Firefox Down

by Craig Thomas

Aubrey did not seem to hear the question. Instead, he pursued his explanation. 'I must talk to Hanni Vitsula in Helsinki.' He smiled, briefly and for the first time. 'Hanni has no love for Russians since they killed his father, and less love for "Finlandisation" as a way of life. He will see the problem from our point of view.'

  'The DG of Finnish Intelligence is a government official, Kenneth, even if he is a friend of yours. What will he do?'

  'I don't know - at the moment, we need friends, and he's one. Perhaps - oh, I don't know… I simply trust to a Finn's long memory. He's from the south-east himself- the part that now lies in Russia, what used to be known as Karelia. He's never been back since he was a child.' Aubrey raised his hands, palms outward, and desisted from the explanation, then added: 'I don't know what to do, Charles - I'm merely running around in this old, deserted house, opening doors with a bang and whistling to myself in the dark. Who knows what may come of it?'

  'You're hopeful something will?' Buckholz asked in surprise.

  'No. But I must try - !'

  Dawn was leaking into the heavily-clouded sky as Gant stepped stiffly out of the large MiL-8 transport helicopter. Light puffs of snow pattered against the fuselage, melting almost at once and drizzling down the olive-drab camouflage paint. Two GRU guards stood on the tarmac of the helicopter base, Kalashnikovs pointed at him, and there were another four behind him in the Mil's main cabin. His hands were handcuffed in front of him. His right arm ached. It had been locked to one of the handholds above his hard seat for the entire journey. His whole body, however, submerged that pain in a general ache. It was difficult to move. His feet seemed numb, the wound the dog had made in his calf pained him, and he staggered as he reached the bottom of the steps. A guard held him upright, not ungently but with care to keep his rifle out of range of Gant's hands.

  Then he was surrounded again by his full escort. A truck drew up near the parked MiL. Gant, with almost no interest, watched more guards debouch from it, noticed a staff car and emerging senior officers beyond it - curiosity rather than business had brought them, he thought. Then he raised his head so that he looked beyond the helicopter base down towards the town of Murmansk and the grey Kola fjord which disappeared north-wards into the heavy mist and snow towards the Barents Sea. There was the smell offish on the snowy wind. The hills behind the base were hidden by cloud. The transport airplane which was to transfer him to Moscow would just get off before the weather closed in sufficiently to prevent further flying.

  He shook his head, half-amused. He wondered why he bothered about met conditions. He was in the Soviet Union, and he was alone and he was manacled. It made no difference whether his location was Murmansk or Moscow; they were the same, cells in the same fortress prison.

  He was gestured into the back of the military truck, and helped over the lowered tailgate when his legs appeared to fail him He struggled in and sat down opposite one of the GRU guards, whose rifle was levelled. Everything was constant, and constantly repeated; wrists manacled, rifles levelled, boxlike metal containers - trucks or aircraft did not matter - and this routine would proceed endlessly… endlessly…

  He tried to believe that the routine would never change because, at the end of the journey, at the change of routine, they would begin to ask their questions. He did not wish to consider the abyss of failure that would open up then, in the first hours or even minutes of his interrogation. Thus, the journey possessed him, was everything.

  The truck moved off with a jerk the moment the rest of his guards had boarded it. Gant watched the MiL shrink in size as they left it behind. The metal and canvas of the truck pressed close around him. Someone coughed; metal scraped, boot-studs perhaps. Leather creaked. The engine of the truck throbbed. Through the V-shaped gap in the canvas at the back of the truck, he could see belching chimneys and anchored ships and grey water - most of all, he registered the movement of the truck itself.

  After some minutes, a brief stop. Red-and-white pole, a guard room. Then a glimpse of runway, a control tower. Most of all, the renewed movement of the truck. He was still travelling, the journey was everything…

  There was no destination. Only movement…

  FIVE:

  Restraints

  'I have divers - who also happen to be expert soldiers - at Kirkenes, sixty or seventy miles from our lake and our intact airframe… pray, what else do I need!' Aubrey asked, waggling his fork in Curtin's direction.

  The USN Intelligence officer brushed a hand through his hair and adopted a lugubrious expression, staring down at his plate of bacon and eggs. Eventually, unnerved by the heavy silence around the breakfast table, he murmured a reply, clearing his throat as he did so as if in apology for what he said.

