Firefox

by Craig Thomas

  The distance to the transmitter of the homing-signal still crying from the ‘Deaf Aid’ registered as ninety-two miles. The fuel-gauges registered empty. Gant was flying on little more than fresh air, and he knew it. It was time - and it might already be too late - to go into a zoom climb and begin the long glide to the contact-point with the refuelling-tanker.

  The more he considered the problem, the more Gant became convinced that such a glide was his only chance. He had to go as high as possible, and then hope that he would leave himself enough fuel for the tricky and delicate task of matching speeds with the tanker-aircraft, and coupling to the fuel-umbilical trailing behind the tanker. Not once had he considered that the tanker might be some kind of surface craft. It could not be a carrier - the USN would not dare put a huge and vulnerable target like that into the Barents Sea. Unlike Vladimirov, he knew that the Americans had developed no carrier-sub.

  Therefore, he was going to have to refuel in the air. He knew the Firefox’s predecessor, the Mig-25 Foxbat, had established an absolute altitude record of almost 119,000 feet, and that the Firefox was intended as being capable of a greater performance. And, in the present atmospheric conditions, at two-and-a-half miles for every thousand feet of height, he could easily reach the tanker, if he could only pull the Firefox up to an altitude of perhaps forty or more thousand feet.

  Yet he had to take a terrible risk. He still had to have plenty of height when he made the rendezvous, and sufficient fuel left for the final manoeuvres. The fueltanks of the Firefox had to be almost empty - had to be, he told himself. It was one aspect of the aircraft with which he was not familiar. Though he had asked Baranovich, the electronics engineer had been unable to help him.

  The engines, at his crawling speed across the grey, ice-littered sea, still operated without hesitation. Yet he could take no further risk. The automatic emergency tanks must have cut in by that time, and he had no idea of the extra range they would give him but he suspected it wouldn’t be sufficient to take him to the contact-point.

  He pushed the throttles forward, and pulled back on the column. The nose of the Firefox lifted and he accelerated, watching the altimeter begin to climb, steadily at first, and then more and more rapidly as he increased the thrust of the two huge turbojets. He seemed not to breathe, not once during the minute-anda-half of climb. The pale, spring blue of the sky began to deepen as he climbed.

  He levelled out at sixty-two thousand feet, throttling back the engines until there was just sufficient power to maintain the function of the generators. At that height, he would be at about twenty-seven thousand feet when he arrived at the tanker’s location. It would be enough. He checked the screen. Nothing.

  There was only one thing to hope - that it remained as clean of activity as it was at that moment.

  The bearing of the signal remained dead ahead of him. The distance readout gave him eighty-eight miles to target. He still wondered how much fuel remained, and the thought nagged at him. He began to think that he might have overplayed the safety margin, with regard to his zoom climb. It must have drained the emergency tanks.

  Ahead of him, far ahead, he saw the grey heaviness of cloud building up. The screen remained empty of activity. The Firefox glided silently through an empty sky, the dark blue canopy of the thin upper layers of the atmosphere above, the tiny, silent greyness of the northern limits of the Barents Sea below. Ahead of him, far ahead, beyond where the cloud seemed to be building, there was an edge of whiteness in sight - the polar-pack.

  United States Navy Captain Frank Delano Seerbacker lay on his cramped bunk in his cramped quarters aboard the USS Pequod, a nuclearpowered ‘Sturgeon’ class submarine, as it drifted beneath the icefloe whose southward path it had imitated for the past five days. Seerbacker’s submarine had passed beneath the polar-pack near the western coast of Greenland and, rigged for silent running, had slithered out into the Barents Sea after fourteen days at sea.

  The journey had possessed three distinct phases for the captain, his officers and the crew. There had been the top-speed dash from the submarine’s concealed base on the Connecticut coast, then the claustrophobic passage beneath the polar ice - and since then, the captain thought again with irritation, they had been drifting without engines, averaging three-point-one miles a day beneath the floe.

  The Pequod was unarmed, another fact which Seerbacker bitterly resented. The submarine’s torpedo room and forward crew’s quarters were flooded with high-octane paraffin, fuel for the super-plane that the CIA was stealing for the good old U.S. of A.

