Authors: Craig Thomas
'It was-such a beautiful aircraft,' Vladimirov announced abstractedly. 'And the American showed us how good it really was.'
'Perhaps they'll build us some more - but don't count on it.' Kutuzov's laughter clogged and grated in his throat. The First Secretary offered them vodka.
'Come,' he said. 'A toast.'
Two frozen lakes. Silence except for the clicking of the automatic ignition with no fuel with which to work. Gant switched it off. Silence. Two frozen lakes, lying roughly north-south, one larger and more elongated than the other, both surrounded by birch and conifer forest. Snowbound, isolated, uninhabited country in the north of Finnish Lapland.
Little more, according to the map on his knee, than forty miles from the border with the Soviet Union. His escape from the Foxbat had taken him further north than he had wished and turned him unnoticed back towards Russia.
Silence. Wind. Out of time.
He was gliding, the heavy airframe wobbling and quivering in the stormy airflow. Altitude, two thousand five hundred feet. The lakes moved slowly southwards behind him. He banked sharply and glided towards them once again.
He would not eject, would not… He'd come this far. The airplane stayed in one piece.
Two thousand feet. The larger of the two lakes was perhaps more than one mile long - long enough to be a runway. The second lake was fatter, rounder, and he would have to land diagonally across it to be certain of stopping the Firefox with room to spare. There appeared to be a lot of surface snow which would effectively slow the aircraft. It would have to be the larger lake.
Pretend it's the floe, he told himself. Just pretend it's the floe. At the end of March, the ice should be thick enough, it should bear the weight of the airframe.
It didn't matter. It was the only available alternative to a crash-landing, or to an ejection which would leave the Firefox to plough into the ground and break up once it ran out of supporting air. He would not let that happen. Instead, he would land the airplane, and wait. When he was certain the search for him had been called off, he could communicate with Bardufoss or Kirkenes - Kirkenes was much closer - and they could drop him fuel. He checked that the airbrakes were in and the booster pumps off. All the trims he set to zero. He tugged at his straps, checking their security.
He could make it. The conifers grew down to the southern neck of the narrow lake and stretched out drunkenly over it - he could see that clearly - and if he could get in close enough to the frozen shore, he would be sheltered from any chance visual sighting. Excitement coursed through him. He could do it. He could preserve the Firefox.
Altitude, a thousand feet. He had only the one chance.
He nudged the rudder and the Firefox swung as lazily and surely through the chill grey air as a great bird. He lowered the undercarriage as he levelled, and operated the flaps. Four hundred feet, well above the trees which rushed beneath the aircraft's belly. The lake joggled in his vision ahead of the plane's nose. Two hundred feet and out over the ice. He'd got it right. The Firefox sagged now, in full flap, dropping with frightening swiftness, and the wheels skimmed the surface snow for a moment, then dug into it, flinging up a great wake around and behind him. He gripped the control column fiercely, keeping the nose steady. The nosewheel touched, dug in, and Gant saw the surface snow ahead rushing towards him, beneath him. The Firefox began to slow, began to stroll, then walk…
The Firefox rolled gently towards the southern neck of the lake, towards the frozen stream that either fed or drained the lake in summer. His speed slowed quickly - too quickly? The aircraft seemed to no more than crawl towards the overhanging shelter of the trees. Would he make it? It had to reach the cover of the trees...
It was enough. The airplane had sufficient speed to move in close to the bank at the very end of the lake, where it narrowed almost to a point at its conjunction with the frozen stream. Low-hanging branches deposited their weight of snow on the cockpit canopy as he slowed to a final stop. Branches scraped along the fuselage. The nosewheel stopped just short of the bank.
He'd done it. The Firefox was hidden. In one piece, and safely hidden. He breathed deeply. Then he raised the cockpit canopy. Cold air rushed in, chilling him to the bone, making his teeth chatter uncontrollably. He grinned at the drop in his body temperature. He disconnected his oxygen supply, the radio and thought-guidance leads to his helmet; he unlocked his leg restraints, and his seat straps. He removed the helmet and, as he stood up in the cockpit, he began to laugh.
Yes, the trees hid almost everything. One wingtip and the tail assembly were still exposed, but the shape of the aircraft was altered, destroyed by camouflage. The sky was heavy with snow. A fall would hide the signs of his landing. It would be all right.
