Firefox

by Craig Thomas

  The second guard joined him, and said: ‘Turn on the engine, please.’ Semelovsky did not recognise this guard, looked at Feodor for a time, then shrugged and did as he was ordered. He revved loudly, and the missing cylinder could be plainly detected. The guard motioned him to release the bonnet-catch, and lifted the bonnet, his head disappearing. Semelovsky spared a momentary glance at the officer, who appeared to be persuaded of the normality of the situation. He was smoking, and appeared bored.

  Leaning out of the window, he called: ‘Any idea what it is?’

  The second guard slammed down the bonnet suddenly, as if caught at some forbidden prank, and replied gruffly: ‘That engine’s filthy. You’re a scientist - you should take more care.’ Then he seemed to realise that his mask of deference had slipped. Semelovsky, surprised by his unguarded tone, realised that the man had to be KGB or GRU, whatever his uniform said.

  He nodded in reply.

  ‘They keep us too busy…‘he began.

  The second guard turned away, and shook his head in the direction of the officer lounging against the wall of the guard-hut The officer waved a hand nonchalantly, and the gates swung apart The guard Feodor waved Semelovsky through.

  He eased the car into gear, and pulled forward. He passed through the gates, and they closed behind him.

  At that point, and at that point only, a wave of fear swept over him. The incident was more fraught in retrospect than it had been as he experienced it. He had smuggled Gant into the complex, and his job was done.

  He steered the car through the straight streets of the living quarters. Each dacha-like dwelling, wooden and one-storied, was identical, set back from the road behind a strip of lawn. It was, he thought, more of a camp than a town. Not a camp like the ones Baranovich knew from personal experience, on what they called the Gulag Archipelago, but it was a camp, nevertheless. It did not have walls like Mavrino, where Baranovich had spent years of his creative adult life - but there were electric fences, and guard-towers, and the KGB.

  He turned the wheel of the car, and drove it up the slightly-sloping drive and into the opened garage of a house halfway down Tupolev Avenue. It was near the middle of the fenced-in township, identical to almost every other street, except those which contained the shops, the bars, and the cinema and dance-hall.

  Semelovsky glimpsed, the watcher in the black car parked across the street from the house. He was suddenly afraid again. It did not matter that Baranovich had told him, and that he knew himself perfectly well, that they would not arrest them until after the weapons trials - otherwise, who would complete the arming of the plane, the rest of the work…? It was only by recalling Baranovich’s face, and by hearing his voice, that he was able to calm himself. Then the bumper of the car bounced gently away from the car-tyre at the end of the garage, and he tugged on the handbrake and switched off the engine. As if forgetting Gant, locked in the boot, he sat for some moments, breathing regularly and deeply. He had seen too much, too quickly.

  Then he opened the door, took the key from the ignition, and closed the garage door before he opened the boot.

  ‘And you have learned nothing from either of them, Dmitri - still nothing?’ The silkiness that had earlier invested it was gone from Kontarsky’s voice. Instead, it was querulous, impatient. He was pacing his office, while Priabin sat in a chair before his desk, maintaining a ceaseless patrol. It was ten past seven. Priabin had left the cellar-room in Dzerzhinsky Street only minutes earlier, after Riassin, the man who seemed most likely to break of the two they had collected from the Mira Prospekt flats that morning, had slipped again into unconsciousness. Priabin tasted the ashes of an unsuccessful interrogation. There had been no time for the more refined, slower processes he preferred - this had been a brutal softening-up and the massive misuse of pentathol on both men. Yet, they had learned nothing. Priabin was of the opinion that there was nothing to learn, other than the fact that the two men knew Pavel Upenskoy, and that one of them, Glazunov, worked with him, as driver’s mate on his delivery truck.

  Glazunov had been instructed to remain at home that day, despite the fact that Upenskoy was leaving for a delivery to Kuybyshev, a long trip but, so he claimed under drugs, he had not been told why.

