'21 26598 North,' she repeated; and her voice sounded as though it came from someone else. 'That's not right, is it?'

The room seemed to have grown quiet, like a crowded church. 'Longitude 39 49882 East - according to your stuff.' Laraby's voice was dead-pan, but with a hint of apology. ; 'That puts it about fifty miles off, to the east. Unless it's been programmed wrong, and that's why it was dumped?'

'What's the correct reading, Mr Laraby?'

After some more fumbling he found the page for the Arabian Peninsula. When he looked at her, he saw that she was very pale. He said, 'Mrs Rawcliff, can you give me any idea what this is all about?'

'I'm afraid I can't. I'm doing it for a friend, as a favour.' She spoke in a dull, choked voice, as she stared at the final sheet of the print-out in his hand. 'Come on - where is it?'

Target.

One.

By 00.30 hours, Friday morning, Cyprus time, the five Hercules transports stood fully loaded and refuelled, the guidance-systems, detonators, hi-fi and loudspeaker equipment set in place. It only remained for the computers to, be activated and the hi-fi sets fitted with their ca.s.settes.

Each pilot had chosen one of the four parachutes that came with his plane.

Rawcliff had never jumped before, let alone over wild, unknown terrain. There was also the possibility that the packs had been tampered with, or that he'd just be unlucky, and go down in a 'Roman candle'; or the chance that he might overfly the drop-zone and be left to fry, without food or water, on some rocky wasteland or in blistering desert; or maybe the Beachcraft Duke was just a blind, and there would be no drop-zone - perhaps Matt had been 'doubling' all along and had already activated the guidance-systems, and it had been intended from the start that the pilots should go down with their exploding planes? The detonators might already have been primed, without any of them knowing. No guarantees, no promises. Nothing certain, except their greed for the balance of that 40,000 in a Swiss vault.

It was a warm, clear night, and they rested, refreshed by tepid water from jerry-cans and by the bitter black coffee. Smoking was rigorously forbidden; and there was little conversation. Now that the final hand was about to be dealt, there seemed to be nothing to talk about. It was certainly no time to start expressing doubts.

Shortly before one am at least one puzzle was solved. Serge, carrying a mapcase and goggles, boarded the Beachcraft Duke. If Jim Ritchie had,any qualms about his pretty air-taxi being flown by a total stranger - a foreign mercenary with no visible credentials or licence to show - he was keeping his feelings to himself.

Rawcliff had long despaired of any forthright explanations, even for the simplest action or incident Throughout this mission, even when you were not airborne, you were left to operate by instinct, deduction and suspicion Just after Serge boarded the Beachcraft, he was joined by Matt, who climbed into the seat beside Serge, carrying the white leather case which Peters had collected from Pol in Nicosia. Rawcliff guessed that it contained the computerized tapes for the guidance-systems and the ca.s.settes for the hi-fisets.

Whoever was behind all this was leaving nothing to chance or to trust. No risk that one of the pilots might decide to turn off and land with his deadly load at some friendly airport, ready to turn them all in for a reward. Without the computerized tapes there would never be any proof of the final target - 'except Judith's word over the phone, and a scrawled message which Peters would certainly have destroyed. And whatever mysterious evidence was held in those ca.s.settes, to be relayed over the ma.s.sive loudspeakers, could easily be wiped off by either Matt or Serge, if anything went seriously wrong.

The strip of runway was now lit by half-a-dozen hurricane-lamps down either side. It was all right for Serge in the little Beachcraft,'Rawcliff thought.

Even at night, in an aircraft like that, a competent pilot can take off and land in a field or an empty street. But for a Hercules, in the dark, they were going to have to calculate to the nearest foot.

They had all done this short take-off once now - even poor Grant - but it had be,en achieved in daylight, with perfect visibility. And Rawcliff knew that even with the most experienced pilots, there were always the times when the nerves began to jump, the sweat started up and the stomach grew heavy. He was worried that he had drunk too much black coffee; his bowels were feeling loose.

