The Sinkiang Executive q-8

by Adam Hall

“The Federal police are looking for Behrendt,” Ferris said in a low monotone. “Everyone is.”

  I thought for a bit and said: “Bocker said he was considered reliable.”

  “Yes. That’s why he’s pulling the place apart.”

  Neither of us said anything for a minute. I would have liked to know where, precisely, they’d got the reliable Corporal Behrendt at this moment, and how far, precisely, he was forcing them to go before he broke. When he broke, the word would go out to the radar stations and anti-aircraft units along the border from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and if anyone tried to nip across in a MiG-28D they’d blow him out of the sky. Or, of course, Corporal Behrendt might be just drinking himself quietly under the table in his girl-friend’s flat, with the security on the Finback still intact.

  I was waiting for Ferris to tell me what he’d come in here to tell me, but he still held back. I suppose he hadn’t the guts.

  “Don’t they know his girl-friends?” I asked him.

  He looked up. “They’re covering that.” The light seemed too bright for him “Do you want anything?”

  “What like?”

  He shrugged. “Something to eat. Something to drink.”

  “Oh. No.”

  I got off the camp-bed and put some slacks on and sat in the other wicker chair between the desk lamp and Ferris so that the light didn’t worry him. He’s normally a very cool cat and it occurred to me that there could be something else, something worse on his mind; but I shied away from that one because the situation we’d already got was quite enough. It also occurred to me that the first man in the Slingshot team to break might be this one sitting here. It’s usually the executive in the field, because it’s his neck on the block, or the control in London, because he’s got most of the responsibility. I’ll tell you one thing: it wouldn’t be Parkis. It was Parkis the Titanic hit, that time.

  “Is it still raining?”

  Ferris looked up again. I always seemed to be interrupting his thoughts, and that worried me too. He should have got all his thinking done before he came in here disturbing my sleep.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ferris, when are you going to regain consciousness? You’ve got a mission on the board and the whole of the bloody North Atlantic Treaty Organization standing at battle stations and you don’t even know if it’s raining?”

  Just the excess adrenalin slopping over: I couldn’t help it. This whole situation was new and it scared me stiff: I’d never been manoeuvred into the pre-jump phase under cover of somebody else’s security organization — we normally use our own and quite frankly the London personnel aren’t the type who don’t show up on guard duty because their marriage is on the blink: it’s dangerous.

  “I’ve made three calls,” Ferris said. “Three so far.”

  “Big deal.”

  “It’s all we can do.”

  The wicker creaked as he got out of the chair and looked at the map on the wall and turned away because it showed northeast Poland and we weren’t interested in that.

  He still wouldn’t tell me but he’d left the opening so I got it over and asked him. “What’s their decision?”

  He looked relieved and said: “We’ve got to wait, of course.”

  Another turn on the gut.

  “Until when?”

  He made himself look at me. “Take-off.”

  Everything sounded very still, suddenly, in here. Because they were going to make me sweat it out with no options, right up to the time of the jump. No quarter, no concessions, nothing to bite on except the bullet.

  “I want the whole directive,” I said.

  I knew he’d got it because he hadn’t been in signals with London just to give them the situation: he’d asked for instructions.

  “They’d like you to go ahead.”

  “That isn’t a directive.”

  “I mean,” he said awkwardly, ‘it’s going to be up to you.”

  I looked at the clock on the desk and checked it with my watch and got 05:12. We’d arranged to have me woken at 05:30 for the final phase before the jump and I didn’t think I could psych myself out for eighteen minutes without getting into a deep sleep curve and waking up groggy. I might as well stay on my feet.

  “We take everything right up to the off, I said slowly, wanting to get it right, “and then if nobody’s found what happened to Corporal Behrendt we make the final decision whether to start running the thing or scrub it out. Is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  I picked up my shaving-kit and the towel they’d given me. “Fair enough. I’ll settle for that.”

  He moved to the door. “They’ll be pleased.”

