The Sinkiang Executive q-8 Read online

  “I suppose so. I was busy, that’s all.”

  “You guys wanna hop on?” someone called out. A jeep was alongside us, still rocking on its springs.

  “I’ll walk,” I told Gilmore.

  “We’re okay!” he called back and they shot off, leaving a lot of dust.

  “It could’ve been a lot worse,” Gilmore said cheerfully.

  “Oh, could it? I don’t know how anyone ever manages to drive those bloody things.”

  “They’re not easy, are they? But that could have happened to anyone at all you know what wind shear means, as well as I do.” He stopped suddenly and pulled me round. “Before we get in there and start putting it all down on paper you ought to bear it in mind that I’m your instructor, and as far as you’re concerned that means Almighty God. I’m going to report wind shear as the cause of that accident and if you’ve got any other ideas I’d like to hear them now, not later.”

  “You’re running this show,” I said and walked on again, making him catch up. “There wasn’t anything wrong with the controls, I don’t mind telling them that.”

  “That’s all I need.”

  “Not really. A pilot might help.”

  “Jesus,” he said with a forced laugh, very annoyed, ‘you’ve been flying these kites for just three weeks! You think you can bring them down on a dinner plate?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh,” he said, ‘you’re one of those.”

  Later I went out and watched them haul the plane clear of the runway and start taking the wings off. There wasn’t a lot of damage but they were going to have to replace the undercarriage and make stress tests, alignment checks, so forth.

  “Squadron-Leader Nesbitt?”

  He looked down at me: I was sitting on the grass at the edge of the runway with my back to a numbered sign.

  “Yes?”

  “Joe says you have a ride into town tonight. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Joe was the Officer Commanding the USAF Base at Zaragoza. A ride into town meant a flight into Barcelona, a hundred and sixty miles east of here. One of the little things I’d learned since Ferris had sent me here was that Barcelona had not been the first available flight out of London. They could have put me on board a plane for Berlin or Paris or Rome about the same time or even earlier: there was a forty-five minute wait for the Iberian 149 and they’d shut me in the loo with a sack over my head because someone said the Yard had come out with an Identikit picture as a result of their interviews with the train passengers and it might look a lot like me.

  But Berlin or Paris or Rome weren’t within a hundred and sixty miles of the USAF Base at Zaragoza, and Barcelona was. And there was another thing I’d learned since I’d got here: the RAF unit attached to the air base by courtesy of the American forces comprised only fifteen men, and their sole concern was with getting one pilot refresher-trained in advanced fighter handling. They might have got here before I was shot out to Barcelona I wasn’t sure, because whenever I started asking questions they pulled the zip but the pilot they’d sent out here to train was me, and no one else. Ferris had talked about ‘peculiar qualifications’ and I was the only shadow executive in London between missions and with an updated degree of experience in military jet operation: I was only three months out of the routine simulator course at Norfolk.

  And throw this in: Ferris had said the target area was ‘still undefined’ but they needed someone with fluency in metropolitan Russian.

  They normally put Egerton on to me when they’ve got some shit to shovel and can’t find anyone to do it: he has that old-world fustian charm that cons you into believing you’re dealing with a league of gentlemen; but this time they’d got their foot on my neck because there was a murder hunt going on throughout the British Isles and the Yard would have contacted Interpol and even here in north-east Spain I was already vulnerable.

  The only hope I had of keeping out of sight until the Novikov thing blew over was by doing what the Bureau told me to do and going wherever it sent me. This was still my thinking, three weeks out of London: that I was on the run and would use the Nesbitt cover for all it was worth as my only means of staying free. But of course this was much too subjective. The larger truth was that London had a mission on the board and I was the executive and we were moving near zero.

  I peeled off from Joe and his group in the Plaza de Madrid some time about eight o’clock. They said they’d heard of some sensational girls who could do things I’d never dreamed of, and I said that was quite possible but as a matter of fact I’d got an elderly aunt near the consulate who was worried about her drains and I’d promised to go and poke around with a coat-hanger.

