The Sinkiang Executive

Chapter Eleven: DUCKSHOOT

ETA Dzhezkazgan was noon plus 15 and I began the run in from thirty-five thousand feet and made an ATA of 12.17 and took photographs and pulled out. From three thousand feet I couldn’t see anything remarkable about the village, but the complex of farm silos might seem rather substantial and the long avenue of trees to the north could cover a transporter rail to the rectangular barns at the end: for rectangular barns read assembly plant

Ten minutes later the centre-line tanks emptied and the light came on and I dropped them over the Golodnaya Steppe and felt the slight increase in airspeed as the drag came off.

Then I began running.

Yelingrad was five hundred miles and the fuselage tanks would give me that distance plus five hundred before we hit bingo and if nothing disturbed the pattern we could make it. But that was academic because an awful lot of things were going wrong: I was still on their screens and I’d overflown two suspect missile sites at low altitude and they hadn’t asked any questions. To take those photographs I’d been prepared to fly a Mach 2 marathon on the after-burners and finish up with empty tanks a long way short of Yelingrad. That hadn’t happened and it should have and I didn’t know why.

The Voronov cover wasn’t that good. I was only a colonel flying a lone course, not a general with fighter escort. The planners in London would have spent a long time on this, working out precisely which rank would suit me best and having to choose between the authority vested in the higher ranks and the increasing availability of the lower: there could be a dozen Colonel Voronovs on the Soviet Air Force list and it would make rapid identification difficult.

Dzhezkazgan Traffic Control to Military 8X454.

I told them I was listening.

Two minutes ago I had pushed the throttles forward and the Finback was climbing for thirty-five thousand feet at close to full power and I was now watching the three mirrors for contrails because I did not believe those people on the ground were letting me get away with it.

What is your course?

I told them 103 degrees.

What is your destination?

I told them Zaysan because Yelingrad was at the point of the wedge and I was heading in that precise direction. There was silence while they worked out that my course for Zaysan should be 101 degrees.

Repeat your course.

It had taken them five seconds.

I repeated.

Silence.

The jets were pushing me into the haze at a fifty-degree? angle and the right side of the windscreen was filled with the dark cloud, its base line swinging gradually as I climbed.

Repeat your destination.

Told them Zaysan.

Use your Mode 4.

Said I’d try.

I didn’t think much of my chances now because this wasn’t Dzhezkazgan Traffic Control calling me: it was the Red Air Force.

I let sixty seconds go by and called them.

A different voice came on.

What is the purpose of your flight?

It was the Red Air Force and somewhere between Zhmerinka and this part of the sky above the wastelands of Golodnaya they’d started to investigate me on the computers and now they were going to give me the full treatment.

I refuse to divulge a military secret.

Thirty thousand feet and still climbing with the jets blowing out thunder and the windscreen darkening: there was no visual fix but the stuff I was going into looked like cloud-base.

The new voice began asking questions again: aircraft number, name of pilot, squadron, so forth.

Who the hell are you? I asked him.

Major-General Ivan Yashenko.

He didn’t give his unit so the name should obviously be known to a colonel in the 36^th Squadron of the 3^rd Air Command. I put my left hand on the thumb wheel turning it slightly back and forth while I was speaking.

The purp — my flight is — test the fuel-range — MiG-28D with — tanks of capacit — conditions of high -

Ten seconds.

You will repeat that.

So we were into the act and I moved the thumb wheel every time I answered him and made sure to dick back on to his frequency when he was speaking. There was a limited amount of smoke I could put out now and it wasn’t going to cover me for more than a few minutes but it was worth doing because I was now levelling out at thirty-five thousand feet and sustaining Mach 18. At this velocity the sound inside the cockpit had taken on an orchestral quality as the ancillaries spun at close to their peak revolutions, whining thinly above the bellow of the engines. The hollower roar of the exhaust was no longer audible because the machine was outstripping the sound of its passage by a factor of more than two, and this had brought a strange decrease in the overall volume: the ears, used to greater sound at greater speeds, felt deafened.

