Loman.

Receiving.

Your voice faded out on that last signal.

Yes, I covered the microphone.

Telling her to go?

Yes.

Just checking.

Understood.

I disconnected the microphone-lead and coupled it to the coiled extension, reconnecting.

Testing.

Receiving you.

I'm going inside.

14: FRENZY

Silence.

Heat.

Darkness.

A faint smell: the rubber casing of the torch. I slid the switch and light hit the skeleton framework of the fuselage. I went forward and stopped in the next second and stood off-balance listening to the steady hiss from somewhere below. Forebrain desperate for explanation: a stream of images out of sequence. The sound becoming fainter.

Sand. Sand dislodged by my feet from the drift the wind had brought in and pouring on to the metal trough of the mid-section here between the pilot's deck and the freight compartment.

Pulse slowing again. Rhodospin was concentrating and my eyes were adapting to scotopic vision, the torchlight growing brighter. Other senses finely adjusting, hyper-receptive to stimuli: heat on the skin, marked absence of motion or even vibration as my weight shifted on to the floor of the pilot's deck. The entombing sand was deadening the motion normally set up by people entering a vehicle with sprung mass and pneumatic tyres.

The door to the freight section was ajar and I moved the torch beam through the four-inch gap in a vertical sweep but it lit nothing except the ribbed wall of the fuselage. The urge was to go in there first, kick the door wide open and go in ready for anything, so I moved in the opposite direction because the urge was emotional: I was afraid of going in there and wanted to get it over. It was safer to follow the instincts and reason.

London wanted to know things.

Loman.

Receiving you.

I'm now in the pilot's compartment. Throttle closed, undercarriage control in the raised position, flaps at full. Fuel reserve at one quarter, all lamp switches in the off position. Instruments and controls compatible with a forced-landing situation by daylight. The crew got out of their 'chute harness, the 'chutes still on their seats. Radio is switched to 6 MHz, one set of headphones on the floor and an earpiece smashed: evidence of impact effects or possible haste to leave the plane.

The torch beam went on moving, sometimes: reflecting from polished surfaces. Pair of worn flying-gloves, photo of a Eurasian woman tucked into a panel over the left-hand seat, packet of chewing-gum sticking out of the map-pocket.

Can you see anything not normally found in the cabin of an aircraft?

This was obviously the first question on a list they'd given him. I spent a full minute on it with the torch.

No. One or two personal effects: pair of tennis shoes in an open locker, carved teakwood statuette in one of them, copy ofPlayboy.Nothing else.

Thank you.

Do you want pictures?

No.

It was the cargo they were more interested in.

The extension lead got caught on a seat strut and I freed it and moved back towards the freight section, my boots grinding on the loose sand across the floor. I didn't hurry because there were a lot of questions crowding in, one of them worrying me. If it was something in the cargo that had driven the two men out of here with the fearof Christ in them I couldn't see why the door was no more than ajar; the four-inch gap seemed too narrow to allow anything to attack through it, and obviously theywouldn't have stopped to pull the door shut after them.

It worried me also to think that the vultures had died with them, as if something had followed them out of the plane to kill anything that lived.

I looped the extension lead across one shoulder to stop it fouling and opened the Pentax, setting it for flash and keeping it slung in front of me so that I could operate it with one hand. There was a chance that if anything happened when I went in there I could got a picture of it and if one day someone thought of processing the film they'd see what had finished me off.

Loman. I'm going into the freight section.

His voice was more distant now because the 200 °CA was standing outside on the sand.

Understood.

I sent the torch beam through the gap and swung the door wider by one inch, stopping and listening, the nerves reacting again and the scalp tightening. Kept seeing their faces, and the gaping beaks of the birds. Another inch and stop and listen and take a gripand bloody well think with the brain instead of the plexus.

But it was difficult because the organism was aware of danger and preparing its defences, draining the blood from the surface to the internal organs, increasing the breathing-rhythm to feed more oxygen to the muscles, dilating the pupils to admit more light and refining the nervesuntil they reached the state where they could be activated by stimuli below the normal threshold of sensitivity. The brain was being by-passed by the nervous system, the automatic defence mechanism that snatches the hand from a hot object, that snaps the eyes shut as a spark flies, without the aid of the brain.

Another inch and stop and listen. Nothing. The beam of light shifting in a calculated zig-zag from high to low: the ribbed wall of the fuselage and alloy racks, an emergency hatchet clipped to a bracket alongside an extinguisher.

A depth of silence I couldn't remember having experienced ever before; the silence of the desert, of the dead.

Quiller.

The sound of his voice explosive.

Wait. Release the breath.

Hear you.

Is there any problem?

No problem.

I'd been off the air for more than a minute and he was having to sweat it out, couldn't see what I was doing, couldn't hear.

Swing it another inch and stop and listen.

Faint metallic clicking.

Not perfectly regular.

Quite close and below me.

It stopped when I held my breath and began again when I breathed. Satisfactory: the Pentax was slung from the neck and the case buckle was intermittently registering my heartbeat when my diaphragm expanded and contracted in breathing.

Trickle of sweat into the corner of one eye, stinging a little. Shielded from the intense direct sunshine, the skin was releasing through the pores. The heat in here was of a different quality: it oppressed, stifling.

Another inch and the beam passed over a cylinder standing erect, clamped to the alloy rack, and I shut my eyes before I triggered the flash to minimize the effect on the dark-adaptation process but even so the torch beam looked almost yellowwhen I opened them again.

Loman. First picture: a cylinder, compressed-air type, four feet high, clamped vertically.

Only one?

So far. There may be others.

Forebrain thinking was becoming clearer: the psyche had been too dominant, concerning itself with occult responses, indulging in a sick belief in fiends, in spectral fantasy, dwelling on creaturehood rather than inanimation.

Nothing had moved, even when the flash had gone off. Nothing in here was alive. Logic found no case for a rigged trap of any kind: they wouldn't have left one themselves and nobody had been here since they'd died.

I swung the door at right-angles and took two shots.

General scene: freight compartment. Two frames.

Thank you.

They looked like people.

Some stood in a group, two or three of them leaning one against the other, about a half-dozen had fallen, either to the floor or piled against the end of the rack at varying angles. They looked like people because at the top of each cylinder was a round protective shield fixed over the nozzle, and below it was the neck widening into shoulders. Scotopic vision had been affected by the last use of the flash and I couldn't see any details.