Fielding’s neighbour, Ken Roskoe, had been listening alertly. ‘You know that girl?’ he asked, his face forked with puzzlement.
‘We know each other,’ the Englishman replied, with the same indifference that he’d shown to the girl.
‘What did she mean — asking if they were taking you?’
‘My dear fellow, I haven’t the f-faintest idea.’
Roskoe sat tight in his seat. ‘All those Intourist girls work for the KGB,’ he said after a pause. ‘You’re not involved in all this, are you, Fielding?’
‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ said Fielding. ‘Unless you’re implying that I’m involved in this hijacking, in which case I suggest you take a grip of yourself and stop panicking. We’re all in this together, remember.’
‘But the girl?’ cried Roskoe.
‘The girl,’ said Fielding, ‘is an entirely private affair.’ And he closed his eyes.
From the back of the plane Pol had watched this episode between the girl and the English journalist with benign amusement. He now turned to her, in her seat opposite him, and repeated what Fielding had already told her. She still looked tense and pale, but the fear was leaving her eyes. ‘They won’t take him away?’ she murmured, in French.
‘There is no cause for alarm, ma petite,’ Pol said, rocking gently forward in his seat. ‘No one will be hurt, if they do as they are told.’
‘But why? Why?’
Pol leant across the aisle and gave her knee a little squeeze. ‘I promise that you will be back in Leningrad tomorrow.’
‘But these men with guns?’ she cried; and at the same moment the floor lurched steeply and Pol, who had not yet fastened his seatbelt, had to grab the corner of her seat to prevent his great weight from toppling to the floor.
The plane was losing height rapidly. There came a series of bumps, and several of the passengers winced and began blowing their noses to relieve the sudden change of pressure. In the control cabin the blond man was balancing on the sloping, shuddering floor, while a thick skein of blood jerked and zigzagged obscenely round his feet. Both pilots were braced against the controls, and the navigator was busily taking measurements off the plastic overlay. The blond man now took from his pocket a second chart and spread it out beside the one on which the Russian was working. It had 1:100,000 scale, and showed the Finnish coast spattered with tiny islands, lakes, and lakes within lakes, and bulging peninsulas joined to the mainland by thin causeways. The area was full of villages linked by twisting roads to the coastal highway from Helsinki to Leningrad.
He laid a lean finger on a deserted point along the coastline midway between Helsinki and the Soviet-Finnish frontier town of Vaalima — a distance of some hundred kilometres. ‘We fly towards Lovisa, to this point between Borga Porvoo and Karhula. When we have reached latitude 62.5 you will commence a descent to one thousand metres. Understood?’
The navigator nodded, white-lipped. His hands shook as he picked up the pair of dividers, but the blond man took them from him and stabbed one of the points into the centre of a ragged bay.
‘This is the spot.’ He beckoned to Capitaine Duhamel and nodded down at the chart. ‘You will land precisely here, Capitaine. The ice will be up to a metre deep and covered with hard snow. You should have no problem.’
The French pilot was smoking again; he said, without removing the cigarette, ‘We will be landing in the dark, blind.’
‘There will be flares.’
‘And the Finnish radar?’
‘On your approach you will identify yourself to Helsinki and tell them you are losing height and may have to attempt an emergency landing. With luck we will be flying too low for radar.’ He looked at the altimeter needle and watched it creeping back round the dial — 2000, 1500, 1200. ‘What is our exact position now?’ he asked, turning back to the navigator.
The Russian indicated a point on the large-scale chart within a couple of centimetres of the dotted line marking the limit of Soviet territorial waters. The blond man turned to Captain Prokovsky.
‘Captain, the moment you are contacted by Soviet ground or air reconnaissance, you will inform them that you are performing low-altitude exercises, and will shortly be heading south for Estonia. If you attempt to signal your destination, or raise the alert, you will be killed.’
The Russian pilot nodded to show that he had understood, and hitched on his earphones. The blond man now turned to Capitaine Duhamel: ‘We are still flying parallel with the territorial limit?’
‘Within less than ten kilometres of the military zone.’
The blond man moved back to the chart and pointed to a complex of tiny off-shore islands called the Haapasaari. ‘When we are exactly parallel with this spot, we will descend to two hundred metres and proceed due east and fly straight to the destination.’
‘And if we are intercepted?’ said Duhamel.
‘Do you think they will shoot down a planeload of their own Government officials?’
There was a pause. ‘We are now within restricted military airspace,’ Duhamel said, squashing out his cigarette under his heel. There was a quick crackle from Prokovsky’s earphones. The Russian adjusted the mouthpiece, and the blond man leaned over him as he began to speak, holding the barrel of his gun along the edge of the Russian’s cheek.
Prokovsky repeated his message three times, then said in French, ‘I am being instructed to alter course immediately.’
‘How far are they?’
Prokovsky nodded at a flickering screen beside his knee, where two tiny green dots were beginning to appear. ‘Perhaps thirty kilometres,’ he said. ‘They are closing at over a thousand kilometres an hour.’
‘Turn due east,’ said the hijacker, ‘and drop to two hundred metres.’
The Russian hesitated. Duhamel shouted: ‘This is madness! We cannot even see the water.’
‘Go by the altimeter,’ said
