by Craig Thomas
Gant had an appointment to keep in the airspace north-west of Volgograd, with the early morning civilian flight from Moscow, a rendezvous which would establish him as travelling towards the southern border of the Soviet Union — a fact he very much wanted to establish in the minds of those who would be controlling the search for him.
He throttled back slightly, keeping his speed at little more than six hundred and fifty knots. He had not pushed the Firefox to its supersonic speeds because, travelling at his present height of almost 15,000 feet, the supersonic footprint he would leave behind him would act like a giant arrow as to his direction for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. There were another twenty-three minutes to his rendezvous.
He had made a minute inspection of the equipment packed into the Firefox. Most of it, communications and radar especially, had been built into the simulator at Langley, and was of a type which closely paralleled U.S. developments in the same fields. They weren't the reason why he was stealing the Firefox. One reason lay in the two mighty Turmansky turbojets which produced in excess of 50,000 lbs of thrust each, giving the plane its incredible speed in excess of Mach 5. Another reason was in the magic of its anti-radar system which, as dead Baranovich had suggested, was non-mechanical, but rather some kind of treatment of, or application to, the skin of the aircraft, and a further reason lay in the thought-guided missiles and cannon the Firefox carried.
The sky ahead of him was clear, pale blue, the rising sun to port of him dazzling off the perspex, the glare diffused and deadened by the tinted mask of the flying helmet. There was nothing to see.
Gant had no interest in the stretching, endless steppe below him. His eyes hardly left the instrument panel, especially the radar which would warn him of the approach of aircraft, or of missiles. One of his ECM devices, which Baranovich had explained in his final briefing was a constant monitor of the radar-emissions from the terrain over which he passed. Effectively, the 'Nose', as Baranovich had called it, sniffed out radar signals directed at him. The 'Nose' seemed unnecessary to Gant, since he could not be picked up on any radar screen on the ground or in the air but, Baranovich had explained and he had seen, a visual sighting of him would lead to intense radar activity on the ground, using the sighting plane as the guide to his whereabouts. In addition, as long as he went on monitoring the read-out on the tiny screen of the 'Nose', he would know where, and in what pattern, missile-radars on the ground below him were.
Gant knew what form the search for him would take. The Russians would guess he would head either direct north or direct south — that to the east was only, eventually, and long after he ran out of fuel, the People's Republic of China, while to the west, between himself and a friendly country, lay the massive defences that surrounded Moscow. He knew that 'Bearhunt' squadrons would be up looking for him, and he also suspected the Russians would be using their sound-detection system — NATO-designated, with inappropriate levity, 'Big Ears' — which in the unpopulated interior of the Russian heartland was designed to detect low-flying aircraft that might have eluded the radar net. Gant had no idea of how numerous might be such installations, nor how efficient they were in obtaining accurate bearings on machines moving at more than six hundred miles an hour — nor did he know at what altitude the system ceased to be effective.
One other thing, he reminded himself. Satellite photography, high-speed and infra-red. He didn't know whether it would be effective within the tiny time-scale of his flight. But it was something else to worry about. He was fighting an electronic war. He was like an asthmatic man with heavy, creaking boots trying to move through a room of insomniacs without disturbing them.
Gant had no idea of the nature, or precise location, of his refuelling point. In his memory were a sequence of different coordinates which he was to feed into the inertial navigator.
He had left the UHF channel open, knowing that they would attempt to contact him from Bilyarsk. In fact, he hoped and expected that they would do so. As soon as he spoke, anybody within a range of two hundred miles of him, using UDF equipment would not only pick up the broadcast, but would be able to obtain, with the assistance of two other fix lines, an almost instant fix on his position. In his case, it would only help to confirm the decoy of his journey south.
He suspected that the silence since his take-off was caused by the take-over of command by the War Command Centre on board the First Secretary's Tupolev. He waited with impatience, a surge of vanity in him wanting, above the desire of being asumed to be heading towards the southern borders of the U.S.S.R., to hear from the First Secretary, or the Marshal of the Soviet Air Force, at the least. He wanted to feed upon their anger, their threats.
