Quiller: The Tango Briefing by Adam Hall

Author:Adam Hall [Hall, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Political, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers & Suspense, Spies & Politics, Espionage, Thrillers
Amazon: B00796EW2A
Publisher: Spectrum Literary Agency, Inc.
Published: 2012-02-11T22:00:00+00:00

Their mass had been thrust upwards from the earth's crust to leave them standing reared and angular against the sky, their strata sloping at twenty or so degrees from the horizontal and their base littered with brittle fragments that had broken off. In several places a whole shoulder of rock had foundered, making an angled arch and giving shade, and under one of these I made my camp.

The flooring was the canopy of the supply 'chute and the roof was provided by my own, propped and draped with the help of the telescopic tubing that was part of the survival gear.

Lizards had run from the area of shade, skittering so fast across the sand that they seemed to float on its surface. I watched them, encouraged by the evidence of life in this region where I'd thought that nothing could hope to live.

For an hour I slept, in the heat of the noon. The distance had been nearer two miles than one and I'd had to make two trips, each time bringing a parachute and half the gear and provisions: four hours' work including rests in the shade of the rocks before I set up camp. Earlier, even when it had been cooler, this degree of effort would have been beyond me: it had been the sight of the tip of rock, the knowledge that it was there, that had given me the strength.

At 12.34 hours I made a signal.

He had to be told, before I decided what kind of effort was needed. Effort used up water and it used it up very fast. He had to be told, although there wasn't much he could do about it. The first thing was to get him to believe it.

Can I have that bearing again, from the rocks to the freighter?

Two hundred.

I checked the compass. The bearing was lined up directly with the tracks I'd left.

What's the distance from the rocks to the plane?

Four hundred and eighty-five yards.

He wasn't going to like it.

Loman, I'm at the rock outcrop now. I've pitched camp.

I had to wait for him to re-check the annotations on the hotograph. No change of tone.

Your heading was twenty degrees?

Yes.

You must have passed close to the aeroplane.

Not close enough to see it.

Then the poor bastard shut up for a bit.

I looked across the blazing sands to the point where my tracks vanished. There were big areas between the dunes and they didn't have the regular formation I'd seen at the point of drop: the rocks would deflect the wind here, setting up turbulence. But I had a clear view for more than five hundred yards and the bearing was correct and I ought to be looking straight at the wreck of the freighter. I was looking at an unbroken waste of sand.

Loman came in.

Quiller.

Hear you.

Do these rocks show any signs of ferrous oxidization?

He was dead scared but he didn't show it in his voice. He showed it in his thinking: he'd got the blown-up photograph m front of him with

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