For five minutes, as the Nimrod continued northwards towards North Cape and her eventual station inside Norwegian airspace off the coast near Kirkenes, Clark and Quin exchanged a complex vocabulary of technical terminology. Aubrey remembered occasions of impending French or Latin tests, and the last minute, feverish recital of vocab by himself and other boys, before the master walked in and all text books had to be put away. The dialogue had a comforting, lulling quality. When Quin indicated they had finished, he opened his eyes. Quin appeared drained, and Aubrey quailed at the prospect of keeping him up to the mark.
"Thank you, Clark. That will do. Maximum communication, minimum noise. Good luck. Out."
Aubrey cut the channel, and nodded his satisfaction to Quin and the flight-lieutenant. Out of the tiny round window, he could see the herringbone pattern of a ship sailing north through the Andfjord, inshore of one of the Vesteralen islands. The Nimrod was perhaps little more, than half an hour from North Cape, and the same time again from their taking up station on the Soviet border. In an hour, they would be committed. "Plumber" would really be running, then.
Clark flicked off the transceiver, and shook his head as if he doubted the reality of the voices he had heard. The Harrier was seemingly about to settle on to the carpet of white cloud beneath them, and the tanker, the old Victor bomber, was a dot ahead and to starboard of them. Below the cloud, where the weather had let in small, almost circular viewing ports, the grey water and the slabbed, cut, knife-carved coastline were already retreating into evening, north of the Arctic Circle. Half an hour before, he had looked down between clouds and seen the vast sheet of the Svartisen glacier, looking like a huge, intact slab of marble fallen on the land, tinged by the sun into pinks and greens and blues. The Harrier moved forward, overtaking the Victor tanker. The pilot changed his position until the tanker was slightly to port, then the probe that had needed to be specially fitted aligned with the long trailing fuel line from the wing of the Victor and its trumpet-bell mouth into which the pilot had to juggle the Harrier's probe. Bee and flower. Clark considered another, more human image, and smiled. Not like that. This was all too mechanical, and without passion.
The Victor's fuselage glowed silver in the sunlight from the west. The RAF roundel was evident on her side as the Harrier slid across the cloud carpet, and there seemed no motion except the slow, dance-like movements of possible combatants as the two aircraft matched speeds and height. The probe nudged forward towards the cone, the fuel-line lying on the air in a gentle, graceful curve. The probe nudged the cone, making it wobble, and then the Harrier dropped back slightly. Too high, too much to the left. Again, the probe slid forward towards the flower-mouth of the cone. Clark watched its insertion, felt the small, sharp jerk as it locked, then saw the glimmer of the three green locking lights on the instrument panel. The fuel began to surge down the fuel line.
Six and a half minutes later — it had become noticeably more evening-like, even at that altitude — the refuelling was complete, and the probe withdrew, the cone slipping forward and away as the speed of the two aircraft no longer matched. The gleaming, part-shadowed fuselage of the tanker slid up and away from them, the fuel-line retreating like a garden hose being reeled in. In a few more moments, the Victor had lost its silhouetted identity and was little more than a gleaming dot. The cloud brushed against the belly of the Harrier.
"Ready?" the pilot asked in his headset.
"Yes."
"Hang on, then. This is where it gets hairy. Don't look if you" ve got a weak stomach." The pilot chuckled.
"I can stand it."
Even before he finished speaking, the nose of the Harrier dipped into the cloud, and white turned grey and featureless and dark immediately. Clark felt the altitude of the Harrier alter steeply as she dived through the clouds, descending from thirty-five thousand feet.
They emerged into a twilit world, and the pilot levelled the Harrier and switched on the terrain-following radar and the auto-pilot which would together flick and twist them through the mountainous Norwegian hinterland.
Clark watched, as the dark water of the Skerstadfjord rose to meet them, then flashed beneath the belly of the aircraft. The pilot was flying the Harrier at five hundred miles an hour. The tiny lights of fishing hamlets flickered along the shore, and then were gone. Small boats returning from the day's fishing, the main north-south highway, then the dark, high, sharp peaks of the mountain range engulfed them. Clark winced, despite his experience, as the tiny insect of the Harrier flicked between two peaks, then followed the snail-like track of a narrow fjord, a smear of lighter grey in the gloom.
The aircraft lifted over the back of a line of hills, then dipped down to follow the terrain again. A huge glacier seemed to emerge suddenly from the darkness, gleaming with a ghostly, threatening light. The Harrier banked, and slipped as buoyantly and easily along its face as a helicopter might have done. Clark had never flown in one of the US Marine Harriers, built under licence by McDonnell Douglas, and it was the only means of comparison he could apply; a demented, speeded-up helicopter. Then the glacier was behind them, one eastern tip of it falling into a small, crater-like lake.
"Sweden," the pilot announced.
"Nice view," Clark replied drily.
"Want to go back for your stomach?"
"I'm okay." Clark noticed the change in his own voice, the subconscious attempt to discourage conversation. He had moved into another phase of "Plumber". Already, he was alone, already it was another, different border they had crossed.
There were lakes as the terrain slowly became less mountainous, the peaks less sharp against the still lighter clouds and the few patches of stars. Grey, almost black water, the jagged lillies of ice floes everywhere. A rounded space of mirror-like water, a few dotted lights, then two companion stretches which the Harrier skimmed across like a stone. Then a long ribbon of lake, almost like a river because he could not perceive, at that altitude, either end of it, which the Harrier followed as it thrust into the centre of Swedish Lapland.
A village, like one dim street lamp at their speed, even the momentary flicker of headlights, then the Harrier banked to port, and altered course, following the single road north through that part of Sweden, the Norbotten, towards the Finnish border. The sheer rock faces closed in again, and the darkness seemed complete, except where the swift glowworms of hamlets and isolated farms and the occasional gleams of car or lorry headlights exposed the whiteness of snow in the narrow valleys through which the road wound. Then, lower country, and a gleaming, humped plain of whiteness stretched before and beneath the aircraft.
"Finland," the pilot announced, but added nothing else.
Clark attempted repose, sensing like a man with a severely limited water supply, the waste of adrenalin his tension betokened. The shadow of the aircraft raced over the snow less then a hundred feet below them as the Harrier skimmed under the radar net. Bodø radar would have reported a loss of contact immediately they had finished refuelling, and the matter would not have been taken further. Neither neutral country, Sweden nor Finland, had been required to know of the passage of the Harrier, nor would they have sanctioned its incursion into their airspace.
A herd of reindeer, startled by the roar of the engine, scattered at the gallop beneath them. Then the darkness of trees, then whiteness again. The cloud cover above the cockpit was broken, mere rags now, and the moon gleamed. They were so close to the ground, it was like impossibly fast skiing rather than flying. It was a mere seventy minutes since they had ended their refuelling, and their flight was more than half completed. Clark glanced to port and starboard, and considered the packs in the two underwing pods. Right hand good, left hand bad, he told himself with a smile that did not come easily. Right-hand pack, repair equipment, meters, spares. Left-hand pack, explosives, detonators, the end of "Leopard". He believed that it was the left-hand pack that he would be forced to use. He did not consider his own fate. He would be arrested as a spy, naturally. Prison, interrogation, exchange for a Russian agent. It was a pattern of events that was predictable and not to be considered. The trick was, not to get caught, even when walking — swimming — into a Russian naval base; don't get caught.