Firefox

by Craig Thomas

  Buckholz, he knew, had survived, even benefited from, the purges which had followed the Congressional enquiry into the activities of the CIA, following Watergate. In fact. it had placed him as Head of the Covert Action Staff within the coterie of top advisers that surrounded the Director himself. It was he, seemingly fired by Aubrey’s crack-brained scheme to steal the new Mig, who had pushed through the arrangements for the theft, laid on, in his own bulldozing, dogged fashion, the refuelling arrangements, the radar-watch, the coordination of SAC and USN assistance he required. He had persuaded the Chief of Naval Operations to second Curtin to his staff until the completion of ‘Operation Rip-Off’, a fact for which Curtin was only dubiously grateful. It had handed him immense, if temporary, power, but it was an operation that could write finis to Curtin’s naval career. And that was something he did not like to contemplate.

  The details of Russian surface and subsurface strength in the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean that he had transferred to the wall-map filled Curtin with doubt. He, better than anyone there, knew the current strength of the Red Banner Northern Fleet of the Red Navy, and how swiftly and thoroughly it could be brought to operate against any discovered intruder into what were considered by the Kremlin to be Soviet waters. So far, the refuelling vessel had not been detected - at least, no moves had been made against her, which ought to have meant the same thing. But, in the upheaval which would follow the theft of the aircraft, in the comprehensive radar and sonar searches by missile cruisers, spy trawlers and submarines - who could say?

  As he headed for the coffee percolator on a trolley in one comer of the room, he said to Buckholz, who continued studiously to ignore him: ‘He hasn’t got a hope in hell, brother - not a hope in hell!’

  It was after three-thirty when Lieutenant-Colonel Yuri Voskov arrived in the pilots’ restroom on the second floor of the security building attached to the Firefox’s hangar at Bilyarsk. He paused inside the door, and his hand reached for the light switch. When that hand encountered another guarding the light switch, his surprise had insufficient time to become shock and alarm before he was struck behind the ear by a terrible, killing blow. He never saw the face of his assassin - the floor rushed up, unseen, as he keeled over from the force of the blow which flung him halfway across the room.

  Gant flicked on the light, and crossed to the inert body, rubbing the fist that had delivered the blow.

  Then, like some great exhalation, the nerves exploded in him, shaking his body like a wind. He had been able to kill Voskov, coldly and mechanically and with his hands, when even Buckholz had sometimes wondered about it. But the reaction continued to shake him, and it was what seemed like minutes before he could kneel steadily by the dead man. Then, gently, as if a medical expert, he felt for the pulse he knew would not be evident. Voskov was dead.

  Gant rolled the body onto its back and looked down at the dead face of Voskov. The man was older than Gant, in his early forties, perhaps. He felt no remorse.

  He had removed a necessary piece from the board; that was all. He merely wondered how good Voskov had been.

  Suddenly galvanised into action, he tugged the body across the carpet towards the tall steep lockers ranged against one wall. Dumping Voskov in a heap, he fished in his jacket pocket for the master key that Baranovich had supplied, and opened one of the lockers. It was, as he had expected, and had been told to expect, empty.

  Holding the door ajar with his foot, he pushed the head and shoulders of the body into the locker. Then, as if engaged in some grotesque, energetic dance in slow-motion, he heaved at the body, until it stood as if alive, upright in the locker. Swiftly, he closed the door and locked it, hearing the soft concussion of Voskov’s body as it leaned forward against the door. Then he pocketed the key.

  Opening another of the lockers, he inspected the pressuresuit that hung there - Voskov’s. Voskov was about his own build. At least, they were sufficiently alike for Gant to be able to use the Russian’s pressuresuit. Fortunately, it was merely an adaptation of the normal aircraft pressuresuit, not something tailor-made like a NASA space-suit. Had that been the case, the slightest difference in form, height, build, would have made the wearing of Voskov’s suit impossible.

  Having completed his inspection, Gant began to remove his GRU uniform. It was three-forty-six in the morning. Gant felt his nerves beating his stomach, a fist. As he removed his shirt, he looked at the bleeper device taped beneath his arm that would summon him to the hangar.

