Authors: Craig Thomas
Felt, fumbled, found… He tested his chilly weight against the strength of his arms, and then heaved his body out of the dinghy, feet scrabbling - careful, don't kick, don't struggle - until they, too, discovered toe-holds. He hung there for a moment, sensing the steadiness of the airframe. It was holding. He began climbing, hand over hand, feet following with exaggerated caution, slipping more than once.
Lip of the cockpit, smoothness of the canopy…
He rested, aware of the airframe now as a see-saw. He waited for it to move. It remained still. The water covered the rear section of the canopy. Water would spill into the cockpit when he opened it. It wouldn't have to matter.
Left-hand side of the instrument panel. He unlocked the canopy, then cranked it slowly open. Water gurgled into the cockpit, splashing down instruments, becoming a pool in the well of the pilot's couch. He eased the canopy open sufficiently to insert his gloved hands, and scrabbled blindly, leaning forward, touching along the instrument panel, across dials and read-outs and displays and buttons and switches, until he felt the edge of the homing device. Like a black cigarette-case, slightly larger than that, same shape…
He tugged at it. The adhesive held it. With both hands he heaved and it detached itself from the panel. With a chilly, sodden, shivering triumph, he drew it out and clutched it against his side, hugging it to him like a prize. Still the airframe remained motionless, rock-steady. He began to crank down the canopy once more
The Firefox shuddered, and the entire airframe lurched away from him towards deeper water. The huge tailplanes sank almost to their tips. The Firefox continued to slide away. With the instinct to preserve himself and the aircraft, he cranked more furiously and grabbed with his other hand at the handhold just below the edge of the cockpit. A tremor ran through him as he heard the homing device slide down the fuselage with a clatter, then drop. He cranked furiously, closing the canopy. He dropped the cranking-handle then, in order to hang on with both hands. He knew the Firefox was going under…
He would float away. He looked around frantically for the homing device, and for the dinghy, already ten yards away. Surely he had heard the impact of the plastic on ice, not the slight splash of its falling into the water - but he could not locate it. The water mounted the canopy towards him. The airframe was steadily rolling backwards now. It would stop only when the slope of the lake-bed levelled. The water was only inches away - he would float off.
He released the grip of his right hand, then made to move his left. He unclenched his fingers from the handhold, and tried to move his arm. Water touched his fingers, embraced his thighs. The canopy was almost submerged, the nose was sinking. The tips of the tailplane were still visible, the leading edges of the wings protruded from the dark water. He could not move his left arm.
He had trapped the sleeve of the pressure suit in the canopy when he cranked it shut. Without the cranking-handle he could not open it again. As the water reached his waist, he tugged frantically, attempting with all his strength to rip the suit.
Clinging to the canopy of the Firefox, he began to slip beneath the water with the airframe. Waist, chest, neck, mouth. He could not free his sleeve…
Above the noise of his blood and breathing, he again heard the bird croak mockingly. Then he disappeared beneath the water.
'There were
two
explosions - two
distinct
explosions… you're certain of that?'
Aubrey waited. The underground Operations Room of RAF Scampton had shrunk to a microphone, two revolving tape reels, and the console and its operator controlling the highspeed, scrambled communications between himself and the captain of an AWACS Nimrod aircraft over the Norwegian Finnmark. Beyond the glass, down on the main floor of the room, Buckholz and Curtin stood beside the huge plot-table, staring at the model that represented the Nimrod. Buckholz wore a headset clamped on his short, grey hair. His shoulders were stiff with the tension generated by the transmission and reception delays of Aubrey's conversation.
The tapes rolled swiftly, halted, rewound, then Aubrey heard Squadron Leader Eastoe's voice, mechanical and distant, but clear.
'There were two, almost in the same spot, but distinct. A small time and distance gap, At…' A slight pause while Eastoe consulted something, then: 'Sixty-nine-forty North, twenty-seven-fifty East. That's no more than twenty-two nautical miles from the nearest point on the Soviet border - about the same from the Norwegian side…'
Eastoe seemed to have paused once more, rather than to have concluded his message. Aubrey lifted his head. Someone pushed a futuristic model into position on the plot-table. It was old-fashioned - on one wall of the Operations Room was a fibre-optic, computer-operated plot-map where aircraft, ships and missiles were registered by moving lights - and yet Aubrey found the plot-table comfortingly familiar. It had a wartime association. It was out-of-date, superannuated. He could see, quite clearly, that Gant was deemed by Eastoe to have met his death in a narrow neck of Finland between the Soviet Union and Norway. The model of the Firefox, placed in position, was in the nature of a memorial. Curtin and Buckholz gazed fixedly at the table - except for a brief upward glance by the senior CIA officer. His face was grim. Aubrey, almost furtively and in shame, lowered his head to the tape-reels and the microphone. Eastoe had not added to his statement.
