Firefox (11 page)

Pavel Upenskoy died when the truck failed to negotiate a bend in the road ten miles from the scene of the accident with the KGB car, overturned, and he was flung unconscious from the cab onto the road. The truck half-mounted the bank, then fell back on top of his body.

Pyotr Vassilyevich Baranovich was no longer puzzled by the American, Gant. At first, and during the first hour or more of his presence in the house in Tupolev Avenue, he had been increasingly puzzled by his behaviour. He had watched the man eat his meal, served by the woman who lived with Kreshin, a secretary from the finance office of the Bilyarsk project. He had watched the American, and had not understood him. He had studied him while they talked of his journey, and of Pavel - who was God knew where by now on the road to Kuybyshev, or in the hands of the KGB - and still been puzzled. Then they had begun to talk of the Mikoyan Mig-31, the Firefox as NATO called it, and he had seen the eager, dry hunger, like lust, in the man’s eyes and he no longer was dubious about Buckholz’s choice of pilot.

Gant, he understood, needed, for some deep reason of his own, to fly the airplane. This man seated before him had been bundled from America to England, then to Russia, from Moscow to Bilyarsk, like so much washing - and he had allowed it to happen to him because at the end of the journey, like a monstrous child’s prize for good behaviour, was the shiny toy of the Mig.

Semelovsky had left them almost as soon as he had delivered the American, to return to his own quarters.

They would not meet again until they reported to the hangar to prepare the aircraft for the weapons trials the following day. Kreshin and he, on the other hand, would pass through the security net into the factory complex together at two in the morning.

Baranovich was aware that the KGB would keep a careful watch upon himself and Kreshin and Semelovsky throughout the night. Without doubt, they would have orders to arrest them hours before the flight. That was only to be expected. But, until the work was done on the weaponssystem they would not touch him. All they could do was watch from a car across the street.

This was why Gant’s presence in the house, so apparent a security risk, was in reality a safety precaution. It was safer than trying to hide him anywhere else in Bilyarsk.

It was the last place they would look.

Baranovich had no intention of dwelling on his personal future. Like Gant himself, and like Aubrey in London, Baranovich accepted the slivers of time that were given to him, and did not seek to understand what might occur in the future hours and days. He had learned to live like that in Mavrino, and before that in the labour camps. He had known what he was doing when he had accepted the order to work at Bilyarsk, to develop the purely theoretical work that had already been done on a thought-controlled weaponssystem, by a man now dead. The KGB had been aware of what they were doing when they released him to take up the appointment. Baranovich had lived on borrowed time for many years, almost since the end of the war - no, before that, he corrected himself, since a soldier lives, on borrowed time, especially on the Russian front in winter. Because he had done so for the greater part of his life, it came as no special occasion now to understand that he was living on borrowed time.

‘How well have you been briefed?’ he asked, settling himself to throw off the useless speculations about himself and the character of the American.

They were seated in Kreshm’s living-room, small, warm and comfortable. The younger man had left them alone - Baranovich suspected that he and the woman were making love in the next room, perhaps with the desperation of the young to whom time, borrowed or otherwise, is precious. Kreshin would, perhaps, be trying to forget the hours ahead in the illusion of passion. Baranovich had told Gant that he could speak without being overheard. The house was indeed bugged - but for that evening the electronics expert had rigged pre-recorded tapes to supply innocuous talk and the noise of the television a background mutter, for the KGB listeners.

‘I told you - I flew some of the Mig-25 copies we built in the States for a couple of years, then I spent months on the simulator flying the Mig-31,’ Gant replied. In his turn, he was impressed by Baranovich.

The man’s patriarchal appearance, white hair and goatee beard, clear blue eyes, and unlined brow, demanded respect.

‘No doubt your training, then, was thorough,’ Baranovich said, smiling, puffing at his pipe, seemingly relaxed as if he and Gant were happily theorising in a university common-room. It had been a very long time, perhaps forty years, since Baranovich had been in such a room.

‘It was,’ Gant agreed. He paused, then said: ‘The weaponssystem … you need to tell me about that.’

Baranovich seemed unaffected by Gant’s directness.

In fact, he respected it. This was the time and place for such directness.