The radio crackled into life. The voice was one he recognised from newsreels, from interviews — that of the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. Involuntarily, his eyes flicked to the instruments, checking his heading and speed, checking the conformity of the dials and readouts.
'I am speaking to the individual who has stolen the property of the U.S.S.R.,' the voice said, levelly, without inflection, almost as if on purpose to disappoint him. 'Can you hear me, Mr. Gant? I presume you have discarded your military rank since you became employed by — shall we say, other persons?' Gant smiled at the man's emphasis, and his caution.
Ever since the U-2 incident, he thought. Softly, softly. It was not to be admitted, not yet, that he was working for the CIA, even that he was an American.
He said: 'Go ahead — I'm listening.'
'Are you enjoying your ride, Mr. Gant — you like our new toy?'
'It could be improved,' Gant said laconically.
'Ah — your expert opinion, Mr. Gant.'
Gant could almost see the big man, with the strong, square face, sitting before the transmitter in the War Command Centre, while the frenzy of activity around him went almost unnoticed. Already, no doubt, someone had pushed beneath his gaze the details of the fix they had obtained on him. At that moment, however, it was between the two of them, between one man in an airplane, and another man with the powers of a god at his disposal. Yet Gant held all the cards, the voice seemed to say. Gant remained unfooled. He understood the fury of the search for him. He was being played like a fish, lulled, until they found him.
'You could say that,' he said. 'Don't you want to threaten me, or something?'
'I will do so, if that is what you wish,' was the level reply. 'But first, I will merely ask you to bring back what does not belong to you.'
'And then you'll forget the whole thing, uh?'
There was what sounded like soft laughter at the other end of the UHF. Then: 'I don't think you would believe that, Mr. Gant — would you? No, of course not. The CIA will have filled your head with nonsense about the Lubyanka, and the security services of the Soviet Union. No. All I will say is that you will live, if you return immediately. It is calculated that no more than forty flying minutes would be required before we would be able to sight you back over Bilyarsk. It has been a nice try, Mr. Gant, as you would say — but now, the game is most definitely over!'
Gant waited before replying, then said: 'And the alternatives…?'
'You will be obliterated, Mr. Gant — simply that. You will not be allowed to hand over the Mig-31 to the security services of your country. We could not allow that to happen.'
'I understand. Well, let me tell you, sir — I like this plane. It fits me. I think I'll just keep it, for the moment…'
'I see. Mr. Gant, as you will be aware, I am not interested in the life of one rogue pilot with a poor health record — I was hoping to save the millions of roubles that have been poured into the development of this project. I see that you won't allow that to happen. Very well. You will not, of course, make it to wherever you are heading. Goodbye, Mr. Gant.'
Gant flicked off the UHF and smiled to himself behind the anonymity of the flying mask. All he really had to worry about, he told himself — the one factor in the game which could cancel out all his advantages — was burning in
the hangar at Bilyarsk: the second Firefox. If they could continue to trace him, and put that up against him… He shrugged.
The civilian flight from Moscow to Volgograd took him by surprise. Suddenly, there was a glint of sunlight off duralumin, and he was on top of it. The vapour trail, at that hour of the morning in those air conditions, had become visible very late. He had intended to cross the nose of the Tupolev, but there was the short contrail away to port. He switched off the auto-pilot.
He rolled the Firefox onto a wingtip, felt the pressure-suit perform its anti-G function, tightening then loosening round his thighs and upper body, and he pulled the aircraft round. The bright, hard glint of the Tupolev Tu-134 was almost directly ahead of him now. He had to give its flight-crew the opportunity to make a positive visual identification, and he had to be heading south as he crossed the nose.
He banked away to port, accelerating into a dive. He moved away from the airliner, losing sight of it. It registered as a bright green blip near the centre of the radar screen. When he had decided that he had slid across and behind it, and accelerated sufficiently to overtake it again, he straightened onto his original course, watching the blip attempt to regain its position to one side of the screen's centre line. He steadied the Firefox like an eager horse as the airliner moved into visual range to starboard, and he could see the contrail and the tiny glint of sunlight. He eased open the throttles, and the Firefox surged forward on what would appear a collision course to the pilot of the airliner.
