The Sinkiang Executive

Chapter Six: NERVES

When we left the Galaxie and walked through the rain to the main buildings I realized that Bocker must have seen us go into the transport because he’d thrown a substantial surveillance net round the area to seal it off. There was also a military escort of two corporals waiting for us at Base Operations and they took us down to an office on the floor below ground level and mounted guard at each end of the passage as we went in.

There were three men sitting round a briefing-table and they got to their feet as Ferris made the introductions.

“This is Major Connors — flying instruction Captain Franzheim, navigation — Captain Baccari, signals, US Air Force. Squadron-Leader Nesbitt, RAF.”

They put down their coffee and shook hands.

“Hi, I’m Chuck.”

“I’m Bill.”

“Call me Omer. Still raining out there?”

“Pissing down.” I took off my soaked jacket.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

Connors looked at Ferris and said: “Okay, why don’t we get started?”

“Do you mind if we take navigation first?”

“Let’s do that.” Connors sat down and looked at Franzheim, who went over to the map on the wall and picked up a pointer.

“Okay, this is an oblique parabolic equal-area projection with a scale of 109 miles per inch, and as you can see it covers the whole of Asia and includes peripheral countries. We’re right here.” He moved the pointer.

This was at 6.35. The navigational briefing took just short of an hour and Franzheim spent most of the time on the access.

“You can’t go in at night without the help of highly sophisticated terrain-mapping radar, because there are hills and you could hit one with only a few degrees of deviation. You can’t go in at high altitude like they did in the days of Gary Powers because they’d shoot you down the minute you crossed the border, even if you were flying at sixty thousand feet which the Finback can attain. So you go in by daylight and you go in very fast and very low.”

He moved the pointer again. “We’ve routed you through Hungary, since there’s no Soviet frontier between east and west: you have to go through either Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary or Romania. Also, you can go down to practically zero feet across these plains on either side of the Hungarian-Russian border and then head for the course of this river here, the Latorica, almost due east. Your speed should be less than Mach I from take-off till you’re across the Carpathian mountains, to avoid sonic boom. You’ll be seen — and certainly heard — overflying the town of Mukachevo right here, but you are now in the Soviet Union and flying a Soviet airplane. How does it sound so far?”

“I like it.”

“Great.”

I liked it because the map had the countries in pretty colours and didn’t show any surface-to-air missile sites and the Carpathian mountains didn’t look like anything you could smash into with an aeroplane.

The pointer moved. “We’re now in Soviet airspace and still flying close to zero feet and radar-undetectable. When you’re clear of the mountains you start climbing in the vicinity of the military airfield here, just west of Zhmerinka, and you turn south-east, parallel with the Romanian border.”

He glanced at Ferris and went on with a rather shut face: “At this point you’ll be picked up on Soviet radar, and since you’re still inside ADIZ airspace they’ll — ”

“ADIZ?”

“Sorry. Air Defence Identification Zone.”

“Thank you.”

“They’ll call you up and ask you to identify yourself and prove you’re not a border violator. You now begin using your cover as a Russian colonel.”

I began looking round the room for bugs because this was strictly cosmic material but the place looked more like a deep shelter than an office and had probably been designed as a briefing-room for NATO flight missions. These three officers had obviously been fully screened and Ferris was looking quite satisfied with the whole arrangement. This was the kind of situation where you had to remember that your control in London was God and that your director in the field was the Son of God and they’d got everything worked out including a method for getting you to the end of the mission alive.

“Question,” I said. “How many alternative routes did you consider and throw out?”

“I’d say twenty or thirty. The point we finally chose is where the terrain-masking afforded by the mountains is greatest, and the Soviet radar coverage is weakest, according to intelligence reports. Also the ground is virtually flat on both sides of the border and you can cross it at Mach.95, or six hundred knots calibrated ground speed just below military power and sonic boom.”

“And very low.”

“We estimate that with the handling capabilities of the Finback you’ll be going in at one hundred AGL.”