  Ferris was waiting for me when I arrived.

  “Five-ten,” I told him, ‘twelve stone, black eyes, dark skin, black moustache, beret, otherwise dressed like a clerk.”

  “Where?”

  “Still outside the building. I had to come in the back way, over the dustbins.”

  “Oh,” Charlie laughed, “that’s Ignacio. He’s sweet on Pepita.” He rolled his chair to the window and looked down over his half-moon glasses.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Takes her to Los Caracoles, I can’t say more than that.”

  I got a glance from Ferris meaning everything was all right, but it still wasn’t easy to relax: the Interpol connection was still on my mind. Charlie was a sleeper and this place had the status of a safe-house and we were a hundred per cent secure according to the book; but we’d had a sleeper in Tehran on the top floor of the radio-station building and London must have put half a dozen operations through there before something blew and the SAVAK sent in six armoured cars to surround the place and put a helicopter down on the roof and took seventeen minutes to do the snatch: two spooks and their field director and the communications man who’d been using Tehran radio for years, tinkering with aural cypher patterns on the Coca-Cola programmes.

  The only one they didn’t get was Sinclair and that was because he took a capsule: he was on his way through to Bahrain with his head full of stuff on a Near-East network project the Bureau was going to run through Crowborough and the embassy and he obviously didn’t trust himself because he couldn’t stand pain. It was Sinclair, of course, they’d been after, and at the other end of the line we’d all breathed again and wished him peace, but the point is that a safe-house is a safe-house until it’s blown.

  It can happen anywhere, and at any time.

  “Oh Christ,” I said when Ferris dropped the picture on to the table. It had everything: the noncommittal eyes, the sharp nose, the lopsided jaw and the go-to-hell line of the mouth. “Where did you get this?”

  “Liaison asked the Yard for a copy.”

  “Going a bit close, weren’t they?”

  “They knew what they were doing.” His yellow cat’s eyes lingered on me. “Which is more than you can say.”

  “Leave the poor sod alone,” Charlie told him. He was putting a tie on, his huge hands losing track of it.

  I looked at the picture again, avoiding Ferris. The Novikov thing had been a gross breach of security and it had shaken the Bureau and they’d lost their faith in me and that was why they were kicking me into a shut-ended mission and Ferris thought they were right, and so did I. But he didn’t have to look at me like that. I’ve done a bit of good, too, along the line.

  “It’s in the London papers,” he told me in disapproval.

  “I don’t give a shit!” I said and my voice cracked and I saw Charlie look up quickly, shocked. “It was something I had to do understand?” Ferris went on watching me, pleased to have drawn so much blood from such a small scratch. I watched him back and thought of other things to say and heard myself saying them in my mind, enjoying them, things about Novikov, like he’d never made a sound, things like that. Then I slid the Identikit thing across the table to him and turned away and saw Charlie reaching for a jacket, blue serge, the cleaner’s tab still on it.

  “Very sharp,”
I said, knowing better than to help him on with it. “Are you cutting out Ignacio?”

  “No. Little Sevillian dolly. Mastectomy.” He jerked the lapels straight. “That’s why she goes for me.” The rubber tyres squawked across the floor. “Lots of Carlos Primero for the good Mr. Ferris. Help yourself,” he said to me, ‘to whatever you fancy.”

  By the show he was making I assumed he’d been asked to leave the two of us alone and that would be logical because the tower had confirmed wind shear and Gilmore had told me he wanted ten more flying hours with this type so we must be getting pretty close to it and I hadn’t had any briefing. We could trust Charlie, of course, or we wouldn’t be meeting here; but no one strictly no one is given access to information that doesn’t specifically concern him. The risk of being picked up and put under implemented interrogation is always present at any time and in any place, and the less we know the less we can give away when it comes to the breaking point.

