Adam Hall - The Striker Portfolio

'Haben Sie sich verlaufen?'

'Ja, ich mochte nach Villendorf.'

'Es gibt keinen solchen Ort hier.'

'Vielleicht ist es Wohlendorf. Die Leute, die mir davon erzahlten, batten keine sehr gate Aussprache.'

'Wohlendorf ah, ja! Das ist etwas ganz anderes. Aber es ist zlemlich weit von hier.'

'Vielleicht konnten Sie so freundlich sein, und es mir auf der Karte zu zeigen '

'Ich kann nicht einmal Karten lesen. Aber Sie mussen zuerst nach Westheim fahren.'

He pointed up the road.

'Ich glaube, ich bin dort durchgefahren.'

'Sie mussen durchgefahren sein. Fahren Sie dorthin zuruck und fragen Sie dam in Westheim.'

I folded the map.

'Ja, haben Sie vielen Dank.'

He was old, a weather-stained man. He watched me turn the car; then in the mirror he was blotted out by the dust.

In two kilometres I took a small road south and turned again to come back parallel and stay in the area. It was routine procedure to tell him I had lost my way. Later it could prove to have been bad security to be seen in this area standing by a car doing nothing. He would remember a man losing his way but it was better than remembering a man standing by a car doing nothing.

But I didn't know if security was important in this area. Those bloody people in London never tell you anything.

Dust drifted across the roadside grass when I pulled up and cut the engine. The silence took over again. The white dust blew like steam across the grass. The roads here ran through chalk and there was a quarry gouged out of the hillside. The sun was past its zenith but I was still hoping I hadn't got here too late. The only real worry was that I didn't know what I was here for at all.

Even in the sun it was cold. I needed to move and the hill looked useful so I went up the road on foot, taking the binoculars.

From the top edge of the quarry all I could see were fields and farm buildings and the spire of the church in Westheim some way off. Below the quarry was an abandoned plough rusting among brambles. There were no traffic and no one was working in the fields. There was nothing interesting to look at and I began feeling fed up.

All they had said was please station yourself in the area Westheim-Pfelberg-Nohlmundt and observe. Only London could be so bloody vague.

Now I was stuck on top of a chalk quarry obediently observing an abandoned plough in some brambles at 12 times magnification. It would do London good if I trudged down there and took it to bits and did a one-tenth-scale sectional drawing and sent it in as sighted 1300 hours map-ref. 0416 Blake's Contour 115-A have no intention of reassembling.

The fields were quiet except for the whisper.

Nothing moved anywhere. The farm buildings looked like cardboard cut-outs in the distance. Any traffic in this area would send up dust and there was no dust. Nothing moved on the land. The whisper was in the air. I looked upwards.

There was no vapour-trail and I had to do a square-search with the binoculars before I caught it. Small as a fly.

I looked down again. Dust was rising along the Westheim-Pfelberg road a couple of miles away near the spot where I'd talked to the farmer. No one could see me from there even on top of the quarry. It probably wouldn't matter if anyone did.

This had the smell of Parkis about it: move X into Square 4 and let him sweat it out, you never know your luck. After a dozen blind swipes Parkis would score a hit and people would call it a 'flair'. They forgot the times he missed.

The trail of dust was fading among the fields towards Pfelberg. Nothing else moved on the land. The whisper was still audible so I lay on my back and propped the binoculars up with my hands on my cheek-bones and adjusted the focus. The fly was very high now and vapour was forming. It was climbing to full ceiling in slow spirals and the sun flashed on it every time round. It was too small to identify but its performance was military and the only plane in the West German air-arm with this much ceiling was the Striker SK-6.

The vapour made a corkscrew in the sky. Most of my awareness was now shut in by the binoculars and I forgot the fields and the farm buildings and concentrated on the bright fly trapped in the lens. It spiralled hypnotically. The whisper was only just audible now. I put it at close on sixty thousand feet, the Striker's operational ceiling.

A new sound came in and I rolled on to one elbow and searched for it. It was a heavy throb. Something red had started moving half a mile off, a farm tractor with a cloud of diesel gas forming above the vertical pipe. I watched it for a while and then lay back on the cold earth with the binoculars and located the plane again.

The vapour-trail had levelled off and there was a break in it. I saw or thought I saw that the machine's attitude was now horizontal. There was a lot of glare and I couldn't be certain.

I started thinking about Parkis again. The area Westheim-Pfelberg-Nohlmundt was big, something like a hundred square miles, and inside the towns that marked it there was only agricultural land. Even one of Parkis's blind swipes wouldn't be aimed at information on red tractors or abandoned ploughs. On the other hand any information about an aeroplane observed at sixty thousand feet would be a bit thin, and you didn't have to come here to see a Striker SK-6. The Luftwaffe had five hundred of them in service and you could see a squadron airborne over various sections of the map on any given day.

The binoculars in my hands were vertical and the plane was dead-centre in the lens. Immediately over the area Parkis had briefed for me there was a military aircraft performing.

But Parkis couldn't have known.

The throb of the tractor went on and I wished it would stop because I wanted to listen to the sky and its silence. The whisper had gone now. The plane was still there, clinging to its ceiling with the jet throttled back, ten tons of potent machinery moving about directly above my head. The pilot was isolated, eleven miles from the nearest human being: myself. His isolation and his contradictory closeness to me in the lens appealed to me in an odd way.

Even with the peripheral light shut off by the binoculars the glare was strong because he was near the sun, so I leaned on my elbow again and rested my eyes on the green fields for a bit.

The tractor was dragging something heavy with a bright curved blade and the earth came up in a wave. Birds had drifted in and were foraging in the furrows. Farther away a truck was sending up dust along the Pfelberg-Nohlmundt road. The air was dead calm: the dust settled where it had risen. The truck was audible now and I could hear the tailboard chains jumping. Above the sounds of the truck and the tractor another one was beginning. It was continuous and fine.

When I lay back and put the binoculars up, the plane flicked at once into the lens because it was bigger now. The vapour had stopped and the corkscrew motion was much tighter. The configuration was dart-like: the Striker SK-6 was a swing-wing and at that altitude the mainplanes would normally be in furled position twenty degrees from the fore-aft line of the fuselage and not showing much.

The sound was pitching higher and I could see the dark blobs of the air-intakes. The whole image was getting progressively bigger and now I could see the exact attitude: the plane was pointing downwards at a rotating angle near the vertical. I used the sun-flash to measure the rotation, counting aloud. One revolution per three seconds. The plane was in a 20 r.p.m. constant vertical spin.

The noise of the truck along the road had faded. The throb of the tractor was being gradually overlaid by the shrilling of the plane.

From the height where the dive had started it would have taken roughly sixty seconds for the sound to reach the ground: by that amount I was listening to the past; but as the dive went on the distance closed and sound was catching up on vision. It was now uncomfortable on the ear-drums. I couldn't estimate speed because the plane was almost head-on to the binoculars. In a vertical dive there wouldn't be any power on but the Striker was built to stand 1500 knots and it could reach that speed by gravity. All I knew was that this scream was the sound of something going very fast.