The Sinkiang Executive

Chapter Four: FURSTENFELDBRUCK

“Haben Sie etwas zu melden?”

“Nein, Herr Hauptmann.”

“Ist jemand vorbeigekommen?”

“Nur der amerikanische Offizier der Wache auf seinem Rundgang.”

“Um wieviel Uhr war das?”

“Mitternacht, Herr Hauptmann.”

“Nun gut. Das hier ist Herr Nesbitt.”

“Ihren Ausweis bitte, mein Herr.”

“Jawohl, hier ist er.”

“Danke, mein Herr.”

He gave it back to me.

“Wissen Sie was die Losung ist?”

“Katapult,” I told him.

“Schon richtig, mein Herr.”

The two dogs leaned against their harness, scenting, their eyes luminous in the lamplight.

“They are war trained,” Bocker told me. “Please don’t make any sudden movement.” He motioned the guard to hurry: it was freezing tonight and a drizzle was coming down, webby against our faces. The hangar loomed above us, the heights of its camouflaged facade lost in the rain-haze.

The two dog-handlers stood firm while the guard went back into his box and used a telephone, giving his name and service number and repeating the password; men he asked for the door to be opened.

“How long has the weather been like this?” I asked Bocker. As a courtesy he always spoke to me in English.

“A week. Perhaps ten days. It’s rather like London, don’t you think?” He had an almost soundless laugh that made his little jokes seem confidential, a mannerism he might have developed during his career in West German Counter-intelligence. He called to the guard.

“Haben Sie sich jetzt beschaftigt?”

“Ich habe es ihnen gesagt, Herr Hauptmann.”

We sank lower into our collars and I studied Hans Bocker while his head was turned away to watch the guard. I needed to know all their faces, and who they were, and what they did. Bocker was a jolly sort, overweight and blond with a red face and small bright eyes shining from puffs of flesh: his manner was confidential and he spoke softly, a plump hand on my arm to remind me that this was for my ears only. His dossier, which Ferris had got for me through NATO channels, showed that his cover identity as army captain was for the Furstenfeldbruck assignment only.

Ferris had said: “You’ll find security’s pretty good up there. They don’t know what we’re doing but they know London’s asked for strict hush. And Bocker is first class: we’ve checked him out.”

Ferris was joining me here in the morning.

We could hear a jingle of keys from inside the hangar, echoing; then the small door near the guard hut pulled open and a beam of light struck across us, blinding me.

Then the whole thing started all over again except that this time it was in English: Bocker introduced himself and presented me and I showed my security card and told them the password and we went inside and I heard one of the dogs give a low sound in its throat, I was glad when the door was shut because I can’t stand those bloody things, they’ve got teeth like sharks.

I suppose I was a bit on edge in any case, because here it was: the Finback.

It was standing all by itself in the middle of the hangar, draped in black shrouds under the cluster of lights. I couldn’t see anything of its surfaces, just the general shape under the covers; and it stood there in a silence so total that it was hard to understand, considering the noise it was going to make when we took it into the open; but I could smell it: the subtle aromatic amalgam of metal, rubber, plastics, oils, fuel, coolant, and the after-smell of the heat that had burned in it on its way through the sky.

“You would like the covers removed?” Bocker asked me.

“What? Yes.”

Two of the guard began work on it. There were four in here, two German and two American, all of them in uniform and carrying side-arms. A telephone rang and one of them went to answer it and came back but didn’t say anything to Bocker.

“It’s quite pretty,” he said to me, and gave a secret laugh.

“Is it?”

I didn’t think that was the word: the thing just looked tremendously potent, like an edged instrument for cutting the sky into swathes, though it had a slightly old-fashioned look, because of the way it stood high on the undercarriage and because of me rectangular air intakes that looked like a couple of boxes stuck on to the sides. But that was because it was on the ground, out of its element like a landed fish. In the air I knew it would look blade-sharp and effective; but I would never, of course, see it in the air.

Basically it was a low-aspect ratio design with high-mounted delta wings and the twin air ducts starting from below the cockpit and flaring back to the engines and beyond them to the six-foot-diameter exhaust nozzles half-way along the tail unit. I walked round it, and Bocker and the guards stayed where they were, for which I was glad: I felt a sense of assignation with the machine, because I was going to be the last man ever to fly it and if I got things right it could do a lot for me and if I got things wrong it would kill me.

It was very quiet in the hangar and my footsteps grated on the concrete as I ducked under the plane and looked at the other side. It didn’t have a lot in common with the FM-3O as far as the configuration was concerned, though that didn’t mean its handling characteristics were as different to the same degree. This model had a retractable air brake mounted well aft, almost underneath the exhaust nozzles, and the undercarriage folded backward and inward instead of forward and inward: there were also six underwing missile pylons, which had been adapted to sling centre-line fuel tanks to complement the wing pods.

