Uncle Target by Gavin Lyall

Author:Gavin Lyall
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

19

The sun was very bright now and the tank had reached a comfortable midpoint between being untouchable either because of the night chill or the noonday heat. The raw rock of the foothills ended with an abrupt plunge into the desert, opening their flank to the south. Maxim grasped the pistol grip of the main gun.

'Traversing right. Piers, hang on.' Their seats swung with the gun so that now they sat crosswise in the tank: it was still a disorientating feeling that the direction he faced could be quite different to the way the tank was heading - and the PVD screen could show a third direction as well. But right now he kept it lined up with the gun, watching the end of the cliff 800 metres away, where trouble might be waiting.

For the same reason he kept the tank going east until they were a kilometre beyond the cliff, before swinging south. Then, with the distance between them and any ambush increasing fast, he relaxed, handed over the PVD to Al-Hamedi, and stood up.

One thing the PVD could never do was give a sense and feel of the landscape. It was like a bore at a cocktail party (probably somebody who worked in television, from recent experience of Agnes's friends) who could talk of nothing but the detail of his or her professional world. Fair enough: if the PVD wanted to be a military bore, obsessed with tactical detail, that was what it was for. But you had to carry the broad picture in your mind to interpret the screen; clever as it was, it couldn't solve the oldest military problem of all: seeing what was on the other side of the hill.

He had actually wanted that kefiyah; it was a vastly more practical use than a pistol in a desert situation. He already had it on over his headset: now he wrapped it loosely across his nose, mouth and microphone to keep the dust out (could a pistol do that?) and scanned around the whole horizon except for the bit blocked by Piers, still perched on the hatch behind him.

Eastwards, the horizon was a lumpy orange of real sand desert that seemed to be edging closer as they went south. But ahead, the vivid blue of the sky ended in a milky blur: perhaps the last south wind of winter beginning to stir the dust, though it was impossible to distinguish the wind from the tank's own speed. But out to the side, he thought he could see nervous ripples over the ground. Did he want wind? - it would flatten their dust trail, already not boiling as high as in the windless valley, but what about the engine air filters?

'Commander, aircraft, west!' Al-Hamedi yelled. He jerked his head to see the dark shape almost head-on, then it sliced past, low and fast and trailing thin dirty smoke. He got a frozen glimpse of the long drooping nose, down-slanted tailplane and a blue star on white. Then the noise hit like a thunderclap.

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