  Seerbacker’s craggy, lined face creased in a frown of contempt. His long nose flared. He disliked, he decided, the CIA - especially when that crud organisation told him to sit under a damn icefloe and wait for a superjet to land on it!

  He stirred on his cot, raising his knees merely for the sake of altering the position of his limbs. His hands were behind his head, and he was staring sightlessly at the ceiling. He and his men were sick, he decided, of the whole monotonous routine of the mission; sick to death, following the icefloe’s unvarying, snail-like course southward.

  It wasn’t, he thought grimly, as if they’d even had the change of routine involved in looking for a suitable floe. The floe - the so-called runway, he thought with contempt - had been selected from the study of hundreds of satellite photographs, in the first instance, the findings of which had been checked and confirmed by a Lockheed Orion which had collected both photographs and visual findings. Proven satistical data from oceanographic surveys allowed experts at Langley to make a firm prediction about the floe’s ability to take the weight of the Firefox. Seerbacker had merely been told where to find it. He realised he was being merely bloody-minded in cursing the domination of machinery, but he went on doing so anyway. There was after all, he told himself, damn all else to do except to curse the temporal powers and their crazy ideas, who had got him into this mess, who had messed up his boat with their paraffin!

  There was a soft knock at his door.

  ‘What?’ he said, irritated rather than thankful at being roused from his fruitless reverie. A crewman handed him a sheaf of flimsy. On it, in the hand of his Exec., who was acting as weather-officer, he read the information that he had been expecting, but which was doubly unwelcome when it came. The temperature of the air above the floe was dropping much too rapidly. Cloud was building up in the area, cloud that would mask from Gant the position and dimensions of the floe.

  Seerbacker tossed his head at the information. It was his bloody luck, just his godawful luck! He dismissed the crewman. He needed no further information. If there was anything else, then the Exec. would send it to him. He had no need to go to the control room, not yet. He cursed again the constant trimming of the tanks, the regular, futile checks to be made on the paraffin that flooded the tubes and the forward quarters, and on the weather, the surface temperature of the floe, the condition of the ice surface … It was, he decided, no job for a man with twenty years in the service, and with one of the best crews in the Navy. He considered the information concerning the air temperature. It was dropping rapidly, which could, and probably would, mean a change in the weather conditions which had been unusually settled and mild for those latitudes and the time of year. The change, when it came, could so easily become freezing fog, localised in their area, spreading perhaps as little as a few square miles. In freezing fog, Seerbacker did not have to know anything about aircraft and pilots to know that there was no way Gant could land on the floe. They had no navigational aids aboard that could help him. allow him to make an automatic landing - nothing except the transmitter that would tell Gant where they were. Already, as the message had told him, there was a local build-up of cloud. Perhaps Gant might not be able to get down, even in that…

  The introduction of doubt prompted his mind to review the emergency procedures. In the final event, he was to avoid capture at all costs. It could never be admitted by Washington that a submarine of the U.S. Navy had been a part of the scheme to stea
l the Firerox - he was to destroy the Pequod, if necessary, to prevent its capture by the Russians.

  His mind winced away from the secret orders he had opened at sea; if Gant failed to land on the floe, or tif he crashed onto the ice, or into the sea in the vicinity of the Pequod, then he was to make every effort to rescue the pilot - and an even greater effort to capture the plane, and tow it ‘home beneath the icepack. The havoc that would cause with his crew, and his navigation, he was not prepared to consider. It was he knew, theoretically feasible, but he hoped that none of this would be necessary and that Gant was good enough to set the Firefox down like a feather.

  The trouble was, Seerbacker admitted to himself finally - Gant was late. He had been briefed as to the performance and range of the Firefox, and the ETA for the plane over the floe had already passed - was minutes past. And with that plane, he knew, minutes were really huge gaps of time - a big enough gap for a man’s death. He would not know whether Gant had even stolen the plane until it appeared, or failed to appear, on the submarine’s infrared. Up through the ice was thrust a single metal spike, camouflaged in white, carrying the transmitter of the homing-signal tuned to Gant’s ‘Deaf Aid’, the complex changing signal that he should be picking up. It was his one and only link with the American pilot.

