Firefox (25 page)

He glanced again at the TFR. He was crossing the coastal strip. The mist that had clung to the coastal mountains had now become what he guessed must be a sea-fog - light, threatening to dissipate, but concealing. Best of all, it provided a sound-muffler, dispersing the noise of his engines so that a sound-trace such as the Russians were known to possess would be confused by echoes.

Then he saw the coast as an uneven line across the TFR screen. The narrow neck of sea formed the furthest inland penetration of the Gulf of Kara. His memory supplied the next set of coordinates as the Firefox passed out over the water, even as he pushed the nose down and lost more height, keeping within the slim belt of fog which slipped past the cabin, grey and formless, removing him from the world. The readout supplied him with the required heading, and he obeyed the intertial navigator, turning onto the heading that would take him towards the twin islands of Novaya Zemlya, north-west of his present position.

He registered that the altimeter stated two hundred feet, checked the TFR, and eased back the throttles. The engine revolutions dropped, and he saw it register on the airspeed indicator. He levelled the aircraft, keeping it at a steady height of two hundred feet, and still eased back the throttles. While in the fog, he had the opportunity to conserve fuel, and thus make less engine noise. If he was heard, he wanted to sound as little like a fleeing thief as possible, and as much like an authorised search-plane as he could. At 250 mph, he steadied.

He reached up and his hand closed upon the transistor radio’s innards, the special device developed for him at Farnborough, solely for the task which he now hoped it would perform. It was a homer pick-up, working on an incredibly complex pre-set pattern, searching for a beacon set on the same alternating pattern of signal frequencies. The signal remained on one frequency only long enough to be dismissed by anyone picking it up as static, or as unimportant. Gant could not tell, but the machine could, at what point it entered the sequence when switched on. The device had to be as complicated as it was because voice communication of any kind, however brief or cryptic, was open to being monitored by the Russians. He flicked the switch on the face of the apparently purposeless piece of hardware. Nothing, but at that moment he was unsurprised.

He knew the machine was searching the frequency band for a signal, and that there was a limit to its range when operational - yet he began to worry at the moment his hand flipped the switch. Only when the machine was functioning did he become truly aware of how much he depended upon it. Unless he picked up the signal transmitted by the refuelling craft, and unless his receiver coordinated with the transmitter to make the homing signal a continuous directional impulse, then he was lost, and he would run out of fuel somewhere over the Arctic Ocean and die.

The ‘Deaf-Aid’, as Aubrey had called it with one of the bastard’s sardonic smiles, was required because no one, not even Buckholz, with Baranovich’s inside knowledge, could be certain that the Russians might not be able to jam every transmitter and receiver aboard the Firefox when it was in the air - in which case Gant would never find the fuel he needed. Even if the Soviets could only track every transmitter and receiver, then Gant would lead them straight to ‘Mother’.

And Gant thought, noticing that the sea fog was thinning, and that the oppressive greyness, the uniformity, of his visual world was lightening, they had not told him where to find ‘Mother’, just in case he got caught. What he himself did not know, lunatic though the logic was, he could not tell anyone, whatever they did to him.

He looked at the fuel-gauges. Less than a quarter full. He had no idea how far he had to go. If, and when, he picked up the signal, he would know he was no more than three hundred miles away from the refuel point. The Farnborough gimmick remained silent.

He had switched in the autopilot, coupled with the TFR. The longest part of his journey was beginning, the part of the journey to stretch the nerves, to test him as no other part of his mission had done - flying by faith, and a single box of tricks never operationally tested before. Guinea-pig. Pigeon. That was what he was.

Gant was an electronic pilot. He had relied on instruments all his flying life. Yet he had never depended on just one, one totally detached from his flying skill, one totally unaffected by anything he could do as the plane’s pilot.

The featureless contours of the sea flowed across the TFR screen, endless, empty of vessels. He pushed up the plane’s nose, rising above the still thinning fog, into the brief glare of sunlight and an impression of blue sky at four hundred feet. Nothing. He ducked the Firefox back into the mist. All his instruments told him that Novaya Zemlya was too far ahead to register - yet, he had wanted the comfort of a visual check, as if his contemplation of his dependence upon a single piece of electronic hardware had made him revert to an earlier age of flying.