This is General Yashenko. Can you hear me?

Can — you intermitt — but — either channel. If -

I left it at that and stayed on 3 and watched the contrails. They were about equidistant, one in each of the side mirrors, and had curved in from the left.

Yashenko had gone quiet and I spun the thumb wheel because it was possible he was now in touch with the two other aircraft. The contrails were expanding slowly and I could now see the machines themselves, small black shapes silhouetted against the white plumes they were leaving behind them across the sky.

I had to assume they were Foxbats, since according to NATO Intelligence reports that was the only aircraft capable of gaining on me so fast at my present airspeed of 1200 knots.

I watched the mirrors.

— Ko — Can you hear -

I waited.

This is General Yashenko. Can you hear me?

I can — times — but -

You are ordered to land your machine immediately.

One of the doors slammed in my mind: one of the doors to survival. I’d been expecting the order but not so early. Something had started travelling faster than the three of us up here, some new element of intelligence.

I didn’t reply.

The two aircraft were now beginning to come up on me and their shapes were in each of the three mirrors, quite large configurations with rectangular sides and inclined tail fins, perfectly outlined against their white contrails.

Colonel Voronov. You are ordered to land immediately.

Sometimes a few seconds are worth saving and I moved the thumb wheel across and across a ten-degree arc as I spoke.

Suggest contact — base commander at — or — yevsk satellite field. My — to remain on — mission -

I set the wheel and concentrated on the two Foxbats as they drew gradually abreast, one on each side at a distance of something like a hundred yards. I could make out the pilots’ heads: the one on the left had his face turned to watch me and I thought I saw his hand waving. I waved back. The one on the right was also waving, with a distinctive hand motion pointing over and down, over and down. I suppose they were calling me up and not getting any answer. I waved again to acknowledge and then checked instruments and made a calculation on the log. The city of Yelingrad was twelve minutes ahead if I remained on course and the white ridges of the Khrebet Tarbagatay range were moving into the bottom right-hand corner of the windscreen.

General Yashenko to Colonel Voronov, aircraft SX454 -

I took a quick look at the Foxbat on the right and saw the pilot signal again, his hand jerking impatiently. Below him was the glint of grey water as we flew parallel with Lake Balkhash, and I checked the green-code map for the last time.

— I personally order you to land immediately.

Connors had told me to yell at them and show my authority but I was outranked and there wasn’t any point in using the radio again because the two interceptors had been sent up here to signal me what I had to do. There was a fractional delay when I hit the throttle to the end of the quadrant and the Mach number swept up and held there while I pulled the stick back and watched the nose come up and the dark cloud swing across the windscreen.

Action is always faster than reaction and I had the Finback streaking over into a left-hand roll before the other two aircraft showed any change in their attitude. They were still in level flight as I met the wall of the cloud at an angle and ran into total obscurity.

The cloud-face had been ten or twelve miles away when I’d started the manoeuvre and it had taken upwards of twenty-five seconds to cover the distance but the interceptors must have lost something like a fifth of that period in total reaction time from the alert in the pilot’s brain to the start of military power and for the moment they’d lost me.

The tight swing of the turns had sent the blood into my legs and the g-suit was swelling and compressing them but there was a tendency to blackout and the bellow of the jets kept fading and coming back as I tried to keep my eyes open and couldn’t manage it, too much singing, the head dropping on one side, it doesn’t really matter because everything’s — it does matter — singing softly and the light — it does matterpull out of it pull yourself out of this — the head coming up and the panel lights glowing below the blank windscreen and reflecting down from the canopy as the thunder of the jets came back and I shifted the controls and set the Finback into an inverted downward curve because I had to get out of this cloud and get out fast: I was still on their ground radar and they could reach me with a blind-flying missile if they decided to get one off.

White ice was forming on the outside of the canopy and I flipped the lever for defrost and began watching the altimeter: the cloud base had looked something like ten thousand feet high when I’d last seen it but at one thousand knots airspeed I was being taken down so fast that I could find cloud at zero feet at the point where I came out. There were voices in the headset but the cloud was putting out too much static and I couldn’t hear what they were saying.