When I climbed the steps I heard someone move closer, but it was probably a coincidence: they knew I was allowed to look into the cockpit and maybe I was touchy, anticipating some kind of opposition. They would also be touchy, since this machine had tighter security wraps than any other in Europe and it was going to be their neck if someone got through.

Ferris hadn’t been selling me short: when I pulled the canopy back I saw that the cockpit layout was very like the FM-3o’s; and for the first time I relaxed a little and thought there might be just a chance of pushing through with this and coming out at the other end and giving those bastards in London the stuff they wanted.

I didn’t know what it was, yet. Ferris had played it very close to the chest in Barcelona and I’d got the impression that the planning stage wasn’t finished even now and that he was standing by for new instructions to pass on to me as soon as they were ready. There was also the smell of sealed orders about this operation and I didn’t like it but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Our feelings vary on this subject: some of the executives like leaving it all to Control, so they don’t have to do any thinking on their way through the mission they simply go for the selected targets and get there and do the job they’ve been told to do. These types work well for people like Parkis because Parkis is good at winding them up and pointing them in the right direction with everything already built in at the start so that all they have to do is respond to negative feedback till they hit the objective. His rationale is that if they knew the size of the background politics it’d give them purpose-tremor so that right at the critical time when they were meant to be making a document filch or blowing a cell or getting a contact across they’d just go to pieces and stand there doing it in their trousers.

The rest of us prefer to know what’s happening behind the scenes because it gives us a chance of switching tactics or changing course according to the run of events: we like the responsibility and it makes us feel a bit less like a robot on its way to a toy fair, but the fact remains that if Control or your director in the field doesn’t want to tell you anything then it’s a waste of time asking.

All I knew about this one was the access, and even the info on that was incomplete. All I really knew was that in approximately fifty-six hours from now they were going to send me into Soviet airspace in a Soviet aircraft and hope no one would notice.

“All right, we’ll try putting her down now.”

“We can skip that bit.”

“You mean landing?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Watch it.

“I’d like to get those turns right.”

“You’re not doing badly. I want you to put her down during this session because that’ll just leave us evasive action to go through.”

“If you say so.”

You’ve got to watch security every second and I’d nearly blown it. All right, Thompson was career RAF and London had deep-screened him and he knew what a Finback was but he might not have been told it was a one-way flight and that I wasn’t going to make a landing. And I’d almost told him.

Watch everything.

And concentrate.

“Okay, we’ll go into the approach.”

“What altitude?”

“Get down to three thousand feet and we’ll start from there. But make a full circuit.”

I put the column forward and used twenty degrees of to the left, watching the horizon and altitude.

“That’s fine.”

I could see Thompson in his glass-panelled control box in front of the simulator. He sat crouched with his headset on, watching the slave screen on the console; he never looked up at me through the windscreen, even when he had to give a sharp command.

“You’re going too wide.”

I corrected.

We’d been working for two hours on this session, nearly seven hours so far for the day. Thompson had wanted more frequent breaks but I’d kept him at it because for me any kind of learning has got to be intensive. I think he was getting fed up.

“What have you got now?”

“Three thousand five.”

He’d got the same reading but he wanted to hear how fast I answered so that he’d know I was watching the right things. During the first hour I’d looked all over the control panel for missing FM-3O features and he’d got worried.

“Make another circuit. Don’t forget you’ve got a twelve-thousand-foot runway, two thousand feet longer than at Zaragoza.”

We kept at it. The clock on the facia said 18:05.

“Right. Level out. Level out now. Less lift than the FM, remember?”

I over corrected and the nose came up too high and I said shit and pushed it down again and thought Ferris might have told me it was a one-way trip because these bloody things were unlandable.

“Watch your altitude.”

There wasn’t any lift at all: we were dropping out of the sky and I trimmed again and put the flaps down and saw her hit a wall on the airspeed indicator.

“Too soon. Ease off.”

It took another ten minutes and I made the over corrections and hit the power too late because she was going down like a stone and I panicked and Thompson went on talking into my headset, repeating himself so often that I didn’t have enough time to assess anything for myself. The angle of approach was all right and we were lined up with the wings level but I cut the power too soon and we hit the deck and lit up the failure sign and I sat there thinking Christ we’re going to go through all that again till I’ve got it right and it’s going to be a total waste of time because I’m never going to need it and I can’t tell him that.

“All right, here’s the first one.”

I watched the screen.

