The Sinkiang Executive q-8

by Adam Hall

“Let’s get up there,” Connors said, and we used the steps to the cockpit. “I’d like you to stop me if you’ve heard anything before, but a few points might bear repeating. Handling techniques have been dealt with in the simulator and I’m told you came out okay. I don’t know how much you intend to use the mountain-range configuration and maybe you won’t know yourself till you get there, but there’s a couple of places where you could make a one hundred eighty degree turn, somewhere around six g’s at the speed you’ll be doing, Mach.95 or lower. For this airplane the radius of turn would be approximately five thousand feet.”

  He draped his lean body across the edge of the cockpit and pushed his wet hair out of his eyes. “One of the most critical factors, of course, is fuel. It’d be nice if you could climb to peak altitude to conserve it but you’d have to come down to take those pictures and it might look a little strange to the radar teams on the ground. Now you can clip this chart to your log on take-off. We estimate that in winter conditions and with your prescribed altitudes you’ll use three thousand gallons per hour at Mach I, which is military power. At maximum speed, using the after-burner, you’ll use seventeen thousand five hundred gallons, or almost six times as much, and I suggest you reserve the after-burners for attack evasion of whatever kind. Or of course for getting out along an escape route if you calculate you can reach home without pushing your bingo fuel. You don’t — ”

  “Bingo.”

  “Right. Your bingo fuel is the calculated fuel for the distance. From Furstenfeldbruck to Yelingrad plus five hundred miles escape distance is three thousand eight hundred and fifteen miles and your internal and pod tanks will give you precisely the amount of fuel you’ll need — which is your bingo. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You start pushing your bingo the minute you exceed the prescribed consumption rate. Any use of the after-burner or any unforeseen deviation will change our basic calculations, obviously. The ideal scenario is that you cross the border at Mach.95 with no after-burner, meet with no kind of attack from the ground or the air, and make your escape by the optimum route planned.”

  I put three questions and he got out a pocket calculator and made notes while we listened to the drumming of the rain on the big metal roof and the whimpering of the guard dogs outside. Ferris was pacing as far as the tail unit and back and I thought if he found a beetle I’d have to stop him somehow because I was getting sensitive about that: the closer we got to the jump-off point the less I wanted to hear a slight crunch and see a small mess on the floor. I’m not normally superstitious but I’m not normally forced into a crash-training operation with a high calculated risk and so much security coverage that one out of a score of people could set me up for killing in the access phase.

  “These are the figures,” Connors said. “I’ve put them on the chart.” He turned round and looked down. “Bill, what’s the difference in distance for those three alternate escape routes?”

  “Route B is plus fifteen miles. C is plus thirty-four.”

  Connors checked his figures again and made one change. “Any more questions?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. There isn’t much more you need. The wing-pod tanks don’t weigh more than five hundred pounds, but they create an awful lot of drag at the lower altitudes and higher speeds. They feed out together and empty at the same time, so you can get rid of them simultaneously and avoid asymmetric wing-loading problems. The centre-line tank feeds out next, leaving you with the internals. On this trip you’ll have enough fuel leeway to wait for wooded ground or good cover before you jettison the tanks, though the drag factor governs this to some extent.”

  He was talking about the effect of the wing tanks on high g-turn characteristics when the phone rang and Baccari went over to the door and took the call and came back and told Ferris it was for him, something about ‘embassy’, and for a couple of seconds I stopped listening to Connors and found myself hoping it was a signal from London calling the whole thing off on the grounds that the risk was too high for success or that someone had found a security leak in a vital-info area — I didn’t care what grounds they had, as long as they cut the switch and let everything die down and leave me alive.

  This wasn’t very good because twelve hours before the jump you ought to be pulling the nerves tight and clearing the head of everything except the data you need to kick into the access phase and keep on going. You shouldn’t be hoping for some bastard in London to revoke his decision and get you a reprieve: because this is how you want to live, inching your way along the edge of the drop to find out how long you can stand it, hanging around that bloody place till they throw you the only thing that gives your life any meaning another mission. It’s all you live for, isn’t it, the next mission?

  It used to be.

  Not now.

  Not this one.

  Ferris came back from the telephone and I wanted to shout at him — this is a bit elaborate, isn’t it, all this bloody charade just to kill off one expendable executive? Why don’t you get one of those discreet-action people to push me under a bus and save all this expense?

  “Of course it depends on the angle when you go into the turn,” Connors was saying, ‘and also on the amount of fuel remaining in the outer pod tanks.” He held his hand out flat and made a turning motion.

  Ferris was standing at the bottom of the steps again, where he’d been standing before. He was looking up at us but not saying anything, not saying anything like I’m sorry to interrupt, Major Connors, but we’re calling the whole thing off. I was waiting for him to say something like that, but he didn’t.

  “With the outer tanks empty, the wings are going to flip over with much less inertia. Am I getting across?”

  “Yes,” I said, “critical mass factor.”

  “Right. Now let’s go through it again, from level flight characteristics through a loop and a turn, with only the outer tanks

  empty but unjettisoned.”

