HIT.

I looked up through the windscreen and saw Thompson taking a gulp of tea.

“You’re a gonner,” he said in a moment. “We’ll try again, and look 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 in safety. 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? But you did two things wrong: you left it too late and you turned too wide. You’re working on a very narrow margin, you see, between bit and miss. Let’s try it again.”

The screen showed a cloudscape and the silhouette of the MiG.

“Course is converging. But hold it.”

The white cylinder shot forward of the plane.

“Missile fired. Wait. Wait. Wait.”

The thing was curving in fast and I didn’t look at anything else.

“Turn. All you’ve got.”

I braced myself and the g’s piled up on the dials till I could almost feel them.

“Tighter than that.”

Gave it the limit but too late and the red letters jumped into the frame: HIT.

For the first time he looked up in his glass-panelled booth.

“Mr. Nesbitt, that Finback is very rugged. You couldn’t make this degree of turn at Mach I in the FM-3O but you can do it in a Finback. I realize you think you’re going to break the wings off, but that won’t happen. Now we’ll do it again.”

We did it again and we got HIT.

This was at 19:22.

MiG-19 and much slower, coming at Mach.98.

HIT.

“You should have beaten that one.”

Shuddup.

MiG-23 and much faster.

HIT.

MiG-25 — the Foxbat and very fast indeed at Mach 18.

HIT.

Mig-19 again. Wait. Turn.

MISS.

“More like it,” Thompson said.

We went on trying.

HIT.

HIT.

MISS.

HIT.

MISS.

“Evens,” Thompson said, and drank some more tea.

20:06.

HIT.

MISS.

MISS.

“Twice running.”

Shuddup.

Concentrate.

MISS.

HIT.

MISS.

MISS.

MISS.

“You’ve got it now all right,”

MISS.

20:51.

“Give me the Foxbat again.” That was the fastest.

“Fair enough. Coming at Mach 2.6.”

HIT.

“Again.”

MISS.

“Again.”

MISS.

“Again.”

MISS.

“Right-ho. Call it a day.” He sounded exhausted.

“I think that wraps it up,” Ferris said.

He pulled the collar of his mac a bit higher. It was still drizzling, and colder today at this time: an hour after first light.

“All right,” I told him.

We stood for a while not speaking again, looking around us. About a hundred yards away one of the USAF crew was dragging a pair of chocks towards the F-III at the end of the line. Half an hour ago a BfV security man had walked across the tarmac to check on us, wondering what we were doing standing here in the middle of nowhere in the rain. We didn’t spell it out for him.

I began clumping my feet up and down. They’d given me a heavier flying-jacket than the one I’d brought here from Zaragoza, but it was still bloody cold.

“Recap,” Ferris said, and crouched down on his haunches to ease his legs. I did the same.

“Right, I’m to expect the Soviet radar stations to start picking me up as soon as I begin climbing. At that point I shall be heading south, parallel with the border and twenty-five miles into their airspace. As Colonel Nikolai Voronov I can — ”

“You start climbing near a military field.”

“Right. Near enough to give the impression I’ve just taken-off from it. As Colonel Voronov of the Red Air Force I’ll respond to any radio calls with the cover story that I’m carrying out a fuel-range test which will explain all those extra tanks. Testing has to be done between thirty and forty thousand feet and any request to fly lower than thirty thousand or make a landing should be resisted for this reason.”

“Use a lot of authority,” Ferris said, and pulled his collar higher. “Yell at them over the radio. They’re shit-scared of authority.”

“Noted.”

I recapped on the main elements: communications, cut-off points, rdv procedures, local direction, so forth; but most of this stuff was abstract and I’d stopped asking him for specifics because he’d said it was too early. It was beginning to look like sealed orders all the way and I assumed London was hogtied by the security demands of the USAF, the RAF, NATO and the BfV, since all four parties were contributing to the mission.

It was the first time I’d taken on an operation with so much exposure at the outset. The first phase of any mission the access is normally sacrosanct in terms of secrecy, simply because the most effective way of blowing up a project is to hit it before it can start. With this one the access was blown if anyone talked: any one of those people who knew that a front-line Soviet aircraft was parked here under wraps at Furstenfeldbruck. At a rough guess there must be more than a dozen of them, including the crew of the Lockheed C5-A Galaxie that had brought the Finback across the Atlantic and the guards now protecting it. Already at this stage of the briefing I could see why London couldn’t find anybody to take this one on. It was much more, and much worse, than sensitive. It was vulnerable.

This was probably why Ferris looked so bloody sour.

“Photographs,” I said, “of X and Y at low altitude. The film — ”

“You’ll be given the actual locations at flight briefing,” he said, looking away.

“Thank Christ for that.” I like as much data as I can get as early as possible, so that I’ve got time to feed it in. I hate being thrown a mass of stuff at the last minute when I’m busy working on the access.

“I don’t like this one,” Ferris swung a sharp look at me, ‘any more than you do.”

“Bad luck. Did you volunteer for it, or did they catch you knocking off some bastard in a train?”

We crouched like a couple of half-drowned monkeys in the rain, snapping at each other, while in the background Parkis and his people were completing and perfecting their glorious brainchild that we were expected to take over when they were ready. I wished them luck. They’d come up with an access that was going to be about as safe as a duck shoot with me as the duck, and the target area they’d picked was about the most desolate bit of waste ground on the face of the planet:

Latitude 47 N. by Longitude 82 E. in the middle of winter, work that one out.

“Signals,” Ferris said.

“Through Chechevitsin in Yelingrad for London via Moscow. What about alerts?”

The man was nearer now. I’d been watching him,

“Use your contacts in place.”

“Or cross the border.”

“Or do that’

The man had a waddling gait; I know people by their walk.

“Get out through Sinkiang.”

“If you’re pushed.”

“Otherwise try Pakistan.”

“The end phase,” he said, ‘is likely to be rather fluid.”

I didn’t follow up. It was my belief that while Parkis and his people were completing and perfecting their glorious brainchild they were building into its complexities a small but deliberate flaw designed to cut me off in the final hours of the mission and remove me from the London intelligence field as an expendable embarrassment.

“Bocker,” I said,

“I beg your pardon?”

“Herr Bocker is coming.”

Ferris looked up. “Now what does he want?” We straightened our legs and went on talking while we waited. “You’re finished with the simulator, Thompson says.”

“Yes.”

“I hope you’re feeling more confident.”

“I’ll be all right once I’ve got the bloody thing off the ground.”