The leader had his glasses up and gave a rapid order. One of the men fed his mortar again, while the other made a slight adjustment to his rangefinder. The explosions now came in fast succession, amplified by the walls of the gorge, until they sounded like an artillery barrage. The lights on the bridge had paused for a moment, then began hurrying forwards and upwards.
All four men were feeding the mortars now, watching the bursts of light on the top of the sandstone pillar. The leader had dropped in the ninth bomb and ducked down, when the four torches on the bridge appeared to glide sideways, then drift down into darkness where they spread out like fireflies and vanished. Above the booming echoes, a thin scream rose from the depths, with an answering bark from the walls of the gorge. Then silence.
The four men had already grabbed up the mortars and ammunition case, and were trotting back towards the jeep. A bullet cracked into the rock a few feet from them, and a second ripped through the jeep’s canvas hood, as they clambered aboard and bounced away, without lights, into the darkness of the desert.
In the back the leader switched on a powerful shortwave radio.
Eighty miles away, in his office in the turret of his marble mansion, Shiva Steiner received the transmission. Dr Zak had departed to his Maker.
CHAPTER 37
For the last two hours they had been flying at treetop level, although there were no trees. There was also no moonlight, but the stars had a brilliance that was reflected in a weird glow off the broken naked landscape.
Ryderbeit had consumed a quarter of the whisky by the time they had crossed Iraq, flying terrifyingly low until they reached the mountains that formed the natural barrier with the Ruler’s kingdom. Here they had climbed steeply, with the little plane bouncing and lurching in the treacherous upcurrents, while Ryderbeit’s fingers slid swiftly, surely over the controls, his lips moving in the dim light from the instrument panel, soothing, coaxing the little antique machine up through the winding corridor of a pass which marked the highest and most remote point of the frontier.
Packer had not been able to see the sides of the pass, but could make out their shape by the absence of stars. Ryderbeit, however, seemed endowed with some especially sensitive night-sight. He had a pencil torch with which he occasionally consulted the charts on his lap; but most of the time he seemed to be flying by instinct.
Packer was no aviation expert, but he guessed that Charles Pol would have had to spread a very wide net indeed in order to find another pilot like this one-eyed Rhodesian pariah. He wondered, too, what extra inducements Pol had offered, beyond the £100,000 that Ryderbeit had already received, and whether it was in a joint account, subject to the same dual signature conditions as Packer’s.
He had fastened on this thought — on any thought — for as long as possible. Anything to keep his mind off the immediate fears of the flight, and the more ominous speculations of what lay ahead that night.
For more than an hour, after crossing from Iraq and leaving the mountains, Ryderbeit took them back up to 1000 feet, and they flew to the steady rattling roar of the engine, without seeing a single light below — not a town, not a village, not one pair of headlamps to mark a road. Packer felt like someone who has swum too far out over a deep lake and wonders if he can make it back to the shore.
At 10.35 local time — an hour ahead of Beirut — they reached another ridge of mountains; and again they came in so low that Packer felt that at any second the long rigid wheelstruts would be snapped off by a rock. But Ryderbeit’s natural antennae seemed to detect every contour, every hump and peak and crevice, until they were drifting down the long empty slopes towards the Gulf. Lights were now sprinkled across the blackness below — and ahead Packer could see the glow of a city.
Ryderbeit signalled with his thumb and passed him the torch. Packer unstrapped himself and crawled back over his seat into the cramped tapering fuselage whose vibrating sides made his teeth rattle.
His fingers found the screws, and with the torch in one hand he got out Ryderbeit’s pocketknife, opened the screwdriver blade and went to work. He slipped three of the spare ammunition clips, each containing thirty rounds, into the deep pockets of his anorak; climbed back over his seat and laid the two MI6s on the floor under his legs, before passing the other three clips to Ryderbeit, who tucked them into his belt.
They were again flying so low that Packer had the sensation of riding in a very fast car, skimming over the shadowy mounds of sand dunes, expecting at any moment to see a house speeding towards them.
Ryderbeit had switched on the radio, and moved the dial slowly round, picking up the occasional static crackle; then a blare of music — a woman wailing to the twang of some primeval instrument. Mamounia Radio. Ryderbeit adjusted the dial to a precise wavelength, with the volume turned up full. A couple of minutes passed; there was a loud swooping howl, and a voice with a thick accent shouted through the cockpit: ‘Please over to forty-three degrees…’ It went on repeating numbers, while Ryderbeit altered direction, again with the speed and ease of a racing driver.
A pair of lights appeared over the next hump of sand — two burning oilcans, with the flames flapping sideways in the crosswind. Ryderbeit flew between them, touched the wheels