‘Yes. It is not, I must say, my own development, though I have done most of the work on the electronics involved, the miniaturisation, and so forth.’ He puffed at his pipe. ‘You are literally plugged into the weaponssystem. The sensors which respond to your thought processes and your eye movements are built into the helmet you wear, into the shell and the visor. A single lead carries the brain-impulses to the firing mechanisms, which you manually plug into the console - you know where that is located on the panel?’ Gant nodded. ‘Good. What happens is not important as a process, only, for you, as an end product, a result. The radar system in the aircraft is specially developed to work in conjunction with the weapons-control - basically, it speeds up the firing-time. You receive an impulse quicker than the eye can respond, from the radar, which causes a reaction in your brain to which the weaponssystem reacts. It makes the launching of air-to-air missiles, or the firing of the cannons, that much quicker … and, of course, for visual contact as opposed to radar contact, it places you seconds ahead of any other airplane or pilot. When your eyes see the target, the impulse is transmitted from the brain to the weapons-control - and whatever weapon you decide to launch, is launched and it allows your brain to guide the missile in flight to its target.’

Baranovich smiled at Gant’s staring eyes. ‘Don’t worry, my friend - some of our Red Air Force pilots are very unintelligent. This system works only as you are wearing the helmet, and are plugged in. Besides,’ he added with a smile. ‘I cannot tell you more - it is top secret, eh?’ Baranovich took his pipe from his mouth, and roared with laughter. Still smiling, he added: ‘There is a master lock-out switch, by the way, which prevents you from blowing friends out of the sky with evil thoughts!’

After a pause, Baranovich sighed. His eyes seemed to be directed inwards, and when he spoke next, it was as if he were summarising a problem for his own satisfaction alone.

‘Your government realises the importance of the weaponssystem. It is the logical next step, and it has endless possibilities. I could tell them much, of course, except that they know they can never get me out of the Soviet Union. To steal the Mig is easier…’ He sucked at the dead pipe, and continued. The United States has hardly begun to develop such a system. If it does not have one soon, then it will never be able to catch up with the flood of refinements and applications that will follow from what is, at present, still a crude electronic implement. So, they have to have the Mig, since they cannot have me. The applications could be endless, infinite as the system is refined. You, naturally, are interested only as a pilot, not as a scientist. At the moment, it employs conventional weaponry - who knows? Soon, the weaponry may leap ahead to match the thoughtguided system…’

He looked sharply at Gant, who wiped the lack of interest from his face. There was a look sharp with pain in Baranovich’s eyes as he said: ‘Of course, I bore you.

Perhaps it is selfpity. I would like to go on living, perhaps in the United States…’

Gant said gently ‘The - antiradar…?’

‘Ah.’ Baranovich shook his head. ‘About that, I know nothing. It is the most secret aspect of the whole project - a Jew with a long record of dissidence would not be allowed to become familiar with it.’ Gant nodded.

‘I have to know,’ he said, ‘whether the Russians can switch it off by remote control when I’m airborne - or if I could switch it off by accident?’

Baranovich looked thoughtful for a moment, puffing stolidly at his pipe. Once again, Gant was forcibly reminded of a university seminar, rather than a vital intelligence briefing.

‘No,’ the Russian said, shaking his head, then rubbing his nose with thumb and forefinger. ‘As far as I have heard from rumours - and those rumours have been few and uncertain - I understand that the antiradar capacity is not mechanical at all.’

‘What in the hell…?’

‘As far as I understand it, that is so,’ Baranovich repeated levelly. ‘It is something - perhaps a skin, even a paint, of some kind, like the low-friction finish developed for certain American airline projects?’ Gant’s eyes widened. ‘Mm. Even we know of it - American security is not as good as the Pentagon would like to think… However, as I was saying, it would appear that the antiradar stems from some such system, so that the radar-beam flows over the surface of the aircraft, and passes on, nothing having registered on the screens. I do know that the system can be neutralised for safety requirements, such as landing at your own airfield in the worst weather, by the pilot, but I can’t tell you how it is done.’ His face darkened. ‘You won’t be able to use it, Mr. Gant. I only repeat what I have heard. And we both know it works. That part of the project has been developed elsewhere, not in Bilyarsk.’

There was a silence, then Gant said, ‘How long can you give me inside the cockpit?’

