"Trevor, Elleston as Hall, Adam - Quiller 07 - The Kobra Manifesto 1.1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hall Adam)

We waited by the traffic lights and he pressed the button.

'What time is he coming in?'

'As soon as it's light enough for him to see the ground. The idea is that there won't be a lot of people about at that hour.'

'How far's the landing site from Istres?'

'I'm going to show you.'

The little green man flickered into life and we went across and opened the Lancia and got in and took Section 84 out of the glove compartment. He had a red felt pen in his hand.

'Just here, okay? A kilometre south of St-Martin-de-Crau.'

The place would be visible from the tower at Istres airfield through a pair of 7X50s but that wasn't critical because the minor road ran north and then west behind a low elevation and that was where I could lose people, 'All right,' I said.

'You want to recap?'

'No.' I wanted to find a phone and tell London they could screw the Pulmeister 101 and screw Milos Zarkovic because tins wasn't a mission they were handing me, it was a contact and escort operation and they could have used Coleman or Matthews or Johnson or anyone from the general facilities pool: they didn't need a first-line shadow executive for this thing and they knew it. But I was between missions and not far along the coastline from Istres and they thought they'd save the expense of flying someone else out from London and risking the operation through lack of experience so they'd winkled me out and sent this little jerk to local-brief me and sell me the thing about 'handling it solo' to give it the look of a first-line penetration job.

His cologne was rather heavy and I folded the map and put it back with the others and got out of the car and stood watching an Air Force Boeing sliding down to the airport across the bay.

'You don't seem very happy, old boy.'

Screw Steadman too.

'If London wants this character, I'll bring him in.'

Soon after Aix-en-Provence I began hitting the Mistral, touching the wheel to correct the steering as the gusts came broadside-on. The Mistral is a strong and steady wind, blowing down the Rhone Valley and bending the cypresses and unnerving the people in its path; it blows for three, six or nine days and by Napoleonic law if it blows for longer than that, murder is not a capital charge.

I didn't know how long it had been blowing this time. If it hadn't dropped by dawn, Zarkovic would have to make a half circuit to bring his plane up-wind because a belly flop would be tricky enough without dead-air conditions. The Mistral turns eastward when it reaches the coast, and that would be Zarkovic's approach direction.

By midnight I was in St-Martin-de-Crau and drove straight through and pulled the Lancia into cover alongside a vineyard, dousing the lights and sleeping on and off for the next five hours. The last time I woke up I was aware of the silence: the Mistral had died and the pre-dawn air was still.

By 05:15 I was positioned to receive the contact, halfway along a narrow road that led south to the coast. The wind had got up again and I stopped trying to work out which way he'd be coming in. There wasn't a lot of room between the railway to the east and the Rhone Basin to the west, but if he managed to come down precisely into the wind he'd be sliding towards me at this point and finish up within a hundred metres of the car.

There are never clouds when the Mistral blows, and I could make out the tower at Istres, black against the pale dawn sky. Within minutes the reeds at the edge of the marshland were turning from blood red to silver as the sun lifted from the low horizons, and the wind tugged at them, curving them into scimitars. Gusts hit the side of the Lancia, shifting it on its springs; I leaned away from it and settled the binoculars on the skyline in the east.

06:00.

He was overdue because Steadman had told me he was coming in at first light and the sun was already five or six diameters high and the waves of heat were floating horizontally across the lens where the railway embankment made the skyline. He could have mucked it, of course. I didn't know anything about his background: he could be a major element in something big the Bureau was running or he could be coming across with the blueprints of the Russian fleet, but even if he were only a contact or a courier he had to get a front-line interceptor airborne out of a military base and he had to go like hell through a gauntlet of radar stations that would trigger off signals to every air police unit along the north Mediterranean before he was across the Italian Alps. He could be chased and intercepted and ordered to turn back by pursuit squadrons of the Yugoslavian air arm, and if they managed to interest the Italians in this thing he'd have to move faster than the decision-makers at a dozen military airfields along his course.

That was his problem, not mine.

06:30.

The heat shimmered against the lenses. I lowered the glasses to rest my eyes and then put them up again. The sky to the east was a blinding sheet of white.

It occurred to me that I'd missed a couple of points because it had looked as if they'd thrown a full-scale mission at me and it had triggered .the normal degree of first-night nerves and I'd been jumping gaps. The thing was this: there hadn't been any need for Steadman in this picture. London could have just signalled Interpol to get me into communication, and all those Monegasque cops had to do was tell me to phone the Bureau; then the Bureau would have told me to go and pick up this character at dawn, Bouches du Rhone, so forth.