The Sinkiang Executive

Chapter Twelve: SPOTLIGHT

The feathers fell.

“Now,” he said.

“What was that?”

“You will open them now.”

The feathers fell softly.

“All right,” I told him.

“Then, of course, you will destroy them.”

He sounded so bloody formal. What else did he expect me to do with them: post them to the KGB?

The feathers fell softly on my face.

My head was singing. The heat was underneath, not on top. It didn’t worry me. But the blinding white was everywhere and that worried me. I put my hand up and saw someone’s glove.

“What the hell do you expect me to do with them?” I asked him. “Post them to — ” but he had gone.

Look.

A flying glove. My own glove. My own hand.

Deduction: my eyes are open and I can see. But all I can see is my own hand in front of my face, big deal. The white blindness must be something else, an object, a sheet of some sort.

The feathers were cold as they fell on my face and I brushed them away and the flames leapt, the ones underneath, and the whole thing blanked out to nothing, like switching the set off.

The second time there was a lot more beta-wave cerebration going on and I felt for the release clips and pressed them and fell away from the seat and held my breath for a long time while the pain went on. It was underneath: the left hip, the rib cage and the shoulder. I was lying on that side with my face in the snow.

I could hear a throbbing sound.

The snow wasn’t soft, for some reason. I put out my hand and swept some of it away and felt rock underneath. I suppose it hadn’t been snowing for long: there was no retrograde amnesia that I could detect, and I remembered there’d been only a light haze when I’d jettisoned the canopy and ejected; the weather had been coming in from the south-east and I’d flown into it just before leaving the aircraft.

The throbbing was duplicated and I listened to it. Sometimes it went right out of synch and I didn’t understand.

Time.

I moved enough to look around and that meant holding my breath again and then respirating slow and deep, slow and deep, drawing in enough oxygen to stay conscious. I could see the crags now, outlines by the snow, jutting against the white background in a faint pattern of shadows, rising above and behind me.

Time. You’ve been -

Moved again and sat up and waited till the worst of it died away. I didn’t know how long it took. The throbbing was much louder and I listened to it and got the message and turned my wrist: 01:17.

Total memory came back like shoving a cassette in the slot and I started moving again and much faster now. There wasn’t any data for the periods of unconsciousness but that didn’t matter: what mattered was whether they’d had time to put these helicopters into the air since the explosion.

They were quite loud now and the last thing I remember thinking about consciously was the time factor: they’d had something like thirty-five minutes from the moment when I’d ejected to the precise present and that was ample to get these things airborne. The logical thought process stopped just here because the snow was still light and they could move very slowly within a few feet of the ground and they’d see that bloody parachute if I didn’t do something about it very fast. I didn’t think I’d broken anything but the left side was heavily bruised from hip to shoulder and when I got up I just fell down again and had to lie there dragging a lot of breath in before I could crawl along the lines towards the canopy.

The light kept going on and off and the sound of the helicopters faded in and out because I suppose I was partially blacked out by the pain but the head was clear enough and I knew Slingshot was going to blow if I didn’t get that spread of silk under some sort of cover: they were probably looking for the plane but they might conceivably have seen me eject on their radar screens and it’s much easier to see a parachute if you’re looking for one.

Their noise was heavy in the sky. Under me the rocks were slippery:

the pressure of my hands and knees compacted the snow into ice and I couldn’t make any headway until I learned to keep the pressure directly downward as I went on crawling with the lines on my right side; that was the side where the rocks sloped away to the edge of a shelf and I didn’t know how big the drop was. Any drop would be too big if I went over because there wasn’t time to flake out and start all over again when I came to: by the closeness of their sound I didn’t need to know how many seconds I’d got left to do this job; I knew it had to be done in the fastest time the organism could manage.

The snow slipped under my hands. Even though I tried to keep the pressure downward the snow slipped sometimes and my head swung and the light flickered again and the noise softened away. The primitive brain was moving its creature along and there was no need to do anything about that: it was pushing me at a speed that was just this side of losing consciousness; but the term consciousness was relative because I wasn’t capable of working anything out: there must have been choices and alternatives for me but I didn’t think of any; I just kept crawling through the haze and over the ice towards the indeterminate point in the distance where I could start pulling at the canopy.