‘No time at all, I think. The security is tighter than ever. You know that the First Secretary is flying down here tomorrow to witness this triumph of Soviet technology? Accompanied by Andropov, the Chairman of the KGB, and other Party notables, of course. Well, because of that - or, even, because of us, Semelovsky, Kreshin and myself - the security is massive, more than ever before.’ He paused and puffed at his pipe in silence. Then he added: ‘A special detachment of GRU troopers was flown in yesterday. They will be under the command of the KGB, of course, but there are more than one hundred of them, in addition to the considerable garrison already here.’ He spread his hands in front of him. ‘Which is why we have been forced to the extremity we have in order to get you into the hangar area…’ Baranovich’s eyes twinkled, and he smiled. ‘You will need to have your hair cut even shorter, of course, so that the helmet and sensors can work efficiently, and your photograph taken for a very special set of papers - but nothing more will need to be done to you.’

Gant shrugged. There was no resistance whatever to the idea of disguise, of assumed identity. His indifference to his own identity, a quality that Buckholz had understood from the first, made him successful as a chameleon. Most agents attempt, subconsciously, to retain something of themselves - an item of clothing, a mannerism, an inflection - as if they were swimmers, fearing to leave their personalities heaped like clothes until they should come back, fearing they might not be there when they returned. Gant had no such qualms, conscious or subconscious. Orion, Grant, Glazunov and the man he was shortly to portray, whoever he was - they were shadows, as he was.

‘What about my route - what’s the lay-out of the hangar area?’ he said bluntly.

Baranovich watched the American’s face for a moment with keen eyes, then nodded as if satisfied, and stood up, gesturing Gant to where a large-scale drawing hung like the edge of a white tablecloth from the small dining-table. Kreshin had left it there after Gant had finished eating.

Baranovich fussily straightened and smoothed the pencil-drawn map of the huge compound, and began to point out its features to Gant.

‘We are here,’ he said, ‘almost in the centre of the living-area - and all technical and scientific staff enter the hangar and factory complex through this gate…’

His finger traced a route along the streets until it stopped at a line marked in red, further marked by red crosses at intervals. ‘Yes,’ Baranovich continued, ‘there is another fence, electric, and guarded by these watchtowers…’ his finger tapped at the red crosses, ‘inside the perimeter fence, which keeps us and the project divided from the village. There is only one other gate in this fence - over here, on the other side of the airstrip.’ Again his finger tapped at the stiff paper. ‘That is used only by security personnel - it is the one you will use.’

‘How for God’s sake?’

Baranovich smiled.

‘With bravado, naturally - and a little help from myself and the others. Don’t worry about it.’ The Russian returned to his pipe, sucked at it energetically, and spilled a thick cloud of smoke from his lips. Gant wrinkled his nose, as if in disapproval. ‘Do you smoke?’ Baranovich asked.

‘No. Not any more.’

Nodding. Baranovich reached into a pocket of his worn, leather-elbowed jacket, and pulled out a packet of American cigarettes. ‘Learn again - now,’ he said simply.

‘Uh?’

‘Learn to smoke in the next hour, before you rest.’

Gant pulled a face. ‘They’re not Russian,’ he said.

‘A status-symbol? Foreign cigarettes, in the mouth of the person you will be, will prove as convincing as anything else - even your papers.’ Baranovich smiled, then returned his attention to the map. Gant picked up the pack of cigarettes from the map, and slipped it into the breast-pocket of his overalls. ‘From this gate, you will make your way to this area here, on the far side of the runway.’ The long finger tapped. Gant watched, as if fascinated, the mottled, thick-veined hand as it lay on the white background of the map. ‘This building is the main hangar, where both prototypes are stored. We will be working here through the night, preparing the airplane that is to take part in the trials. Attached to the hangar are the security offices, right on the spot, and also the pilots’ rooms. You see that?’ Gant nodded. ‘Good. You have to go upstairs, and along this corridor…’ Baranovich’s finger was now tracing the direction on a second-storey plan of the buildings attached to the huge main hangar. ‘The other buildings - they are merely the laboratories, wind-tunnels, test-houses, and the like. Waste no time with them. Get yourself to the pilots’ dressing-room as soon as you can. Red Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel Yuri Voskov will arrive some hours before the flight. You must be ready for him.’