LITMIR.BIZ

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      Mann sat down at the table and began toying with the Swiss army penknife that he’d bought in the souvenir shop at Geneva airport. ‘If the wind starts up again tonight …’ he balanced the knife on its end, ‘sand will make that road south impassable. And I don’t need your pal Percy to tell me that.’

      ‘Even in the Land Rover?’

      ‘Did you see that three-tonner down to the axles?’ He let go of the knife and it stayed perfectly balanced. ‘Sand that bogs down a three-ton six by six will bury a Land Rover.’

      ‘They were gunning the motor,’ I said. ‘You bury yourself that way.’

      ‘You’ve been reading the camping-in-the-desert section of the boy scout handbook,’ said Mann. Again he banged the folding knife down on to the table, and again it balanced on its end. ‘And in any case,’ he added, ‘how do we know the Russkie will be able to steal a four-wheel drive? He might be trying to get here in a Moskvich sedan for all we know.’

      ‘Is he stupid?’

      ‘Professor Bekuv’s intellect is not universally admired,’ said Mann. ‘During the time he was with the Russian scientific mission at the UN he wrote two papers about little men in flying saucers, and earned his reputation as a crank.’

      ‘Defecting cranks don’t get the department’s OK,’ I said.

      ‘Looking for messages from little men in flying saucers probably motivated his work on masers,’ said Mann. ‘And Bekuv is one of the world’s experts on masers.’

      ‘I’m not even sure I know what a maser is,’ I said.

      ‘You read the Technical Brief.’

      ‘Twice,’ I said. ‘But not so as to understand it.’

      ‘Maser,’ said Mann. ‘It’s an acronym – “m” for microwave, “a” for amplification, “s” for stimulated, “e” for emission, “r” for radiation.’

      ‘Do you mind if I take notes?’

      ‘Listen, dummy. It converts electromagnetic radiation – from a whole range of different frequencies – to a highly amplified, coherent microwave radiation.’

      ‘Is it anything to do with a laser?’

      ‘Well, a maser is a laser but a laser is not necessarily a maser.’

      ‘Is it anything to do with that guy looking in a mirror who says “Brothers and sisters have I none”?’

      ‘Now you’re beginning to get the idea,’ said Mann.

      ‘Well, somebody must be very interested in masers,’ I said, ‘or they wouldn’t have sent us two down here to provide Bekuv with a red-carpet reception.’

      ‘Or interested in flying saucers,’ said Mann.

      ‘If this Russian is such an idiot, what makes anyone believe that he’s capable of escaping from that Russian compound, stealing a roadworthy vehicle and getting all the way up here to meet us?’

      ‘Don’t get me wrong, pal. Bekuv is crazy like a fox. Maybe he is a flying-saucer freak, but when he was in New York with that UN scientific set-up he was reporting back to the KGB. He joined the 1924 Society – crackpots maybe, but they have some of the world’s top scientists as members. Bekuv was only too keen to read them long papers about gabfests through the galactic plasma by Soviet scientists, but he was listening very carefully when they told him what kind of work they were doing with their radio telescopes and electromagnetic wave transmissions.’ Major Mann ran his fingers back through his wispy hair that each day went greyer, now that he’d used up the last of his dark rinse. Almost without being conscious of what he was doing, he pushed hair over the balding patch at the back of his head. ‘Professor Bekuv was a spy. Don’t ever forget that. No matter how you dress it up as being a free exchange of scientific know-how, Bekuv was skilfully digging out a whole lot more than rumours about flying saucers.’

      I looked at Mann. I’d seen plenty of such men all the world over from the Shetlands to Alaska, and all the way through Communist Algeria too: foot-loose Americans, their linen clean and their livers tormented, soft accents blunted by a lifetime of travelling. It would have been easy to believe that this wiry fifty-year-old was one of those condottieri of the oil fields – and that’s what was written in his nice new passport.

      ‘Where did Bekuv go wrong?’ I asked.

      ‘To be sent down to Mali, as part of Soviet aid to under-developed African countries … deputy head of a six-man team of Soviet scientists.’ Major Mann reached for his hip-flask. He looked round the room to be sure he was not observed before putting a shot of whisky into his sweet, fizzy Algerian cola. ‘Nobody knows for sure. The latest guess is that Bekuv’s flying saucers began to be an embarrassment for the Soviet Academy and they sent him down here for a spell to concentrate his mind on political realities.’

      ‘I thought the Soviet Academy were very enthusiastic about flying saucers,’ I said. ‘What about this big radio telescope they’ve built in the northern Caucasus – the RATAN-600?’

      ‘Now you reveal the depths of your ignorance,’ said Mann. ‘There’s a whole lot of difference between the respectable scientific work of searching deep space for signals from extra-terrestrial intelligence and the strictly infra dig. pastime of looking for unidentified flying objects, or what the sci-fi freaks call ufology.’

      ‘Now, I’m glad you told me that,’ I said waving away Mann’s offer of the flask. ‘And so Bekuv was kicked downstairs into the foreign aid programme, and that’s why he decided to defect. Well, that all fits together very neatly.’

      Mann swallowed his drink and gave a grim smile to acknowledge that such a verdict was seldom intended as a compliment in the circles in which we moved. ‘Right,’ he said.

      ‘Last one in the shower is a cissy,’ I said. As I got up from the table I noticed that his knife was not balanced there after all; he’d driven its short screwdriver right into the wood.

      2

      The Trans-Sahara Highway is a track that goes south, through In-Salah and Tam, to the Atlantic. But we were using another trans-Sahara highway; the lesser known route that runs parallel to it, and many miles to the west. This was the way to the least known parts of Africa. This was the way to Gao and to Bamako, the capital of landlocked Mali. This was the way to Timbuktu.

      It was four fifteen the next morning when we left the hotel in Adrar. Mann and Percy were in the Land Rover. I followed in the VW bus with Johnny, an extra driver from ‘Dempsey’s Desert Tours’. We drove through the market-place in the gloom of desert night. It was damned cold, and the drivers wore scarves and woolly hats. The big trucks that cross the desert in convoy, loaded with dried fish and oranges, were nearly ready to move off. One of the drivers waved us past. Desert travellers have survival in common; never knowing when you might need a friend.

      We turned south. I followed the rear lights of the Land Rover. The road was hard sand, and we maintained a good speed past the roughly painted signs that pointed to distant villages. In places, loose sand had drifted on to the track, and I braked each time the Land Rover rear lights bounced; but the drift had not yet built up into the humps that tear an axle in half.

      The gun-metal sky lightened and glowed red along the horizon until, like a thermic lance, the sun tore a white-hot hole in it. This road skirted the edges of the Sahara’s largest sand-seas. To the west the horizon rolled like a storm-racked ocean, but to the east the land was flat and featureless, as grey and as hard as concrete. Sometimes we passed herds of moth-eaten camels, scratching for a bite of thorn-bush or a mouthful of scrub. The route south was marked by small cairns of stones. Often there was a solitary Arab riding astride some wretched beast, so small and bowed that the rider’s feet almost touched the ground. Once an Arab family were rearranging the burdens upon the saddles of their three camels. We saw no motor traffic.

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