  “I’m happy for them.” I put a new blade in, because there was going to be a lot of sweat under the face mask and stubble wouldn’t help. “Ferris.”

  “Yes?”

  “Before they put that directive together, did anyone actually want me to take-off on orders?”

  “On orders?” He knew bloody well what I meant.

  “With no option. Even if they didn’t find Behrendt.”

  He was on his way out and he didn’t stop. “I wouldn’t know, would I? I’m not in London.”

  “That’s true enough.”

  But he knew what I was talking about. Parkis would have tried to get me airborne whatever happened.

  Memo: Quiller is expendable, and if he can complete this operation before getting into terminal difficulties in the end phase, well and good. But if he fails to survive the access phase we shall have no real complaint. It would save us the unpleasant task, later, of ensuring that the threat to security he would continue to present was nullified.

  For your eyes only, destroy after reading, so forth. But someone had said no. Possibly Egerton. Possibly Mildmay or one of their lordships on the Admin, floor. It had been agreed that the executive should be given the final decision whether to take-off or abort the mission. It was, after all, his life. Or his death.

  But I knew Parkis. And I knew that Ferris did have something else, something worse, on his mind. There was something big getting out of hand, still in the distance but rolling closer, black and mountainous and unstoppable. And I knew now that I wouldn’t have time to get out of its way.

  “Ten thousand rubles. Fifty gold Napoleon francs. Four digital watches and these six rough-cut diamonds.”

  I nodded and he put them into the leather bag and fastened the straps. I’d seen him before, when Bocker had called those people into the briefing-room: he was BfV with military cover, ranking as captain.

  Connors and Baccari were watching, looking a little tense. They’d been told we were going ahead with the programme right up to the point of take-off, when we would either proceed or abort according to whether Corporal Behrendt had been found. Whenever the telephone rang they looked in its direction. We all did.

  Ferris was sitting on the steps to the cockpit. Twenty minutes ago he’d told me there had been a further signal from London confirming the last directive.

  The time was now 07:14.

  There was no news of Behrendt yet. Not long ago Bocker had called Ferris to say he had a lead from the mess sergeant, who had seen the man talking to a civilian in a cafe in the town last evening. He would keep us closely in touch with any progress. We didn’t take much notice: Bocker had lost an awful lot of face over this, and I thought the only thing that kept him going was our decision to press on to the zero in the hope that security was still intact.

  “Hunting knife. Service revolver, officer’s.” He hesitated, glancing across at Ferris, who got off the steps and came up close to us, speaking quietly.

  “We thought on this trip you might want a capsule.”

  They both waited.

  But I couldn’t see his reasoning, in terms of ‘this trip’. You need a capsule when you’ve been caught and they’re going to take your mind to pieces and drive you mad in the process — but there’d been no mention of specific opposition in b
riefing: I wasn’t going to penetrate a cell or filter through a screen or close in on any individual who might detonate if I touched him. You need a capsule in the wilds if you can’t stand pain or thirst or privation, and if I ever reached Soviet airspace I might come down somewhere isolated — but Ferris knew me better than that: I’m an animal and the wilds are my home, whether they’re forest-land or the jungle of the big-city streets.

  So I just said no, because I couldn’t ask him what he meant by this trip with so many people about and it wasn’t worth our going off to talk in privacy: I know when to ask for one of those things — it’ll be when I ask for a gun.

  The man did some sleight-of-hand and the little red box disappeared. The uniform, clothing and equipment were all manufactured in the Soviet Union or one of its satellites. Most of it was made in Tashkent.” Close to the target area. This is the kind of meticulous attention to detail you get from Parkis, and I tried to feel reassured but it wasn’t easy, because there’s the other side to him! the inflexible slide-rule precision that doesn’t give you any freedom of choice when a fuse blows.