  He had two-and-a-half hours to go.

  Five.

  THE RIP-OFF.

  Kontarsky glanced at his gold wrist-watch. It was four o’clock. From where he was standing in the open doorway of the main hangar, he could survey the scene of quiet, intense activity within. He had seen the guards become aware of him, not only those on the doors, but those at their stations close to the aircraft became suddenly more aware, more intent in their scrutiny. Many of the scientists and technicians took no notice of him - though he had seen Kreshin look up and then mutter something to Semelovsky, who stood next to him. Baranovich he could see as a hunched figure, swallowed to the waist by the open cockpit, giving instructions to the technician seated in the pilot’s couch of the Mig-31.

  Kontarsky had no aesthetic or military feelings concerning the aircraft. Its aerodynamic lines, its potency, the huge gaping mouths of its air intakes, were nothing to him but a problem in security. And with that problem, he had taken every precaution he possibly could.

  He ought to have felt a comfortable self-pride, he realised. Such a feeling, however, eluded him. The night had remained mild, but he felt cold. He was chewing on an indigestion tablet now as he stood outside the hangar. It seemed to be having no effect whatsoever.

  The Production Prototype One was less than a hundred feet from him; behind it, ignored by the team of patient, hardly moving technicians, a second aircraft the PP Two - stood near the rear of the giant hangar.

  Kontarsky wondered whether to speak to the guards near the aircraft, but decided against it. They were all picked men, and he had briefed them thoroughly before they went on duty. To have inspected them now at close quarters would have been an error of leadership, a sign of absent confidence, and he knew it. Reluctantly, he crossed the strip of light spilling from the open doors, and rejoined his personal bodyguard who was in conversation with one of the door-guards. Nodding to him to fall in behind him, he headed for the second hangar, the one in which the Mig-31 had been built - it was locked and in darkness, but it would not hurt to have the guards who ringed it make one more interior search.

  Priabin was, at that moment, he knew, running the agent to earth. As the hours of the night had limped by, he had become more and more open to his aide’s suggestion that the man must be some kind of technical expert, sent to talk to Baranovich and the others before they were arrested, as would be inevitable as soon as the trials were successfully completed, and to observe as much as he could of the trials themselves. What kind of equipment, other than his eyes, he had brought with him, Kontarsky had no idea. As he crossed the bright, stark space between the hangars, he looked out beyond the fence, seeking some vantage-point from which such an observer might consider he had a good view of the runway. There was no hillock, no rising ground.

  When he had completed his inspection of the production hangar, he told himself, it would be as well to send out dog patrols beyond the fence - just in case.

  Despite his decision, he still felt that the man was inside the fence, a part of the complex, in some disguise or other. He would have the whole area searched again.

  Baranovich watched the form that he recognised as belonging to Kontarsky as it crossed the black hole of the night, and vanished in the direction of the production hangar. When he looked down again from his perch on top of a pilot’s ladder wheeled against the fuselage of the Firefox, he saw the squat, flattened features of the mechanic in the pilot’s couch looking up at him, grinning. Baranovich, with, as much aplomb as he could muster, smile
d back and the mechanic, who had expected and wished to see fear, or unsettlement at the least, on Baranovich’s face, scowled and turned back to his work. He was in the process of checking the circuits within the weapons-guidance system. Part of the instrument panel on the left-hand side was removed, and the intricate wiring and miniature circuits of the system were exposed. Under Baranovich’s direction, the final check proceeded slowly.

  Baranovich knew that the mechanic was KGB. For months now, as he had installed and perfected the system on which he had been forced to work originally while still in the scientific prison of Mavrino, he had had assigned to his technical team this man, Grosch, an electronics technician of high capability. Grosch was the child of a German scientist captured by the Red Army early in 1945; there was no more loyal member of the Party.

  Baranovich felt no anger at the man - not because his father was a Nazi, or because he himself was a secret policeman. If Gant had been able to see the look on his face as he gazed down at the top of Grosch’s cropped head, he would have recognised that look of painful wisdom, of detached pity, which he had seen at Kreshin’s quarters. Baranovich looked unobtrusively at his watch. Four minutes after four. He looked round him at the security within the hangar as Grosch absorbed himself in checking a printed circuit. He had decided already on the method of diversion he would use.

