At any given stage in any given mission you’re not far from the crunch because you’re usually working on alien ground and it’s not long before an opposition cell picks up the action and starts coming in: I’m talking about the field executives in penetration work or in snatch jobs where you’ve got to home in to the target and hit the objective or deactivate it or bring it all the way in, whether it’s a document or a device or a flesh-and-blood defector. I’m not talking about the sleepers or the people in place or that sleazy crowd of pussy-footed pimps in the diplomatic infiltration set because the nearest they ever get to a crisis is when the paper runs out in the loo.

For the field executives the crunch is part of the trade and if it wasn’t there you wouldn’t do it, but that doesn’t mean you don’t let it worry you, assuming you want to live (Calthrop didn’t want to: one of his contacts told him there was going to be a secret police unit waiting for him at the airport but when he stepped out of the helicopter they weren’t there after all because he stepped out ten minutes before it came in to land.)

With a thing like Slingshot the crunch was going to be fairly close the whole of the way: there was no specific opposition to initiate close combat but the general opposition police, secret police and counter-intelligence forces was there as a permanent background, because the alien-soil thing still applied and this was the sticky side of the Curtain: all they had to do was pull me in and there wouldn’t be anything useful I could tell them that would get me back across the frontier with anything like a pulse. I’d got airborne cover designed for getting me to Yelingrad through a reasonable degree of suspicion on the part of the traffic controllers responsible for the areas I was overflying, but if I ever let them get me down on the ground I wouldn’t make any more progress because there wasn’t any Finback 8X454 on the roster for the 36^th Squadron and if there was a pilot named Nikolai Voronov he wouldn’t look like this man sitting here at the table under the five-hundred-watt bulb.

The stress to the organism was therefore normal but there was the missing factor on my mind and that was bringing out some of the excess adrenalin.

Something to do with time.

A time factor. An estimation of some sort. An assumption.

Never assume. Never assume anything. It can be lethal.

What plane are you?

I told them.

What is your destination?

I said Dzhezkazgan. If I said anything else they’d only start getting the twitters when I didn’t alter course.

What is your present altitude?

Thirty-five thousand feet.

I waited for more.

There wasn’t any more.

The headset was silent.

It was the first time they’d asked for my destination. That would be the military, putting the question through Mode 3. They were getting warm now: I had to take photographs over Dzhezkazgan and there was still thirty-one minutes’ flying time remaining on the log and that gave them plenty of room. They were already interested in me and I believed they were now checking on the information I’d given them, which meant it was a matter of time before they found I was putting out cover and ordered me down. This is what I meant when I said that on this operation we were going to work close to the crunch the whole time: if they decided to investigate me they only had to say a few final words into my headset and Slingshot would detonate. You are ordered to land immediately. Tick-tock-bang.

I sat listening to the long-drawn muted thunder of the jets. Through the windscreen the sky was cut in half by a line of cloud reaching from somewhere near the ground fifty miles away to as high as I could see; one huge swathe of the darker half was almost black but there was no lightning: it was too cold for a storm, though it could be a mile-high drift of snow moving up from the south-east. It didn’t worry me because my speed was consistent at Mach.95 and I would reach the camera target in twenty-five minutes from now and climb above the weather if I had to.

What worried me was the time factor: the thing I was missing. It had something to do with Furstenfeldbruck and there was an image floating at the edge of consciousness that I still couldn’t recognize. Ignore. Let it come in when I wasn’t thinking of it: it’s the only access to the subconscious.

Another thing that worried me was the shape of the airborne phase of Slingshot as seen on paper. It was wedge-shaped, in terms of increasing risk. I’d gone in at the wide end and I was now somewhere past the middle and I would soon be narrowing down to the point: which was Yelingrad. But it was still open ended, to a degree. I couldn’t remain airborne over Soviet territory indefinitely because my fuel was limited and I couldn’t cross a frontier because even at my peak ceiling I’d still be on their screens and they could shoot me down. Parkis had known this, and had framed a specific directive: at the moment when the wedge narrowed down to its point I was to disappear.

ETA Dzhezkazgan was noon plus 15 and I began the run in from thirty-five thousand feet and made an ATA of 12.17 and took photographs and pulled out. From three thousand feet I couldn’t see anything remarkable about the village, but the complex of farm silos might seem rather substantial and the long avenue of trees to the north could cover a transporter rail to the rectangular barns at the end: for rectangular barns read assembly plant

Ten minutes later the centre-line tanks emptied and the light came on and I dropped them over the Golodnaya Steppe and felt the slight increase in airspeed as the drag came off.

Then I began running.

Yelingrad was five hundred miles and the fuselage tanks would give me that distance plus five hundred before we hit bingo and if nothing disturbed the pattern we could make it. But that was academic because an awful lot of things were going wrong: I was still on their screens and I’d overflown two suspect missile sites at low altitude and they hadn’t asked any questions. To take those photographs I’d been prepared to fly a Mach 2 marathon on the after-burners and finish up with empty tanks a long way short of Yelingrad. That hadn’t happened and it should have and I didn’t know why.

The Voronov cover wasn’t that good. I was only a colonel flying a lone course, not a general with fighter escort. The planners in London would have spent a long time on this, working out precisely which rank would suit me best and having to choose between the authority vested in the higher ranks and the increasing availability of the lower: there could be a dozen Colonel Voronovs on the Soviet Air Force list and it would make rapid identification difficult.

Dzhezkazgan Traffic Control to Military 8X454.

I told them I was listening.

Two minutes ago I had pushed the throttles forward and the Finback was climbing for thirty-five thousand feet at close to full power and I was now watching the three mirrors for contrails because I did not believe those people on the ground were letting me get away with it.

What is your course?

I told them 103 degrees.

What is your destination?

I told them Zaysan because Yelingrad was at the point of the wedge and I was heading in that precise direction. There was silence while they worked out that my course for Zaysan should be 101 degrees.

Repeat your course.

It had taken them five seconds.

I repeated.

Silence.

The jets were pushing me into the haze at a fifty-degree? angle and the right side of the windscreen was filled with the dark cloud, its base line swinging gradually as I climbed.