White ice was forming on the outside of the canopy and I flipped the lever for defrost and began watching the altimeter: the cloud base had looked something like ten thousand feet high when I’d last seen it but at one thousand knots airspeed I was being taken down so fast that I could find cloud at zero feet at the point where I came out. There were voices in the headset but the cloud was putting out too much static and I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
Assume they are ordering a kill.
Six thousand feet and going down like a stone.
Five thousand.
The city of Yelingrad should be somewhere east by south but the compass had been shaken up by the turns and the aircraft was still at an acute angle of descent and half-way through a curve designed to bring me put at two thousand feet in level flight but you don’t take this big a chance on instruments alone and I was easing the stick forward at four thousand feet.
Three thousand and bright light burst against the screen and I saw low hills and the snows of a mountain range much higher and to the left. If the two interceptors had taken up pursuit I wouldn’t see them from here: they’d have had to make a similar trajectory and by now they’d be thirty or forty thousand feet above me and possibly inside the cloud, but in a few seconds I ought to start watching the minors because they were faster than I was and if they came up behind me again they could float a missile at me without even taking aim. The compass had steadied and gave a reading of 106 degrees but it didn’t mean anything because the roll had taken me two or three thousand feet north of my original course and the blackout had lasted several seconds and I didn’t know what the Finback had been doing while I was out. The weather had been moving in from the south and the only feature I could see clearly was the range of white peaks dead ahead of me and they had to be the Khrebet Tarbagatay, fifteen miles beyond Yelingrad. It was a fix and I continued level flight at close to Mach 3.5, still using a lot of the gravity I’d picked up from the thirty-thousand-foot dive. The ground features were streaming past the canopy when I looked down but I saw the missile because it was ahead of me and just lifting from the launcher two thousand feet below. It was long and thin and white and my instinct was to kick the controls and get out of its way but that would be fatal because it could home on me wherever I went.
I watched it.
At this airspeed forward and the speed of the missile upward the collision point was seven or eight seconds away and I decided to remain on course for four seconds and try to judge the closeness of the thing by noting its size. This wouldn’t be easy because the combined speed at point of impact would in the region of three thousand knots and the process of vision is not instantaneous: the brain has a mass of computing to do when the eye sees a moving object.
I sat waiting. The idea, Thompson had told me over his cup of tea, is to leave it as late as you can.
It was now very hot inside the cockpit because I’d left the defroster going and a trickle of sweat had reached a corner of my eye and there wasn’t time to do anything about it. A stray thought was trying to come in but I blocked it and flicked a glance at the fuel gauges for the inboard tanks because at low altitude and military speed this Finback used three thousand gallons per hour and I couldn’t sustain this speed for more than nine minutes longer.
Three seconds.
Stray thought Resist: irrelevant.
The missile had canted over to the vertical and was well clear of the launcher and from this distance it looked like a white telegraph pole rising from the background of low hills. The warhead would not be nuclear because you can kill off any given aircraft with a prescribed minimal charge of conventional explosive but the result would be as effective and I became aware of my position here in the air and my relationship with the data streaming into the senses: the undulating hills and the idea of green grass and the summertimes of youth, kite-flying under the drifting cumulus; the sound of the engines that were driving me so tumultuously across the planet’s surface towards the point of extinction; the feel of the pressure suit and the back of the seat connecting me to the mundane world of engineering while the psyche began its last long scream of terror inside the organism.
Two seconds.
Stray thought persisting: yes, it had been the time factor I’d been overlooking since I’d breached the invisible frontier and entered Soviet airspace unmolested, because these people were now ordered to kill and they must therefore be certain who I was. They would deal with a rebellious pilot of their own forces less drastically, leading him down with their interceptors or simply waiting till he ran out of fueclass="underline" the quartermaster general of the Soviet Air Command would know better than anyone how much these aircraft cost and they weren’t to be thrown away. So now I knew this: that the element of intelligence that had out paced me from Furstenfeldbruck had now been examined and assessed and was still in time to hurl a missile into the sky above Yelingrad.
Behrendt had broken.
One second.
Behrendt had broken and not long ago, holding out as far as the edge of lunacy and at the final moment saving enough of his mind for them to ravage.
When did this aircraft take-off? Pain beyond comprehension, the body disintegrating. What is its mission? If I tell them, what will be left of me to go on living? Is the pilot an American? Stop just let them stop just let them stop just let them stop. Throw water. Quickly throw more water.
So that was the time factor I’d got wrong. When I’d crossed the frontier without drawing their fire I’d assumed that security had never been breached, that Behrendt was no longer a threat. But at that time they were still working on him and he’d broken only an hour ago, or half an hour, in time for the information to be flashed through the priority signals network and trigger the long white cylinder that was gliding upward and towards me now, curving slowly into the windscreen with the silence of a shark.
Zero seconds.
The idea is to leave it as late as you can, so when you go into the turn you’re as close to the missile as you can get.
I watched it coming, through the clear glass of the windscreen. It was turning slowly at the command of the electronic guidance system, the pointed nose tilting to focus on the target and the fins swinging into line behind it. The trickle of sweat at the corner of my left eye had begun stinging but I had to ignore it because this was the time when an estimation had to be made about the size of the missile and its closeness: the delay of four seconds before starting to avoid it had been arbitrary, a desperate attempt to control the conditions by an educated guess. It could already be too late.
It was difficult to see, to judge. The thing was now lined up in a head-on attitude and looked like a white ball shining in the light and increasing rapidly in size as it floated towards the windscreen.
The organism was screaming.
Turn.
Shuddup and wait.
The distance has got to be so short that it can’t make the turn when you do. You don’t give it enough room to manoeuvre, okay?
Sipping his bloody tea.
Turn now.
Wait.
The white ball came floating, its high-explosive content still inert in these last few seconds.