Think.

I can’t think. Haze, rocks, the fall of the soft flakes, the enormous drumming in the sky. Those are my thoughts.

But there were vague periods of cerebration when the pain seemed less:

perhaps I ought to be crawling away from the canopy instead of towards it because they were going to see it at any second, now and then they’d see me too. If I turned round and moved in the other direction I could find a cleft in the rocks, some kind of shelter.

Think snow.

Yes, it’s snowing. And they’re coming.

The whole sky thundered with them now and my skull was filled with the noise and I stopped crawling and looked upward and saw one of them, a darkness moving through the whiteness not far above the rocks ahead of me where the parachute canopy was lying. I kneeled there swaying as the air came in sudden gusts, whirling the snow against me and past me in a small blizzard, blinding me.

Think camouflage.

Kneeled with my head hanging. Basic thought process: too late, they must have seen it, so forth.

The sky hammered and the snow came blowing, darting against my face and sticking there. When I opened my eyes and looked down I couldn’t see my hands because the snow had covered them, and the whole thing came together and I got the point, camouflage, yes, the stuff was covering that canopy too. Started shuffling along the other way, fast as I could, the thing was to get as far as possible from this area because they’d be searching along a narrow band in the direction of the Finback’s final flight, and they’d see me even if they didn’t see the canopy or the seat or the lines under the cover of snow.

There was another one coming. It was somewhere ahead of me again but I knew I was facing the opposite direction now so it was no good going that way. My hands slipped as I turned round and I got terribly annoyed and stood up and went forward with my shoulders leaning against the haze and no real sense of tilting over until the rock came up and I made a half-roll to the right and finished on my hand and knees again you bastards will you go away you bastards with the whole sky swinging and the sound of them booming in my head, the last of the thoughts drowned out by the force of it, only a flicker of awareness now, the awareness that I was some kind of animal dodging and scrambling on the mountainside as the eagles came in for the kill.

Period of total unconsciousness.

Better, quite a lot better when I surfaced and looked around me. It could have been hours since I fell but it was obviously minutes because another one was coming in and I picked myself up and staggered across the rocks trying to get away from it but it was no go: the thing was heading straight towards me and it wouldn’t matter which way I went because I couldn’t go far enough to get out of sight. The visibility was about a hundred yards and I could make out a group of boulders, immense blobs in the haze, their outlines rounded by the juggernaut descent they’d made from higher in the range.

I would have to reach them.

Various objections: too far, too little time, so forth. Ignore.

The thing above me was so loud now that I couldn’t understand why it was still invisible: there was just the wasteland of white, with the earth meeting the sky at no particular level, white upon white, and somewhere in it the relentless hammering din of that machine getting closer, louder, while I stood there for another second trying to see it before I moved again, lurching over the rocks with the body leading the mind, the feet finding their purchase by reflex alone and the hands spread against the haze to push it away and let me see as I ran on, let me see the boulders.

The sky had become a storm.

Run.

Run through the storm and keep running.

It’s too far, and too slippery. They won’t see me in all this snow.

That’s dangerous thinking: they’ll be using field glasses and you’re black against white, don’t stop.

Feet skittering and the air freezing in the lungs, aching against the

teeth, stinging the eyes. They won’t see me now if I -

Don’t stop.

The whole world white and without perspective, without definition, a wilderness without end. Don’t stop.

The pace dizzying and the swirling snow mesmeric, I could run as easily with my eyes shut but that would send me off my balance and if I fell down again it would be for the last time because they’d seen me. The boulders were close now, great white shapes humped against the sky with only the grey of shadows to show where they were.

The thundering of the machine was a physical weight trying to push me down and I shouted at it but couldn’t hear anything. I had to look upward now because I was afraid of something so enormous pouncing on me without seeing it: in the final seconds I would have to take some kind of action, scratch at it, beat my hand against it before it blotted me out.

And here it came, a black mass taking shape in the whiteness, the snow beginning to whip into clouds under the storm of the rotors, the air screaming and the rocks trembling under the tumult coming from the machine. It was moving slowly and was low enough for me to see the numbers on it as I reached the boulders and pitched down and burrowed into the crevice below them and stayed there with my eyes shut and my lungs heaving while the sound drew down and over me, passing me by and leaving a vortex in the air that whipped and fluttered at the rocks before dying away, slowly dying away.