“Christ, how high are the church steeples?”

“There aren’t any on the route we’ve planned for you.”

“You’ve checked on the steeples?”

He gave a brief grin. “The Base Commander said we had to do a good job and we’re kind of scared of him. We checked on steeples, power grids, radio masts, factory chimneys, the whole bit. At one hundred feet on that precise course you won’t hit anything, and you can have that in writing.”

I said I was impressed and he thanked me.

“Naturally, we couldn’t allow for pilot error. You’ll have quite a job staying on course. There is a navigational control system fitted to the Finback but the guy who flew it into Alaska said it wasn’t very accurate and it was defunct anyway when he landed. It hasn’t been removed and we haven’t installed a good one of our own, because the airplane has to look like what it is: a Soviet MiG-28D, in case they ever get a close look at it.”

I saw Ferris move his head a fraction towards me, and folded my arms in acknowledgement. What Franzheim had just told me was that he didn’t know this was a one-way trip for the plane: ‘in case they ever’, so forth. Ferris just wanted to warn me to leave this subject blacked out.

“You can’t use radio fixes,” Franzheim went on, ‘because as you know you’d have to transmit a signal to get ranging information, and they’d pick it up. Also they’d pick up your radar pulses from the ground. So you’ll be steering with visual fixes, compass and dead reckoning. I’m talking about the leg this side of the Zhmerinka field, where you’ll start climbing and adopt your cover.”

He picked up his coffee and finished it and dropped the cup into the disposal can and pulled another one off the stack and filled it at the dispenser. “I guess all you guys must be caffeine-shy. Omer, do you have those maps?”

Captain Baccari opened a briefcase and dropped three folders on to the table.

“Okay,” Franzheim said, and pulled them open. “These are your three maps, colour-coded for the projected route, alternative legs, break off and escape routes. You’ll see they’re self-explanatory when you study them: we’ve made provisions for you to abort the mission and escape by air at calculated altitudes over the safest possible terrain, avoiding airfields, radar posts, missile sites and so on. You can take a look now, we’re in no hurry.”

They were printed by the USAF Cartographic Department and bore the NATO-designated COSMIC SECRET stamp. They were also marked KEEP FROM UNAUTHORIZED HANDS and DESTROY AT DISCRETION. The detail was elaborate and the contour relief was indicated to within twenty feet above sea level. For the first time I saw the identities of the three points X, Y and Z.

“The first suspect village,” Franzheim said as he leaned over the table, “is right here at Saratov, twelve miles north of the town. The second one is ten miles south-east of Dzhezkazgan at this point. The third is ten miles from the town of Yelingrad, not far from the Sinkiang border.”

“I’ll need special briefing on the camera runs.”

“Right. Major Connors will see to that.”

Franzheim asked for questions and I went over the whole route with him again, using the green-code map and spending most of the time on the low-level run through the Carpathians. The range was a mass of ridges and valleys, with a major road following the Latorica River for forty miles through the mountains.

“I shall be seen from the road, obviously, at a hundred feet.”

“Okay, but we have to define the word 'seen'. At Mach.95 they won’t see more than a streak in the sky and they won’t be able to tell whether it was an airplane or a bat out of hell.”

Major Connors said lazily: “The first time I saw a plane going over my head that fast and that low I just messed my pants.”

Baccari squeezed out a laugh and went to get himself some more coffee. Franzheim said: “Where you won’t be seen, if you follow the road and the river, is on the radar screens east of the range, and that’s what we’re really talking about.”

I told him he’d sold me on that and we folded the maps and put them back into their waterproof pouches. This was at 07:31 and Ferris got up and stretched his legs and asked for flying instructions.

“Let’s go see the airplane,” Connors said.

The two guards were still at each end of the passage and they fell in behind us as we took the stairs. A Military Police sergeant and three men were standing in the main lobby and did a lot of circumspect saluting as we went through the doors into the rain. The wind-gusts were driving it against the buildings.

