“Very well.”

It took less than a couple of minutes. I never draw a firearm but on this trip a Soviet-made senior officer’s revolver was part of the cover and there was no point in objecting. The code for the overall operation was a one-time pad and he gave it to me. “You can use the local codes or cyphers if our contacts have got a reliable system going. Your discretion. But for all alerts and priorities you’ll use the pad.”

Travel and Cover had been built into the access and that only left Accounts and there was no change from the established records. Unless we’re cleared in London, where there’s a witness, we have to make the attestation verbally before we sign the form. Against the rain’s drumming and the creak of the shadowed fuselage my voice was only just audible, because I was due out soon and this sounded less like a statement of faith than of despair.

No dependants, no next of kin.

No monetary assets or final bequests.

If remains available, use them for medical research.

In the soft ashen light from the perimeter lamps he turned his head and looked at me, though his eyes were in shadow and I couldn’t see them.

“Roses,” he said, “for Moira?”

“Yes.”

When we left the Galaxie and walked through the rain to the main buildings I realized that Bocker must have seen us go into the transport because he’d thrown a substantial surveillance net round the area to seal it off. There was also a military escort of two corporals waiting for us at Base Operations and they took us down to an office on the floor below ground level and mounted guard at each end of the passage as we went in.

There were three men sitting round a briefing-table and they got to their feet as Ferris made the introductions.

“This is Major Connors — flying instruction Captain Franzheim, navigation — Captain Baccari, signals, US Air Force. Squadron-Leader Nesbitt, RAF.”

They put down their coffee and shook hands.

“Hi, I’m Chuck.”

“I’m Bill.”

“Call me Omer. Still raining out there?”

“Pissing down.” I took off my soaked jacket.

“Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

Connors looked at Ferris and said: “Okay, why don’t we get started?”

“Do you mind if we take navigation first?”

“Let’s do that.” Connors sat down and looked at Franzheim, who went over to the map on the wall and picked up a pointer.

“Okay, this is an oblique parabolic equal-area projection with a scale of 109 miles per inch, and as you can see it covers the whole of Asia and includes peripheral countries. We’re right here.” He moved the pointer.

This was at 6.35. The navigational briefing took just short of an hour and Franzheim spent most of the time on the access.

“You can’t go in at night without the help of highly sophisticated terrain-mapping radar, because there are hills and you could hit one with only a few degrees of deviation. You can’t go in at high altitude like they did in the days of Gary Powers because they’d shoot you down the minute you crossed the border, even if you were flying at sixty thousand feet which the Finback can attain. So you go in by daylight and you go in very fast and very low.”

He moved the pointer again. “We’ve routed you through Hungary, since there’s no Soviet frontier between east and west: you have to go through either Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary or Romania. Also, you can go down to practically zero feet across these plains on either side of the Hungarian-Russian border and then head for the course of this river here, the Latorica, almost due east. Your speed should be less than Mach I from take-off till you’re across the Carpathian mountains, to avoid sonic boom. You’ll be seen — and certainly heard — overflying the town of Mukachevo right here, but you are now in the Soviet Union and flying a Soviet airplane. How does it sound so far?”

“I like it.”

“Great.”

I liked it because the map had the countries in pretty colours and didn’t show any surface-to-air missile sites and the Carpathian mountains didn’t look like anything you could smash into with an aeroplane.

The pointer moved. “We’re now in Soviet airspace and still flying close to zero feet and radar-undetectable. When you’re clear of the mountains you start climbing in the vicinity of the military airfield here, just west of Zhmerinka, and you turn south-east, parallel with the Romanian border.”

He glanced at Ferris and went on with a rather shut face: “At this point you’ll be picked up on Soviet radar, and since you’re still inside ADIZ airspace they’ll — ”

“ADIZ?”

“Sorry. Air Defence Identification Zone.”

“Thank you.”

“They’ll call you up and ask you to identify yourself and prove you’re not a border violator. You now begin using your cover as a Russian colonel.”

I began looking round the room for bugs because this was strictly cosmic material but the place looked more like a deep shelter than an office and had probably been designed as a briefing-room for NATO flight missions. These three officers had obviously been fully screened and Ferris was looking quite satisfied with the whole arrangement. This was the kind of situation where you had to remember that your control in London was God and that your director in the field was the Son of God and they’d got everything worked out including a method for getting you to the end of the mission alive.

“Question,” I said. “How many alternative routes did you consider and throw out?”

“I’d say twenty or thirty. The point we finally chose is where the terrain-masking afforded by the mountains is greatest, and the Soviet radar coverage is weakest, according to intelligence reports. Also the ground is virtually flat on both sides of the border and you can cross it at Mach.95, or six hundred knots calibrated ground speed just below military power and sonic boom.”

“And very low.”

“We estimate that with the handling capabilities of the Finback you’ll be going in at one hundred AGL.”

“Christ, how high are the church steeples?”

“There aren’t any on the route we’ve planned for you.”

“You’ve checked on the steeples?”

He gave a brief grin. “The Base Commander said we had to do a good job and we’re kind of scared of him. We checked on steeples, power grids, radio masts, factory chimneys, the whole bit. At one hundred feet on that precise course you won’t hit anything, and you can have that in writing.”

I said I was impressed and he thanked me.

“Naturally, we couldn’t allow for pilot error. You’ll have quite a job staying on course. There is a navigational control system fitted to the Finback but the guy who flew it into Alaska said it wasn’t very accurate and it was defunct anyway when he landed. It hasn’t been removed and we haven’t installed a good one of our own, because the airplane has to look like what it is: a Soviet MiG-28D, in case they ever get a close look at it.”

I saw Ferris move his head a fraction towards me, and folded my arms in acknowledgement. What Franzheim had just told me was that he didn’t know this was a one-way trip for the plane: ‘in case they ever’, so forth. Ferris just wanted to warn me to leave this subject blacked out.

“You can’t use radio fixes,” Franzheim went on, ‘because as you know you’d have to transmit a signal to get ranging information, and they’d pick it up. Also they’d pick up your radar pulses from the ground. So you’ll be steering with visual fixes, compass and dead reckoning. I’m talking about the leg this side of the Zhmerinka field, where you’ll start climbing and adopt your cover.”

He picked up his coffee and finished it and dropped the cup into the disposal can and pulled another one off the stack and filled it at the dispenser. “I guess all you guys must be caffeine-shy. Omer, do you have those maps?”