by Adam Hall
“Sales talk.”
“I hope you’re joking.”.
“Not really.”
I wanted to make him work for it. I wanted him to tell me more than I needed to know. Because I didn’t trust London, not on this one.
“There were three planners,” he said with forced patience. “Parkis, Mildmay and Egerton. That alone shows you the size of this operation. They had to rope in the RAF to carry out screening in depth. They had to get facilities from NATO and provide an extensive blackout on God knows how many security movements. And they had to ask the USAF for that Finback, in good condition and ready to fly. I want you to understand that everything has been worked out, exhaustively including the access.”
This was impressive but it didn’t change anything.
“I’ve still got to take that thing off the ground without any training in it.”
“You’re being trained with the FM-3O at Zaragoza because it’s the closest thing we’ve got to the Finback. The two particular planes you’ve been using had their cockpit layout modified to resemble the Finback as far as possible. What I’m saying is that Control is fully aware of the risk in the access phase, and has tried to do everything to decrease it.”
“Good of him.”
But of course it had to be true. If Parkis lost me on the run in he’d lose the mission and he knew that.
“There are always certain areas of high risk,” Ferris said reasonably, “in any operation. They’re not usually in the access phase. In this one they are. It’s possible that Parkis wanted you for this one because he knows you do your best work when the risks are high.”
I turned away and looked out of the window and didn’t like the view but it was better than Ferris. “Parkis wants me for this one,” I said, “because he’s got his boot on my balls and he knows I can’t get away. So don’t give me any bullshit.” I turned round again. “Is that thing in Europe now?”
“Yes. It’s waiting for you at Furstenfeldbruck, ten miles from Dachau.”
“How did they get it there?”
“In a transport plane.”
“Where was it before?”
“In California.”
“They make a model of it?”
“That’s right.”
It looked logical enough. London wanted to inject me into Soviet airspace without getting me shot down, so it had to be in a Russian plane; and I couldn’t fly the thing anywhere in the West without people noticing, because that Finback had made the front page when it had dropped into Alaska and everyone knew where it was — and where it ought to be. That’s why they’d made a model.
That bit didn’t worry me. But both shoulders were still bruised and I could still feel those sickening swings this afternoon when the FM had begun spinning, and the primitive brain was afraid and wouldn’t give me any peace. I stood a good chance of finishing up as a lump of brawn compacted into the front end of a tin can on a mountainside maybe three days from now and the organism was scared sick and it affected my dunking.
“Cockpit layout’s one thing,” I told Ferris. “What about actual handling characteristics?”
“You’ll have the simulator at Furstenfeldbruck, and Gilmore’s going to be with you the whole time, right up until take-off.”
“Good old Gilmore.” I wished I could stop sweating.
“He’s told us, in any case, that the handling characteristics aren’t too different. He chose the FM-3O himself, right at the beginning. The least dissimilarity is in level flight and on fast turns. On take-off you’ll find less lift, because the Finback can use larger outboard fuel tanks than the FM.”
He was trying to sound very reasonable, very relaxed.
“What about landing?”
“You won’t be landing it anywhere,” he said. “This is a one-way flight.”
Chapter Four: FURSTENFELDBRUCK
“Haben Sie etwas zu melden?”
“Nein, Herr Hauptmann.”
“Ist jemand vorbeigekommen?”
“Nur der amerikanische Offizier der Wache auf seinem Rundgang.”
“Um wieviel Uhr war das?”
“Mitternacht, Herr Hauptmann.”
“Nun gut. Das hier ist Herr Nesbitt.”
“Ihren Ausweis bitte, mein Herr.”
“Jawohl, hier ist er.”
“Danke, mein Herr.”
He gave it back to me.
“Wissen Sie was die Losung ist?”
“Katapult,” I told him.
“Schon richtig, mein Herr.”
The two dogs leaned against their harness, scenting, their eyes luminous in the lamplight.
“They are war trained,” Bocker told me. “Please don’t make any sudden movement.” He motioned the guard to hurry: it was freezing tonight and a drizzle was coming down, webby against our faces. The hangar loomed above us, the heights of its camouflaged facade lost in the rain-haze.
The two dog-handlers stood firm while the guard went back into his box and used a telephone, giving his name and service number and repeating the password; men he asked for the door to be opened.
“How long has the weather been like this?” I asked Bocker. As a courtesy he always spoke to me in English.
“A week. Perhaps ten days. It’s rather like London, don’t you think?” He had an almost soundless laugh that made his little jokes seem confidential, a mannerism he might have developed during his career in West German Counter-intelligence. He called to the guard.
“Haben Sie sich jetzt beschaftigt?”
“Ich habe es ihnen gesagt, Herr Hauptmann.”
