp before the sun gets high. And we have to find a place where the Russkie can spot us from the main road.’
Dempsey’s Desert Tours VW bus was equipped with two tent sides that expanded to provide a large area of shade. There was also a nylon sheet stretched across the roof, and held taut above it, which prevented the direct sunlight striking the top of the bus and so making it into the kind of oven that metal car bodies became.
The bright orange panels could be seen for miles. The Russian spotted them easily. He had driven non-stop from some prospecting site along the river Niger east of Timbuktu. It was a gruelling journey over poor tracks and open country, and he’d ended it in the fierce heat of early afternoon.
The Russian was a hatchet-faced man in his early forties.
He was tall and slim with cropped black hair that showed no sign of greying. His dark suit was baggy and stained, its jacket slung over his brawny shoulder. His red check shirt was equally dirty, and the gold pencil clipped into its pocket was conspicuous because of that. Pale blue eyes were almost sealed by fine desert sand, and his face was lined and bore the curious bruise-like marks that come with exhaustion. His arms were muscular and his skin was tanned very dark.
Major Mann opened the nylon flap and indicated the passenger seats of the VW bus and the table-top fixed between them. In spite of the tinted windows the plastic seat covering was hot to the touch. I sat opposite the Russian and watched him take off his sun-glasses, yawn and scratch the side of his nose with his car-key.
It was typical of Mann’s cunning, and of his training, that he offered the Russian no chance to rest. Instead he pushed towards him a glass and a vacuum flask containing ice-cubes and water. There was a snap as Mann broke the cap on a half-bottle of whisky and poured a generous measure for our guest. The Russian looked at Mann and gave him a thin smile. He pushed the whisky aside and from the flask grabbed a handful of ice-cubes and rubbed them on his face.
‘You got ID?’ Mann asked. As if to save face he poured whisky for himself and for me.
‘What are ID?’
‘Identification. Passport, security pass or something.’
The Russian took a wallet from his hip pocket. From it he brought a dog-eared piece of brown cardboard with his photo attached. He passed it to Mann, who handed it to me. It was a pass into the military zone along the Mali frontier with Niger. It described the Russian’s physical characteristics and named him as Professor Andrei Mikhail Bekuv. Significantly the card was printed in Russian and Chinese as well as Arabic. I gave it back to him.
‘You have the photo of my wife?’
‘It would have been poor security to risk it,’ said Mann. He sipped at his drink but when he set it down again the level seemed unchanged.
Professor Bekuv closed his eyes. ‘It’s fifteen months since I last saw her.’
Mann shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘She will
be in London by the time we get there.’
Bekuv spoke very quietly, as if trying to keep a terrible temper under control. ‘Your people promised a photo of her – standing in Trafalgar Square.’
‘It was …’
‘That was the agreement,’ said Bekuv, ‘and you haven’t kept to it.’
‘She never left Copenhagen,’ said Mann.
Bekuv was silent for a long time. ‘Was she on the ship from Leningrad?’ he said finally. ‘Did you check the passenger list?’
‘All we know is that they didn’t come in on the plane to London,’ said Mann.
‘You lie,’ said Bekuv. ‘I know the sort of people you are. My country is filled with such men as you. You had men there waiting for her.’
‘She will come,’ said Mann.
‘Without her I will not come with you.’
‘She will come,’ said Mann. ‘She is probably there already.’
‘No,’ said Bekuv. He turned in his seat, to see the road that would take him a thousand miles back to the Russians in Timbuktu. In spite of the tinted windows, the sand was no more than a blinding glare. Bekuv picked up the battered sun-glasses that he’d left on the table alongside his car keys. He toyed with them for a moment and then put them into the pocket of his shirt. ‘Without her I am nothing,’ said Bekuv reflectively. ‘Without her life is not worth living for me.’
Mann said, ‘There is urgent work to be done, Professor Bekuv. Your chair of Interstellar Communication at New York University will give you access time on the Jodrell Bank radio telescope – and, as you well know, that has a 250-foot steerable paraboloid. The university is also arranging time on the 1,000-foot fixed radio telescope they’ve built in the Puerto Rican mountains near Arecibo.’
Bekuv didn’t answer but he didn’t leave either. I glanced at Mann and he gave me the sort of glare that was calculated to shrivel me to silent tissue. I realized now that Mann’s joke about little men in flying saucers was no joke.
‘There is no one else doing this kind of cosmology,’ Mann said. ‘Even if you fail to make contact with life in other solar systems, you’ll be able to give it a definitive thumbs down.’
Bekuv looked at him scornfully. ‘There is already enough – proof to satisfy any but the most stupid.’
‘If you don’t take this newly created chair of Interstellar Communication there will be another bitter fight … and next time the cynics might get their nominee into it. Professor Chataway or old Delahousse would jump at such an opportunity to prove that there was no life anywhere in outer space.’
‘They are fools,’ said Bekuv.
Mann pulled a face and shrugged.
Bekuv said, ‘I have a beautiful wife who has remained faithful, a proud mother and a talented son who will soon be at university. Nothing is more important than they are.’
Mann sipped some of his whisky and this time he really drank. ‘Suppose you go back to Timbuktu and your wife is waiting in London? What then, eh?’
‘I’ll take that chance,’ said Bekuv. He slid across the seat and stepped down from the VW into the sand. The light through the nylon side-panels coloured him bright orange.
Mann didn’t move.
‘You don’t fool me,’ said Mann. ‘You’re not going anywhere. You made your decision a long time ago and you’re stuck with it. You go back now, and your comrades will stake you out in the sand, and toss stale piroshkis at you.’
Bekuv said nothing.
‘Here, you forgot your car keys, buddy,’ Mann taunted him.
Bekuv took the keys that Mann offered but he did not step out into the sunshine. The sudden buzzing of a fly sounded unnaturally.
