ADAM HALL - The Sinkiang Executive

I checked instruments and noted the new course on the log card and took her up to four hundred feet because there were low hills on the map and I couldn’t see them: I couldn’t see anything .

The jets were rumbling like a freight-tram and all systems were in good order but the cockpit air-conditioning wasn’t doing its job and I was sweating too much energy away. At 600 knots and close to the deck the air was bumpy and I went up another hundred.

They’d stopped calling.

That could mean anything. I didn’t think they’d just give up but at this stage there wasn’t much they could do because their interceptors wouldn’t find me in this stuff and they wouldn’t want to send up any flak because they weren’t sure I wasn’t one of their own pilots with a duff radio.

Some of the sweat wasn’t due to the cockpit temperature: flying blind at this speed put a lot of stress on the organism because if the altimeter developed a fault I could hit a hill or a grid or a radio mast at any next second and write the whole thing off. But I didn’t want to go any higher because their radar would pick me up and I’d start running into the duck shoot before I’d even crossed the border.

Sit and sweat.

Parkis, you bastard.

Don’t think about Parkis.

Check and recheck, RPM, EOT, fuel, warning lights, artificial horizon, altitude, airspeed.

Two minutes later there was a hellish bump and the top of my helmet touched the canopy and I took her up to six hundred as a reflex action because the hills were below and this degree of turbulence could drop me two hundred before I could do anything about it.

Parkis was on my -

Don’t think about Parkis

On my mind because Ferris had been so bloody shut-in while we were all waiting for that corporal to turn up and he’d been in constant signals with London while Connors was final-briefing me in the hangar before dawn this morning and a few minutes ago an idea had got into my head and it wasn’t nice. Those bastards in London could have -

Bump and the whole of the airframe shuddered and I kept low on the seat and wished to Christ I could see something because there was an isolation factor getting into the psyche: I was flying into nothing and there was nothing behind me and the needle on the dial was losing its meaning if this thing slowed down and stood still in the sky with the jets still running I wouldn’t feel any difference.

Climb.

No. Radar.

Climb just a little bit.

I’m not scared enough. Not yet.

Those bastards in London could have ordered an execution during that last hour at Furstenfeldbruck and that could have been why Ferris had been so shut-in at a time when it was his job as the director in the field to give me every possible reassurance and get me to the zero feeling I had a chance.

Noise like a freight-train, a freight-train going nowhere, standing still in a cold grey void: you can keep your bearings by looking at the dials in front of you but you can lose them inside your skull if you don’t hang on.

That bastard Parkis could have given Ferris a final directive: if that corporal is found to be in the hands of a Soviet cell or is considered to have been in their hands and under interrogation for a period long enough for him to have divulged the nature of Slingshot, the executive is not to be informed, and the operation is to proceed as planned.

That would be logical because this was a new kind of mission and it had its own built-in destruct unit and there was a point we could reach where they would use it. The two components of Slingshot were a man and a machine and they were both expendable: this thing I was flying was a museum-piece and it’d be cheaper to junk it than take it all the way back to the States; and the pilot was due for throwing out if he ever got back alive and it’d be cheaper to let him go into the access phase and run into a certain barrage than take him back to London and debrief him. It would save us the unpleasant task, later, so forth.

Destruct. Destruct by neglect.

You’re paranoiac.

No, I -

Ferris said so.

But they could have found Corporal Behrendt, or his body -

You surely don’t believe -

Shuddup . They could have found Behrendt and that man Bocker could have called up Ferris with the news and Ferris could have told him to keep a blackout on it, a total blackout. Within the context of an expendable man and an expendable machine it’s a perfectly logical premise, and I -

But even Parkis wouldn’t do a thing -

He wouldn’t what?

I was in his office with two other people the day Swarmer came in half-dead from fatigue after running the gauntlet from Prague to the border and losing two couriers. He’d blown the whole route wide open and Parkis had made the three of us stay in the room while he stood in front of Swarmer and took a full ten minutes to break the man up while we had to listen to it. He never raised his voice, which made it worse. I was in his office a year later when Laszlo was brought in to plead for asylum. Parkis told him that for political reasons we were going to drop him back across the frontier where the KGB were hunting for him, and the poor little devil put a pill in his mouth and hit the floor before we could stop him.

Be advised: Parkis will do anything .

Drifting.

Wind gusts.

I corrected the attitude.

And there was another thing. One of our sleepers in Brussels had got himself into a Venus trap and one of the Moscow cells had turned him and he’d begun doubling and Parkis had sent a man out to deactivate him before he got dangerous, and the man was back within twenty-four hours and there weren’t any questions asked but we passed the hat round in all departments for the sleeper’s widow. The man who went out, and came back, was Ferris.

Drift Correct.

And forget.

At this point I was thirteen minutes from the Hungarian-Soviet frontier and flying towards it at a steady six hundred knots and if Corporal Behrendt had been got at successfully I had these last thirteen minutes to live, so it was a good time to make a decision: go back or go on. But nothing had changed since I’d committed myself and put this thing into the air, except that the idea had come into my mind, about Parkis. But that could be paranoia and if I gave in to it I could make so many wrong decisions that I could wreck an awful lot more than the life and career of just one little shit-scared ferret on his way to a terminal explosion.

Twelve minutes now, not thirteen. Twelve.

I could for instance abort this mission and swing back to Furstenfeldbruck and tell Ferris to get me to London, but they had a manhunt going on there and I was the man and it’d be no go because the Bureau wouldn’t let me in: once in the dock and with no defence I could bring down the Sacred Bull and they knew that. They’d order Ferris to hole me up on neutral ground and keep me there till they could debrief me and let me loose like a piece of junk with a pension, or save their money and rig a bang in a flight bag and put me in the records as executive deceased between missions , I wouldn’t put it past them, I wouldn’t put anything past those idolatrous bloody pagans if they had to choose between the Bull and a human being.

Bump , very bumpy. We dropped a hundred and fifty just then and I don’t understand it because there ought to be flat land below us now without any turbulence.

I brought her to five hundred and stared through the windscreen at the blank grey wall and listened to the jets pushing me into it with the force of a hurricane and looked down at the clock again: eleven.