  So we went through it again, and I stopped thinking about the phone call because it wasn’t going to save me so I ought to concentrate on the briefing data the major was feeding me: if anyone was going to get me to the other side of the Carpathian range still alive it was Connors.

  He was taking me through the camera passes now: “At this point you should look for ground features such as railroad tracks or concrete roadways that could lead to and from the factories where the missiles are assembled.”

  Ten minutes on the photography procedures, then he started talking about seat-ejection.

  “The technique for this ship is much the same as for the FM-3o’s you’ve been flying. With the anti-g suit you’ll be wearing you don’t have a lot of protection from wind-force, and three hundred and fifty knots would probably be the highest survivable speed. From there up to five hundred knots and beyond, you’d have your arms and legs torn off. I’d say that if you eject at any speed from two hundred and fifty knots down to stall-zero you’ll come out fine.” He flattened his hand again. “An upward vector of twenty degrees is ideal for one ejection and the procedure is the same as for all other planes: this one has an emergency-release for the canopy and an emergency seat-detonator, and you shouldn’t have any problems.”

  “Fair enough.” I turned slightly and looked down at Ferris, pitching my voice higher. “Is it still on?”

  He looked puzzled for a moment and then nodded.

  “Yes,” he called up.

  The major waited till I’d turned back. “The procedure for ejecting in the event of total failure of the seat mechanism is about what you’d expect: you trim for nose down and hold the stick back, then let it go sharply. As the plane noses over you’ll pop out like a cork because you’re in a vector.”

  He went through this again and talked about harness release, chute deployment and angles of escape relative to the tail unit configuration at critical speeds while I brooded at the back of my mind about the sheer bloody stupidity of letting Ferris know precisely how frightened I was of this one
. He’d got an awful lot on his plate and his responsibilities wouldn’t end when Slingshot began running: they’d increase; and I shouldn’t have let him know that all this executive was waiting for as the time slid down to zero was a phone call telling us it was cancelled.

  Yes indeed, the gut-shrink syndrome produces the necessary adrenalin and triggers the organism for action and that’s a valuable factor in the last hours before the jump, but it can get out of hand if you let it and then it’s dangerous. The time to start praying for a reprieve is ten seconds after the red light’s on the board and the mission’s running because you’re then in the access phase and too busy to get the twitch. I’ve proved it a dozen times and this time I’d have to prove it again.

  But this time it’s different.

  Shuddup.

  Connors blew his nose and rubbed his thin raw-looking hands together.

  “I’m ready for questions.”

  I didn’t have many and we gave it five minutes more, then he went down the steps saying he’d fix up some cocoa before we all froze to death. The signals captain came up the steps and asked me to sit in the cockpit while he spoke over my shoulder; most of the radio panels were on the left side, below the throttle quadrants.

  “It’s routine stuff. Just as soon as you start climbing from near the airfield at Zhmerinka — which is your virtual frontier in terms of becoming radar-detectable — you can start squawking your codes and modes on the digital transponder.” He moved the dial and began flipping switches as he talked. “Mode 4 is the classified super-secret squawk code for Soviet military airplanes. Mode 3 is for traffic control and nobody’s going to ask you any questions when you hit that one. These are tactical frequencies, so if you went high you’d have to squawk on the Mode 4 and we don’t have their code. As you’ll be flying low at this point and across the camera-target areas at Saratov, Dzhezkazgan and Yelingrad you won’t need to worry about that but bear it in mind if for any reason you get forced high by missile or interceptor action. Okay so far?”

  “Will they ask me to respond on Mode 4 in that situation?”

  “You bet. And you don’t know the code.”

  “So I use normal frequencies and tell them Mode 4 doesn’t work. If they — ”

  “Okay, right, but do it this way: tell them you’re sending and let them tell you they’re not receiving. Then sound surprised, and you’re into the act.” He turned his sharp nose towards me and said: “And here’s one buster who’s glad he won’t be there.”

  “My felicitations.”

  He blew out a short laugh and started prodding the radio panels again and we did some repeats and I told him I’d got it and he didn’t believe it so we went over the whole thing again.

  That was at 09:41.

  “Okay,” he said finally, “I’m satisfied. If you hit any problems it isn’t going to be because you don’t understand your codes and modes. Can anyone smell cocoa?”

  He went down the steps and turned and looked up at me as I got out of the cockpit. “Just one little thing more you should know. We’ll be informing all NATO and Luftwaffe radar stations and air bases that a Soviet MiG-28D is going to be flying from Furstenfeldbruck to the Hungarian frontier at dawn tomorrow, so you won’t get shot down from this side.”

  They’d rigged up a camp-bed for me in one of the small offices in the basement where we’d begun the briefing, and I turned in soon after ten-thirty, with four guards mounted in the corridor and six deployed at the top of the stairs to cover the main doors and the stairs to the upper floors.

  I thought Bocker was laying the security on a bit thick, but one of the guard sergeants woke me at 1.00 a.m. and took me along to the briefing office where Bocker himself was on the telephone blasting at someone in German. Ferris was there and his face was white.

  “I think we’ve been blown,” he said.