  However, Kontarsky was in no mood to believe that Priabin had tried as hard as he could, pushed as hard as he dare, without killing Glazunov and the other man - he was prepared to believe only that his aide had failed. Kontarsky, it was obvious, still believed that the two men possessed the information.

  Priabin’s eyes followed Kontarsky as he paced the carpet. He, like his chief, had a sense that there was a mounting urgency about the circumstances of the second man in the truck. The problem was the inability to understand what these agents of British and American intelligence could hope to gain by smuggling one man into Bilyarsk … for that must be where the impostor was heading. What could he do, that one man, that could not be done by Baranovich, the brilliant original mind, or Semelovsky, or even Kreshin - all of whom would be working on the actual aircraft during the night? A stranger would not be able to get anywhere near the Mig. And to consider that he had come merely to spy, to photograph, was ridiculous, Priabin concluded once more.

  He realised that Kontarsky had halted in front of him. He looked up into the colonel’s strained face. The man was already hours late in departing for Bilyarsk, since he wanted to go with positive information concerning the man travelling in the same direction in Upenskoy’s truck. A KGB helicopter had been waiting for him on the outskirts of the city since early afternoon.

  ‘Very well,’ Kontarsky said, appearing to have come to some decision. Tick up the phone, Dmitri. Get in touch with the tail-car, and have Upenskoy and the other man pulled in - at once!’

  ‘Sir.’

  Priabin picked up the telephone. A simple instruction would be relayed via radio to the KGB office in Kazan, whence it would be passed on to the tail-car. ‘Tell them to request what help they need from the guard-post at the Bilyarsk junction,’ Kontarsky added.

  ‘How many men in that car?’

  Three.’ Priabin replied. Then he said: The last position of the truck showed it to have passed the junction to Bilyarsk - it didn’t slow down, and it didn’t stop…’ He held the phone loosely in his hand.

  Kontarsky whirled round, and snapped: ‘Then they must stop it now - I want to know if that second man is still aboard!’

  As soon as he passed the Bilyarsk junction, glancing at the guard-post as he did so in the deepening dusk, Pavel Upenskoy knew that his time was limited. Without slowing, taking one hand from the wheel, he unzipped his jacket, and tugged an old service automatic from his waistband. He laid it gently on the passenger seat, which Gant had occupied.

  The tail-car had abandoned the idea of following him without lights. He could see the spreading stains of its headlights on the road behind. He wondered whether it would stop to consult the guards on the road to Bilyarsk, but it did not - probably, they were in conversation with them by radio. They would learn that he had not stopped, or slowed - and they would wonder why.

  Upenskoy reckoned on having perhaps ten miles of road before they would become suspicious, or whoever they were answerable to ordered them to investigate his mysterious passenger. Then they would overtake, and order him to slow down. He knew the road between Kazan and Kuybyshev fairly well. It was farming country, isolated villages miles apart, some farms, but no town on the road before Krasny Yar, itself only ten or fifteen miles from Kuybyshev. He would not be allowed to get that far.

  He had accepted the risks. He knew how important the Bilyarsk project,was to the Soviets, how vital it was to NATO. He understood the desperation behind the plan to steal the aircraft. And the desperation that had induced Edgecliffe to sacrifice himself, and poor Fenton, and the others. He prided himself that Edgecliffe knew his worth, and would not lightly throw him away.

  Now, however, he was on his own, expendable - he was to avoid capture, if possible, for at least twelve hou
rs, until Gant… There was no time to wonder about Gant, or to retrace the uncomfortable, depressing feeling the man exuded, like body odour.

  He decided that he would run for it - there would be no road-blocks, in all probability, before Krasny Yar.

  He had to make sure he could get close enough to stand a chance of hiding there. He knew no one in the town, but that thought didn’t worry him. He needed only shelter which he could find, and food which he could steal - then … He sensed that it did not do to consider the future. No, he would not think about it, merely react when the car behind him made its move.

