Firefox (20 page)

There seemed noise like a wall behind him, pushing against him with an almost physical force. In front of him, there was a cone of silence, with Kreshin and himself at the point, and the semi-circle of closing guards embraced within it as they moved slowly forward. It was one of the most powerful visual images of his life, the approaching guards and then, beating at his ears, a palpable silence.

A gun roared at his side and its sound, too, seemed to come from far away, as if muffled. He saw a guard drop, and a second one lurch sideways. It was too easy, he thought, they are too close together, as he had once seen advancing Germans in the defence of Stalingrad - too close … His mind did not tell him to open fire.

His own gun lay uselessly in his pocket.

‘Drop your weapons, or I shall order them to open fire!’ he heard the distant, mechanical voice say. He did not hear the command, but he saw the flames from the rifles, sensed, rather than saw, Kreshin plucked away from his side. Then, with growing agony and the terrible revulsion of the awareness of death, he felt his own body plucked by bullets, his coat ripped as if by small detonations. He felt old. He staggered, no longer sure of his balance. He stumbled back a couple of paces, then sat untidily down on the ground, like a child failing a lesson in walking. Then it seemed as if the hangar lights had been turned off, he rolled sideways from the waist, like an insecure doll flopping onto its side. His eyes were tightly closed, squeezed shut, to avoid the terrible moment of death and, as his face slapped dully against the concrete floor, he didn’t see Gant, a dim shadow in the dull green pressuresuit, standing at the entrance to the hangar from the security building. Baranovich died believing that Gant would not come.

Gant could see from where he stood something white coat on the ground, and the closing, cautious semi-circle of guards approaching it. He saw Kreshin’s blond head, and his limbs flung in the careless attitude of violent death. The aircraft was thirty yards from him, no more.

There had been a fire at the other end of the hangar. He could see the two fire-tenders, and the foam-soaked frame of the second prototype now being rolled clear of the smouldering materials that had begun, and sustained, the fire. Already, he realised, the occupants of the hangar were in a position to begin to turn their attention back to the Firefox. He was almost too late he might, in fact, be too late. The excuse for rolling the plane out of the hangar was almost over, the fire out. He saw a spurt of flame near the wall of the bangar, and an asbestos-suited fireman rear back from it. He heard the dull concussion of a fuel-drum explode.

The second prototype was clear of the flame, but the men towing it with a small tractor hurried to get it further off. It was his chance.

His legs were still stiff, rebellious, from the hysterical paralysis of the dream, but he forced them to stride out, to cross the thirty yards of concrete to the Firefox. The pilot’s ladder that Baranovich had used for his supervision of Grosch’s work was still in place, and he began to climb it. As he bent over the cockpit, a voice at the bottom of the ladder called up to him. ‘Colonel Voskov?’

He looked round, and nodded down at the young, distraught, sweating face below him. The man was in the uniform of a junior officer in the KGB. His gun was in his hand.

‘Yes?’ he said.

‘What are you doing. Colonel?’

‘What the devil do you think I’m doing, you idiot? Do you want this plane to be damaged like the other one? I’m taking it out of here, that’s what I’m doing.’ He swung his legs over the sill. and dropped into the pilot’s couch. While he still looked down at the young KGB man, his hands sought for the parachute straps, and he buckled himself in, following this by strapping himself to the couch itself.

The young man had stepped back a couple of paces, so that he could still see Gant clearly. The tinted facemask of the helmet, combined with the integral oxygenmask, made it impossible for him to tell that it wasn’t Colonel Voskov in the pilot’s position. He was at a loss what action to take. He glanced swiftly down the hangar. It was true that the second Mig-31 was being towed towards him from the far end of the hangar and, although it appeared under control, there was still smoke and flame from the fire there. He had been told by Tsernik that no one, on the express orders of Colonel Kontarsky, was to be allowed near the plane. But did that apply to the pilot?

