Authors: Craig Thomas
The two Foxbats pressed down upon him. Altitude now forty-nine thousand feet. The three aircraft were in what might have been termed a dive. The two Russian pilots had tilted him forward and down, throwing the Firefox over a cliff of air towards the cloud beneath.
Dive -
Gant thrust the control column forward, then rammed the throttles forward almost to the detent and reheat. The Firefox leapt at the cloud-layer, the huge Turmansky jets roaring. He saw the two Foxbats accelerate behind him, closing the gap he had opened. He opened the airbrakes, jolting the aircraft, then flung the Firefox into a roll and pull-through, suddenly changing the direction in which he was moving. It avoided the optimum firing position he had given them on his tail, and increased the time lag between them. He closed the airbrakes and pushed the throttles open as he came out of the pull-through. In his mirror, two abandoned stars gleamed and winked. On his screen, the white dot moved away from him. He forced his left hand to keep the throttles wide open. The silver trail of droplets sprayed out into a mist behind him. The white dot on the screen steadied, altered course by going through his own manoeuvre, and then began to struggle to regain the centre of the screen. His headset babbled in Russian, from the pilots and from Bilyarsk.
He jabbed the airbrakes out again, slowing with wrenching suddenness, rolled and pulled through, closed the brakes, and opened the throttles again. Once more, the two Foxbats were left further behind and away from his tail. He felt the suit around him resist the pressure of the G-forces. He was now travelling directly west, across the neutrality of Finland towards Norway. How much distance the tanks would still give him he did not know because he had no idea how quickly he was losing fuel in that sparkling, dazzling spray of diamonds behind him. But any distance between the Firefox and the border with Russia was good and right and necessary.
The Foxbats altered course and closed once more. Airbrakes, roll, pull-through, close brakes, throttles. He whirled like a falling sycamore pod once again.
Thirty thousand feet… twenty-five… twenty, nineteen… the figures unrolled on the altimeter. The white dot that was the two Foxbats still in close formation was steady in the lower half of his screen. No more than a mile away…
Fourteen thousand, and the sun disappeared and he was blind, the grey cloud slipping past as if his speed were tearing it like rags, but it was still thick enough to exclude the light. Ten thousand feet…
Eight, seven, six -
He used the airbrakes and closed the throttles. He pulled back on the column. The Firefox began to level out.
Four… three… two-point-seven, two-five. The white dot split into two tiny stars, and both moved nearer the centre of the screen. The headset babbled. Bilyarsk ordered the border squadrons at top speed to the last visual sighting, before he entered the cloud.
Cloud,
cloud -
The Proximity Warning began to bleep again as the Foxbats closed.
Fifteen hundred feet, the glimpse of a sombre, snow-covered landscape, an horizon of low white hills, a uniformly grey sky now above him - he pulled back on the column, and nosed the Firefox back into the cloud. The world contracted, wrapping its shreds tightly around the cockpit. He slowed almost to stalling speed, feeling the adrenalin and nerves and fear and sweat catch up with his decisions. He breathed quickly and heavily enough to begin to cloud the facemask of his helmet. There was a heavy dew of sweat on his brow. The two white dots hurried towards the centre of his screen, blind but somehow confident. They would pass within a mile of him, to starboard of his present flight path. Other, new dots had appeared at the edge of the screen, like spectators spilling onto a football field. He demanded a range-to-target readout for the approaching squadrons. Then he altered the request - time-to-target. Two minutes seven-point-four, the computer read-out supplied. Then the distance between the two Foxbats increased, and Gant realised that one of them was retreating again above the cloud layer; a tactic designed to catch him by surprise if he suddenly increased altitude. He would pop out of the cloud into bright betraying sunlight, within missile range. He grinned.
He banked the Firefox, moving to intercept the other Foxbat as it continued to rush through the cloud. He armed the only remaining Anab missile, and waited. He cancelled the read-out, replacing it with information on the closing Foxbat. Range-to-target two miles, one-point-nine, one-point-seven… He activated the thought-guidance systems on the console to his left.
He would have to be right. Optimum moment. The Anabs that had been replaced by the submarine crew on the ice-floe were not equipped with a steering system linked to his thought-control capability. They were an earlier model, captured from a Foxbat in Syria. He had to rely on judgement, on selecting the exact moment. He could not guide the missile, once he launched it.