  He thought about Marya, his wife. It was time, he considered, to allow himself that luxury. How old was she now? Thirtyseven, three years older than himself. Twelve years in prison - for demonstrating against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Her original sentence had been for three years, but she had smuggled out pamphlets and writings describing her treatment in prison, had been discovered, and her sentence had been increased by ten years. Pavel knew, with a sick certainty, that she would never be released - that she would not take that much favour from a regime she hated and despised.

  Marya was Jewish, and highly educated. She had once been a school-teacher, before her political activities had got her dismissed, then locked away. He had never understood how she came to marry him, simple, uneducated as he was. Yet he worshipped her for having done so, and he had spent the last twelve years trying to be worthy of her. Whatever had been asked of him by Edgecliffe and Lansing, and those who had preceded them at the British Embassy, he had done.

  He was not sure, because one could never be sure of such things, but he thought it probable that his wife had been given forcible mental treatment, such as was concomitant with Kremlin and KGB thinking. Anyone who dissented must be a lunatic, thus ran the official line. Yet the worst thought of all was not that, but the fact that, because of the way the years in prison would have aged her, he might have passed her in the street without recognising her. He was almost afraid, should that impossibility ever come to pass.

  He checked the driving-mirror, and saw that the car had pulled up on him. He glanced to his side, checking that the gun had not shifted. The butt still lay towards him so that he could snatch it up. He checked the mirror again. The car was flashing its lights now, as if to overtake. Pavel smiled grimly. They knew that he sa knew who they were, and they assumed, in semi-divine arrogance, that now they had decided the little game was played out, he would fold like a house of cards.

  He pressed his foot down on the accelerator, and the lights of the car dropped away behind, then spurted nearer as the car realised he was attempting to escape.

  They were on a straight stretch of road but a stretch that had not yet been converted and widened to dual carriageway. To overtake him, the car would have to pass close to him, in the northbound lane. It was that for which he hoped. If he attempted to outrun the car for long enough, he reckoned on insulted KGB arrogance to make that attempt to pass him. He watched, the smile set on his features, as the car attempted to stop him by flashing its lights. He accelerated up to seventy miles an hour.

  Again, the lights fell away behind, and then neared suddenly. Pavel knew that the men in the car would be angry by this time - they were unused to being defied, in any way at all. He tensed himself, and studied the road ahead. There were no trees on this stretch, merely the road itself bordered by low banks, which separated it from the wheat-growing countryside through which it passed. The bank would have to do, would do for his purposes.

  The car began to nose out into the other lane, cautiously, as if suspecting some trick. The driver was hanging back, still flashing his lights. Then the car seemed to leap forward, as the driver’s foot went hard down and, almost taking Pavel by surprise, was all but level with his cab before he reacted. Viciously he swung the wheel, and the truck swerved across the road. He heard, and felt, the tearing impact as the two vehicles collided, then he straightened the wheel, and the lights of the car wavered crazily before ploughing into the bank. He took his foot from the accelerator, and braked sharply. The truck screeched to a halt. He rolled down the window and listened. There was silence. The engine of the car had stalled as it collided with the bank. He picked up the gun and climbed down from the cab. The car was more than a hundred yards away, its nose buried in the bank. As he walked towards it, he could see the body of the front-seat passenger lying across the bonnet, thrown at seventy miles an hour through the windscreen.

  He was surprised when the rear door fell open and a dark shape slumped onto the road. He stopped, tense for movement. The flash from the gun and the noise of the shots, two sharp, flat cracks shocked him as if they were entirely out of place in the scene. One bullet missed him, the other tore through his shoulder. Raising the gun, as if oblivious of his wound, he fired twice in return. The dark figure slowly, balletically, extended itself on the road.

  He did not have to inspect his wound to know that it would make steering the heavy truck almost impossible. Holding the wounded arm at his side, he turned back to the truck and, with great difficulty, a mist of pain before his eyes, sweat cold on his brow, he hauled himself aboard. With a supreme effort, his whole frame shaking, he shoved the truck into gear and pulled away, from the scene of the accident, his body leaning heavily on the steering wheel, his eyes clouded with the pain and the loss of blood. He had only two thoughts in his mind - to get to Krasny Yar before he passed out, and the face of his wife, Marya, as he remembered her.