Assume they are ordering a kill.

Six thousand feet and going down like a stone.

Five thousand.

The city of Yelingrad should be somewhere east by south but the compass had been shaken up by the turns and the aircraft was still at an acute angle of descent and half-way through a curve designed to bring me put at two thousand feet in level flight but you don’t take this big a chance on instruments alone and I was easing the stick forward at four thousand feet.

Three thousand and bright light burst against the screen and I saw low hills and the snows of a mountain range much higher and to the left. If the two interceptors had taken up pursuit I wouldn’t see them from here: they’d have had to make a similar trajectory and by now they’d be thirty or forty thousand feet above me and possibly inside the cloud, but in a few seconds I ought to start watching the minors because they were faster than I was and if they came up behind me again they could float a missile at me without even taking aim. The compass had steadied and gave a reading of 106 degrees but it didn’t mean anything because the roll had taken me two or three thousand feet north of my original course and the blackout had lasted several seconds and I didn’t know what the Finback had been doing while I was out. The weather had been moving in from the south and the only feature I could see clearly was the range of white peaks dead ahead of me and they had to be the Khrebet Tarbagatay, fifteen miles beyond Yelingrad. It was a fix and I continued level flight at close to Mach 3.5, still using a lot of the gravity I’d picked up from the thirty-thousand-foot dive. The ground features were streaming past the canopy when I looked down but I saw the missile because it was ahead of me and just lifting from the launcher two thousand feet below. It was long and thin and white and my instinct was to kick the controls and get out of its way but that would be fatal because it could home on me wherever I went.

I watched it.

At this airspeed forward and the speed of the missile upward the collision point was seven or eight seconds away and I decided to remain on course for four seconds and try to judge the closeness of the thing by noting its size. This wouldn’t be easy because the combined speed at point of impact would in the region of three thousand knots and the process of vision is not instantaneous: the brain has a mass of computing to do when the eye sees a moving object.

I sat waiting. The idea, Thompson had told me over his cup of tea, is to leave it as late as you can.

It was now very hot inside the cockpit because I’d left the defroster going and a trickle of sweat had reached a corner of my eye and there wasn’t time to do anything about it. A stray thought was trying to come in but I blocked it and flicked a glance at the fuel gauges for the inboard tanks because at low altitude and military speed this Finback used three thousand gallons per hour and I couldn’t sustain this speed for more than nine minutes longer.

Three seconds.

Stray thought Resist: irrelevant.

The missile had canted over to the vertical and was well clear of the launcher and from this distance it looked like a white telegraph pole rising from the background of low hills. The warhead would not be nuclear because you can kill off any given aircraft with a prescribed minimal charge of conventional explosive but the result would be as effective and I became aware of my position here in the air and my relationship with the data streaming into the senses: the undulating hills and the idea of green grass and the summertimes of youth, kite-flying under the drifting cumulus; the sound of the engines that were driving me so tumultuously across the planet’s surface towards the point of extinction; the feel of the pressure suit and the back of the seat connecting me to the mundane world of engineering while the psyche began its last long scream of terror inside the organism.

Two seconds.

Stray thought persisting: yes, it had been the time factor I’d been overlooking since I’d breached the invisible frontier and entered Soviet airspace unmolested, because these people were now ordered to kill and they must therefore be certain who I was. They would deal with a rebellious pilot of their own forces less drastically, leading him down with their interceptors or simply waiting till he ran out of fuel: the quartermaster general of the Soviet Air Command would know better than anyone how much these aircraft cost and they weren’t to be thrown away. So now I knew this: that the element of intelligence that had out paced me from Furstenfeldbruck had now been examined and assessed and was still in time to hurl a missile into the sky above Yelingrad.

Behrendt had broken.

One second.

Behrendt had broken and not long ago, holding out as far as the edge of lunacy and at the final moment saving enough of his mind for them to ravage.

