by Adam Hall
I went back into the hangar and got into my anti-g suit with Franzheim giving me a hand. The helmet felt too small and I took it off again and we found part of the leather flap folded upwards, and pulled it down.
“Feel good?”
“Yes,” I told him. I took it off again.
We adjusted the wrist straps.
“You know something? I just wish they’d find that bastard.”
“So does he,” I said, ‘quite possibly.”
Because we were almost ready and everybody had put a lot of work into the project and we wanted to believe he was just a young idiot in the throes of a domestic crisis, but we still didn’t know where he was and he could be holding out, even as late as this, swaying in the chair in the cellar with the radio turned up high to cover the noise, why do they want a Soviet plane, the needle probing the urethra, yes, you’ve told us that, but did they bring it specially from the United States, the radio very high because he was losing control now, but we want to know who is going to fly it, everything red around him, everything on fire with what they were doing, until it didn’t matter what they knew, didn’t matter what he told them, very well, go on, we are listening, go on.
Franzheim tucked the radio leads out of the way and checked the helmet again. “You think they’ve hijacked him?”
“How the hell should I know?” I said and went back to stand in the doorway looking out at the drizzle. There was a taste of metal in my mouth and it would have been good to have a drink of water but I wasn’t thirsty and the system had to remain as dry as I could comfortably allow: it was one of the circumspect phrases Connors had used in the briefing, as dry as you can comfortably allow.
This too was natural. You remember meaningless things.
Then Ferris came up.
I’d been waiting for him.
The glow of dawn was increasing now, whitening over the seconds and touching highlights along the wings of the Finback over there. I hadn’t looked at my watch for a while because there wasn’t any point: we’d overrun our zero for the jump and only Ferris would know why and when he was ready he’d tell me.
“They can’t trace him yet.”
He meant Behrendt.
Nobody was moving, now, over there by the Finback. The men stood like figures in a landscape, the light growing brighter on their wet capes, one standing upright near the tail unit, two others crouched on their haunches by the starter trolleys, their heads turned in this direction. Baccari was near the mobile steps, the test kit still in one hand, his eyes watching the hangar. I didn’t know who would give the order to start up, if we decided to do that. Probably the base commander; he was talking quietly to Connors, somewhere behind us.
“All right,” I said to Ferris. “So they can’t trace him.”
He was standing beside me, not facing me. He was watching the Finback, as we all were.
“I talked to London again, a few minutes ago.”
A bird flew up, somewhere beyond the plane and the men who were standing there. Its call must have been an alarm cry, because the whole flock followed, darting from the ground at a sharp angle and wheeling away from us. I watched them till the haze blotted them out.
“What does London say?” I asked Ferris.
“Nothing’s changed. They’re leaving the decision to you.”
One of the men near the Finback moved slightly, stamping his feet in the cold.
So nothing had changed. But it was academic now, whether I took-off on orders or on my own decision: there was a substantial chance that a man so reliable as Corporal Behrendt had not simply run out on his wife while he was engaged in security duties, but had been taken by one of the Moscow-controlled cells in the area and held under duress and interrogated and finally broken. This likelihood made the idea of a take-off so dangerous that some of these people were waiting for the signal to abort.
But if he fails to survive the access phase we shall have no real complaint.
Parkis kept coming into my mind and this too was natural: in the last few seconds before a mission starts running there are only two people totally involved: Control and the executive in the field. I would be in Parkis’s mind too for this brief time as he stood behind the man at the console, his hands tucked into the pockets of his impeccably-tailored jacket and their thumbs hooked over the top. He would be waiting.
I hated Parkis because he was inhuman and he hated me because I wouldn’t respect him and now he was daring me to do something dangerous and he was half counting on it to kill me and I knew that. He’d made certain I knew it: they tell you only what you need to know and he’d wanted me to understand that the only choice I had was to accept his dare or back down. And the thing that had been rolling towards me, black and mountainous and unstoppable, was the fact that I didn’t really have a choice at all. That bastard knew there was one thing I could not do.
Signal, sir. The executive has decided not to take-off. He feels the risk is too high.
The one thing I could not do.
Ferris was waiting.
“Tell him we’re starting up,” I said.
Because Parkis knows too much. He knows that all you have to do to kill a moth is light a candle.
Chapter Eight: SLINGSHOT
I swung round as the van came up because they had the power ground-unit running now and the roar blanked out most of the other sounds.
“Franzheim! Have you seen my gloves?”
He threw open the door. “I got the whole bit!”
Time was 08:17 and we were late but it wasn’t critical because the drizzle was steady and the daylight was only just getting through.
I put the gloves on and Franzheim gave me a hand with the parachute harness.
“So they found that guy?”
“What guy?”
“That god dammed guard.”
“No.”
I shrugged the harness comfortable.
“Oh Jesus,” he said.
I wished he’d shut up.
