Line of Succession

Lime beckoned Gilliams over and showed him the map. “I think Ben Krim’s heading for the same wadi where Binaud picked up the plane last week. Now that Catalina cruises at about a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. The Lear can do three times that speed. I want to be at that wadi before Ben Krim gets there. I’ll want half a dozen of the A-team men with me. The rest of you had better rendezvous at Touggourt and wait for word from me. Have you got a portable scrambler set?”

“Transceiver? There’s one in each helicopter.”

“Have one put aboard the Lear for me.”

“All right Mr. Lime. But what happens if you’re guessing wrong? You’re out there in some Godforsaken wadi.”

“If we don’t get there ahead of Ben Krim we’ve got no way to track his contact. There’s a town called Guerara about ten miles from the wadi—I’ll have to commandeer a car there.”

“If they’ve got one.” Gilliams looked dubious. “You know those bled towns. A camel and four jackasses.”

“Something else is worrying you. What?”

“Maybe your pilot can land that Lear down there and maybe he can’t. But there ain’t no for-real airplane runways around there. He’ll probably never take it off.”

“Then we’ve cost ourselves an airplane haven’t we.”

The killer boys were trooping on board the jet with their rifles and knapsacks. Lime collected Chad Hill and went up the boarding stairs. Somebody closed the door after them and as Lime was buckling into his seat he felt the engines begin to whine and vibrate.

The Lear had oil company markings and he hoped that would appease Sturka’s bunch if they saw it go by overhead. He had a strong feeling they were right down there somewhere—almost near enough to touch.

There was a road outside Guerara, a paved secondary road that went in an absolutely straight line across seventy miles of plateau to the main highway at Berriane. It made a fine landing strip for the Lear; they buzzed it once to make sure there was no traffic and the pilot set down easily on the pavement, wandering with a bit of wind drift because the road had a high crown.

The chief of the A-team unpacked the fold-up motorbike from the seemingly endless stockpile of gadgetry the CIA teams always carried, and went putt-putting off with an agent riding behind him on the fender, east toward Guerara, a palmtree-shadowed village a mile away. From the air they had spotted half a dozen vehicles there and Lime had specified two of them he wanted: a Land Rover and a truck.

Twenty minutes. The sun went down with a splash of color and the Land Rover came up over the rise into view. The truck was a two and one half ton Weyland with hooped canvas over its rear bed; it was war surplus—something Monty’s army had left behind in wreckage after El Alamein.

Lime didn’t ask the CIA chief how he had obtained the two vehicles and the CIA chief didn’t volunteer the information. His name was Orr, he was a wiry Texan with close-cropped iron-gray hair, and there wasn’t a doubt in the world he had once been in the paratroops or the Green Berets.

Lime spread the map on the hood of the Land Rover, on top of the spare tire, and talked for five minutes. Orr listened and nodded. When Lime got into the Land Rover with one of the agents for a driver, Orr gathered the rest of his men in the truck and they set out eastward in close-formation convoy. In the road behind them the Lear was taxiing off to the side to wait in case Lime needed it again.

They drove through the village and the stares of Arabs followed them until they were beyond the palms. Lime twisted around in the seat to crank up the battery-powered scrambler transceiver they had manhandled off the plane. It took him three or four minutes to make contact.

“Gilliams?”

“Yes sir, sir.” Gilliams sounded in good spirits.

“He still in the air?”

“Yes sir he sure is. Starting his descent just a few minutes ago. Right where you guessed he’d go.”

“We’re on the ground. It should take us ten minutes or so to get there, another five or ten minutes to get in position. Have we got enough time?”

“I imagine you have. He’s still got thirty-five miles to cover and it’ll take him some time to feel his way down. It’ll be dusk by then, pret’ near dark. I doubt he’ll have much by way of landing lights.”

“A pair of headlights I imagine,” Lime said. “Don’t make any more calls on this frequency until I get back to you.”

“Step it up a little,” he told the driver.

“Can I use the headlights?”

“God no.”

Lime and Orr were belly-down in the brush along the wadi bank when the PBY came lumbering down onto the piste, the jeep dirt track that ran alongside the dry river. A car sat in the road with its headlights stabbing forward; Ben Krim’s pilot was guiding by the headlights but it was a tricky maneuver because the closer he got to the ground the more blinding the headlights would be in his eyes. But the pilot would be good. Sturka used only experts.

Two of Orr’s commandos had slithered toward the car that was lighting up the plane’s landing strip. If the driver was sitting in the car they were to wait; if he was outside they were to plant the bleeper on the car. He would have to get out to meet Ben Krim and turn over the parcel.

That would be Corby or Renaldo in the car. He’d have with him one of those tape-recorder-transmitter devices to broadcast the next set of instructions to the Americans—where to deliver the Washington Seven.

It was Ben Krim’s job to report to Sturka’s man—give him the firsthand report on the landing of the Seven in Geneva—and collect the recorder-transmitter, and fly back to El Djamila to deposit the Catalina, and drive to Algiers, and book a flight to Madrid or Paris or Berlin where he would set up the transmitter on another tiresome little clock device so that Ben Krim would be halfway back to Algiers by the time the thing broadcast its message to the world.

Lime was only mildly interested in what the instructions would be. At any rate Ben Krim would be picked up when he flew back to El Djamila and Gilliams’ people would analyze the tape.

In the meantime the car was bugged and Lime would be following Corby or Renaldo back to Sturka’s lair.

It was going to work. He felt it for the first time: the positive knowledge that he had Sturka.

In the night silence he watched the PBY make its superb landing-roll to a stop within a hundred feet of the waiting headlights. The lights clicked off. Someone got out of the car and walked toward the airplane, and Benyoussef Ben Krim climbed down from the dimly lit cockpit to meet the courier. Through the Mark Systems glasses Lime watched the two shadows flow together in the dusk.

The meeting was brief. There was enough light to make out silhouettes, and Lime was fairly sure that was Cesar Renaldo. Not big enough for Corby nor lean enough for Sturka himself.

A curious question occurred to him. What if it had been Sturka? Arrest him on the spot and search for the others? Or, having him in hand, let him go so he could lead you back to them? With Renaldo Lime didn’t care, would let him go; Lime didn’t want Renaldo, not personally. But suppose it had been Sturka?

Renaldo get back in the car, started it up, switched on his lights, drove along the piste making a little curve to get around the PBY, drove almost a mile and stopped in the distance to make a U-turn, his headlights glaring with starlike twinkles across the flat clarity of the bled. Ben Krim was back in the plane and the pilot had one engine ru

Lime was looking at the place where Renaldo’s car had been sitting and his brain was working again. A car, he thought. Not a jeep, not a Land Rover. A car. One of those old diesel-powered Mercedes sedans, it was. Humpbacked and round.