by Adam Hall
20.06.
HIT.
MISS.
MISS.
‘Twice running.’
Shuddup.
Concentrate.
MISS.
HIT.
MISS.
MISS.
MISS.
‘You’ve got it now all right,’
MISS.
20.51.
‘Give me the Foxbat again.’ That was the fastest.
‘Fair enough. Coming at Mach 26.’
HIT.
‘Again.’
MISS.
‘Again.’
MISS.
‘Again.’
MISS.
‘Right-ho. Call it a day.’ He sounded exhausted.
‘I think that wraps it up,’ Ferris said.
He pulled the collar of his mac a bit higher. It was still drizzling, and colder today at this time: an hour after first light.
‘All right,’ I told him.
We stood for a while not speaking again, looking around us. About a hundred yards away one of the USAF crew was dragging a pair of chocks towards the F-III at the end of the line. Half an hour ago a BfV security man had walked across the tarmac to check on us, wondering what we were doing standing here in the middle of nowhere in the rain. We didn’t spell it out for him.
I began clumping my feet up and down. They’d given me a heavier flying-jacket than the one I’d brought here from Zaragoza, but it was still bloody cold.
‘Recap,’ Ferris said, and crouched down on his haunches to ease his legs. I did the same.
‘Right, I’m to expect the Soviet radar stations to start picking me up as soon as I begin climbing. At that point I shall be heading south, parallel with the border and twenty-five miles into their airspace. As Colonel Nikolai Voronov I can -‘
‘You start climbing near a military field.’
‘Right. Near enough to give the impression I’ve just taken-off from it. As Colonel Voronov of the Red Air Force I’ll respond to any radio calls with the cover story that I’m carrying out a fuel-range test which will explain all those extra tanks. Testing has to be done between thirty and forty thousand feet and any request to fly lower than thirty thousand or make a landing should be resisted for this reason.’
‘Use a lot of authority,’ Ferris said, and pulled his collar higher. ‘Yell at them over the radio. They’re shit-scared of authority.’
‘Noted.’
I recapped on the main elements: communications, cut-off points, rdv procedures, local direction, so forth; but most of this stuff was abstract and I’d stopped asking him for specifics because he’d said it was too early. It was beginning to look like sealed orders all the way and I assumed London was hogtied by the security demands of the USAF, the RAF, NATO and the BfV, since all four parties were contributing to the mission.
It was the first time I’d taken on an operation with so much exposure at the outset. The first phase of any mission - the access - is normally sacrosanct in terms of secrecy, simply because the most effective way of blowing up a project is to hit it before it can start. With this one the access was blown if anyone talked: any one of those people who knew that a front-line Soviet aircraft was parked here under wraps at Furstenfeldbruck. At a rough guess there must be more than a dozen of them, including the crew of the Lockheed C5-A Galaxie that had brought the Finback across the Atlantic and the guards now protecting it. Already at this stage of the briefing I could see why London couldn’t find anybody to take this one on. It was much more, and much worse, than sensitive. It was vulnerable.
This was probably why Ferris looked so bloody sour.
‘Photographs,’ I said, ‘of X and Y at low altitude. The film-‘
‘You’ll be given the actual locations at flight briefing,’ he said, looking away.
‘Thank Christ for that.’ I like as much data as I can get as early as possible, so that I’ve got time to feed it in. I hate being thrown a mass of stuff at the last minute when I’m busy working on the access.
‘I don’t like this one,’ Ferris swung a sharp look at me, ‘any more than you do.’
‘Bad luck. Did you volunteer for it, or did they catch you knocking off some bastard in a train?’
We crouched like a couple of half-drowned monkeys in the rain, snapping at each other, while in the background Parkis and his people were completing and perfecting their glorious brainchild that we were expected to take over when they were ready. I wished them luck. They’d come up with an access that was going to be about as safe as a duck shoot with me as the duck, and the target area they’d picked was about the most desolate bit of wasteground on the face of the planet: Latitude 47 °N. by Longitude 82 °E. in the middle of winter, work that one out.