  He looked back over the tailunit of the Firefox, to where the second production prototype stood, rather shunted into a comer. The aircraft, seemingly in shadow, unglamorous, lacking the pristine deadliness of the model atop which he stood, was fully fuelled, in a state of readiness for take-off against some kind, any kind, of airborne attack upon the factory. All Sovie aircraft, whether prototype, production model, or service aircraft, as long as they were military, remained in a maximum twenty-four-hour condition of readiness while on the ground.

  Therefore, Baranovich concluded, there was only one thing that could be done when Gant escaped at the controls of the first aircraft. They would send the second one after him. There would be a delay, of course, while it was fully-weaponed - perhaps an hour, including a quickest possible check of systems and controls. And the second aircraft would be refuelled in mid-air, unlike Gant, who would have to refuel on the ground, wherever that ground was. Unless he, Kreshin and Semelovsky could put that second aircraft out of action, Gant could be caught, and destroyed, by the only plane capable of doing both to him - PP Two.

  Fire: he knew the answer. A hangar fire would create a panic, and allow Gant to climb aboard as the pilot, and taxi the aircraft onto the taxiway outside without suspicion. Two birds with one stone, he remarked to himself. Gant away, and the pursuit of him prevented at the same time. There was so much fuel, oil, timber and other inflammables in the hangar that causing the fire would be no problem. Fire was one of the plans he had outlined to the others - now he would tell them of his final decision in its favour.

  Baranovich spent no time wondering whether Gant would survive the flight. He would show up on no radar which meant the Russians would need a visual sighting before they could loose off infrared or proximity missiles, or send aircraft after him. He glanced towards the tail where Semelovsky was supervising the fitting of the special tailunit, his own project from first to last, on which Kreshin had worked as his assistant the tail-assembly that provided Gant’s most effective anti-missile system and ECM gear. Semelovsky said it would work, but it had only been tried on an RPV that day, it would be a part of the weapons-trials and a man would have to use it. Gant would need it, he knew.

  It was all a question of timing, he decided. The First Secretary’s aircraft was scheduled to arrive at nine. Before that, he knew, he and the others would be placed under arrest. Their work would be completed by six-thirty at the latest. This meant that six-thirty was the latest time for the diversion, and the take-off. He would have to arrange the timetable, with the others at their next coffee-break, which was at five.

  The security was so tight that when he had visited the toilets at the other end of the hangar an hour earlier, a guard had detached himself from the wall, and followed him inside, making no effort to relieve himself, but merely contenting himself with observing Baranovich. Grosch should find that damaged power transistor within the next few minutes, he thought, which would helpfully lengthen the final checks.

  He was suddenly, oddly, assailed by memory, a memory that was akin to his present situation, but removed from self-concern. He was in the same overalls as now, but those in his memory were oil-stained, uncleaned. The temperature was well below zero, and his hands were numb. He was bending forward into the cockpit of a Mig, an old wartime Mig. He was in a hangar at the Red Army air base outside Stalingrad. Because he was a Jew, he was an army mechanic, nothing more glorified than that.

  He shrugged off the memory. The past was an intrusion, an interference in what he had to do, had to plan. He thought of the gun beneath his armpit. He had not been searched on entering the gates. The gun, he realised, with the kind of shock of cold water on the drowsy skin, meant that he had accepted that this was the end. He did not expect to live through the day.

  Baranovich smiled as Grosch found the malfunctioning circuit-board, and looked up into his face. Grosch held up the extracted plastic square, with its thirtyseven gold-plated tags, into his face.

  ‘Looks like the power transistor. Comrade Director Baranovich,’ he said. Baranovich smiled. Grosch was being obsequiously civil. He, too, then understood that it was the end.

  ‘Mm.’ Baranovich turned the square of plastic over in his hand, nodding. Then he handed it back to Grosch. ‘Scrap it, then. I’ll get another.’

  ‘From the experimental technical stores. Director?’ Grosch queried with a smile.

