Firefox mg-1

by Craig Thomas

  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 himself 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-the-second 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 self-inflicted blow, performed an age before.

  He walked stiffly, like a man on new limbs, across to the locker which he remembered contained Voskov's pressure-suit. 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 G-forces 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 inna
rds 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' rest-room, 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 pressure-suit, 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 in a 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 hangar, 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.

  The young man had stepped back a couple of paces, so that he could still see Gant clearly. The tinted face-mask of the helmet, combined with the integral oxygen-mask, made it impossible for him to tell that it wasn't Colonel Voskov in the pilot's position. He was at a loss what action to take. He glanced swiftly down the hangar. It was true that the second Mig-31 was being towed towards him from the far end of the hangar and, although it appeared under control, there was still smoke and flame from the fire there. He had been told by Tsernik that no one, on the express orders of Colonel Kontarsky, was to be allowed near the plane. But did that apply to the pilot?

  Gant ignored the KGB man and went through his pre-start checks as swiftly as he could. He plugged in his radio and communications equipment, finding the location of the socket instinctively, as if he had always flown that aircraft. The simulator which had been built in Langley, Virginia, at CIA headquarters, from Baranovich's smuggled descriptions and photographs and from computer projections, now proved its worth. Then, he plugged in the connection from his helmet to the weapons-system, a single jack-plug similar to the radio. He pushed the jack-plug home into the side of the ejector-seat itself. It was the final sophistication of the weapons system of the Mig: if he were forced to eject, then he could control the destruct mechanism of the system to prevent any part or fragment of the plane's weaponry and its control-system from falling into enemy's hands.

  He glanced down at the KGB man, swiftly, as if taking in the reading from one of his gauges. The junior officer still seemed perplexed, reluctant. Gant connected up his oxygen supply, then coupled in the emergency oxygen. Next, he switched in the anti-G device, a lead which plugged into the pressure-suit just below the left knee. It was this which would bleed air into the suit to counteract the effects of increased G-forces on his blood, forcing it round his system against the effect of sudden turns, dives or accelerations. Cautiously, he tested it, felt the air bleed in rapidly, and checked the gauges which confirmed his bodily reaction. It was working.

  * * *

  He knew he was stripping the pre-flight routine to the bone, but there weren't even seconds to spare. His eyes read the gauges; flaps, brakes and fuel. The fuel-tanks were full, and the
y would need to be since, as he sat there, he did not even know the nature or position of his refuelling-point.

  There was one more thing. He extracted the innards of the transistor radio from a pouch-pocket on the thigh of the suit, bared an adhesive strip, and then fixed the anonymous collection of circuits in their wafer-thin black case developed at Farnborough exclusively for his use to the corner of the instrument panel, with a silent prayer that it had not been damaged during the past three days. If it had been, he would never know.

  He was ready. His routine had taken mere seconds to complete. The second Firefox was only yards away as it trailed behind the small tractor. He had a single moment in which to convince the man below him. He leaned down, and waved his hand for him to move, yelling as he did so:

  'You'll get your head knocked off if you stand there any longer!' He swept a finger across his throat, and pointed to the wing and engine-intake behind the Russian. The young man looked, understood, and self-preservation made him move clear, tugging the ladder obligingly after him.

  Gant smiled, relaxed, and turned his attention to the aircraft. As he did so, his gaze swept across the door into the hangar through which he had entered perhaps a minute earlier. He saw Kontarsky, his face white, his arm extended, finger pointing in his direction. There were other men at his side, perhaps half-a-dozen, filling the doorway behind him. In a purely reflex action, he pressed the hood control, and automatically the hood swung down, locked electronically. Then he locked it manually as a standard double-check. He was isolated in the machine. A part of it.