‘Signals,’ Ferris said.
Through Chechevitsin in Yelingrad for London via Moscow. What about alerts?’
The man was nearer now. I’d been watching him,
‘Use your contacts in place.’
‘Or cross the border.’
‘Or do that’
The man had a waddling gait; I know people by their walk.
‘Get out through Sinkiang.’
‘If you’re pushed.’
‘Otherwise try Pakistan.’
‘The end phase,’ he said, ‘is likely to be rather fluid.’
I didn’t follow up. It was my belief that while Parkis and his people were completing and perfecting their glorious brainchild they were building into its complexities a small but deliberate flaw designed to cut me off in the final hours of the mission and remove me from the London intelligence field as an expendable embarrassment.
‘Bocker,’ I said,
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Herr Bocker is coming.’
Ferris looked up. ‘Now what does he want?’ We straightened our legs and went on talking while we waited. ‘You’re finished with the simulator, Thompson says.’
‘Yes.’
‘I hope you’re feeling more confident.’
‘I’ll be all right once I’ve got the bloody thing off the ground.’
‘Your flight briefing starts this evening at six o’clock. Why don’t you hop into town today and shake yourself loose a bit? Get rid of the tension.’ He sounded terribly casual.
‘Fair enough.’
‘I am sorry to disturb you, gentlemen!’
‘Morning, Hans. Not disturbing.’
‘Your embassy in Bonn was on the line. The cultural attaché would be obliged if you’d call him back.’
‘All right.’
Ferris left us, hurrying through the drizzle with his head down and his mac flapping.
‘No one seemed to know where you were, Mr. Nesbitt. I always find that a distinct advantage myself - to be difficult to find.’ A soundless laugh, his cheeks wobbling with it.
‘How right you are. That limousine, by the way.’
We began walking towards the buildings.
‘Ah, yes.’ He was right on to it. ‘They are our friends, of course.’
It was a large black Mercedes and I’d seen it standing there at the boundary fence for most of yesterday. There were two men leaning on it, identically dressed and watching the aircraft on the north side of the hangars.
‘Are they always there?’
He shrugged amiably. ‘Nearly always.’
‘I don’t think much of their cover.’
He bubbled happily at this. ‘You are familiar with their thinking, I am sure. In Russia only the nachalstvo drive about in large black limousines, and no one dares to question their movements. They believe it is the same in the West, and therefore station their cars where they please - quite often near airfields and missile sites.’ His hand rested for a moment on my arm. ‘You may be quite sure Squadron-Leader, that when your aircraft leaves its hangar before dawn tomorrow, those two gentlemen will be safely at police headquarters on a minor charge.’
I saw Ferris for a few minutes in the Base Operations Office. He said
the embassy call had conveyed a London signal asking for confirmation that Slingshot was ready to go into access phase at first light tomorrow, 07.47 local time.
‘Except for flight briefing and clearance,’ I said.
‘We’re giving you those tonight.’
‘Then we can go.’
‘That’s what I told them,’ he nodded.
Chapter 5
SWALLOW
‘You like that?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Tell me what you like, and what you do not like. Tell me,’ she said, taking her mouth away for a moment, ‘what drives you crazy.’
‘You drive me crazy,’ I said, ‘whatever you do.’
She started again and I shut my eyes and stroked her short thick hair, listening to what she was doing. The glare of the wintry light from the window was white against my eyelids, and I kept seeing the red word jump into the screen: HIT.
But we’d beaten that one: the last three had been misses, even with the Foxbat. There wasn’t anything to worry about.
This is the way?’ she asked me.
‘Yes. That is the way.’
I wouldn’t have been able to take it much longer if I hadn’t been letting the brain run on. The thoughts in the brain weren’t very sexy. If they were going to cut me off in the end phase and leave me hanging on the wire then I would do what I could to confound their bloody enterprise: get out and go to ground somewhere, and if possible leave evidence of death.
