He’s landed in this field and he doesn’t know what to do next. He’s forgotten all of his training. Partly because that’s his type, he’s the forgetting type, but also partly because when he was actually undergoing training it was being delivered by some useless fruit straight out of the academy for assholes so he wasn’t paying much in the way of attention.

When they set off in their small plane they all said what a laugh it would be if they were to go down because of The Pilot’s incessant drinking, which he naturally took as a challenge and naturally he was up to the challenge and naturally he decided to fly just a little above radar detection altitude so the Commie fucks could see the occasional blip every fifty miles or so but not really be able to predict his trajectory or where he was coming from.

He didn’t realise or didn’t care that it would result in their flight taking a little longer, that they would miss their rendezvous with command down in Kiev, that the flak cannons down on the plateaus and rolling fields would be loaded and ready and their visibility would be markedly improved.

He also forgot to put his watch backwards so was an hour ahead of schedule anyway, would’ve landed in Kiev and been summarily executed rather than supported and reinforced.

So they got shot down outside Donetsk and The Pilot was the only one with a working ejector seat and a working parachute, the other passengers getting either one or the other. The faces of the men with ejector seats were, The Pilot reckoned, among the most hauntingly beautiful things he had ever seen, sheer terror in such naive virgin eyes that had never so much as seen a deer get hit by a truck now bound to hit the Earth at terminal velocity and unable even to stretch their legs and enjoy the ride because of the two-ton torture chair strapped to their backs.

In the Congressional hearings about the incident they called a couple of people working at the airfield from which The Pilot and his crew set off, a couple of the less senior guys responsible for refueling and checking the landing gear and making sure the crew’s helmets were all airtight and the plane was airworthy.

The first guy was called Claude, a refugee from wartime France who saw no goddamn need in going home and taking care of his wife and kids because goddamn what kind of life is that for a virile, his new American girlfriend says hyper-virile, man in his early-twenties with the world at his goddamn feet and all the skill in the world in his goddamn hands.

(The ‘goddamn’ habit he had picked up from the sailors on the boat that came to rescue him from the ship sunk by u-boats in the mid-Atlantic; if the Germans had captured him he’d be calling the judge a schweinhund by now)

He offered his condolences to the family but said he wasn’t in the least responsible — he only ever had to check the engines and that all the little dials in the cockpit were working. They did, perfectly. Everything he touched was faultless. What difference did it make that he did the whole thing while under the influence? He came remarkably close to saying the phrase “I’m not on trial here” before realising fully his surroundings.

Donetsk was pronounced differently from how it looked. The Pilot remembered that from just before he took off, from the little guidebook they hand out to pilots, a leatherbound thing marked

SECRET DIARY

because it was made of recycled diaries taken from young girls back home.

Occasionally staff would hand back these little guidebooks, complaining that they already had been filled with lists of the names of handsome young men living in Gary, Indiana, or the hopes and dreams of prepubescent girls in pigtails in Casper, Wyoming. Sometimes, if the censors didn’t see anything wrong with the contents, they would be put back into active circulation and given to the next unfortunate soul looking for a map of the Czech countryside and instead finding a short fiction piece about kissing little Bobby Obraniak, on the lips, under a full moon, next to a waterfall, riding a horse.

If the censors saw something that might be useful to the enemy, the books would be burnt. Burning diaries was one of the cushiest jobs in the military, The Pilot had heard — sometimes they would cook things on the smouldering ashes, play pretend that they were Nazis burning Brecht or Shakespeare or Joyce or some other degenerate literature, listen as the commanding officer read aloud from the diary notebook of Laura Whitberg and told the men about her dreams of absconding with her English Literature teacher to some faraway island in the South Pacific.

The Pilot had gotten a little lucky this time, his notebook being actually full of maps and only a few pages of scrawled notes about the visual quality of Lee North, age 13, and his new leather jacket.

The second man on trial was a shifty-looking Cuban man who called himself The Fox, but whose real name was Raul Castro Ortega Luis. He was responsible for the instruments in the plane, and of particular interest in this case was the

PARACHUTE OK

light, supposedly glowing green and then flashing alternate green and red when The Pilot went to push his seat. The radio operator heard The Pilot scream “damn you Raul Ortega!” when he was going down, and heard the characteristic beeping of a malfunctioning ejector unit.

The investigator in charge puts it to the court that, on discovering the green light glowing, Raul should not only have halted the mission but started a factory recall procedure to replace every ejector component in every plane in the Atlantic fleet.

Raul was incredulous, in a matter-of-fact and aloof way.

“Oh no. No. First, point one, first — I did not see the green light. The engines were not on. How I could be expected to see…” He gives a noncommital shrug.

“Point two, no. No. I do not know this word recall.”

“Point three, if you would recover your eyes the evidence provided to the court…”

He gestures towards a plane wing he brought with him outside, wingspan of about twenty metres. He keeps pointing at it for the best part of a minute, demanding the audience to stare — when somebody looks back at him he stares deep into their eyes and nods his head back to the wing until they look again. The prosecutor kept trying to intervene but the judge was transfixed, completely lost in the artful way in which Raul was holding the attention of the crowds.

When they all had their eyes on the wing, he slinked out the back door and nobody noticed. The judge declared him mentally unfit and cleared him of all charges.

The Pilot found himself in a bar on Kuybysheva Street, flanked by austere tower blocks of apartments owned by workers’ councils. Great grey behemoths bathed a little in neon orange advertising something unreadable in neon cyrillic runes on the bar.

The predominant language in the place was Ukrainian, obviously, but not by much. The whole city had undergone such a rapid change that when you stopped somebody on the street you’d not know what their first language was. The establishment of the Zona Internacional, the interzone in Donbas region not run by any particular goverment, to stop the internal rifts and civil wars and ec0nomic strifes and genocide that had plagued the region. It was built as a place where artists, creatives, writers, architects, poets, and all that sort could come and live and create to try to rebuild using culture.

Mostly it was full of drunk pilots who crashlanded in the farms and fields surrounding Donetsk.

The final man the inquiry thought fit to blame for the plane crash was an Englishman who was supposedly descended from royalty, and indeed showed all the outward signs of it, dressing and speaking well and firmly believing his place in the world was earned and rightly his to own.

He had a lovely air about him despite the arrogance — a man of silk scarves and golden blonde hair, a preternaturally arse-shaped chin not blemishing the rest of his soft face.

The prosecutor, being of sound mind and within the normal range of sexuality as defined by Her Majesty’s Government, felt an overwhelming urge within him to not only let this man free but also to offer him his phone number and give him the full freedom of London (including his flat and especially his bedroom and particularly his own body).

The case was adjourned until the war was over.