ADAM HALL - The Sinkiang Executive

“Nothing.” I went up the steps to talk to Baccari in the cockpit, not pleased with myself, not pleased at all, ten minutes from the jump and showing my nerves to anyone who was around, dear Jesus, I’d have to do better than this, much better than this.

“We’re all checked,” Baccari said and climbed out. Then everyone was moving suddenly and I saw an NCO come through the door and go up to Connors. Ferris came off the phone and started across to the plane, walking a little quicker than he usually did. A nerve in my eyelid began flickering and I was aware of it and knew there was no way to stop it except by relaxing and I couldn’t do that now.

“Everything’s go,” I heard Connors say, and the NCO went back to the door at a slow run. There were voices outside again and one of the dogs barked and a word of command silenced it.

Ferris was standing at the bottom of the steps looking up at me, his hands in the pockets of his mac and his pale head tilted under the lights.

“Bocker hasn’t got anything definite for us,” he said, ‘so far.”

The eyelid went on flickering.

“How’s London?”

“They’re being kept informed.”

Of nothing. Uninformation.

The colonel’s outfit looks good,” Ferris said.

Then the hangar doors began rolling open, making a thin crack of dark that spread slowly with a noise like distant thunder. No stars, no trees, nothing but the dark. It wasn’t morning yet, and I stared at the great black rectangle thinking that if morning never came it would be all right; and I’ve learned for a long time mat the only thing to do about that kind of thought when you’re within minutes of the crunch is to be aware of it, recognize the emotion behind it and remember that it’s natural, perfectly natural.

Men were coming in from the rain, their camouflaged capes bright with it. They came towards the Finback.

Franzheim was waiting for me at the bottom of the steps.

“You want a final run-through with the maps?”

“No.”

We’d covered it exhaustively and the day before the exams old Winthrop used to boot me out on to the rugger field. My God, that was a long time ago: is he still alive? He used to smell of camphor.

Baccari was at the bottom of the steps, winding his instrument leads into a skein over his hand, turning to look across at the telephone: it had begun ringing again and Connors took the call.

07:49 on my watch.

I looked at Ferris. “Have they pushed our zero forward?”

“It’s not daylight yet,” he said and walked off before I could ask him anything else. I suppose they were dragging their heels in London, weighing up the chances and sending each other prissy little memos while these rain-caped men in here guided the tractor across to the Finback and dropped the lugs of the tow-bar into the holes and signalled the driver, sending each other memos for your eyes only, so forth, going through the required bureaucratic ritual, Parkis in Signals now, standing behind the man at the console for the Slingshot board with the red light not switched on yet Egerton with him, possibly, or possibly not: Parkis might have kept him away at the last minute, clearing the place of everyone except the signals personnel. Parkis would be nervous now. Even Parkis.

The Finback began rolling, a man at each wingtip and one at the tail as the tractor gunned up a little and made for the middle of the doorway. Connors was coming over from the phone and I waited for him.

“We’re cleared by the Met along most of the course.” Franzheim heard him and shook a map open. “You’ll be running into cloud at two thousand feet this side of Zhmerinka but that’s okay because you don’t have to take any pictures there. Saratov is clear and the cloud floor over Dzhezkazgan is between four and five thousand, so you can go in below it with the camera. There’s a cold front moving north across Sinkiang towards Yelingrad and they’re looking for snow some time before the afternoon, but you could make it and get pictures before it closes in, unless they offer you some kind of harassment that forces you off your course.”

I asked him about wind strengths and we looked at the map again. Franzheim was folding it away when a short man in aircrew overalls joined us and Connors presented him to me as Colonel Lambach, the base commander. We exchanged courtesies and the telephone rang and the guard took the call but I was getting fed up with watching the thing and Ferris didn’t seem interested so I went outside and saw the first flush of light coming into the sky behind the dark mass of the hangar.

07:58 with a light drizzle falling and the sharp angular form of the MiG-28D rolling through the haze, the tractor swinging it between ground markers to bring the tail at right-angles to a jet stream barrier. There were no lights on, anywhere at all: even the tower was dark except for the directional beacon. The men followed the plane without calling to each other, two of them pulling the trolley-accumulators into position below the fuselage, making no sound but for the hiss of the tyres over the wet concrete. I had heard Connors saying that until daylight came the airfield would be operating under war-time blackout conditions.

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.