  Chapter Seven: MOTH

  The mountain was dead ahead and I began pulling the control column back without trying to turn because this was the middle of the range and there were peaks in every direction. The nose wasn’t lifting so I dragged at the stick again and watched the line of rocks begin rising against the sky instead of dropping away and I remembered Connors had said at Mach 3 you have to react very fast because everything takes more time. I’d got Mach 3.4 on the dial and the after-burners were roaring but there was no point in bringing the speed down because the nose wasn’t coming up and I heaved on the stick and watched the side of the mountain float right against the windscreen and burst and I could still remember shouting as I rolled over and felt the tubular metal of the camp-bed under my hand, sweat running on my face, still shouting inside my head, time — what time?

  03:21.

  Pitch dark.

  Sat up and hit the wall because this thing hadn’t got a headboard, why wasn’t I informed? Bocker had kept asking into the telephone, his voice like a slowly-traversing machine-gun, its volume rising and falling as he tried to control his anger. It was the first time I’d seen him like that: no more silent laughter, no plump hand on my arm. He’d hardly recognized me when I’d come in.

  Ferris had told me to go back to bed now that I knew what had happened, try to get some sleep in case there was anything to do in the morning. I’d had to go down consciously through the alpha waves with the mantra I always use… karisma… karisma… before I could reach delta and let go. I’d slept for two hours but it hadn’t done me any good because the alarm had been in my mind when I’d gone under and the dreams had been violent and highly coloured, with vivid reds predominating.

  There’d already been seven men in the briefing-room by the time I got there: five of Bocker’s own security chiefs and two of the military. Others had been sent for, Ferris said Counter-intelligence people are functionally paranoid and the security branches are the worst because they’re geared to the risk of exposure from all quarters and especially from the inside, but I didn’t think Bocker had over-reacted to this particular incident. The man’s name was Corporal Behrendt and he was one of the close-security area guards in the Finback hangar and he’d been due to report for the midnight watch and he hadn’t shown up. Bocker had worked on it for an hour before suggesting I ought to be informed.

  “The situation is very simple,” he told us. “This man was of course fully screened by the civilian and military branches and we have known him for more than three years. He is considered to be totally reliable, and that is why we are treating his disappearance as a priority alert.”

  The phone rang while he was talking and he answered it and spoke very slowly in High German, demolishing a subordinate with words that hit with the force of hammers while we listened. I hadn’t seen this Hans Bocker before: there was suddenly a sinister aspect to him that made his fat blond amiable appearance look like a disguise. He rang off.

  “Es ware wahrscheinlich uberflussig zu sagen aber wir machen alle anstrengungen um den Mann zu finden — ” then he remembered the courtesies and switched back to English — “I don’t need to tell you that we are making every conceivable effort to locate this man.”

  Some of the BfV people weren’t catching some of this and Ferris noticed it and said: “Nesbitt and I have German, so please use that.”

  Bocker accepted this with a polite gesture that made him even more sinister because of the contrast: Slingshot had run straight into the dark and we’d lost it and he knew that and he was going to be held responsible and he ought not to have time to consider good manners: unless he was some kind of machine. He went on talking, his short bursts of diction hitting the walls while we stood like men washed up on an unknown shore by a sudden storm. Ferris was still pale and I wasn’t long out of sleep and I began thinking Jesus Christ, Parkis isn’t going to get this one started after all.

  Before I went back to the business of trying to sleep again Ferris told me he’d be in constant signals with London and I left him to it. Communication was fairly fast via the embassy phone and the Ministry radio at Crowborough and by this time Parkis
and his team would be in Signals watching the board, but I thought Ferris would probably switch to the NATO channels and reach the Bureau through the War Office because this thing was the equivalent to a red alert and seconds would become important as the time ran out to the jump.

  If, of course, there was one.

  I don’t remember feeling pleased at this thought, or feeling anything at all. The psyche was coming under a barrage of conflicting influences and the only thing to do was sleep.

  Ferris woke me just before five o’clock, coming into the room without a sound and then sitting in the dark repeating my name until I woke.

  “Ferris,” he said quietly when he heard me stir.

  There was a desk lamp and I switched it on. He was sitting on one of the wicker chairs they’d brought in here for me; he looked very held-in, and sat so still that I wished he’d get up and break something to get it over with.

  “What’s the score?” I asked him.

  He was a long time answering. “We don’t know. Bocker’s still taking the place to pieces, with four interrogation officers called in from the BfV headquarters in Munich to grill the other security guards and anyone who might know what’s happened to Corporal Behrendt.” He began talking a bit faster now, taking some kind of courage. “All we know so far is that Behrendt was having trouble with his wife, who was threatening to leave him. This has been going on for the past few months and Bocker’s blasting the people who knew this and failed to tell him: the man was obviously a security risk. The woman’s being interviewed here — ”

  “Woman?”

  “Behrendt’s wife.” He looked slightly surprised.

  “I’ve only just woken up,” I said through my teeth, I didn’t like this, any of it. I could feel something big getting out of hand, far away in the background but rolling closer all the time, black and mountainous and unstoppable. I didn’t think I was going to have enough time to get out of the way.