The silence was total.

8178716 38 198 18765413 17 1 829.

It was very cold. After the heated confines of the cockpit this degree of exposure was getting through to my bones. I hadn’t changed out of the uniform yet: it was added protection under the hunting furs.

The falling snow accentuated the silence: it provided movement and with movement there is usually noise and there was no noise, and the silence seemed more intense. There had been no further aerial activity: the helicopters had made three more runs along their line of search, spreading out each time they came back and flying slowly up the mountainside, following its contours. Now they had gone. I didn’t know whether they’d located the wreckage.

8 1876 23 489873890 38 782 1 0109.

In the final briefing my instructions had been to disappear at the end of the airborne phase by ejecting at very low altitude and letting the Finback fly into the Khrebet Tarbagatay range and destruct. The missile had taken care of this requirement and the only thing I had failed to do was to photograph the suspect village near Yelingrad, because the surface-to-air crews had opened fire too soon; but Yelingrad was the target area and I might dig up some material on the village later, possibly something better than low-level photographs.

19 28889198614 15 1555 166 1887.

Ferris hadn’t given me a gamma: I would have needed the matrix and co-ordinates and this way was much faster once I’d plugged in the introductory 8178716. There were ten variations and this was the sixth, indicated by the final numeral, and all I had to do was transpose, reverse and remove blind numbers.

Kirinski. Alexei Kirinski.

I went through them again. The films were to be removed from the camera, and the camera destroyed. A courier would take the films from me at a pretended time, when — re-read: 9198761846, using the sixth variation, not the seventh — at a prescribed time, when I could give him any material I might then have for transmission. The main subject of the orders was the man Kirinski. I was to investigate him and send a report, again by courier. He was a forty-two-year-old engineer and at present lived in Apartment 48 of the Union Building in Gromyko Prospekt, Yelingrad. And that was all.

I thought at first that it looked like a screening for entrapment, but they wouldn’t have mounted an operation the size of Slingshot, involving the USAF and NATO, just for three aerial pictures and a screening job: an agent-in-place could do that with his eyes shut. It could be that London was preparing to bring Kirinski across and wanted to make sure he was clean, or that he’d requested screening as a potential a-i-p, but the same objection applied: Slingshot was a mainline project and the target had to be something bigger than one isolated Russian.

Just before three o’clock I read the orders a fourth time and committed the essentials to memory and burned them, burying the ash. It was now below freezing and I got back into my niche and opened some more food concentrate and nibbled at it slowly: it was the same bloody protein amalgamate they’d given me the last time out and it tasted of fish. I munched some snow for dessert and then struck camp, getting out of the uniform and putting on the polo sweater and slacks. The hunting jacket and hat were some kind of ancient astrakhan and smelt of mothballs, but the fit was perfect and the feeling of chill eased off within a few minutes. The pain in the hip and shoulder was still a nuisance but I could move around well enough; the rib cage only hurt when I took too deep a breath.

I left only the fishing-rod behind, buried deep in a cleft among the boulders. The snow was now driving hard, across the mountainside and visibility was down to less than fifty feet. My tracks would be well covered but that was all: there was no horizon now, and no visual reference for size or distance a sheer drop a few feet in front of me could look like a ledge much farther below, and a smooth area of snow could conceal loose stones and an incipient avalanche.

It took me nearly twenty minutes to find that fishing-rod again and screw it together; then I began moving down the mountain with it, tapping my way like a blind man.

The target area is always a trap.

I went into the railway station at nine o’clock in the morning, waiting until there was a train in and a certain amount of activity going on. The descent from the mountain had taken most of the night and I’d spent an hour on the horse-drawn wagon from the farmstead to the town: they’d found me walking with my bundle and had given me a lift after the woman had insisted on giving me some broth and watching me drink it; she had been very concerned and I’d promised to write when I arrived safely back in Moscow.