‘Professor Bekuv,’ I said. ‘It’s in our mutual interests that your family should be with you.’
Bekuv took out his hankerchief and wiped sand from the corners of his eyes but he gave no sign of having heard me.
‘I understand there is still work to be done, so you can bet that the American Government will do everything in their power to make sure you are happy in every respect.’
‘In their power, yes …’ said Bekuv sadly.
‘There are ways,’ I said. ‘There are official swops as well as escapes. And what you never hear about are the secret deals that our governments do. The trade agreements, the loans, the grain sales … all these deals contain hundreds of secret clauses. Many of them involve people we exchange.’
Bekuv dug the toe of his high, laced boots into the sand and traced a pattern of criss-cross lines. Mann reached forward from his seat and rested a hand upon Bekuv’s shoulder. The Russian twitched nervously.
‘Look at it this way, Professor,’ Mann said, in the sort of voice that he believed to be gentle and conciliatory. ‘If your wife is free we’ll bring her to you, so you might as well come with us.’ Mann paused. ‘If she’s in prison … you’d be out of your mind to go back.’ He tapped Bekuv’s shoulder again. ‘That’s the way it goes, Professor Bekuv.’
‘There was no letter from her this week,’ said Bekuv.
Mann looked at him but said nothing.
I had seen it before: men like Bekuv are ill fitted for the conspiracy of defection, let alone years of conspiracy that threatened the safety of his family. His gruelling journey across the Sahara had exhausted him. But his worst mistake was in looking forward to the moment when it would all be over; professionals never do that. ‘Oh Katinka!’ whispered Bekuv. ‘And my fine son. What have I done to you. What have I done.’
I didn’t move, and neither did Mann, but Bekuv pushed the nylon flap aside and stepped out into the scorching sun. He stood there for a long time.
3
The next problem was how to lose Bekuv’s vehicle. It was a GAZ 59A, a Russian four-wheel drive field-car. It was a conspicuous contraption – canvas top, angular bodywork and shiny metal springs showing through the seat covers. You couldn’t bury it in sand, and setting it ablaze would probably attract just the sort of attention we were trying to avoid.
Mann took a big wrench and ripped the registration plates off it and defaced the RMM sign that would tell even an illiterate informer that it was from Mali.
Mann didn’t trust Percy Dempsey out of his sight. And Mann certainly didn’t trust Johnny, the ever-smiling Arab driver. Only because he couldn’t come up with a better idea did he agree to Johnny heading back north with the GAZ, while we followed with Bekuv in the VW. And all the time he was turning to look at Bekuv, watching Percy in the Land Rover behind us and telling me that Percy Dempsey wasn’t half the man I’d cracked him up to be.
‘It’s damned hot,’ I said.
Mann grunted and looked at Bekuv still asleep on the bench seat behind us. ‘If we dump that GAZ anywhere here in the south, the cops will check it to make sure it’s not someone dying of thirst. But the farther we go north, the more interest the cops are going to take in that funny-looking contraption.’
‘We’ll be all right.’
‘We haven’t seen one of those heaps in the whole of Algeria.’
‘Stop worrying,’ I said. ‘Percy was doing this kind of thing out here in the desert when Rommel was in knee pants.’
‘You Limeys always stick together.’
‘Why don’t you drive for a while, Major.’
When we stopped to change seats, we stayed there long enough to let Johnny get a few kilometres ahead. The GAZ was no record-breaker. It wasn’t all that far advanced from the Model A Ford from which it evolved. There would be no problem catching up with it, even in the VW.
In fact, the old GAZ came into view within twenty-five minutes of us resuming the journey. We saw it surmounting the gentle slope of a dune and Mann flicked his headlights in greeting.
‘We’ll keep this kind of distance,’ Mann said. There was about five hundred yards between the vehicles.
Behind us Percy came into view, driving the Land Rover. ‘Is Percy a fag?’ said Mann.
‘Queer?’ I said. ‘Percy and Johnny? I never gave it a thought.’
r /> ‘Percy and Johnny,’ said Mann. ‘It sounds like some cosy little bar in Tangier.’
‘Does that make it more likely that they are queers, or less likely?’
‘As long as they do their job,’ said Mann. ‘That’s all I ask.’ He glanced in the mirror before taking a packet of Camels from his shirt pocket, extracting a cigarette and lighting up, without letting go of the wheel. He inhaled and blew smoke before speaking again. ‘Just get us up to that goddamned airstrip, that’s all I ask.’ He thumped the steering-wheel with his bony fist. ‘That’s all I ask.’
I smiled. The first hint of Bekuv’s possible defection had been made to a British scientist. That meant that British Intelligence were going to cling to this one like a limpet. I was the nominated limpet, and Mann didn’t like limpets.
‘We should have moved by night,’ I said, more to make conversation than because I’d thought about it very carefully.
‘And what do we tell the cops, that we are photographing moths?’
‘No explanation necessary,’ I said. ‘These roads probably have more traffic at night when it’s cool. The danger is running into camels or people walking.’
‘Look at tha – Jesus Christ!’
Mann was staring ahead but I could see nothing there, and by the time I realized he was looking in the rear-view mirror it was too late. Mann was wrenching the steering-wheel and we were jolting into the desert in a cloud of sand. There was a howl of fury as Bekuv was shaken off the back seat and hit the floor.
I heard the jet helicopter long before I caught sight of it. I was still staring at the GAZ, watching it disappear in a flurry of sand and white flashes. Then it became a big molten blob that swelled up, and, like a bright red balloon, the fuel exploded with a terrible bang.
The helicopter’s whine turned to a thudding of rotor blades as it came back and flew over us with only a few feet clearance, its blades chopping Indian signals out of the smoke that drifted up from the GAZ.