The Striker Portfolio

'My name's Martin.'

'Rohmhild.' His feet came together. 'Are you English?'

'Yes. Aviation psychologist.'

'Another one?' He corrected himself quickly. 'Maybe you're the one we've been waiting for.'

It looked as if a ton of grey lump-sugar had been tipped across the hangar floor in the chance shape of an aeroplane.

There were only six people working on it. The place was enormous, a tin cathedral, and cold. The heaters were on and it was less cold than outside by a few degrees. The cost of the heaters would probably have kept the whole squadron airborne for a week. The winter sun was up but it was brighter inside the hangar: lamps hung in focussed clusters from the gantries, their glare emphasizing the silence. Despite the movement of six men there was a mortuary stillness here.

'You know anything about orchids?'

One of the small doors at the side of the hangar came open and I looked across to see who it was. The survivor, the one with the wet guttural laugh, might be sent down here to look for me. I'd come to Hanover to see Lovett and Lovett had known when the next one would crash so they might think it natural for me to move out to Linsdorf and take it from there. So I wanted to know who people were when they came towards me.

'Not much,' I said.

This was Philpott, leading the A.I.B. group. I'd been here for an hour and all he liked talking about was orchids.

The man who had come into the hangar was carrying a transverse coupling and he dropped it on to the thick-topped butcher's bench. It set up a pure vibration that echoed from the roof.

'Sound as a bell.'

None of the others came near. Pure vibration wasn't news. They were waiting for something that made a sulky clunk when you dropped it.

'I'm working on a tropical epiphyte called Orchis Ledulum at the moment. Grafting, you know.'

He was a short hesitant-moving man in a white dust-coat. He looked gloomily across the plane-shaped litter of metal and saw nothing to interest him there. But his reputation was big even at Farnborough and I supposed he was like a conductor at rehearsal, dozing off until a false note came, then he would hit the roof.

The man who had come in was tying a mauve label to the transverse coupling.

'What did you do to your hand, then?' Philpott asked me.

Tin-opener.'

'Ah.'

A man with devon aviation on his dust-coat came over from the engine area. The engine was a slug-shaped lump encrusted with white ash and there was nothing they could do with it: the kinetic energy created by a gas-turbine running at full pitch on impact will melt most of its alloys.

'Did Andy check this, Mr Philpott?'

It was some kind of control-toggle.

'Have a look at the list, then give it a flame-test. He'll be back tomorrow. Is the other one like that?'

'I've not freed it yet.'

'Go careful, then. Andy's got hopes there.'

I followed him past the nose section. It was just a melted lump but he seemed pleased with it.

'Titanium. They know how to take it on the nose, don't they?' He gave a wintry smile.

'Would you expect to turn up manufacturing faults at this stage?'

'Normally. Not with the Striker. They introduced Zero Defects Programming at Devon before these things were built.' He gazed at me pensively. 'These Strikers are perfect when you roll them out. It wasn't like that a few years ago. You'd find anything left about inside, you could furnish a house with some of the stuff. Rivets, bulldog clips, hand-rags. A whole tablecloth, once. You know what we found inside a flexible tank a couple of years ago? Three-legged stool, milk a cow on it. Went down off the Azores with a crew of seven. Zero Defects is going to put a stop to all that. American idea. Rolls-Royce brought it into Britain. Why?'

'I just wanted to know.'

'Design faults are different. We can turn anything up.' He looked broodingly across the sea of fragments. By the time we've rebuilt this lot we can tell you how many kids the chief riveter's got and whether they're boys or girls. Of course it's getting more difficult for us these days. Look at that turbine. Now what can you do with that? The higher they go up the harder they come down. You imagine the noise this one made when it hit. Like a bomb.'

'I can imagine.'

The test-flame coughed into life across at the butcher's bench.

'We can turn up anything. Anything.'

'Have you given much thought to sabotage?'

'Quite a bit.' He was looking away from me, watching the colour of the flame when the component was passed through it. 'You've got to. Flags, frontiers, it's like a circus.'

When the flame went out I said: 'This isn't exactly in your department, but if the pilot loses control and hasn't switched to automatic what attitude does the Striker assume?'

'Nose-down at four or five degrees.'

We went across to the bench.

'It's negative, Mr Philpott. 'Tell Andy.'

The man took a green label from the box.

'Then we could say, could we, that if they didn't want to leave any evidence they'd go for the engine?'

'Who?' There was a drip on his nose and he blew it, squinting at me above his handkerchief. 'Oh, I see. Yes. That's what they'd probably go for.'

He'd been drinking but he wasn't drunk.

'Psychologize me.'

A quick forced laugh.

'I'm off duty,' I said.

They held each other, both half-turned towards me, still moving to the music. The whole of her body was in her eyes as she looked at me and I knew she would look at anyone like that, any man.

'Martin,' he said, 'wasn't it?'

'That's right.'

He said to her: 'Herr Martin.' He spoke to me without looking away from her. 'This is my wife.'

'Frau Rohmhild.'

'Nitri,' she said. The flash of her mouth took away some of the animal, brought back some of the child.

'Walter.'

'Franz. Franz, Nitri and Walter.' As if we had made some eternal pact. 'We will see you again.'

'Yes,' she said and looked back over her bare shoulder as I knew she always did, at anyone. They drifted away.

'She's charming.'

'Yes.'

His name was Eagner and he had a doctorate in psychology. We had met earlier and he was back in the corner again where I was holed up to watch people, especially the pilots.

Even for a peace-time officers' mess it was lush and the band had been brought in from Hanover. It was invitation night and the room was crowded: pilots and their wives and girls, admin, officers and attached civilian staff, the A.I.B. group and the Devon Aviation team. I'd seen even Philpott here brooding solitarily at the bar over his tropical epiphytes.

I looked at the door every time it opened. If they came at all they would come before morning: the moment their controllers knew where I was they'd send them in very fast so that I couldn't do them any more damage. I was more than ready for them because I hadn't cooled down much: a bandaged hand and a bandaged arm were all I'd got to show for last night's work and I badly wanted to signal Ferris with something good, something he could use, as a change from mucking it up.

And at the back of my mind I was trying to tell myself it wasn't true that Parkis had put it across me so smoothly that you could have spread it on toast. Because that was what he had done. I'd been through the situation twice and it stood up. Someone had told Lovett where and when the next Striker SK-6 was going to crash. Lovett had signalled London. Parkis had wanted it confirmed and he'd wanted it confirmed by the man in the field who was going to be given the mission so he'd sent me in from Munich to observe and report. I was already hooked when I'd gone to see him: he knew I was interested in aeroplanes and he knew if he could bring one down on my head I'd be more interested still.

But he was thorough: this one 'wasn't for me'; they were 'giving it to Waring'; there 'wasn't time' to change the director in the field if I didn't want to work with him. I'd have worked with Pontius Pilate and the Seven Dwarfs and he'd known that. I was a shadow executive and he'd made me sit up and beg for a sabotage investigation job and now I was doing it. I would have refused: he'd known that too. I'd tried to refuse the Berlin thing and after that Bangkok and he wasn't going to let me refuse this one.