By midnight I was in St-Martin-de-Crau and drove straight through and pulled the Lancia into cover alongside a vineyard, dousing the lights and sleeping on and off for the next five hours. The last time I woke up I was aware of the silence: the Mistral had died and the pre-dawn air was still.
By 05:15 I was positioned to receive the contact, halfway along a narrow road that led south to the coast. The wind had got up again and I stopped trying to work out which way he'd be coming in. There wasn't a lot of room between the railway to the east and the Rhone Basin to the west, but if he managed to come down precisely into the wind he'd be sliding towards me at this point and finish up within a hundred metres of the car.
There are never clouds when the Mistral blows, and I could make out the tower at Istres, black against the pale dawn sky. Within minutes the reeds at the edge of the marshland were turning from blood red to silver as the sun lifted from the low horizons, and the wind tugged at them, curving them into scimitars. Gusts hit the side of the Lancia, shifting it on its springs; I leaned away from it and settled the binoculars on the skyline in the east.
06:00.
He was overdue because Steadman had told me he was coming in at first light and the sun was already five or six diameters high and the waves of heat were floating horizontally across the lens where the railway embankment made the skyline. He could have mucked it, of course. I didn't know anything about his background: he could be a major element in something big the Bureau was running or he could be coming across with the blueprints of the Russian fleet, but even if he were only a contact or a courier he had to get a front-line interceptor airborne out of a military base and he had to go like hell through a gauntlet of radar stations that would trigger off signals to every air police unit along the north Mediterranean before he was across the Italian Alps. He could be chased and intercepted and ordered to turn back by pursuit squadrons of the Yugoslavian air arm, and if they managed to interest the Italians in this thing he'd have to move faster than the decision-makers at a dozen military airfields along his course.
That was his problem, not mine.
06:30.
The heat shimmered against the lenses. I lowered the glasses to rest my eyes and then put them up again. The sky to the east was a blinding sheet of white.
It occurred to me that I'd missed a couple of points because it had looked as if they'd thrown a full-scale mission at me and it had triggered.the normal degree of first-night nerves and I'd been jumping gaps. The thing was this: there hadn't been any need for Steadman in this picture. London could have just signalled Interpol to get me into communication, and all those Monegasque cops had to do was tell me to phone the Bureau; then the Bureau would have told me to go and pick up this character at dawn, Bouches du Rhone, so forth.
But they hadn't done that. They'd sent Steadman. Or Steadman had been down here in the field and they'd told him to stand by and brief me. One possible answer was that some ether service like DI6 had got on to this Zarkovic thing and found it too hot to handle and shunted it through Liaison 9 for the Bureau to look after, because the Bureau doesn't exist. Another possible answer was that London was still in the middle of sorting out a mass of raw intelligence that had started hitting the fan up there, but there wasn't time for me to think about that because a quick black dart was crossing the lenses and I swung them to keep it centred.
He was moving from east through south and standing on his starboard wingtip as he came round again and dropped very fast across the skyline to the west. I began running because his approach path looked like half a kilometre north of the mark Steadman had made on the map and I couldn't get the Lancia there. The only available detour would take me five or six kilometres and rather close to the airfield buildings and I didn't want to expose the image because in an hour from now the Lancia with the CD plate could be the subject of an all-points bulletin if the gendarmerie decided that Yugoslavians ought not to drop out of the sky and jump into cars and disappear.
The ground was soft and I kept away from the reeds and the bright areas where the sun was reflecting off stagnant water but it was sticky going because the surface was inconsistent and I kept stumbling over firm patches and then wallowing in the troughs. A lot of white birds were crowding into the air not far away because they'd seen the plane. Vision was jerky and I stopped and stood still and tried to get some kind of fix on the spot where he'd be coming down. From this oblique angle the front-end configuration was like a bent dart, with a very small wing area that would make for a high stalling-speed: he couldn't stay airborne much longer and I worked it out that if I ran like hell I could finish up at a point where I'd be close enough to make the rendezvous without fetching the thing on top of me.
Began running again. Heard the whine of the twin jets, then they cut off and there was only the buffeting of the wind: he was keeping to his cover situation and going through the motions of running out of fuel; either that or for some very good reason he'd been loafing about over the sea to use up the reserve tank to the point where he'd have to come in, to give the whole thing credibility if anyone decided to take a look at the fuel gauges.
He was coming in very low indeed and I had to veer a bit without breaking my run because he wouldn't be able to avoid me if I got it wrong. There was the smell of kerosene as the wind shifted and the light shone bright on the silver-grey fuselage and I could see the nose wheel turning very slowly as the airstream caught it, then he was alongside and I veered again into the wind and got a rear-oblique view of him as he reached the stalling-point and dropped tail first and bounced and tilted and bounced again and then bucked forward and dug the nose in and flipped over in a wave of mud. I kept on running.
Chapter Two: LONDON
The momentum hadn't been completely exhausted when the Pulmeister had nipped over, and the razor-thin trailing edges of the tail unit had been thrust into the soft earth like a dart driven backwards with force. The front end of the thing was sticking up at something like twenty degrees from the horizontal and of course it was upside down. It looked as if he'd tried to get out because the cockpit hood was open and I could see part of his head and one elbow.
The wave of mud had sloshed upwards into the cockpit and it was difficult to see any detailed objects against the glare of the sky but I knew one thing: if I couldn't pull him out very soon the weight of the front end would prise the tail unit out of the mud and bring the cockpit down on both of us, so I crawled underneath and felt for the release clip of his helmet. He didn't move.
The whole thing was smothered in mud and I couldn't find the clip, partly because my fingers didn't know the precise shape to feel for. Some kind of fluid was dripping from a severed pipe somewhere behind the instrument panel and the wind kept slapping the side of the fuselage: I could bear the sucking sound as the tail unit flexed in the mud. I didn't think I had more than a few seconds to get him clear. My hands began moving in a kind of controlled frenzy, feeling for whatever they could find: clips, buckles, fasteners, anything they could release, worming their way in the mud and the half-dark while the tail unit flexed, steadied and flexed again.
'Zarkovic,' I said to the helmet.