  When the door was shut Ferris stood for half a minute with his sandy head tilted and his eyes moving by degrees around the room, looking at nothing. We could hear the sound of the tyres on the landing outside and the whine of the lift as it came up from below; then the door rattled shut and the whine began again, rather lighter than before: presumably the counterweights were less heavy than the lift cage plus Charlie and put less strain on the motor.

  Ferris went on listening. The door of the lift may have closed by now — I couldn’t tell; there were other sounds from below: street traffic, someone on the phone, the voice of the chestnut vendor, a dustbin lid banging in the rear. Ferris waited another fifteen seconds and then padded across the floor and opened the door and looked out, listening again.

  He wasn’t normally like this: the field directors aren’t executives and they take security for granted; all they have to do if something blows is to get out as fast as they can, and perhaps that makes them less cautious. Tonight Ferris was nervy and I didn’t like that: one of the things your director in the field is supposed to do is to assure you, by his whole attitude, that things are running perfectly and you’re going to come out all right.

  He closed the door and came padding back in his soft green shoes, looking at the spiders in their transparent plastic boxes as he passed the bench.

  “They’ve got a lethal bite, haven’t they?”

  “It depends on your condition,” I said. “They pack about the same kick as a rattlesnake.” Charlie had filled me in.

  Ferris peered down at them, fascinated. “They’re so small.”

  “For Christ’s sake don’t tread on them. He has them flown in from Arizona.”

  He tapped a box to make one of them move, then lost interest and padded past me and sat on Charlie’s bed. “How are the flying lessons?”

  “All right.”

  “Nearly through, I’m told.”

  “Another two days.”

  “Did you get any prelim briefing out there?”

  “Only on flying.”

  He looked up quickly. “Well, they wouldn’t have briefed you on anything else, would they?”

  “How the hell should I know?” I was getting fed up with his studied reproofs. “Nobody’s told me who that chap Gilmore is — he could be Bureau for all I know, couldn’t he?”

  “Unlikely,” he said after a moment. “You see, we — ”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake do your job, Ferris. If you’re my director in the field for this one then bloody well say so, and if you’re not then tell me who is.”

  I went over to the fridge in the corner and found some milk and drank it from the carton, bringing it with me, calcium for the nerves. All right, a lot of it was characteristic paranoia and a lot of it was guilt, but he ought to understand that: it was what he was for, to guide me and send me out with my armour shining and my head held high and some — at least some — of the fear assuaged in the pit of my shrinking gut.

  Because this was likely to be the last go, and we both knew that. Not because there wouldn’t be a chance in hell of getting out at the other end there’s always a chance but because they didn’t want me back. And I don’t know how those poor devils do it, standing on the trap with a good breakfast inside them and a parting joke for the priest, I’m not like that, I don’t intend to go out doing nothing, I’m going to fight like a cat in a sack, and if you’ve ever tried drowning one you’ll know what I mean.

  “You’re rather touchy,” Ferris said.

  “Didn’t think you’d notice.”

  He waited five seconds and then said: “All right, I’m your director and this session has got to be your clearance and field briefing, because you obviously can’t get back into London and there isn’t enough time anyway. Time,” he said and swung a glance at me, “is very short as things are. Otherwise we’d have extended your flying hours by another fifty, which Gilmore has been bleating at us to do.”

  I couldn’t think of anything useful to say. The gut just shrank a little more.

  “A wheel has come off, as I told you, in Central Asia. But we’re not sending you out there to put it back on; this isn’t the situation you had to face in Tunisia. This is your mission exclusively and not the tag-end of someone else’s. Incidentally the code-name for the mission is Slingshot. Time is short but that doesn’t mean Control hasn’t been able to set everything up satisfactorily while you’ve been learning to fly those things in Zaragoza. We’ve got total access’ he gave an amused snort for some reason ‘and we’ve got reasonable cover. The target is precise and the field hasn’t any specific opposition deployed.” He got off the bed and put his thin freckled hands into the pockets of his mac and wandered about. “The get out point can’t be defined because it’ll depend on local conditions, but you’ll be close to a neutral frontier. You won’t be, for instance, anywhere like Moscow. I hope all this makes you feel a little better.”