The Firefox lurched, as if the starboard landing gear had snapped. Gant clung to the side of the cockpit to steady himself, his ears filled with a terrible, strained cracking noise. He dropped the helmet he had just removed.
A black, crooked line, like a tree growing in hideous fast-motion, moved away across the ice. Branches grew from it. The Firefox lurched again, this time to port, and settled unsurely. Other black trees grew out across the ice around and behind him.
Horrified, he looked over the fuselage. He could see water behind the starboard wing, water behind and in front of the port wing. Water beyond the tail. Huge jagged plates and slabs of ice bobbed and rubbed one another around the Firefox, which now floated on its belly, buoyed up for the moment by the empty fuel tanks in the wings and fuselage. Gant knew that as soon as the engine outlets and tailpipes filled, the aircraft would sink steadily into the lake.
The tail of the Firefox slid deeper into the water as the tailpipes and inlets flooded and the undercarriage sought the pebbled floor of the lake where it sloped steeply from the bank. The nose of the aircraft jutted into the lower branches of the nearest firs but it, too, was slowly sinking. Gant did not understand. The ice was thin and weak at the neck of the lake, even though the stream that provided the lake's outlet was evidently frozen between its banks. Everything was frozen - yet the Firefox was sinking.
He felt panic mount, rising like a thermometer. He could not control it because he had used all his reserves of energy and self-control to reach the lake with the aircraft intact, and this disaster had struck at the moment of his release, his greatest relief. The panic rose in waves through him, and his hands gripped the side of the cockpit, numb with the pressure he exerted; a mad, dazed ship's captain waiting for the end.
Floor of the lake steep - draining water leaving a pocket of air under the ice, making it thin - engine weight will roll her back into the lake, further out - she'll drown, drown…
The jagged plates of ice touched, rubbed, moved apart. He could easily make it to the shore, even though the overhead branches were already out of reach. It was the airplane, the Firefox -
There was nothing he could do. His frame shuddered with tension and futility. He was weary, and his limbs seemed very heavy. He had nothing left. Water lapped up the fuselage, very slowly moving higher - the branches over the cockpit were now over the up-jutting nose. The huge weight of the engines and the airframe was slowly dragging the Firefox deeper and further out into the lake. The long nose section thrust from the water like the snout of a creature that had breached the flimsy ice.
The cracks had stopped. They branched perhaps fifty or sixty yards out into the lake behind the aircraft. The loose plates of ice had floated away from the fuselage to gather like a motiveless crowd where the ice remained deceptively firm. To his left, the snow-covered shore of the lake was still within jumping distance.
Gant climbed onto the lip of the cockpit, poising himself, his hands gripping the edge of the cockpit tightly. He looked back down at the still-lit instruments, the fallen helmet, the pilot's couch…
The Firefox lurched backwards, out from beneath the shelter of the trees, the water lapping the fuselage. Now, it was little more than a foot from the edge of the cockpit; another movement, and the first icy ripples would spill into it - fusing, shorting, damaging everything. The panic in his stomach and chest would not subside. There was no nightmare of Vietnam, not in this cold, not with the smoky grey shoreline and the omnipresence of show. But he was as bereft of purpose as if he were suffering one of his bouts of paralysis.
The aircraft was steady now, tilting backwards on the sloping bed of the lake. Perhaps only for seconds… The water was ten inches from the lip of the cockpit… the tail was half-submerged, the huge engines already under water…
He dropped, in his apelike crouch, back into the cockpit, his hands nerveless and numb as he tried to make them operate small, delicate switches and buttons. Thought-guidance - shut down… come on… weapons-systems - shut down… radio, radar, auto-pilot, ECM systems - shut down… His hands seemed warmer now, no longer lumps at the ends of his arms but active, moving with a trained, automatic precision and speed. In seconds, he shut down the aircraft, killing it, rendering it lifeless. Then he climbed over the lip of the cockpit. He was still wearing his parachute. Clipped to his life-jacket were his inflatable dinghy and his survival pack. Icy water touched his heel, and he withdrew his foot. Awkwardly, he moved over the cockpit sill, his toes feeling clumsily for the spring-loaded steps. When he found them, and balanced himself, he pulled out the cockpit canopy hand crank from its compartment below the cockpit sill. He cranked down the cockpit canopy until it closed tightly. Then he closed the manual, exterior locks.