The target area is always a trap because your work is clandestine, and by definition you are doing something illegal and will have the whole strength of the local police department against you the moment you make a mistake. Once the police have got control of you the problem escalates and involves counter-intelligence, interrogation and the inevitable consignment to the labour camps or the firing squad. The thing is, of course, not to make that mistake.

This leads you to take precautions from the moment you enter the area, as a matter of routine: precautions even against dangers that can’t possibly exist. That was why, when I pushed my bundle into the parcel lockups at the left side of the booking office, I went across to the far side of the hall and bought a copy of Sovietskaya Kazakh and took up a secure position behind a crate of drilling-bits to watch the consignee from a distance of a hundred feet or so from the big plate-glass window I was using for the mirror. I gave it ten minutes and then left. The station master had the keys to those things but there was absolutely no chance of anyone’s taking an interest in me at this stage: I was merely instilling red-area routine into my movements so that they would become automatic.

I began working as soon as I left the station, checking for tags as an exercise and watching the people on the street, noting their dress, listening to their speech as I queued up in the government store and bought a cheap suitcase and a map of the city: they’d been out of stock at the station. Gromyko Prospekt was two miles away and I made a detour to get me to the only car-hire office marked on the map. Papers galore, of course, and I spread them out on the counter, noting that Credentials had used two different photographs for the social security card and the driver’s licence, and made them as dissimilar as they could. The personal identity propusk had the same photograph as the driver’s licence and their dates were within six months of each other, though I was stated to have been a journalist with the Sovietskaya Rossia for the past four years, covering the southern provinces.

The best vehicle they had was a six-year-old Mercedes 220, which I suppose had filtered down from one of the East German consulates. It had an automatic shift, which the man demonstrated at some length, pointing out its advantages: you could lean one arm out of the window, light a cigarette in safety, or put your arm round your girl-friend while you were driving along.

“That’s fantastic,” I said. “Where are the wiper blades?”

“In the glove compartment.” He showed me. “You want them fitted?”

“I’ll put them on when it starts snowing again.” The spare-parts situation was obviously no better than the last time I’d been in Russia: you’d still lose your wipers if you didn’t watch out.

I paid the deposit and took the car three times round the block to make sure it wasn’t going to break down right away, then checked the map again and drove to Gromyko Prospekt. They’d put some sand down along the main streets but the ice had begun to pack and quite a few Wolgas and Zhigulis were cocked against the kerb with their body work bent in various places. A black Moskwicz came into the mirror three blocks after I’d started out and stayed there for another mile before it turned off at an intersection. Soon afterwards a Chaika limousine came hounding along in the centre lane, slewing from side to side and pulling up outside a red brick building near the main square. There was no indication of what went on inside, which was typical, and I put it down as the Communist Party Headquarters or the local KGB, because of the guards.

By the time I reached the Union Building it had started to snow again, and I drove past the block and made two left turns and got out to fit the wiper blades. I then drove off and made an expanding box search of the streets in the vicinity until I found a hotel. It was a tall narrow building wedged between a market-produce exchange and an employment bureau, and I left the Mercedes and walked round to the rear of the place and checked it out for access, exposure and geometry: single iron fire-escape from the fifth floor to the ground, high double gates to the yard with their hinges rusty and one of them broken away, a parked van with two of the tyres flat and the spare wheel missing, and a row of dustbins below the three barred windows on the left side looking out from the building. The exposure looked all right except for the place on the far side of the street at an angle of thirty degrees and I went across at the first intersection and walked back on the other side and read the official-looking board over the main doors: it was a home for unmarried mothers. I walked back round the block and went up the steps and into the hotel.

Papers, papers.

For two nights. Perhaps for three, but that would depend on the snow.

Andreyev Rashidov, an ex-captain of the Red Army, now journalist. Yelingrad is a fine town, and its people are welcoming. I am sure I shall be very comfortable here.

One narrow staircase. No lift. Two doors to the rear, three to the side of the entrance hall, the front door being fitted with dead bolts top and bottom, the panels being glass but too narrow to let an average human body through in an emergency. My baggage is in the car. I will bring it in myself. It was a room on the fifth floor, which I had asked for. I like a good view and it isn’t necessary to go down the steps of a fire-escape if you’re in a hurry: using the series of swings they’ve worked out at Norfolk you can reach the ground within three seconds per floor of any given building with ceilings eight feet high.

