The Sinkiang Executive

by Adam Hall

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Fair enough, it makes sense. It’s just that I don’t like going into a mission with so many armies in the field. What the hell are we doing, Ferris, operating in the open like this with -‘

  ‘We’re doing,’ he said sharply, ‘what we’ve been told to do, and we don’t have any choice. Or at least, you don’t. And remember that within a few minutes of taking-off from this airfield, you’ll be working in complete isolation.’

  I shut up and let him talk about mobile cover, local facilities, action phases. ‘You are to explore area Z, having photographed it.’ He still didn’t want to look at me, but this might only have been because he’d obviously had new signals from Control. They’d thrown that Z at me without any warning and I didn’t know where it was. ‘We’ve got an agent in place there and you can contact him any time after reaching ground.’

  ‘Where is it, for Christ’s sake? I don’t -‘

  ‘You’ll be informed.’

  ‘Oh, shit.’

  Because you normally get the whole picture given to you with everything made perfectly clear before you leave London, and here I was in West Germany at the jump-off point and they were still chucking new directives at me through Ferris and the reason was dear enough: those bastards were still in the planning stage while the clock was going round to zero in less than fourteen hours from now.

  Sealed orders all the way.

  ‘Do they want any elint?’ I asked Ferris. I’d looked for fancy electronics in the cockpit of the Finback last night and hadn’t found any, but that didn’t mean there hadn’t been a whole gang of deep-screened boffins putting the stuff in all day today.

  ‘There’s nothing you can pick up on this flight that the satellites aren’t already getting, from radio programmes to rocket launch signals. All they’ve asked for are the pictures.’

  He went over general considerations: alternate routes, backup faculties (there was a man in Tashkent who might local-liaise, if sufficiently harassed), and end-phase decision-making. He asked for any questions on the last subject and I said there weren’t any: I was damned if I were going to spell out what kind of decisions I was going to make when the show was winding up, because that was when they’d try to throw me to the dogs if they could.

  ‘Have you got everything?’

  I let him wait, while we listened to the soft roar of the rain along the enormous fuselage and the occasional creak of metal as the wind came in gusts under the wings. I’d been briefed enough times to know whether he’d left anything out but I went over it twice because on this one I was going to hell on a handcart and I wasn’t sure of the way.

  ‘I’ve got everything,’ I said, ‘that you’ve told me. Christ knows it’s not much.’

  ‘You’re going straight into flight briefing,’ he said impatiently, ‘when we leave here. That’ll fill in the rest.’

  ‘Is it security?’

  ‘Is what security?’

  He knew what I meant.

  ‘This lack of data.’

  ‘Yes.’

  I didn’t expect that

  ‘From London?’

  ‘Mostly from this end. These people are extremely security-conscious, partly because their eastern frontier is the Iron Curtain. You’ve no idea how difficult things have been, just to get their permission to take-off from here. Parkis had a bed put into a spare office near Signals, three weeks ago. It’s been like that.’

  ‘The bastard’s actually been sleeping?’ I got up from the crate I’d been sitting on and wandered farther into the tunnel of the fuselage and came back and said: ‘All right, I’ve got all you gave me. Now get me cleared.’

  ‘Very well.’

  It took less than a couple of minutes. I never draw a firearm but on this trip a Soviet-made senior officer’s revolver was part of the cover and there was no point in objecting. The code for the overall operation was a one-time pad and he gave it to me. ‘You can use the local codes or cyphers if our contacts have got a reliable system going. Your discretion. But for all alerts and priorities you’ll use the pad.’

  Travel and Cover had been built into the access and that only left Accounts and there was no change from the established records. Unless we’re cleared in London, where there’s a witness, we have to make the attestation verbally before we sign the form. Against the rain’s drumming and the creak of the shadowed fuselage my voice was only just audible, because I was due out soon and this sounded less like a statement of faith than of despair.

  ‘No dependents, no next of kin. No monetary assets or final bequests. If remains available, use them for medical research.’

  In the soft ashen light from the perimeter lamps he turned his head and looked at me, though his eyes were in shadow and I couldn’t see them.

  ‘Roses,’ he said, ‘for Moira?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Chapter 6

  NERVES

  When we left the Galaxie and walked through the rain to the main buildings I realized that Bocker must have seen us go into the transport because he’d thrown a substantial surveillance net round the area to seal it off. There was also a military escort of two corporals waiting for us at Base Operations and they took us down to an office on the floor below ground level and mounted guard at each end of the passage as we went in.

  There were three men sitting round a briefing-table and they got to their feet as Ferris made the introductions.

  ‘This is Major Connors, flying instruction - Captain Franzheim, navigation - Captain Baccari, signals, US Air Force. Squadron-Leader Nesbitt, RAF.’