  I looked the stuff over as it was laid out for me: the only distinctive items were a peasant’s fur coat and hunting gear, well worn, and a short collapsible fishing-rod bound with tape; the rest comprised the standard essentials: signal flares, matches, fire lighting chemicals for use with damp wood, food concentrates, a small torch, a whistle and a compass. The first-aid kit included morphine and water-purification tablets, and there was a compact toilet bag. Almost every item was made in Russia, but the razor was Polish and the torch Czechoslovakian.

  “Life-jacket?”

  “In the cockpit.”

  We began putting it all together and Baccari went up the steps with a testing kit and started checking the circuits. Franzheim was crouched over the landing gear with a tyre gauge and Connors went off on a tour of inspection of the airframe: they were doubling for the ground staff to keep down the number of people on secret commission. They worked without talking, and Baccari seemed especially subdued: it was now 07:27 and we were thirty-three minutes to zero.

  Ferris went across to the small door and talked to the USAF MP sergeant on guard there; from this distance I couldn’t hear what they were saying. The BfV man was stowing the equipment in the cockpit and I started changing into the Soviet colonel’s uniform. A few minutes later the telephone rang and Ferris took it. We had all looked in his direction for a couple of seconds, but he stood with his back to us.

  I thought he was speaking in German. He was on the phone for less man a minute and when he rang off he went on talking to the sergeant. It could have been London, through the embassy in Bonn or through NATO and the War Office, but I wasn’t going over to ask him. He’d tell me what I needed to know, and if it was nothing then he’d tell me nothing.

  The uniform fitted well: it would have been made by the Bureau tailor, the man with the artificial hand in the back room off Regent Street. The KYP are looking for him under the name of Zaphiropoulos and if they find him we won’t see him again.

  “Looks pretty neat,” Connors said.

  “What?”

  “The uniform.”

  “Might get me a few girls. Are we fuelled up yet?”

  “Sure. During the night.”

  I suppose that was why there were so many puddles in here: they’d brought the fuel-tanker in from the rain.

  The telephone rang again and Ferris answered it, and there was an odd flash of understanding that passed between Connors and myself: we both wanted to look over there in case the call was important but we didn’t want to show each other how edgy we felt, so we didn’t turn our heads.

  “Is it still raining?” I asked him.

  There wasn’t any sound on the hangar roof.

  “Drizzling, I guess.” He was peeling a piece of gum. “You use this stuff?”

  “No. I’d probably choke on it.”

  He laughed unnecessarily: things weren’t so bad if we could make our little jokes while the tune ran out and Bocker didn’t call and we hit zero still not knowing.

  “What’s the visibility going to be like in the morning?” The morning was now fourteen minutes away.

  “The last forecast was a mile and a half.”

  “What’s the least I can work with?”

  “I’d say twelve hundred feet, for this trip. That’s the length of your take-off roll.” He put the gum in his mouth and flicked the ball of paper into a puddle.

  Ferris was still over there and the calls were coming through without a break now, all of them short, less than half a minute. He never raised his voice.

  “How are you feeling?” Connors asked me.

  “Fine.”

  Because they had another twelve minutes to find Corporal Behrendt and he might just have run away from his wife.

  “You shouldn’t have any problems.” He gave a tight smile. “You’re too well briefed.”

  “Correct.”

  Then some kind of vehicle pulled up outside the hangar and we could hear voices. One of the dogs started growling, deep in its throat, keeping it up until I could almost see the fangs and the stare of the trained-to-kill eyes.

  “I wish that bloody thing would stop,” I said.

  “You wish what?”

  He’d been half-turned to the door, trying to hear what Ferris was saying on the phone.

  “Nothing.” I went up the steps to talk to Baccari in the cockpit, not pleased with myself, not pleased at all, ten minutes from the jump and showing my nerves to anyone who was around, dear Jesus, I’d have to do better than this, much better than this.

  “We’re all checked,” Baccari said and climbed out. Then everyone was moving suddenly and I saw an NCO come through the door and go up to Connors. Ferris came off the phone and started across to the plane, walking a little quicker than he usually did. A nerve in my eyelid began flickering and I was aware of it and knew there was no way to stop it except by relaxing and I couldn’t do that now.

