ADAM HALL - The Sinkiang Executive

Before I went back to the business of trying to sleep again Ferris told me he’d be in constant signals with London and I left him to it. Communication was fairly fast via the embassy phone and the Ministry radio at Crowborough and by this time Parkis and his team would be in Signals watching the board, but I thought Ferris would probably switch to the NATO channels and reach the Bureau through the War Office because this thing was the equivalent to a red alert and seconds would become important as the time ran out to the jump.

If, of course, there was one.

I don’t remember feeling pleased at this thought, or feeling anything at all. The psyche was coming under a barrage of conflicting influences and the only thing to do was sleep.

Ferris woke me just before five o’clock, coming into the room without a sound and then sitting in the dark repeating my name until I woke.

“Ferris,” he said quietly when he heard me stir.

There was a desk lamp and I switched it on. He was sitting on one of the wicker chairs they’d brought in here for me; he looked very held-in, and sat so still that I wished he’d get up and break something to get it over with.

“What’s the score?” I asked him.

He was a long time answering. “We don’t know. Bocker’s still taking the place to pieces, with four interrogation officers called in from the BfV headquarters in Munich to grill the other security guards and anyone who might know what’s happened to Corporal Behrendt.” He began talking a bit faster now, taking some kind of courage. “All we know so far is that Behrendt was having trouble with his wife, who was threatening to leave him. This has been going on for the past few months and Bocker’s blasting the people who knew this and failed to tell him: the man was obviously a security risk. The woman’s being interviewed here — ”

“Woman?”

“Behrendt’s wife.” He looked slightly surprised.

“I’ve only just woken up,” I said through my teeth, I didn’t like this, any of it. I could feel something big getting out of hand, far away in the background but rolling closer all the time, black and mountainous and unstoppable. I didn’t think I was going to have enough time to get out of the way.

“The Federal police are looking for Behrendt,” Ferris said in a low monotone. “Everyone is.”

I thought for a bit and said: “Bocker said he was considered reliable.”

“Yes. That’s why he’s pulling the place apart.”

Neither of us said anything for a minute. I would have liked to know where, precisely, they’d got the reliable Corporal Behrendt at this moment, and how far, precisely, he was forcing them to go before he broke. When he broke, the word would go out to the radar stations and anti-aircraft units along the border from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and if anyone tried to nip across in a MiG-28D they’d blow him out of the sky. Or, of course, Corporal Behrendt might be just drinking himself quietly under the table in his girl-friend’s flat, with the security on the Finback still intact.

I was waiting for Ferris to tell me what he’d come in here to tell me, but he still held back. I suppose he hadn’t the guts.

“Don’t they know his girl-friends?” I asked him.

He looked up. “They’re covering that.” The light seemed too bright for him “Do you want anything?”

“What like?”

He shrugged. “Something to eat. Something to drink.”

“Oh. No.”

I got off the camp-bed and put some slacks on and sat in the other wicker chair between the desk lamp and Ferris so that the light didn’t worry him. He’s normally a very cool cat and it occurred to me that there could be something else, something worse on his mind; but I shied away from that one because the situation we’d already got was quite enough. It also occurred to me that the first man in the Slingshot team to break might be this one sitting here. It’s usually the executive in the field, because it’s his neck on the block, or the control in London, because he’s got most of the responsibility. I’ll tell you one thing: it wouldn’t be Parkis. It was Parkis the Titanic hit, that time.

“Is it still raining?”

Ferris looked up again. I always seemed to be interrupting his thoughts, and that worried me too. He should have got all his thinking done before he came in here disturbing my sleep.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Ferris, when are you going to regain consciousness? You’ve got a mission on the board and the whole of the bloody North Atlantic Treaty Organization standing at battle stations and you don’t even know if it’s raining?”

Just the excess adrenalin slopping over: I couldn’t help it. This whole situation was new and it scared me stiff: I’d never been manoeuvred into the pre-jump phase under cover of somebody else’s security organization — we normally use our own and quite frankly the London personnel aren’t the type who don’t show up on guard duty because their marriage is on the blink: it’s dangerous.

“I’ve made three calls,” Ferris said. “Three so far.”

“Big deal.”

“It’s all we can do.”

The wicker creaked as he got out of the chair and looked at the map on the wall and turned away because it showed northeast Poland and we weren’t interested in that.

He still wouldn’t tell me but he’d left the opening so I got it over and asked him. “What’s their decision?”

He looked relieved and said: “We’ve got to wait, of course.”

Another turn on the gut.

“Until when?”

He made himself look at me. “Take-off.”

Everything sounded very still, suddenly, in here. Because they were going to make me sweat it out with no options, right up to the time of the jump. No quarter, no concessions, nothing to bite on except the bullet.

“I want the whole directive,” I said.

I knew he’d got it because he hadn’t been in signals with London just to give them the situation: he’d asked for instructions.

“They’d like you to go ahead.”

“That isn’t a directive.”

“I mean,” he said awkwardly, ‘it’s going to be up to you.”

I looked at the clock on the desk and checked it with my watch and got 05:12. We’d arranged to have me woken at 05:30 for the final phase before the jump and I didn’t think I could psych myself out for eighteen minutes without getting into a deep sleep curve and waking up groggy. I might as well stay on my feet.

“We take everything right up to the off, I said slowly, wanting to get it right, “and then if nobody’s found what happened to Corporal Behrendt we make the final decision whether to start running the thing or scrub it out. Is that it?”

“Yes.”

I picked up my shaving-kit and the towel they’d given me. “Fair enough. I’ll settle for that.”

He moved to the door. “They’ll be pleased.”

“I’m happy for them.” I put a new blade in, because there was going to be a lot of sweat under the face mask and stubble wouldn’t help. “Ferris.”

“Yes?”

“Before they put that directive together, did anyone actually want me to take-off on orders?”

“On orders?” He knew bloody well what I meant.

“With no option. Even if they didn’t find Behrendt.”

He was on his way out and he didn’t stop. “I wouldn’t know, would I? I’m not in London.”

“That’s true enough.”

But he knew what I was talking about. Parkis would have tried to get me airborne whatever happened.

Memo: Quiller is expendable, and if he can complete this operation before getting into terminal difficulties in the end phase, well and good. But if he fails to survive the access phase we shall have no real complaint. It would save us the unpleasant task, later, of ensuring that the threat to security he would continue to present was nullified.