03 The Striker Portfolio Read online

  The Striker Portfolio

  Adam Hall [1969]

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  Contents

  Chapter One : THE FLY

  Chapter Two : BRIEFING

  Chapter Three : SELBSTMORD

  Chapter Four : THE DUMP

  Chapter Five : THE WIDOWMAKER

  Chapter Six : NITRI

  Chapter Seven : COLLAPSE

  Chapter Eight : THE PALLBEARERS

  Chapter Nine : AUTOBAHN

  Chapter Ten : FUGUE

  Chapter Eleven : THE HARE

  Chapter Twelve : TO GROUND

  Chapter Thirteen : THE FRONTIER

  Chapter Fourteen : STORM-CENTRE

  Chapter Fifteen : KOHN

  Chapter Sixteen : ORDEAL

  Chapter Seventeen : THE GRAVE

  Chapter Eighteen : HELDA

  Chapter Nineteen : FINAL APPROACH

  A man watches the sky, somewhere in West Germany. Centred in his binoculars, small as a fly, is a supersonic jet fighter. Within minutes he sees it plunge thirty thousand feet to the ground. He reports briefly to London: “The fly fell down.”

  The man is Quiller, shadow executive of the “Bureau,” His mission: to find out why thirty-six “Striker” swing-wing aircraft have crashed, killing their pilots - and destroying any evidence of sabotage. As always, Quiller works alone.

  Chapter One : THE FLY

  ‘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, hatten keine sehr gute Aussprache.’

  ‘Wohlendorf - ah, ja! Das ist etwas ganz anderes. Aber es ist ziemlich 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 dann 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. 04-16 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 dr
ifted 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.

  Time started telescoping now and I was worrying. The plane was big enough at this stage to see without the binoculars and I dropped them and cupped my hands to block out the glare and watch the thing coming on at the ground without any sign of pulling out or any sign of being able to pull out. The shrilling was so bad now that it was difficult to go on thinking rationally because the primitive brain was telling me to get up and run somewhere safe while the modern brain was working out a few figures: the plane was now below half its attainable ceiling and coming on at something like its peak attainable airspeed which put it at a mile for every four seconds and that gave me fifteen seconds to get out and there was nowhere to go.

  Then the whole sky went dark as the plane’s shadow passed over me and the noise was so loud that I was on my feet and running by the time it hit the ground a hundred yards away. The impact was explosive and comparable to a medium-charge conventional bomb detonating just below ground level in soft conditions. Earth began falling on me soon after the shock-wave had passed and there was a spherical cloud of chalk billowing round the crater the plane had made. I was running into it and through it until the fore-brain took over and stopped me. There was no need to run any more.

  Then I began moving through the Weird white light, lurching against my own shadow that the sun was throwing against the chalk. I could have believed I wasn’t alone. It took a minute to reach the edge of the cloud and I was choking a bit. Mixed with the damp-cellar smell of the chalk was the sharpness of molten metal and kerosene. The flame-wave followed me and I had to start running again until I was clear.

  The wailing sound got on my nerves and I had to stop and identify it: the birds following the tractor had flown to a group of elms and were still calling in fright at the explosion. The man had left his tractor and was lumbering towards the cloud of burning kerosene as if there were something he could do.

  I found the binoculars and went back to the car, turning it towards Westheim. On the way there I realized something. Parkis had known.

  Most of the post office staff were still outside and people were telling them what had made the noise, but one man was behind the counter and I gave him the number and hung about for ten minutes until the connection was made. London would get it by the overt intelligence sources in a few hours but they wanted it quicker than that or they wouldn’t have sent me here as an observer. They hadn’t warned me to use speech-code when reporting so I compromised and just said: ‘The fly fell down.’

  Chapter Two : BRIEFING

  People with Pekingese grow to look like Pekingese.

  The Bureau doesn’t officially exist, so everyone there has grown to look anonymous. They are flesh and blood but you never quite know whose flesh or whose blood they consist of today: you get the odd feeling that during the night there was enacted an unspeakable rite involving flesh-eating and blood-letting by some refined form of extrasensory transference and that the A-positive you were talking to yesterday is now Rhesus-negative.

  The permanent staff at the Bureau have another thing in common. Whenever I show up there they look as if someone has left a dead rat on their desk. They looked like that when I flew in from West Germany and asked to see Parkis. It took nearly an hour to get into his room: he is very high in the Whitehall 9 Echelon and his room is behind what amounts to a series of distorting mirrors constructed on the principle of the Chinese Box, the idea being that halfway through the system you give up and ask for the street.