While the Beachcraft Duke stood warming up its engines, Rawcliff asked Ritchie, as casually as possible, if he knew where the plane was going.

Ritchie sounded almost off-hand: 'They've got permission to do some aerial reconnaissance for a French geological inst.i.tute - somewhere over the empty part of the Nafud Desert in the north of Saudi. And they've been cleared for Egyptian and Saudi air-s.p.a.ce clearance - no problems.'

The Beachcraft took off at 01.15 hours, on that last Friday. For a few minutes they watched its lights and heard its engines pulsing out over the sea: then it was gone, leaving behind a heavy silence. It also seemed to leave a vacuum -an absence of true authority, in the person of Serge - as well as the departure of Rawcliff's specious accomplice, Matt Nugent-Ross.

Peters was now back in full command, and determined to make the most of it.

Only one set of items remained to be loaded on to the Hercules, through the side-doors, where they would be easily accessible: five drums of grey paint, five sprayers, and five light extendable ladders.

Peters now handed each pilot his buff envelope; but before dismissing them to their aircraft, he stood rigidly to attention and made a short speech. It was an incongruous, even comic performance. To Rawcliff's ear it was obvious that it had been translated, almost certainly from French, and that Peters was reciting it, in his prim 'colonial' voice, which rendered some of the more lyrical phrases into pa.s.sionless plat.i.tudes.

He began by saying that he was about to announce the full significance of their mission, which would be of historic proportions. He paused dead-pan, his eyes avoiding Rawcliff's, as he went on: 'And while I am unable to divulge the precise nature of our ultimate target - for reasons of our own security, as well as that of others - I promise that each of you will be striking a major blow for the defence of Western civilization, for freedom and democracy, against the increasing threat of alien and barbarian forces.

'Unfortunately, for reasons of international security, your ident.i.ties must never be known, although by the end of the day you will be the unsung heroes of the Free World. You are about to undertake a mission of a magnitude whichthe supine governments of the West are too craven even to contemplate. But I a.s.sure you that next to the enormity of this mission, the risks you run will be minimal.'

Peters concluded his homily with more practical details. In approximately eight hours they would have returned, having made a rendezvous with the Beachcraft at their primary destination, as marked on their sealed flight-plans. The mission would then be officially concluded, their contracts terminated. At the same time, each of their bank accounts in Geneva would be credited with the balance of forty thousand pounds sterling, at the prevailing rate.

Peters glanced maliciously at Thurgood. 'With the exception of the Flight-Lieutenant here, who will be receiving thirty thousand.'

At the mention of his name, Thurgood straightened up with pride, shoulders back, heels together, his eye twitching ominously.

At 01.30 Peters ordered them into their planes. Ten minutes to study the flight-plan. Take-off 01.40.

Rawcliff settled into his seat, checked ignition, contact, undercarriage, flaps and hydraulics, R/T and radio-compa.s.s; then he broke open the buff envelope.

The flight-plan followed the previous path across the Nile Delta, down as far as Lat.i.tude 28, where the Gulfs of Suez and Aqaba joined the Red Sea.

Fifteen miles south of Sharm el Sheikh they would turn due east and cross the Saudi coast, flying at 200 metres alt.i.tude, up over the Harrat ar Raha mountains. It would be first light and they would be relying on their Red Cross markings for 'protective colouring'; the rest would depend on their flying skills, and on luck.

There was only a marginal danger from ground-to-air missiles; but this time, if they were intercepted by fighter-planes, they were to scatter at once, still keeping to the minimum alt.i.tude, using their radios to pretend they were lost.

Their destination was the south-west corner of the Nafud Desert. Here they would rendezvous with Matt and Serge in the Beachcraft. They would spray out the Red Crosses and other markings, and take off again, heading due south, alt.i.tude 100 feet: switch on the guidance-systems, as Matt would explain to them, set the detonators, then bail out as quickly as possible and make their way back to the Beachcraft.

