Firefox (16 page)

Gant looked at him, startled. The guard saw a white face, sweaty and strained, and a hand gripping the stomach - and the uniform.

‘I - just indigestion. Think I’ve got an ulcer,’ he added, for the sake of veracity.

‘Would you like a drink. Captain?’ the guard was solicitous.

Gant shook his head. He had to move away now.

The incident was already becoming too memorable, his face too familiar; the story would be recounted in the other ranks’ mess when the guard went off-duty. He smiled, a poor imitation of the real thing, and straightened himself.

‘No - thanks soldier. No. Just comes in spasms…’

Then he realised he was being far too human, he was responding as if he did have an ulcer. He brushed his jacket straight, and jammed his cap on his head. He glared at the soldier, as if he had in some way offended rank by noticing his officer’s difficulties, then strode off down the corridor, his boots clicking loudly along the linoleum. In front of him were the stairs up to the officers’ mess, and to the pilots’ restroom.

As he mounted the stairs, the images of the last minutes dying in his mind, the feverish pulse slowing, he hoped to his God that Dherkov, the courier, did not know what he looked like. He glanced at his watch. - Still not three o’clock. More than three hours. He wondered how brave a man the grocer was.

There were five of them now in Aubrey’s secluded operations room: the two CIA men and the two representatives of the SIS had been joined by a man wearing the uniform of a Captain in the U.S. Navy - Captain Eugene Curtin, from the office of the Chief of Naval Operations, USN. Curtin it was who had been responsible for the arrangements for the refuelling of the Firefox, presuming Gant to be able to steal it on schedule, and head in the right direction - north, towards the Barents Sea.

Curtin was in his forties, square-built, the uniform stretched across his broad shoulders and back. His hair was clipped so short it seemed he had recently survived an internment in some POW camp. His face was large, square, chiselled, and his eyes were piercingly blue. He had just completed some amendments to the huge projection of the Arctic seas, marking the latest reported positions of Russian surface and subsurface vessels. To Aubrey’s eye, there appeared a great many of them - too bloody many, he reflected wryly, as Shelley might have said. Also, Curtin had brought with him a new set of satellite weather photographs, as well as sheets of more local weather reports, and some of the numerous SAC radar and weather planes flying over the seas to the north of Soviet Russia.

Curtin saw Aubrey regarding his amendments to the wall-map, and grinned at him.

‘Looks bad - uh?’ he said.

Aubrey said nothing, but continued to regard the wall. He disliked the disconcerting honesty that Curtin shared with Buckholz, and other Americans he had encountered in the field of intelligence, whether operational, or merely analytical. The Americans, he considered, had a penchant for being disconcertingly blunt about things. It simply did not do to assume that Gant had no chance of success - the only way to prevent such gloomy reflections was not to think too far ahead - one step at a time.

Aubrey sipped at the cup of tea that Shelley had poured for him, and continued to study the map without any apparent reaction on his features.

Curtin joined Buckholz and his aide, Anders, at their desk where they were analysing the weather reports linking them with the latest positions of the Soviet trawler fleets supplied by the office of Rear-Admiral Philipson over the telephone.

‘Well?’ Curtin asked softly, his eye on Aubrey.

Buckholz looked up at him. ‘It looks good,’ he said adopting the same conspiratorial whisper. He picked up his coffee and swallowed the last of it. He pulled a face. He had let the coffee get cold in the bottom of the cup. He handed the empty cup to Anders, who went away to refill it.

‘The weather up there can change like - that,’ Curtin said amiably, clicking his thumb and forefinger.

‘It’s been good for the last four days,’ Buckholz pointed out.

‘Means nothing,’ Curtin observed unhelpfully. ‘That means there’s four days less of good weather left to play with.’

Buckholz scowled at him. ‘How bad can it get?’ he said.

‘Too bad for Hotshot ever to find the fuel he’s going to need,’ Curtin replied, ‘if he ever gets off the ground at Bilyarsk. What about that information Aubrey received?’

‘I don’t know. Our British friend plays it very close to his chest.’

Curtin nodded. ‘Yeah. I don’t understand why. But, if they’re onto Hotshot - what chance has he got?’

‘Some,’ Buckholz admitted reluctantly. ‘These guys at Bilyarsk on Aubrey’s payroll are no fools, Curtin.’