  But I wanted to see Parkis about the fly so I kicked up a bit of fuss and they finally got the message and sent me into his room. This is the room with the smell of polish and the Lowry. It’s a good picture but it has associations for me. I was standing under this picture the day Parkis invited Swanner to resign. Swanner had mucked up a mission and three of us were present when Parkis stood there with his hands clasped in front of him and his small feet together and broke the man up while we listened. We didn’t like it. Parkis should have told us to get out first. I was standing under this picture the day when Lazlo put a pill in his mouth before we could get to him. That was all right: he was finished and knew it and did the sensible thing and at least he died in civilized surroundings instead of where they would have put him if we’d thrown him back over the frontier. But he was on the floor and already turning green when Parkis told us to ‘take it away and get it buried’. We didn’t like that either: it was said for effect.

  The worst thing about Parkis is that he is the most anonymous-looking of all at the Bureau. His face is so ordinary that it could only be a mask and his eyes are like holes in it because they are colourless. He stands so still that you feel you could walk up to him and go on walking right through him and not notice anything but a slight chill on the skin. But you’d come out Rhesus-negative.

  I was standing under the picture now. It’s the only place to stand, because of the disposition of the desk and the filing cabinets and the briefing table. It may be arranged like that because when Parkis talks to you he looks at the picture most of the time, just above your head, to remind you that you don’t exist any more than he does, any more than the Bureau does.

  He had got up when I came in. He stood in front of me with his hands clasped together, looking at the Lowry.

  ‘How was Munich?’

  ‘All right.’

  They’d pulled me out of Munich to watch the fly.

  ‘Did anything happen there?’

  ‘Munich?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I sent in my report.’

  ‘Ah.’ It sounded as if he hadn’t seen it but I knew he had. They would have pulled me out before long anyway for lack of ‘positive lead-in data’, by which they mean the smell of anything fishy.

  ‘I expect you’ll be going to Paris, will you?’

  ‘No one mentioned leave,’ I said.

  ‘Waring is due back.’ He looked at me instead of the picture.

  ‘There was nothing doing in Munich. That was as good as leave.’

  ‘Not quite Paris, is it?’

  ‘This aeroplane,’ I said.

  ‘It isn’t for you.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re a shadow executive.’

  He turned away.

  ‘Why was I sent there?’

 
To observe.’

  ‘Well I did.’

  ‘But you didn’t observe anything. It just fell down, so you said. We wanted to know why.’ He was staring out of the window at the winter sky.

  The portfolio on his desk had a word on the cover.

  ‘That’s all I saw. You read my report. It just came down like a ton of bricks.’

  The word on the cover was Striker.

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Look, is it because I mucked up the Bangkok thing?’

  ‘I don’t think you mucked it up, did you?’ He turned round again and I could watch his face, the mask with the colourless holes. ‘We’re giving this one to Waring.’

  ‘Why him? He doesn’t know anything about aeroplanes. He doesn’t know which end the flint goes in.’

  Parkis stood very still. ‘It’s not really about aeroplanes.’

  I was getting fed up. ‘You send me out to a precise map reference just in time to fetch a Striker SK-6 on top of my head and now you say it’s nothing to do with aeroplanes.’

  The thing that nettled me was that I wanted to know something and I couldn’t ask him. He’d sent me to observe a Striker crash that he’d known was going to happen, even to the time and the place. I wanted to ask him how he’d known.

  ‘Not really,’ he said.

  I tried an oblique level. ‘You wanted confirmation.’

  ‘We have to put someone on it.’

  ‘Waring.’

  ‘Yes.’ ‘Why him?’ Nobody likes Waring because he can’t work without a closed-circuit transmitting system and a bullet-proof jock-strap: he’s got a ‘low threshold of psychological stress’, which is Bureau terminology for being shit-scared. ‘Because he’s due back from leave and sufficiently refreshed.’ ‘I’ve never been fitter.’

  He looked down from the Lowry. ‘Why are you so upset, Quiller?’

  ‘I want the mission.’ ‘Yes, I can see that. Why?’ ‘I was there.’

  ‘Ah.’ He waited, and I knew I’d have to give him more than that.

  But it was personal. The fly in the lens. His loneliness up there eleven miles away from the nearest human being: myself. The silence in the sky and then the long scream and the crater and the shadow I’d lurched against in the weird white light of the chalk-cloud. Personal.