The Sinkiang Executive

by Adam Hall

  Sit and sweat.

  Parkis, you bastard.

  Don’t think about Parkis.

  Check and recheck, RPM, EOT, fuel, warning lights, artificial horizon, altitude, airspeed.

  Two minutes later there was a hellish bump and the top of my helmet touched the canopy and I took her up to six hundred as a reflex action because the hills were below and this degree of turbulence could drop me two hundred before I could do anything about it.

  Parkis was on my Don’t think about Parkis On my mind because Ferris had been so bloody shut-in while we were all waiting for that corporal to turn up and he’d been in constant signals with London while Connors was final-briefing me in the hangar before dawn this morning and a few minutes ago an idea had got into my head and it wasn’t nice. Those bastards in London could have Bump and the whole of the airframe shuddered and I kept low on the seat and wished to Christ I could see something because there was an isolation factor getting into the psyche: I was flying into nothing and there was nothing behind me and the needle on the dial was losing its meaning - if this thing slowed down and stood still in the sky with the jets still running I wouldn’t feel any difference.

  Climb.

  No. Radar.

  Climb just a little bit.

  I’m not scared enough. Not yet.

  Those bastards in London could have ordered an execution during that last hour at Furstenfeldbruck and that could have been why Ferris had been so shut-in at a time when it was his job as the director in the field to give me every possible reassurance and get me to the zero feeling I had a chance.

  Noise like a freight-train, a freight-train going nowhere, standing still in a cold grey void: you can keep your bearings by looking at the dials in front of you but you can lose them inside your skull if you don’t hang on.

  That bastard Parkis could have given Ferris a final directive: if that corporal is found to be in the hands of a Soviet cell or is considered to have been in their hands and under interrogation for a period long enough for him to have divulged the nature of Slingshot, the executive is not to be informed, and the operation is to proceed as planned.

  That would be logical because this was a new kind of mission and it had its own built-in destruct unit and there was a point we could reach where they would use it. The two components of Slingshot were a man and a machine and they were both expendable: this thing I was flying was a museum-piece and it’d be cheaper to junk it than take it all the way back to the States; and the pilot was due for throwing out if he ever got back alive and it’d be cheaper to let him go into the access phase and run into a certain barrage than take him back to London and debrief him. It would save us the unpleasant task, later, so forth.

  Destruct. Destruct by neglect.

  You’re paranoiac.

  No, I Ferris said so.

  But they could have found Corporal Behrendt, or his body You surely don’t believe Shuddup. They could have found Behrendt and that man Bocker could have called up Ferris with the news and Ferris could have told him to keep a blackout on it, a total blackout. Within the context of an expendable man and an expendable machine it’s a perfectly logical premise, and I But even Parkis wouldn’t do a thing He wouldn’t what?

  I was in his office with two other people the day Swanner came in half-dead from fatigue after running the gauntlet from Prague to the border and losing two couriers. He’d blown the whole route wide open and Parkis had made the three of us stay in the room while he stood in front of Swanner and took a full ten minutes to break the man up while we had to listen to it. He never raised his voice, which made it worse. I was in his office a year later when Laszlo was brought in to plead for asylum. Parkis told him that for political reasons we were going to drop him back across the frontier where the KGB were hunting for him, and the poor little devil put a pill in his mouth and hit the floor before we could stop him.

  Be advised: Parkis will do anything.

  Drifting.

  Wind gusts.

  I corrected the attitude.

  And there was another thing. One of our sleepers in Brussels had got himself into a Venus trap and one of the Moscow cells had turned him and he’d begun doubling and Parkis had sent a man out to deactivate him before he got dangerous, and the man was back within twenty-four hours and there weren’t any questions asked but we passed the hat round in all departments for the sleeper’s widow. The man who went out, and came back, was Ferris.

  Drift Correct.

  And forget.

  At this point I was thirteen minutes from the Hungarian-Soviet frontier and flying towards it at a steady six hundred knots and if Corporal Behrendt had been got at successfully I had these last thirteen minutes to live, so it was a good time to make a decision: go back or go on. But nothing had changed since I’d committed myself and put this thing into the air, except that the idea had come into my mind, about Parkis. But that could be paranoia and if I gave in to it I could make so many wrong decisions that I could wreck an awful lot more than the life and career of just one little shit-scared ferret on his way to a terminal explosion.

  Twelve minutes now, not thirteen. Twelve.

  I could for instance abort this mission and swing back to Furstenfeldbruck and tell Ferris to get me to London, but they had a manhunt going on there and I was the man and it’d be no go because the Bureau wouldn’t let me in: once in the dock and with no defence I could bring down the Sacred Bull and they knew that. They’d order Ferris to hole me up on neutral ground and keep me there till they could debrief me and let me loose like a piece of junk with a pension, or save their money and rig a bang in a flight bag and put me in the records as executive deceased between missions, I wouldn’t put it past them, I wouldn’t put anything past those idolatrous bloody pagans if they had to choose between the Bull and a human being.

  Bump, very bumpy. We dropped a hundred and fifty just then and I don’t understand it because there ought to be flat land below us now without any turbulence.

