He dropped to 800 metres, made a wide inland sweep as though he were about to hook round and come in over the dust-grey outskirts to the north of the city; then yelled at Packer: ‘Sit back! — we’re rolling over!’ The floor seemed to slide away, the patchy brown below tilted up until the margin of veined green-blue sea was hanging above them; then with a swooping roar the Storch levelled out, with its detachable wings swaying giddily, and the city and the sea gone behind them.
The compass wobbled and settled down to due-east. The radio came on with a loud jabber of Arabic. Ryderbeit switched it off. From now on, whatever came over was not going to be polite, even if they could understand it.
The altimeter had dropped to just above 300 metres. Below stretched scrubland and semi-desert, spotted with olive trees and the occasional smallholding, racing towards them at over 140 knots. Ryderbeit had said he was not worried about the Lebanese; the real danger was that the Syrians would pick up Tripoli radio, and if someone got jittery enough, they might send up a fighter. There was an air-base at Homs, he’d said, just inside the border; and the Syrians had MIG 23s — not to mention SAMs.
But the light was already going. The sky was black and the desert ahead was turning the colour of a blood orange. Fifteen minutes after leaving their northerly course to Tripoli, the Storch sank to within 100 metres of the ground, its high-tailed shadow, with the long fixed undercarriage, rippling over the rocky sand like a great bird gliding in for the kill.
Packer could see no signs of the frontier; nor were there any tell-tale streaks from MIG afterburners or missiles. The landscape was now flat and featureless, bare of even the few scraps of cultivation they had crossed in the Lebanon.
Suddenly it was night: a wide deep blue-black nothing, except for the tiny green glow from the instrument panel. For the next three hours, and the next 500 miles, they were going to be flying what Ryderbeit called ‘dead blind’ — no lights, no radar, no radio, just a gyro-compass and an altimeter — in an aircraft that had been built when Ryderbeit and Packer were both in short trousers.
Packer settled back and tried to sleep.
CHAPTER 36
At the moment that the Fieseler Storch was illegally crossing the Lebanese-Syrian frontier, a sand-coloured jeep with four men stopped close to the great Gorge of Darak, some eighty miles east of Mamounia.
In the quiet dusk the jeep showed no lights. The four men descended swiftly, their rubber-soled boots making no sound on the rocky slope up to the edge of the precipice. They wore grey denim battle-dress and walked in pairs, two carrying what looked like pieces of drainpipe attached to a tripod, the other two lugging a heavy metal box.
When they reached the edge, one of them signalled with his hand and the tripods were set down on the ground. No spoken orders were given. From the black abyss in front of them came a cold dead hush, broken by the whine of distant wind. The pale rim of the sky still showed the jagged treeless horizon.
The man who had given the signal now raised a pair of night-glasses and scanned the far side of the gorge, turned and swept them over the rugged ground ahead. Against the fading light he could just distinguish a blurred pillar of sandstone, with two black threads curving down into the darkness of the gorge. There was no trace of life.
He looked at his watch. They were not to act until it was completely dark, he had been told: which would be in five or ten minutes — no more.
The other three were adjusting the tripods and rangefinders. One of them had opened the steel box and carefully, silently, arranged the pear-shaped bombs in rows between the two mortars; then they lay flat and waited.
They waited eight minutes. The sky was now black and full of stars: a good night, the men thought, because the moon was low and thin. They were all watching the same spot, on the sheer, faintly discernible ridge of cliff ahead, when a light blinked twice. The leader swung the glasses round to the foot of the sandstone pillar. There was no answering light, but a quick moth-like movement.
Half a minute later a second, feebler light flickered over the ridge ahead and meandered down to the edge of the invisible footbridge. Here it paused while four more lights joined it from above; then the five of them began wobbling out over the chasm.
The leader with the night-glasses nodded. Two of the soldiers reached out and each picked up a mortar bomb. They rested on their elbows and held the bombs over the mouths of both barrels. The man with the glasses followed the luminous second hand of his watch; after fifty seconds, the cluster of lights had progressed a third of the way across, swaying visibly. He waited another thirty seconds. The lights had passed the lowest dip of the bridge and began to climb, more slowly now. He raised his right hand.
The group on the bridge was within fifty feet of the rock base when he brought his hand down with a quick slicing movement. The two commandos dropped the bombs into the barrels of the mortars. In the silence there was a rattle of metal, then two almost simultaneous clonks and a whistle of air. A couple of seconds
