The Tango Briefing Read online

  The dunes flowed under my eyes.

  Swing. Stop. Run-back.

  The projector droned.

  I kept wanting to look at the rocks but Eastlake had said it wasn’t worth bothering with. They weren’t interested in the rocks. And it was no good asking them for a clue because the object of the exercise was that I should see the target for myself, avoiding the risk of conditioned illusion.

  Swing. Stop. Run-back.

  The dunes were becoming a mirage. The dunes and the rocks and the flow of light and shade across the scene were beginning to swirl in a slow-moving vortex and I was losing track of perspective.

  ‘Would you like us to back-project against a -‘

  ‘What? No. Run it back. Run it back, will you?’

  The scene swung to a stop.

  ‘Tell me when -‘

  ‘Yes.’

  Anti-clockwise. The shadows flowing and the angle. Stop.’

  ‘This frame?’

  ‘Back another fraction.’

  The sprockets whirred again and stopped. ‘Yes, that’s the one. I’ve got it now.’

  Chapter 2

  OVERFLIGHT

  ‘It didn’t take you long.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  The WRAF shut down the projector and we all stretched our legs.

  ‘It took us a bit of time ourselves,’ said Eastlake, ‘even though the navigator had seen it through direct binocular vision.’ He showed me a couple of dozen stills and blow-ups and filter-screen montages on the static viewers but they weren’t any clearer, and even the still they’d taken from the frame of the movie strip didn’t have the same definition. I asked Johnson about that. He was the interpretation officer.

  ‘It doesn’t seem possible,’ he said, ‘does it? When you look at the still you’re looking at exactly the same picture as the one on the strip - but there’s some data missing, all the same. The eye hasn’t got anything for immediate comparison. It’s the movement through the projector that leads the eye over the changing pattern till it suddenly sees an inconsistency. That’s what happened with you.’

  Eastlake cut the viewer lamp and someone pulled the curtains and stopped sharp when I said: ‘What sort of plane is it?’

  Someone gave a nervous cough.

  Squadron leader Eastlake said: ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘If I did, I wouldn’t ask.’

  It was perfectly all right if the Bureau had its reasons for pitching me in here without any briefing, but if their idea was to get me steamed-up about this thing then people would have to answer the questions I wanted to ask them or it was go.

  ‘Thank you, Phyllis. That’s all we needed to see.’

  When the WRAF went out and shut the door the pilot and navigator and photo-interpretation bod stood looking at their toes and Eastlake said:

  ‘Mr. Gage has been fully screened.’

  They relaxed a bit and one of them offered a package of gum around and nobody wanted any and the pilot said: ‘We were told to look for a medium freighter.’

  ‘You think this is a medium freighter?’

  We were grouped by the static viewer. On the blown-up still it didn’t really look like an aeroplane at all but now that I’d seen it on the movie strip I could accept the smudgy configuration on the sand as an aircraft with one wing dislocated at the root end.

  The interpretation officer didn’t say anything. The navigator shrugged.

  ‘All I’d say from the pix is that it could be. From what I through the binocs I’d say it’s not military and not very big. If I had a bet on it I’d put it down as a light or medium twin-prop short-haul commercial transport.’

  ‘Not just because that’s what you were told to look for and expected to see.’

  He smiled lopsidedly. ‘What can we ever do about that? Once we’re told what kind of target to look for, we’re to an extent conditioned.’

  I was feeling it difficult now to look away from the static viewer. In the illuminated central frame the picture wasn’t very big: it had been blown up to the point where the grain would start blurring the definition. The ribbed background of dunes was perfectly clear but the grey ashy smudge could be anything - or nothing, just a fault in the processing - but even from sixty-five thousand feet they’d seen it was some kind of aircraft and now that they’d found it the Bureau bad cabled Tokyo fully urgent and I was here looking at this vague configuration on the photographic plate that was the focal point of the mission they were trying to sell me.

  ‘Where is it?’

  Eastlake spoke before the others could start worrying. The people with No. 2 Fighter-Reconnaissance Squadron RAF spent most of their time taking the sort of pictures that nobody really wanted to reprint as post-cards for the tourist trade. This was one of them.

  ‘Longitude 8°3’ East by Latitude 30°4’ North.’

  ‘Tunisia?’

  ‘Algeria.’

  ‘When did the plane come down?’

  ‘We weren’t informed. Our job was to look for it and take pictures if we found it.’

  ‘From sixty-five thousand feet?’

  ‘It’s the highest we go.’

  ‘You could’ve gone lower.’

  Someone coughed again.

  I thought I might as well push them right up against the wall so that they’d either have to answer my question or throw me out.

  ‘Did you get official overflying permission?’ I counted up to seven.

  ‘Did we what?’

  Very slowly I said: ‘Did you get official permission from the Algerian government to overfly their territory and take those pictures? Or did you go up to the maximum operational ceiling because the view was better?’

  This time I was at nine before the pilot said:

  ‘Actually, neither.’

  It was just their natural disinclination as secret reconnaissance men to trust an unknown civilian with the whole score. Eastlake had told them I’d been screened and they’d obviously been briefed to give me all the info they could, but they still didn’t like it.

