by Adam Hall
And remember your briefing.
Then they were coming, both of them, one very big and the other floating a little distance from it in visual terms. I didn’t have to do anything complicated: I just had to wrench the Finback out of its trajectory at a speed approaching one thousand knots and against the force of gravity and hope that nothing would break.
Pull out. Pull out now before we -
Of course.
Blind in one eye because of the sweat but when I dragged at the stick the big metal sphere floated down past the bottom of the windscreen and out of sight and the smaller one followed, but more slowly. The stick was shuddering in my hands and the whole machine was coming alive as the airstream was forced against the ailerons. The high thin scream of the ancillaries overlaid the bellowing of the jets and the voices in the headset sounded unreal, their meaning lost in the tumult that was shaking the aircraft.
Blood pooling into the lower half of the body and the suit reacting, squeezing. The organism was in terror because somewhere below and behind it the two missiles were trying to turn or were already turning and moving in to the target and there was no action, simply no action at all to be taken except to maintain the muscular strength necessary to hold the controls in their present attitude so that the Finback would eventually pull out of the dive before the ground came up and blotted it into a smudge.
One thousand.
The right eye had moved to look at something and snatch at an item of data for me and I examined it: we were flying in a diminishing curve at one thousand feet above the ground and my head was tilting upward to look through the windscreen because it wasn’t going to be the first missile or the second missile it was going to be the surface of the earth that would provide the other component of the impact, so be it, go out cursing Parkis I hope you rot in hell.
We must have cleared the missiles but it was academic because the needle was down to four hundred feet and colours were filling the windscreen and sliding downward, trees, building, gold on a dome, downward, as the nose began coming up and the buffeting began and broke off and began again until the thing was shaking like a dog and we flying level through ground pockets and shifts of air with the perspective of a town scape streaming across the windscreen towers, rooftops, domes and suddenly the trees again, spreading past and behind in a tangle of winter lacework against the frosted land.
You are too low.
Understood. Adjust altitude.
The blackout had fluttered at the brain and for a moment the windscreen had darkened but the light was back and cerebration started up again, avid for data and desperate to analyse.
Remember the mountains. And your briefing. I was now at the point of that wedge-shaped pattern and the risks had narrowed to the certainty that at any next second they would throw more missiles into the air unless I could keep low enough: to use what terrain masking was available and get off their screens. Get off their screens and go for the Khrebet Tarbagatay and do what I had been briefed to do: disappear.
I assumed at this time that there were further missiles in launch or already airborne but we had two minutes left before we hit bingo fuel and it was long enough, would be long enough if I could stay this close to the ground without hitting a hill or a tower or a radio mast, and that was a matter of chance. The rest was a matter of following instructions.
The snow cloud was drawing across the range with its base on the ground and its darkness began closing in as I held the Finback on its course while the buffeting started again and shook the ground and the sky and the blood inside my skull and then eased off gradually, leaving vision partially clear.
The terrain below was now rocky and desolate, with crags rising towards the mountain range in the first haze of the now. There was nothing -
Mirrors.
The shape was in all three of the mirrors and steadily increasing in diameter as it floated in the wake of the Finback, the explosive warhead catching the light and the fins revolving slowly as it homed in on its target. The thing was coming at me faster than I could run and if I tried making turns it would follow wherever I went because I didn’t have the speed to break away and send it ballistic so the only thing I could do was get out and the only way to get out was to slow down because at this speed my limbs would be torn off but if I slowed down that thing in the mirrors would close in for the kill.
My left hand dragged the throttles back. I didn’t know it was going to do that but the organism was taking over and the brain went on recording, interpreting, as the senses fed in the data: eight hundred knots on the airspeed indicator, seven hundred, six.
Don’t forget anything.
Signal barely understood.
Don’t forget.
Five hundred.
Floating in the mirrors, the fins turning slowly and lazily against the cold grey sky, the warhead enormous, a great sphere.
Remember camera remember camera remember camera remem -
All right got it now but that bloody thing’s going to blow us up and I can’t -
Camera.
Pulled at the lever and snapped the release and put my hand through the strap and looked up and saw the needle at four hundred knots and looked higher and saw the three mirrors filled with the spinning shape.
At three hundred and fifty I blew the canopy off and triggered the seat and felt the cartridge fire and thought Christ we’re hit and then the windblast sent me whirling in the sky and in the middle of a visual sequence I saw the Finback and the long thin missile closing on it in the final seconds before the detonation boomed and the shock-wave kicked me away and fragments came fluting through the smoke of the sunburst that had been the aircraft, picking at my body and whining past and picking again until I felt the jerk of the harness as the main chute deployed, a sense of life after death and the reek of chemicals, a glimpse of a torn panel turning like a falling leaf, a numbness creeping and then cold, intense cold, embalming the consciousness.