They took off in column formation this time: Peters leading, Ryderbeit and Rawcliff behind. Thurgood and Ritchie taking up the rear.

Weather reports as far as the Red Sea continued to give flying conditions as good.

The sky warmed and flared a bright mauve, turning to burning gold over the craggy southern point of the Sinai Peninsula.

In the black hours before dawn Rawcliff's legs had again been numbed by the cold. If it hadn't been for those hopeless attempts to call poor Judith, he might have stopped long enough to buy himself a pair of extra trousers. He had noticed that nowhere along the line had anyone been offered, or asked for, a blanket. He imagined Ryderbeit making some crack about having a stewardessalong too; and Rawcliff wondered what had happened to Jo. Had she flown from Athens on to Rome, to meet old Abe, of the Israeli Secret Service? or was she heading for some rich play-pen, waiting to snuggle down with the hapless Nugent-Ross and enjoy their combined bounty of 100,000? Or perhaps she would just return to Ritchie's fashionable London dock side pad?

But what the h.e.l.l did Rawcliff care what happened to her? Something else worried him far more. If young Klein really did trade happily between Langley, Virginia, and Dzerzhinski Square, Moscow, and if the Russians therefore knew about the mission, they'd have that nuclear site in the Yemen bristling with SAMs, the skies swarming with MiGs, so that by the end of the day there would be just five huge glorious bangs over the desert, with probably no one any the wiser. At no point had there been any mention of the full payment of money being contingent on the mission's success.

Rawcliff shivered, hunching himself over the controls. It wasn't the kind of mission where you had a contract with witnesses and lawyers. You just b.u.mped into somebody in a pub. and were introduced to a little man called Newby, and you took his word for it. Right down the line. You trusted, you believed.

People will believe anything for money.

At this point Rawcliff had only one job in hand: to fly his Hercules according to the flight-plan, avoiding radar and interceptors, and somehow get her down and up again, off unknown and probably unfriendly country, then manage a low parachute jump without breaking his neck. He refused to worry about whether Matt or Jo or Ritchie, or all three, had already betrayed them. It was Peters'

business to worry about security. So leave it to Peters. Rawcliff had been hired to drive a plane - no more, no less.

Keep your mind on the job, eyes on the horizon. Don't think about Judith, that you may already have dropped her in the s.h.i.t. Or about little Tom. Just think that the high pounding roar 'of the four great turboprops on either side is earning you around 1,000 a minute.

Peters' voice came over the R/T, 'Begin descent to 800 feet. Formation spread out to 200 metres distance - prepare to scatter if ordered.'

They went down steeply, and even above the noise of the engines Rawcliff could hear his dreadful cargo groaning against it bindings. He began to chew hard, his ears popping painfully. The sun was now hard in his eyes, as he watched keenly for those telltale specks coming up at them over the horizon. But nothing except the clear, deep azure of dawn: the coast of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia pa.s.sing below them at 1,500 feet: naked ribs of mountain unfolding back over the yellow rim of the earth.

The plane began to bounce and sway and shudder with the first draughts of early-morning heat. Their flight-pattern now zigzagged, well south of the little town of Tabuk on the road on up into Jordan.

Great patches of sandy wasteland opened up, climbing into the wall of purplish volcanic mountains, pitted and scarred like a lunar plateau, its razor-sharp ridges racing towards them, often barely a hundred feet below.

Rawcliff's eyes were becoming strained, his muscles stiff and aching as he worked incessantly at the controls, dipping, rising, changing every fraction of a degree as marked on the flight-pattern, following the luminous electronic compa.s.s and the agile movements of Ryderbeit's high tail-fin ahead.

Their destination was some 240 miles inside the country. They were some ninety miles from the spot, pa.s.sing close to the oasis-town of Tayma, when Ryderbeitspotted the plane coming out of the sky from the south.

It was flying well above them, closing in at about 600 knots, and seemed to be alone.

Rawcliff's radio picked up a stream of Arabic, as the fighter flew down low over them, then arched up on to its back and shrieked up towards the horizon.

