Roberts finally replied. ‘Sir, Aspen Three Four is supersonic this time, and we’re high. There’s nobody up here but us.’
The controller gave up. ‘Roger, Aspen Three Four. You have forty-three miles to run to Lossiemouth. Decrease speed to subsonic, and descend to maintain Flight Level one zero zero initially. Advise when you’re ready to copy the Lossiemouth weather.’
Forty miles east of the airfield, Frank Roberts pulled the throttles back and the big aircraft began to fall, losing height and speed simultaneously.
Newman’s office was a little bigger than Erroll’s, an indication of his slightly more exalted official status. With Erroll watching quizzically from the doorway, Richter began rooting through the contents of the desk.
‘Pardon me, but what exactly are you looking for?’
‘When Mr Newman’s family heard that I was being sent to Moscow,’ Richter said, ‘they asked my company if I could collect some items of sentimental value and one or two documents that they would like returned to them immediately.’ He held up his notebook and displayed a handwritten list. He didn’t mention that it was the list he had compiled in his hotel room immediately after lunch. ‘What I can’t find here,’ Richter continued, ‘should be at his apartment, which is the reason I want to visit both.’
Richter selected a photograph of a handsome, rather than pretty, woman that stood on the desk, and an address book, and left it at that. He could hardly take Newman’s desk diary or look through the filing cabinets with Erroll watching. Someone from Vauxhall Cross was going to have to go through the room with a fine tooth-comb, but it wasn’t going to be him.
Three Panavia Tornado GR–1 aircraft doing circuits and bumps were told to hold at circuit height until further advised. A fourth Tornado, which had been entering the runway when the line from the Distress and Diversion Cell buzzed, was instructed to turn through one hundred and eighty degrees and clear the runway immediately.
The Lossiemouth Radar Supervisor was talking to the Distress and Diversion Cell Controller and the Director was preparing to take operational control. ‘Aspen Three Four is identified. Call Lossiemouth Director on frequency two five nine decimal nine seven five.’
‘Two five nine decimal nine seven five for Aspen Three Four. Thank you, Lossie.’
Newman’s apartment was in one of the compounds adjacent to the Embassy. The Rover drove through the gates and stopped outside the building, and the black ZIL – the letters stand for ‘
Number 22 had the same light grey door as all the other apartments on the second floor, and a small white card, with ‘Graham Newman’ typed neatly on it, inserted in a cheap chrome frame at eye level. Selecting a Yale- type key from a bunch he produced from his pocket, Erroll opened the door and ushered Richter inside.
The apartment was square and basic. Three rooms in all, the largest being the sitting room and dining area combined, and with a small kitchenette at one end, equipped with a tiny refrigerator and a two-ring electric hob. There were three cupboards over the sink, and the single window offered only a view of the wall of the adjacent building. The dining area boasted a table and four chairs, and the sitting room a two-seater sofa and a pair of easy chairs. Opening off the sitting room was the bedroom, equipped with a double bed, wardrobe and a dressing table with a mirror. The bathroom had two doors, one from the bedroom and the other from the sitting room. Compact, unimaginative and basic.
There was little stamp of personality. There were a few pictures on the walls, quite possibly supplied with the apartment; the carpets were uniform shades, matching the sitting-room furniture, and the few books were a catholic mixture of reference works and a selection of paperbacks, mainly westerns and thrillers.
Richter took the notebook from his pocket and found the right page, then glanced round the sitting room hopefully. There was a small writing desk in one corner, fitted with a drop-down flap, which was up, and locked. On the desk was another picture of a lady of middle years, similar to the one Richter had already removed from Newman’s office, so he took that. He looked closely at the lock on the writing desk, but there was no evidence of forced entry. That didn’t mean it hadn’t already been searched. It isn’t necessary to leave convenient telltale scratches on a lock when probing with a pick or skeleton key. In fact, if the metal of the lock is of reasonable quality, it’s difficult to mark it at all.
Erroll produced the key, unlocked the desk and dropped the flap. There were six vertical slots inside, three each side of a central section of two drawers. The top drawer produced assorted cuff-links, paper-clips, drawing pins and an elderly bow tie – the elasticized sort, which caused Erroll to sneer slightly – while the second contained about fifty pounds sterling value in roubles. The slots held an insurance policy, which Richter added to his pile, and a group of letters with a Northumberland postmark. He glanced through two or three, and then put them with the photograph.
Fifteen minutes later, having briefly checked every drawer in the flat and the interior of the wardrobe, Richter had finished. He wrote out a detailed list of all the items he had removed, duplicated it, and then he and Erroll signed each copy. Erroll kept one, and the second went into Richter’s briefcase. ‘That’s it. Thank you very much for your co-operation.’
‘Not at all, old boy.’
Richter glanced at his watch. ‘How long to the airport?’
‘It’s about twenty miles, so say thirty-five minutes, at this time of day.’
There are slow descents, there are cruise descents and there are fast descents. What Frank Roberts was doing could perhaps have been best described as a plunge descent, with the aircraft losing in excess of twenty thousand feet a minute. The one thing he could not do was to overshoot the field, because they certainly wouldn’t have the fuel to get back to it, and he knew the USAF would be really pissed if he dumped the Blackbird down on some Scottish hillside instead of a concrete runway.
At twenty-five thousand feet the sky was clear, but the cloud that the Distress and Diversion Cell Controller had reported over Lossiemouth actually blanketed most of the United Kingdom. It looked like dirty grey soup, and the Blackbird plunged into it twenty-seven miles east of the airfield. The world outside the cockpit immediately went black with zero visibility, but Frank Roberts was already flying solely on instruments.
He was twenty-two miles out when he raised Lossiemouth. ‘Lossiemouth Director, this is Pan aircraft Aspen Three Four squawking Emergency. We’re IMC in thick cloud, passing Flight Level one two zero in a fast descent on a heading of two eight five, and requesting a straight-in approach to a priority landing.’
In the Approach Room at Lossiemouth the Director, a young flight lieutenant, had been watching the rapid movement of the 7700 Emergency squawk across his screen. The Emergency Services were standing by, fire engines and ambulances waiting on the airfield, engines running, fully manned.
‘Aspen Three Four, Lossiemouth Director, all copied. You are identified with nineteen miles to run to the field. Maintain your present heading and continue descent to two thousand feet on QNH two nine decimal eight one inches. Confirm you are now subsonic.’
‘Three Four is subsonic and in the drop to two thousand on twenty-nine eighty-one.’
Passing ten thousand feet, the Blackbird crew unsealed their visors and raised the faceplates. As usual, the cockpit smelt of burnt metal. At fifteen miles range, the squall that had been gathering to the west of the field finally hit, reducing visibility to under a mile.
‘Aspen Three Four, Director. We’ve been hit by a squall and visibility is under one mile with full cover cloud at three hundred feet. This will be a precision approach to runway two three. Turn left heading two five zero.’
