The Tango Briefing [antikvár]

1. Birdseye I came in over the Pole and we were stacked up for nearly twenty minutes in a holding circuit round London before they could find us a runway and then we had to wait for a bottleneck on the ground to get itself sorted out and all we could do was stare through the windows at the downpour and that didn't help. Sayônara, yes, very comfortable thank you. There was a long queue in No. 3 Passenger Building and I was starting to sweat because the wire had said FULLY URGENT and London never uses that phrase just for a laugh; then a quietly high-powered type in sharp blue civvies came up and asked who I was and i told him and he whipped me straight past Immigration and Customs without touching the sides and told me there was a police car waiting and was it nice weather in Tokyo. "Better than here." "Where do we send the baggage?" "This is all I've got." He took me through a fire exit and there was the rain slamming down again and the porters were trudging about in oilskins. The radio operator had the rear door open for me and I ducked in and the driver hooked his head round to see who I was, not that he'd know. "You want us to go as fast as we can?" "That's what it's all about." Sometimes along the open stretches where the deluge was flooding in the hollows we worked up quite a bow wave and I could see thé flash of our emergency light reflected on it. "Bit of a summer storm." "You can keep it." They were using their siren before we'd got halfway along Waterloo Road and after that they just kept their thumb on it because the restaurants and cinemas were turning out and every taxi was rolling. Big Ben was sounding eleven when we did a nicely controlled slide into Whitehall across the front of a bus and