“These are the figures,” Connors said. “I’ve put them on the chart.” He turned round and looked down. “Bill, what’s the difference in distance for those three alternate escape routes?”

“Route B is plus fifteen miles. C is plus thirty-four.”

Connors checked his figures again and made one change. “Any more questions?”

“No.”

“Okay. There isn’t much more you need. The wing-pod tanks don’t weigh more than five hundred pounds, but they create an awful lot of drag at the lower altitudes and higher speeds. They feed out together and empty at the same time, so you can get rid of them simultaneously and avoid asymmetric wing-loading problems. The centre-line tank feeds out next, leaving you with the internals. On this trip you’ll have enough fuel leeway to wait for wooded ground or good cover before you jettison the tanks, though the drag factor governs this to some extent.”

He was talking about the effect of the wing tanks on high g-turn characteristics when the phone rang and Baccari went over to the door and took the call and came back and told Ferris it was for him, something about ‘embassy’, and for a couple of seconds I stopped listening to Connors and found myself hoping it was a signal from London calling the whole thing off on the grounds that the risk was too high for success or that someone had found a security leak in a vital-info area — I didn’t care what grounds they had, as long as they cut the switch and let everything die down and leave me alive.

This wasn’t very good because twelve hours before the jump you ought to be pulling the nerves tight and clearing the head of everything except the data you need to kick into the access phase and keep on going. You shouldn’t be hoping for some bastard in London to revoke his decision and get you a reprieve: because this is how you want to live, inching your way along the edge of the drop to find out how long you can stand it, hanging around that bloody place till they throw you the only thing that gives your life any meaning another mission. It’s all you live for, isn’t it, the next mission?

It used to be.

Not now.

Not this one.

Ferris came back from the telephone and I wanted to shout at him — this is a bit elaborate, isn’t it, all this bloody charade just to kill off one expendable executive? Why don’t you get one of those discreet-action people to push me under a bus and save all this expense?

“Of course it depends on the angle when you go into the turn,” Connors was saying, ‘and also on the amount of fuel remaining in the outer pod tanks.” He held his hand out flat and made a turning motion.

Ferris was standing at the bottom of the steps again, where he’d been standing before. He was looking up at us but not saying anything, not saying anything like I’m sorry to interrupt, Major Connors, but we’re calling the whole thing off. I was waiting for him to say something like that, but he didn’t.

“With the outer tanks empty, the wings are going to flip over with much less inertia. Am I getting across?”

“Yes,” I said, “critical mass factor.”

“Right. Now let’s go through it again, from level flight characteristics through a loop and a turn, with only the outer tanks

empty but unjettisoned.”

So we went through it again, and I stopped thinking about the phone call because it wasn’t going to save me so I ought to concentrate on the briefing data the major was feeding me: if anyone was going to get me to the other side of the Carpathian range still alive it was Connors.

He was taking me through the camera passes now: “At this point you should look for ground features such as railroad tracks or concrete roadways that could lead to and from the factories where the missiles are assembled.”

Ten minutes on the photography procedures, then he started talking about seat-ejection.

“The technique for this ship is much the same as for the FM-3o’s you’ve been flying. With the anti-g suit you’ll be wearing you don’t have a lot of protection from wind-force, and three hundred and fifty knots would probably be the highest survivable speed. From there up to five hundred knots and beyond, you’d have your arms and legs torn off. I’d say that if you eject at any speed from two hundred and fifty knots down to stall-zero you’ll come out fine.” He flattened his hand again. “An upward vector of twenty degrees is ideal for one ejection and the procedure is the same as for all other planes: this one has an emergency-release for the canopy and an emergency seat-detonator, and you shouldn’t have any problems.”

“Fair enough.” I turned slightly and looked down at Ferris, pitching my voice higher. “Is it still on?”

He looked puzzled for a moment and then nodded.

“Yes,” he called up.

The major waited till I’d turned back. “The procedure for ejecting in the event of total failure of the seat mechanism is about what you’d expect: you trim for nose down and hold the stick back, then let it go sharply. As the plane noses over you’ll pop out like a cork because you’re in a vector.”

He went through this again and talked about harness release, chute deployment and angles of escape relative to the tail unit configuration at critical speeds while I brooded at the back of my mind about the sheer bloody stupidity of letting Ferris know precisely how frightened I was of this one. He’d got an awful lot on his plate and his responsibilities wouldn’t end when Slingshot began running: they’d increase; and I shouldn’t have let him know that all this executive was waiting for as the time slid down to zero was a phone call telling us it was cancelled.

Yes indeed, the gut-shrink syndrome produces the necessary adrenalin and triggers the organism for action and that’s a valuable factor in the last hours before the jump, but it can get out of hand if you let it and then it’s dangerous. The time to start praying for a reprieve is ten seconds after the red light’s on the board and the mission’s running because you’re then in the access phase and too busy to get the twitch. I’ve proved it a dozen times and this time I’d have to prove it again.

But this time it’s different.

Shuddup.

Connors blew his nose and rubbed his thin raw-looking hands together.

“I’m ready for questions.”

I didn’t have many and we gave it five minutes more, then he went down the steps saying he’d fix up some cocoa before we all froze to death. The signals captain came up the steps and asked me to sit in the cockpit while he spoke over my shoulder; most of the radio panels were on the left side, below the throttle quadrants.

“It’s routine stuff. Just as soon as you start climbing from near the airfield at Zhmerinka — which is your virtual frontier in terms of becoming radar-detectable — you can start squawking your codes and modes on the digital transponder.” He moved the dial and began flipping switches as he talked. “Mode 4 is the classified super-secret squawk code for Soviet military airplanes. Mode 3 is for traffic control and nobody’s going to ask you any questions when you hit that one. These are tactical frequencies, so if you went high you’d have to squawk on the Mode 4 and we don’t have their code. As you’ll be flying low at this point and across the camera-target areas at Saratov, Dzhezkazgan and Yelingrad you won’t need to worry about that but bear it in mind if for any reason you get forced high by missile or interceptor action. Okay so far?”

“Will they ask me to respond on Mode 4 in that situation?”

“You bet. And you don’t know the code.”

“So I use normal frequencies and tell them Mode 4 doesn’t work. If they — ”

“Okay, right, but do it this way: tell them you’re sending and let them tell you they’re not receiving. Then sound surprised, and you’re into the act.” He turned his sharp nose towards me and said: “And here’s one buster who’s glad he won’t be there.”