“What’s my minimum take-off visibility?” I asked the major.

“A lot of things like that,” he said close to my ear, “are going to be up to you. We can give you the standard safety rules, and you can push it from there if you want.”

On the way to the hangars I counted twelve security men dispersed at strategic points, seven of them in uniform. We were halted twice and one of the men came with us as far as the end hangar. There were now two MP sergeants and four dog-handlers outside the doors and we all had to go through the identity check. One of the sergeants telephoned our names through to his unit and waited for the okay before he used the intercom and ordered the door opened. Connors and Baccari hadn’t brought their coats and by this time they were drenched and shivering.

We trooped inside and began leaving puddles all over the floor.

“She’s still there,” Franzheim said, and someone laughed.

Ferris was near me. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m all right. The briefing’s first class.”

“They were hand-picked.”

There were six Luftwaffe military policemen surrounding the plane and Ferris said something to Connors, then took him aside. In a minute Connors turned round and said we could take the covers off; then he and Ferris went back to the door and I heard Connors phoning someone.

We’d got the last cover off when an MP lieutenant came into the hangar and told the six guards to form up outside. Ferris said we could go ahead.

He was watching me carefully for nerves and so far I was all right but there was an awful lot about this job that was beginning to scare me: it was the first time for sixteen missions that I wasn’t going in solo. I’d be on my own for the access phase and strictly speaking we weren’t running yet, but the number of people we’d needed to bring in just to get me off the ground was increasing, and I wasn’t reassured by all the security on show because you can deep-screen a man till you’re black in the face and still make a mistake and that was why Ferris had got those guards out of the way: they’d had to see the MiG in here in order to guard it but they didn’t have to see who was going to fly it and they didn’t have to hear Connors telling him how to do it.

I looked at my watch without meaning to.

It was 07:56 and there were twelve hours to go.

“Let’s get up there,” Connors said, and we used the steps to the cockpit. “I’d like you to stop me if you’ve heard anything before, but a few points might bear repeating. Handling techniques have been dealt with in the simulator and I’m told you came out okay. I don’t know how much you intend to use the mountain-range configuration and maybe you won’t know yourself till you get there, but there’s a couple of places where you could make a one hundred eighty degree turn, somewhere around six g’s at the speed you’ll be doing, Mach.95 or lower. For this airplane the radius of turn would be approximately five thousand feet.”

He draped his lean body across the edge of the cockpit and pushed his wet hair out of his eyes. “One of the most critical factors, of course, is fuel. It’d be nice if you could climb to peak altitude to conserve it but you’d have to come down to take those pictures and it might look a little strange to the radar teams on the ground. Now you can clip this chart to your log on take-off. We estimate that in winter conditions and with your prescribed altitudes you’ll use three thousand gallons per hour at Mach I, which is military power. At maximum speed, using the after-burner, you’ll use seventeen thousand five hundred gallons, or almost six times as much, and I suggest you reserve the after-burners for attack evasion of whatever kind. Or of course for getting out along an escape route if you calculate you can reach home without pushing your bingo fuel. You don’t — ”

“Bingo.”

“Right. Your bingo fuel is the calculated fuel for the distance. From Furstenfeldbruck to Yelingrad plus five hundred miles escape distance is three thousand eight hundred and fifteen miles and your internal and pod tanks will give you precisely the amount of fuel you’ll need — which is your bingo. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You start pushing your bingo the minute you exceed the prescribed consumption rate. Any use of the after-burner or any unforeseen deviation will change our basic calculations, obviously. The ideal scenario is that you cross the border at Mach.95 with no after-burner, meet with no kind of attack from the ground or the air, and make your escape by the optimum route planned.”

I put three questions and he got out a pocket calculator and made notes while we listened to the drumming of the rain on the big metal roof and the whimpering of the guard dogs outside. Ferris was pacing as far as the tail unit and back and I thought if he found a beetle I’d have to stop him somehow because I was getting sensitive about that: the closer we got to the jump-off point the less I wanted to hear a slight crunch and see a small mess on the floor. I’m not normally superstitious but I’m not normally forced into a crash-training operation with a high calculated risk and so much security coverage that one out of a score of people could set me up for killing in the access phase.