There was never a moment when he considered he might have misjudged the distance, the heading. He rolled the plane onto a wingtip, and dived away from the oncoming Tupolev, now filling his starboard window. They would have seen him, and panicked, since their radar screens would be stupefyingly empty. The slim fuselage, and the huge engines of an unknown aircraft, suddenly appearing, would be imprinted on their minds by fear. He rolled the plane into a Mach descent, a thousand feet below the airliner, and listened to the chatter of the pilot over the Russian airline frequency, smiling in satisfaction.
The ground rushed at the Firefox as he screamed down from 15,000 feet. He trimmed slightly nose-up, then pulled out of the suicidal dive, levelling at little more than two hundred feet above the flat terrain of the steppes. The pressure on the G-suit was evident, uncomfortable, as he was thrust back into the pilot's couch. His vision blurred, reddened, and then cleared, and he read off the instruments before him.
He switched in the auto-pilot and fed in the next coordinates that he had memorised so exactly, and the inertial navigator took over, settling the Firefox onto its new course. He had been seen, and the sighting would confirm the UDF fix they must have. They would have confirmed the fact that he was heading south, beyond Volgograd, towards perhaps the border with Iran, and some kind of rendezvous in Israel, or over the Mediterranean. The search would flatten in that sector of the Soviet defence system. Now he had need of at least some fair proportion of the Firefox's speed capability. He opened the throttles and watched the rpm gauges swing over, and the Mach-counter which was his only intimation, other than his ground speed read-out, that he was travelling faster than the speed of sound. He was heading east, towards the mountain chain of the Urals, seeking the shelter, he hoped, of their eastern slopes before turning due north. He could not employ the real cruising capability of the plane. Nevertheless, it was with satisfaction that he watched the numbers slipping through the Mach-counter… Mach 1,1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5…
Just below him, the flat, empty, silent expanse of the steppes fled past, receded. The buoyancy he had felt, the clearness and pleasure of the first moments of the flight, returned to him. He was flying the greatest war-plane ever built. It was a meeting of that aircraft, and the only human being good enough to fly it. His egotism, cold, unruffled, calculating, was fulfilled. A visual sighting at the height he was travelling became less and less likely. The supersonic footprint of his passage was narrow at two hundred feet, and there was little below him of human manufacture or human residence to record it. All he needed to avoid was the 'Big Ears' sound detection network. He had no idea of its capability, or location. In the Urals, however, the echoes set up by his passage would confuse any such equipment.
Suddenly, in a violent alteration of mood, he felt naked and his equilibrium seemed threatened. He was running for cover. Despite his better judgement, he pushed the throttles forward and watched, with satisfaction, as the Mach-counter reeled off the mounting numbers. Mach 1.8, 1.9, Mach 2, 2.1, 2.2…
He knew he was wasting fuel, precious fuel, yet he did not pull back the throttles. He watched the numbers mount until he had reached Mach 2.6, and then he steadied the speed. Now, the terrain below him was merely a blur. He was in a soundless cocoon, removed from the world. He began to feel safe as he switched in the TFR (Terrain Following Radar) which was his eyes and his reactions, operating as it did via the autopilot. He had not expected to need it until he entered the foothills of the Urals, but at his present speed of almost two thousand mph, he had to switch them in. He was no longer flying the aircraft. The Urals were only minutes away now and there, safe, he would regain control of the Firefox. His sense of well-being began to return. The sheer speed of the aircraft deadened the ends of nerves. The steadied figure of Mach 2.6 on the Mach-counter was brilliantly clear in his vision. At this speed, despite the draining-away of the irreplaceable kerosene, a visual sighting was as good as impossible. He was safe, running and safe…
* * *
'Give the alert to the contingency refuelling locations at once, would you?' Aubrey said blandly. He was speaking via a scrambler to Air Commodore Latchford at Strike Command, High Wycombe. He had, that moment, received a report from Latchford which indicated a definite lift-off by Gant from Bilyarsk. The AEWR (Airborne Early Warning Radar) had recorded signs of a staggered sector scramble amongst border squadrons of the Red Air Force and this, in conjunction with radio — and code-monitoring which had shown signs of furious code-communication between sections of the Red Air Force, and between the First Secretary and the Admiral of the Red Banner Northern Fleet, as well as Russian ships in the Mediterranean — all of this evidence amounted to a sighting of Gant lifting clear of the runway at Bilyarsk.
