“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.
Chapter Seven: MOTH
The mountain was dead ahead and I began pulling the control column back without trying to turn because this was the middle of the range and there were peaks in every direction. The nose wasn’t lifting so I dragged at the stick again and watched the line of rocks begin rising against the sky instead of dropping away and I remembered Connors had said at Mach 3 you have to react very fast because everything takes more time. I’d got Mach 3.4 on the dial and the after-burners were roaring but there was no point in bringing the speed down because the nose wasn’t coming up and I heaved on the stick and watched the side of the mountain float right against the windscreen and burst and I could still remember shouting as I rolled over and felt the tubular metal of the camp-bed under my hand, sweat running on my face, still shouting inside my head, time — what time?
03:21.
Pitch dark.
Sat up and hit the wall because this thing hadn’t got a headboard, why wasn’t I informed? Bocker had kept asking into the telephone, his voice like a slowly-traversing machine-gun, its volume rising and falling as he tried to control his anger. It was the first time I’d seen him like that: no more silent laughter, no plump hand on my arm. He’d hardly recognized me when I’d come in.
Ferris had told me to go back to bed now that I knew what had happened, try to get some sleep in case there was anything to do in the morning. I’d had to go down consciously through the alpha waves with the mantra I always use… karisma… karisma… before I could reach delta and let go. I’d slept for two hours but it hadn’t done me any good because the alarm had been in my mind when I’d gone under and the dreams had been violent and highly coloured, with vivid reds predominating.
There’d already been seven men in the briefing-room by the time I got there: five of Bocker’s own security chiefs and two of the military. Others had been sent for, Ferris said Counter-intelligence people are functionally paranoid and the security branches are the worst because they’re geared to the risk of exposure from all quarters and especially from the inside, but I didn’t think Bocker had over-reacted to this particular incident. The man’s name was Corporal Behrendt and he was one of the close-security area guards in the Finback hangar and he’d been due to report for the midnight watch and he hadn’t shown up. Bocker had worked on it for an hour before suggesting I ought to be informed.
“The situation is very simple,” he told us. “This man was of course fully screened by the civilian and military branches and we have known him for more than three years. He is considered to be totally reliable, and that is why we are treating his disappearance as a priority alert.”
The phone rang while he was talking and he answered it and spoke very slowly in High German, demolishing a subordinate with words that hit with the force of hammers while we listened. I hadn’t seen this Hans Bocker before: there was suddenly a sinister aspect to him that made his fat blond amiable appearance look like a disguise. He rang off.
“Es ware wahrscheinlich uberflussig zu sagen aber wir machen alle anstrengungen um den Mann zu finden — ” then he remembered the courtesies and switched back to English — “I don’t need to tell you that we are making every conceivable effort to locate this man.”
Some of the BfV people weren’t catching some of this and Ferris noticed it and said: “Nesbitt and I have German, so please use that.”
Bocker accepted this with a polite gesture that made him even more sinister because of the contrast: Slingshot had run straight into the dark and we’d lost it and he knew that and he was going to be held responsible and he ought not to have time to consider good manners: unless he was some kind of machine. He went on talking, his short bursts of diction hitting the walls while we stood like men washed up on an unknown shore by a sudden storm. Ferris was still pale and I wasn’t long out of sleep and I began thinking Jesus Christ, Parkis isn’t going to get this one started after all.
Before I went back to the business of trying to sleep again Ferris told me he’d be in constant signals with London and I left him to it. Communication was fairly fast via the embassy phone and the Ministry radio at Crowborough and by this time Parkis and his team would be in Signals watching the board, but I thought Ferris would probably switch to the NATO channels and reach the Bureau through the War Office because this thing was the equivalent to a red alert and seconds would become important as the time ran out to the jump.
If, of course, there was one.
I don’t remember feeling pleased at this thought, or feeling anything at all. The psyche was coming under a barrage of conflicting influences and the only thing to do was sleep.
Ferris woke me just before five o’clock, coming into the room without a sound and then sitting in the dark repeating my name until I woke.
“Ferris,” he said quietly when he heard me stir.
There was a desk lamp and I switched it on. He was sitting on one of the wicker chairs they’d brought in here for me; he looked very held-in, and sat so still that I wished he’d get up and break something to get it over with.