  I brought her to five hundred and stared through the windscreen at the blank grey wall and listened to the jets pushing me into it with the force of a hurricane and looked down at the clock again: eleven.

  Or I could put this thing down on an airfield in Hungary or Romania or Bulgaria and blarney my way into the blue as a Soviet military overseer on a special mission: the slave-state security police would lick anyone’s boots providing they were made in Moscow. But London would know where I went because they knew me and they knew my ways and they’d put a directive through the network and the moment I showed up above ground they’d make the snatch, finis.

  Ten minutes and running into nothing and the isolation thing was creeping up on me again because I was strapped in an airtight pod with nothing distant for the eyes to focus on.

  Check.

  RPM, EGT, fuel gauges, artificial horizon, airspeed, all warning panels dark. Clock.

  Nine minutes left.

  Then something flashed and I looked down to the left and saw a break in the rain-haze and a long sinuous line running more or less parallel, its curved sections reflecting the steely light. The corner of the green-code map began fluttering in the airstream from a conditioner vent and I folded it back and checked the area from Budapest to the Carpathians. Fair enough: I was on course but three or four miles too far south, if that was the Tisza down there.

  Over the next three minutes the turgid grey of the cloud-mass broke up gradually into landscape patterns that swung past me five hundred feet below. I kept lie altimeter in view and went down three hundred feet, turning slightly and turning again to steady the course a mile to the north of the river. The cloud-base was lifting all the time now and the glare of the low sun filled the windscreen. I kept my head turned and began looking for landmarks but it was difficult because the terrain was streaming past at six hundred knots and becoming a blur as the sun’s light strengthened and shone across fields and wooded areas still bright from the recent rains. There should be a tank-farm complex a mi
le to the north of the Tisza at this point if the dead-reckoning figures added up, but I couldn’t see it yet: it could be five miles behind or five miles ahead of me and I began looking for the two adjacent landmarks: a highway intersection in the shape of an X and a village with two churches, one at each end.

  Dock: six minutes.

  There was no direct sunshine but the glare was blinding now and the streaming terrain immediately below had the glimmer of molten metal.

  No farm.

  No village.

  Recalculate and note time: five minutes to the frontier, give or take the margin of error. I wasn’t sure I would in fact be able to distinguish the features of low-relief landmarks at this speed and at a vertical angle, so I made a one-degree turn and held it for ten seconds and came back one degree and brought the river across to the other side, increasing the vertical angle and staring down again until a visual shift mechanism was set up and I had to look away.

  Four minutes.

  The most distinctive landmark to the north of the Tisza was a bauxite minehead two miles east of a co-operative farm with maize silos, and I turned my head to the left again and looked down.

  Hova valo? Hova valo?

  I didn’t answer. Major Connors’s reports from NATO Intelligence had been rather vague, since last year’s attempt at insurgence had ‘affected the disposition of Red Army units in this satellite state’. Nobody knew definitely whether a Soviet aircraft moving flat out at low altitude through Hungarian airspace would cause alarm, though I’d been warned to expect interceptors east of the Austrian border if radio calls for identification became insistent and went unanswered.

  Igazolja magat!

  I suppose they’d found me on the radar when I’d climbed through the turbulence to give myself elbow room but I was now skinning the deck at two hundred feet and ought to be off the screens according to the map indications: the nearest radar stations to the Tisza within a hundred miles of the border were on the northern side of a hill range and the terrain masking was noted as total for 17 m.

  Hova valo? Igazolja magat!

  At this speed and altitude I was producing a continuous roll of thunder across the ground and it was probable that I was panicking livestock and that agricultural workers and the garrisons of isolated police stations were running to phone a report to the nearest military air base.

  Hova valo? Igazolja magat!

  No comment.

  I checked the instruments but had to do it in a series of snatched glances because I could be miles out in my dead reckoning and the flat bright plains could break into low hills and I’d need a lot of time to bring the nose up and clear them. The first hills on the map began ten miles from the frontier and I’d have to start climbing in any case when Stubby tubular configuration low left: silos? Then angular superstructures ten or twelve seconds after: the bauxite minehead to the east of the farm.

  Check map. Check time. The landmark was thirty miles from the frontier and the clock gave me three minutes to go. I waited thirty seconds and eased the control column back a degree and held it and flattened out again at four hundred feet and looked for the hills and saw their shadows this side of them in the lower half of the windscreen. They were sliding towards me in a soft green wave and I wanted to climb again to increase the margin of safety but that was gut-think because the briefing sources were first class and these hills were down as three hundred feet and the margin was as much as I could afford without starting to show up on someone’s radar screen.

  Two minutes.

  I was now closing very fast on the frontier from twenty miles west and there was no reason to turn back but I switched on the set and made two clicks with an interval of one second. It was the only signal I’d been briefed to make and it meant that all was well and I was going in. I was to make it on the final approach to the Soviet frontier while I still had enough rime to swing round and return to base if so ordered. The response would be one click as a signal to proceed as planned, three rapid clicks as a signal to turn round and head back to Furstenfeldbruck.