He looked again at the fuel-gauges. The refuelling point would be hundreds of miles beyond the Russian coastline, had to be, for safety. Less than a quarter full, the huge wing tanks, the skin of the fuselage itself that acted as a fuel tank.

Gant had no relish for the equation of fuel against distance, and again cursed his panicdash for the Urals. What had given him a sense of escape then, of life, might well have killed him.

‘What is the matter. General Vladimirov?’ the First Secretary asked conversationally. Vladimirov stopped in mid-stride and turned to face the Soviet leader. You must learn to accept success with more aplomb, my dear Vladimirov!’ The First Secretary laughed.

Vladimirov smiled a wintry smile, and said: ‘I wish I could be certain. First Secretary - much as I fear my mood must displease you, I am not certain.’

‘You’re not happy that we have lost the Mig-31!’

‘No. I’m not happy that we have lost it - I wonder whether we could kill this man Gant quite so easily.

‘But it was your plan we followed, Vladimirov - you have doubts about it now?’ Andropov asked from behind the First Secretary, a thin smile on his lips. ‘I never was certain of its success. Chairman, Vladimirov replied.

‘Come ‘ the First Secretary said softly. ‘What would make you happy, Vladimirov. I am in a generous mood.’ The man smiled, broadly, beatifically.

‘To continue, and intensify, the search for Gant. Vladimirov’s tone was blunt, direct.

‘Why?’

‘Because - if he’s still alive, our self-congratulation might be just the help he needs. Find the refuelling aircraft, or ship, or whatever it is, that must be waiting for him.’

The First Secretary seemed to be looking into Vladimirov’s mind as he debated the argument. After a long silence, he looked not at Vladimirov with his refocused gaze, but at Kutuzov.

‘Well, Mihail Ilyich - what do you say?’

Kutuzov, his throat apparently rusty with disuse, said: ‘I would agree to every precaution being taken, First Secretary.’

‘Very well.’ The First Secretary’s bonhomie had disappeared, and he seemed displeased that the euphoric mood of the room that had existed since the report from Firechain One-24 had been dispelled. He was brusque, efficient, cold. ‘What do you need, apart from the massive forces you have already called upon…?’ There was an almost sinister emphasis on the word, and he left the sentence hanging uncomfortably in the air.

‘Give me the Barents Sea map, and bleed in current naval dispositions in the area, together with trawler activity and Elint vessels,’ Vladimirov called over his shoulder, standing himself squarely in front of the circular table, his hand plucking at his chin thoughtfully. The projection of the northern coastline of the USSR faded, taking with it the pricks of light that had been the Firechain stations and the ‘Wolfpack’ bases, and was replaced by a projection of the Barents Sea.

Vladimirov waited, as the map operator punched out his demands on the computer-console. Slowly, one by one, like stars winking in as dusk fell, lights began to appear on the map, the stations of ships in the Barents Sea and the southern Arctic Ocean. Vladimirov stared at them for a long time in silence.

‘Where is the print-out?’ he asked after a while. The map operator detached himself from his console, and handed Vladimirov a printed sheet of flimsy which registered the identification and exact last reported position and course of each of the dots on the projection glowing on the table. Vladimirov studied the sheet, glancing occasionally at the map.

North of Koluyev Island and west of Novaya Zemlya, the clustered dots of a trawler-fleet registered in white. The neutral colour signified their non-military purpose. They were a large and genuine fishing fleet. However, slightly apart from the close cluster were two deep-blue dots, which signified Elint vessels, spy trawlers, overfitted with the latest and most powerful aerial, surface and subsurface detection equipment. They flanked the fishing fleet like sheepdogs but, as Vladimirov knew, their interest lay elsewhere. At that moment, they would be sweeping the skies with infrared detectors, checking traces with the search-pattern they would have received from the ‘Wolfpack’ sector commander the coast of whose area they were sailing. It was early in the year for Elint vessels to be operating in the Barents Sea, but Deputy Defence Minister, Admiral of the Soviet Fleet Gorshkov, liked his spy ships in action as soon in the Arctic year as was feasible. Because of the southward drift of the ice in the Arctic spring, at the moment they did little more than supplement the coastal radars.

