You are too low.

Understood. Adjust altitude.

The blackout had fluttered at the brain and for a moment the windscreen had darkened but the light was back and cerebration started up again, avid for data and desperate to analyse.

Remember the mountains. And your briefing. I was now at the point of that wedge-shaped pattern and the risks had narrowed to the certainty that at any next second they would throw more missiles into the air unless I could keep low enough: to use what terrain masking was available and get off their screens. Get off their screens and go for the Khrebet Tarbagatay and do what I had been briefed to do: disappear.

I assumed at this time that there were further missiles in launch or already airborne but we had two minutes left before we hit bingo fuel and it was long enough, would be long enough if I could stay this close to the ground without hitting a hill or a tower or a radio mast, and that was a matter of chance. The rest was a matter of following instructions.

The snow cloud was drawing across the range with its base on the ground and its darkness began closing in as I held the Finback on its course while the buffeting started again and shook the ground and the sky and the blood inside my skull and then eased off gradually, leaving vision partially clear.

The terrain below was now rocky and desolate, with crags rising towards the mountain range in the first haze of the now. There was nothing -

Mirrors.

The shape was in all three of the mirrors and steadily increasing in diameter as it floated in the wake of the Finback, the explosive warhead catching the light and the fins revolving slowly as it homed in on its target. The thing was coming at me faster than I could run and if I tried making turns it would follow wherever I went because I didn’t have the speed to break away and send it ballistic so the only thing I could do was get out and the only way to get out was to slow down because at this speed my limbs would be torn off but if I slowed down that thing in the mirrors would close in for the kill.

My left hand dragged the throttles back. I didn’t know it was going to do that but the organism was taking over and the brain went on recording, interpreting, as the senses fed in the data: eight hundred knots on the airspeed indicator, seven hundred, six.

Don’t forget anything.

Signal barely understood.

Don’t forget.

Five hundred.

Floating in the mirrors, the fins turning slowly and lazily against the cold grey sky, the warhead enormous, a great sphere.

Remember camera remember camera remember camera remem -

All right got it now but that bloody thing’s going to blow us up and I can’t -

Camera.

Pulled at the lever and snapped the release and put my hand through the strap and looked up and saw the needle at four hundred knots and looked higher and saw the three mirrors filled with the spinning shape.

At three hundred and fifty I blew the canopy off and triggered the seat and felt the cartridge fire and thought Christ we’re hit and then the windblast sent me whirling in the sky and in the middle of a visual sequence I saw the Finback and the long thin missile closing on it in the final seconds before the detonation boomed and the shock-wave kicked me away and fragments came fluting through the smoke of the sunburst that had been the aircraft, picking at my body and whining past and picking again until I felt the jerk of the harness as the main chute deployed, a sense of life after death and the reek of chemicals, a glimpse of a torn panel turning like a falling leaf, a numbness creeping and then cold, intense cold, embalming the consciousness.

The feathers fell.

“Now,” he said.

“What was that?”

“You will open them now.”

The feathers fell softly.

“All right,” I told him.

“Then, of course, you will destroy them.”

He sounded so bloody formal. What else did he expect me to do with them: post them to the KGB?

The feathers fell softly on my face.

My head was singing. The heat was underneath, not on top. It didn’t worry me. But the blinding white was everywhere and that worried me. I put my hand up and saw someone’s glove.

“What the hell do you expect me to do with them?” I asked him. “Post them to — ” but he had gone.

Look.

A flying glove. My own glove. My own hand.

Deduction: my eyes are open and I can see. But all I can see is my own hand in front of my face, big deal. The white blindness must be something else, an object, a sheet of some sort.

The feathers were cold as they fell on my face and I brushed them away and the flames leapt, the ones underneath, and the whole thing blanked out to nothing, like switching the set off.

The second time there was a lot more beta-wave cerebration going on and I felt for the release clips and pressed them and fell away from the seat and held my breath for a long time while the pain went on. It was underneath: the left hip, the rib cage and the shoulder. I was lying on that side with my face in the snow.

I could hear a throbbing sound.

The snow wasn’t soft, for some reason. I put out my hand and swept some of it away and felt rock underneath. I suppose it hadn’t been snowing for long: there was no retrograde amnesia that I could detect, and I remembered there’d been only a light haze when I’d jettisoned the canopy and ejected; the weather had been coming in from the south-east and I’d flown into it just before leaving the aircraft.

The throbbing was duplicated and I listened to it. Sometimes it went right out of synch and I didn’t understand.

Time.

I moved enough to look around and that meant holding my breath again and then respirating slow and deep, slow and deep, drawing in enough oxygen to stay conscious. I could see the crags now, outlines by the snow, jutting against the white background in a faint pattern of shadows, rising above and behind me.

Time. You’ve been -

Moved again and sat up and waited till the worst of it died away. I didn’t know how long it took. The throbbing was much louder and I listened to it and got the message and turned my wrist: 01:17.

Total memory came back like shoving a cassette in the slot and I started moving again and much faster now. There wasn’t any data for the periods of unconsciousness but that didn’t matter: what mattered was whether they’d had time to put these helicopters into the air since the explosion.

They were quite loud now and the last thing I remember thinking about consciously was the time factor: they’d had something like thirty-five minutes from the moment when I’d ejected to the precise present and that was ample to get these things airborne. The logical thought process stopped just here because the snow was still light and they could move very slowly within a few feet of the ground and they’d see that bloody parachute if I didn’t do something about it very fast. I didn’t think I’d broken anything but the left side was heavily bruised from hip to shoulder and when I got up I just fell down again and had to lie there dragging a lot of breath in before I could crawl along the lines towards the canopy.

The light kept going on and off and the sound of the helicopters faded in and out because I suppose I was partially blacked out by the pain but the head was clear enough and I knew Slingshot was going to blow if I didn’t get that spread of silk under some sort of cover: they were probably looking for the plane but they might conceivably have seen me eject on their radar screens and it’s much easier to see a parachute if you’re looking for one.

Their noise was heavy in the sky. Under me the rocks were slippery: