Firefox

by Craig Thomas

  Priabin was out of breath when he answered his superior’s call. Kontarsky heard his voice clearly, though there was some quality of distance about it that might have been elation. His own stomach jumped at the proximity of a solution.

  ‘Colonel - we’ve got him. He’s been identified!’ he heard Priabin say, ‘Colonel, are you there?’

  ‘Quickly, Priabin - tell me?’ One or two of the nearest heads looked up, at the sound of Kontarsky’s choked, quiet whisper. They sensed that the breakthrough had come.

  ‘He’s a pilot… Mitchell Gant, an American…’

  ‘American?’ Kontarsky repeated mechanically.

  ‘Yes. A member of their Mig squadron, the one they built to train their pilots in combat with Russian machines, the Apache group, they call it, designated by the Red Air Force and ourselves as the Mirror squadron.’

  ‘Go on, Priabin. Why him?’

  ‘Obviously, sir, he knows our aircraft as well as anyone. He’d be a good choice for sabotage, or for analysis of information. Perhaps he intends a - close inspection of the Mig-31?’ There was a silence at the other end of the line. The truth, huge and appalling, struck both men at the same moment, hi the silence, Kontarsky’s voice dropped like a feeble stone.

  ‘He - he can’t be here for that…?’

  ‘No, sir, surely not. They couldn’t hope to get away with it!’

  Kontarsky’s voice trembled, as he said: ‘Thank you, Dmitri - thank you. Well done.’ The receiver clanged clumsily into its rest as he replaced it. Kontarsky looked out over the team for a few moments, then he picked up the receiver again. He dialled the number of the guard-post at the hangar, and drummed his fingers as he waited.

  Tsernik - is that you? Arrest Baranovich and the others - now!’

  ‘You’ve had news, sir?’

  ‘Yes - dammit, yes! I want to know from them where this agent is - at once. And let no one near that aircraft - no one, understand?’

  ‘Sir.’ Tsernik replaced his receiver. Kontarsky looked around the room again, at the men at their futile paperwork. Then he looked at his watch. Eleven minutes past six. ‘Some of you - all of you!’ he shouted. ‘Get down to that hanger now - no, half of you there, the rest search this building - quickly!’

  The room moved before him, as men gathered their coats, checked their weapons.

  One voice, distant, said: ‘Who are we looking for, sir?’

  ‘A pilot - dammit, a pilot!’ Kontarsky’s voice was high, piercing, almost hysterical.

  Baranovich watched the slight figure of Semelovsky as he emerged from the lavatory at the end of the hangar. The little man stepped away from the door and began crossing the hangar, unconcernedly it appeared at that distance: Baranovich waited. A guard had followed Semelovsky to the lavatory. Baranovich wondered whether he would emerge.

  Semelovsky reached the shadow of the PP Two, and the guard had still not appeared. Baranovich smiled, a smile of fierce success. Semelovsky, probably with a spanner or wrench, had killed the guard. He loosened the white coat which he wore on top of his overalls, not against the temperature, but to conceal the automatic thrust into the waistband of his trousers. Then he nodded, without looking in Kreshin’s direction. He knew he would be watching for his signal.

  The work on the aircraft had been completed a little after six. Grosch, suspecting that Baranovich was dalaying completion of the work, but misconstruing the motive as simple fear, had returned to the restaurant, together with most of the other technicians and scientific team-leaders. One man, Pilac, an electronics expert like himself, had deliberately passed him as he left, nodding rather helplessly in his direction. Baranovich had been touched by the gesture, despite its futility.

  He reached into the pocket of his coat, and flipped over the switch on a tiny transmitter. Inaudibly, it transmitted to the bleeper taped to Gant’s arm, a one-to-thesecond noise that would alert him to the fact that the diversion had begun. When Baranovich turned the switch over, the signal would become a continuous bleep, Gant’s signal that he was to make his way to the hangar as quickly as possible. He turned his head to survey the distance between himself and the nearest guard. He estimated it at about twelve yards. The guards were still much in evidence - he counted four within twenty-five yards and, despite the hour of the morning, they did not seem tired, or inattentive. They had been changed too frequently to become thoroughly bored or fatigued.

  He looked to the far end of the hangar. He thought, as his heart leapt in anticipation, he detected the flare of Semelovsky’s lighter or matches. Almost immediately, burning across his gaze, a column of flame shot up. He could not any longer see Semelovsky’s bending figure, and had no way of knowing whether the man had immolated nimself in the sudden blaze.

  He turned, drawing the gun from his waistband Already, the moment before the column of flame had shot up, to roll out under the roof of the hangar, there had been cries from the booth, away behind him. Holding the gun across his stiffened forearm, he shot the nearest guard through the stomach, and then moved swiftly towards Kreshin and the other end of the hangar. A bullet plucked at the fuselage above his head as he ran in a ducking crouch, and then someone screamed for the firing to stop, because it was endangering the Mig. He smiled to himself as he pushed at the immobile, frozen form of Kreshin, caught as if in a spotlight, so that the two of them were running towards the fire, together with other forms.

  The alarm bell began to clatter its hysterical note and, despite the fire drills that had been endlessly practised, Baranovich got the impression of a surge of people in the direction of the gouting flames. He had a confused, jolting image of a small figure in a white coat, burning like a torch, and he knew it had to be Semelovsky. He thrust the automatic back in his pocket and, shoulder to shoulder with Kreshin, he paused, in a shifting, purposeful group, the heat from the flames like a desert wind striking his face. He flipped over the switch on the transmitter in his pocket, praying that his now continuous signal was reaching Gant. Pushed aside by an unseeing guard tugging a hose behind him, then another, he glanced down at his watch. Six-thirteen. He looked over his shoulder. Over the heads of the crowd pressing behind him, he could see the guard’s body near the Firefox and saw, too, the ring of security men surrounding the aircraft. He knew they had discovered, or guessed, what was intended by the diversion, who the agent in Bilyarsk was, and what he intended.

  Somehow the distraction was understood for what it was, and the Mig had not been left temporarily unguarded. He could see the squat form of Tsernik directing the formation of the ring of guards, and the junior officer in charge of hangar-security detailing men to fight the fire. A voice crackled over the loudspeaker system, above the noise of the flames, which seemed to have made the watchers oblivious to their danger.

  Flame spilled across the hangar floor beneath the second aircraft, like swift lava, and the pall of smoke was beginning to engulf them, masking the most forward of the guards with their hoses and extinguishers. The loudspeaker ordered them to clear the area, clamouring for their attention above the racket of the alarm and the new, added note of the fire-tender, rushing into the chaos of the hangar from its station near the development-hangar.

  There was only one thing to do, he realised, the flames at his back now as he watched the fire-tender and the movements of a second group of hurrying guards, the off-duty squad hastily recalled. They were looking for him, and for Kreshin. There was only one thing to do - he had to show himself, draw their fire, draw away, if possible, the ring around the Mig. He began to move in the direction of the retreating tide of spectators as the bulk of the fire-tender edged its way through them. He glanced towards the door through which he knew Gant must enter the hangar. There was no sign of him.

  At first, the signal from the bleeper was a muscular tic, not even a sound to Gant as he was consumed by the flames of his dream. He was still in the posture of defeat, sagging stiffly, immobile, on the lavatory seat, his body damp with sweat. Something pulsed in his arm, he was
aware of it, but he could not move his hand to scratch it, to rub the spot. The dream was drawing towards an end, and he was patiently waiting for his release. There was no need to move, no need to fight. It had been bad, but it was ebbing now, the separate images flung off like frozen sparks, photographs of his past in a flickering album.

  The noise ate down into his mind, the one-to-thesecond bleeping of the receiver. A part of Gant’s mind, the part that always coldly observed the progress of the dream, powerless to prevent or still, recognised that it was some kind of signal and fumbled, as with frozen fingers, to decipher its significance. Something to do with an alert - not an alert like others, not a scramble ‘ With sudden, frightening clarity he knew what it was, so that the image of the Firefox, in one of the photographs he had studied, was before him - then the memory of the cockpit simulator they had built for him. on which he had learned … He knew what it was. Baranovich. He saw the wise face, peering kindly, in Olympian pity, through the flames.

  Tic and noise coordinated. The bleeper on his arm, taped there by Baranovich. The instructions filtered through, like pebbles dropped irregularly into dark water. The bleep was the alert - wait for the continuous sound, which is the summons.

  He tried to move, felt that he was moving against a great wave, which pinned him where he was, struggled, tried again to raise himself - and did so.

