So did a great many pairs of alien eyes. We could not have looked as though we belonged in those surroundings and we did draw stares. Everyone seemed to have something else to do, though, and no one made any attempt to find out who we were or where we thought we were going. There were no idle hands about, and the Devil’s work remained undone.

We ran. We dodged fuel trucks, circled around little gangs of mechanics and ground crew men. We ran, and I led, and everyone followed, and I wished to hell I knew just what it was I was looking for. A plane, of course. A plane that could take us out of Russia and back to America. A good, fast plane that would get us up and out before anyone could figure out what we were doing. But all the planes were manned with huge crews, and I couldn’t imagine how we could capture one or do anything with it once we did. It had been miracle enough that I had driven our bus from Riga to Tallinn; piloting a jet from Tallinn to Alaska was too much to expect.

And then, at the far end of the field, I saw something unlikely. A huge plane, its engines running, its wings swept back at acute angles, its body positioned almost vertically for takeoff.

This in itself was not so odd. But this plane, instead of being surrounded by a humming crew of fliers, and mechanics, was almost untended. One man, wearing boots and a heavy flying suit and holding a helmet by its strap, stood at its side smoking a cigarette. He was the only person within fifty yards of the aircraft.

Why?

I ran to him, and the rest of the company followed in turn. I had my pistol in my hand but wasn’t quite sure what on earth I could do with it. Shoot the man, I suppose, and then try to fly the plane. But that seemed somehow mindless.

He looked up at our approach, took a last bored drag on his cigarette, and flipped it away. I couldn’t think of an even vaguely intelligent opening line.

“You,” I snapped in Russian, “what are you doing?”

It should have been his question to me, since I was the one who was behaving oddly. But he did not appear to think of this.

“I’m following stupid orders,” he said.

He was very young, early twenties, with a mop of disarranged black hair, deep, dark eyes, and the pointed face and long nose of a Liverpool singer.

“Stupid orders,” he said again. “Why do they always have to hold these stupid drills in the middle of the night? If the Americans attack us, it will not be in the middle of the night. The Americans are not crazy. They will come at a sensible hour. So why have drills at this hour?”

Then I hadn’t started a war; they were used to drills of this nature. That was comforting.

“And why, if they must have these drills, must I be a part of them? My plane is experimental. There are no bombs on it, only space for bombs. I have no navigator, no copilot, no bombardier, no ground crew. Nothing. So should I not be back in my warm bed?”

“Of course.”

“But no. Stupid orders! I must come here, I must start my engines, I must be in my flying suit, I must be ready to take off at once. Even if there is a war, I would not take off. I would have nothing to do. Stupid.”

“This is an experimental plane?”

He nodded at it. “A bomber. Long range.” He launched into a string of statistics that left me with the general impression that the plane would travel very far and very fast, which was just the fate I had in mind for it.

“And you can fly it? You, by yourself?”

“That is my job. I always fly it.”

“Without a crew?”

“Crews get in the way.”

I raised the pistol. Behind me Milan and Minna and the Lettish girls hovered expectantly. I pointed the pistol at the young pilot, and he seemed to take notice of it for the first time. He did not look frightened, or even intimidated. He looked at the gun, he looked at me.

He looked bored. “Who are you?”

“An American agent,” I said. Forcefully, I hope. “I am ordering you to fly us” – I motioned toward the others – “to America. Now.”

“You American?” He had switched, incredibly, to English. “You American agent, Joe? No shit?”

I looked quickly around. The world still seemed to be ignoring us. Minna was tugging at my sleeve. Milan was saying comforting things to the Lettish girls. And I was being spoken to in a strange variety of English by a highly unlikely test pilot.

“No shit,” he was saying. “You American?”

“Yes.”

“I love America,” he said. “I, Igor Radek, I love America! Hey, Joe, Charlie Mingus! Thelonious Monk? No shit!”

“No shit.”

“Always my dream is to go to America. Play the trombone, right? Hot jazz, real cool music. No shit, some of a bitch!”

“Could you take us there?”

“In this plane?”

“Yes.”

“But the authorities-”

“Or would you rather spend the rest of your life following stupid orders?”

“Some of a bitch,” he said. “You right, Joe. We go to America, no sweat, we fly like a bird.” He looked past me at the crowd. “All these peoples going?”

“Is there room?”

“No bombs in the plane, no crew in the plane, sure, no sweat, some of a bitch, plenty of room.”

“And you could get us to Alaska?”

“No sweat.”

“No one could catch us?”

“This plane?” He laughed. “No plane in Russia catch this some of a bitch.”

“Then-”

He looked past me. “Hey, Joe, car coming this way. They after you maybe?”

“Maybe.”

“Then what we waiting for? Everybody inside. No sweat, some of a bitch, everybody inside!”

He threw the door open and led the way, and we scurried up the little ladder and into the plane. From the field a man in a jeep was shouting at us through a bullhorn. Igor Radek shouted, “Drop to dead, you some of a bitch!” And, the last of us inside the bomber, he shut the hatch.

Chapter 16

The plane in which we were all huddled was an experimental fighter-bomber. Military experimentation, we have long been told, leads inevitably to progress in civilian living – peacetime uses of atomic power, as an example. Sooner or later, then, the great advances exemplified by our Russian fighter-bomber would bear fruit in comparable advances in commercial aircraft.

Such an interpretation seemed highly theoretical to me. Our aircraft struck me as several light-years away from adaptation to comfortable commercial flight. The operative word was comfortable; the plane simply wasn’t.

We were loaded into the bomb compartments. The bombs, had the plane been carrying them, would have been strapped carefully into place. Otherwise, subjected to the stresses and strains that faced the plane’s passengers, the bombs would have delivered their payload immediately upon takeoff.

Which is very nearly what happened to us.

At one moment we were perching precariously in the bomb compartments and trying to ignore the fact that the men on the ground were presently surrounding the airplane. And at the next moment, after Igor had increased engine speed and made a bevy of adjustments to the plane’s forbidding instrument panel, and after he had flipped one final lever, we were hurled abruptly into space. No gentle taxiing down the runway, no meticulous countdown to zero in a heavy German accent, no television cameras to increase the moment of drama. No warning at all, really. Just sudden, wild, wholly unanticipated movement.

The girls began to shriek. Milan, evidently convinced that what goes up must come down and that what goes up violently must come down violently, had wrapped his head inside his coat in the manner of a turtle, withdrawing into its shell. And Minna, small and soft in my arms, looked up at me and asked me calmly how long it would be before we reached America. She knew nothing about planes, and thus it had not occurred to her that they were something to be afraid of.