ADAM HALL - The Sinkiang Executive

“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.

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 walked 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.