It looked like one of the older marks of Mystere, and he noticed that it was not armed with missiles. Just taking a look at them: but as soon as they got the message down in Jeddah, they'd be likely to have half the Saudi Air Force up looking for them. They had no friends in Jeddah, Rawcliff remembered - thanks to that loony Thurgood.

Peters called over the R/T, 'Formation scatter - at will.'

Ryderbeit's voice cut in, 'The rest of you b.u.g.g.e.r off in all directions. I'll take the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Leave him to me!'

While Ryderbeit spoke, his Hercules rocked nervously and banked downwards, his port-wing narrowly missing a sharp peak. The Mystere had come out of its climbing turn and seemed to be hesitating, as though its pilot could not decide which plane to chase. Ryderbeit's was the nearest and the lowest. The Mystere dived down, its stubby blue shadow rippling over the rocks below, and Rawcliff felt the thump of its hot exhaust as it swept overhead, swooping clown now towards Ryderbeit.

It executed a neat pa.s.s over the Rhodesian's lumbering Hercules, which again wobbled ominously, and for a moment Rawcliff, as he pulled away in a wide turn, wondered if by any chance Ryderbeit had lost control or lost his nerve.

The Arab pilot must have been thinking the same thing. His voice came over the R/T for the first time in English, calling Ryderbeit's number. He had a young, c.o.c.ky, trans-Atlantic voice, a cowboy enjoying the kicks -although he seemed to forget that he was flying on an old horse. 'C 130, BZ 462, follow me - just do as I say!'

'f.u.c.k you and your mother and all your sisters, Ryderbeit said' calmly, and pushed the Hercules' nose hard down. He was almost clear of the mountains now, beyond their gleaming pool of sand, its horizon already lost in the haze.

For a moment it looked as though the Arab had jerked his plane to a standstill. He didn't reply to Ryderbeit's taunt, but rolled up on to his back and went down again, in another ferocious pa.s.s, this time looking as though his belly might sc.r.a.pe down the roof of the Hercules fuselage. Ryderbeit was down to 50 feet, and the Mystere had to pull up quickly.

Rawcliff was watching from a distance of around three-quarters of a mile and a height of about 500 feet. Ryderbeit was still wobbling and swaying, as though trying desperately to pick a spot to land. Then suddenly he wheeled his mighty plane round, straight into the dazzle of the sun; waited a couple of seconds until the Mystere had levelled out again behind him, closing fast, then wrenched back the throttles, pulling up straight into the jet's path. The Mystere reared up like some terrified animal, until it appeared to be riding on its tail; then went into a sudden shuddering spasm and began to sink forward into the slackening slip-stream.

Rawcliff realized that he was witnessing one of the nightmares of all modern jet-pilots. Ryderbeit's apparently ungainly performance had lured the Arab into the cla.s.sic trap to which single-engine jet-fighters are the most vulnerable. The Mystere had cut its air-speed so abruptly that it had goneinto what is known as a 'wing-stall' - as though the whole aircraft had been seized with mid-air cramp, its jet firing impotently against the static airflow.

A couple of seconds later it went into a 'super-stall', and began spiralling gently, helplessly downwards, like a dead b.u.t.terfly.

Rawcliff was able to catch a glimpse of the pilot behind his goggles and the ugly snout of his oxygen-mask, as he struggled, too busy even to send out a Mayday signal. He did not even try to eject. Perhaps his fierce Islamic pride, savaged by Ryderbeit's obscenity, refused to allow his a.s.sailant that small satisfaction.

He hit the desert with a thump that was audible above Rawcliffs engines, and was followed by Ryderbeit's triumphant cackle over the R/T.

Peters broke in, 'Formation rea.s.semble - proceed destination, 100 feet, 310 knots, total radio silence. And keep your eyes on the sky. There may be others.'

They were flying now above a bone-white wasteland, strewn with boulders and broken up by banks of wrinkled sand, like some petrified sea on which the occasional bleached skeleton-palms of a dead oasis swooped towards them under the rippling, racing shadows of the five huge planes.

