Confessional

He ushered the Arab out and closed the door. The coffee was surprisingly good and very hot. Villiers said, ‘So they use some Arab personnel?’

‘In the kitchens and for sanitary duties and that sort of thing. Not from the desert tribes. They bring them from Hauf, I believe.’

‘What do you think will happen now?’

‘Well, tomorrow is Thursday and there’s a supply plane in. It will probably take us back with it to Aden.’

‘Moscow next stop?’

There was no answer to that, of course, just as there was no answer to concrete walls, steel doors and bars. Villiers lay on one bed, Levin on the other.

The old Russian said, ‘Life is a constant disappointment to me. When I visited England, they took me to Oxford. So beautiful.’ He sighed. ‘It was a fantasy of mine to return one day.’

‘Dreaming spires,’ Villiers observed. ‘Yes, it’s quite a place.’

‘You know it then?’

‘My wife was at university there. St Hugh’s College. She went there after the Sorbonne. She’s half-French.’

Levin raised himself on one elbow. ‘You surprise me. If you’ll forgive me saying so, you don’t have the look of a married man.’

‘I’m not,’ Villiers told him. ‘We got divorced a few months ago.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be. As you said, life is a constant disappointment. We all want something different, that’s the trouble with human beings, particularly men and women. In spite of what the feminists say, they are different.’

‘You still love her, I think?’

‘Oh, yes,’ Villiers said. ‘Loving is easy. It’s the living together that’s so damned hard.’

‘So what was the problem?’

‘To put it simply, my work. Borneo, the Oman, Ireland. I was even in Vietnam when we very definitely weren’t supposed to be. As she once told me, I’m truly good at only one thing, killing people, and there came a time when she couldn’t take that any more.’

Levin lay back without a word and Tony Villiers stared up at the ceiling, head pillowed in his hands, thinking of things that would not go away as darkness fell.

He came awake with a start, aware of footsteps in the passageway outside, the murmur of voices. The light in the ceiling must have been turned on whilst he slept. They hadn’t taken his Rolex from him and he glanced at it quickly, aware of Levin stirring on the other bed.

‘What is it?’ the old Russian asked.

‘Nine-fifteen. Must be supper.’

Villiers got up and moved to the window. There was a half-moon in a sky alive with stars and the desert was luminous, starkly beautiful, the MIG 23s like black cutouts. God, he thought. There must be a way. He turned, his stomach tightening.

‘What is it?’ Levin whispered as the first bolt was drawn.

‘I was just thinking,’ Villiers said, ‘that to make a run for it at some point, even if it means a bullet in the back, would be infinitely preferable to Moscow and the Lubianka.’

The door was flung open and the corporal stepped in, followed by an Arab holding a large wooden tray containing two bowls of stew, black bread and coffee. His head was down and yet there was something familiar about him.

‘Come on, hurry up!’ the corporal said in bad Arabic.

The Arab placed the tray on the small wooden table at the foot of Levin’s bed and glanced up, and in the moment that Villiers and Levin realized that he was Salim bin al Kaman, the corporal turned to the door. Salim took a knife from his left sleeve, his hand went around the man’s mouth, a knee up pulling him off balance, the knife slipped under his ribs. He eased the corporal down on the bed and wiped the knife on his uniform.

He smiled. ‘I kept thinking about what you said, Villiers Sahib. That your people in the Dhofar would pay a great deal to have you back.’

‘So, you get paid twice – once by both sides. Sound business sense,’ Villiers told him.

‘Of course, but in any case, the Russians were not honest with me. I have my honour to think of.’

‘What about the other guards?’

‘Gone to supper. All this I discovered from friends in the kitchens. The one whose place I took has suffered a severe bump on the head on the way here, by arrangement, of course. But come, Hamid awaits on the edge of the base with camels.’

They went out. He bolted the door and they followed him along the passageway quickly and moved outside. The Fasari airbase was very quiet, everything still in the moonlight.

‘Look at it,’ Salim said. ‘No one cares. Even the sentries are at supper. Peasants in uniform.’ He reached behind a steel drum which stood against the wall and produced a bundle. ‘Put these on and follow me.’

They were two woollen cloaks of the kind worn by the Bedouin at night in the intense cold of the desert, each with a pointed hood to pull up. They put them on and followed him across to the hangars.

‘No fence around this place, no wall,’ Villiers whispered.

‘The desert is the only wall they need,’ Levin said.

Beyond the hangars, the sand dunes lifted on either side of what looked like the mouth of a ravine. Salim said, ‘The Wadi al Hara. It empties into the plain a quarter of a mile from here where Hamid waits.’

Villiers said, ‘Had it occurred to you that Kirov may well put two and two together and come up with Salim bin al Kaman?’

‘But of course. My people are already half-way to the Dhofar border by now.’

‘Good,’ Villiers said. ‘That’s all I wanted to know. I’m going to show you something very interesting.’

He turned towards the Sandcruiser standing nearby and pulled himself over the side while Salim protested in a hoarse whisper. ‘Villiers Sahib, this is madness.’

As Villiers dropped behind the driving wheel, the Rashid clambered up into the vehicle, followed by Levin. ‘I’ve a dreadful feeling that all this is somehow my fault,’ the old Russian said. ‘We are, I presume, to see the SAS in action?’

‘During the Second World War, the SAS under David Stirling destroyed more Luftwaffe planes on the ground in North Africa than the RAF and Yanks managed in aerial combat. I’ll show you the technique,’ Villiers told him.

‘Possibly another version of that bullet in the back you were talking about.’

Villiers switched on and as the engine rumbled into life, said to Salim in Arabic, ‘Can you manage the machine gun?’

Salim grabbed the handles of the Degtyarev. ‘Allah, be merciful. There is fire in his brain. He is not as other men.’

‘Is that in the Koran, too?’ Villiers demanded, and the roaring of the 110 horsepower engine as he put his foot down hard drowned the Arab’s reply.

The Sandcruiser thundered across the tarmac. Villiers swung hard and it spun round on its half tracks and smashed the tailplane of the first MIG, continuing right down the line as he increased speed. The tailplanes of the two helicopters were too high, so he concentrated on the cockpit areas at the front, the Sandcruiser’s eight tons of armoured steel crumpling the perspex with ease.