Roman-style central hearing with grilled vents in the floor, two narrow windows overlooking the rear, a drainpipe running down past the left-hand window but with one of the U-clamps broken away from the brickwork, discount. No telephone.

There is a bell to summon you to the hall, should you receive a caller or a message. You may order simple meals from the State Restaurant across the street and eat them in the parlour on the ground floor, with vodka if you wish. To close the heating you merely slide this shutter, so. The bed is comfortable, as you can observe.

He was a tired stooping man with a habit of holding his head on one side as if he were listening to you with one ear and to something else with the other. The badge in his lapel showed him to be a Party member of the Yelingrad district headquarters, as he explained with an air of faded fervour. I was permitted male guests in my room.

When he had gone I checked for bugs and of course found nothing: this wasn’t Moscow, but a small agricultural-industrial city with a garrison of the military installed on its outskirts at the end of the road that ran seventy miles to the frontier of Sinkiang. Beets, zinc and soldiery: and somewhere not far away a helicopter base I would have to locate — they had been short-range WSK Swidniks and I wanted to know more about them; it was conceivable that London would finally insist on that third photograph.

A little before ten o’clock I left the hotel and drove to the post office near the huge Museum of Folklore and Minerals and telephoned Chechevitsin. The number was reported as being out of order but in Russia this normally means the operator is in the middle of a conversation or didn’t hear the number correctly, and I insisted and finally got a connection.

There was nothing I could tell from Chechevitsin’s voice, which reassured me. He repeated after me that the twelve tungsten drilling-bits had arrived at the freight station and were in order. The consignment number was 3079.I thanked him and hung up. On a scale of one to twelve I was in good physical condition; tungsten indicated that I had read, understood and was following sealed orders; drilling-bits meant that I now had a car and was therefore fully mobile; freight indicated that I was at present totally clear of surveillance and station referred to the films. The consignment number was of course that of the telephone at my hotel. There’s a diminutive ginger-haired clerk in London Cyphers who sits on her thin little bottom all day working out one-time speech codes for specific operations, and although we twig her a lot she does a good enough job and searches out the local scene very thoroughly: as I’d noted this morning at the railway station.

When we twig her too much she says she’s going to give us a birds-egg collection in the code, which would of course mean we’d been blown.

Ten minutes later I left the post office and took the Mercedes to the junction of Gromyko Prospekt and Union Square and parked it under the bare winter trees. There was no kind of surveillance on the Union Building from the front, unless use was being made of a window somewhere within sight of the main entrance; I had no way of finding out. When I drove through the square and round to the rear of the building I again saw no evidence of a watcher. It took me forty minutes to satisfy myself about this because the man on the corner had been walking up and down and blowing into his bare hands until a taxi picked him up. The other man, in charge of the hot-chestnut stand on the south side of the square, had also interested me until I noted that he had been standing with his back to the main entrance while seven people had left the building and three had gone in.

At 10:45 I left the car in the square and walked across at the intersection, going up the steps to the double doors.

There is a specific time during any mission when the executive moves into prescribed hazard. The access phase for Slingshot had been dangerous but only in a general sense: the Soviet security services had become aware that one of their own military aircraft with a foreign pilot aboard was penetrating their domestic airspace with a view to photographing ground installations, and had shot it down. All that Corporal Behrendt could have told them was that it was probably a photo-recce mission. That general danger was now past and at this moment no one in the USSR knew that I was on Soviet soil and engaged in the capacity of an intelligence agent. No one.

I could live, if I had to, in the city of Yelingrad for weeks or longer, walking the streets and sharing the life of the people here and getting in nobody’s way until the time came when I made a mistake. The Finback had disintegrated and the snow had covered the parachute and it was unlikely that any search could be made until the spring. So I was in the clear and my status was neutral: the condition we apply to an executive during the first stripes of his mission until the specific instant arrives when he becomes exposed.

That instant was now. I’d checked for surveillance on the Kirinski apartment and found none; but there could well be a permanent watch mounted at any one of the hundred windows overlooking the entrance to the Union Building, and as I climbed the steps to the double doors I had the familiar nerve-tightening sensation of walking into a spotlight.