When did this aircraft take-off? Pain beyond comprehension, the body disintegrating. What is its mission? If I tell them, what will be left of me to go on living? Is the pilot an American? Stop just let them stop just let them stop just let them stop. Throw water. Quickly throw more water.

So that was the time factor I’d got wrong. When I’d crossed the frontier without drawing their fire I’d assumed that security had never been breached, that Behrendt was no longer a threat. But at that time they were still working on him and he’d broken only an hour ago, or half an hour, in time for the information to be flashed through the priority signals network and trigger the long white cylinder that was gliding upward and towards me now, curving slowly into the windscreen with the silence of a shark.

Zero seconds.

The idea is to leave it as late as you can, so when you go into the turn you’re as close to the missile as you can get.

I watched it coming, through the clear glass of the windscreen. It was turning slowly at the command of the electronic guidance system, the pointed nose tilting to focus on the target and the fins swinging into line behind it. The trickle of sweat at the corner of my left eye had begun stinging but I had to ignore it because this was the time when an estimation had to be made about the size of the missile and its closeness: the delay of four seconds before starting to avoid it had been arbitrary, a desperate attempt to control the conditions by an educated guess. It could already be too late.

It was difficult to see, to judge. The thing was now lined up in a head-on attitude and looked like a white ball shining in the light and increasing rapidly in size as it floated towards the windscreen.

The organism was screaming.

Turn.

Shuddup and wait.

The distance has got to be so short that it can’t make the turn when you do. You don’t give it enough room to manoeuvre, okay?

Sipping his bloody tea.

Turn now.

Wait.

The white ball came floating, its high-explosive content still inert in these last few seconds.

You’re working on a very narrow margin, you see, between hit and miss.

Floating, dead centre in the windscreen, the fins revolving slowly in the light.

The left eye watering now, the vision blurring.

Somewhere along the invisible line that ran from the nose of the Finback to the nose of the missile there was the ideal point where the turn had to be initiated, before which the missile would have room to follow, after which the two objects would collide and explode. But there wasn’t time to measure its position visually; nor had I had the weeks and months of simulator training and combat experience that would have allowed me even a reasonable guess. At a combined speed of three thousand knots the object in the windscreen was approaching my coordinated eye-and-brain system at a relative speed of zero: the ball was simply expanding, not moving, against a background of blank space that offered no reference. The most I could do was to make sure that when I initiated the turn it was at the point where I thought it would be effective, not at the point where my nerve broke.

Don’t forget to turn into the missile’s trajectory.

It turned into mine. It’s the same thing.

You just go into a very high g-turn at the last moment.

That’s all I’ve got to do. It’s easy.

Turn. If you don’t turn now we’ll -

Shuddup.

Wait.

The ball was quite large now, floating as if motionless but expanding at a rate my eye could measure against two lines of reference: the sides of the windscreen. It was expanding very fast now, like a visual explosion. The fins were becoming a windmill.

Allow for the risk of target attraction, the mesmeric influence that will sometimes take the pilot all the way home to extinction. Allow for the margin of error. Allow for luck.

Turn now.

Yes. Now.

The control column shivered in my hands and the rudder bar resisted as I kicked at it and hauled the column back and felt the long wave of vibration coming into the airframe as the jets thrust it into the new trajectory with the stubby delta wings cutting the air and the ailerons taking the overload of pressure against their upper surfaces. The spheroid configuration of the missile sank immediately below the windscreen but it was still there and still trying to home in to the target; it would already have started turning for me, upwards and to the side as the Finback spiralled into the rolling climb and I waited, letting the mind go and the body instruct the machine. This was all I had to do. The organism would have striven to do a thousand other things, rather than be destroyed; but there was no need for them.

I realize you think you’re going to break the wings off, but that won’t happen.