  I suppose the pilot thought that if things had gone this far it couldn’t do any harm to go the whole way and the squadron leader would slap him down in any case if he made a mistake.

  ‘You see,’ he said with a perfectly straight face, ‘we were tooling around in Malta on a friendly visit and then we got these orders from on high. So we planned a suitable exercise and went in at our best altitude so we wouldn’t annoy the scheduled airlines. Then we sort of lost our way a bit and after we’d got back on course for home we found Charlie here had made a silly mistake and left all the cameras running. I really don’t know what things are coming to, in this mob.’

  The squadron leader was looking out of the window. He didn’t say anything.

  ‘You must have been tracked by radar.’

  ‘Bound to have been.’

  ‘How long were you overflying Algerian territory?’

  ‘Not long enough to sort of cause too much comment.’

  ‘Did they put up interceptors?’

  ‘Don’t actually know. You see, from that height we can go rather fast in quite a short time, by pointing things downwards.’

  It was all I wanted to know and I left it at that.

  When Eastlake took me down the corridor he said: ‘Where exactly do you fit in with this little circus?’

  ‘You can’t see much from those photographs. I suppose they’ll send me in to have a closer look at the bloody thing.’

  There was nobody around in Field Briefing so Tilson sat me down and folded his chubby hands and said:

  ‘Well, what shall we talk about?’

  I said I wanted to know who my director would be if I took job on.

  ‘It depends who can get there first.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Tunis.’

  ‘Who’s been sent for?

  ‘I’m not really -‘

  ‘You’re a liar -‘

  ‘Now why should I want to -‘


  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake stop pouncing me about, will you?’

  He sighed gently. ‘They asked for Loman.’

  ‘As my director in the field?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He looked at his pink shiny nails.

  I got up and walked about and thought of saying no, I’m working with that bastard, but he was waiting for me to do that and I didn’t want to give him the pleasure of being right.

  ‘What’s the mission, Tilson?’

  Tm not sure I -‘

  ‘Oh come on, don’t waste my time.’

  He looked up amiably and said: ‘Are you in a hurry?’

  I turned away and did some more walking and thought of saying no, I’m not in a hurry, but he’d got me and we both knew it and I was fed-up because they’d hijacked me into a new mission the fastest way possible: by holding back and keeping off and letting me get interested without anyone coming to interfere.

  Yes I was in a hurry.

  We can refuse a mission. We can refuse to work at the kind of thing that’s not our specialty or the kind of thing that we’ve proved in the past to be beyond our particular talents. We can say no, this one sounds too political or complex or dull or dirty or dangerous and we can say we don’t like the director or we don’t like Bangkok or Warsaw or Tunis. We can say we’ve got a cold or we can just tell them to go and find someone else without even giving a reason. It works all right because if a shadow executive lets himself be forced into an assignment he’s a dead duck and they know that and it doesn’t suit their book.

  But if we refuse a mission it means we have to hang around and wait for another one to come up and it gets on the nerves, the waiting. So in the end we’ll take almost anything if it looks as though there’s a break-even chance of getting out alive. Today I wasn’t interested in that because the chances are always as good as you want to make them. They knew what I was interested in today.

  The ash-grey smudge on the photograph.

  It was just a medium twin-prop short-haul commercial transport and all it had done was to come down in the desert but the nearest anyone had got to it was sixty-five thousand feet and nobody else had dared to go any closer.

  So I wanted to.

  And they’d known I would.

  ‘What’s the timing on this?’

  Tilson raked for a folder.

  ‘Immediate.’

  ‘You mean when I’m ready.’

  ‘That’s right.’ He was opening the folder. ‘So long as you’re ready immediately.’

  ‘Fill me in, will you?’

  He looked up patiently. ‘I’m afraid I can’t, old horse. All I know is they want you to go and take a look at that thing you saw at the Air Ministry. Loman will spell it all out for you when you reach Tunis.’

  ‘How long have I got for clearance?’

  ‘There’s a plane at 13.50 so you’ll just have to do everything as quick as you can.’

  On my way through the building to Credentials I passed Napier, one of our Admin types.

  ‘Hallo, Quiller, I thought you were in Tokyo.’

  ‘So did I.’

  ‘We’re leaving your cover name as Charles Warnford Gage but there’s a change in the cover itself. Excuse me.’

  While she answered the phone I checked the papers.

  C. W. Gage, geophysical consultant attached to Societe Petrocombine’s South 4 drilling-camp in the Tunisian complex: specific contract, exploration and preliminary assay, until October, optionally renewable, previous contracts with platinum-prospecting consortia, UK and Belgium. Returning from month’s routine leave.

  When she’d got off the phone I asked who’d designed this one.

  ‘Mr. Egerton.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘It came through late last night.’

  They’d been so bloody sure of me.

  ‘It’s a new camp, is it?’

  ‘First assays, yes.’

  Egerton had his faults but I’d take any cover he worked for me. This one was very smooth because a geophysical consultant attached to a prospecting company hoping to strike oil was going to keep his mouth shut: it was the perfect excuse not to talk and that was fine because I didn’t know anything about survey work.

