The Sinkiang Executive

Chapter Ten: MOIRA

“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^th Squadron, 3^rd Air 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^th Squadron, 3^rd Air 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.

Silence.

This could of course be deliberate. They of all people know the effectiveness of keeping you guessing: they’ve used it as a tool in interrogation for centuries.

Watch what you’re doing and get your RPM up for the climb and don’t let those bastards work on your -

Did you squawk on Mode 4?

They knew I’d tried. Somewhere on the thumb wheel I’d passed the frequency.

Of course I did. I told you, nothing’s functioning properly.

I was safe up to a point because they couldn’t ask me what frequency I’d selected: I’d been briefed that Military 4 was their top-secret code and they wouldn’t want anyone in traffic control to know it.

Silence.

Ten thousand feet and still climbing. The optimum altitude for the thousand-mile leg in terms of fuel conservation was thirty-five thousand feet and the people down there weren’t telling me to use a different level.

They still didn’t answer but I knew now that it wasn’t just because they were untalkative They’d wanted to know my name because they’d been squawking on Mode 4 and I hadn’t answered and they’d wanted to find out why and I’d told them. That was all right. The thing that worried me was that they’d called me on the military frequency — they must have — for some specific reason and I couldn’t ask what it was. It’s one of the things the Soviets are very good at, these bland-faced silences that persuade you they’re thinking of something else. They’re not. They’re waiting for your next question, because it’s your questions, not your answers, that tell them what they want to know.

The set could have gone dead.

I fiddled with it and got static and some talk.

They were waiting for me to ask a question.

Bloody well wait.

I pushed her up through the last few thousand feet to thirty-five and levelled off and checked the panel and made out the log and tried to think what it was I was missing. I gave it a full ten minutes’ concentration, going over the whole of the flight from take-off until now and looking for trouble and not finding any. The briefing patterns were intact and the schedule was on the line and you can forget the Hungarian phase because no one in Hungary is going to put a trace on a M1G-28D with Soviet markings seen going eastwards: if you want to defect in one of these things you’ve got to go the other way.

So there was nothing wrong. Except the missing factor.

Ignore.

ETA Dzhezkazgan was 12:16 and it was now 11:30 and I got fed up and pushed the levers all over the place on the air-conditioning control panel from full cold to full heat with zero to high on the fans and nothing happened except that I blew the map off my knee and had to get down there to pick it up and there wasn’t a lot of room. The actual cockpit temperature wasn’t too bad: it had dropped from 80 degrees to 63 degrees since I’d started climbing from Saratov; it was the g-suit more than anything, and the increased heat of the organism due to stress.

At any given stage in any given mission you’re not far from the crunch because you’re usually working on alien ground and it’s not long before an opposition cell picks up the action and starts coming in: I’m talking about the field executives in penetration work or in snatch jobs where you’ve got to home in to the target and hit the objective or deactivate it or bring it all the way in, whether it’s a document or a device or a flesh-and-blood defector. I’m not talking about the sleepers or the people in place or that sleazy crowd of pussy-footed pimps in the diplomatic infiltration set because the nearest they ever get to a crisis is when the paper runs out in the loo.

For the field executives the crunch is part of the trade and if it wasn’t there you wouldn’t do it, but that doesn’t mean you don’t let it worry you, assuming you want to live (Calthrop didn’t want to: one of his contacts told him there was going to be a secret police unit waiting for him at the airport but when he stepped out of the helicopter they weren’t there after all because he stepped out ten minutes before it came in to land.)

With a thing like Slingshot the crunch was going to be fairly close the whole of the way: there was no specific opposition to initiate close combat but the general opposition police, secret police and counter-intelligence forces was there as a permanent background, because the alien-soil thing still applied and this was the sticky side of the Curtain: all they had to do was pull me in and there wouldn’t be anything useful I could tell them that would get me back across the frontier with anything like a pulse. I’d got airborne cover designed for getting me to Yelingrad through a reasonable degree of suspicion on the part of the traffic controllers responsible for the areas I was overflying, but if I ever let them get me down on the ground I wouldn’t make any more progress because there wasn’t any Finback 8X454 on the roster for the 36^th Squadron and if there was a pilot named Nikolai Voronov he wouldn’t look like this man sitting here at the table under the five-hundred-watt bulb.

The stress to the organism was therefore normal but there was the missing factor on my mind and that was bringing out some of the excess adrenalin.

Something to do with time.

A time factor. An estimation of some sort. An assumption.

Never assume. Never assume anything. It can be lethal.

What plane are you?

I told them.

What is your destination?

I said Dzhezkazgan. If I said anything else they’d only start getting the twitters when I didn’t alter course.

What is your present altitude?

Thirty-five thousand feet.

I waited for more.

There wasn’t any more.

The headset was silent.

It was the first time they’d asked for my destination. That would be the military, putting the question through Mode 3. They were getting warm now: I had to take photographs over Dzhezkazgan and there was still thirty-one minutes’ flying time remaining on the log and that gave them plenty of room. They were already interested in me and I believed they were now checking on the information I’d given them, which meant it was a matter of time before they found I was putting out cover and ordered me down. This is what I meant when I said that on this operation we were going to work close to the crunch the whole time: if they decided to investigate me they only had to say a few final words into my headset and Slingshot would detonate. You are ordered to land immediately. Tick-tock-bang.

I sat listening to the long-drawn muted thunder of the jets. Through the windscreen the sky was cut in half by a line of cloud reaching from somewhere near the ground fifty miles away to as high as I could see; one huge swathe of the darker half was almost black but there was no lightning: it was too cold for a storm, though it could be a mile-high drift of snow moving up from the south-east. It didn’t worry me because my speed was consistent at Mach.95 and I would reach the camera target in twenty-five minutes from now and climb above the weather if I had to.

What worried me was the time factor: the thing I was missing. It had something to do with Furstenfeldbruck and there was an image floating at the edge of consciousness that I still couldn’t recognize. Ignore. Let it come in when I wasn’t thinking of it: it’s the only access to the subconscious.

Another thing that worried me was the shape of the airborne phase of Slingshot as seen on paper. It was wedge-shaped, in terms of increasing risk. I’d gone in at the wide end and I was now somewhere past the middle and I would soon be narrowing down to the point: which was Yelingrad. But it was still open ended, to a degree. I couldn’t remain airborne over Soviet territory indefinitely because my fuel was limited and I couldn’t cross a frontier because even at my peak ceiling I’d still be on their screens and they could shoot me down. Parkis had known this, and had framed a specific directive: at the moment when the wedge narrowed down to its point I was to disappear.