The Sinkiang Executive (q-8) by ADAM HALL

Author:ADAM HALL [HALL, ADAM]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: det_espionage

MISS.

Good old Thompson, what about a spot more tea?

Suit getting the pressure up and the blood going back and I eased the controls and brought her out of the roll and checked the altimeter, seven thousand feet

They’ve got more than one.

What?

They’ve got dozens of those things.

Head went cold and I sat up and brought her level and looked down through the bottom panels of the canopy and saw another one lifting off a launcher a mile away and seven thousand feet down, long and thin and white with the winter sunshine making a highlight on the warhead, coming up very fast with a second one lifting off behind it, no bloody go.

They were out for a kill and they knew how to do it and it didn’t matter where I went: these things were medium range and the gauges on the facia were reading out a six-minute deadline for me on the after-burners and I couldn’t shut them off because I needed the speed.

Voices in the headset, and a lot of static.

The cockpit was an oven, baking a body alive.

Some kind of campaign necessary: a glorious ten-second campaign to prove we went down at least with banners flying and the head held high, so forth.

This is it. They’re going to kill us, they -

Oh for Christ’s sake shuddup.

Half-roll and dive. There isn’t time to think and then act: the thinking has got to be done while the action’s running. And remember the mountains.

The only thing to do was dive because I had to turn into their trajectories and their trajectories were identical. And remember the altimeter because at Mach 2.5 everything looks farther away than it is: there’s no optical illusion, it’s just that every time you blink at this speed you’re a thousand feet closer to what you’re aiming at and I was now aiming at the ground, six thousand, five thousand, four.

Half-roll to come back on them. The low hills spun through 180 degrees in the windscreen and I saw the two missiles, one large, one small, both spherical and lined up and expanding. Remember the mountains and their direction from this new position: they would be due east when I came out of the dive and the snow cloud would be still moving across from the south and blotting out half the Khrebet Tarbagatay range but that wouldn’t affect me unless I had to change course.

And remember your briefing.

Then they were coming, both of them, one very big and the other floating a little distance from it in visual terms. I didn’t have to do anything complicated: I just had to wrench the Finback out of its trajectory at a speed approaching one thousand knots and against the force of gravity and hope that nothing would break.

Pull out. Pull out now before we -

Of course.

Blind in one eye because of the sweat but when I dragged at the stick the big metal sphere floated down past the bottom of the windscreen and out of sight and the smaller one followed, but more slowly.

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