It felt, though, that it was going to happen. The whole balance of this aerodynamic structure had been altered and by a factor so extreme that I could feel it reacting as if it were alive: it had become skeletal, animalistic, vibrant with nerves that quivered in the controls and the seat and the canopy above me. Even its voice had adopted new and undefinable tones as its shape was forced against the static air at its fullest angle, making a gigantic reed of its cowlings, curves and linear sections and sending them singing as finely as the song of the wind above the roar of the sea.

Information.

I would appreciate some information. Are the conditions such that within the next half second I shall be proved to have reacted too slowly, too late? If so, spare me the technical findings, the degree of heat engendered at the heart of the explosion from here inside this cockpit, the force exerted outwards from the centre, the subtler effect upon blood pressure, heart rate and cranial activity in the microsecond before the body flowers into a surrealistic sunburst, its blood bright in the sky. Spare me that.

But I would like to know where that bloody thing is and how close it is. I would like just this much information.

Sweat running and the left eye streaming and the mouth like a husk and the air pumping into the g-suit and squeezing my legs and the pelvic area as the force of the turn pushed me against the seat and held me there so that I couldn’t move. Trying to look into the mirrors but a lot of blood going down and away from the head because this is a very -

You just go into a very tight g-turn.

Yes. Exactly. Blackly, and the singing in the nerves. If it had missed the target, missed, it would have singing, nothing to see in the black, the roaring fading and coming back, would have gone ballistic and come down Christ knows where.

Look in the mirrors. Yes but it’d be too small by now. Has it missed me, then, has it missed me?

MISS.

Good old Thompson, what about a spot more tea?

Suit getting the pressure up and the blood going back and I eased the controls and brought her out of the roll and checked the altimeter, seven thousand feet

They’ve got more than one.

What?

They’ve got dozens of those things.

Head went cold and I sat up and brought her level and looked down through the bottom panels of the canopy and saw another one lifting off a launcher a mile away and seven thousand feet down, long and thin and white with the winter sunshine making a highlight on the warhead, coming up very fast with a second one lifting off behind it, no bloody go.

They were out for a kill and they knew how to do it and it didn’t matter where I went: these things were medium range and the gauges on the facia were reading out a six-minute deadline for me on the after-burners and I couldn’t shut them off because I needed the speed.

Voices in the headset, and a lot of static.

The cockpit was an oven, baking a body alive.

Some kind of campaign necessary: a glorious ten-second campaign to prove we went down at least with banners flying and the head held high, so forth.

This is it. They’re going to kill us, they -

Oh for Christ’s sake shuddup.

Half-roll and dive. There isn’t time to think and then act: the thinking has got to be done while the action’s running. And remember the mountains.

The only thing to do was dive because I had to turn into their trajectories and their trajectories were identical. And remember the altimeter because at Mach 2.5 everything looks farther away than it is: there’s no optical illusion, it’s just that every time you blink at this speed you’re a thousand feet closer to what you’re aiming at and I was now aiming at the ground, six thousand, five thousand, four.

Half-roll to come back on them. The low hills spun through 180 degrees in the windscreen and I saw the two missiles, one large, one small, both spherical and lined up and expanding. Remember the mountains and their direction from this new position: they would be due east when I came out of the dive and the snow cloud would be still moving across from the south and blotting out half the Khrebet Tarbagatay range but that wouldn’t affect me unless I had to change course.

And remember your briefing.

Then they were coming, both of them, one very big and the other floating a little distance from it in visual terms. I didn’t have to do anything complicated: I just had to wrench the Finback out of its trajectory at a speed approaching one thousand knots and against the force of gravity and hope that nothing would break.

Pull out. Pull out now before we -

Of course.

Blind in one eye because of the sweat but when I dragged at the stick the big metal sphere floated down past the bottom of the windscreen and out of sight and the smaller one followed, but more slowly. The stick was shuddering in my hands and the whole machine was coming alive as the airstream was forced against the ailerons. The high thin scream of the ancillaries overlaid the bellowing of the jets and the voices in the headset sounded unreal, their meaning lost in the tumult that was shaking the aircraft.