Latchford affirmed an immediate alert for both contingency refuelling points to begin transmission of the homing-signal which operated on the very special frequency of Gant's transistor-innards which would lead him home.
'Mother Two and Mother Three will go on alert now,' the Air Commodore said. 'You'll take care of Mother One yourself — at least, I presume you will, since I have no idea where to find her?' There was a chuckle at the other end of the line. Latchford had had to know about the two contingency refuelling points, but had been kept in the dark concerning the one Gant was expected to use. Aubrey sensed a communion of tension, of suppressed excitement.
'Yes, Captain Curtin will take care of Mother One,' Aubrey assured him, and then added: 'Thank you, Air Commodore — your news comes, if I may say, like a ray of pure sunshine. Many thanks.' He listened to Latchford's throaty chuckle for a moment, seeming to draw comfort from the sound, and then replaced the receiver.
Buckholz, elbows on his desk, was watching him intently as he looked up. 'They confirm? All that activity isn't just because they caught our boy?' he enquired.
Aubrey shook his head. 'No, my dear Buckholz,' Aubrey said blandly. 'AEW Radar confirms the pre-dieted activity on the part of the Red Air Force, northern and southern borders — Gant is in the air.'
Buckholz breathed deeply, his breath exhaling loudly. He turned to Anders, almost asleep next to him, and grinned with the pure self-satisfaction of a child.
'Thank God,' he whispered.
There was a silence, broken by Curtin's creaking descent from the step-ladder. When he regained the floor, he said to Aubrey: 'I didn't reckon on doing the office-boy's job when I volunteered for this!' He grinned as he said it. 'You want me to tell Washington to alert Mother One, Mr. Aubrey?'
&nb
sp; Aubrey nodded. 'Yes, my boy — do that now, would you? If the weather's still holding, that is.'
Curtin walked back to the map, picked up a pointer and tapped at a satellite weather-photograph pinned high on the wall. 'That's the latest — two a.m. your time. All clear.'
'And the track of Mother One?'
'Constant — moving slowly south, in an area of loosened pack. Temperature low enough. She's holding.'
'Good. Then put through your call, Captain. Mother One it is.'
Before Curtin could place the call, they were startled by the chatter of a teletype from the Code Room. Aubrey watched Shelley as the younger man ripped the sheet of flimsy from the machine.
'Communications picked this up only minutes ago,' he said, a slight smile on his tired face. 'Plain language. Picked up by the operator listening in on the Soviet airline frequency.'
'Ah,' Aubrey remarked. 'And…?'
'He was spotted north-west of Volgograd — almost tore the nose off the airliner, before they lost sight of him. The pilot was screaming his head off, before someone told him to keep quiet!'
'Good.'
Aubrey inspected the sheet of paper, and then offered it to Buckholz who had crossed to perch on the table.
Buckholz stared at it, as if needing to be convinced, and then said: 'Good. Damn good.' He looked into Aubrey's face, and added: 'So far, so good?'
'I agree, my dear Buckholz. Hopefully, the Russians are now scrambling everything, including the mess bar, to the south of Gant.' He rubbed his chin, and said: 'I still worry about "Big Ears", you know. Gant must be making a frightful amount of noise, heading east to the Urals.'
'It is not, my dear Kutuzov, a war situation,' the First Secretary said, seated in his chair before the round table. His eyes disregarded the map of European Russia, from the Polish border to the Urals, from the Arctic Ocean to the Black Sea, despite its glowing squares of colour, despite the winking strings of tiny lights that signalled the interceptor stations with fighters in the air, despite the other lights forming links in the glowing chain which signalled the inissile sites on full war alert. Kutuzov seemed, on the other side of the table, unable to remove his fixed stare from the hypnotic projection before him. Reluctantly, it seemed, he lifted his eyes, and gazed at the First Secretary.