The engines whined. The readings were satisfactory all over the panel but the cockpit heat was too high and I lowered it but didn’t feel anything immediately. Sweat ran.

Birds flew up from behind one of the marker boards as I swung into line with the runway, their wings black against the glare of the haze in the east. Rivulets ran down the windscreen and I cleared it and sat waiting, watching the tower.

The tower was quiet.

Connors was off the air now: I tried him but all I got was my own dead voice. When I looked down and sideways I couldn’t see anyone. Connors would be in the flight van: it had swung through the rain to line up parallel with me a hundred yards away. Ferris wouldn’t be with him: he would have gone back to the hangar to wait by the telephone in case it rang and he had to get a signal to me to switch everything off. If he didn’t get a call he would make one himself, the moment I was airborne.

I watched the tower again.

The set was still dead.

The birds that had flown up were circling now, lowering across the bright wet grass where -

Green light.

Tower to 8X454.

Hear you.

You’re cleared for take-off.

Roger.

I pumped the brakes and pushed the throttles forward to military power.

Confirm canopy locked.

It was Connors again, from the van.

I checked the lever.

Confirm locked. All systems for climb out are now on.

Confirm ejection seat pin pulled.

Confirm.

I switched over to continuous ignition to prevent a flame-out and reported to Connors. The sound of the engines at 85 per cent of their power was a sustained scream and the aircraft was trembling as the thrust worked at it, straining against the lyres.

The tower came through again.

There’s no traffic. There is no traffic.

I acknowledged and checked the engine dials and then looked up through the windscreen. Streaks of rain had formed again and I cleared them but it wasn’t much better: I could see the control tower on my right with the green signal showing steadily but the view immediately ahead was a sheet of diffused grey light and I couldn’t make out the runway beyond a hundred yards.

What the hell were they doing?

8X454 to tower. Can you give me -

They must have had their hand on the button because the runway lights were suddenly glowing and I just told them I was rolling and took off the brakes and pushed the throttles forward to full power and heard the twin jets hitting up a scream that totally blanked out something that was coming through to me on the headset. I didn’t ask them to repeat because this was the go and if someone had got it wrong they’d have to punch off a flare: the scream was filling my skull now and the set was drowned out The amethyst light-path tapered ahead of the windscreen and the individual lamps were blurring into a continuous line as they slid past and out of sight. There was an awful lot of vibration at this speed and it was getting worse but Thompson had warned me about this and I ignored it and kept the throttles hard against the quadrant stop and sat watching the track of lights with the stick dead steady until I flicked a glance at the dials and pulled it back and waited.

By Christ this one was quick and they’d told me about that too: the lights fell away and the vibration eased off and I felt the tensions shifting in the airframe as the stress came off the undercarriage and the mass became cushioned and the aerodynamics came into play.

I hit the retract button.

Ten-tenths rain haze and the fierce push of the jets against my back and a microsecond image of Ferris at a telephone putting a red light on the board in London as Slingshot began running.

They picked me up again between Budapest and Kecskemet.

Hova valo?

I kept silent.

They’d got on to me twenty minutes ago when I’d slipped across the Austro-Hungarian frontier at Mach.95 at three hundred feet, and since then I’d been expecting interceptors. I couldn’t tell if this second demand for identity was isolated or if they’d started signals from the frontier to get ahead of me on the ground. If they hadn’t done it already they could start doing it now and I couldn’t go fast enough to beat them.

Visibility had opened out since the frontier but the sky closed in now like a lid coming down and I was flying into a ten-tenths screen of rain.

Hova valo?

Nothing I could tell them.

This was where I had to make a 118 degree turn to meet the east border near the Latorica, and the cement works that Franzheim had given me as a landmark were buried in the sludge so I used the compass and hoped for a break in the rain farther east to give me a visual fix.

Igazolja magat!

Oh for Christ’s sake I’m a British intelligence agent up from a West German NATO base flying a MiG-28D into Soviet airspace with cover as a Red Army colonel and if you’ll believe that you’ll believe anything.

I checked instruments and noted the new course on the log card and took her up to four hundred feet because there were low hills on the map and I couldn’t see them: I couldn’t see anything.

The jets were rumbling like a freight-tram and all systems were in good order but the cockpit air-conditioning wasn’t doing its job and I was sweating too much energy away. At 600 knots and close to the deck the air was bumpy and I went up another hundred.

They’d stopped calling.

That could mean anything. I didn’t think they’d just give up but at this stage there wasn’t much they could do because their interceptors wouldn’t find me in this stuff and they wouldn’t want to send up any flak because they weren’t sure I wasn’t one of their own pilots with a duff radio.

Some of the sweat wasn’t due to the cockpit temperature: flying blind at this speed put a lot of stress on the organism because if the altimeter developed a fault I could hit a hill or a grid or a radio mast at any next second and write the whole thing off. But I didn’t want to go any higher because their radar would pick me up and I’d start running into the duck shoot before I’d even crossed the border.

Sit and sweat.

Parkis, you bastard.

Don’t think about Parkis.

Check and recheck, RPM, EOT, fuel, warning lights, artificial horizon, altitude, airspeed.

Two minutes later there was a hellish bump and the top of my helmet touched the canopy and I took her up to six hundred as a reflex action because the hills were below and this degree of turbulence could drop me two hundred before I could do anything about it.

Parkis was on my -

Don’t think about Parkis

On my mind because Ferris had been so bloody shut-in while we were all waiting for that corporal to turn up and he’d been in constant signals with London while Connors was final-briefing me in the hangar before dawn this morning and a few minutes ago an idea had got into my head and it wasn’t nice. Those bastards in London could have -

Bump and the whole of the airframe shuddered and I kept low on the seat and wished to Christ I could see something because there was an isolation factor getting into the psyche: I was flying into nothing and there was nothing behind me and the needle on the dial was losing its meaning if this thing slowed down and stood still in the sky with the jets still running I wouldn’t feel any difference.

Climb.

No. Radar.

Climb just a little bit.

I’m not scared enough. Not yet.

Those bastards in London could have ordered an execution during that last hour at Furstenfeldbruck and that could have been why Ferris had been so shut-in at a time when it was his job as the director in the field to give me every possible reassurance and get me to the zero feeling I had a chance.