  They put down their coffee and shook hands.

  ‘Hi, I’m Chuck.’

  ‘I’m Bill.’

  ‘Call me Omer. Still raining out there?’

  ‘Pissing down.’ I took off my soaked jacket.

  ‘Would you like some coffee?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  Connors looked at Ferris and said: ‘Okay, why don’t we get started?’

  ‘Do you mind if we take navigation first?’

  ‘Let’s do that.’ Connors sat down and looked at Franzheim, who went over to the map on the wall and picked up a pointer.

  ‘Okay, this is an oblique parabolic equal-area projection with a scale of 109 miles per inch, and as you can see it covers the whole of Asia and includes peripheral countries. We’re right here.’ He moved the pointer.

  This was at 6.35. The navigational briefing took just short of an hour and Franzheim spent most of the time on the access.

  ‘You can’t go in at night without the help of highly sophisticated terrain-mapping radar, because there are hills and you could hit one with only a few degrees of deviation. You can’t go in at high altitude like they did in the days of Gary Powers because they’d shoot you down the minute you crossed the border, even if you were flying at sixty thousand feet - which the Finback can attain. So you go in by daylight and you go in very fast and very low.’

  He moved the pointer again. ‘We’ve routed you through Hungary, since there’s no Soviet frontier between east and west: you have to go through either Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary or Romania. Also, you can go down to practically zero feet across these plains on either side of the Hungarian-Russian border and then head for the course of this river here, the Latorica, almost due east. Your speed should be less than Mach I from take-off till you’re across the Carpathian mountains, to avoid sonic boom. You’ll be seen - and certainly heard - overflying the town of Mukachevo right here, but you are now in the Soviet Union and flying a Soviet airplane. How does it sound so far?’

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘Great.’

  I liked it because the map had the countries in pretty colours and didn’t show any surface-to-air missile sites and the Carpathian mountains didn’t look like anything you could smash into with an aeroplane.

  The pointer moved. ‘We’re now in Soviet airspace and still flying close to zero feet and radar-undetectable. Whe
n you’re clear of the mountains you start climbing in the vicinity of the military airfield here, just west of Zhmerinka, and you turn south-east, parallel with the Romanian border.’

  He glanced at Ferris and went on with a rather shut face: ‘At this point you’ll be picked up on Soviet radar, and since you’re still inside ADIZ airspace they’ll -‘

  ‘ADIZ?’

  ‘Sorry. Air Defence Identification Zone.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘They’ll call you up and ask you to identify yourself and prove you’re not a border violator. You now begin using your cover as a Russian colonel.’

  I began looking round the room for bugs because this was strictly cosmic material but the place looked more like a deep shelter than an office and had probably been designed as a briefing-room for NATO flight missions. These three officers had obviously been fully screened and Ferris was looking quite satisfied with the whole arrangement. This was the kind of situation where you had to remember that your control in London was God and that your director in the field was the Son of God and they’d got everything worked out including a method for getting you to the end of the mission alive.

  ‘Question,’ I said. ‘How many alternative routes did you consider and throw out?’

  ‘I’d say twenty or thirty. The point we finally chose is where the terrain-masking afforded by the mountains is greatest, and the Soviet radar coverage is weakest, according to intelligence reports. Also the ground is virtually flat on both sides of the border and you can cross it at Mach 95, or six hundred knots calibrated groundspeed, just below military power and sonic boom.’

  ‘And very low.’

  ‘We estimate that with the handling capabilities of the Finback you’ll be going in at one hundred AGL.’

  ‘Christ, how high are the church steeples?’

  ‘There aren’t any on the route we’ve planned for you.’

  ‘You’ve checked on the steeples?’

  He gave a brief grin. ‘The Base Commander said we had to do a good job and we’re kind of scared of him. We checked on steeples, power grids, radio masts, factory chimneys, the whole bit. At one hundred feet on that precise course you won’t hit anything, and you can have that in writing.’

  I said I was impressed and he thanked me.

  ‘Naturally, we couldn’t allow for pilot error. You’ll have quite a job staying on course. There is a navigational control system fitted to the Finback but the guy who flew it into Alaska said it wasn’t very accurate and it was defunct anyway when he landed. It hasn’t been removed and we haven’t installed a good one of our own, because the airplane has to look like what it is: a Soviet MiG-28D, in case they ever get a close look at it.’

  I saw Ferris move his head a fraction towards me, and folded my arms in acknowledgement. What Franzheim had just told me was that he didn’t know this was a one-way trip for the plane: ‘in case they ever’, so forth. Ferris just wanted to warn me to leave this subject blacked out.

