The President nodded thoughtfully and then looked back at the screen.
“General, to get back to the North Cape, will they try to break out unsupported and will they use nukes?”
“Mr President, I just don’t know.”
Svetlana removed all her clothes, including underwear and padded barefoot across the tile floor unabashed and oblivious to the stares of two males present. At rear the tattoos on the rolling buttock and in the fore the gold stud piercing an intimate item ‘down south’, catching the light from the bright strip lighting.
She took the ‘Suit, underwear, flame retardant, thermal’ from the blushing storeman and pulled it on. It was supposed to be a snug fit and indeed it was. Major Caroline Nunro was stood with folded arms, leaning against the wall and watching, deciding the girl looked even more naked once garbed in the thing. The storeman and a specialist flight suit technician grinned at one another like schoolboys as she bent over to adjust the feet, appreciating the view of a rather superb example of buttocks clad in elasticated Nomex.
“I’ll take it from here.” she stated, with the steel of authority in her voice. “Wait outside.” The men left the heated G-Suit and departed, wondering how their wives would react to suggestions they join a gym.
Caroline plugged in the G-Suit to a test set and connected the valves at the end of the suits air bladders, inflating it to check for leaks and ensure that the heating matrix was operating. It wasn’t, and the technician was summoned. In extreme circumstances the non-function of the bladders could result in brain damage; however a non-functioning or malfunctioning heating matrix spelt certain death from hypothermia.
The fault was quickly found and a tiny coupling replaced; the suit heated up immediately.
“Replace them all.” Caroline ordered, just to be on the safe side and thirty two couplings were indeed swapped out for new ones and the circuit tested again.
Her skin was flushed as she helped Svetlana struggle into the heated G-suit, having to get up close and personal to heave the thing on. It was far bulkier than their own G-suits because she would be cocooned in the unheated belly of the aircraft.
“What’s the matter Caroline?”
“Oh nothing.” She replied. “All my payloads have bodies born for porn, haven’t you noticed?” Svetlana howled with laughter.
The Nighthawk pilot had been busy until noon with last minute preparations, followed by crew rest because of their 0430 start. This was the first time since arriving at the RAF station that day that she had seen Svetlana, and until she had hooted in laughter she had been uncharacteristically quiet, her normal effervescence subdued.
She knew about Constantine’s removal from the mission, it meant that Svetlana now only had the nuclear weapon for company on the flight, and that their fuel consumption was improved fractionally. Constantine had collared her half an hour before, distressed that he was not going, angry with himself and also worried for Svetlana.
“Keep an eye on her please Caroline; make sure she doesn’t try winging it solo when she makes contact with her old boss. She might trust this woman but I don’t.”
She now reached out to stroke the Russian girl’s hair.
“What are you brooding about, him or yourself?”
Svetlana smiled in a sad way.
“I’ve been avoiding him all day… Scott told me last night that he was pulling Con off the mission. The trouble is that Con feels so useless right now, he knew that he was only going along because I wanted him there, even though he would be stuck in the safe house at the landing strip. Now that I’m going in alone… I’m scared Caroline.” The American gave her a brief hug and stood back.
“You are not alone in this ‘lana, there are twenty tough American boys already in place, they know their stuff.”
“I don’t doubt that, but they look like fighting men… even if they are fluent, but their youth and all the muscles will give them away, they’ll get picked up, and maybe even screw up my mission at the same time.”
Caroline frowned; she was not on the need-to-know-list of the ground mission specifics.
“I thought your part was a done deal… this person you are contacting, she got you your job, and you’re solid, right?”
“It’s not quite as cut and dried as that,” Svetlana began; the American pilot knew nothing of the type of work she had originally been recruited for. She was a spook, as simple as that.
“I didn’t have any real choice in the matter, either I joined one of their departments or I got blacklisted from any kind of decent work. They would have prevented me leaving the country to make a living abroad, too.” She turned to the American pilot. “I had a certain reputation at university and I was given an offer I could have refused but as I just said, not without ruining my life. After they spent nine months training me, there isn’t a man, or woman for that matter, who I wouldn’t stand a far better than average chance of getting into bed, and once there who wouldn’t blab secrets just so I would carry on doing to them whatever it was I was doing to them.” She looked Caroline in the eye and the pilot read in those eyes that it hadn’t exactly been all fun.
Caroline said the name of a rather gorgeous Sparrow who had hit the headlines worldwide, in an effort to lighten the sudden dark mood of the Russian girl.
“Pah!” Svetlana said her grin and twinkle returning. “She got a B as her final grade and you guys caught her.”
“And you?”
“You never caught me.” She said simply in reply as she frowned in the mirror at the G-suit she wore.
“Hardly a Viv Westwood.” She mused to herself, and then paused to look back over her shoulder. “And I passed with honours.” She said, winking wickedly.
“Anyway, I love the Motherland but being pressed into service to be her whore was not on my to-do list when I was growing up… I mean the sex was fun, I liked that a lot, but I could do that in my own time. I wanted a real life, a career and a couple of million in the bank, and then I’d find Mr Right and become a fat happy Mummy churning out beautiful babies.”
“You still could.” Caroline said. “When this is all over, and we have peace again.”
Involuntarily Svetlana shivered.
“I am going back there, back to people who see me as nothing but bait on a hook.” The Russian shook her head as she recalled. “There was a girl I sometimes worked with, a real looker, when they felt the sapphic touch was appropriate for whichever man or woman they wanted to turn.” She paused. “They sent her off with a foreign diplomat without telling her he got his jollies hurting pretty things… the video footage they got of him doing that was the leverage to turn him.” again the involuntary shudder. “When I saw her again she wasn’t pretty anymore.” She shrugged and smiled weakly.
“That’s when I knew I had to get out, and if I couldn’t get out of the spying game then at least out of the Aviary… that is what they call the Sparrow’s department.”
Caroline thought she was listening to some film plot, but she realised she was being naïve; this sort of thing went on for real.
“So I took steps when I found out my recruiter had been moved to a different department, and was in a position to get me in there too.” It was all Svetlana was prepared to elaborate to the pilot. Not who the recruiter was nor how she had achieved the move from Mata Hari baiting honey pots in Russia to low profile Jemima Bond in the west.
“Well… I’ll be in Russia too, so will Patty so it is not as if you will be amongst strangers.”