Point-nine… point eight-seven, six, five…
six, fire
. He formed the command precisely, in Russian, and felt the Anab drop, then flick forward. It was an orange glow in the cloud, then it disappeared. He watched the screen, the infra-red glow of the missile's exhaust slipping across the small gap of screen between himself and the Foxbat. The Russian fighter, blind in the cloud, continued to descend like a white meteorite, nothing showing on his radar.
Then the white dot suddenly altered course. The pilot's headset had yelled a warning. The orange dot encroached, neared, sidled towards… The white dot accelerated, changed course, dipped and weaved. The orange dot, like a faithful dog, ran behind, accelerated, sniffing the radar and other electronic emissions from the Foxbat, closed, dodged with the white dot, closed, closed -
A brief flare on the screen, and then there remained only the white dots of the second Foxbat above the clouds, the slowly-moving AWACS plane, and the more distant interceptors at the edge of the screen. Gant banked the Firefox, easing the throttles forward as he settled on his new heading, and began running west. Altitude three thousand feet, speed two hundred and seventy knots, fuel non-existent.
The crowd of white dots rushed towards the centre of the radar screen, towards the now-fading flare that had a moment before been an aircraft and a pilot. The cloud slipped past him, seemingly lighter and thiner.
He tensed himself for the first visual sighting when he ran out of the cloud.
The ministry car had left the M1 north of Leicester, and they had used the A46 through Newark and Lincoln to reach Scampton by lunchtime. Flat land beneath a cloud-strewn sky, the three honey-coloured towers of Lincoln Cathedral overlooking the red-roofed city, and then they were on a minor road between clipped, weather-strained hedges before arriving at the Guard Room of the RAF station.
Kenneth Aubrey had been voluble during the journey, as excited as a child on an annual holiday. To the two Americans, Buckholz and Curtin, he was tiresome in his complete and impenetrable pleasure at the success of the Firefox operation. Their passes were inspected by the guard, and then they were directed towards the CO's office.
Group Captain Bradnum was on the steps of the main administration building, two stories of red brick, and he hurried to the car as it came to a halt. Aubrey almost bounced out of the rear seat to shake his hand, his smile bordering on something as vulgar and uninhibited as a grin. Bradnum's heavy features reflected the expression he saw on Aubrey's lips. It was all right. Everything was all right.
'Well, Group Captain?' Aubrey asked archly. Buckholz and Curtin left the car with less speed and more dignity, yet with as much pleasurable anticipation.
'He must be safe by now,' Bradnum replied.
Aubrey glanced at his watch. 'The British Airways flight from Stockholm leaves in thirty minutes, I see. I presume Gant's going to be on time - mm, Charles?' He turned to Buckholz, who shrugged, then nodded. 'Oh, my apologies, Group Captain - Charles Buckholz of the the CIA, and Captain Eugene Curtin of the USN Office of Naval Intelligence.' Hands were shaken. When the formalities were over, Aubrey said, 'You said he must be safe by now. Why? Has anything happened?'
Bradnum's face was lugubrious. 'The Nimrod - at your request-was monitoring Gant's advised flight path…'
'Yes, yes,' Aubrey snapped impatiently. 'What of it?'
'Only minutes ago there was nothing in the area except a Russian AWACS plane on the Soviet side of the border with Finland.'
'And - ?'
'Now there are two Foxbat interceptors in that airspace - and a great deal of coded signal traffic, and -' Bradnum shrugged. His mirroring of Aubrey's smile had been unwarranted, a moment away from the truth. 'Eastoe in the Nimrod claims they were climbing very fast, very positively…'
'On an interception course?'
'They're close enough to spit at the Firefox, Eastoe said.'
'Why weren't we told this?' Buckholz demanded heavily.
'It happened only minutes ago.'
'And in those minutes?'
'Eastoe's reported a great deal of manoeuvring…'
Aubrey turned away, facing south across the still-wet runways. Beyond the hangars and other buildings, beyond the flagpole and the perimeter fence, a sudden gleam of sunlight displayed the distant towers of Lincoln Cathedral on its perch of limestone. Then the towers were dulled as the watery sun disappeared behind a swiftly-moving cloud. He turned back to Bradnum.
