Firefox

by Craig Thomas

  ‘We’ve checked on known or suspected agents of most of the Western intelligence services, who might be interested in the Bilyarsk project, and capable of mounting this sort of operation.’ Tortyev nodded. ‘Because the man’s been clever, we’ve assumed that he’s a very good agent, one of their top men - which means we ought to have found him by now - eh?’

  ‘Agreed. He’s obviously new, or been kept back for this one job - it’s big enough to warrant that.’

  ‘Too bloody true,’ Priabin commented gruffly.

  ‘Exactly. So - why haven’t we found him - and where do we look?’

  ‘Just my own thought. As I was saying - he’s either a top agent or, he’s not an agent at all.’

  ‘He has to be - with this kind of cover-operation going on.’ Tortyev nodded over his shoulder at the slumped form of the Jew. ‘They’ve used Filipov knowing they might be expending him. They expended another top man, the truck-driver. That’s two down. The British are always careful of their operatives, Dmitri, they don’t throw them away!’

  ‘No - I don’t mean he’s not working for the British, or the Americans … just that he’s been recruited from some other field. Look at it this way. What if he’s not there to damage the project? After all. what would be the point? As far as we know, the Americans are so far behind, they’d need ten years to catch up with the Mig-31 despite being handed a Mig-25 by Belenko four years ago.’ Priabin’s voice had sunk to a confidential whisper, and he glanced sideways at Stechko and Holokov who, politically, seemed to be occupied with the limp form of Filipov, minutely inspecting him in a grotesque form of damage-report.

  ‘I agree - from what you’ve told me.’

  ‘So - our security has been able to intercept most of what has been passed to London and Washington by the underground at Bilyarsk, via the Embassy here. Therefore, the Americans and British want to know more. They want a first-hand report of what’s going on, perhaps even photographs, and an eye-witness account…?’

  ‘You mean - an expert?’

  ‘Yes!’ Priabin’s voice was suddenly louder. ‘What if they’ve sent an aeronautics expert, who knows what to look for, what questions to ask?’

  ‘God - it could be anyone - someone we don’t even know!’

  There was a silence.

  ‘I don’t think he knows,’ Priabin said, nodding towards Filipov, who groaned with returning consciousness as he did so.

  ‘He could do,’ Tortyev replied. ‘Besides,’ he added in a menacing tone, ‘I haven’t finished with him yet, the little Jewish shit!’

  Priabin shrugged. ‘Suit yourself,’ he said. ‘But don’t start on him again until I’ve made another call. I want a check run through the computer on the entire American and British aerospace industries.’

  ‘It’ll take hours…!’ Tortyev protested.

  ‘No longer than it will take your gorillas to beat it out of Filipov. There won’t be many names - not capable of making the most of this elaborate subterfuge to smuggle him into Bilyarsk. Let me make the call - then you can resort to the physical stuff!’

  Tortyev hesitated for a moment, shrugged in his turn, and Priabin picked up the receiver.

  The searchlight picked him up early, with fifty yards still to go, fixed on him, and he walked into the tunnel of its white, blinding light. He tried to appear casual, yet irritated, and shaded his eyes studiously. Each footstep threatened to become reluctant, to stutter to a halt, his frame and motive power running down, like a machine dying. He forced his legs to work. The cramp was coming back to his stomach. He knew the sweat was standing out on his forehead, and his hands were shaking. Gant was suddenly threatened. It was as if his ego had been stripped and he knew he could not carry it through. This was worse than the flying - this was the struggle of the stranded fish.

  ‘Identify yourself,’ the voice said and he realised, with a shock, that he was close to the gate. A guard was pointing a rifle in his direction. ‘Identify yourself.’

  His voice sounded old and weak, winding up hoarsely like an ancient clock to strike. ‘Identify yourself - sir!’ he snapped. ‘Soldier!’

  The guard reacted. It was what he expected from a GRU officer, even though he did not know the face, and he replied as expected.

  ‘Identity, please - sir.’

  Gant fished in his papers and passed them across, the yellow ID card on the top. The guard took it, and inspected it. Gant knew he had to light a cigarette now, to calm himself, to occupy the hands that threatened to betray him. He reached as casually as he could into the hip-pocket of his jacket, and pulled out the cigarette case. He lit the cigarette and inhaled, almost choking on the raw smoke. He exhaled thankfully, stifling a cough. He began to inspect the arrangements at the gate.