  “Everything’s go,” I heard Connors say, and the NCO went back to the door at a slow run. There were voices outside again and one of the dogs barked and a word of command silenced it.

  Ferris was standing at the bottom of the steps looking up at me, his hands in the pockets of his mac and his pale head tilted under the lights.

  “Bocker hasn’t got anything definite for us,” he said, ‘so far.”

  The eyelid went on flickering.

  “How’s London?”

  “They’re being kept informed.”

  Of nothing. Uninformation.

  The colonel’s outfit looks good,” Ferris said.

  Then the hangar doors began rolling open, making a thin crack of dark that spread slowly with a noise like distant thunder. No stars, no trees, nothing but the dark. It wasn’t morning yet, and I stared at the great black rectangle thinking that if morning never came it would be all right; and I’ve learned for a long time mat the only thing to do about that kind of thought when you’re within minutes of the crunch is to be aware of it, recognize the emotion behind it and remember that it’s natural, perfectly natural.

  Men were coming in from the rain, their camouflaged capes bright with it. They came towards the Finback.

  Franzheim was waiting for me at the bottom of the steps.

  “You want a final run-through with the maps?”

  “No.”

  We’d covered it exhaustively and the day before the exams old Winthrop used to boot me out on to the rugger field. My God, that was a long time ago: is he still alive? He used to smell of camphor.

  Baccari was at the bottom of the steps, winding his instrument leads into a skein over his hand, turning to look across at the telephone: it had begun ringing again and Connors took the call.

  07:49 on my watch.

  I looked at Ferris. “Have they pushed our zero forward?”

  “It’s not daylight yet,” he said and walked off before I could ask him anything else. I suppose they were d
ragging their heels in London, weighing up the chances and sending each other prissy little memos while these rain-caped men in here guided the tractor across to the Finback and dropped the lugs of the tow-bar into the holes and signalled the driver, sending each other memos for your eyes only, so forth, going through the required bureaucratic ritual, Parkis in Signals now, standing behind the man at the console for the Slingshot board with the red light not switched on yet Egerton with him, possibly, or possibly not: Parkis might have kept him away at the last minute, clearing the place of everyone except the signals personnel. Parkis would be nervous now. Even Parkis.

  The Finback began rolling, a man at each wingtip and one at the tail as the tractor gunned up a little and made for the middle of the doorway. Connors was coming over from the phone and I waited for him.

  “We’re cleared by the Met along most of the course.” Franzheim heard him and shook a map open. “You’ll be running into cloud at two thousand feet this side of Zhmerinka but that’s okay because you don’t have to take any pictures there. Saratov is clear and the cloud floor over Dzhezkazgan is between four and five thousand, so you can go in below it with the camera. There’s a cold front moving north across Sinkiang towards Yelingrad and they’re looking for snow some time before the afternoon, but you could make it and get pictures before it closes in, unless they offer you some kind of harassment that forces you off your course.”

  I asked him about wind strengths and we looked at the map again. Franzheim was folding it away when a short man in aircrew overalls joined us and Connors presented him to me as Colonel Lambach, the base commander. We exchanged courtesies and the telephone rang and the guard took the call but I was getting fed up with watching the thing and Ferris didn’t seem interested so I went outside and saw the first flush of light coming into the sky behind the dark mass of the hangar.

  07:58 with a light drizzle falling and the sharp angular form of the MiG-28D rolling through the haze, the tractor swinging it between ground markers to bring the tail at right-angles to a jet stream barrier. There were no lights on, anywhere at all: even the tower was dark except for the directional beacon. The men followed the plane without calling to each other, two of them pulling the trolley-accumulators into position below the fuselage, making no sound but for the hiss of the tyres over the wet concrete. I had heard Connors saying that until daylight came the airfield would be operating under war-time blackout conditions.