Страница 24 из 56
Noise like a freight-train, a freight-train going nowhere, standing still in a cold grey void: you can keep your bearings by looking at the dials in front of you but you can lose them inside your skull if you don’t hang on.
That bastard Parkis could have given Ferris a final directive: if that corporal is found to be in the hands of a Soviet cell or is considered to have been in their hands and under interrogation for a period long enough for him to have divulged the nature of Slingshot, the executive is not to be informed, and the operation is to proceed as pla
That would be logical because this was a new kind of mission and it had its own built-in destruct unit and there was a point we could reach where they would use it. The two components of Slingshot were a man and a machine and they were both expendable: this thing I was flying was a museum-piece and it’d be cheaper to junk it than take it all the way back to the States; and the pilot was due for throwing out if he ever got back alive and it’d be cheaper to let him go into the access phase and run into a certain barrage than take him back to London and debrief him. It would save us the unpleasant task, later, so forth.
Destruct. Destruct by neglect.
You’re paranoiac.
No, I -
Ferris said so.
But they could have found Corporal Behrendt, or his body -
You surely don’t believe -
Shuddup. They could have found Behrendt and that man Bocker could have called up Ferris with the news and Ferris could have told him to keep a blackout on it, a total blackout. Within the context of an expendable man and an expendable machine it’s a perfectly logical premise, and I -
But even Parkis wouldn’t do a thing -
He wouldn’t what?
I was in his office with two other people the day Swarmer came in half-dead from fatigue after ru
Be advised: Parkis will do anything.
Drifting.
Wind gusts.
I corrected the attitude.
And there was another thing. One of our sleepers in Brussels had got himself into a Venus trap and one of the Moscow cells had turned him and he’d begun doubling and Parkis had sent a man out to deactivate him before he got dangerous, and the man was back within twenty-four hours and there weren’t any questions asked but we passed the hat round in all departments for the sleeper’s widow. The man who went out, and came back, was Ferris.
Drift Correct.
And forget.
At this point I was thirteen minutes from the Hungarian-Soviet frontier and flying towards it at a steady six hundred knots and if Corporal Behrendt had been got at successfully I had these last thirteen minutes to live, so it was a good time to make a decision: go back or go on. But nothing had changed since I’d committed myself and put this thing into the air, except that the idea had come into my mind, about Parkis. But that could be paranoia and if I gave in to it I could make so many wrong decisions that I could wreck an awful lot more than the life and career of just one little shit-scared ferret on his way to a terminal explosion.
Twelve minutes now, not thirteen. Twelve.
I could for instance abort this mission and swing back to Furstenfeldbruck and tell Ferris to get me to London, but they had a manhunt going on there and I was the man and it’d be no go because the Bureau wouldn’t let me in: once in the dock and with no defence I could bring down the Sacred Bull and they knew that. They’d order Ferris to hole me up on neutral ground and keep me there till they could debrief me and let me loose like a piece of junk with a pension, or save their money and rig a bang in a flight bag and put me in the records as executive deceased between missions, I wouldn’t put it past them, I wouldn’t put anything past those idolatrous bloody pagans if they had to choose between the Bull and a human being.
Bump, very bumpy. We dropped a hundred and fifty just then and I don’t understand it because there ought to be flat land below us now without any turbulence.
I brought her to five hundred and stared through the windscreen at the blank grey wall and listened to the jets pushing me into it with the force of a hurricane and looked down at the clock again: eleven.
Or I could put this thing down on an airfield in Hungary or Romania or Bulgaria and blarney my way into the blue as a Soviet military overseer on a special mission: the slave-state security police would lick anyone’s boots providing they were made in Moscow. But London would know where I went because they knew me and they knew my ways and they’d put a directive through the network and the moment I showed up above ground they’d make the snatch, finis.
Ten minutes and ru
Check.
RPM, EGT, fuel gauges, artificial horizon, airspeed, all warning panels dark.
Clock.
Nine minutes left.
Then something flashed and I looked down to the left and saw a break in the rain-haze and a long sinuous line ru
Over the next three minutes the turgid grey of the cloud-mass broke up gradually into landscape patterns that swung past me five hundred feet below. I kept lie altimeter in view and went down three hundred feet, turning slightly and turning again to steady the course a mile to the north of the river. The cloud-base was lifting all the time now and the glare of the low sun filled the windscreen. I kept my head turned and began looking for landmarks but it was difficult because the terrain was streaming past at six hundred knots and becoming a blur as the sun’s light strengthened and shone across fields and wooded areas still bright from the recent rains. There should be a tank-farm complex a mile to the north of the Tisza at this point if the dead-reckoning figures added up, but I couldn’t see it yet: it could be five miles behind or five miles ahead of me and I began looking for the two adjacent landmarks: a highway intersection in the shape of an X and a village with two churches, one at each end.
Clock: six minutes.
There was no direct sunshine but the glare was blinding now and the streaming terrain immediately below had the glimmer of molten metal.
No farm.
No village.
Recalculate and note time: five minutes to the frontier, give or take the margin of error. I wasn’t sure I would in fact be able to distinguish the features of low-relief landmarks at this speed and at a vertical angle, so I made a one-degree turn and held it for ten seconds and came back one degree and brought the river across to the other side, increasing the vertical angle and staring down again until a visual shift mechanism was set up and I had to look away.
Four minutes.
The most distinctive landmark to the north of the Tisza was a bauxite mine head two miles east of a co-operative farm with maize silos, and I turned my head to the left again and looked down.