ADAM HALL - The Sinkiang Executive

For your eyes only, destroy after reading, so forth. But someone had said no. Possibly Egerton. Possibly Mildmay or one of their lordships on the Admin, floor. It had been agreed that the executive should be given the final decision whether to take-off or abort the mission. It was, after all, his life. Or his death.

But I knew Parkis. And I knew that Ferris did have something else, something worse, on his mind. There was something big getting out of hand, still in the distance but rolling closer, black and mountainous and unstoppable. And I knew now that I wouldn’t have time to get out of its way.

“Ten thousand rubles. Fifty gold Napoleon francs. Four digital watches and these six rough-cut diamonds.”

I nodded and he put them into the leather bag and fastened the straps. I’d seen him before, when Bocker had called those people into the briefing-room: he was BfV with military cover, ranking as captain.

Connors and Baccari were watching, looking a little tense. They’d been told we were going ahead with the programme right up to the point of take-off, when we would either proceed or abort according to whether Corporal Behrendt had been found. Whenever the telephone rang they looked in its direction. We all did.

Ferris was sitting on the steps to the cockpit. Twenty minutes ago he’d told me there had been a further signal from London confirming the last directive.

The time was now 07:14.

There was no news of Behrendt yet. Not long ago Bocker had called Ferris to say he had a lead from the mess sergeant, who had seen the man talking to a civilian in a cafe in the town last evening. He would keep us closely in touch with any progress. We didn’t take much notice: Bocker had lost an awful lot of face over this, and I thought the only thing that kept him going was our decision to press on to the zero in the hope that security was still intact.

“Hunting knife. Service revolver, officer’s.” He hesitated, glancing across at Ferris, who got off the steps and came up close to us, speaking quietly.

“We thought on this trip you might want a capsule.”

They both waited.

But I couldn’t see his reasoning, in terms of ‘ this trip ’. You need a capsule when you’ve been caught and they’re going to take your mind to pieces and drive you mad in the process — but there’d been no mention of specific opposition in briefing: I wasn’t going to penetrate a cell or filter through a screen or close in on any individual who might detonate if I touched him. You need a capsule in the wilds if you can’t stand pain or thirst or privation, and if I ever reached Soviet airspace I might come down somewhere isolated — but Ferris knew me better than that: I’m an animal and the wilds are my home, whether they’re forest-land or the jungle of the big-city streets.

So I just said no, because I couldn’t ask him what he meant by this trip with so many people about and it wasn’t worth our going off to talk in privacy: I know when to ask for one of those things — it’ll be when I ask for a gun.

The man did some sleight-of-hand and the little red box disappeared. The uniform, clothing and equipment were all manufactured in the Soviet Union or one of its satellites. Most of it was made in Tashkent.” Close to the target area. This is the kind of meticulous attention to detail you get from Parkis, and I tried to feel reassured but it wasn’t easy, because there’s the other side to him! the inflexible slide-rule precision that doesn’t give you any freedom of choice when a fuse blows.

I looked the stuff over as it was laid out for me: the only distinctive items were a peasant’s fur coat and hunting gear, well worn, and a short collapsible fishing-rod bound with tape; the rest comprised the standard essentials: signal flares, matches, fire lighting chemicals for use with damp wood, food concentrates, a small torch, a whistle and a compass. The first-aid kit included morphine and water-purification tablets, and there was a compact toilet bag. Almost every item was made in Russia, but the razor was Polish and the torch Czechoslovakian.

“Life-jacket?”

“In the cockpit.”

We began putting it all together and Baccari went up the steps with a testing kit and started checking the circuits. Franzheim was crouched over the landing gear with a tyre gauge and Connors went off on a tour of inspection of the airframe: they were doubling for the ground staff to keep down the number of people on secret commission. They worked without talking, and Baccari seemed especially subdued: it was now 07:27 and we were thirty-three minutes to zero.

Ferris went across to the small door and talked to the USAF MP sergeant on guard there; from this distance I couldn’t hear what they were saying. The BfV man was stowing the equipment in the cockpit and I started changing into the Soviet colonel’s uniform. A few minutes later the telephone rang and Ferris took it. We had all looked in his direction for a couple of seconds, but he stood with his back to us.

I thought he was speaking in German. He was on the phone for less man a minute and when he rang off he went on talking to the sergeant. It could have been London, through the embassy in Bonn or through NATO and the War Office, but I wasn’t going over to ask him. He’d tell me what I needed to know, and if it was nothing then he’d tell me nothing.

The uniform fitted well: it would have been made by the Bureau tailor, the man with the artificial hand in the back room off Regent Street. The KYP are looking for him under the name of Zaphiropoulos and if they find him we won’t see him again.

“Looks pretty neat,” Connors said.

“What?”

“The uniform.”

“Might get me a few girls. Are we fuelled up yet?”

“Sure. During the night.”

I suppose that was why there were so many puddles in here: they’d brought the fuel-tanker in from the rain.

The telephone rang again and Ferris answered it, and there was an odd flash of understanding that passed between Connors and myself: we both wanted to look over there in case the call was important but we didn’t want to show each other how edgy we felt, so we didn’t turn our heads.

“Is it still raining?” I asked him.

There wasn’t any sound on the hangar roof.

“Drizzling, I guess.” He was peeling a piece of gum. “You use this stuff?”

“No. I’d probably choke on it.”

He laughed unnecessarily: things weren’t so bad if we could make our little jokes while the tune ran out and Bocker didn’t call and we hit zero still not knowing.

“What’s the visibility going to be like in the morning?” The morning was now fourteen minutes away.

“The last forecast was a mile and a half.”

“What’s the least I can work with?”

“I’d say twelve hundred feet, for this trip. That’s the length of your take-off roll.” He put the gum in his mouth and flicked the ball of paper into a puddle.

Ferris was still over there and the calls were coming through without a break now, all of them short, less than half a minute. He never raised his voice.

“How are you feeling?” Connors asked me.

“Fine.”

Because they had another twelve minutes to find Corporal Behrendt and he might just have run away from his wife.

“You shouldn’t have any problems.” He gave a tight smile. “You’re too well briefed.”

“Correct.”

Then some kind of vehicle pulled up outside the hangar and we could hear voices. One of the dogs started growling, deep in its throat, keeping it up until I could almost see the fangs and the stare of the trained-to-kill eyes.

“I wish that bloody thing would stop,” I said.

“You wish what?”

He’d been half-turned to the door, trying to hear what Ferris was saying on the phone.