We sank lower into our collars and I studied Hans Bocker while his head was turned away to watch the guard. I needed to know all their faces, and who they were, and what they did. Bocker was a jolly sort, overweight and blond with a red face and small bright eyes shining from puffs of flesh: his manner was confidential and he spoke softly, a plump hand on my arm to remind me that this was for my ears only. His dossier, which Ferris had got for me through NATO channels, showed that his cover identity as army captain was for the Furstenfeldbruck assignment only.
Ferris had said: “You’ll find security’s pretty good up there. They don’t know what we’re doing but they know London’s asked for strict hush. And Bocker is first class: we’ve checked him out.”
Ferris was joining me here in the morning.
We could hear a jingle of keys from inside the hangar, echoing; then the small door near the guard hut pulled open and a beam of light struck across us, blinding me.
Then the whole thing started all over again except that this time it was in English: Bocker introduced himself and presented me and I showed my security card and told them the password and we went inside and I heard one of the dogs give a low sound in its throat, I was glad when the door was shut because I can’t stand those bloody things, they’ve got teeth like sharks.
I suppose I was a bit on edge in any case, because here it was: the Finback.
It was standing all by itself in the middle of the hangar, draped in black shrouds under the cluster of lights. I couldn’t see anything of its surfaces, just the general shape under the covers; and it stood there in a silence so total that it was hard to understand, considering the noise it was going to make when we took it into the open; but I could smell it: the subtle aromatic amalgam of metal, rubber, plastics, oils, fuel, coolant, and the after-smell of the heat that had burned in it on its way through the sky.
“You would like the covers removed?” Bocker asked me.
“What? Yes.”
Two of the guard began work on it. There were four in here, two German and two American, all of them in uniform and carrying side-arms. A telephone rang and one of them went to answer it and came back but didn’t say anything to Bocker.
“It’s quite pretty,” he said to me, and gave a secret laugh.
“Is it?”
I didn’t think that was the word: the thing just looked tremendously potent, like an edged instrument for cutting the sky into
swathes, though it had a slightly old-fashioned look, because of the way it stood high on the undercarriage and because of me rectangular air intakes that looked like a couple of boxes stuck on to the sides. But that was because it was on the ground, out of its element like a landed fish. In the air I knew it would look blade-sharp and effective; but I would never, of course, see it in the air.
Basically it was a low-aspect ratio design with high-mounted delta wings and the twin air ducts starting from below the cockpit and flaring back to the engines and beyond them to the six-foot-diameter exhaust nozzles half-way along the tail unit. I walked round it, and Bocker and the guards stayed where they were, for which I was glad: I felt a sense of assignation with the machine, because I was going to be the last man ever to fly it and if I got things right it could do a lot for me and if I got things wrong it would kill me.
It was very quiet in the hangar and my footsteps grated on the concrete as I ducked under the plane and looked at the other side. It didn’t have a lot in common with the FM-3O as far as the configuration was concerned, though that didn’t mean its handling characteristics were as different to the same degree. This model had a retractable air brake mounted well aft, almost underneath the exhaust nozzles, and the undercarriage folded backward and inward instead of forward and inward: there were also six underwing missile pylons, which had been adapted to sling centre-line fuel tanks to complement the wing pods.
When I climbed the steps I heard someone move closer, but it was probably a coincidence: they knew I was allowed to look into the cockpit and maybe I was touchy, anticipating some kind of opposition. They would also be touchy, since this machine had tighter security wraps than any other in Europe and it was going to be their neck if someone got through.
Ferris hadn’t been selling me short: when I pulled the canopy back I saw that the cockpit layout was very like the FM-3o’s; and for the first time I relaxed a little and thought there might be just a chance of pushing through with this and coming out at the other end and giving those bastards in London the stuff they wanted.
I didn’t know what it was, yet. Ferris had played it very close to the chest in Barcelona and I’d got the impression that the planning stage wasn’t finished even now and that he was standing by for new instructions to pass on to me as soon as they were ready. There was also the smell of sealed orders about this operation and I didn’t like it but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Our feelings vary on this subject: some of the executives like leaving it all to Control, so they don’t have to do any thinking on their way through the mission they simply go for the selected targets and get there and do the job they’ve been told to do. These types work well for people like Parkis because Parkis is good at winding them up and pointing them in the right direction with everything already built in at the start so that all they have to do is respond to negative feedback till they hit the objective. His rationale is that if they knew the size of the background politics it’d give them purpose-tremor so that right at the critical time when they were meant to be making a document filch or blowing a cell or getting a contact across they’d just go to pieces and stand there doing it in their trousers.
The rest of us prefer to know what’s happening behind the scenes because it gives us a chance of switching tactics or changing course according to the run of events: we like the responsibility and it makes us feel a bit less like a robot on its way to a toy fair, but the fact remains that if Control or your director in the field doesn’t want to tell you anything then it’s a waste of time asking.