  It looked all right. They weren’t going to drop me into a mess someone else had made and there wasn’t any opposition except of course for the entire population of the USSR, including the army. But they were non-specific.

  “Let’s start with the access,” I said. “What frontier?”

  “In effect, there won’t be any. You’ll be going too fast.”

  I felt another slight squeezing of the gut. “I’m not going in with one of those things?” I meant the FM-3o’s I’d been flying at Zaragoza.

  “Oh no. You wouldn’t get very far, would you? No, they’ve got a Finback lined up for you in West Germany, complete with markings.”

  “A Finback?”

  “That’s right.”

  NATO designation for the Soviet MiG-28D, duo syllabic F group: Fishbed, Foxbat, Flogger, so forth. I said: “Jesus Christ, where did they get it?”

  “One of their defectors put it down in Alaska, in July last year. We — ”

  “That one?”

  “That one.”

  I suppose he was enjoying himself in a way. The field directors get a certain amount of glory spilling over from London when Control comes up with something exotic or spectacular: access is a phase where the planners can use their creative imagination and they always try for something elegant it’s a sophisticated exercise and the spotlight’s on them and they can rake in a lot of kudos if they devise something effective, especially if the heat’s on and they’ve got the clock to beat. The one we like was when they dropped Dawkins smack in the middle of the sports stadium in San Salvador by parachute in broad daylight and dressed up as a clown, five minutes before President La Paz was due there to make a speech Dawkins said he was advertising for the local circus. It was an anti-terrorist thing and London had had exactly three hours to get a man in there so they’d used a private plane and one of our sleepers, unsuccessfully because La Paz took a magnum in the rib cage before we could do anything, but that didn’t spoil the score for the access.

  Of course they don’t work at the spectacular for its own sake: the prime requirement of access is that it’s the best way in to the target area, m
eaning quickest, safest, most discreet, so forth. If the best way in is through a main drain then you’ve got to crawl through the bloody thing and hope there’s more than one end.

  This was the first time they’d thought of putting a man into Russia in a MiG-28D with Russian markings and that was why Ferris was looking pleased.

  “How long have I got with it?” I asked him. Time was short, fair enough, but it hadn’t got to be that short.

  “You mean to train with it?” He was looking away.

  “Yes.”

  “They’ve got a simulator for you.”

  “All right, but — ”

  I left it but he didn’t say anything.

  “Well, how long?”

  “We can’t actually let you fly it,” he said a little impatiently, “till you go in.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “You mean no training?”

  “No training. I realize it doesn’t — ”

  “Have you gone out of your bloody mind?”

  “These are not,” he said with a sigh, ‘my instructions.”

  “All right, who’s running this? Who’s my control?”

  He hesitated.

  “Parkis.”

  “Parkis?”

  He turned away. I began saying something else, then shut up.

  This really wasn’t looking terribly good. They’d thrown me a last-ditch operation to give me a chance of going out with a good record, fair enough, at least I knew the score. But I hadn’t known they were putting me into a potent, sensitive fifteen hundred miles per hour fighter-interceptor without even one hour’s familiarization with it in the air. And this was for the access phase, when mission-risk is normally at a minimum.

  And Parkis was my control.

  “Why don’t they just send me a letter-bomb?”

  Ferris came wandering back in his soft shoes, keeping his voice low and speaking in short sustained bursts: “You’ll have to stop taking things so personally, Quiller, if we’re going to get this off the ground. There are personal considerations, of course: they’re reluctant to fire you summarily and they obviously feel you can do this job better than anyone else available at the moment all well and good. But don’t make the mistake of thinking they’re just giving you the first bit of work that’s come along.” He stopped moving around and stood facing me, very concerned. “This is a major operation, and they’ve been working the clock round on it for more than a month. You know Parkis anything he takes on has got to be big, and it’s got to work. Above all it’s got to succeed. Am I getting anything across?”