Rage of my own as I went on hooking at his face but he was rolling sideways and when another breath went heaving into my lungs I used the oxygen and wrenched his arm away and brought a series of eye-darts against his face and felt him jerk and swung a wedge-hand across his throat: I suppose it was the sword-strike to the neck that had weakened him to this extent and I hadn’t realized it you should always be aware, you — a quicker movement from him but I paralysed the nerves in the bicep with a centre-knuckle and found leverage and got to one knee and drove the wedge-hand down with all the strength that was in me and felt the vertebrae snap and the head come forward, fell on him, fell across him, closing my eyes and letting the breath come, letting it ebb and flow, life-bringing, ebb and flow, this was the way.
He didn’t move.
After a time I raised my head and opened my eyes and looked down at him, Kirinski, the objective for Slingshot, a silence across the snow.
Chapter Nineteen: FLARE
Of similar threats in the past. The Soviet Union has been steadily increasing its collusion with the United States of America and its anti-China military deployment, intensifying its threats against the Chinese Republic.
In spite of protests from Peking there have been more than three hundred incidents along the Sinkiang border during the past year, all of them provoked by the Soviet garrisons in the area.
Moscow must learn that it can no longer continue to flout warnings issued repeatedly by the Chinese Republic, and that practical measures to normalize the situation will have to be undertaken in the immediate future.
I kicked the door open and it smashed back against the wall.
They swung round and stared at me, two lieutenants and a sergeant.
Meanwhile it is learned that a serious lack of vegetables in Soviet markets is causing nutritional problems among the people. Harvests have been -
“Switch that off!”
The sergeant moved so fast that he knocked the transistor off the bench and tried to catch it before it smashed open on the concrete floor.
“Leave it there!”
He straightened up.
“Get to attention!”
One of the lieutenants had gone pale. Everyone down here listened to the broadcasts in Russian from Peking but in the armed services you could be shot for it.
“Sergeant, write down these officers’ names and numbers.”
I went across the hut and kicked the red plastic transistor against the wall. “Who does this receiver belong to?”
None of them spoke.
“Answer me!”
“We don’t know, Colonel. We all share it.”
“Then you’ll all share the responsibility. Sergeant, add your name and number — come on, I’m in a hurry!”
The shoulder was stiffening. The wound had opened again and I couldn’t tell whether the blood had started seeping through the uniform. It wouldn’t look right: they’d call their headquarters.
I turned to the senior lieutenant with the ribbons and the pilot’s insignia. “I want an aircraft readied for flight — where is your crew?”
“On standby, Colonel.” His heels came together.
“Get them moving!”
He looked surprised so I said: “Listen to me. I’ve been ordered to the Mongolian border to lead an escort squadron: the Chinese have provoked a new incident there. This is an emergency, and if you can get me airborne in record time I might forget your receiver — you understand?”
“Yes, Colonel!”
He swung round and hit the klaxon on the wall as I snatched the list of names from the sergeant. “Get me a helmet and flying kit — come on, man, you can move faster than that!”
He broke for the door and I followed him out.
Half a dozen ground crew were tumbling out of the hut near the dispersal bay. They didn’t need any orders: the klaxon was still going.
There was no actual hurry: I wanted to keep them busy so that they wouldn’t have time to ask any questions.
This was the nearest decoy field to the city, ten miles away to the south, according to the map. Kirinski had told me they flew two planes from each field, and these were both on the ground with their wing covers off and starter trolleys hooked up. They were MiG-28C’s, precursors to the Finback, their tail units higher and the missile racks bunched closer to the air intakes: there didn’t seem to be any major difference in configuration but I didn’t know how different they’d be to handle.
“Sergeant! Help me with this gear.”
One of the officers was trotting across to the tower and climbing the steps, and half a minute later the klaxon was shut off and all we could hear was the whine of the first engine as it started up. The second one came in almost immediately afterwards, and the stink of kerosene blew back to us across the tarmac.
My head kept bumping. I didn’t know quite what the trouble was: I’d had a couple of brief blackouts on the way here in the car and I didn’t want another one at the wrong time. It was probably the result of whiplash: we’d gone down into snow from the ledge but the impact had been awkward and the head is a dead weight during a fall.
I let them help me into the cockpit because it was standard procedure and I didn’t think I could have made it on my own: the shoulder was almost useless and giving a lot of pain and it wasn’t easy to move normally — I’d told the sergeant I’d sprained it in the gymnasium.
Blackout again and the instrument panel faded and got lost altogether because my head had dropped and I was looking at my knees when I came to.
“You can check your trim, sir!”
Did that.
We were on internal power and I checked instruments and looked at the ground crew; there wasn’t anything coming through on the headset and I didn’t know whether I was going to be operation-controlled: no one seemed to be in charge of anything in this bloody place.
I saw them before I looked back at the instruments. There were four of them, all of them military except the last one, which looked like police: it had got its emergency lights swivelling.
The sergeant was still hanging over the edge of the cockpit, completing his checks. One of the ground crew was on the other side, plugging in the radio connections.
“Are you receiving, Colonel?”
“Yes.”
The headset was still dead but I was in a hurry now.
The leading vehicle looked like a staff car, with a pennant flying from the front wing. They were all going flat out along the cinder-surfaced perimeter track and one of them had its horn blaring and its headlights on. The sergeant was watching them now.
Either they’d found Kirinski or Chechevitsin had been blown and given them the number of the Wolga or one of these people here had decided to phone a report through to his headquarters: unfamiliar Air Force colonel demanding flight preparation, so forth, and some bright spark in the hierarchy had got the message: they’d been looking for an Air Force colonel ever since the Finback had come down.
“Sergeant!”
“Sir?”
“Get the chocks away.”
He turned and called down to the ground crew and I heard the hollow drag of the woodblocks.
There was a change in the engine note and I looked at the panel again but couldn’t see anything on the instruments; then I got it: the police car had its siren going as the convoy came heeling off the perimeter track and on to the tarmac. They were a hundred yards away and I pumped the brakes and pushed the throttles forward and started rolling.