‘You do not touch me,’ she said, and took her mouth away to get her breath back. So I touched her and she jerked her thighs as if I’d released a spring. She’d come into the car park outside the hotel just after me, and we’d noticed each other and that was that. She was young, pretty, blonde and suntanned, with nothing very interesting about her; but I agreed we should go up to her room because that was what I was here for. She said she would speak English, because it was very bad and she would like me to correct her as often as possible so that she could improve.
‘Oh God,’ she said on her breath, ‘you are fantastic … I have never known a man like you …’
It was a strictly sales-training compliment and I’d realized by now that she was practised to the point of pretending she was virginal and inexperienced: ‘You like this?’ and so forth.
I didn’t think she was run by the hotel but she may have been free-lancing with a pitch here, on commission.
‘Halt, bitte! Ich kann nicht mehr!’
She was forgetting her English now. At first I’d thought she was a lesbian and professional enough not to let it show; but now she was getting involved and her honey-brown shoulders had slid to the floor and she was arched upside-down across the edge of the bed, so I buried my mouth in the thick triangle of hair that reached almost to her navel, and she began thrashing about and saying things in German again.
‘Noch einmal - mach’ es noch einmal!’
At some time I thought I heard a knock at the door but I let it go because I’d checked for security on my way here and it was satisfactory; the only trouble I’d had was in flushing the man Docker had obviously sent along on my tail when I’d left the airfield; it was good of him but I don’t like being mothered.
‘Du bist so schon,’ she was gasping, and the choice of the word was lesbian so I assumed she was a bi, which was why she’d been able to get involved. We started all over again and I stopped thinking about the screen and the silhouette and about the high degree of risk on take-off and about the fact that for the first time in my life I was considered expendable.
Later we found ourselves lying across each other on the floor, our eyes shut and our sweat cooling, the quietness coming back.
‘God,’ she whispered, ‘I need to drink.’
‘You need “a” drink,’ I said, and she laughed softly.
I fetched her some water and she drank and asked for more. She’d seen me at the airfield, she said: she had a brother working there as a technician - did I know him? His name was Max.
I said I didn’t know him.
‘You are pilot?’
‘Yes and no.’
‘Yes and no?’
‘More water?’
‘No, thank you.’ She got off the floor and kissed me and got a comb from her big leather bag and went over to the mirror, leaving the bag open. ‘Max knows all the pilots, because he is technician on airplanes. How long will you be at Furstenfeldbruck, darling?’
‘I can’t really say.’
She lit a cigarette and followed me as far as the shower. You must stay a long time,’ she told me, ‘and we will meet with frequency. Are you here on special work?’
‘Not really.’
‘Max said there was an Englander here on special work.’
I turned the tap to cold and took the shock and turned it off. She handed me the towel.
‘Well, you see,’ I said, ‘I mustn’t really talk about it.’
She rubbed my back dry, dropping some ash on my foot.
‘But I never tell about things. Max tells me many things, and he knows it is safe with me. You must be special pilot, or maybe technician.’ She threw the towel on to the linen basket and walked into the bedroom with her arm round me. ‘I think you are someone very important in your work. I guess good at these things, darling.’
‘“I’m good at guessing things,”’ I said and she repeated it slowly.
‘You are beautiful teacher.’ She put her hands down and stroked me. ‘You will teach me about this too.’ Some more ash dropped and she went over to stub out the cigarette. ‘Now tell me what is the work that you do - it must be exciting. I will never tell anyone, never.’ She came back, walking with a swing of the hips that started me thinking about bed again, so I started putting my clothes on.
‘I promise,’ she said. ‘You can trust me, darling.’
I looked into her eyes. ‘I really believe I could.’
‘But of course!’ She kissed me generously.
‘The thing is,’ I said doubtfully, ‘you might not understand, even if I told you. It’s rather technical.’
‘You forget my brother is technician.’