Blood pooling into the lower half of the body and the suit reacting, squeezing. The organism was in terror because somewhere below and behind it the two missiles were trying to turn or were already turning and moving in to the target and there was no action, simply no action at all to be taken except to maintain the muscular strength necessary to hold the controls in their present attitude so that the Finback would eventually pull out of the dive before the ground came up and blotted it into a smudge.

One thousand.

The right eye had moved to look at something and snatch at an item of data for me and I examined it: we were flying in a diminishing curve at one thousand feet above the ground and my head was tilting upward to look through the windscreen because it wasn’t going to be the first missile or the second missile it was going to be the surface of the earth that would provide the other component of the impact, so be it, go out cursing Parkis I hope you rot in hell.

We must have cleared the missiles but it was academic because the needle was down to four hundred feet and colours were filling the windscreen and sliding downward, trees, building, gold on a dome, downward, as the nose began coming up and the buffeting began and broke off and began again until the thing was shaking like a dog and we flying level through ground pockets and shifts of air with the perspective of a town scape streaming across the windscreen towers, rooftops, domes and suddenly the trees again, spreading past and behind in a tangle of winter lacework against the frosted land.

You are too low.

Understood. Adjust altitude.

The blackout had fluttered at the brain and for a moment the windscreen had darkened but the light was back and cerebration started up again, avid for data and desperate to analyse.

Remember the mountains. And your briefing. I was now at the point of that wedge-shaped pattern and the risks had narrowed to the certainty that at any next second they would throw more missiles into the air unless I could keep low enough: to use what terrain masking was available and get off their screens. Get off their screens and go for the Khrebet Tarbagatay and do what I had been briefed to do: disappear.

I assumed at this time that there were further missiles in launch or already airborne but we had two minutes left before we hit bingo fuel and it was long enough, would be long enough if I could stay this close to the ground without hitting a hill or a tower or a radio mast, and that was a matter of chance. The rest was a matter of following instructions.

The snow cloud was drawing across the range with its base on the ground and its darkness began closing in as I held the Finback on its course while the buffeting started again and shook the ground and the sky and the blood inside my skull and then eased off gradually, leaving vision partially clear.

The terrain below was now rocky and desolate, with crags rising towards the mountain range in the first haze of the now. There was nothing -

Mirrors.

The shape was in all three of the mirrors and steadily increasing in diameter as it floated in the wake of the Finback, the explosive warhead catching the light and the fins revolving slowly as it homed in on its target. The thing was coming at me faster than I could run and if I tried making turns it would follow wherever I went because I didn’t have the speed to break away and send it ballistic so the only thing I could do was get out and the only way to get out was to slow down because at this speed my limbs would be torn off but if I slowed down that thing in the mirrors would close in for the kill.

My left hand dragged the throttles back. I didn’t know it was going to do that but the organism was taking over and the brain went on recording, interpreting, as the senses fed in the data: eight hundred knots on the airspeed indicator, seven hundred, six.

Don’t forget anything.

Signal barely understood.

Don’t forget.

Five hundred.

Floating in the mirrors, the fins turning slowly and lazily against the cold grey sky, the warhead enormous, a great sphere.

Remember camera remember camera remember camera remem -

All right got it now but that bloody thing’s going to blow us up and I can’t -

Camera.

Pulled at the lever and snapped the release and put my hand through the strap and looked up and saw the needle at four hundred knots and looked higher and saw the three mirrors filled with the spinning shape.

At three hundred and fifty I blew the canopy off and triggered the seat and felt the cartridge fire and thought Christ we’re hit and then the windblast sent me whirling in the sky and in the middle of a visual sequence I saw the Finback and the long thin missile closing on it in the final seconds before the detonation boomed and the shock-wave kicked me away and fragments came fluting through the smoke of the sunburst that had been the aircraft, picking at my body and whining past and picking again until I felt the jerk of the harness as the main chute deployed, a sense of life after death and the reek of chemicals, a glimpse of a torn panel turning like a falling leaf, a numbness creeping and then cold, intense cold, embalming the consciousness.