  I waited.

  One click.

  I switched off the set.

  The hills streamed past the windscreen in a wash of undulating green and I estimated the visibility at five or six miles: a distance of thirty seconds in terms of time. Then I checked the whole panel and noted that all systems were functioning within their prescribed limits of efficiency and finally I tested the harness straps because the bumping had put a slight degree of stress on them and I wanted to know whether they’d broken.

  One minute.

  They hadn’t broken. They couldn’t have. They hadn’t received one thousandth of the stress needed to do it. It was my nerve that was breaking and driving me into these final gestures of supplication: I couldn’t pray and I couldn’t cross myself and I didn’t carry a rabbit’s foot so I’d tested the straps because if they were all right then everything was going to be all right and to hell with your bone-rattling prophecies of doom.

  Easy to say, because the primitive brain was aware that its organism was trapped inside a projectile and hurtling through the air towards the likelihood of death: and not by accident.

  But if he fails to survive the access phase Get out of my mind.

  Get out.

  Concentrate. Thirty seconds: five miles. Check, recheck, recalculate, do anything, but give the consciousness some work.

  Airspeed 640 knots, altitude 300 feet, steady on course, bearing 121 degrees.

  Twenty seconds.

  Ten. Zero.

  And ahead of me, spreading into the windscreen, the snows of the Carpathians. Despite all you have done, Parkis, and all you may do or try to do, you may write this much at least across the board: the executive in the field for Slingshot has penetrated Soviet airspace and is still alive.

  Chapter 10

  MOIRA

  ‘I don’t give a damn who you are.’

  She meant what I was.

  It was the first thing she ever said to me, and she didn’t know it was important. She still doesn’t.

  ‘It’s unusual,’ I said.

  This was later.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Not wanting to know.’

  ‘Oh.’ The head perfectly still, the long green eyes alone moving to look at me. ‘But then I’m a lot more than just sex, aren’t I?’

  She has rich auburn hair, clouds of it, but doesn’t use it for effect: she uses her shoulders. They are slightly tanned and she likes them bare and knows how to move them, though she does it sparingly because it’s an expression of foreplay and it can devastate. Somewhere along the line there’s a car smash and a divorce and an autistic child she’s slowly bringing to life, and other things.

  ‘This business I’m in,’ she told me a year ago, ‘I don’t know.’ We were looking down into the Thames, just before dawn. ‘It isn’t doing anything for me. It’s slowly beginning to hollow out my guts, but I can’t stop.’ After a bit: ‘It’s like that with you, isn’t it?’

  ‘No.’

  Too quick and she heard it, and laughed softly.

  ‘You never turn your back, do you? Maybe I could learn from that: I’ve been letting things creep up on me.’

  She flew out to Taiwan a month ago with her director to do a remake of Song of the Islands and I couldn’t see her off because this thing had started, but whenever she leaves, or I leave, I get the same feeling: that all she’s going to see of me again is a dozen roses. I’ve been trying for a long time to break this insidious association of her name with death - my death - but it still conies in strongly when the odds are stacked and it looks like the end of the line, and I felt it now because the climb indicator was showing a ten-degree angle as I eased the control column back and watched the airspeed come down through 550 knots before I pushed the throttles forward and took her back to 640 and sat waiting.

  This was the stage I’d been trying not to think about since we’d cleared the Carpathians without drawing fire; I’d grown used
to being close to the ground where no one could see me but at Zhmerinka I had to shift out of the access phase and fly my image deliberately on to their radar screens and I was doing that now and it felt dangerous and in the microsecond intervals between practical observations I thought of Moira.

  Altitude 500 feet.

  600.

  700.

  What plane are you?

  They were on to me very fast and I didn’t like it because I was well beyond the Air Defence Identification Zone and only four miles west of the airfield at Zhmerinka and they shouldn’t be so bloody surprised at seeing a MiG on the screen.

  The briefing had been precise on this and I switched the transponder thumbwheel to the Mode 3 frequency and squawked.

  800.

  900.

  What is your course?

  I told them 104 degrees and went on climbing steadily.

  One thousand feet.

  It really was very hot in this bloody cockpit and I looked at the air-conditioning lever but it had been on full cool since I’d crossed the Austro-Hungarian border and the thing was obviously defunct.

  1200.

  They hadn’t answered me.

  I didn’t like that either. I didn’t like any of it because there was something in the back of my mind that was nagging all the time, something I’d missed.

  There was still no answer. I was tempted to ask them for an acknowledgement and I resisted it because when in Rome you’ve got to do as the Romans do and don’t you forget it. That man down there was just not the talkative type: he’d popped a couple of questions and got a couple of answers and now he’d gone back to checking somebody’s king, fair enough, it was the way they did things over here.

  You’re just cheering yourself up.

  Wouldn’t you?

  Going through four thousand feet I checked instruments and brought the log up to date and changed course by five degrees to take me north of the missile site at Voliapin. They could reach me at a hundred miles’ range and I wasn’t trying to get out of their way: it’s just that when you creep past the lion’s den you take care not to tread on its tail.