Devil May Care - Sebastian Faulks [65]
Here, from an American who had drunk too much bourbon, Darius learned something even more interesting. A Vickers VC-10, which was meant to be delivered to the BOAC-owned Gulf Air in Bahrain two weeks earlier, had mysteriously never arrived. The American had heard from a friend whose son worked on a USAF base that the VC-10 had in fact entered western Persian airspace but had not emerged. The plane was thought either to have crashed or to have put down in the sand desert, the Dasht-e Lut, somewhere near Kerman. No trace had been found.
Darius’s fingers relayed the news with measured urgency. He knew that M would understand the implications – and the danger – as completely as if he had transmitted the entire message en clair. An hour later, in the middle of the London afternoon, the pulse high on M’s right temple was showing, as it did when he was tense. He struck a match and held it to his pipe, inhaling noisily. On his desk were cables
from Paris and Washington, as well as Darius’s latest offering from Tehran. Between them they might make up an entire picture, but for the time being they were only fragments – urgent, frustrating, incomplete. On the roof, only a few feet above M’s head, were the three squat masts of the most powerful radio transmitters in Britain. The ninth floor was almost entirely taken up by a hand-picked group of communications experts who spoke a private language about sunspots and the ‘Heaviside layer’. But as they had patiently explained to M, in reply to his tetchy questions, there was not much more they could do to help without further incoming signal traffic. M walked to the window and looked out towards Regent’s Park. A couple of weeks ago he had spent a morning down the road at Lord’s, watching England on their way to victory over the touring Indians by an innings and 124 runs. There was no time for such frivolities now.
He buzzed the intercom. ‘Moneypenny? Send in the chief of staff.’
Down the softly carpeted corridor from the green baize door that separated M’s private staff from the rest of the world came the chief of staff, a lean, relaxed man of about James Bond’s age.
Miss Moneypenny raised an eyebrow as he
approached. ‘Go straight in, Bill,’ she said, ‘but fasten your seat-belt.’
As the door of M’s office opened and closed, a green light came on above it.
‘ Take a seat,’ said M. ‘What do you make of Pistachio’s cable?’
‘I’ve just had a report from the aviation people,’
said the chief of staff. ‘It’s difficult to be sure from the information we’ve got in the cable, but they think it could be an Ekranoplan.’
‘What the devil’s that?’ said M.
‘It looks like a plane with cut-off wings, but it operates like a hovercraft on what’s called ‘‘ground effect’’. It weighs double the heaviest conventional aircraft, it’s over three hundred feet long and has a wingspan of a hundred and thirty feet. You know when birds come into land – geese on a lake, for instance – and they prolong their glide without effort? That’s ground effect. That upward pressure you feel when a plane comes in to land? That’s ground effect, too. A cushion of air is trapped between the wing and the runway and causes an updraught. The Soviets have found a way of harnessing this power. It’s called a ‘‘wig’’ – or wing-in-ground-effect craft. It’s light years ahead of anything we’ve got. The details are in this report.’ He handed a file across the desk.
‘If that’s what it is,’ said M, ‘we have a problem.’
‘Yes. They’re still testing at the moment. We know of only four in existence, but the Russians plan to build more than a hundred in the Volga shipyard. There are some low-quality photographs taken by US
satellites over the Caspian and one by a U2 spyplane. Word got round from Persian fishermen who’d seen one. They call it the Caspian Sea Monster.’
‘What kind of damage can it do?’ said M.
‘We think it’s designed to be a troop transport and assault craft. But it can carry a payload of