Gant ignored the KGB man and went through his pre-start checks as swiftly as he could. He plugged in his radio and communications equipment, finding the location of the socket instinctively, as if he had always flown that aircraft. The simulator which had been built in Langley, Virginia, at CIA headquarters, from Baranovich’s smuggled descriptions and photographs and from computer projections, now proved its worth. Then, he plugged in the connection from his helmet to the weaponssystem, a single jackplug similar to the radio. He pushed the jackplug home into the side of the ejector-seat itself. It was the final sophistication of the weapons system of the Mig: if he were forced to eject, then he could control the destruct mechanism of the system to prevent any part or fragment of the plane’s weaponry and its control-system from falling into enemy’s hands.

He glanced down at the KGB man, swiftly, as if taking in the reading from one of his gauges. The junior officer still seemed perplexed, reluctant. Gant connected up his oxygen supply, then coupled in the emergency oxygen. Next, he switched in the anti-G device, a lead which plugged into the pressuresuit just below the left knee. It was this which would bleed air into the suit to counteract the effects of increased Gforces on his blood, forcing it round his system against the effect of sudden turns, dives or accelerations. Cautiously, he tested it, felt the air bleed in rapidly, and checked the gauges which confirmed his bodily reaction. It was working.

He knew he was stripping the pre-flight routine to the bone, but there weren’t even seconds to spare. His eyes read the gauges; flaps, brakes and fuel. The fueltanks were full, and they would need to be since, as he sat there, he did not even know the nature or position of his refuelling-point.

There was one more thing. He extracted the innards of the transistor radio from a pouch-pocket on the thigh of the suit, bared an adhesive strip, and then fixed the anonymous collection of circuits in their wafer-thin black case developed at Farnborough exclusively for his use to the corner of the instrument panel, with a silent prayer that it had not been damaged during the past three days. If it had been, he would never know.

He was ready. His routine had taken mere seconds to complete. The second Firefox was only yards away as it trailed behind the small tractor. He had a single moment in which to convince the man below him. He leaned down, and waved his hand for him to move, yelling as he did so: ‘You’ll get your head knocked off if you stand there any longer!’ He swept a finger across his throat, and pointed to the wing and engine-intake behind the Russian. The young man looked, understood, and selfpreservation made him move clear, tugging the ladder obligingly after him.

Gant smiled, relaxed, and turned his attention to the aircraft. As he did so, his gaze swept across the door into the hangar through which he had entered perhaps a minute earlier. He saw Kontarsky, his face white, his arm extended, finger pointing in his direction. There were other men at his side, perhaps half-a-dozen, filling the doorway behind him. In a purely reflex action, he pressed the hood control, and automatically the hood swung down, locked electronically. Then he locked it manually as a standard double-check. He was isolated in the machine. A part of it.

The fogginess, the lethargy, the nausea of the dream, all had left him now. There was, curiously, no elation either. There was only the functioning of smooth machinery - a mechanism within a larger mechanism. Elation would come later perhaps.

He checked the cockpit air-pressure; then, reaching forward, he gang-loaded the ignition switches, switched on the starter motors, turned on the high-pressure cock and, without hesitation, even for self-drama, pressed the starter-button.

Halfway down the fuselage, there was the sound of a double explosion, like the noise of a twelve-bore against his ears, as the cartridge start functioned. Two puffs of sooty smoke rolled away from the engines. There was a rapid, mounting whirring as the huge turbines built up; he checked gyro instruments erect. He saw the flashing light which indicated that he had forgotten the fuel-booster pump, switched it in, and the light disappeared on the panel. He eased open the throttles, and watched the rpm gauges as they mounted to twenty-seven per cent, and he steadied them there. He glanced out of his side-window. Kontarsky and two of his men, as if galvanised by the explosions of the starter-cartridges, were moving forward but, by comparison with the speed of his actions and responses, as if they were moving underwater, slowly - too slowly to stop him now. He saw a gun raised, and something whined away off the cockpit, harmlessly.

With one eye on the JPT (jet-pipe temperature) gauge, he opened the throttles until the rpm gauges were at fifty-five per cent and the whine had increased comfortingly. He released the brakes.

