Gromkyan pulled back the control column, the nose came up instantly and the tarmac began to drop away. When he had first learned to fly, on single-engined planes, he learned to push the control column forward a little immediately after lifting off, to let the flow of air build up under the wings, before starting the climb up to cruising altitude; but in this massive aircraft, it was the thrust of the jet engines rather than the airflow which propelled it upwards into the sky. He just kept the nose pointed at a seventeen-degree angle upwards, the throttles wide open, and instructed Kieviz to retract the undercarriage. Kieviz pushed the lever to the up position, and then flicked the switch that would extinguish the No Smoking sign in the 169 seat cabin behind the locked door at the rear of the cockpit.

There was, they both knew, a VIP in that cabin: Nicholai Ztachinov, deputy head of the KGB. He was coming out on this Sunday afternoon flight to Heathrow, London, and would be returning to Moscow in the morning. Ztachinov was a chain-smoker, and it had been made very clear to Gromkyan that Ztachinov did not like to be kept waiting for his smokes.

At two thousand feet, as they came up into the first wisps of cloud, Gromkyan engaged the automatic flight-control system, which was already programmed to fly to London. Almost immediately, the aircraft adopted a banking attitude, in a long slow sweep around, upwards and to the left, and then began to level out.

‘What do you fancy doing in London tonight, Viktor?’ asked Gromkyan.

‘A McDonald’s hamburger followed by a negress with big bazonkas.’

‘Count me in,’ said Yolef Stiz, the flight engineer who sat behind them.

‘And me too,’ grinned Gromkyan.

‘I’ll go along with that,’ said Vasilik, the radio operator. Korshov, the navigator nodded his assent also.

‘Botnick at the Embassy’s promised to arrange it all. He can get negresses for forty roubles.’

‘Forty roubles!’ said Stiz. ‘I don’t want one with gold teeth – just an ordinary one will do.’

‘Yes, well, you don’t want an ugly one do you?’ said Gromkyan. ‘Remember the story you told us when you were on the New York run?’

Stiz remembered. The negress he had picked up who was so cheap – so stunningly beautiful and yet so cheap. He’d clambered into bed and discovered she was possessed not of breasts and vagina, but of a pair of testicles and eight inches of penis.