“These are the figures,” Connors said. “I’ve put them on the chart.” He turned round and looked down. “Bill, what’s the difference in distance for those three alternate escape routes?”

“Route B is plus fifteen miles. C is plus thirty-four.”

Connors checked his figures again and made one change. “Any more questions?”

“No.”

“Okay. There isn’t much more you need. The wing-pod tanks don’t weigh more than five hundred pounds, but they create an awful lot of drag at the lower altitudes and higher speeds. They feed out together and empty at the same time, so you can get rid of them simultaneously and avoid asymmetric wing-loading problems. The centre-line tank feeds out next, leaving you with the internals. On this trip you’ll have enough fuel leeway to wait for wooded ground or good cover before you jettison the tanks, though the drag factor governs this to some extent.”

He was talking about the effect of the wing tanks on high g-turn characteristics when the phone rang and Baccari went over to the door and took the call and came back and told Ferris it was for him, something about ‘embassy’, and for a couple of seconds I stopped listening to Connors and found myself hoping it was a signal from London calling the whole thing off on the grounds that the risk was too high for success or that someone had found a security leak in a vital-info area — I didn’t care what grounds they had, as long as they cut the switch and let everything die down and leave me alive.

This wasn’t very good because twelve hours before the jump you ought to be pulling the nerves tight and clearing the head of everything except the data you need to kick into the access phase and keep on going. You shouldn’t be hoping for some bastard in London to revoke his decision and get you a reprieve: because this is how you want to live, inching your way along the edge of the drop to find out how long you can stand it, hanging around that bloody place till they throw you the only thing that gives your life any meaning another mission. It’s all you live for, isn’t it, the next mission?

It used to be.

Not now.

Not this one.

Ferris came back from the telephone and I wanted to shout at him — this is a bit elaborate, isn’t it, all this bloody charade just to kill off one expendable executive? Why don’t you get one of those discreet-action people to push me under a bus and save all this expense?

“Of course it depends on the angle when you go into the turn,” Connors was saying, ‘and also on the amount of fuel remaining in the outer pod tanks.” He held his hand out flat and made a turning motion.

Ferris was standing at the bottom of the steps again, where he’d been standing before. He was looking up at us but not saying anything, not saying anything like I’m sorry to interrupt, Major Connors, but we’re calling the whole thing off. I was waiting for him to say something like that, but he didn’t.

“With the outer tanks empty, the wings are going to flip over with much less inertia. Am I getting across?”

“Yes,” I said, “critical mass factor.”

“Right. Now let’s go through it again, from level flight characteristics through a loop and a turn, with only the outer tanks

empty but unjettisoned.”

So we went through it again, and I stopped thinking about the phone call because it wasn’t going to save me so I ought to concentrate on the briefing data the major was feeding me: if anyone was going to get me to the other side of the Carpathian range still alive it was Connors.

He was taking me through the camera passes now: “At this point you should look for ground features such as railroad tracks or concrete roadways that could lead to and from the factories where the missiles are assembled.”

Ten minutes on the photography procedures, then he started talking about seat-ejection.

“The technique for this ship is much the same as for the FM-3o’s you’ve been flying. With the anti-g suit you’ll be wearing you don’t have a lot of protection from wind-force, and three hundred and fifty knots would probably be the highest survivable speed. From there up to five hundred knots and beyond, you’d have your arms and legs torn off. I’d say that if you eject at any speed from two hundred and fifty knots down to stall-zero you’ll come out fine.” He flattened his hand again. “An upward vector of twenty degrees is ideal for one ejection and the procedure is the same as for all other planes: this one has an emergency-release for the canopy and an emergency seat-detonator, and you shouldn’t have any problems.”