All I knew about this one was the access, and even the info on that was incomplete. All I really knew was that in approximately fifty-six hours from now they were going to send me into Soviet airspace in a Soviet aircraft and hope no one would notice.
“All right, we’ll try putting her down now.”
“We can skip that bit.”
“You mean landing?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Watch it.
“I’d like to get those turns right.”
“You’re not doing badly. I want you to put her down during this session because that’ll just leave us evasive action to go through.”
“If you say so.”
You’ve got to watch security every second and I’d nearly blown it. All right, Thompson was career RAF and London had deep-screened him and he knew what a Finback was but he might not have been told it was a one-way flight and that I wasn’t going to make a landing. And I’d almost told him.
Watch everything.
And concentrate.
“Okay, we’ll go into the approach.”
“What altitude?”
“Get down to three thousand feet and we’ll start from there. But make a full circuit.”
I put the column forward and used twenty degrees of to the left, watching the horizon and altitude.
“That’s fine.”
I could see Thompson in his glass-panelled control box in front of the simulator. He sat crouched with his headset on, watching the slave screen on the console; he never looked up at me through the windscreen, even when he had to give a sharp command.
“You’re going too wide.”
I corrected.
We’d been working for two hours on this session, nearly seven hours so far for the day. Thompson had wanted more frequent breaks but I’d kept him at it because for me any kind of learning has got to be intensive. I think he was getting fed up.
“What have you got now?”
“Three thousand five.”
He’d got the same reading but he wanted to hear how fast I answered so that he’d know I was watching the right things. During the first hour I’d looked all over the control panel for missing FM-3O features and he’d got worried.
“Make another circuit. Don’t forget you’ve got a twelve-thousand-foot runway, two thousand feet longer than at Zaragoza.”
We kept at it. The clock on the facia said 18:05.
“Right. Level out. Level out now. Less lift than the FM, remember?”
I over corrected and the nose came up too high and I said shit and pushed it down again and thought Ferris might have told me it was a one-way trip because these bloody things were unlandable.
“Watch your altitude.”
There wasn’t any lift at all: we were dropping out of the sky and I trimmed again and put the flaps down and saw her hit a wall on the airspeed indicator.
“Too soon. Ease off.”
It took another ten minutes and I made the over corrections and hit the power too late because she was going down like a stone and I panicked and Thompson went on talking into my headset, repeating himself so often that I didn’t have enough time to assess anything for myself. The angle of approach was all right and we were lined up with the wings level but I cut the power too soon and we hit the deck and lit up the failure sign and I sat there thinking Christ we’re going to go through all that again till I’ve got it right and it’s going to be a total waste of time because I’m never going to need it and I can’t tell him that.
“All right, here’s the first one.”
I watched the screen.
“It’s a MiG-21 and it’s seen you and it’s closing. What’s the distance?”
“A mile.”
“A mile and a half at this point. Okay, we’ll stop the action. Don’t forget to turn into the missile’s trajectory. It’s the only way you can beat it. You just go into a very high g-turn, as tight as you can. Right — action.”
The shape on the screen began moving again and a thin white cylinder shot forward from it.
“Missile fired.”
I used the rudder and ailerons and glanced across the dials to check the degree of turn and pushed it a bit more and concentrated on the missile.
“More g’s.”
The cloudscape swung on the screen but the white cylinder
“You’re too slow. You’ve got to turn on a sixpence.” Pushed everything hard over but the missi
le kept coming in. “More g’s. But it’s too late anyway.” I was braced forward against the harness and this was the limit of turn but the thing on the screen was rapidly filling it and then the screen went white and a word jumped into the frame:
HIT.
I looked up through the windscreen and saw Thompson taking a gulp of tea.
“You’re a gonner,” he said in a moment. “We’ll try again, and look the idea is to leave it as late as you can, so when you go into the turn you’re as close to the missile as you can get in safety. The distance has got to be so short that it can’t make the turn when you do: you don’t give it enough room to manoeuvre. Okay? But you did two things wrong: you left it too late and you turned too wide. You’re working on a very narrow margin, you see, between bit and miss. Let’s try it again.”
The screen showed a cloudscape and the silhouette of the MiG.
“Course is converging. But hold it.”
The white cylinder shot forward of the plane.
“Missile fired. Wait. Wait. Wait.”
The thing was curving in fast and I didn’t look at anything else.
“Turn. All you’ve got.”
I braced myself and the g’s piled up on the dials till I could almost feel them.
“Tighter than that.”
Gave it the limit but too late and the red letters jumped into the frame: HIT.
For the first time he looked up in his glass-panelled booth.