  'A hell of a lot else, sir - too much, if you don't object to me saying so. Much too much.'

  Aubrey snorted, then stabbed his fork at the centre of his remaining egg. Yolk oozed onto the plate. Buckholz glanced at Pyott, who had arrived no more than an hour earlier and evidently had not slept. The Deputy Director of the Covert Action Staff of the'CIA searched the English soldier's face for signs of complicity; a willingness to squash Aubrey's ever more unrestrained imagination. Pyott, however, appeared willing to remain silent while Aubrey rambled, prodded, enquired, snapped.

  Buckholz sighed audibly. 'There's nothing you can do, Kenneth - nothing at all. You're clutching at straws.' He spread his hands in front of his chest, in sign of pacification. 'It's not realistic, it's not even adult, to scratch at this particular sore the way you're doing. Let's settle for your guy Waterford triggering the charges he's planted…?'

  Aubrey glared at him, his nostrils pinched and white, his lips bloodless. 'Adult? Childish?' he repeated scathingly. 'Do you think, when we play our suburban, late-century version of the Great Game, we are ever being adult?'

  'Kenneth - ' Pyott warned quietly.

  'It was not adult - it was not the behaviour of a gentleman - to throw prisoners under interrogation from helicopters or encourage murder in south-east Asia!'

  'Kenneth be quiet!' Pyott snapped. 'It was not civilised to sacrifice people for metal, lives for avionics - as you did, as we all have done with this operation.' Pyott's face was white, highlighting the dark smudges beneath his eyes. Aubrey appeared abashed, even ashamed.

  'Forgive me, Charles - I apologise for that remark,' he said.

  'It's long ago and far away-another country,' Buckholz replied.

  'Thank you.' Aubrey turned to Pyott immediately. The soldier saw that four hours' sleep had done nothing to improve Aubrey's temper or patience. He was the pestering, gifted child of SIS, and his impatience had become habitual, even incessant. Like the highly intelligent children he somehow suggested, he was solitary, frustrated, intolerantly and urgently alive inside his own mind. He could handle people with suavity and aplomb when he chose, but for the most part he regarded the world as a stumbling-block, no more, placed between himself and his goal. Aubrey was simply too clever.

  'Kenneth, you are silently pleading with me,' Pyott said with heavy humour. 'What is it?'

  'I - ' Aubrey waved his hands over the table like a hypnotist. 'I've seen airframes transported on motorways-in this country. Their wings are folded, or they are absent. What I need is someone to take the wings off this poor butterfly.'

  Pyott nodded to the Americans, requiring them to answer. Curtin, grinning suddenly and rubbing his hand through his hair once more, said, 'You may have seen them here-but you won't get trucks to move far enough and fast enough in Finnish Lapland at this time of year. You don't even have roads they could use, always supposing they could move!'

  Aubrey's face was taut with disappointed anger. 'I see,' he managed to utter.

  'What you need is a chopper - a very big chopper,' Curtin added. Aubrey's face brightened.

  'Which one?' He immediately placed a small, gold-bound notebook beside his plate, and touched the tip of a pencil to his tongue. 'Pray, what is the name of this marvellous beast?'

  'You need the ne
w Sikorsky. Skyhook - it could lift fifty thousand pounds in a sling load with no trouble.'

  'And - this helicopter could transport the airframe?'

  'It might take it as much as two hours to get the Firefox back into Norway from the lake. The problem is - the closest one is probably in Germany, as far south as Wiesbaden.'

  'But it could transport it, in a single lift, all the way out of Finland?'

  'Yes.'

  'Christ, Gene-you're getting as crazy as he is!' Buckholz exclaimed. 'Have you seen the met. forecasts for that area? You'd be real lucky to get the Skyhook up there, never mind operating!'

  'I'm afraid that's true, Mr. Aubrey,' Curtin reluctantly agreed.

  'Could it lift it straight out of the lake?' Aubrey persisted.