  Seerbacker cursed the British designer for not including a facility, built-in, so that Gant could identify himself - but it was strictly one-way. The Pequod transmitted, and the Firefox received - at least, until the aircraft was close enough for the transponder in the homing device to emit an identification signal, and that distance was within visual range anyway. As his Exec had commented - if General Dynamics had fitted it as standard equipment in ‘Sturgeon’ class subs, it would dispense Coca-Cola, along with doing the laundry and playing canned music. Seerbacker’s lips twisted in a reflective smile.

  When Gant appeared over the floe, the frequency of the signal he received would change, and he would hear the equivalent of an instantaneous echo, as on sonar. Then no doubt, to his appalled mind it would become clear that he would have to land on an icefloe - in cloud, Seerbacker added vitriolically, perhaps in freezing fog. This would probably mean scraping the pilot off the ice, sinking the remains of the plane, and towing it thousands of miles back to Connecticut. It didn’t bear thinking about.

  Gant was late. The thought nagged at him. Minutes onlv - but late. His fuel must be shot to hell by now, Seerbacker thought savagely. Must be. He thought about going down to the control-room, almost swung his long, thin legs off the cot, and then decided against it. After five days, he couldn’t start showing a yellow flag as soon as the guy was a couple of minutes overdue. He reflected that there was very little aerial activity in the area - even if that lack of activity included Gant.

  There was no comfort to be found, he decided. None at all…

  Surprisingly, it was Buckholz, massive, self-confident, almost silent Buckholz, who cracked first.

  Aubrey had been aware of the tension rising in the room as the morning wore on, after Shelley had cleared the breakfast remains, and they had finished with the coffee. Then, suddenly, there had been nothing to do. The tension in the room had been palpable, lifting the hair at the nape of the neck like static electricity. A profound silence had descended on the five occupants, broken only by the creaking of the stepladder whenever Curtin ascended or descended, pinning his satellite weather photographs to the wall, or altering and supplementing the coloured pins in the map of the Barents Sea.

  Buckholz had ceased to take notice of the map. For more than half an hour he had not looked once in its direction. It was as if he were listening to some inner voice, seeing some mental image, and did not need the confirmation of pictures and pins.

  Aubrey knew why he was silent, grim-faced, tense. He shared that tension because he, too, understood how perilous Gant’s fuel state must be. The last report from the Pequod, from Mother One and Seerbacker, was a routine weather report which contained no coded reference to sighting Gant by infrared and contained, moreover, some discouraging news concerning the weather in the area of the floe, news that would make it difficult for Gant to land. Aubrey did not want his neat, carefully conceived, methodically executed operation to end with the humiliation of a crash-landing on the floe, and the ignominy of a Firefox damaged and affected by the corrosive sea-water from being towed home behind the Pequod.

  But, it was the fuel state that worried him, more than the weather. To Buckholz, Aubrey guessed, it signified that Gant had already failed. Aubrey glanced up at the clock, and then again at Buckholz. It was the wrong thing to do, he realised, to remind Buckholz of what he had evidently forgotten but, nevertheless, he said, his voice carefully deferential:

  ‘Is it not time we released the decoy submarine into the arena, Buckholz?’

  There was a moment of silence, then Buckholz, his lips working, snapped: ‘What in hell’s name for?’ His eyes glared at Aubrey, as if the latter had interrupted some kind of ritual, solemn and awful, proceeding within the American.

  Aubrey spread his arms. ‘It is time, by the clock,’ he said blandly.

  ‘Why waste it?’ Buckholz asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The decoy - decoy for what, man?’ Buckholz seemed to half-rise from his seat, as if to browbeat the small, rotund Aubrey.

  ‘We don’t know he’s lost…’ Aubrey began.

  ‘What in the hell was all that coded stuff we picked up, between Bilyarsk and the Riga, then?’ Buckholz snapped. ‘They got him, Aubrey - blew the ass from under him!’

  Aubrey tried to retain a smile of encouragement on his face, and said: ‘I don’t know - it could have meant they didn’t get him.’