  Pavel Upenskoy died when the truck failed to negotiate a bend in the road ten miles from the scene of the accident with the KGB car, overturned, and he was flung unconscious from the cab onto the road. The truck half-mounted the bank, then fell back on top of his body.

  Pyotr Vassilyevich Baranovich was no longer puzzled by the American, Gant. At first, and during the first hour or more of his presence in the house in Tupolev Avenue, he had been increasingly puzzled by his behaviour. He had watched the man eat his meal, served by the woman who lived with Kreshin, a secretary from the finance office of the Bilyarsk project. He had watched the American, and had not understood him. He had studied him while they talked of his journey, and of Pavel - who was God knew where by now on the road to Kuybyshev, or in the hands of the KGB - and still been puzzled. Then they had begun to talk of the Mikoyan Mig-31, the Firefox as NATO called it, and he had seen the eager, dry hunger, like lust, in the man’s eyes and he no longer was dubious about Buckholz’s choice of pilot.

  Gant, he understood, needed, for some deep reason of his own, to fly the airplane. This man seated before him had been bundled from America to England, then to Russia, from Moscow to Bilyarsk, like so much washing - and he had allowed it to happen to him because at the end of the journey, like a monstrous child’s prize for good behaviour, was the shiny toy of the Mig.

  Semelovsky had left them almost as soon as he had delivered the American, to return to his own quarters.

  They would not meet again until they reported to the hangar to prepare the aircraft for the weapons trials the following day. Kreshin and he, on the other hand, would pass through the security net into the factory complex together at two in the morning.

  Baranovich was aware that the KGB would keep a careful watch upon himself and Kreshin and Semelovsky throughout the night. Without doubt, they would have orders to arrest them hours before the flight. That was only to be expected. But, until the work was done on the weaponssystem they would not touch him. All they could do was watch from a car across the street.

  This was why Gant’s presence in the house, so apparent a security risk, was in reality a safety precaution. It was safer than trying to hide him anywhere else in Bilyarsk.

  It was the last place they would look.

  Baranovich had no intention of dwelling on his personal future. Like Gant himself, and like Aubrey in London, Baranovich accepted the slivers of time that were given to him, and did not seek to understand what might occur in the future hours and days. He had le
arned to live like that in Mavrino, and before that in the labour camps. He had known what he was doing when he had accepted the order to work at Bilyarsk, to develop the purely theoretical work that had already been done on a thought-controlled weaponssystem, by a man now dead. The KGB had been aware of what they were doing when they released him to take up the appointment. Baranovich had lived on borrowed time for many years, almost since the end of the war - no, before that, he corrected himself, since a soldier lives, on borrowed time, especially on the Russian front in winter. Because he had done so for the greater part of his life, it came as no special occasion now to understand that he was living on borrowed time.

  ‘How well have you been briefed?’ he asked, settling himself to throw off the useless speculations about himself and the character of the American.

  They were seated in Kreshm’s living-room, small, warm and comfortable. The younger man had left them alone - Baranovich suspected that he and the woman were making love in the next room, perhaps with the desperation of the young to whom time, borrowed or otherwise, is precious. Kreshin would, perhaps, be trying to forget the hours ahead in the illusion of passion. Baranovich had told Gant that he could speak without being overheard. The house was indeed bugged - but for that evening the electronics expert had rigged pre-recorded tapes to supply innocuous talk and the noise of the television a background mutter, for the KGB listeners.

  ‘I told you - I flew some of the Mig-25 copies we built in the States for a couple of years, then I spent months on the simulator flying the Mig-31,’ Gant replied. In his turn, he was impressed by Baranovich.

  The man’s patriarchal appearance, white hair and goatee beard, clear blue eyes, and unlined brow, demanded respect.

  ‘No doubt your training, then, was thorough,’ Baranovich said, smiling, puffing at his pipe, seemingly relaxed as if he and Gant were happily theorising in a university common-room. It had been a very long time, perhaps forty years, since Baranovich had been in such a room.