I pulled the zipper up and got my polo-neck sweater. ‘That’s perfectly true, of course. Well, I’m at Furstenfeldbruck to work on a new system they’re developing. It’s called the Directional U-beam Kinetic Sensor. We call it the DUKS for short.’ I pulled the sweater over my head. ‘The key compartment is the ARS, which is short for Annular Reciprocating Speculum.’
‘But I have heard of that!’ she said excitedly. ‘Max has talked to me of it.’
‘Really? Then I’m not telling you anything new.’
‘Oh yes! He is only on the outside - outside part -‘
‘On the fringe.’
‘Yes. Fringe. ‘
‘Well, the big question in all our minds over there is to do with the actual fit of these components.’ I picked up her tortoiseshell comb from where she’d left it near her bag, which was still open a couple of inches. Going across to the mirror I said: ‘Expressed technically, the big question is: exactly how tight is a DUKS ARS?’
In the mirror I watched her listening intently, her blonde head on one side. ‘Of course,’ I told her, ‘we’re already on to a theory. But that’s top secret, and I ought not to -‘
‘But darling, you said you would trust me!’ She came up behind me and put her arms round my waist, resting her head on my shoulder. ‘You promised.’
‘I suppose I did.’ I stroked her head. ‘Well, our theory is that it must be watertight, or it wouldn’t float.’
‘What about over there?’ Ferris said.
The Galaxie transport was standing on the far side of the tarmac from the hangars, only just visible in the slanting rain. We pulled our collars tight and trudged across to it under the main perimeter lamps, looking for movement and not seeing any. It was only 6.15 in the evening but the weather had grounded all aircraft, and the crews were off duty.
At the top of the steps I
asked Ferris: ‘Have you got permission to board this thing?’
‘No, but that doesn’t matter.’
‘As long as they don’t set those bloody dogs on us.’
The main fuselage was cavernous and we sat like a couple of half-drowned Jonahs. ‘We’ll only be here five minutes,’ Ferris said, ‘because you’ve got most of it.’
I didn’t ask him if he’d had any new signals. In final briefing and recap the thing is to listen as hard as you can because it’s your last chance to get it right and if you don’t get it right you can blow the whole thing anywhere along the line.
Ferris lowered himself on to a stack of life-jackets and brushed some of the rain off his mac. The only light in here came through the small round windows, and we could hardly see each other.
‘There are one or two things we didn’t spell out,’ he said in a moment, ‘like motivation, the rationale for various phases and things like that. You ought to know, for instance, why they planned this kind of access. You’re being put into an area that nobody can reach from the West without an awful lot of complications; any form of public transport or the use of your own car would need months of form-filling for Intourist plus elaborate and substantial cover. A moon-drop wouldn’t work because you’d be shot down the minute you crossed the frontier - any frontier. You could go in by road through Sinkiang from China or Afghanistan or Kashmir, but apart from frontier difficulties you’d have to spend half your time in ox-wagons if you could find a road that wasn’t closed by snow at this time of the year. So despite the delays we’ve had because of training procedures, the fastest access is by military plane, and that plane has to be Russian.’
My eyes were accommodating now and I could watch his face. Ferris was a talented director in the field and could put you through a maze without hitting a cul-de-sac, but he wasn’t an executive and he didn’t have a poker face and that was why he was worth watching. All I could tell at the moment was that he was having to force himself through the business of getting me to the start line, without any stomach for it. Even though we could now see each other he avoided my eyes, and this was uncharacteristic.
‘The plane has to be Russian, and so has the pilot. The only way we could get the plane was by going through NATO and the USAF. Our debt to NATO is being repaid by taking some pictures for them at X and Y: the current satellite photoscans show two villages that weren’t there before and they’re believed to be missile sites for the Soviet six-MIRVed SS-9 with the built-in three-hundred-yard Circular Error Probable capability. The United States is also interested in air-surveying these two points, obviously, and the only way of getting really detailed resolution is by using a low-flying aircraft. Making sense?’