  There were six guards, frozen into unreal postures in the harsh light that bathed the wire and the open space before it. The red-and-white barrier remained firmly lowered, and two uniformed KGB guards stood woodenly behind it, rifles casually pointed in his direction. There was a guard-hut at either side of the barrier, giving it the appearance of a customs-post, and in the doorway of each another soldier was visible. The sixth man stood behind the guard inspecting his papers.

  Gant checked the piping and the tabs on each of the uniforms. Each guard was KGB, not part of the GRU Security Support Group to which he was supposed to belong. That, at least, would explain his unfamiliar face. ‘Why were you outside the wire -sir?’

  There was a silence, and then Gant said: ‘You have your orders, soldier - I have mine. You know that a suspected agent is in the vicinity.’ He leaned forward, staring into the soldier’s face, and smiled. ‘Or perhaps you don’t?’

  The soldier was silent for a moment, then he said: ‘Yes, sir - we’ve been alerted.’

  ‘Good. Then I suggest you get a dog out here, and look at that clump of trees regularly during the next few hours.’

  Gant watched the soldier’s eyes. His whole consciousness focused on them. Slowly, infinitely slowly, he watched the moment turn over, like a world orbiting. It retreated. The soldier snapped to attention, and nodded.

  ‘Yes, sir. Good idea, sir.’

  Gant touched his cap ironically, still smiling. The barrier swung up at a signal from the guard, and Gant saw one of the figures in a hut-doorway turn inside, presumably to inform the guards at the second gate that the officer had been cleared for entry. Nodding, he stepped forward, feeling the sudden weakness of his legs, as if they were somewhere far away from the rest of his body.

  The rotors of a chopper buzzed suddenly loud, as if his hearing had become suddenly acute. He looked up, forcing himself to act casually; then he had reached the gate, which remained closed against him. He saw the guard, gun at the ready, then saw a second guard emerge from the guard-hut, and signal that the gate could be safely opened. Gant drew his ID card from his pocket, dropped his cigarette in the dirt and ground his heel on it. He appeared irritated at the delay, standing with his hands on his hips, his lips pursed. He saw, comfortingly, that the guard was beginning to fall back into his routine pattern of behaviour. He had been confronted with a uniform, superior in rank to his own, and he had accepted it.

  The gate opened, not the huge double gate but a small personnel door set into the gates. Gant, nodding irritatedly, stepped through, and it clattered shut behind him. He didn’t bother to study the guards, but headed down the track, which skirted the runway towards the hangar. It was all he could do to prevent the surge of adrenalin through his system from driving his body at a run. Probably, the guards at the gate had already forgotten him. Yet, their eyes bored into his back. His shirt was sticky with sweat across the small of his back. His heart pumped loudly in his ears, drumming him into activity, into a run…

  He stepped across the runway, turning off the road. He glanced swiftly along its length, then gazed ahead of him. The hangar was nearer now. He followed the taxiway that led to it from the runway proper.

  A chopper buzzed overhead, the downdraught plucking hi
s cap and jacket, flapping his trousers. He held onto his cap, and looked up. He saw a face at the open door of the chopper and he waved, the abrupt wave of an officer with every right to be where he was. The chopper pulled round in a tight circle, and the face grinned at him, a hand waved, and the chopper pulled away. Settling his cap firmly on his head, Gant walked on.

  It was less than a hundred yards now, he estimated.

  He could see the guards stationed at the hangar doors, see the spillage of warm light on the concrete, hear the sounds of echoed metal dimly. The hangar door, as the taxiway curved and straightened, opened before him, and he felt a quickening of his pulse, the surge of adrenalin in his system - but not as before, not because fear was gripping his stomach, crawling up his spine.

  This was an elation, an excitement. He could not pause to stare open-mouthed into the hangar, but he possessed all the sudden wonder and response of the child at an exhibition. Gant was a single-minded individual.