Rawcliffs eyes were still narrowed into the rising sun, muscles tensed at the controls, ready at any moment to throttle back at the sight of some towering rock, some sheer precipice thrown up by the accident of Nature. The compa.s.s-reading, against the detailed flight-path, showed that they were getting very close.

The sky was still as empty as the desert - a vast dome of burning gla.s.s, under which the five fat grey transports, hurtling along at nearly 300 miles an hour, belly-hugging the sand, would have shown up with the clarity of insects moving across a sheet of clear paper.

It was just a question of whether that lone Mystere pilot had signalled back to Jeddah, before he spun down to his death.

Peters called, 'LZ at two to three minutes. Slow to 180 knots - decreasing. .

Rawcliff could hear the slight drop of the engines, the soft push as the nose tried to go down. 'Undercarriages!' Peters called. The dry whine and clonk, the nasty drag as Rawcliff kept his arms braced, nose up, trying to plough up through the stagnant air and regain that few feet of alt.i.tude.

'LZ dead ahead!'

Through the shields of perspex Rawcliff could just make out the blue-and-white fleck ahead: a slender bird resting on its fragile legs. Then, as they came down, two planes abreast, he saw Ritchie's motto 'Come Fly with Me looking faintly frivolous in the arid vastness of the Arabian sands.

The small dark figures of Serge and Matt Nugent-Ross could be seen resting in the meagre shadow of one wine Serge came out, signalling with a white flag.

The zone had evidently been chosen with some care: a flat tract of desert that seemed to have been cleared for about 50 yards of all stones and boulders,lying between a steep cliff of rock on one side and a shelving sea of soft sand on the other. It was as safely hidden as anywhere in the desert can be, in the harsh light of day.

Peters and Ryderbeit landed first, almost simultaneously on either side of the Beachcraft. As soon as their main wheels touched down, the dust exploded behind them in two rolling mushroom-clouds that almost instantly blotted out the little plane, and soon obliterated the margin of the makeshift landing-strip.

Rawcliff throttled back fast and did a high howling turn, out over the sloping sand-sea. This was no time to make mistakes, he thought, as he brought the Hercules round, back through the dense dust, and could see Peters' and Ryderbeit's planes drawn up at the end of the airstrip.

Both Ritchie and Thurgood were good enough pilots not to have questioned what he was doing. He levelled the plane, with the windshield now smudged a cloudy-yellow. He chose the side of the Beachcraft that ended with a wall of rock, guessing that it would be firmer than the side closer to the sand-sea.

Not that it would make a blind bit of difference, he thought, if either Ritchie or Thurgood made a too soft landing and stuck - nose down, tail rising, with the image of Grant's final seconds coming vividly into focus. On this run it was all or nothing. There would be no survivors.

He felt his wheels b.u.mp down, grinding, slewing slightly: watching frantically his long starboard-wing and measuring the distance from the bare rock-face.

Then he felt a jarring thud as the wheels gouged out four deep channels in the sandy surface. The four engines screamed at the hot dry air, is he reversed the props, slammed on the airbrakes, the *rings shivering, as he bounded and lurched to a stop. He switched off, and heard his ears ringing, felt his body i drenched with sweat; got the cabin-door open and lowered himself down into the blinding light.

His nose-wheel was very slightly buckled and half-bedded in the loose sand. He watched, a little dazed, as Ritchie and Thurgood came in through a fresh cloud of dust, taxiing noisily up to the end of the strip next to the other three planes.

Although it was still not eight o'clock, the heat was scorching, airless, seeming to burn one's throat and lungs with a rasping mixture of sand and dust and kerosene fumes.

All the engines had been turned off, and the silence was gigantic, terrifying.

Just the scuff of the pilots' boots as they came, already panting, blinking through the sweat, towards the Beachcraft. Matt Nugent-Ross was carrying the white leather case from inside the little plane.

