The Sinkiang Executive q-8
Page 25
The sergeant was still hanging over the edge of the cockpit, completing his checks. One of the ground crew was on the other side, plugging in the radio connections.
“Are you receiving, Colonel?”
“Yes.”
The headset was still dead but I was in a hurry now.
The leading vehicle looked like a staff car, with a pennant flying from the front wing. They were all going flat out along the cinder-surfaced perimeter track and one of them had its horn blaring and its headlights on. The sergeant was watching them now.
Either they’d found Kirinski or Chechevitsin had been blown and given them the number of the Wolga or one of these people here had decided to phone a report through to his headquarters: unfamiliar Air Force colonel demanding flight preparation, so forth, and some bright spark in the hierarchy had got the message: they’d been looking for an Air Force colonel ever since the Finback had come down.
“Sergeant!”
“Sir?”
“Get the chocks away.”
He turned and called down to the ground crew and I heard the hollow drag of the woodblocks.
There was a change in the engine note and I looked at the panel again but couldn’t see anything on the instruments; then I got it: the police car had its siren going as the convoy came heeling off the perimeter track and on to the tarmac. They were a hundred yards away and I pumped the brakes and pushed the throttles forward and started rolling.
The sergeant was shouting something but I motioned him to get clear and slid the canopy shut as the other man dropped to the ground. The systems for climb out were running and I tugged at the ejection-seat pin and switched to continuous ignition as the leading staff car swung in a half-circle across the dispersal bay.
The twin jets were screaming and I left the throttles wide open and moved in a curve to the end of the runway before the speed was too high. The tower was showing a red light and the headset was still dead but I was on my own now and the runway began blurring as the ground speed rose. Vibration was setting in but that was characteristic of the MiG-28 and I left the controls where they were and began waiting for liftoff.
The light was still fair and the cloud cover was high. The nearest airfield in Pakistan was Khanabad and last night the snow had started moving in from the south-west and it could push me higher and on to the radar screens but the tanks were full and it was only a thousand miles and at Mach 2 with the after-burners switched on I could make it in thirty minutes: the chances were first class.
The tower light was still red and the first shots hit the fuselage just aft of the cockpit: they sounded like stones. The third smashed into the panelling a foot from the canopy and I saw flakes of paint flick away in the slipstream. A red flare was floating across from the tower, trailing smoke as it buried itself in the snow beside the runway. The next came closer and left pink light dying against the windscreen as one of the tyres burst and set up a rumbling below the scream of the jets, the right wing dipping and correcting and lifting as I used the ailerons. They were shooting low and the nose went down and I brought the control column back: they’d hit the forward wheel and we were off the runway now and skating over snow, hitting a marker lamp and a second and a third until the whole of the aircraft was shuddering and I pulled the stick back another degree and waited and felt the lift coming into the wings.
Bad vibration, then it eased off, and the jets were the only sound.
A flare curved across the mirrors, dropping away below.
The End
Notes
FB2 document info
Document ID: fbd-b4a55a-bc4b-9d4e-208a-56bf-a417-194da4
Document version: 1
Document creation date: 01.09.2007
Created using: Fiction Book Designer, Fiction Book Investigator, FB Writer v2.2, FB Editor v2.2 software
Document authors :
Paco
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