'You conclude that one of the MiG-25s was successful?' he, snapped. The tapes spun, then waited. Spun again, rewound, played.
'Yes,' Eastoe replied. Aubrey watched Buckholz's shoulders hunch, shrug. Curtin's face was abstracted. The naval officer seemed fascinated by the small black model of the Firefox. The plotters near them hovered like deferential servants, or like the policeman bringing news of a road accident. 'They tried to shepherd him, he shook them off, took out the first of them - the second must have pursued at ground-level, and they got each other. We couldn't see the MiG-31, of course, so we don't know whether it was damaged earlier. Since the explosions, nothing. The area's filling up with MiGs now, but their activity suggests they can't locate anything.' Eastoe's voice paused, then: 'Mr. Aubrey - what do you want me to do?'
Aubrey rubbed his chin vigorously, as if conjuring the answer from a lamp. The tape-reels waited for him to speak. Alongside him, the staff of the Operations Room sat behind their consoles and radios and radars and screens. The plotters hovered. The huge wall map gleamed with moving lights. The walls of the Ops. Room displayed other maps crowded with pins and scribbled legends, coloured tapes. Blackboards revealed information regarding the serviceability of aircraft. Large meteorological maps were heavily marked, garlanded with satellite weather photographs. A long row of pale blue headsets, together with a single red telephone, stretched away on either side of him. A multiplicity of technical devices were at his disposal. He dragged his hands through the hair above his ears. His fingers touched the back of his head. He heard old bones and muscles crack and stretch reluctantly. He replaced his hands in his lap, hunching forward. He did not know what to say to Eastoe. He did not know how to begin to use the people and equipment that lay at his disposal.
Not once, not once… his thoughts murmured hesitantly. Not once, not once -
Until now, he answered himself. Until now. Not once had he doubted, truly doubted, not once had he thought the game lost, the aircraft or the pilot lost…
Until now.
Now he believed it. It had been forced upon him. Gant was dead, the aircraft scattered over the landscape like sooty dots on the carpet of snow. Nothing, nothing left of it.
Despair was an unfamiliar companion. A sometime acquaintance, away elsewhere for long periods; older and leaner at each unexpected return. Yet it was despair Aubrey felt. He had failed. The whole operation had failed. Delicate, complex, devious - brilliant and his own, it had failed. Aubrey's despair dressed in a sober suit and carried a briefcase. It was an entirely professional emotion, and bottomless.
He saw an image, then, of civilian air disasters. Newsreel film. Flight-recorders being searched for by the experts who did not concern themselves with the search for the living and the dead. Black boxes. Cockpit voice-recorders, flight recorders. The secrets of the dead.
In his mind, he could see a recent piece of newsfilm. The joggling camera registering the walking legs of a man and the two heavy, black, flame-scarred boxes he carried, one on either side of him. Walking legs, black boxes -
He rubbed his eyes. Voice-activated, the tape-reels moved.
'Remain on-station, Eastoe;' he ordered, his voice clearing and strengthening as he spoke. 'Fly up and down that piece of border until you hear something!'
A pause. Eastoe's reply returned, was rewound, then became audible. 'Please repeat, Mr. Aubrey.'
Aubrey slapped his forehead. He had not explained. 'I wish to be certain,' he said. Buckholz, one hand holding the earphone of his headset, looked up towards the glass-fronted gallery where Aubrey was sitting. 'If the aircraft has crashed or been destroyed, then there may be nothing. If Gant is alive - if the aircraft is still intact - then you may pick up a signal from his homing device. You have the equipment to activate and receive it.'
After a little while, during which Aubrey felt hot and the small sense of excitement that hope had brought deserted him, he turned pale and felt foolish like a gauche new entrant to an ancient and dignified club. Foolish - must try it-foolish, though…
'Roger, Mr. Aubrey. If he's there, we'll find him.'