  The bathroom came into a kind of focus, and he shook his head, rubbed both stiff hands down his cheeks. It was like coming back from the dead, far worse than coming back from a narcotic trip, far worse than that. The water, still running, filtered through his mind as a distant sound, nothing to do with the crackling of flames. He had always been afraid of moving like this, before the dream had played itself out. Now he knew he had to.

  He opened the bathroom door, his hand like a frozen claw gripping the door handle clumsily. He slammed the door behind him. He felt an ache, dull and distant, in his thigh. He looked down. There was a bruise across his muscle. He presumed it was some selfinflicted blow, performed an age before.

  He walked stiffly, like a man on new limbs, across to the locker which he remembered contained Voskov’s pressuresuit. He had to dress himself…

  The bleep is the alert; wait for the continuous noise, which is the summons. Baranovich smiled down on him, the memory of that moment in Kreshin’s bedroom, the white-haired man holding the cup of sweet coffee. He saw the face from that angle, as he had lain on the bed.

  He spilled the suit onto the floor and bent wearily, a long way down, to pick it up. He untaped the bleeper, then stuck it to the locker door. Then he began to struggle into the legs, fitting his clumsy limbs into the stiff, unyielding garment. He was running freely with sweat.

  Another sound clamoured for the attention of his fogged awareness - an alarm, a fire-alarm, he decided. He knew then what the diversion was, responding to stimuli as he was. He knew that it signalled an increase in the urgency of his efforts. It marked another stage passed, a new tempo introduced. He began to struggle with the lacing, the all-important lacing that was his only protection against the disastrous effects of the Gforces he would encounter in the Firefox. It was a skilled job, it required more of him than he was able to give. Yet it had to be right - it might kill him, as surely as any mechanical malfunction in the aircraft, more surely. He tried to concentrate.

  It was not easy, but it was familiar. He knew what he was doing. He forced himself to pay attention, his own harsh breathing roaring in his ears.

  The bleep is the alert; wait for the continuous noise, which is the summons, Baranovich told him, above the panic of the blood.

  At last he had finished. The suit was hot, choking, sticky with his frantic efforts. He had no time to put on dry underclothes. He picked the pilot’s helmet from its shelf, glanced inside it, and could make nothing of the contacts and sensors of the thought-system. They had been checked by Baranovich the previous day.

  He tugged on the helmet, snapped down the visor, and the image of flame roared up in his imagination, the dying effort of the dream to swallow his consciousness.

  Wait for the continuous noise, which is the summons. Baranovich whispered above the noise of the flames.

  He realised that the bleep had vanished. There was a continuous, penetrating cry from the receiver on the locker. He reached into the locker, and picked from the shelf the innards of the transistor radio. He looked at the small black object, like a cigarette case now its disguise of transistors and batteries had gone. In the radio it had appeared nothing more sinister than a circuit-board.

  The continuous noise is the summons.

  He moved swiftly towards the door.

  The crowd simply seemed, as if by a communal awareness and command, to disappear, to drift to either side of the two Jews. They were alone, and marked. There was nowhere to hide, no shelter for them. A group of guards in a semi-circle was advancing slowly towards them, through the smoke that was filling the hangar, rolling like a pall towards the open doors. Tsernik’s head was hidden by the loud-hailer he had raised to his lips, and they heard his amplified, mechanical voice call to them.

  ‘Put down your weapons - now, or I will order them to open fire! Put down your weapons - immediately!’

  There seemed little else to do. The fire-tender had been joined, raucously, by its twin, and the fire-fighting units were soaking the aircraft and the hangar floor with foam, choking out Semelovsky’s fire, Semelovsky’s funeral pyre. There were people all around them now, backing away, as from something diseased or deformed - men in white coats, others in overalls, the technicians and scientists who had rushed towards the fire, then retreated from it like an ebbing wave. Baranovich and Kreshin were between the crescent of the approaching guards, and the crescent of the fire-fighters behind them. Baranovich felt the drop in temperature as the foam choked the life from the fire beneath the second Mig. Around the first one, around Gant’s plane, the circle of guards had thinned, though they had not disappeared, not all left their posts.

  Where was Gant? He had turned over the switch. The summons should have brought him by now. If he did not appear within seconds at the door leading to the security-building and the pilots’ restroom, the guards would have arrested them, and re-formed around the aircraft. The gleaming silver flanks of the plane reflected the light of the dying flames. The fuel tanks of the second Mig had not caught fire as Baranovich had hoped. With luck, for the Soviets, it would still fly.

  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 press
uresuit, 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.