ADAM HALL - The Sinkiang Executive

“I don’t give a damn who you are.”

She meant what I was.

It was the first thing she ever said to me, and she didn’t know it was important. She still doesn’t.

“It’s unusual,” I said.

This was later.

“What is?”

“Not wanting to know.”

“Oh.” The head perfectly still, the long green eyes alone moving to look at me. “But then I’m a lot more than just sex, aren’t I?”

She has rich auburn hair, clouds of it, but doesn’t use it for effect: she uses her shoulders. They are slightly tanned and she likes them bare and knows how to move them, though she does it sparingly because it’s an expression of foreplay and it can devastate. Somewhere along the line there’s a car smash and a divorce and an autistic child she’s slowly bringing to life, and other things.

“This business I’m in,” she told me a year ago, “I don’t know.” We were looking down into the Thames, just before dawn. “It isn’t doing anything for me. It’s slowly beginning to hollow out my guts, but I can’t stop.” After a bit: “It’s like that with you, isn’t it?”

“No.”

Too quick and she heard it, and laughed softly.

“You never turn your back, do you? Maybe I could learn from that: I’ve been letting things creep up on me.”

She flew out to Taiwan a month ago with her director to do a remake of Song of the Islands and I couldn’t see her off because this thing had started, but whenever she leaves, or I leave, I get the same feeling: that all she’s going to see of me again is a dozen roses. I’ve been trying for a long time to break this insidious association of her name with death — my death — but it still comes in strongly when the odds are stacked and it looks like the end of the line, and I felt it now because the climb indicator was showing a ten-degree angle as I eased the control column back and watched the airspeed come down through 550 knots before I pushed the throttles forward and took her back to 640 and sat waiting.

This was the stage I’d been trying not to think about since we’d cleared the Carpathians without drawing fire; I’d grown used to being close to the ground where no one could see me but at Zhmerinka I had to shift out of the access phase and fly my image deliberately on to their radar screens and I was doing that now and it felt dangerous and in the microsecond intervals between practical observations I thought of Moira.

Altitude 500 feet.

600.

700.

What plane are you?

They were on to me very fast and I didn’t like it because I was well beyond the Air Defence Identification Zone and only four miles west of the airfield at Zhmerinka and they shouldn’t be so bloody surprised at seeing a MiG on the screen.

The briefing had been precise on this and I switched the transponder thumb wheel to the Mode 3 frequency and squawked.

800.

900.

What is your course?

I told them 104 degrees and went on climbing steadily.

One thousand feet.

It really was very hot in this bloody cockpit and I looked at the air-conditioning lever but it had been on full cool since I’d crossed the Austro-Hungarian border and the thing was obviously defunct.

1200.

They hadn’t answered me.

I didn’t like that either. I didn’t like any of it because there was something in the back of my mind that was nagging all the time, something I’d missed.

There was still no answer. I was tempted to ask them for an acknowledgement and I resisted it because when in Rome you’ve got to do as the Romans do and don’t you forget it. That man down there was just not the talkative type: he’d popped a couple of questions and got a couple of answers and now he’d gone back to checking somebody’s king, fair enough, it was the way they did things over here.

You’re just cheering yourself up.

Wouldn’t you?

Going through four thousand feet I checked instruments and brought the log up to date and changed course by five degrees to take me north of the missile site at Voliapin. They could reach me at a hundred miles’ range and I wasn’t trying to get out of their way: it’s just that when you creep past the lion’s den you take care not to tread on its tail.

Of course I was still on their screens and I was going to stay there now wherever I went: this wasn’t a sneak penetration any more, it was a cover trip and everything was taking shape according to the briefing except that I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind that I was missing something, some kind of factor that had started quietly developing like a slow-burn fuse and would reach the point of detonation before I could do anything to stop it.

Something to do with time.

What plane are you?

MiG-28D No. 8X454 from 36 thSquadron, 3 rdAir Command.

What course are you on?

One hundred and one degrees.

I didn’t name my actual destination: Saratov.

There was no acknowledgement It didn’t worry me this time: earlier I’d felt they were puzzled and had started checking on the information I’d given them. They were just untalkative.

And you’re just trying to -

Shuddup.

Alter course 4 degrees south and maintain speed at Mach 95. This would bring me to bear directly on Saratov and I would be -

What course are you on?

I got back very fast with 105 degrees and started sweating hard because they didn’t just have me on their screens: they were following me under a microscope.

I don’t like cover trips. Sneak penetration is flexible and versatile and you can go flat out and break every rule in the book and outthink the opposition if you’re quick enough and outrun them if you’ve got the speed: I could have done all that over Hungary and still got through because they didn’t know where I was and they didn’t know where I was going next But these people knew precisely where I was and precisely where I was going next and I had to sit here and let them watch and if anything scared me I couldn’t hit the controls and start scraping the deck to get off the screens because the instant they lost me they’d put up a flock of interceptors with radar and find me again.

They’d find me whatever I did.

Fly on a web.

ATA Saratov: 10:47.

I took photographs one minute later in level flight at three thousand feet without having to deviate and I don’t think I could have done it in any other way because they started calling me up before I’d switched the camera off.

What plane are you?

MiG-28D No. SX454.

From what squadron?

36 thSquadron, 3 rdAir Command.

They asked me for repeats and I sent them.

What is your name?

The nerves went tight because this wasn’t traffic control material any more.

Colonel Nikolai Voronav . I took a chance. Listen, my set’s out of order. I can’t seem to get anything.

Silence.

Sit and sweat.

I didn’t know the frequency for the military Mode 4 and I suspected they’d been trying to test me because what is your name? is strictly not a traffic control question.

They weren’t answering.

Automatically I was easing the stick back to climb for the Saratov-Dzhezkazgan leg and save fuel, but I was also listening for

any -

Have you been squawking on Mode 4?

Yes.

Connors had said: “ Tell them you’re sending and let them tell you they’re not receiving. Then sound surprised. And here’s one buster who’s glad he won’t be there.”

Signal on Mode 4.

I waited five seconds and then spun the thumb wheel against the ratchet and spoke slowly, this is Colonel Voronov calling you from MiG-28D 8X454, so forth, repeating until the wheel came to a stop. At some point they must have picked up a few words and with any luck it had sounded as if the set was on the blink.