Chapter Twelve: SPOTLIGHT
The feathers fell.
“Now,” he said.
“What was that?”
“You will open them now.”
The feathers fell softly.
“All right,” I told him.
“Then, of course, you will destroy them.”
He sounded so bloody formal. What else did he expect me to do with them: post them to the KGB?
The feathers fell softly on my face.
My head was singing. The heat was underneath, not on top. It didn’t worry me. But the blinding white was everywhere and that worried me. I put my hand up and saw someone’s glove.
“What the hell do you expect me to do with them?” I asked him. “Post them to — ” but he had gone.
Look.
A flying glove. My own glove. My own hand.
Deduction: my eyes are open and I can see. But all I can see is my own hand in front of my face, big deal. The white blindness must be something else, an object, a sheet of some sort.
The feathers were cold as they fell on my face and I brushed them away and the flames leapt, the ones underneath, and the whole thing blanked out to nothing, like switching the set off.
The second time there was a lot more beta-wave cerebration going on and I felt for the release clips and pressed them and fell away from the seat and held my breath for a long time while the pain went on. It was underneath: the left hip, the rib cage and the shoulder. I was lying on that side with my face in the snow.
I could hear a throbbing sound.
The snow wasn’t soft, for some reason. I put out my hand and swept some of it away and felt rock underneath. I suppose it hadn’t been snowing for long: there was no retrograde amnesia that I could detect, and I remembered there’d been only a light haze when I’d jettisoned the canopy and ejected; the weather had been coming in from the south-east and I’d flown into it just before leaving the aircraft.
The throbbing was duplicated and I listened to it. Sometimes it went right out of synch and I didn’t und
erstand.
Time.
I moved enough to look around and that meant holding my breath again and then respirating slow and deep, slow and deep, drawing in enough oxygen to stay conscious. I could see the crags now, outlines by the snow, jutting against the white background in a faint pattern of shadows, rising above and behind me.
Time. You’ve been -
Moved again and sat up and waited till the worst of it died away. I didn’t know how long it took. The throbbing was much louder and I listened to it and got the message and turned my wrist: 01:17.
Total memory came back like shoving a cassette in the slot and I started moving again and much faster now. There wasn’t any data for the periods of unconsciousness but that didn’t matter: what mattered was whether they’d had time to put these helicopters into the air since the explosion.
They were quite loud now and the last thing I remember thinking about consciously was the time factor: they’d had something like thirty-five minutes from the moment when I’d ejected to the precise present and that was ample to get these things airborne. The logical thought process stopped just here because the snow was still light and they could move very slowly within a few feet of the ground and they’d see that bloody parachute if I didn’t do something about it very fast. I didn’t think I’d broken anything but the left side was heavily bruised from hip to shoulder and when I got up I just fell down again and had to lie there dragging a lot of breath in before I could crawl along the lines towards the canopy.
The light kept going on and off and the sound of the helicopters faded in and out because I suppose I was partially blacked out by the pain but the head was clear enough and I knew Slingshot was going to blow if I didn’t get that spread of silk under some sort of cover: they were probably looking for the plane but they might conceivably have seen me eject on their radar screens and it’s much easier to see a parachute if you’re looking for one.
Their noise was heavy in the sky. Under me the rocks were slippery:
the pressure of my hands and knees compacted the snow into ice and I couldn’t make any headway until I learned to keep the pressure directly downward as I went on crawling with the lines on my right side; that was the side where the rocks sloped away to the edge of a shelf and I didn’t know how big the drop was. Any drop would be too big if I went over because there wasn’t time to flake out and start all over again when I came to: by the closeness of their sound I didn’t need to know how many seconds I’d got left to do this job; I knew it had to be done in the fastest time the organism could manage.
The snow slipped under my hands. Even though I tried to keep the pressure downward the snow slipped sometimes and my head swung and the light flickered again and the noise softened away. The primitive brain was moving its creature along and there was no need to do anything about that: it was pushing me at a speed that was just this side of losing consciousness; but the term consciousness was relative because I wasn’t capable of working anything out: there must have been choices and alternatives for me but I didn’t think of any; I just kept crawling through the haze and over the ice towards the indeterminate point in the distance where I could start pulling at the canopy.
Think.
I can’t think. Haze, rocks, the fall of the soft flakes, the enormous drumming in the sky. Those are my thoughts.
But there were vague periods of cerebration when the pain seemed less:
perhaps I ought to be crawling away from the canopy instead of towards it because they were going to see it at any second, now and then they’d see me too. If I turned round and moved in the other direction I could find a cleft in the rocks, some kind of shelter.
Think snow.
Yes, it’s snowing. And they’re coming.