Major Connors was in the cockpit of the Finback doing the preflight routine, doubling for the launch control officer. His face was coloured by the glow of the panel lights and he sat crouched forward, concentrating.
“Got the helmet?”
Franzheim passed it down to me and climbed out of the van.
“Did you get your medical?” he asked me.
“Last night.”
I noticed Lambach, the base commander, trotting steadily across to the hangar, the dogs watching him as he neared. I couldn’t see Ferris anywhere.
Baccari was coming over from the mobile steps, looking up at the sky.
It wasn’t really the sky: it was a thousand-foot ceiling to the haze.
“Everything’s go,” he said and put a thumb up.
“Listen, has anyone told the people on our side of the border to leave me alone?”
“How’s that again?” I had to repeat it because of the noise from the ground-unit. He stood back and looked at me. “What the fuck d’you think we’re running — Disneyland? You bet your ass they’ve been told!”
Franzheim gave a discordant laugh but it didn’t help. Everyone knew that bloody corporal hadn’t been found and they seemed to think they were setting me up for an execution.
“You want to put your hat on?” Franzheim asked me.
“Are we that close?”
“Sure.”
“All right.”
He helped me with it. We’d been handling it the right way up all the time to keep the rain out but the leather was ice cold and felt tighter than it was. The roar of the power-unit was muffled now but I couldn’t hear anything else. Someone came up and I saw it was Ferris. He said something and I bent towards him and tapped the side of the helmet.
“Everything is under control.” He gave me a small plain envelope and I wasn’t surprised because I’d known all along that this thing stank of sealed orders. “Open on arrival. Feeling all right?”
“Yes,” I said, and watched him as he walk
ed away, feeling oddly reassured to think that if Slingshot was going to finish me there’d always be Ferris, a thin sandy man with untidy hair walking for ever across the rainswept airports with his head down and his mac flapping and his mind on the access, the rendezvous, the courier route while his eye watched the ground for a beetle.
“Boots tight?”
“What?”
Franzheim.
I couldn’t hear in this bloody helmet.
He said it again and I bent down and checked the laces When I straightened up I heard the sound of the power-unit dying away. Connors was climbing out of the cockpit and we began walking over there through the shallow puddles. It was light enough now to see some of the F-15’s standing in their dispersal bays, and the line of trees along the perimeter road at the far side of the airfield. The black Mercedes limousine wasn’t there today: Bocker had moved it, or they didn’t need to watch any more because they’d broken the corporal and he’d told them everything they — oh balls, listen, the whole thing’s a gamble and either you’re going to get killed or you’re going to beat that bastard Parkis at his own game and there’s nothing you can do about it because you’re committed and that was what you wanted so shuddup.
There was a deep puddle and we splashed through it. “We’re ready for strap-up,” Connors said. He watched me for a moment and then looked away across the airfield. “Are you going to wait for some visibility?”
“They’ll be giving me lights, won’t they?”
“Sure thing.”
“I’ll use those.”
I went up the steps and got into the cockpit and they began crowding around me, plugging in leads and making the man-machine connections, strapping me to the ejection seat and checking, double-checking, none of them talking. The pale green light of the gunsight reticle was making reflections along the cushioning rim of the visor and I moved my head slightly to face the front. Under my body I could feel the flexing of the hydraulic landing-gear as the men leaned across the edge of the cockpit.
One of them tapped my helmet and I looked up.
“Okay?” Connors asked me.
“Yes.”
“Everything’s go.” He patted the helmet again. “Good luck.”
I nodded. Someone else put his thumb up, Franzheim, I think: there were so many of them, a lot of faces and arms. I nodded again to reassure him; then they left me and I turned my head and saw the steps moving away. I reached up and slid the canopy shut.
The engines were rumbling and one of them fired, and thirty seconds later the other one came in. They began whining now, their sound rising slightly and then falling as they stabilized at idle with the exhaust gas temperature still cool at 380 degrees. Connors came through on the UHF and I adjusted the set and acknowledged; then we began bringing the systems on line and setting the configurations while I reported the oil, fuel and hydraulic pressures and the RPM.
Pressurize.
I flicked the switch.
Check trim.
I moved the controls, watching the mirror.
Okay. I turned my head and saw him holding his thumb up. Wait for the green.
What about those lights?
You’ll get them.
I began waiting for the tower to come through. They’d strapped the clip-board to my right knee and I took the pencil out: I couldn’t crow-fly the first leg to the Carpathian range because it would take me twice across the Hungarian-Czechoslovakian border, so the initial magnetic course was 148 and I filled it in. ETA for the turning-point was thirty-five minutes after take-off and I left it blank because I didn’t have the data: the time was now 08:21 and the tower was still out.
Connors was standing where I could see him easily. He was looking up at me and then turning his head towards the control tower. I tried them again and they didn’t respond.
“Shit,” I said to anyone who was listening.
