Firefox

by Craig Thomas

  In the mirror, the Russian stayed with him, and the body was only able to hold off the hunter behind from an optimum firing position which the Russian pilot would now be seeking, now that he had wasted two of his four missiles. He might even be closing for a cannon burst, to cripple and slow his quarry.

  The man was good, the mind admitted, overheating with its own fever. It was unable to free itself from past and future, the moments before, the moments to come. He had been taken - whatever he did, the Russian would stay with him, behind him, closing the range.

  The body registered the appearance of the second Firefox on the screen as an orange blip. It was old information, useless to the body. He already knew what plane it was tucked behind him.

  The body tried another strategem, because the Russian’s plane was coming into the ‘up-sun’ position. Gant flicked the aircraft to the left, then continued into a barrel-roll. At the same time, he saw in the mirror the series of ragged puffs of mist from the wings of the Russian plane, the burst of cannon fire they signified. Orange globules drifted with apparent slowness towards him, accelerating as under a great depth of water to overtake him. Tretsov had fired because he, too, was on edge, anxious to end the developing drama, make the fictitious quick kill. The power of his aircraft lulled him into precipitate action.

  The Russian, now that Gant was in the roll and realising that the cannon burst had gone wide, would expect him to turn into the line of the sun. Instead, he held the roll another ninety degrees, checked and pulled on the stick - the Firefox shuddered through its length, and Gant’s stomach muscles cramped up, the vision narrowing again to the long tunnel. He screamed into the facemask to reduce the effects of the mounting, stunning G-force. The G-meter registered plus 9, he saw with his severely limited vision of the control panel.

  As he came out of the roll, he saw the Russian plane ahead of him. The mind shouted with relief, the sudden prospect of an optimal firing position as his vision cleared and he saw the Russian plane emerging from the expanding diaphragm of the lens his vision had become. He was in the Russian’s tail cone, at a range of six hundred yards. He thought, and two Anab missiles were launched. The aircraft shuddered again, straightened, and he watched the missiles slide home. He had aimed via the aiming system, a reflective panel in front of the windscreen, since he had no guidance just as the Russian had possessed none. The thoughtguidance system was linked to the radar, not infrared. Tretsov had been unable to direct the missiles once he had fired, without the radar image, and Gant now saw, with a stunned sense of defeat, that he was unable to do so either. He saw the Russian pilot use his own trick, chopping the throttles and pulling the aircraft into a climb and roll to the right. The Anabs drove harmlessly past, seeking the heatsource the Russian had whisked away from them.

  Gant realised that the mind had interfered with the body, infected it. It was like the last days in Vietnam, before the hospital. A sense of the failure of the past, and a present inadequacy, crushed him for a moment. He was flying badly now, as then - on raw nerves and a draining supply of mental energy. He was afraid again. He could be dead - already the matrix of circumstances which had made his death inevitable might have been established. It might already be too late to initiate an action that would save him.

  The body, functioning a split second below its unimpaired best, wrenched the plane to the right. Again, the Gforces momentarily stupefied body and mind. Vision closed in. He followed the Russian. He had been too quick, too eager, squeezing the thought like a firing-button, loosing the missiles.

  It was too late to calm himself. He was committed now. He was the electronic chessmaster who had lifted his hand from the piece he had elected to move. There was no going back, no reappraisal. He had to fly as he was, the system buckling under the flow of emotion, the adrenalin pumping through him, memory flickering on a screen as if lit by flames.

  He eased the controls, and the grey Arctic Ocean swung slowly across his head as his eyes quartered the airspace. The search was frantic because he had lost the Russian again. The sea slid down behind his shoulder. Then his eyes caught a reflection of light in the mirror. He had found the Russian, who had used Gant’s own trick of the barrel-roll. He was now behind him, closing the range rapidly, coming for the kill - and making certain that Gant would have no time, no room, in which to wriggle away; small fish from hungry predator. The body recognised that the Russian was good - the mind gibbered that he was dead already.

  Gant trod the left rudder, and smacked the stick hard over, pulling the Firefox to the left, seeing as he did so a missile flick away from the Russian plane, bright, mesmeric orange. He wrenched the column back, feeling the Gforces sagging him deep into the couch, the awful pressure for a moment on legs and stomach and the mask pulling at the flesh of his face, his head pinned to his chest…

  The mind retreated from the sudden pain, leaving the clarity of the body that he needed. Then the plane kicked in response to his hand on the column and there was a wild shuddering through its length.