  There was no real complexity to his character. The only thing he had been able to do supremely well, ever, was to fly airplanes. Now, in the hangar spilling its raw, warm, light, echoing with voices and noise, he glimpsed the Firefox. Its elongated nose was tilted up and towards him, and he saw the attendant, insect figures busy about the gleaming silver fuselage. Two huge intakes glared blackly at him, and there was the reeling, impression of wings edge-on … Then he had turned aside. His momentary pause would not have been out of character for a man new to the project and who had flown in the previous night.

  There was activity of a different kind at the door of the KGB building, the security headquarters attached to the hangar. It was, Gant reflected, with an unusual poetry, a symbol - wherever Soviet achievements went the KGB was sure to go, linked by an umbilical cord.

  As he approached, guards on the door snapped to attention, and for a moment he wondered whether had not attracted this respect - then the door opened, held by a guard from inside, and he was face to face with KGB Colonel Mihail Kontarsky, head of security for the Mikoyan Project. He snapped to attention, fingers at his peak, as he confronted the short, slim, busy-looking man, and noticed the edge of worry in the eyes, the nervous movement they possessed.

  Kontarsky stared at Gant. ‘Yes, Captain?’ he snapped nervously.

  Gant realised his mistake. He had made it appear that he wished to report to Kontarsky. Behind Kontarsky was Tsernik, looking at him in puzzlement. He was a strange face, and Gant knew that to Tsemik he should not have been a strange face. Tsernik would have met him, had he really arrived with the GRU detachment the previous day, or would have seen his file and photograph.

  The moment hit him in the stomach, bunching it, twisting it in its grip. He was less than a hundred yards from his objective, the airplane, and he had walked straight into the arms of the security chief.

  ‘Sir - I have, without your permission, ordered a dog for the guards on the security entrance … to search the belt of trees, thoroughly,’ Gant said, his voice level controlled by a supreme effort. His mind screaming at him to break and run.

  Kontarsky seemed to take a moment to realise what was being said to him, as if he were concentrating on something else, then he nodded.

  ‘Good thinking. Captain - my thanks.’ Kontarsky touched the peak of his cap with his glove and passed on. Gant dropped his hand, then raised it again to salute as Tsernik passed him. With a sweeping relief Gant realised that his report had been accepted by the second-in-command. He merely nodded, no longer looking puzzled, and passed on behind Gant.

  As they moved away, he heard Kontarsky say: ‘Now is the time to pick up Dherkov - now that the others are safely inside. You agree, Tsemik?’

  ‘Yes. Colonel, of course. I will get onto that right away - and his wife.’

  Gant heard no more. He passed inside the door, the guards remaining at attention until he was inside. Once there, he leaned against the wall in a narrow corridor, hardly noticing the guard posted there in his sudden, overwhelming relief, until the guard said: ‘Are you all right. Captain?’

  Gant looked at him, startled. The guard saw a white face, sweaty and strained, and a hand gripping the stomach - and the uniform.

  ‘I - just indigestion. Think I’ve got an ulcer,’ he added, for the sake of veracity.

  ‘Would you like a drink. Captain?’ the guard was solicitous.

  Gant shook his head. He had to move away now.

  The incident was already becoming too memorable, his face too familiar; the story would be recounted in the other ranks’ mess when the guard went off-duty. He smiled, a poor imitation of the real thing, and straightened himself.

  ‘No - thanks soldier. No. Just comes in spasms…’

  Then he realised he was being far too human, he was responding as if he did have an ulcer. He brushed his jacket straight, and jammed his cap on his head. He glared at the soldier, as if he had in some way offended rank by noticing his officer’s difficulties, then strode off down the corridor, his boots clicking loudly along the linoleum. In front of him were the stairs up to the officers’ mess, and to the pilots’ restroom.

  As he mounted the stairs, the images of the last minutes dying in his mind, the feverish pulse slowing, he hoped to his God that Dherkov, the courier, did not know what he looked like. He glanced at his watch. - Still not three o’clock. More than three hours. He wondered how brave a man the grocer was.

  There were five of them now in Aubrey’s secluded operations room: the two CIA men and the two representatives of the SIS had been joined by a man wearing the uniform of a Captain in the U.S. Navy - Captain Eugene Curtin, from the office of the Chief of Naval Operations, USN. Curtin it was who had been responsible for the arrangements for the refuelling of the Firefox, presuming Gant to be able to steal it on schedule, and head in the right direction - north, towards the Barents Sea.

