by Craig Thomas
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 taxi-way that led to it from the runway proper.
A chopper buzzed overhead, the downdraught plucking his 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 taxi-way 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 fleeting 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 he 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 Tsernik 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, Tsernik?'
'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, overwhehning relief, until the guard said: 'Are you all right, Captain?'
Gant looked at him, start
led. 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' rest-room.
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 sub-surface 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.
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 sub-surface strength in the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean that he had transferred to the wall-map rilled 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 corner 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' rest-room 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 t
ime 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.