  He was in a flat spin, the nose of the plane pitching fifteen degrees and more above and below the horizon. There was a moment of relief as the Anab was left targetless high above him - then alarm spread as the G-pressure mounted on the meter, through 8.5, towards 9-G. His airspeed plummeted towards the 100 knot marker.

  There was a clicking in his headphones as the automatic igniters worked madly to prevent a flame-out in the huge turbines behind him. The disturbed airflow of the spin was dousing the engines like a liquid, and they were being relit every half second. His eyes flicked to the rpm gauges, and saw that they were down to sixty per cent and the needles flickering. Before he realised it, he had tumbled through eight thousand feet, the altimeter unwinding madly.

  He lost all sight of the Russian aircraft, but Tretsov had watched him, and thrust his own aircraft into a dive. The American was a sitting target.

  Gant went through the SOP for a flat spin, pushing the column forward. Nothing happened. The Firefox did not respond. Now, the Russian above him and no doubt following him down had no existence or reality. Now he was fighting the plane itself as it plunged out of control towards the sea. He moved the column back and forth, jockeyed the throttles to get the nose down and to give him better airflow over the elevators. He was trying to put the plane into a more nose-down attitude in order to pick up speed and regain control.

  For perhaps two seconds, nothing happened, except the continued chatter of the auto-ignition and the unwinding of the altimeter. Already he was down to thirty thousand feet, and still falling like a leaden leaf. In desperation, he reached his hand for the controls, and dumped the undercarriage to provide a sudden shock of drag on the plane - something the body remembered from a conversation, a story long before. The tail lifted with a twitch, and the nose dipped suddenly and the spin steepened. He applied opposite rudder, and opened the throttles. He was twenty thousand feet up, the altimeter still unwinding but he was back in control. He exerted pressure on the column to level out, and retracted the undercarriage. He pulled the column steadily towards him, and eased the throttles further open. The plane began to level out. The body breathed, its first dragging inhalation since the spin had begun.

  Then he saw with an icy shock that the Russian was a bright glow on the screen. The pilot had followed him down, battening on him as he recovered from the spin. The speed of his approach, Gant calculated, was in excess of Mach 1.6. The Russian knew he could kill, that he could get close enough to finish Gant.

  There was to be no margin for error, no slight gap through which brilliance or luck might slip.

  Gant saw him in the mirror, an image leaping at him. The mind cracked open, gibbering in the moment of its death. The orange globules that sprang out of the puffs of mist at the wing edges chased him at a frightening speed, overhauling him. He flung the plane aside, as if trying to avoid some charging animal, and saw in the mirror the Russian turning to follow him, turning inside Gant’s heat-cone, jockeying for the optimum p
osition with one missile left.

  There was a false relief that he knew was vapid and unreal even as he felt it; to have escaped the cannon fire was meaningless, a prolongation of seconds.

  The body, struggling to master the crying mind, fought to regain control. His hand opened the throttles and he eased the column back and to the right. The mind cried out for something to fire at the tailing Russian, something that would operate on an enemy behind.

  The mind’s imperative overrode the body. It was a command the body would never have considered. The mind screamed the order to the thoughtguidance system, and the last of the decoys in the Rearward Defence Pod was jettisoned. There was a blinding light in the rear mirror that burned eyesight as the decoy heatsource, the incandescent ball, detached itself and hung for a moment in the air. Then the mirror erupted in burning light, brighter than the ball. The body, stunned by its own apparent inactivity, sensed the shock-wave.

  Gant held the Firefox in the tight turn. As he steadied the aircraft, there was nothing within the circle he was describing in the air except a pall of black, oily smoke, lit from within by livid, orange flame. Glistening fragments of metal tumbled down from the smoke-pall, like metal leaves turning in the sunlight.

  He understood what had happened. While the mind spewed its relief, its incoherent sense of escape and victory, it realised that the incandescent ball of fire released from the tail of the Firefox had been greedily swallowed by one of the huge intakes of the Russian Firefox and it had exploded instantaneously.

  Gant wanted to throw up. He choked on his vomit, preventing it from filling the facemask and suffocating him. The mind invaded the body, and he realised that he was shaking all over.

  While he remained capable of effort, he switched in the autopilot and then punched in, hesitantly and with a vast effort of memory, the coordinates of his course. The Firefox banked round, steadied, and headed for Finland, while he lay back in the couch, weak, empty, shaking.

  Eventually he knew he would recover. Then he would take over the manual control of the plane. But not yet, not just yet…

  The Mig-31, NATO codenamed Firefox, and the single, priceless example of its type, cruised at 80,000 feet, at a speed of Mach 3.7. towards the hidden coast of Finland.