ADAM HALL - The Sinkiang Executive

The engines were rumbling and one of them fired, and thirty seconds later the other one came in. They began whining now, their sound rising slightly and then falling as they stabilized at idle with the exhaust gas temperature still cool at 380 degrees. Connors came through on the UHF and I adjusted the set and acknowledged; then we began bringing the systems on line and setting the configurations while I reported the oil, fuel and hydraulic pressures and the RPM.

Pressurize.

I flicked the switch.

Check trim.

I moved the controls, watching the mirror.

Okay . I turned my head and saw him holding his thumb up. Wait for the green.

What about those lights?

You’ll get them.

I began waiting for the tower to come through. They’d strapped the clip-board to my right knee and I took the pencil out: I couldn’t crow-fly the first leg to the Carpathian range because it would take me twice across the Hungarian-Czechoslovakian border, so the initial magnetic course was 148 and I filled it in. ETA for the turning-point was thirty-five minutes after take-off and I left it blank because I didn’t have the data: the time was now 08:21 and the tower was still out.

Connors was standing where I could see him easily. He was looking up at me and then turning his head towards the control tower. I tried them again and they didn’t respond.

“Shit,” I said to anyone who was listening.

Connors heard me and went over to the flight van for a lamp. He was obviously trying to get the tower and couldn’t.

I was beginning to sweat, and the cockpit pressure was uncomfortable. When I looked down again Connors was pointing the lamp at the tower, pressing it on and off. I looked back at the main panel. The clock was out of synch with my watch by fifteen seconds and I adjusted it and began thinking that London must have come through with a fifty-ninth-second order to abort and that was why the tower was keeping us on ice like this, or they had found that corporal and seen the marks on his body and decided that if anyone slipped a Finback across the border he’d run smack into a duck shoot because -

Tower to 8X454.

Hear you , I said. Where the hell have you been ?

Stand by.

Sweat was itching.

Then Connors came on again.

Internal power.

I switched over.

I’m on internal.

They turned off the ground-unit and the staff began moving clear.

Chocks gone. You can proceed to the runway.

I slipped the brakes.

There were no lights yet and I thought of asking for them again, but Connors had sounded a fraction curt the last time and I suppose they were going to wait for the last minute, to observe blackout orders.

The engines whined. The readings were satisfactory all over the panel but the cockpit heat was too high and I lowered it but didn’t feel anything immediately. Sweat ran.

Birds flew up from behind one of the marker boards as I swung into line with the runway, their wings black against the glare of the haze in the east. Rivulets ran down the windscreen and I cleared it and sat waiting, watching the tower.

The tower was quiet.

Connors was off the air now: I tried him but all I got was my own dead voice. When I looked down and sideways I couldn’t see anyone. Connors would be in the flight van: it had swung through the rain to line up parallel with me a hundred yards away. Ferris wouldn’t be with him: he would have gone back to the hangar to wait by the telephone in case it rang and he had to get a signal to me to switch everything off. If he didn’t get a call he would make one himself, the moment I was airborne.

I watched the tower again.

The set was still dead.

The birds that had flown up were circling now, lowering across the bright wet grass where -

Green light.

Tower to 8X454.

Hear you.

You’re cleared for take-off.

Roger.

I pumped the brakes and pushed the throttles forward to military power.

Confirm canopy locked.

It was Connors again, from the van.

I checked the lever.

Confirm locked. All systems for climb out are now on.

Confirm ejection seat pin pulled.

Confirm.

I switched over to continuous ignition to prevent a flame-out and reported to Connors. The sound of the engines at 85 per cent of their power was a sustained scream and the aircraft was trembling as the thrust worked at it, straining against the lyres.

The tower came through again.

There’s no traffic. There is no traffic.

I acknowledged and checked the engine dials and then looked up through the windscreen. Streaks of rain had formed again and I cleared them but it wasn’t much better: I could see the control tower on my right with the green signal showing steadily but the view immediately ahead was a sheet of diffused grey light and I couldn’t make out the runway beyond a hundred yards.

What the hell were they doing?

8X454 to tower. Can you give me -

They must have had their hand on the button because the runway lights were suddenly glowing and I just told them I was rolling and took off the brakes and pushed the throttles forward to full power and heard the twin jets hitting up a scream that totally blanked out something that was coming through to me on the headset. I didn’t ask them to repeat because this was the go and if someone had got it wrong they’d have to punch off a flare: the scream was filling my skull now and the set was drowned out The amethyst light-path tapered ahead of the windscreen and the individual lamps were blurring into a continuous line as they slid past and out of sight. There was an awful lot of vibration at this speed and it was getting worse but Thompson had warned me about this and I ignored it and kept the throttles hard against the quadrant stop and sat watching the track of lights with the stick dead steady until I flicked a glance at the dials and pulled it back and waited.

By Christ this one was quick and they’d told me about that too: the lights fell away and the vibration eased off and I felt the tensions shifting in the airframe as the stress came off the undercarriage and the mass became cushioned and the aerodynamics came into play.

I hit the retract button.

Ten-tenths rain haze and the fierce push of the jets against my back and a microsecond image of Ferris at a telephone putting a red light on the board in London as Slingshot began running.

They picked me up again between Budapest and Kecskemet.

Hova valo?

I kept silent.

They’d got on to me twenty minutes ago when I’d slipped across the Austro-Hungarian frontier at Mach.95 at three hundred feet, and since then I’d been expecting interceptors. I couldn’t tell if this second demand for identity was isolated or if they’d started signals from the frontier to get ahead of me on the ground. If they hadn’t done it already they could start doing it now and I couldn’t go fast enough to beat them.

Visibility had opened out since the frontier but the sky closed in now like a lid coming down and I was flying into a ten-tenths screen of rain.

Hova valo?

Nothing I could tell them.

This was where I had to make a 118 degree turn to meet the east border near the Latorica, and the cement works that Franzheim had given me as a landmark were buried in the sludge so I used the compass and hoped for a break in the rain farther east to give me a visual fix.

Igazolja magat!

Oh for Christ’s sake I’m a British intelligence agent up from a West German NATO base flying a MiG-28D into Soviet airspace with cover as a Red Army colonel and if you’ll believe that you’ll believe anything.