They still didn’t answer but I knew now that it wasn’t just because they were untalkative They’d wanted to know my name because they’d been squawking on Mode 4 and I hadn’t answered and they’d wanted to find out why and I’d told them. That was all right. The thing that worried me was that they’d called me on the military frequency — they must have — for some specific reason and I couldn’t ask what it was. It’s one of the things the Soviets are very good at, these bland-faced silences that persuade you they’re thinking of something else. They’re not. They’re waiting for your next question, because it’s your questions, not your answers, that tell them what they want to know.
The set could have gone dead.
I fiddled with it and got static and some talk.
They were waiting for me to ask a question.
Bloody well wait.
I pushed her up through the last few thousand feet to thirty-five and levelled off and checked the panel and made out the log and tried to think what it was I was missing. I gave it a full ten minutes’ concentration, going over the whole of the flight from take-off until now and looking for trouble and not finding any. The briefing patterns were intact and the schedule was on the line and you can forget the Hungarian phase because no one in Hungary is going to put a trace on a M1G-28D with Soviet markings seen going eastwards: if you want to defect in one of these things you’ve got to go the other way.
So there was nothing wrong. Except the missing factor.
Ignore.
ETA Dzhezkazgan was 12:16 and it was now 11:30 and I got fed up and pushed the levers all over the place on the air-conditioning control panel from full cold to full heat with zero to high on the fans and nothing happened except that I blew the map off my knee and had to get down there to pick it up and there wasn’t a lot of room. The actual cockpit temperature wasn’t too bad: it had dropped from 80 degrees to 63 degrees since I’d started climbing from Saratov; it was the g-suit more than anything, and the increased heat of the organism due to stress.
At any given stage in any given mission you’re not far from the crunch because you’re usually working on alien ground and it’s not long before an opposition cell picks up the action and starts coming in: I’m talking about the field executives in penetration work or in snatch jobs where you’ve got to home in to the target and hit the objective or deactivate it or bring it all the way in, whether it’s a document or a device or a flesh-and-blood defector. I’m not talking about the sleepers or the people in place or that sleazy crowd of pussy-footed pimps in the diplomatic infiltration set because the nearest they ever get to a crisis is when the paper runs out in the loo.
For the field executives the crunch is part of the trade and if it wasn’t there you wouldn’t do it, but that doesn’t mean you don’t let it worry you, assuming you want to live (Calthrop didn’t want to: one of his contacts told him there was going to be a secret police unit waiting for him at the airport but when he stepped out of the helicopter they weren’t there after all because he stepped out ten minutes before it came in to land.)
With a thing like Slingshot the crunch was going to be fairly close the whole of the way: there was no specific opposition to initiate close combat but the general opposition police, secret police and counter-intelligence forces was there as a permanent background, because the alien-soil thing still applied and this was the sticky side of the Curtain: all they had to do was pull me in and there wouldn’t be anything useful I could tell them that would get me back across the frontier with anything like a pulse. I’d got airborne cover designed for getting me to Yelingrad through a reasonable degree of suspicion on the part of the traffic controllers responsible for the areas I was overflying, but if I ever let them get me down on the ground I wouldn’t make any more progress because there wasn’t any Finback 8X454 on the roster for the 36th Squadron and if there was a pilot named Nikolai Voronov he wouldn’t look like this man sitting here at the table under the five-hundred-watt bulb.
The stress to the organism was therefore normal but there was the missing factor on my mind and that was bringing out some of the excess adrenalin.
Something to do with time.
A time factor. An estimation of some sort. An assumption.
Never assume. Never assume anything. It can be lethal.
What plane are you?
I told them.
What is your destination?
I said Dzhezkazgan. If I said anything else they’d only start getting the twitters when I didn’t alter course.
What is your present altitude?
Thirty-five thousand feet.
I waited for more.
There wasn’t any more.
The headset was silent.
It was the first time they’d asked for my destination. That would be the military, putting the question through Mode 3. They were getting warm now: I had to take photographs over Dzhezkazgan and there was still thirty-one minutes’ flying time remaining on the log and that gave them plenty of room. They were already interested in me and I believed they were now checking on the information I’d given them, which meant it was a matter of time before they found I was putting out cover and ordered me down. This is what I meant when I said that on this operation we were going to work close to the crunch the whole time: if they decided to investigate me they only had to say a few final words into my headset and Slingshot would detonate. You are ordered to land immediately. Tick-tock-bang.
I sat listening to the long-drawn muted thunder of the jets. Through the windscreen the sky was cut in half by a line of cloud reaching from somewhere near the ground fifty miles away to as high as I could see; one huge swathe of the darker half was almost black but there was no lightning: it was too cold for a storm, though it could be a mile-high drift of snow moving up from the south-east. It didn’t worry me because my speed was consistent at Mach.95 and I would reach the camera target in twenty-five minutes from now and climb above the weather if I had to.
What worried me was the time factor: the thing I was missing. It had something to do with Furstenfeldbruck and there was an image floating at the edge of consciousness that I still couldn’t recognize. Ignore. Let it come in when I wasn’t thinking of it: it’s the only access to the subconscious.
Another thing that worried me was the shape of the airborne phase of Slingshot as seen on paper. It was wedge-shaped, in terms of increasing risk. I’d gone in at the wide end and I was now somewhere past the middle and I would soon be narrowing down to the point: which was Yelingrad. But it was still open ended, to a degree. I couldn’t remain airborne over Soviet territory indefinitely because my fuel was limited and I couldn’t cross a frontier because even at my peak ceiling I’d still be on their screens and they could shoot me down. Parkis had known this, and had framed a specific directive: at the moment when the wedge narrowed down to its point I was to disappear.
Chapter Eleven: DUCKSHOOT
ETA Dzhezkazgan was noon plus 15 and I began the run in from thirty-five thousand feet and made an ATA of 12.17 and took photographs and pulled out. From three thousand feet I couldn’t see anything remarkable about the village, but the complex of farm silos might seem rather substantial and the long avenue of trees to the north could cover a transporter rail to the rectangular barns at the end: for rectangular barns read assembly plant
Ten minutes later the centre-line tanks emptied and the light came on and I dropped them over the Golodnaya Steppe and felt the slight increase in airspeed as the drag came off.
Then I began running.
Yelingrad was five hundred miles and the fuselage tanks would give me that distance plus five hundred before we hit bingo and if nothing disturbed the pattern we could make it. But that was academic because an awful lot of things were going wrong: I was still on their screens and I’d overflown two suspect missile sites at low altitude and they hadn’t asked any questions. To take those photographs I’d been prepared to fly a Mach 2 marathon on the after-burners and finish up with empty tanks a long way short of Yelingrad. That hadn’t happened and it should have and I didn’t know why.