The whole sky thundered with them now and my skull was filled with the noise and I stopped crawling and looked upward and saw one of them, a darkness moving through the whiteness not far above the rocks ahead of me where the parachute canopy was lying. I kneeled there swaying as the air came in sudden gusts, whirling the snow against me and past me in a small blizzard, blinding me.
Think camouflage.
Kneeled with my head hanging. Basic thought process: too late, they must have seen it, so forth.
The sky hammered and the snow came blowing, darting against my face and sticking there. When I opened my eyes and looked down I couldn’t see my hands because the snow had covered them, and the whole thing came together and I got the point, camouflage, yes, the stuff was covering that canopy too. Started shuffling along the other way, fast as I could, the thing was to get as far as possible from this area because they’d be searching along a narrow band in the direction of the Finback’s final flight, and they’d see me even if they didn’t see the canopy or the seat or the lines under the cover of snow.
There was another one coming. It was somewhere ahead of me again but I knew I was facing the opposite direction now so it was no good going that way. My hands slipped as I turned round and I got terribly annoyed and stood up and went forward with my shoulders leaning against the haze and no real sense of tilting over until the rock came up and I made a half-roll to the right and finished on my hand and knees again you bastards will you go away you bastards with the whole sky swinging and the sound of them booming in my head, the last of the thoughts drowned out by the force of it, only a flicker of awareness now, the awareness that I was some kind of animal dodging and scrambling on the mountainside as the eagles came in for the kill.
Period of total unconsciousness.
Better, quite a lot better when I surfaced and looked around me. It could have been hours since I fell but it was obviously minutes because another one was coming in and I picked myself up and staggered across the rocks trying to get away from it but it was no go: the thing was heading straight towards me and it wouldn’t matter which way I went because I couldn’t go far enough to get out of sight. The visibility was about a hundred yards and I could make out a group of boulders, immense blobs in the haze, their outlines rounded by the juggernaut descent they’d made from higher in the range.
I would have to reach them.
Various objections: too far, too little time, so forth. Ignore.
The thing above me was so loud now that I couldn’t understand why it was still invisible: there was just the wasteland of white, with the earth meeting the sky at no particular level, white upon white, and somewhere in it the relentless hammering din of that machine getting closer, louder, while I stood there for another second trying to see it before I moved again, lurching over the rocks with the body leading the mind, the feet finding their purchase by reflex alone and the hands spread against the haze to push it away and let me see as I ran on, let me see the boulders.
The sky had become a storm.
Run.
Run through the storm and keep running.
It’s too far, and too slippery. They won’t see me in all this snow.
That’s dangerous thinking: they’ll be using field glasses and you’re black against white, don’t stop.
Feet skittering and the air freezing in the lungs, aching against the
teeth, stinging the eyes. They won’t see me now if I -
Don’t stop.
The whole world white and without perspective, without definition, a wilderness without end. Don’t stop.
The pace dizzying and the swirling snow mesmeric, I could run as easily with my eyes shut but that would send me off my balance and if I fell down again it would be for the last time because they’d seen me. The boulders were close now, great white shapes humped against the sky with only the grey of shadows to show where they were.
The thundering of the machine was a physical weight trying to push me down and I shouted at it but couldn’t hear anything. I had to look upward now because I was afraid of something so enormous pouncing on me without seeing it: in the final seconds I would have to take some kind of action, scratch at it, beat my hand against it before it blotted me out.
And here it came, a black mass taking shape in the whiteness, the snow beginning to whip into clouds under the storm of the rotors, the air screaming and the rocks trembling under the tumult coming from the machine. It was moving slowly and was low enough for me to see the numbers on it as I reached the boulders and pitched down and burrowed into the crevice below them and stayed there with my eyes shut and my lungs heaving while the sound drew down and over me, passing me by and leaving a vortex in the air that whipped and fluttered at the rocks before dying away, slowly dying away.
The silence was total.
8178716 38 198 18765413 17 1 829.
It was very cold. After the heated confines of the cockpit this degree of exposure was getting through to my bones. I hadn’t changed out of the uniform yet: it was added protection under the hunting furs.
The falling snow accentuated the silence: it provided movement and with movement there is usually noise and there was no noise, and the silence seemed more intense. There had been no further aerial activity: the helicopters had made three more runs along their line of search, spreading out each time they came back and flying slowly up the mountainside, following its contours. Now they had gone. I didn’t know whether they’d located the wreckage.
8 1876 23 489873890 38 782 1 0109.
In the final briefing my instructions had been to disappear at the end of the airborne phase by ejecting at very low altitude and letting the Finback fly into the Khrebet Tarbagatay range and destruct. The missile had taken care of this requirement and the only thing I had failed to do was to photograph the suspect village near Yelingrad, because the surface-to-air crews had opened fire too soon; but Yelingrad was the target area and I might dig up some material on the village later, possibly something better than low-level photographs.
