ADAM HALL - The Sinkiang Executive

When the door was shut Ferris stood for half a minute with his sandy head tilted and his eyes moving by degrees around the room, looking at nothing. We could hear the sound of the tyres on the landing outside and the whine of the lift as it came up from below; then the door rattled shut and the whine began again, rather lighter than before: presumably the counterweights were less heavy than the lift cage plus Charlie and put less strain on the motor.

Ferris went on listening. The door of the lift may have closed by now — I couldn’t tell; there were other sounds from below: street traffic, someone on the phone, the voice of the chestnut vendor, a dustbin lid banging in the rear. Ferris waited another fifteen seconds and then padded across the floor and opened the door and looked out, listening again.

He wasn’t normally like this: the field directors aren’t executives and they take security for granted; all they have to do if something blows is to get out as fast as they can, and perhaps that makes them less cautious. Tonight Ferris was nervy and I didn’t like that: one of the things your director in the field is supposed to do is to assure you, by his whole attitude, that things are running perfectly and you’re going to come out all right.

He closed the door and came padding back in his soft green shoes, looking at the spiders in their transparent plastic boxes as he passed the bench.

“They’ve got a lethal bite, haven’t they?”

“It depends on your condition,” I said. “They pack about the same kick as a rattlesnake.” Charlie had filled me in.

Ferris peered down at them, fascinated. “They’re so small.”

“For Christ’s sake don’t tread on them. He has them flown in from Arizona.”

He tapped a box to make one of them move, then lost interest and padded past me and sat on Charlie’s bed. “How are the flying lessons?”

“All right.”

“Nearly through, I’m told.”

“Another two days.”

“Did you get any prelim briefing out there?”

“Only on flying.”

He looked up quickly. “Well, they wouldn’t have briefed you on anything else, would they?”

“How the hell should I know?” I was getting fed up with his studied reproofs. “Nobody’s told me who that chap Gilmore is — he could be Bureau for all I know, couldn’t he?”

“Unlikely,” he said after a moment. “You see, we — ”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake do your job, Ferris. If you’re my director in the field for this one then bloody well say so, and if you’re not then tell me who is.”

I went over to the fridge in the corner and found some milk and drank it from the carton, bringing it with me, calcium for the nerves. All right, a lot of it was characteristic paranoia and a lot of it was guilt, but he ought to understand that: it was what he was for, to guide me and send me out with my armour shining and my head held high and some — at least some — of the fear assuaged in the pit of my shrinking gut.

Because this was likely to be the last go, and we both knew that. Not because there wouldn’t be a chance in hell of getting out at the other end there’s always a chance but because they didn’t want me back. And I don’t know how those poor devils do it, standing on the trap with a good breakfast inside them and a parting joke for the priest, I’m not like that, I don’t intend to go out doing nothing, I’m going to fight like a cat in a sack, and if you’ve ever tried drowning one you’ll know what I mean.

“You’re rather touchy,” Ferris said.

“Didn’t think you’d notice.”

He waited five seconds and then said: “All right, I’m your director and this session has got to be your clearance and field briefing, because you obviously can’t get back into London and there isn’t enough time anyway. Time,” he said and swung a glance at me, “is very short as things are. Otherwise we’d have extended your flying hours by another fifty, which Gilmore has been bleating at us to do.”

I couldn’t think of anything useful to say. The gut just shrank a little more.

“A wheel has come off, as I told you, in Central Asia. But we’re not sending you out there to put it back on; this isn’t the situation you had to face in Tunisia. This is your mission exclusively and not the tag-end of someone else’s. Incidentally the code-name for the mission is Slingshot. Time is short but that doesn’t mean Control hasn’t been able to set everything up satisfactorily while you’ve been learning to fly those things in Zaragoza. We’ve got total access’ he gave an amused snort for some reason ‘and we’ve got reasonable cover. The target is precise and the field hasn’t any specific opposition deployed.” He got off the bed and put his thin freckled hands into the pockets of his mac and wandered about. “The get out point can’t be defined because it’ll depend on local conditions, but you’ll be close to a neutral frontier. You won’t be, for instance, anywhere like Moscow. I hope all this makes you feel a little better.”

It looked all right. They weren’t going to drop me into a mess someone else had made and there wasn’t any opposition except of course for the entire population of the USSR, including the army. But they were non-specific.

“Let’s start with the access,” I said. “What frontier?”

“In effect, there won’t be any. You’ll be going too fast.”

I felt another slight squeezing of the gut. “I’m not going in with one of those things?” I meant the FM-3o’s I’d been flying at Zaragoza.

“Oh no. You wouldn’t get very far, would you? No, they’ve got a Finback lined up for you in West Germany, complete with markings.”

“A Finback?”

“That’s right.”

NATO designation for the Soviet MiG-28D, duo syllabic F group: Fishbed, Foxbat, Flogger, so forth. I said: “Jesus Christ, where did they get it?”

“One of their defectors put it down in Alaska, in July last year. We — ”

“ That one?”

“That one.”

I suppose he was enjoying himself in a way. The field directors get a certain amount of glory spilling over from London when Control comes up with something exotic or spectacular: access is a phase where the planners can use their creative imagination and they always try for something elegant it’s a sophisticated exercise and the spotlight’s on them and they can rake in a lot of kudos if they devise something effective, especially if the heat’s on and they’ve got the clock to beat. The one we like was when they dropped Dawkins smack in the middle of the sports stadium in San Salvador by parachute in broad daylight and dressed up as a clown, five minutes before President La Paz was due there to make a speech Dawkins said he was advertising for the local circus. It was an anti-terrorist thing and London had had exactly three hours to get a man in there so they’d used a private plane and one of our sleepers, unsuccessfully because La Paz took a magnum in the rib cage before we could do anything, but that didn’t spoil the score for the access.

Of course they don’t work at the spectacular for its own sake: the prime requirement of access is that it’s the best way in to the target area, meaning quickest, safest, most discreet, so forth. If the best way in is through a main drain then you’ve got to crawl through the bloody thing and hope there’s more than one end.

This was the first time they’d thought of putting a man into Russia in a MiG-28D with Russian markings and that was why Ferris was looking pleased.

“How long have I got with it?” I asked him. Time was short, fair enough, but it hadn’t got to be that short.

“You mean to train with it?” He was looking away.