The noise of an RAF Vulcan taking off seemed a mocking, unnecessary intrusion into the tense silence.
'I know Eastoe - what's his best guess?' Aubrey asked quietly. 'He would have one and he would have offered it, asked or no.'
Bradnum nodded. 'They've been in the tightest formation and descending very slowly for two minutes or more. He thinks the Firefox is there, too. It's too deliberate to be for no reason.'
Aubrey snapped his fingers in an inadequate expression of anger and urgency.
'We must talk to Eastoe,' he said, addressing Buckholz. 'At once. From your Ops. Room, Group Captain. Lead on, if you please.'
At the edge of eyesight, another shaft of sunlight warmly lit the distant cathedral towers. Aubrey shivered with the cold of the wind.
'What now? What now?' the First Secretary demanded. The Tupolev Tu-144 was cruising at fifty thousand feet, almost a hundred miles of the journey from Bilyarsk to Moscow already accomplished.
Vladimirov leaned heavily on the other side of the map-table, his eyes focused upon the dark-haired wrists that protruded from beneath the Russian leader's shirt cuffs. Grey hairs, too…
The report from the surviving Foxbat confirmed that visual contact with the Firefox had been lost. Gant was hidden somewhere in the twelve or thirteen thousand feet of the cloud layer. On low power, an infra-red trace would be difficult to establish, almost impossible to pinpoint and attack. Because attack would be the next order. Vladimirov knew that. For him the game was up. Deluded by the apparent passivity of the American and the success of his two Foxbat pilots, Vladimirov had fatally delayed the order to the border squadrons on the Kola Peninsula to scramble. Now, he was once more blind, the Firefox's anti-radar concealing the American. Neither the surviving Foxbat nor the AWACS Tupolev 'Moss' could detect his presence.
Vladimirov's own future remained difficult to envisage. His pride was hurt. He had lost to the American once again, and he could not forgive himself. The anger of others failed to interest him.
Eventually, he looked up at the Russian leader. The man's face was dark with habitual anger, habitual power. Threat. The image of the bully. Yet the stupid man had no ideas of his own - had no
conception
.
The scatter of luminous blips representing the scrambled interceptors, mainly MiG-25s and swing-wing MiG-27 Floggers, moved across the bright map towards the border with Finland. Other dots scurried south-eastwards from the west of North Cape, their contact time still six minutes away. Although no more than a futile gesture, the AWACS Tupolev had changed course to patrol the hundred miles or so of border which contained the point at which Gant would have crossed -
had crossed
, he reminded himself-into Russia. The single remaining Foxbat's white dot buzzed and twisted in tight little circles on the map, like an insect dying.
'In two minutes we will have eighteen, even twenty-four aircraft in the area,' Vladimirov said calmly. 'Visual contact will be re-established.'
The First Secretary sneered, then compressed his lips above his clenched jaw. When he spoke, all he said was: 'And what will you do if and when he is sighted?'
'I await your orders, Comrade First Secretary…' Vladimirov announced in a quiet, restrained voice. Behind the Russian leader, Air Marshal Kutuzov nodded with the wisdom and cowardice of great age, paining Vladimirov by his assent. Andropov smiled thinly, and flicked a little nod in the direction of the general. The gesture acknowledged the acquisition of good sense, proper caution; the priority of survival. The First Secretary appeared suspicious, then mollified.
'Very well.' He leant more closely over the surface of the map, the colours of the projectedjand mottling his features. It was a parody of knowledge apeing the strategist. The First Secretary had been a Political Commissar during the Great Patriotic War. His reputation suggested, even in the sanitised, history-book version now current, that he had killed many more Russians than he had Nazis. No, no, Vladimirov warned himself, stilling the angry tremor of his hands. You've begun it-play it out. 'Very well,' the First Secretary repeated. 'We - will wait, until our forces are in the
area
...' He looked to Vladimirov for approval, and the general nodded perfunctorily.
Masterly, Vladimirov announced silently and with irony. Quite masterly. Aloud, he said: 'Contact time of closest squadrons - one minute. Warn them to concentrate on infrared search. Blanket the area. Gant is virtually weaponless, and out of fuel.' Even to himself, his optimism sounded remarkably hollow. It appeared, however, to satisfy Andropov and the First Secretary.