“Fair enough.” I turned slightly and looked down at Ferris, pitching my voice higher. “Is it still on?”

He looked puzzled for a moment and then nodded.

“Yes,” he called up.

The major waited till I’d turned back. “The procedure for ejecting in the event of total failure of the seat mechanism is about what you’d expect: you trim for nose down and hold the stick back, then let it go sharply. As the plane noses over you’ll pop out like a cork because you’re in a vector.”

He went through this again and talked about harness release, chute deployment and angles of escape relative to the tail unit configuration at critical speeds while I brooded at the back of my mind about the sheer bloody stupidity of letting Ferris know precisely how frightened I was of this one. He’d got an awful lot on his plate and his responsibilities wouldn’t end when Slingshot began running: they’d increase; and I shouldn’t have let him know that all this executive was waiting for as the time slid down to zero was a phone call telling us it was cancelled.

Yes indeed, the gut-shrink syndrome produces the necessary adrenalin and triggers the organism for action and that’s a valuable factor in the last hours before the jump, but it can get out of hand if you let it and then it’s dangerous. The time to start praying for a reprieve is ten seconds after the red light’s on the board and the mission’s running because you’re then in the access phase and too busy to get the twitch. I’ve proved it a dozen times and this time I’d have to prove it again.

But this time it’s different.

Shuddup.

Connors blew his nose and rubbed his thin raw-looking hands together.

“I’m ready for questions.”

I didn’t have many and we gave it five minutes more, then he went down the steps saying he’d fix up some cocoa before we all froze to death. The signals captain came up the steps and asked me to sit in the cockpit while he spoke over my shoulder; most of the radio panels were on the left side, below the throttle quadrants.

“It’s routine stuff. Just as soon as you start climbing from near the airfield at Zhmerinka — which is your virtual frontier in terms of becoming radar-detectable — you can start squawking your codes and modes on the digital transponder.” He moved the dial and began flipping switches as he talked. “Mode 4 is the classified super-secret squawk code for Soviet military airplanes. Mode 3 is for traffic control and nobody’s going to ask you any questions when you hit that one. These are tactical frequencies, so if you went high you’d have to squawk on the Mode 4 and we don’t have their code. As you’ll be flying low at this point and across the camera-target areas at Saratov, Dzhezkazgan and Yelingrad you won’t need to worry about that but bear it in mind if for any reason you get forced high by missile or interceptor action. Okay so far?”

“Will they ask me to respond on Mode 4 in that situation?”

“You bet. And you don’t know the code.”

“So I use normal frequencies and tell them Mode 4 doesn’t work. If they — ”

“Okay, right, but do it this way: tell them you’re sending and let them tell you they’re not receiving. Then sound surprised, and you’re into the act.” He turned his sharp nose towards me and said: “And here’s one buster who’s glad he won’t be there.”

“My felicitations.”

He blew out a short laugh and started prodding the radio panels again and we did some repeats and I told him I’d got it and he didn’t believe it so we went over the whole thing again.

That was at 09:41.

“Okay,” he said finally, “I’m satisfied. If you hit any problems it isn’t going to be because you don’t understand your codes and modes. Can anyone smell cocoa?”

He went down the steps and turned and looked up at me as I got out of the cockpit. “Just one little thing more you should know. We’ll be informing all NATO and Luftwaffe radar stations and air bases that a Soviet MiG-28D is going to be flying from Furstenfeldbruck to the Hungarian frontier at dawn tomorrow, so you won’t get shot down from this side.”

They’d rigged up a camp-bed for me in one of the small offices in the basement where we’d begun the briefing, and I turned in soon after ten-thirty, with four guards mounted in the corridor and six deployed at the top of the stairs to cover the main doors and the stairs to the upper floors.

I thought Bocker was laying the security on a bit thick, but one of the guard sergeants woke me at 1.00 a.m. and took me along to the briefing office where Bocker himself was on the telephone blasting at someone in German. Ferris was there and his face was white.

“I think we’ve been blown,” he said.