  In Firearms they wanted me to try out a new club-snout rapid loader they’d just had in from Italy and I told them where to put it.

  ‘Take one of these compacts, then. Slung holster.’

  ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘Me? Three weeks.’

  ‘Look, there’s my signature, so just put Weapons drawn none.’

  ‘Oh you’re the one.’

  Codes and Ciphers gave me a third-series seven-digit duplication set-up with normal contractions, transferred numerals no blanks. The alert phrase was ‘wherever possible.’

  ‘Christ, don’t they know that one by now?’

  ‘It’s never been blown.’

  ‘There’s a first time for everything.’

  Accounts had passed their stuff on to Travel and I picked up the Caledonian air ticket, two hundred dinars, travellers’ cheques and an American Express card. The existing will and testament to stand as it was, no new codicil.

  Then I went back to Field Briefing but Tilson said nothing fresh had come in.

  ‘Has Loman arrived in Tunis yet?

  ‘There’s been no signal. ‘

  ‘Where’s he coming from?’

  ‘Nobody said.’

  Tilson wouldn’t necessarily tell me. He’d tell me precisely what Admin wanted me to know and nothing more. Sometimes we bitch about this but it’s based on logic because if an executive goes out on a mission with his head stuffed full of background info that doesn’t directly concern him it’ll take his mind off the job in hand and that can be dangerous. Last year Webster was found mixed up with the propellers of a Greek coaster in Trieste because he’d got himself involved in the political aspect of a perfectly straightforward penetration job and blew his cover by sending signals when he should have been concentrating on a fast in-and-out documentation snatch.

  If you work for the Bureau you’ve got to work to the rules and they’re strict. The Bureau doesn’t officially exist. If it existed it couldn’t do the things it’s been designed to do: things that could never be countenanced even at Cabinet level. So if you get into a jam in the course of a mission you can count on London to help you but only up to a point: the point where they see there’s a risk of exposing the Bureau, of letting it be seen to exist. Then they’ll cut you off and you’ll know it because the set’s gone dead or the contact doesn’t show up and then God help you because London never will.

  Up to that point they’ll look after you and one of the ways they do it is by keeping you short of information that you don’t really need at the time.

  ‘What made them pick Loman for this one?’

  ‘No idea.’

  Loman was a bastard but he was third in the ranks of the really high-echelon directors simply because he was brilliant at his job. The ash-grey smudge on that photograph must be hellishly important for them to send a man like Loman in.

  ‘Did he ask for me?’

  ‘Everything’s been so quick,’ Tilson said apologetically. ‘No-one’s had time to tell me anything.’

  So I asked the only kind of questions he’d be able to do anything with.

  ‘What contacts in Tunis?’

  ‘None. There’ll be an Avis car waiting for you at the airport, dark blue Chrysler 180.’

  ‘Rendezvous?’

  ‘Hotel Africa, Les Caravaniers Bar on the 5th floor, 18.00 today. No code, just recognition.’

  ‘What do I do if he’s not there?

  ‘Rdv at hourly intervals till twenty-four hundred and then send us a signal. Code name for the mission is Tango.’

  ‘Noted.’ I belted my mack. ‘Got any transport?’

  ‘Car and driver standing by for you below.’

  I turned away and an odd thing happened.

  The
re is no ceremony at the Bureau. The only human contact in this ancient and featureless building is made when a shadow executive reports for briefing and clearance or when he comes in from a mission: Nobody exists here because the Bureau itself doesn’t exist. We call each other by the names we’re given: except to the top echelon people our own names have never been known.

  Tilson had been here long enough to lose his soul to the sacred bull: the Bureau. He knew what we really were, the shadow executives: we were so many ferrets to be released down a hole and left there to hunt in the dark, to pursue the sinuous ways of the warren and to emerge blinded by the ”fight, bloodied and embattled, triumphant or dismayed, or never, on occasions, to emerge at all.

  Object achieved.

  Executive withdrawn.

  Mission failed.

  Executive deceased.

  Deceased or replaced or overdue or home and dry and drunk as a lord because this time we pulled it off and nothing worse to show than a flesh wound from a glancing shot. Nobody cheers, nobody grieves. Only the results are important.

  The J class sub in the Black Sea has augmented missile potential and rejoins the Med. flotilla tonight on orders from Tikhomirov.

  The Cuban national in Room 39 of the hotel opposite the dais where General Fernandez will speak tomorrow had a Marlin 336T .35 telescopic rifle with 44X scope among his possessions; appropriate action taken; his sister has identified him at the morgue.

  The Temple of Heavenly Light near Kucheng has a central minaret comprising concealed guidance ramp with 17-degree inclination towards the Russian border and accommodation for warhead armament in the Z-phase ICBM category. These are the photostats taken from the original designs.

  We are nameless and speak in ciphers; we are homeless and work among strangers; and if we can claim identity then it lies in the sacrosanct and classified files somewhere in this building whose doors are as nameless as we.

  So it was odd that Tilson should do so human a thing as to get up from his desk as I turned for the door, and stand there awkwardly with his plump arms folded and his round pink head on one side as he watched me go.

  It told me that however much or little they’d briefed him about this mission, he knew that it was deadly.