  Curtin was in his forties, square-built, the uniform stretched across his broad shoulders and back. His hair was clipped so short it seemed he had recently survived an internment in some POW camp. His face was large, square, chiselled, and his eyes were piercingly blue. He had just completed some amendments to the huge projection of the Arctic seas, marking the latest reported positions of Russian surface and subsurface vessels. To Aubrey’s eye, there appeared a great many of them - too bloody many, he reflected wryly, as Shelley might have said. Also, Curtin had brought with him a new set of satellite weather photographs, as well as sheets of more local weather reports, and some of the numerous SAC radar and weather planes flying over the seas to the north of Soviet Russia.

  Curtin saw Aubrey regarding his amendments to the wall-map, and grinned at him.

  ‘Looks bad - uh?’ he said.

  Aubrey said nothing, but continued to regard the wall. He disliked the disconcerting honesty that Curtin shared with Buckholz, and other Americans he had encountered in the field of intelligence, whether operational, or merely analytical. The Americans, he considered, had a penchant for being disconcertingly blunt about things. It simply did not do to assume that Gant had no chance of success - the only way to prevent such gloomy reflections was not to think too far ahead - one step at a time.

  Aubrey sipped at the cup of tea that Shelley had poured for him, and continued to study the map without any apparent reaction on his features.

  Curtin joined Buckholz and his aide, Anders, at their desk where they were analysing the weather reports linking them with the latest positions of the Soviet trawler fleets supplied by the office of Rear-Admiral Philipson over the telephone.

  ‘Well?’ Curtin asked softly, his eye on Aubrey.

  Buckholz looked up at him. ‘It looks good,’ he said adopting the same conspiratorial whisper. He picked up his coffee and swallowed the last of it. He pulled a face. He had let the coffee get cold in the bottom of the cup. He handed the empty cup to Anders, who went away to refill it.

  ‘The weather up there can change like - that,’ Curtin said amiably, clicking his thumb and forefinger.

  �
�It’s been good for the last four days,’ Buckholz pointed out.

  ‘Means nothing,’ Curtin observed unhelpfully. ‘That means there’s four days less of good weather left to play with.’

  Buckholz scowled at him. ‘How bad can it get?’ he said.

  ‘Too bad for Hotshot ever to find the fuel he’s going to need,’ Curtin replied, ‘if he ever gets off the ground at Bilyarsk. What about that information Aubrey received?’

  ‘I don’t know. Our British friend plays it very close to his chest.’

  Curtin nodded. ‘Yeah. I don’t understand why. But, if they’re onto Hotshot - what chance has he got?’

  ‘Some,’ Buckholz admitted reluctantly. ‘These guys at Bilyarsk on Aubrey’s payroll are no fools, Curtin.’

  ‘I never said they were. But I heard the KGB were pretty good at their job, too. If they find out we sent a flyer to Bilyarsk, Hotshot will never get near that damn plane.’

  ‘I know that,’ Buckholz appeared suddenly irritated with Curtin. He was being too honest, too objective - breezing in late, like a cold wind, disrupting the close, confined, suppressed subjectivity of the mood of the four intelligence operatives. Sometimes, Buckholz considered, there was a right time for a little deceptive hope. And now was the right time.

  ‘Sorry,’ Curtin said with a shrug. ‘I’m only the Navy’s messenger boy - I just bring you the facts.’

  ‘Yeah, I know that, too.’

  Curtin looked down at the mass of papers on Buckholz’s desk, and observed: ‘Jesus, but this is a half-cock operation.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Uh-huh. I wonder why you let the British do all the planning, Buckholz. I really do.’

  ‘They had the men on the ground, brother - that’s why.’

  ‘But - so much depends on - so many people.’

  ‘It’s called the element of surprise, Curtin.’

  ‘You mean - it’s a surprise if it works?’ Curtin said, his eyebrow raised ironically.

  ‘Maybe - maybe.’ Buckholz looked down at the papers before him, as if to signal the end of the conversation. Curtin continued to regard him curiously.