ADAM HALL - The Sinkiang Executive

“Make another circuit. Don’t forget you’ve got a twelve-thousand-foot runway, two thousand feet longer than at Zaragoza.”

We kept at it. The clock on the facia said 18:05.

“Right. Level out. Level out now . Less lift than the FM, remember?”

I over corrected and the nose came up too high and I said shit and pushed it down again and thought Ferris might have told me it was a one-way trip because these bloody things were unlandable.

“ Watch your altitude .”

There wasn’t any lift at all: we were dropping out of the sky and I trimmed again and put the flaps down and saw her hit a wall on the airspeed indicator.

“Too soon. Ease off.”

It took another ten minutes and I made the over corrections and hit the power too late because she was going down like a stone and I panicked and Thompson went on talking into my headset, repeating himself so often that I didn’t have enough time to assess anything for myself. The angle of approach was all right and we were lined up with the wings level but I cut the power too soon and we hit the deck and lit up the failure sign and I sat there thinking Christ we’re going to go through all that again till I’ve got it right and it’s going to be a total waste of time because I’m never going to need it and I can’t tell him that.

“All right, here’s the first one.”

I watched the screen.

“It’s a MiG-21 and it’s seen you and it’s closing. What’s the distance?”

“A mile.”

“A mile and a half at this point. Okay, we’ll stop the action. Don’t forget to turn into the missile’s trajectory. It’s the only way you can beat it. You just go into a very high g-turn, as tight as you can. Right — action.”

The shape on the screen began moving again and a thin white cylinder shot forward from it.

“Missile fired.”

I used the rudder and ailerons and glanced across the dials to check the degree of turn and pushed it a bit more and concentrated on the missile.

“More g’s.”

The cloudscape swung on the screen but the white cylinder

“You’re too slow. You’ve got to turn on a sixpence.” Pushed everything hard over but the missile kept coming in. “More g’s. But it’s too late anyway.” I was braced forward against the harness and this was the limit of turn but the thing on the screen was rapidly filling it and then the screen went white and a word jumped into the frame:

HIT.

I looked up through the windscreen and saw Thompson taking a gulp of tea.

“You’re a gonner,” he said in a moment. “We’ll try again, and look the idea is to leave it as late as you can, so when you go into the turn you’re as close to the missile as you can get in safety. The distance has got to be so short that it can’t make the turn when you do: you don’t give it enough room to manoeuvre. Okay? But you did two things wrong: you left it too late and you turned too wide. You’re working on a very narrow margin, you see, between bit and miss. Let’s try it again.”

The screen showed a cloudscape and the silhouette of the MiG.

“Course is converging. But hold it.”

The white cylinder shot forward of the plane.

“Missile fired. Wait. Wait. Wait .”

The thing was curving in fast and I didn’t look at anything else.

“ Turn . All you’ve got.”

I braced myself and the g’s piled up on the dials till I could almost feel them.

“ Tighter than that. ”

Gave it the limit but too late and the red letters jumped into the frame: HIT.

For the first time he looked up in his glass-panelled booth.

“Mr. Nesbitt, that Finback is very rugged. You couldn’t make this degree of turn at Mach I in the FM-3O but you can do it in a Finback. I realize you think you’re going to break the wings off, but that won’t happen. Now we’ll do it again.”

We did it again and we got HIT.

This was at 19:22.

MiG-19 and much slower, coming at Mach.98.

HIT.

“You should have beaten that one.”

Shuddup.

MiG-23 and much faster.

HIT.

MiG-25 — the Foxbat and very fast indeed at Mach 18.

HIT.

Mig-19 again. Wait. Turn.

MISS.

“More like it,” Thompson said.

We went on trying.

HIT.

HIT.

MISS.

HIT.

MISS.

“Evens,” Thompson said, and drank some more tea.

20:06.

HIT.

MISS.

MISS.

“Twice running.”

Shuddup.

Concentrate.

MISS.

HIT.

MISS.

MISS.

MISS.

“You’ve got it now all right,”

MISS.

20:51.

“Give me the Foxbat again.” That was the fastest.

“Fair enough. Coming at Mach 2.6.”

HIT.

“Again.”

MISS.

“Again.”

MISS.

“Again.”

MISS.

“Right-ho. Call it a day.” He sounded exhausted.

“I think that wraps it up,” Ferris said.

He pulled the collar of his mac a bit higher. It was still drizzling, and colder today at this time: an hour after first light.

“All right,” I told him.

We stood for a while not speaking again, looking around us. About a hundred yards away one of the USAF crew was dragging a pair of chocks towards the F-III at the end of the line. Half an hour ago a BfV security man had walked across the tarmac to check on us, wondering what we were doing standing here in the middle of nowhere in the rain. We didn’t spell it out for him.

I began clumping my feet up and down. They’d given me a heavier flying-jacket than the one I’d brought here from Zaragoza, but it was still bloody cold.

“Recap,” Ferris said, and crouched down on his haunches to ease his legs. I did the same.

“Right, I’m to expect the Soviet radar stations to start picking me up as soon as I begin climbing. At that point I shall be heading south, parallel with the border and twenty-five miles into their airspace. As Colonel Nikolai Voronov I can — ”

“You start climbing near a military field.”

“Right. Near enough to give the impression I’ve just taken-off from it. As Colonel Voronov of the Red Air Force I’ll respond to any radio calls with the cover story that I’m carrying out a fuel-range test which will explain all those extra tanks. Testing has to be done between thirty and forty thousand feet and any request to fly lower than thirty thousand or make a landing should be resisted for this reason.”

“Use a lot of authority,” Ferris said, and pulled his collar higher. “Yell at them over the radio. They’re shit-scared of authority.”

“Noted.”

I recapped on the main elements: communications, cut-off points, rdv procedures, local direction, so forth; but most of this stuff was abstract and I’d stopped asking him for specifics because he’d said it was too early. It was beginning to look like sealed orders all the way and I assumed London was hogtied by the security demands of the USAF, the RAF, NATO and the BfV, since all four parties were contributing to the mission.

It was the first time I’d taken on an operation with so much exposure at the outset. The first phase of any mission the access is normally sacrosanct in terms of secrecy, simply because the most effective way of blowing up a project is to hit it before it can start. With this one the access was blown if anyone talked: any one of those people who knew that a front-line Soviet aircraft was parked here under wraps at Furstenfeldbruck. At a rough guess there must be more than a dozen of them, including the crew of the Lockheed C5-A Galaxie that had brought the Finback across the Atlantic and the guards now protecting it. Already at this stage of the briefing I could see why London couldn’t find anybody to take this one on. It was much more, and much worse, than sensitive. It was vulnerable.