“It’s a MiG-21 and it’s seen you and it’s closing. What’s the distance?”

“A mile.”

“A mile and a half at this point. Okay, we’ll stop the action. Don’t forget to turn into the missile’s trajectory. It’s the only way you can beat it. You just go into a very high g-turn, as tight as you can. Right — action.”

The shape on the screen began moving again and a thin white cylinder shot forward from it.

“Missile fired.”

I used the rudder and ailerons and glanced across the dials to check the degree of turn and pushed it a bit more and concentrated on the missile.

“More g’s.”

The cloudscape swung on the screen but the white cylinder

“You’re too slow. You’ve got to turn on a sixpence.” Pushed everything hard over but the missile kept coming in. “More g’s. But it’s too late anyway.” I was braced forward against the harness and this was the limit of turn but the thing on the screen was rapidly filling it and then the screen went white and a word jumped into the frame:

HIT.

I looked up through the windscreen and saw Thompson taking a gulp of tea.

“You’re a gonner,” he said in a moment. “We’ll try again, and look 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 in safety. 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? But you did two things wrong: you left it too late and you turned too wide. You’re working on a very narrow margin, you see, between bit and miss. Let’s try it again.”

The screen showed a cloudscape and the silhouette of the MiG.

“Course is converging. But hold it.”

The white cylinder shot forward of the plane.

“Missile fired. Wait. Wait. Wait.”

The thing was curving in fast and I didn’t look at anything else.

“Turn. All you’ve got.”

I braced myself and the g’s piled up on the dials till I could almost feel them.

“Tighter than that.”

Gave it the limit but too late and the red letters jumped into the frame: HIT.

For the first time he looked up in his glass-panelled booth.

“Mr. Nesbitt, that Finback is very rugged. You couldn’t make this degree of turn at Mach I in the FM-3O but you can do it in a Finback. I realize you think you’re going to break the wings off, but that won’t happen. Now we’ll do it again.”

We did it again and we got HIT.

This was at 19:22.

MiG-19 and much slower, coming at Mach.98.

HIT.

“You should have beaten that one.”

Shuddup.

MiG-23 and much faster.

HIT.

MiG-25 — the Foxbat and very fast indeed at Mach 18.

HIT.

Mig-19 again. Wait. Turn.

MISS.

“More like it,” Thompson said.

We went on trying.

HIT.

HIT.

MISS.

HIT.

MISS.

“Evens,” Thompson said, and drank some more tea.

20:06.

HIT.

MISS.

MISS.

“Twice running.”

Shuddup.

Concentrate.

MISS.

HIT.

MISS.

MISS.

MISS.

“You’ve got it now all right,”

MISS.

20:51.

“Give me the Foxbat again.” That was the fastest.

“Fair enough. Coming at Mach 2.6.”

HIT.

“Again.”

MISS.

“Again.”

MISS.

“Again.”

MISS.

“Right-ho. Call it a day.” He sounded exhausted.

“I think that wraps it up,” Ferris said.

He pulled the collar of his mac a bit higher. It was still drizzling, and colder today at this time: an hour after first light.

“All right,” I told him.

We stood for a while not speaking again, looking around us. About a hundred yards away one of the USAF crew was dragging a pair of chocks towards the F-III at the end of the line. Half an hour ago a BfV security man had walked across the tarmac to check on us, wondering what we were doing standing here in the middle of nowhere in the rain. We didn’t spell it out for him.

I began clumping my feet up and down. They’d given me a heavier flying-jacket than the one I’d brought here from Zaragoza, but it was still bloody cold.

“Recap,” Ferris said, and crouched down on his haunches to ease his legs. I did the same.

“Right, I’m to expect the Soviet radar stations to start picking me up as soon as I begin climbing. At that point I shall be heading south, parallel with the border and twenty-five miles into their airspace. As Colonel Nikolai Voronov I can — ”

“You start climbing near a military field.”

“Right. Near enough to give the impression I’ve just taken-off from it. As Colonel Voronov of the Red Air Force I’ll respond to any radio calls with the cover story that I’m carrying out a fuel-range test which will explain all those extra tanks. Testing has to be done between thirty and forty thousand feet and any request to fly lower than thirty thousand or make a landing should be resisted for this reason.”

“Use a lot of authority,” Ferris said, and pulled his collar higher. “Yell at them over the radio. They’re shit-scared of authority.”

“Noted.”

I recapped on the main elements: communications, cut-off points, rdv procedures, local direction, so forth; but most of this stuff was abstract and I’d stopped asking him for specifics because he’d said it was too early. It was beginning to look like sealed orders all the way and I assumed London was hogtied by the security demands of the USAF, the RAF, NATO and the BfV, since all four parties were contributing to the mission.