  ‘Yes, Grosch. But you won’t have to get out of that comfortable seat to accompany me. The guard will take me.

  Before Grosch could reply, he began to descend the ladder, with a light, youthful, untroubled step.

  ‘You incompetent bloody fool, Stechko - he’s dead!

  You’ve killed him!’ Tortyev exploded. He rounded on Stechko, and the big man stepped back, a look of confused, abashed defeat on his face. Tortyev rose from his haunches where he had squatted before the sagging, lifeless form of Filipov, and glared at his subordinate.

  The beatings had been too regular, too vicious, too hurried - he knew that now. In his desperate effort to make the man talk, he had allowed Stechko and Holokov to kill him. He ground his teeth and clenched and unclenched his fists in the fury of impotence.

  When he turned to Priabin, the KGB lieutenant was already on the telephone. His indifference seemed to anger Tortyev further. He crossed the room to confront Holokov who was sitting on a hard chair, astride it, watching the body intently as if for some sign of life.

  Tortyev stood before him, and Holokov’s intensity of expression became transformed to doubt.

  ‘You stupid fat shit,’ Tortyev breathed, his eyes blazing. ‘You incompetent lump of dogshit!’

  ‘You pressed us…’ Holokov began, and then recoiled as Tortyev slapped him across the cheek with the back of his hand. He reached for his cut lip, in surprise, inspected his fingers, and the smear of blood on them in some state of shock.

  ‘He knew nothing.’ Tortyev heard Priabin speak quietly, and turned on him. Priabin was holding one hand over the receiver, and smiling. His smile irritated Tortyev.

  ‘What the hell do you mean by that?’ he said.

  ‘He knew nothing - hell, he’d have told you long ago if he had anything to tell.’

  ‘You clever bastard - what’s the answer, then? Your precious bloody aircraft is still in danger, or had you forgotten that?’ Tortyev wiped the saliva from his lip. Priabin continued to smile irritatingly, and waggled the receiver in Tortyev’s direction.

  ‘Why do you think I want to talk to the computer?’ he said mildly.

  Tortyev looked at the dock, and said: ‘You’d better get a bloody move-on! It’s four-thirty, or hadn’t you noticed?’ Ther
e was a sneer in his voice, a returning self-confidence. He had done his part. Now it was up to Priabin.

  ‘Hello?’ Priabin said into the receiver. ‘Priabin. What news?’ He listened for a while, and then said: ‘How quickly are you checking out the whereabouts of these people?’ Irritation crossed his face. ‘I don’t care the information’s in that machine’s guts somewhere, and I want it!’ He slammed the telephone down, and saw Tortyev smiling at him.

  ‘What’s the matter - less than miraculous, is it, that machine?’ he said.

  Priabin ignored him, thought for a moment, and then said: ‘We couldn’t do it any faster - a lot slower in fact.’ He looked across at the body and said: ‘Get that out of here, you two - now.’ Holokov looked at Tortyev, and the policeman nodded. The two detectives hoisted the body to its dragging feet, and took it through the door.

  The break seemed to calm both men. When they were alone. Tortyev said: ‘What are they checking out?’

  They’ve got a list of less than a dozen top aeronautics experts in America and Europe, young enough and fit enough to be our man. But they’re checking current whereabouts of all of them, and it’s taking time … too much time,’ he added quietly, his voice strained. ‘They’ve linked into the First Directorate’s computer, whose banks have constant monitor-records, as you know, on thousands of useful or important public and scientific figures in the West. The answers are coming…’

  ‘But they might be too late.’

  ‘Too true.’

  Priabin left his desk and began to pace the room, his hand cupping his chin, or pulling at his lower lip. It was minutes before he spoke again. Then he said: ‘I can’t speed up the process. We’ll either get the information in time, or we won’t. In which case, I prefer not to think about it. But, what else can I do - what else can I ask that bloody machine to do at the same time as it’s processing these people?’ He was standing before Tortyev, a look of appeal on his face. Tortyev was silent for a moment, then he said: ‘Anything to do with aircraft. Check everyone and everything, Dmitri.’