I confess. I had no luck tracking down the nose number of the Mig15bis in which Yuri took his final, fatal flight. So I made one up. If anyone asks, tell them I did it to confuse the CIA.
How to end it? The full circumstances of the crash are still obscure, so to show it in any detail seemed wrong. I had been working all through the book with the idea of time ticking by. Datelines and even minute by minute times thread all the way through the story, heightening tension. As I read through accounts of Yuri’s death, trying to piece together the sequence of events, I realised that the final moments were really known only through intercom radio traffic. A soundtrack of crackly, static-y voices played in my head. I read too, about how the bad weather had closed in so quickly, and suddenly, the final image was there: A take-off into a thickening fog of bad weather that is at the same time, a haze of static in which Yuri’s story finally fades out.
I built the page, then set a horizontal ruler-guide, and, selecting a thin white pen effect, began to scratch and scratch away with my digital stylus, half erasing the climbing plane on its optimistic trajectory, and the final, terse words of the script.
Then I went for a long walk.