He followed Binaud into the cruiser’s forward cabin. Chad Hill and two agents sat drinking coffee. Hill was saying to Binaud, “You did very well.”
“May I have the money now?”
“Let him hold it,” Lime said. “Keep two men on him till this is wrapped up.” He looked at Hill’s camera. “Get some good face shots?”
“I think so.”
They might need to be able to identify Ben Krim’s pilot later on if things got murky. Lime hadn’t got a good look at the man. Too small and fair-skinned to be Corby, but then it wouldn’t have been Corby.
Hill put his cup down and yawned. “Time to get back to Algiers, I guess.”
The cars were concealed behind the bar. The two-way was blat-ting when they approached and Lime reached in to unsnap the mike and bring it to his mouth. “Lime here.”
“It’s Gilliams. Didn’t he get there yet?”
“He’s already taken off. Haven’t you got his bleeper signal?”
“It hasn’t moved an inch.”
“That’s the one on the boat. There were two of them. He took the plane.”
“I know. But the signals should have diverged if he’s moved. It’s still one signal. Standing still.” Gilliams’ voice came out of the dashboard speaker, poorly defined, heavy with crackling.
Hill said, “Oh shit. The one on the plane isn’t working then. It’s my fault—I should have tested them.”
Lime said into the mike without taking his eyes off Hill, “Gilliams, switch your triangulators over to seventeen hundred. One seven zero zero, got that?”
“One seven zero zero. Hang on a minute.”
Chad Hill’s puzzled eyes swiveled around to Lime.
Gilliams: “Right, we’ve got a pulse. It seems kind of weak though.”
“It’s pretty small and it’s inside the plane—it’s got a lot of metal around it. Is it strong enough to follow?”
“I guess it is if we stick fairly close to it.”
“Then get your aircraft moving.”
“They’re already moving.”
“All right. We’re coming into Algiers. Expect us in half an hour. Have the Lear jet standing by. Have you got cars and choppers at Bou Saada?”
“Yes sir. And the Early Birds. Waiting down there with those dart guns.”
‘I’ll see you in half an hour.” Lime hung the mike and turned to face Chad Hill. “Pick up the rest of the crew and tell them to follow us in the station wagon.”
Chad Hill said, “I’m sorry about the bleeper. But how’d you get that other one on the plane?”
“It’s not on the plane. It’s on Ben Krim,” Lime said. “It’s in his pocket.”
He went around the car and got into the passenger seat. Hill slid in very slowly, as if he weren’t sure the seat would support him.
The sun blasted down, the sand shot painful reflections against the eye. Green hills lifted above the beach. Lime sat back with his arms folded and his face closed up.
They were leaving two men on Binaud; the rest were getting into the station wagon and Chad Hill started the car and drove around the bar to the road.
Once, Hill stiffened, looking at something; Lime looked ahead and saw nothing but the curving road. Whatever it was Hill had identified it and dismissed it; he had relaxed now. He’s in better shape than I am, Lime thought; Lime hadn’t seen anything at all. His tired eyes stared out of a bottomless disgust.
They boarded the Lear jet to fly to Bou Saada, the “City of Happiness” on the Naïl Plateau. Gilliams’ radio direction finders—at Algiers, at El Goléa, and in an airborne tracking station orbiting behind Ben Krim’s Catalina—had the target on-screen and it was still moving when the Lear took off and climbed steeply to clear the coastal range. Lime had a one-to-four-million-scale Michelin map across his knees. It showed the whole of north Africa in enough detail to cover every potable waterhole, every jeep track and wadi and fort.
The fertile crowded Tell region lay south of the Atlas Mountains, forming a bulge against the arid plateaus that fell across hundreds of dusty miles toward the Sahara. Putting together what he knew about Julius Sturka and what he had learned about the radius of the Catalina’s previous flight, Lime studied the map and came to certain conclusions.
He could rule out the Sahara proper. The plane hadn’t gone that far when they’d used it to carry Fairlie. And the Sahara was less a hiding place than a trap—there were too few places to hide. Sturka might be in the outback but he wouldn’t be too far from avenues of flight. Somewhere down here in the bled within pragmatic distance of a decent road and a place to land and take off in an airplane if you had to. Bedouin country perhaps but not the Tuaregs’ desert. Possibly even a farm in the Tell.
The wadi Binaud had pinpointed—the riverbed oasis where he’d picked up the Catalina last week—was east of Ghardaïa and north of Ouargla: arid plains around there, like parts of Arizona and New Mexico—hardpan clay earth that supported boulders and scrub brush, the occasional stunted tree, enough broken ground and cut-banks to conceal armies. Sturka had operated there before with the efficiency of an Apache Indian war chief and he would feel comfortable there.
Lime kept remembering the number of times he had gone looking for Sturka in that country: looking but never finding.
He had one or two advantages now he hadn’t had then. Electronic surveillance had become more sophisticated. He didn’t have to function in quite so much secrecy now. And he had almost unlimited manpower to draw upon. Gilliams had pulled every CIA man in North Africa into it, from Dakar to Cairo. There was the crew Lime had brought with him and then there were the Early Birds—the A-team killer squads Satterthwaite had sent from Langley. Lime had insisted the Early Birds be armed, in addition to their normal issue, with tranquilizer-dart bullets obtained from a Kenyan game preserve. The darts were fired by standard rifle cartridges; the chemical was M-99, a morphine derivative. The tranquilizer would take effect almost instantly and render the victim unconscious for fifteen or twenty minutes. It was standard procedure in wild-game protection; whether it had ever been used before in a quasi-military operation Lime didn’t know and didn’t care.
The objective was to get Fairlie out alive; what happened to the kidnappers was secondary but they couldn’t afford to leave half a dozen corpses strewn across the Algerian landscape. Algiers wouldn’t stand still for that and a fair number of opportunistic capitals—Peking, Moscow, the Third World towns—would join in the condemnations. Rescuing a VIP was one thing, starting a pocket battle on foreign soil was another. If it happened, the United States would survive it as she had survived Laos and the Dominican Republic and dozens of others, but it was better to avoid it if you could.
Lime lacked interest in the complexities of international relations but Satterthwaite had made it fairly clear to him that a gaffe in Algeria might cost the United States the nuclear bases in Spain which both Brewster and Fairlie had been trying mightily to protect before all this idiocy had erupted. Spain was not a NATO member, never had been. Overt American arrogance in Algeria would be too close to home; Perez-Blasco would have to turn away from Washington and that was to be avoided. So it was better to use drugged darts than bullets.
He hoped they were somewhere in the bled. It would be so much easier without witnesses. If they were holed up in the middle of one of the towns there would be no way to make it neat.
The chief dilemma was how to get Fairlie away from them. If you attacked them frontally they would use him as a shield.
It had to be played by ear and at any rate he had to find them first.
When they landed at Bou Saada the Catalina was still in the air, still being tracked southward.
“West of El Meghaier,” the radio man explained to Lime. “Still maintaining altitude.”
Lime left the radio shack and walked across the tarmac to the little gathering of aircraft—the Lear, the charter turboprop with the CIA people aboard, the Early Birds’ helicopters.