A moment of pain, of acute failure, and then he poised and leapt. He landed in soft snow, paining his hand on a buried tree root, rolling over and scrabbling for a hold on frozen grass and icy rocks beneath the snow. His survival pack and the dinghy lay beneath him. Snow filled his mouth and eyes, even his ears, though they were still alive to the terrible scraping lurch that meant the Firefox was moving further out, further under the surface.
Yes. He turned to look. The water had reached the cockpit - thank God he'd remembered to close and lock it - and the nose pointed to the grey sky at a more acute angle than before. He drew his knees up to his chest - the cold of the snow seeping through the pressure suit and the thin underclothing beneath - and dropped his head. He could not move. He felt it was like waiting by a deathbed - but not his father's, for that had been an impatient wait with release and the throwing off of hatred at the end of the tunnel.
It would be no more than a minute now -
He laughed; high and crazy. The noise was like the call of a rook in the thick cold air. He could not prevent it; a cackle of survival and defeat.
He'd certainly hidden the Firefox, hidden it good -
He could not stop the laughter. Tears rolled down his blanched, cold cheeks, down the creases of his pained face. He cackled like a madman.
He'd really, really hidden it -
Another grating lurch - some part of him remained surprised that the undercarriage had withstood the pressure upon it - and he looked up to see the cockpit now half-submerged, the water lapping towards the nose of the Firefox.
And the laughter stopped.
The locked and shut down aircraft was twenty yards from him, the black nose jutting, the cockpit half-submerged. Everything -
everything
electronic, every means of communication, was locked beneath the canopy, locked inside the airframe. Radio, radio,
radio
…
Gant swallowed, savagely wiped his mouth. The aircraft was steady again, one of the wheels, perhaps, halted against the chock of a boulder or sunk in softer mud. Tantalisingly steady -
There was nothing -
'Nothing, dammit!' he exploded, banging his clenched fists on his thighs. A bird replied in a hoarse voice from one of the trees. 'Nothing - !' He could do nothing. He couldn't sit in the Firefox until help came, he couldn't dismantle the radio and rescue it, he couldn't, couldn't couldn't -
Strangely, he heard the voice of Aubrey then. The soft, self-deprecating, insinuating tones. His final briefing, the fake transistor radio that was a homing receiver which had saved his life, listening as it had done for signals from 'Mother One', the submarine that had refuelled the Firefox. It was attached by a single adhesive strip to one corner of the instrument panel.
Receiver - ?
Transmitter, too… Aubrey had been reluctant to mention it, hovered over the words like a choosily-feeding pet until he had uttered them.
In case of some -
final
emergency, my dear fellow… not likely, of course… but, it has an emergency signal facility if you - have to… you understand
…?
Gant was on his feet, still nodding at the remembered words as he had nodded when he first heard them. Aubrey didn't want to mention crashing, injury, death, but Gant had understood.
And he had left it in the cockpit!
He slipped and scrambled down the steep bank. He undipped his survival pack, his parachute harness, the dinghy. The dinghy - ! A fringe of ice cracked beneath his weight, and he slid into the icy water. He cried out with shock. He stepped back - pebbles and larger boulders on the bed of the lake, so he moved carefully - and the water retreated. He dragged the dinghy towards him, and inflated it. It boiled and enlarged and groaned, then bobbed on the water. His teeth chattered, his whole body shuddered. A bird croaked, as if in mockery. The nose of the Firefox tilted upwards like a snub, a dismissal of his frantic efforts. He climbed into the dinghy, and paddled furiously towards the aircraft. His head bobbed up at every frantic stroke to study the unmoving nose of the plane. His body temperature continued to drop. His heartbeat raced with tension, with the sense of time lost and almost run out, with the fight to keep the blood warm and circulating.
His hand touched the fuselage, and he withdrew it as if shocked, in case the pressure of fingertips might be enough to thrust it beneath the water. He juggled and bumped the dinghy slowly along the fuselage until it was beneath the cockpit tilted crazily high above him. His hands felt for the spring-loaded steps up the side of the fuselage.