‘I never said they were. But I heard the KGB were pretty good at their job, too. If they find out we sent a flyer to Bilyarsk, Hotshot will never get near that damn plane.’

‘I know that,’ Buckholz appeared suddenly irritated with Curtin. He was being too honest, too objective - breezing in late, like a cold wind, disrupting the close, confined, suppressed subjectivity of the mood of the four intelligence operatives. Sometimes, Buckholz considered, there was a right time for a little deceptive hope. And now was the right time.

‘Sorry,’ Curtin said with a shrug. ‘I’m only the Navy’s messenger boy - I just bring you the facts.’

‘Yeah, I know that, too.’

Curtin looked down at the mass of papers on Buckholz’s desk, and observed: ‘Jesus, but this is a half-cock operation.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Uh-huh. I wonder why you let the British do all the planning, Buckholz. I really do.’

‘They had the men on the ground, brother - that’s why.’

‘But - so much depends on - so many people.’

‘It’s called the element of surprise, Curtin.’

‘You mean - it’s a surprise if it works?’ Curtin said, his eyebrow raised ironically.

‘Maybe - maybe.’ Buckholz looked down at the papers before him, as if to signal the end of the conversation. Curtin continued to regard him curiously.

Buckholz, he knew, had survived, even benefited from, the purges which had followed the Congressional enquiry into the activities of the CIA, following Watergate. In fact. it had placed him as Head of the Covert Action Staff within the coterie of top advisers that surrounded the Director himself. It was he, seemingly fired by Aubrey’s crack-brained scheme to steal the new Mig, who had pushed through the arrangements for the theft, laid on, in his own bulldozing, dogged fashion, the refuelling arrangements, the radar-watch, the coordination of SAC and USN assistance he required. He had persuaded the Chief of Naval Operations to second Curtin to his staff until the completion of ‘Operation Rip-Off’, a fact for which Curtin was only dubiously grateful. It had handed him immense, if temporary, power, but it was an operation that could write finis to Curtin’s naval career. And that was something he did not like to contemplate.

The details of Russian surface and subsurface strength in the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean that he had transferred to the wall-map filled Curtin with doubt. He, better than anyone there, knew the current strength of the Red Banner Northern Fleet of the Red Navy, and how swiftly and thoroughly it could be brought to operate against any discovered intruder into what were considered by the Kremlin to be Soviet waters. So far, the refuelling vessel had not been detected - at least, no moves had been made against her, which ought to have meant the same thing. But, in the upheaval which would follow the theft of the aircraft, in the comprehensive radar and sonar searches by missile cruisers, spy trawlers and submarines - who could say?

As he headed for the coffee percolator on a trolley in one comer of the room, he said to Buckholz, who continued studiously to ignore him: ‘He hasn’t got a hope in hell, brother - not a hope in hell!’

It was after three-thirty when Lieutenant-Colonel Yuri Voskov arrived in the pilots’ restroom on the second floor of the security building attached to the Firefox’s hangar at Bilyarsk. He paused inside the door, and his hand reached for the light switch. When that hand encountered another guarding the light switch, his surprise had insufficient time to become shock and alarm before he was struck behind the ear by a terrible, killing blow. He never saw the face of his assassin - the floor rushed up, unseen, as he keeled over from the force of the blow which flung him halfway across the room.

Gant flicked on the light, and crossed to the inert body, rubbing the fist that had delivered the blow.

Then, like some great exhalation, the nerves exploded in him, shaking his body like a wind. He had been able to kill Voskov, coldly and mechanically and with his hands, when even Buckholz had sometimes wondered about it. But the reaction continued to shake him, and it was what seemed like minutes before he could kneel steadily by the dead man. Then, gently, as if a medical expert, he felt for the pulse he knew would not be evident. Voskov was dead.

Gant rolled the body onto its back and looked down at the dead face of Voskov. The man was older than Gant, in his early forties, perhaps. He felt no remorse.

He had removed a necessary piece from the board; that was all. He merely wondered how good Voskov had been.

Suddenly galvanised into action, he tugged the body across the carpet towards the tall steep lockers ranged against one wall. Dumping Voskov in a heap, he fished in his jacket pocket for the master key that Baranovich had supplied, and opened one of the lockers. It was, as he had expected, and had been told to expect, empty.