  ‘You can’t use radio fixes,’ Franzheim went on, ‘because as you know you’d have to transmit a signal to get ranging information, and they’d pick it up. Also they’d pick up your radar pulses from the ground. So you’ll be steering with visual fixes, compass and dead reckoning. I’m talking about the leg this side of the Zhmerinka field, where you’ll start climbing and adopt your cover.’

  He picked up his coffee and finished it and dropped the cup into the disposal can and pulled another one off the stack and filled it at the dispenser. ‘I guess all you guys must be caffeine-shy. Omer, do you have those maps?’

  Captain Baccari opened a briefcase and dropped three folders on to the table.

  ‘Okay,’ Franzheim said, and pulled them open. ‘These are your three maps, colour-coded for the projected route, alternative legs, breakoff and escape routes. You’ll see they’re self-explanatory when you study them: we’ve made provisions for you to abort the mission and escape by air at calculated altitudes over the safest possible terrain, avoiding airfields, radar posts, missile sites and so on. You can take a look now, we’re in no hurry.’

  They were printed by the USAF Cartographic Department and bore the NATO-designated COSMIC SECRET stamp. They were also marked KEEP FROM UNAUTHORIZED HANDS and DESTROY AT DISCRETION. The detail was elaborate and the contour relief was indicated to within twenty feet above sea level. For the first time I saw the identities of the three points X, Y and Z.

  ‘The first suspect village,’ Franzheim said as he leaned over the table, ‘is right here at Saratov, twelve miles north of the town. The second one is ten miles south-east of Dzhezkazgan at this point. The third is ten miles from the town of Yelingrad, not far from the Sinkiang border.’

  ‘I’ll need special briefing on the camera runs.’

  ‘Right. Major Connors will see to that.’

  Franzheim asked for questions and I went over the whole route with him again, using the green-code map and spending most of the time on the low-level run through the Carpathians. The range was a mass of ridges and valleys, with a major road following the Latorica River for forty miles through the mountains.

  ‘I shall be seen from the road, obviously, at a hundred feet.’

  ‘Okay, but we have to define the word “seen”. At Mach 95 they won’t see more than a streak in the sky and they won’t be able to tell whether it was an airplane or a bat out of hell.’

  Major Connors said lazily: ‘The first time I saw a plane going over my head that fast and that low I just messed my pants.’

  Baccari squeezed out a laugh and went to get himself some more coffee. Franzheim said: ‘Where you won’t be seen, if you follow the road and the river, is on the radar screens east of the range, and that’s what we’re really talking about.’

  I told him he’d sold me on that and we folded the maps and put them back into their waterproof pouches. This was at 7.31 and Ferris got up and stretched his legs and asked for flying instructions.

  ‘Let’s go see the airplane,’ Connors said.

  The two guards were still at each end of the passage and they fell in behind us as we took the stairs. A Military Police sergeant and three men were standing in the main lobby and did a lot of circumspect saluting as we went through the doors into the rain. The wind-gusts were driving it against the buildings.

  ‘What’s my minimum take-off visibility?’ I asked the major.

  ‘A lot of things like that,’ he said close to my ear, ‘are going to be up to you. We can give you the standard safety rules, and you can push it from there if you want.’

  On the way to the hangars I counted twelve security men dispersed at strategic points, seven of them in uniform. We were halted twice and one of the men came with us as far as the end hangar. There were now two MP sergeants and four dog-handlers outside the doors and we all had to go through the identity check. One of the sergeants telephoned our names through to his unit and waited for the okay before he used the intercom and ordered the door opened. Connors and Baccari hadn’t brought their coats and by this time they were drenched and shivering.

  We trooped inside and began leaving puddles all over the floor.

  ‘She’s still there,’ Franzheim said, and someone laughed.

  Ferris was near me. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘I’m all right. The briefing’s first class.’

  ‘They were hand-picked.’

  There were six Luftwaffe military policemen surrounding the plane and Ferris said something to Connors, then took him aside. In a minute Connors turned round and said we could take the covers off; then he and Ferris went back to the door and I heard Connors phoning someone.

  We’d got the last cover off when an MP lieutenant came into the hangar and told the six guards to form up outside. Ferris said we could go ahead.

  He was watching me carefully for nerves and so far I was all right but there was an awful lot about this job that was beginning to scare me: it was the first time for sixteen missions that I wasn’t going in solo. I’d
be on my own for the access phase and strictly speaking we weren’t running yet, but the number of people we’d needed to bring in just to get me off the ground was increasing, and I wasn’t reassured by all the security on show because you can deep-screen a man till you’re black in the face and still make a mistake and that was why Ferris had got those guards out of the way: they’d had to see the MiG in here in order to guard it but they didn’t have to see who was going to fly it and they didn’t have to hear Connors telling him how to do it.

  I looked at my watch without meaning to.

  It was 7.56 and there were twelve hours to go.

  ‘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 -‘