The Firefox had been tugging against the brakes’ restraint and now that they were released, skipped rather than rolled forward, towards the hangar-doors through which Gant could see the dawn streaking and lighting the sky. He saw men rushing to the doors, in an attempt to close them against him - but they too, moved with a painful, ludicrous slowness and they were too late, far too late. He checked the gauges and booster-pumps and then he was through the hangar doors and out onto the taxiway. In his mirror he could see running figures, left ridiculously behind him as the Firefox rolled towards the runway.

Using the rudder and differential braking, he turned onto the runway. As he straightened the airplane, he ran through the checks again.

He breathed deeply, once, then he opened the throttles to full. He pushed the throttles straight through the detent, and brought the reheat of the massive engines into play. He felt their power as a huge shove in the back, an almost sexual surge forward. There was a moment of elation, fierce, pure. The plane gathered speed. At 160 knots, it was skipping on the ridges in the runway-slabs. At 165 knots, he brought the elevator controls into play, and the Firefox left the ground. There was a further surge of acceleration as the drag induced by contact with the runway vanished. He retracted the undercarriage.

The Firefox wobbled its wings as he over-controlled, unused to the quality and finesse of the power-control system. He was lifting away steeply now, within seconds.

In the rising sun he saw, off to the right of the nose, a glint of sun on metal. He pulled back, and hauled the stick to the right. He felt the pressure of the anti-G as he went into the turn, almost rolled the plane completely through his over-control, then levelled the wings. He looked out to his left, and below and behind him. A Tupolev Tu-144, carrying, he knew, the First Secretary, was turning to make its final approach to the runway at Bilyarsk. He looked at his altimeter. He was already at almost eight thousand feet.

It was fifteen seconds since the undercarriage had left contact with the runway. He was a thousand miles from the Russian border - any Russian border. As the sweat of reaction from his near-collision ran down his sides, beneath his arms, he grinned to himself. He had done it. He had stolen the Firefox.

COUNTER MEASURES

By the time Kontarsky came aboard the First Secretary’s Tupolev Tu-144, the moment after the giant supersonic airliner had rolled to a halt on the runway at Bilyarsk, dashing up the mobile passenger-gangway in which he had ridden from the hangar, the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party had already been told of the theft of the Mig-31 over the flight-deck UHF. As he was ushered into the military command section of the aircraft, aft of the passenger accommodation, the equivalent of the war command office on board the U.S. President’s aircraft, he was confronted by what was, in fact, a council of war. The room was already filled with heavy cigar smoke.

Kontarsky saluted rigidly, and kept his eyes straight ahead. Only the back of a radiooperator’s head at the far end of the cigar-shaped room filled his vision. Yet he knew that the eyes of the room’s principal occupants were on him. An awareness that seemed to seep through the skin like damp told him where each of those powerful men sat. He knew that each was regarding him intently. He understood the details of the expression on each face. Directly in front of him, round the command table, circular in shape and fitted with projection equipment which would throw onto the table a relief map of any part of the Soviet Union, any part of the world, sat the First Secretary himself; on his right sat Kutuzov, Marshal of the Soviet Air Force, a world war ace, and a hardline Communist of the Stalinist school; to the left of the Soviet First Secretary sat Andropov, Chairman of the KGB and his ultimate superior. It was that trinity which so frightened him, which made the moments since he had stepped through the guarded door into this sanctum seem like minutes, hours … endless.

It was the First Secretary who spoke. Kontarsky, still rigidly to attention, and not requested to be at ease or to sit, saw from the corner of his eye the restraining hand of the First Secretary fall on the sleeve of Andropov’s suit, and he caught the glint of an overhead striplight reflected from the gold-rimmed spectacles worn by the Chairman of the KGB.

‘Colonel Kontarsky - you will explain what has happened,’ the First Secretary said, his voice soft, authoritative. He seemed unhurried. There was no other sound in the room except the steady hiss from a radio. It was nearly three minutes since Gant had taken off in the Mig, yet nothing seemed to have been done.

Now that he had failed, Kontarsky was almost hysterically eager to encourage and exhort the efforts to reclaim - or destroy, he presumed - the stolen aircraft. He swallowed. ‘An American…‘he began, and coughed. He kept his eyes looking directly ahead, at the scrubbed neck of the radiooperator. ‘An American pilot called Gant is responsible for the theft of the Mig-31, sir.’