It was the first time I’d taken on an operation with so much exposure at the outset. The first phase of any mission the access is normally sacrosanct in terms of secrecy, simply because the most effective way of blowing up a project is to hit it before it can start. With this one the access was blown if anyone talked: any one of those people who knew that a front-line Soviet aircraft was parked here under wraps at Furstenfeldbruck. At a rough guess there must be more than a dozen of them, including the crew of the Lockheed C5-A Galaxie that had brought the Finback across the Atlantic and the guards now protecting it. Already at this stage of the briefing I could see why London couldn’t find anybody to take this one on. It was much more, and much worse, than sensitive. It was vulnerable.

This was probably why Ferris looked so bloody sour.

“Photographs,” I said, “of X and Y at low altitude. The film — ”

“You’ll be given the actual locations at flight briefing,” he said, looking away.

“Thank Christ for that.” I like as much data as I can get as early as possible, so that I’ve got time to feed it in. I hate being thrown a mass of stuff at the last minute when I’m busy working on the access.

“I don’t like this one,” Ferris swung a sharp look at me, ‘any more than you do.”

“Bad luck. Did you volunteer for it, or did they catch you knocking off some bastard in a train?”

We crouched like a couple of half-drowned monkeys in the rain, snapping at each other, while in the background Parkis and his people were completing and perfecting their glorious brainchild that we were expected to take over when they were ready. I wished them luck. They’d come up with an access that was going to be about as safe as a duck shoot with me as the duck, and the target area they’d picked was about the most desolate bit of waste ground on the face of the planet:

Latitude 47 N. by Longitude 82 E. in the middle of winter, work that one out.

“Signals,” Ferris said.

“Through Chechevitsin in Yelingrad for London via Moscow. What about alerts?”

The man was nearer now. I’d been watching him,

“Use your contacts in place.”

“Or cross the border.”

“Or do that’

The man had a waddling gait; I know people by their walk.

“Get out through Sinkiang.”

“If you’re pushed.”

“Otherwise try Pakistan.”

“The end phase,” he said, ‘is likely to be rather fluid.”

I didn’t follow up. It was my belief that while Parkis and his people were completing and perfecting their glorious brainchild they were building into its complexities a small but deliberate flaw designed to cut me off in the final hours of the mission and remove me from the London intelligence field as an expendable embarrassment.

“Bocker,” I said,

“I beg your pardon?”

“Herr Bocker is coming.”

Ferris looked up. “Now what does he want?” We straightened our legs and went on talking while we waited. “You’re finished with the simulator, Thompson says.”

“Yes.”

“I hope you’re feeling more confident.”

“I’ll be all right once I’ve got the bloody thing off the ground.”

“Your flight briefing starts this evening at six o’clock. Why don’t you hop into town today and shake yourself loose a bit? Get rid of the tension.” He sounded terribly casual.

“Fair enough.”

“I am sorry to disturb you, gentlemen!”

“Morning, Hans. Not disturbing.”

“Your embassy in Bonn was on the line. The cultural attache would be obliged if you’d call him back.”

“All right.”

Ferris left us, hurrying through the drizzle with his head down and his mac flapping.

“No one seemed to know where you were, Mr. Nesbitt. I always find that a distinct advantage myself to be difficult to find.” A soundless laugh, his cheeks wobbling with it.

“How right you are. That limousine, by the way.”

We began walking towards the buildings.

“Ah, yes.” He was right on to it. “They are our friends, of course.”

It was a large black Mercedes and I’d seen it standing there at the boundary fence for most of yesterday. There were two men leaning on it, identically dressed and watching the aircraft on the north side of the hangars.

“Are they always there?”

He shrugged amiably. “Nearly always.”

“I don’t think much of their cover.”

He bubbled happily at this. “You are familiar with their thinking, I am sure. In Russia only the nachalstvo drive about in large black limousines, and no one dares to question their movements. They believe it is the same in the West, and therefore station their cars where they please — quite often near airfields and missile sites.” His hand rested for a moment on my arm. “You may be quite sure Squadron-Leader, that when your aircraft leaves its hangar before dawn tomorrow, those two gentlemen will be safely at police headquarters on a minor charge.”

I saw Ferris for a few minutes in the Base Operations Office. He said the embassy call had conveyed a London signal asking for confirmation that Slingshot was ready to go into access phase at first light tomorrow, 07:47 local time.

“Except for flight briefing and clearance,” I said.

“We’re giving you those tonight.”

“Then we can go.”

“That’s what I told them,” he nodded.