I hated Parkis because he was inhuman and he hated me because I wouldn’t respect him and now he was daring me to do something dangerous and he was half counting on it to kill me and I knew that. He’d made certain I knew it: they tell you only what you need to know and he’d wanted me to understand that the only choice I had was to accept his dare or back down. And the thing that had been rolling towards me, black and mountainous and unstoppable, was the fact that I didn’t really have a choice at all. That bastard knew there was one thing I could not do.
Signal, sir. The executive has decided not to take-off. He feels the risk is too high.
The one thing I could not do.
Ferris was waiting.
“Tell him we’re starting up,” I said.
Because Parkis knows too much. He knows that all you have to do to kill a moth is light a candle.
Chapter Eight: SLINGSHOT
I swung round as the van came up because they had the power ground-unit running now and the roar blanked out most of the other sounds.
“Franzheim! Have you seen my gloves?”
He threw open the door. “I got the whole bit!”
Time was 08:17 and we were late but it wasn’t critical because the drizzle was steady and the daylight was only just getting through.
I put the gloves on and Franzheim gave me a hand with the parachute harness.
“So they found that guy?”
“What guy?”
“That god dammed guard.”
“No.”
I shrugged the harness comfortable.
“Oh Jesus,” he said.
I wished he’d shut up.
Major Connors was in the cockpit of the Finback doing the preflight routine, doubling for the launch control officer. His face was coloured by the glow of the panel lights and he sat crouched forward, concentrating.
“Got the helmet?”
Franzheim passed it down to me and climbed out of the van.
“Did you get your medical?” he asked me.
“Last night.”
I noticed Lambach, the base commander, trotting steadily across to the hangar, the dogs watching him as he neared. I couldn’t see Ferris anywhere.
Baccari was coming over from the mobile steps, looking up at the sky.
It wasn’t really the sky: it was a thousand-foot ceiling to the haze.
“Everything’s go,” he said and put a thumb up.
“Listen, has anyone told the people on our side of the border to leave me alone?”
“How’s that again?” I had to repeat it because of the noise from the ground-unit. He stood back and looked at me. “What the fuck d’you think we’re running — Disneyland? You bet your ass they’ve been told!”
Franzheim gave a discordant laugh but it didn’t help. Everyone knew that bloody corporal hadn’t been found and they seemed to think they were setting me up for an execution.
“You want to put your hat on?” Franzheim asked me.
“Are we that close?”
“Sure.”
“All right.”
He helped me with it. We’d been handling it the right way up all the time to keep the rain out but the leather was ice cold and felt tighter than it was. The roar of the power-unit was muffled now but I couldn’t hear anything else. Someone came up and I saw it was Ferris. He said something and I bent towards him and tapped the side of the helmet.
“Everything is under control.” He gave me a small plain envelope and I wasn’t surprised because I’d known all along that this thing stank of sealed orders. “Open on arrival. Feeling all right?”
“Yes,” I said, and watched him as he walked away, feeling oddly reassured to think that if Slingshot was going to finish me there’d always be Ferris, a thin sandy man with untidy hair walking for ever across the rainswept airports with his head down and his mac flapping and his mind on the access, the rendezvous, the courier route while his eye watched the ground for a beetle.
“Boots tight?”
“What?”
Franzheim.
I couldn’t hear in this bloody helmet.
He said it again and I bent down and checked the laces When I straightened up I heard the sound of the power-unit dying away. Connors was climbing out of the cockpit and we began walking over there through the shallow puddles. It was light enough now to see some of the F-15’s standing in their dispersal bays, and the line of trees along the perimeter road at the far side of the airfield. The black Mercedes limousine wasn’t there today: Bocker had moved it, or they didn’t need to watch any more because they’d broken the corporal and he’d told them everything they — oh balls, listen, the whole thing’s a gamble and either you’re going to get killed or you’re going to beat that bastard Parkis at his own game and there’s nothing you can do about it because you’re committed and that was what you wanted so shuddup.
There was a deep puddle and we splashed through it. “We’re ready for strap-up,” Connors said. He watched me for a moment and then looked away across the airfield. “Are you going to wait for some visibility?”
“They’ll be giving me lights, won’t they?”
“Sure thing.”
“I’ll use those.”
I went up the steps and got into the cockpit and they began crowding around me, plugging in leads and making the man-machine connections, strapping me to the ejection seat and checking, double-checking, none of them talking. The pale green light of the gunsight reticle was making reflections along the cushioning rim of the visor and I moved my head slightly to face the front. Under my body I could feel the flexing of the hydraulic landing-gear as the men leaned across the edge of the cockpit.
One of them tapped my helmet and I looked up.
“Okay?” Connors asked me.
“Yes.”
“Everything’s go.” He patted the helmet again. “Good luck.”
I nodded. Someone else put his thumb up, Franzheim, I think: there were so many of them, a lot of faces and arms. I nodded again to reassure him; then they left me and I turned my head and saw the steps moving away. I reached up and slid the canopy shut.
The engines were rumbling and one of them fired, and thirty seconds later the other one came in. They began whining now, their sound rising slightly and then falling as they stabilized at idle with the exhaust gas temperature still cool at 380 degrees. Connors came through on the UHF and I adjusted the set and acknowledged; then we began bringing the systems on line and setting the configurations while I reported the oil, fuel and hydraulic pressures and the RPM.
Pressurize.
I flicked the switch.
Check trim.
I moved the controls, watching the mirror.
Okay. I turned my head and saw him holding his thumb up. Wait for the green.
What about those lights?
You’ll get them.
I began waiting for the tower to come through. They’d strapped the clip-board to my right knee and I took the pencil out: I couldn’t crow-fly the first leg to the Carpathian range because it would take me twice across the Hungarian-Czechoslovakian border, so the initial magnetic course was 148 and I filled it in. ETA for the turning-point was thirty-five minutes after take-off and I left it blank because I didn’t have the data: the time was now 08:21 and the tower was still out.
Connors was standing where I could see him easily. He was looking up at me and then turning his head towards the control tower. I tried them again and they didn’t respond.
“Shit,” I said to anyone who was listening.
Connors heard me and went over to the flight van for a lamp. He was obviously trying to get the tower and couldn’t.
I was beginning to sweat, and the cockpit pressure was uncomfortable. When I looked down again Connors was pointing the lamp at the tower, pressing it on and off. I looked back at the main panel. The clock was out of synch with my watch by fifteen seconds and I adjusted it and began thinking that London must have come through with a fifty-ninth-second order to abort and that was why the tower was keeping us on ice like this, or they had found that corporal and seen the marks on his body and decided that if anyone slipped a Finback across the border he’d run smack into a duck shoot because -