Vladimirov’s eye wandered north across the projection of the Barents Sea, picking up the scarlet dot of a naval vessel. From the list in front of him, he knew it was the helicopter and missile cruiser, ‘Moskva’ class, the Riga, and the pride of the Red Banner Northern Fleet: 18,000 tons displacement, armed with two surface-to-air missile-launchers, and two surface or antisubmarine launchers, four sixty-millimetre guns, mortars, four torpedotubes, and four hunterkiller helicopters of the Kamov Ka-25 type. She was proceeding at that moment on an easterly course, at the express command of the First Secretary, through Gorshkov in Leningrad, which would, within little more than an hour, bring her close to Novaya Zemlya.

Elsewhere on the living map, Vladimirov registered the presence of two missile-destroyers, smaller, less powerfully armed replicas of the missile-cruiser, without that ship’s complement of helicopters. One of them was well to the north of Novaya Zemlya, near Franz Josef Land on the edge of the permanent ice-sheet, and the other was steaming rapidly south and east from the Spitzbergen area. The majority of the Red Banner fleet’s surface vessels were in Kronstadt, the huge is-, land naval base in the estuary of the Neva, near Leningrad; it was too early for operations, too early for exercises, in the Barents Sea.

There were, however, Vladimirov saw with some relief, a number of yellow dots glowing on the surface of the map, signifying the presence of Soviet submarines. He glanced down at the list, identifying the types available to him, mentally recalling their armament and their searchcapability. Soviet naval policy in the Barents Sea was to keep the surface vessels in dock during the bitter winter months and during the early spring onslaught of the southward drift of the impermanent pack-ice, and to use a single weapon in the arsenal of the Red Banner Fleet for patrol duties - the huge submarine fleet at the disposal of the Kremlin and the Admiral of the Soviet Fleet. The policy explained why the Soviet Union had concentrated for so long, and so successfully, on the development of the Soviet submarine fleet, and why they had even returned to the commissioning of new, cheaper, conventional dieselpowered submarines, instead of an exclusive concentration, as had been U.S. policy, on the hideously expensive nuclear subs.

He ignored, for the moment, the three nuclearpowered ‘V type antisubmarine subs. and the two ballistic-missile subs returning to Kronstadt after their routine strike-patrol along the eastern seaboard of the United States. They would be of no use to him. What he required were submarines with the requisite searchcapability for spotting an aircraft, and for bringing it down.

‘What are the reports of the search for wreckage of the plane?’ he asked aloud at last, tired suddenly of the lights on the map, it was impossible for Gant to escape, and yet… he should already be dead.

‘Nothing so far, sir - air-reconnaissance reports no indications of wreckage other than that of the Badger … the ground search parties have not yet arrived at the site of the crash.’

‘Give me a report on the search for the refuellingcraft,’ Vladimirov said in the wake of the report. A second voice sang out: ‘Negative, sir. No unidentified surface vessels or aircraft in the area the computer predicts to be the limit of the Mig’s flight.’

Vladimirov looked angry, and puzzled. It was what he wanted to hear, from one point of view. No planes or ships of the West anywhere near the area. It was, frankly, impossible. There had to be a refuellmg-pomt. But the nearest neutral or friendly territory had to be somewhere in Scandinavia. It was, of course, possible to suppose that Gant was scheduled to make another alteration of course, to head west and follow the Russian coastline to North Cape, or Finnish Lapland…

He did not believe it, even though he had taken the necessary precautions already. He believed that the CIA and the British SIS would not have been able to persuade any of the Scandinavian governments to nsk what the landing of the Mig on their territory would mean, in their delicate relations with the Soviet Union on their doorsteps. No, the refuelling had to be out at sea, or at low altitude somehow. It could not be a carrier, there wasn’t one in the area, not remotely in the area. Apart from which, the Mig-31 was not equipped for a deck landing. But could the base be an American weather-station on the permanent ice-sheet of the Pole?

Vladimirov disliked having to confront the problem of the refuelling. Until final confirmation that Gant had crossed the coast, and the evidence that there was no refuelling-station apparent, he had concentrated on stopping him over Soviet territory. But, now…