  Curtin nodded. 'But, I suggest you have winches as a back-up, to haul that airplane's ass out of the water onto dry land. The Skyhook would like that - and the weather wouldn't help a straight lift, either.' He watched Aubrey scribbling furiously in his tiny notebook, and added, as if dictating: 'From Waterford's report, it must have run backwards into deep water - you could winch it out, up the slope, along a portable roadway…'

  'Just a moment!' Pyott snapped. 'I'm going to put-a hypothetical case, shall we say? - to the RAF's Field Recovery Unit at Abingdon. I want an expert opinion - with apologies to Captain Curtin - on all this speculation.' He stood up, dabbing his lips, then dropped his napkin on the table. 'I shan't be long,' he offered in a cheery voice.

  When the door had closed behind him, Buckholz leaned over the table and whispered fiercely at Aubrey: 'We know men and machines can do anything you want them to - but what about politicians, Kenneth? You haven't got a dime's worth of change out of the Finns since yesterday. Even your buddy in Helsinki isn't too crazy about more interference from us - '

  'Or from the Russians.'

  'Don't count on that,' Buckholz said abruptly. Ignoring him, Aubrey addressed Curtin. 'What else do I need?'

  'I agree with Director Buckholz, Mr. Aubrey - you need the politicians to say yes to you. But, if you're asking me, I'd think about maybe even dismantling the airplane and taking it away in pieces - in case you haven't gotten a Skyhook to the lake. You could hide the pieces and go back later…?' Curtin shrugged. 'So,' he continued, 'you need technicians, equipment, winches and pulleys, cutting tools, airframe experts, and a hell of a lot more besides, all gathered around your lake, and you need the utmost secrecy and you need time.'

  'How much time?'

  'From beginning to end - a lot of days.'

  'And Gant isn't going to be able to give you that time, Kenneth,' Buckholz supplied, staring at his fingertips as he spread them on either side of his cup of coffee. They drummed pointlessly, without discernible rhythm. 'Gant hasn't got any time left, so neither do we.' He looked up from the table, shaking his head. 'This whole conversation's pointless.'

  'Don't say that- '

  'I have to, Kenneth. All right, you're the guy, the main man, the one who dreamed up this crazy scheme - and almost made it work - but it hasn't worked. Blow the damned airframe into little pieces!'

  Aubrey stood up. 'And that is your considered, your expert, opinion, Charles?' he asked.

  Buckholz nodded. 'That's it.'

  'Then I beg to disagree.' He looked at his plate with an old man's reluctance to leave food uneaten, then shook his head. 'I must talk to London - to Helsinki via London, to be exact. You gentlemen will excuse me.'

  He closed the door of the small dining-room in the Mess behind him. A secure line direct to Shelley at Queen Anne's Gate had been installed in the bedroom he had been allocated. He went heavily up the staircase, his mind whirling with the possibilities of his scheme. Pride stung him into desire. He wanted action, activity, organisation, a scenario. He would not let the aircraft go; could not bring himself to destroy the airframe. Guilt, too, hounded him now; had awoken him in the short night when he had tried to sleep. Guilt for Fenton, who had been tricked to his brutal murder on the bank of the Moskva after doing good work trail-blazing for Gant; guilt for Pavel Upenskoy, guilt for Baranovich and Semelovsky and Kreshin, all of whom had died at his orders, or had been considered no more than expendable in promoting the success of the operation. It was a heavy toll of good people; best people.

  To destroy the airframe now, scatter it over the bed of the frozen lake, would be more criminal than creating the circumstances of those deaths. Gant was lost. Strangely, he did not feel any acute guilt at the American's loss… but the others…

  He closed the door behind him and crossed to the telephone. He felt the physical sensation of weight between his shoulder-blades, slowing him, wearing him down. He felt he would only rid himself of it if he recovered the Firefox; would only reduce and lighten it if he tried for such a recovery.

  He dialled Shelley's number.

  'Peter?'

  'Yes, sir. Good morning.'

  'What news?'

  'As far as we can tell, he hasn't arrived yet… sorry.'

  'Put me through immediately to Hanni Vitsula, Peter, I must talk to him. I'll wait until you call me back.'

  He replaced the receiver, and rubbed his hands on his thighs. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he recaptured the position his body had adopted when he first woke and made to rise. Hunched, small, lost. Guilt, yes - guilt and pride. Two emotions to move mountains; or bury people beneath mountains.

