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.
The sergeant was shouting something but I motioned him to get clear and slid the canopy shut as the other man dropped to the ground. The systems for climb out were running and I tugged at the ejection-seat pin and switched to continuous ignition as the leading staff car swung in a half-circle across the dispersal bay.
The twin jets were screaming and I left the throttles wide open and moved in a curve to the end of the runway before the speed was too high. The tower was showing a red light and the headset was still dead but I was on my own now and the runway began blurring as the ground speed rose. Vibration was setting in but that was characteristic of the MiG-28 and I left the controls where they were and began waiting for liftoff.
The light was still fair and the cloud cover was high. The nearest airfield in Pakistan was Khanabad and last night the snow had started moving in from the south-west and it could push me higher and on to the radar screens but the tanks were full and it was only a thousand miles and at Mach 2 with the after-burners switched on I could make it in thirty minutes: the chances were first class.
The tower light was still red and the first shots hit the fuselage just aft of the cockpit: they sounded like stones. The third smashed into the panelling a foot from the canopy and I saw flakes of paint flick away in the slipstream. A red flare was floating across from the tower, trailing smoke as it buried itself in the snow beside the runway. The next came closer and left pink light dying against the windscreen as one of the tyres burst and set up a rumbling below the scream of the jets, the right wing dipping and correcting and lifting as I used the ailerons. They were shooting low and the nose went down and I brought the control column back: they’d hit the forward wheel and we were off the runway now and skating over snow, hitting a marker lamp and a second and a third until the whole of the aircraft was shuddering and I pulled the stick back another degree and waited and felt the lift coming into the wings.
Bad vibration, then it eased off, and the jets were the only sound.
A flare curved across the mirrors, dropping away below.
The End