Holding the door ajar with his foot, he pushed the head and shoulders of the body into the locker. Then, as if engaged in some grotesque, energetic dance in slow-motion, he heaved at the body, until it stood as if alive, upright in the locker. Swiftly, he closed the door and locked it, hearing the soft concussion of Voskov’s body as it leaned forward against the door. Then he pocketed the key.

Opening another of the lockers, he inspected the pressuresuit that hung there - Voskov’s. Voskov was about his own build. At least, they were sufficiently alike for Gant to be able to use the Russian’s pressuresuit. Fortunately, it was merely an adaptation of the normal aircraft pressuresuit, not something tailor-made like a NASA space-suit. Had that been the case, the slightest difference in form, height, build, would have made the wearing of Voskov’s suit impossible.

Having completed his inspection, Gant began to remove his GRU uniform. It was three-forty-six in the morning. Gant felt his nerves beating his stomach, a fist. As he removed his shirt, he looked at the bleeper device taped beneath his arm that would summon him to the hangar.

He had two-and-a-half hours to go.

THE RIP-OFF.

Kontarsky glanced at his gold wrist-watch. It was four o’clock. From where he was standing in the open doorway of the main hangar, he could survey the scene of quiet, intense activity within. He had seen the guards become aware of him, not only those on the doors, but those at their stations close to the aircraft became suddenly more aware, more intent in their scrutiny. Many of the scientists and technicians took no notice of him - though he had seen Kreshin look up and then mutter something to Semelovsky, who stood next to him. Baranovich he could see as a hunched figure, swallowed to the waist by the open cockpit, giving instructions to the technician seated in the pilot’s couch of the Mig-31.

Kontarsky had no aesthetic or military feelings concerning the aircraft. Its aerodynamic lines, its potency, the huge gaping mouths of its air intakes, were nothing to him but a problem in security. And with that problem, he had taken every precaution he possibly could.

He ought to have felt a comfortable self-pride, he realised. Such a feeling, however, eluded him. The night had remained mild, but he felt cold. He was chewing on an indigestion tablet now as he stood outside the hangar. It seemed to be having no effect whatsoever.

The Production Prototype One was less than a hundred feet from him; behind it, ignored by the team of patient, hardly moving technicians, a second aircraft the PP Two - stood near the rear of the giant hangar.

Kontarsky wondered whether to speak to the guards near the aircraft, but decided against it. They were all picked men, and he had briefed them thoroughly before they went on duty. To have inspected them now at close quarters would have been an error of leadership, a sign of absent confidence, and he knew it. Reluctantly, he crossed the strip of light spilling from the open doors, and rejoined his personal bodyguard who was in conversation with one of the door-guards. Nodding to him to fall in behind him, he headed for the second hangar, the one in which the Mig-31 had been built - it was locked and in darkness, but it would not hurt to have the guards who ringed it make one more interior search.

Priabin was, at that moment, he knew, running the agent to earth. As the hours of the night had limped by, he had become more and more open to his aide’s suggestion that the man must be some kind of technical expert, sent to talk to Baranovich and the others before they were arrested, as would be inevitable as soon as the trials were successfully completed, and to observe as much as he could of the trials themselves. What kind of equipment, other than his eyes, he had brought with him, Kontarsky had no idea. As he crossed the bright, stark space between the hangars, he looked out beyond the fence, seeking some vantage-point from which such an observer might consider he had a good view of the runway. There was no hillock, no rising ground.

When he had completed his inspection of the production hangar, he told himself, it would be as well to send out dog patrols beyond the fence - just in case.

Despite his decision, he still felt that the man was inside the fence, a part of the complex, in some disguise or other. He would have the whole area searched again.

Baranovich watched the form that he recognised as belonging to Kontarsky as it crossed the black hole of the night, and vanished in the direction of the production hangar. When he looked down again from his perch on top of a pilot’s ladder wheeled against the fuselage of the Firefox, he saw the squat, flattened features of the mechanic in the pilot’s couch looking up at him, grinning. Baranovich, with, as much aplomb as he could muster, smiled back and the mechanic, who had expected and wished to see fear, or unsettlement at the least, on Baranovich’s face, scowled and turned back to his work. He was in the process of checking the circuits within the weapons-guidance system. Part of the instrument panel on the left-hand side was removed, and the intricate wiring and miniature circuits of the system were exposed. Under Baranovich’s direction, the final check proceeded slowly.