  Stop it, he told himself, sitting upright, hands thrust into his pockets. Prepare yourself for the next step, for this conversation.

  The Finns - more precisely, the Finnish Cabinet Defence Committee under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister - had agreed to the overflight of the Firefox and to certain, very limited back-up facilities and incursions of Finnish airspace. Aubrey had been tempted by a new mood in the country, under the new government, to use Finnish airspace rather than order Gant to fly the longer journey down the spine of Norway to rendezvous with the British Airways flight from Stockholm to London. Infra-red invisibility would have been guaranteed by the aircraft's proximity to the civilian airliner for the last crucial stage of its flight across the North Sea. The Finns had agreed because 'Finlandisation' had become a term of abuse, an insult to a resurgent mood of independence in the country. But-

  But, but, but…

  Army deserters crossing from the Soviet Union into Finland had been publicised, and not handed back. Granted asylum. Key industrial projects in the Soviet Union designed and built by the Finns had been halted or suspended until more acceptable trade agreements and repayment terms had been agreed. All good signs…

  But, but, but -

  The telephone rang, startling Aubrey out of his reverie of justification and optimism. He snatched at the receiver. 'Yes?'

  'Director Vitsula,' Shelley said, and then he heard, more distantly, the voice of the Director-General of Finnish Intelligence.

  'Good morning, Kenneth.'

  'Good morning, Hanni - '

  'What is this business we have to discuss - your aide tells me it is urgent… is that so?'

  'I'm afraid it is.'

  'What has changed since last night?'

  'Nothing - except our attitude here to what we discovered.'

  'Yes.'

  'What is the feeling at present in your Cabinet Defence Committee?'

  'Deadlock - I can put it no more hopefully than that.'

  'What about the Russians?'

  'I think they are more angry with them than with your country and the Americans. They do not know about - your little escapade, only about the overflight by the Nimrod, which they permitted, in the event… but, there has been a leak in the newspapers here

  'What?'

  'Only concerning intrusions into our airspace by Soviet fighters - nothing more. But the Prime Minister has made the most serious protest to Moscow concerning the matter.'

  'Is there any hope there, Hanni?' Aubrey was speaking very loudly now because the Finn's voice seemed more distant.

  'Hope for wha
t?'

  'A - ' Aubrey hesitated, then said: 'That matter we talked about last night… a fishing expedition.'

  'Kenneth - I have seen the Foreign Minister and the Prime Minister - nothing, I'm afraid.'

  'Do they understand?'

  'Yes, Kenneth, they understand. They are not unsympathetic. But - troops, vehicles, helicopters - it would be easier to ignore the whole problem, or drop a bomb in the lake…"

  Aubrey, enraged, snapped: 'What is it they want?'

  'Ah,' Vitsula sighed. In front of his reply, as if coming from the next room, the line crackled and spat. 'Reciprocity and access were two of the words being tentatively used, I believe,' Vitsula said.

  'Would they agree, in that case?' Aubrey snapped.

  'I - don't know. It might… soften them.'

  'It's a high price.'

  'Higher than you think. Access to highest levels, access to the codes, access to the scenarios regarding Scandinavia…'

  'You mean your people want a full Intelligence partnership with NATO while remaining neutral?' Aubrey asked, taken aback. He rubbed his forehead, wiping slowly and with force at the creases he found, as if they surprised him.'It's your price, of course.'

  'My suggestion, yes.'

  'In return-?'

  'We would keep our heads down - three wise monkeys. '

  'For how long?'

  'I - don't know. How long must you have?'

  'I don't know!'

  'Then you must think it over. Just one more thing, Kenneth.'

  'Yes?'

  'Can you assure me - give me your word - that our friends across the border know nothing, nothing at all, of the whereabouts of their property? I must have that assurance, Kenneth, before I do anything more. Are you able to give it?'

  Aubrey envisaged Gant's face for an instant, cleared his throat, and said, 'Yes. I can give you that assurance. They are in complete ignorance.'

  'Thank you. When do we talk again ?'

  'Later. I will talk to London and Washington.'

  'Good.'

  'The price is very high.'

  'So are the risks.'