Peters gave orders. They each had ten minutes, no more, to spray out all the Red Cross markings on the five aircraft. Then they were to fasten parachutes and prepare for immediate take-off. At alt.i.tude 200 feet - absolutely no lower - they were to prime the detonators, before jumping. Any pilot who overdropped the DZ, or who was injured and unable to make it back to the Beachcraft, would be on his own.

Rawcliff realized that Peters was not necessarily excluding himself from these conditions. And, since he still had his bad ankle, there was no denying that the man was brave. He had probably lived too near the margin of death for it to matter much now. The same would go for Ryderbeit. Thurgood looked as inscrutable, blank-eyed, as ever. He would have made a fine kamikaze pilot, Rawcliff decided. Jim Ritchie looked calm and serious. Young Ritchie had more to worry about than getting his plane back off the ground and making a smooth parachute landing. Rawcliff wondered at what moment he had planned for the Americans or the Israelis, or even the Russians, to arrive like the flying-cavalry and remove those lethal detonators?

Five miles above, the tiny silver speck of an airliner crawled across the sky, trailing a thin white wake of exhaust. Probably an early flight from Athens or Cairo, Bombay or Karachi. They would be serving breakfast now: smiling hostesses bringing the fresh piping-hot coffee up to the pilots sitting comfortably in their pressurized air-conditioned coc.o.o.n of instruments, everything legal and correct, according to the book.

Spraying out the Red Crosses was a more horrible task than Rawcliff had antic.i.p.ated. It also struck him as unnecessarily dangerous. The skin of the aircraft was rapidly becoming too hot to touch; and the fierce spray of paint bubbled and wrinkled ominously as he swept the nozzle back and forth, desperately trying to erase those last emblems of international respectability.

It took longer than Peters had predicted; long enough for a squadron of Saudi Arabian F-5s to be making a broad sweep of the Nafud Desert, in a search for their colleague in the drowned Mystere. But Rawcliff remembered that searching the desert is like searching the ocean: there would be no more left of the little fighter-plane than a few sc.r.a.ps of blackened flotsam.

His face was sprayed with a thin mask of grey, his eyes burning with paint fumes and sweat, his head pounding with the heat. When he got back inside the plane, nothing had changed, except that Matt had now armed the neat metal box that contained the computerized guidance-system. The hi-fi set behind the navigator's seat had also been loaded with a ca.s.sette.

Rawcliff strapped on his parachute, made sure that the line was secure, and breathed a meaningless prayer that the nose-wheel would not come loose. G.o.d, what he'd have given now for a chilled beer!

The sound of Peters' and Ryderbeit's engines shattered the awful silence, like eight powerful explosions. They took off in the same order, at two-minute intervals. The dust was again crouching over the whole airstrip, as thick as fog. Rawcliff calmed himself, reminded himself of that first meeting with Newby and how he had claimed that they were offering too much money. Maybe there were certain things that didn't have a price. Like getting a Hercules off the ground in the equivalent of a static sand-storm - visibility perhaps ten feet, no helpful voice from the control-tower, a gammy front-wheel and a runway as smooth as a wrestler's grip.

He steadied her, gave full throttle, felt the nose-wheel break off with a nasty sc.r.a.ping, wrenching sound, as the floor of the cabin slid along the rocky sand. Then suddenly the nose bounced up, the engines took control, and a few seconds later he was above the dust-cloud, turning steeply again out over the sand-sea which disappeared into an invisible horizon; and now he was concentrating on the altimetre: 160 - 170 - 190 - 200. .. He leaned down and turned the screw-head dial of the detonator; flicked the little white switch on the guidance-system; pulled back, to maximum throttle, waiting for the strip of churned up landing-zone to come sliding round towards him at just under 500 feet; then released the controls, feeling the guidance-system take over, while he made his way down between the rails and the creaking steel drums to the open rear vent, and smelt the hot blast of the slip-stream; saw the landing-zone pa.s.sing almost directly below now; then jumped.