  There was a silence. Buckholz seemed to sink back into his chair. Anders, standing behind him, a plastic cup clutched in his big hand, looked down at Buckholz’s cropped head, then looked across the room at Aubrey. His gaze seemed quizzical. Aubrey nodded, and mouthed the single word: ‘Decoy.’ Anders crossed to a telephone in the corner, dialled a number, and spoke. Hearing his voice, Buckholz turned incuriously to watch him, then glanced across at Aubrey, and shook his head.

  Buckholz had returned to his sightless contemplation of the papers in front of him. By the time Anders had completed his telephone call to an operations room in the MOD which would alert the decoy submarine at that moment lying to the west of Spitzbergen and the decoy aircraft waiting to take off from Greenland, or already in the air to the east of that frozen land-mass.

  Aubrey nodded to Anders in acknowledgement of his call, then proceeded to gaze across the room at the map. The decoy planes would be picked up by Russian landborne and seaborne radar within minutes, and be seen to be heading towards the vicinity of North Cape, while the submarine would entice Russian surface vessels and submarines to investigate, drawing them away from the Pequod while she was on the surface, refuelling the Firefox.

  A doubt suddenly struck him, cold in the pit of his stomach, clutching with a hot, burning sensation in his chest, like indigestion or a heart murmur. Would the Pequod ever need to surface? Looking again at Buckholz, it was evident that he didn’t think so. Aubrey rubbed his smooth, cherubic cheeks, and wondered.

  At twenty-two thousand feet, the Firefox dropped into the top of the cloud-stack that Gant had watched inexorably approaching. The silent, gliding aircraft slid through the ruffled, innocuous edges of the cloud, into the grey silence, with the helplessness of a stone. He had been unable to estimate the depth of the stack - it could, he knew, reach down to the surface of the pewter-coloured sea. He was four minutes to target, descending at a steady rate of three-and-a-half thousand feet per minute, moving ahead at 180 knots, three miles a minute. When he reached the target location, he would still be eight thousand feet above sea-level. It would have to be enough. There was nothing on the screen. Only the TFR reflected the monotonous pattern of icefloes slipping past him. below the cloud. There was nothing that looked remotely like a ship, anywhere within the limits of the target
area. There was no aircraft. There was merely the incessant, monotonous signal, emanating from some unknown source, beckoning.

  In the cloud, Gant felt cold. The signal was his only contact with reality, and yet it seemed to possess no other reality than that of sound. He was unable to believe in its physical source. Gant had always been an electronic pilot, always relied on instruments. Stories older men told him, of flying bombers over Germany in the last days of the last war, were tales that might have come from ancient Greece - mythological. Therefore, he did not panic, was not really afraid. The signal did have a source, however distant, however ghostly. It was no illusion. He trusted it. Nevertheless, it began, subtly but certainly, to feel cold in the cabin of the Firefox, a chill, arctic cold, salt like the sea.

  Seerbacker was swinging his legs off the bunk even as his Exec. - who in his excitement had come in person - peered round the door to his quarters and said, almost breathless with sudden, renewed tension: ‘Aircraft contact, sir - heading this way.’

  ‘Range?’ Seerbacker snapped, tugging his cap on his head, and pressing past the younger man, who followed his captain’s rapid progress towards the control-room. ‘Less than four miles, sir - height about twelve thousand - she’s on the bearing, sir. And there’s no radar contact, only a very faint infrared. She’s either on lowest power or not using her engines at all.’

  Without looking behind him, Seerbacker said:

  ‘Then it’s him.’ Then he added: ‘What’s the surface temperature of the floe?’

  ‘Still dropping, sir. Dewpoint’s still a couple of degrees away’.

  Seerbacker suddenly stopped, and turned on his Exec. ‘A couple of degrees?’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Wind?’

  ‘Five to ten knots, variable.’

  ‘Insufficient turbulence, then?’ he said mysteriously, and the younger man, Lt. Commander Dick Fleischer, nodded, understanding his drift. ‘But, what about his turbulence, when he comes into land - uh? What happens then?’