Connors heard me and went over to the flight van for a lamp. He was obviously trying to get the tower and couldn’t.
I was beginning to sweat, and the cockpit pressure was uncomfortable. When I looked down again Connors was pointing the lamp at the tower, pressing it on and off. I looked back at the main panel. The clock was out of synch with my watch by fifteen seconds and I adjusted it and began thinking that London must have come through with a fifty-ninth-second order to abort and that was why the tower was keeping us on ice like this, or they had found that corporal and seen the marks on his body and decided that if anyone slipped a Finback across the border he’d run smack into a duck shoot because -
Tower to 8X454.
Hear you, I said. Where the hell have you been?
Stand by.
Sweat was itching.
Then Connors came on again.
Internal power.
I switched over.
I’m on internal.
They turned off the ground-unit and the staff began moving clear.
Chocks gone. You can proceed to the runway.
I slipped the brakes.
There were no lights yet and I thought of asking for them again, but Connors had sounded a fraction curt the last time and I suppose they were going to wait for the last minute, to observe blackout orders.
The engines whined. The readings were satisfactory all over the panel but the cockpit heat was too high and I lowered it but didn’t feel anything immediately. Sweat ran.
Birds flew up from behind one of the marker boards as I swung into line with the runway, their wings black against the glare of the haze in the east. Rivulets ran down the windscreen and I cleared it and sat waiting, watching the tower.
The tower was quiet.
Connors was off the air now: I tried him but all I got was my own dead voice. When I looked down and sideways I couldn’t see anyone. Connors would be in the flight van: it had swung through the rain to line up parallel with me a hundred yards away. Ferris wouldn’t be with him: he would have gone back to the hangar to wait by the telephone in case it rang and he had to get a signal to me to switch everything off. If he didn’t get a call he would make one himself, the moment I was airborne.
I watched the tower again.
The set was still dead.
The birds that had flown up were circling now, lowering across the bright wet grass where -
Green light.
Tower to 8X454.
Hear you.
You’re cleared for take-off.
Roger.
I pumped the brakes and pushed the throttles forward to military power.
Confirm canopy locked.
It was Connors again, from the van.
I checked the lever.
Confirm locked. All systems for climb out are now on.
Confirm ejection seat pin pulled.
Confirm.
I switched over to continuous ignition to prevent a flame-out and reported to Connors. The sound of the engines at 85 per cent of their power was a sustained scream and the aircraft was trembling as the thrust worked at it, straining against the lyres.
The tower came through again.
There’s no traffic. There is no traffic.
I acknowledged and checked the engine dials and then looked up through the windscreen. Streaks of rain had formed again and I cleared them but it wasn’t much better: I could see the control tower on my right with the green signal showing steadily but the view immediately ahead was a sheet of diffused grey light and I couldn’t make out the runway beyond a hundred yards.
What the hell were they doing?
8X454 to tower. Can you give me -
They must have had their hand on the button because the runway lights were suddenly glowing and I just told them I was rolling and took off the brakes and pushed the throttles forward to full power and heard the twin jets hitting up a scream that totally blanked out something that was coming through to me on the headset. I didn’t ask them to repeat because this was the go and if someone had got it wrong they’d have to punch off a flare: the scream was filling my sku
ll now and the set was drowned out The amethyst light-path tapered ahead of the windscreen and the individual lamps were blurring into a continuous line as they slid past and out of sight. There was an awful lot of vibration at this speed and it was getting worse but Thompson had warned me about this and I ignored it and kept the throttles hard against the quadrant stop and sat watching the track of lights with the stick dead steady until I flicked a glance at the dials and pulled it back and waited.
By Christ this one was quick and they’d told me about that too: the lights fell away and the vibration eased off and I felt the tensions shifting in the airframe as the stress came off the undercarriage and the mass became cushioned and the aerodynamics came into play.
I hit the retract button.
Ten-tenths rain haze and the fierce push of the jets against my back and a microsecond image of Ferris at a telephone putting a red light on the board in London as Slingshot began running.
Chapter Nine: ACCESS
They picked me up again between Budapest and Kecskemet.
Hova valo?
I kept silent.
They’d got on to me twenty minutes ago when I’d slipped across the Austro-Hungarian frontier at Mach.95 at three hundred feet, and since then I’d been expecting interceptors. I couldn’t tell if this second demand for identity was isolated or if they’d started signals from the frontier to get ahead of me on the ground. If they hadn’t done it already they could start doing it now and I couldn’t go fast enough to beat them.
Visibility had opened out since the frontier but the sky closed in now like a lid coming down and I was flying into a ten-tenths screen of rain.
Hova valo?
Nothing I could tell them.
This was where I had to make a 118 degree turn to meet the east border near the Latorica, and the cement works that Franzheim had given me as a landmark were buried in the sludge so I used the compass and hoped for a break in the rain farther east to give me a visual fix.