'Yes,' Aubrey replied abstractedly, unconcerned that the word and its tone would be transmitted. The console operator turned to him. Aubrey flapped his hand dismissively, staring at his lap. Gant was dead. The Firefox was in pieces.
'The AWACS Tupolev is watching us watching him,' F.astoe announced. Aubrey hardly heard his voice. 'He'll be listening for the same thing. Could he pick up a signal?'
'I hope not,' Aubrey murmured in a moment of uncalculated honesty that was full of doubt and foreboding.
The shock of the icy water which engulfed him almost made him open his mouth to scream, to expel the lungful of air he had snatched as his face was dragged into the water. His chest seemed too full, inflated under pressure from within. If only he could expel the air, make his body more empty, smaller, the cold would be less intense, less painful. He forced himself to retain the air.
Even a few feet beneath the surface, the water was lightless because of the disturbed silt, as if the ice had closed over the Firefox as soon as it sank. The noise of the undercarriage moving down the steeply-sloping bed of the lake was magnified and distorted into a prolonged groan. The Firefox dragged him by the sleeve deeper beneath the water. His body banged against the metal of the nose as he bobbed and attempted to float. His body's buoyancy tugged at the trapped sleeve of his pressure-suit, turning him almost in a cartwheel, twisting him, slamming him down on his back against the fuselage, then scraping him along the nose of the aircraft.
His lungs seemed fuller. He knew he was beginning to drown. There seemed a simple solution, but he believed it was light-headedness that suggested the idea. He was trapped. He tried to reach his left arm with his right hand. The Firefox continued to roll, and he could not tell whether it was beginning to level out and slow down. He could not reach his trapped sleeve. Without purchase, he could not apply any force to the feeble grip of his right hand on the material of the suit. His hands were numb, anyway, fingers crooked like claws, frozen.
Weariness, and the knowledge that survival and escape had been snatched from him, curtailed his ability to think, to move, to even desire anything. His chest hurt with retained air. His head swirled like the dark water. Just as around him the disturbed mud drifted back towards the bed of the lake, his body sagged down to straddle the nose of the Firefox.
The napalm of his nightmare lit the scene. Freezing and numb though he was, his body still felt hot, burning. From within the bamboo cage in which he had been imprisoned, he witnessed his rescue; the attack upon the Viet-Cong detachment and their hidden village. He saw the little girl with the sadly-wise face running, and he saw her dissolve in the gout of napalm dropped near her. He saw all the others burn like matchsticks, like trees in a forest set alight. He felt himself burn. He was one of them - he
was
them…
The nightmare claimed him. He struggled against it, but his body seemed to have no conception of water and drowning, only of his recurrent dream, only of the napalm. The water around him seemed redly-lit by its flare. Every one of the gooks had burned, the little girl had burned. He had remained untouched physically, safe in his abandoned bamboo cage. Ever since, horror and guilt had caused him to burn, melt, dissolve with the Vietnamese; with the little girl, in her place…
His hand embraced his left thigh. He noticed the touch, the clawlike grip. The crablike scrabbling, the tugging at a press-studded flap. His mind was detached and separate from his right hand. His left hand was feelingless, somewhere above him, against the canopy of the cockpit. His lungs were bursting.
He could see only the red burning colour of the water as his right hand closed thumb and forefinger upon the flap on his thigh. Gant did not understand. The flap pulled slowly open like a hesitant mouth. He did not know what his right hand expected. He wanted, more than anything to empty his lungs, more even than to stop the nightmare because this time he was going to die inside it. His right hand closed on something and withdrew it from the pocket. It felt hard.
The little girl's body, right at the centre of the mass of golden-red fire, dissolved… he was on the point of opening his mouth to scream… and something detached itself - straw hat or head he had never known, had never dared to look - he wanted only to scream.
His right hand brought up the hard object, close to his face. His right hand needed the evidence, the use of his eyes. But his eyes did not work, dazzled by the light of the fiames. Where his hand was, where the object was, it was dark. Thin gleam - ? He could not focus. His head swirled. The flames lessened. His right hand continued to act, reaching forward, ahead of him into the place where the numbing, icy cold seemed to be coming from, where it had already swallowed his left hand, left arm. He tried to watch, to understand -