Clock: six minutes.
There was no direct sunshine but the glare was blinding now and the streaming terrain immediately below had the glimmer of molten metal.
No farm.
No village.
Recalculate and note time: five minutes to the frontier, give or take the margin of error. I wasn’t sure I would in fact be able to distinguish the features of low-relief landmarks at this speed and at a vertical angle, so I made a one-degree turn and held it for ten seconds and came back one degree and brought the river across to the other side, increasing the vertical angle and staring down again until a visual shift mechanism was set up and I had to look away.
Four minutes.
The most distinctive landmark to the north of the Tisza was a bauxite mine head two miles east of a co-operative farm with maize silos, and I turned my head to the left again and looked down.
Hova valo? Hova valo?
I didn’t answer. Major Connors’s reports from NATO Intelligence had been rather vague, since last year’s attempt at insurgence had ‘affected the disposition of Red Army units in this satellite state’. Nobody knew definitely whether a Soviet aircraft moving flat out at low altitude through Hungarian airspace would cause alarm, though I’d been warned to expect interceptors east of the Austrian border if radio calls for identification became insistent and went unanswered.
Igazolja mag at.
I suppose they’d found me on the radar when I’d climbed through the turbulence to give myself elbow room but I was now skinning the deck at two hundred feet and ought to be off the screens according to the map indications: the nearest radar stations to the Tisza within a hundred miles of the border were on the northern side of a hill range and the terrain masking was noted as total for 17m.
Hova valo? Igazolja magat!
At this speed and altitude I was producing a continuous roll of thunder across the ground and it was probable that I was panicking livestock and that agricultural workers and the garrisons of isolated police stations were running to phone a report to the nearest military air base.
Hova valo? Igazolja mag at.
No comment.
I checked the instruments but had to do it in a series of snatched glances because I could be miles out in my dead reckoning and the flat bright plains could break into low hills and I’d need a lot of time to bring the nose up and clear them. The first hills on the map began ten miles from the frontier and I’d have to start climbing in any case when -
Stubby tubular configuration low left: silos? Then angular superstructures ten or twelve seconds after: the bauxite mine-head to the east of the farm.
Check map. Check time. The landmark was thirty miles from the frontier and the clock gave me three minutes to go. I waited thirty seconds and eased the control column back a degree and held it and flattened out again at four hundred feet and looked for the hills and saw their shadows this side of them in the lower half of the windscreen. They were sliding towards me in a soft green wave and I wanted to climb again to increase the margin of safety but that was gut-think because the briefing sources were first class and these hills were down as three hundred feet and the margin was as much as I could afford without starting to show up on someone’s radar screen.
Two minutes.
I was now closing very fast on the frontier from twenty miles west and there was no reason to turn back but I switched on the set and made two clicks with an interval of one second. It was the only signal I’d been briefed to make and it meant that all was well and I was going in. I was to make it on the final approach to the Soviet frontier while I still had enough time to swing round and return to base if so ordered. The response would be one click as a signal to proceed as planned, three rapid clicks as a signal to turn round and head back to Furstenfeldbruck.
I waited.
One click.
I switched off the set.
The hills streamed past the windscreen in a wash of undulating green and I estimated the visibility at five or six miles: a distance of thirty seconds in terms of time. Then I checked the whole panel and noted that all systems were functioning within their prescribed limits of efficiency and finally I tested the harness straps because the bumping had put a slight degree of stress on them and I wanted to know whether they’d broken.
One minute.
They hadn’t broken. They couldn’t have. They hadn’t received one thousandth of the stress needed to do it. It was my nerve that was breaking and driving me into these final gestures of supplication: I couldn’t pray and I couldn’t cross myself and I didn’t carry a rabbit’s foot so I’d tested the straps because if they were all right then everything was going to be all right and to hell with your bone-rattling prophecies of doom.
Easy to say, because the primitive brain was aware that its organism was trapped inside a projectile and hurtling through the air towards the likelihood of death: and not by accident.
But if he fails to survive the access phase -
Get out of my mind.
Get out.
Concentrate. Thirty seconds: five miles. Check, recheck, recalculate, do anything, but give the consciousness some work.
Airspeed 640 knots, altitude 300 feet, steady on course, bearing 121 degrees.
Twenty seconds.
Ten. Zero.
And ahead of me, spreading into the windscreen, the snows of the Carpathians. Despite all you have done, Parkis, and all you may do or try to do, you may write this much at least across the board: the executive in the field for Slingshot has penetrated Soviet airspace and is still alive.
Chapter Ten: MOIRA
“I don’t give a damn who you are.”
She meant what I was.
It was the first thing she ever said to me, and she didn’t know it was important. She still doesn’t.
“It’s unusual,” I said.
This was later.
“What is?”
“Not wanting to know.”
“Oh.” The head perfectly still, the long green eyes alone moving to look at me. “But then I’m a lot more than just sex, aren’t I?”
She has rich auburn hair, clouds of it, but doesn’t use it for effect: she uses her shoulders. They are slightly tanned and she likes them bare and knows how to move them, though she does it sparingly because it’s an expression of foreplay and it can devastate. Somewhere along the line there’s a car smash and a divorce and an autistic child she’s slowly bringing to life, and other things.
“This business I’m in,” she told me a year ago, “I don’t know.” We were looking down into the Thames, just before dawn. “It isn’t doing anything for me. It’s slowly beginning to hollow out my guts, but I can’t stop.” After a bit: “It’s like that with you, isn’t it?”
“No.”
Too quick and she heard it, and laughed softly.
“You never turn your back, do you? Maybe I could learn from that: I’ve been letting things creep up on me.”
She flew out to Taiwan a month ago with her director to do a remake of Song of the Islands and I couldn’t see her off because this thing had started, but whenever she leaves, or I leave, I get the same feeling: that all she’s going to see of me again is a dozen roses. I’ve been trying for a long time to break this insidious association of her name with death — my death — but it still comes in strongly when the odds are stacked and it looks like the end of the line, and I felt it now because the climb indicator was showing a ten-degree angle as I eased the control column back and watched the airspeed come down through 550 knots before I pushed the throttles forward and took her back to 640 and sat waiting.