Firefox (27 page)

He moved swiftly now, without fuss, without consultation with the First Secretary or with Marshal Kutuzov; the former appeared to have relapsed into silence, and the latter, the old airman, appeared embarrassed and shaken by the politician’s outburst against a military man trying to attain the near-impossible.

Vladimirov briefly studied the map on the table’s glowing surface. If Gant’s course had been accurately charted after he left Novaya Zemlya, then he was heading, though he could not yet know it, directly towards the missile-cruiser, the Riga, and her two attendant hunterkiller submarines. Out of that fact, if it was a fact, he could manufacture another trap.

Swiftly, he ordered search planes into the area of permanent pack towards which Gant was heading to make a possible landfall. It was possible to stop Gant. His finger unconsciously tapped the map at the point, which registered as the present location of the Riga. At that moment, her two attendant protectors, the missilecarrying, dieselpowered ‘F’ class antisubmarine submarines, were still submerged. Because of the importance of their role in protecting the missile-cruiser, they had been adapted to carry subsurface-to-air missiles, to supplement the hideous firepower of the Riga against aerial attack.

‘Instruct the Riga to hold her present position,’ he called out, ‘and inform her two escorts to surface immediately.’

‘Sir,’ the code-operator replied, confirming the order.

‘Send a general alert to all ships of the Red Banner Fleet,’ he said. ‘Prepare them for an alteration of Gant’s suspected course. Give them that course.’

‘Sir.’

‘What is the prediction on Gant’s fuel supply?’ he said.

Another voice answered him promptly, ‘The computer predicts less than two hundred miles left, sir.’

‘How accurate is that forecast?’

‘An error factor of thirty per cent, sir - no more.’

This meant that Gant might have fuel for another hundred and forty miles, or for nearly three hundred. Vladimirov rubbed his chin. Even the most generous estimate would leave him well short of the polar-pack. He ignored the inference, behaving as Buckholz’s advisers had predicted. Vladimirov, since the days of his flying, had become a cautious man, unimaginative: daring by the standards of the Soviet high command, in reality safe, unimaginative. He could not make the mental jump required. If Gant’s fuel would not last him to the pack, then the inference was that he would crash into the sea. There could not be another answer. He checked.

‘Any unidentified aerial activity in the area?’

‘None, sir. Still clear.’

‘Very well.’ He returned to his contemplation of the map. Gant would not take the aircraft up, not now, without fuel to make use of its speed. Therefore, as he had been doing when sighted, he would be travelling as close to the surface of the sea as he could. That meant, with luck, visual fire-control from the cruiser, at close range. Otherwise, there would be need to depend on infrared weapons-aiming, which was not the most emcient of the fire-control systems aboard the Riga. However, it would do. It would have to do…

A voice interrupted his train of thought. ‘Report from the Tower, Sir - Major Tsernik. PP2 is ready for take-off, sir.’

Vladimirov’s head turned in the direction of the voice, then, as his gaze returned to the map, he saw the First Secretary staring at him. He realised that something was expected of him, but he could not immediately understand what it was. There was no need to despatch the second Mig, not now, with Gant more than three thousand miles away, and running out of fuel. He was not going to be able to refuel now, therefore the intercept role designed for the second plane was irrelevant.

‘Who is the pilot?’ the First Secretary asked bluntly.

‘I - I don’t believe I know his…’ Vladimirov said, surprised at the question.

‘Tretsov,’ Kutuzov whispered. ‘Major Alexander Tretsov.’

‘Good. I realise there is little time, but I will speak with him before he-takes off.’ The First Secretary appeared to be on the point of rising.

Vladimirov realised, with a flash, that the First Secretary expected him to order the second prototype to take off and to pursue, at maximum speed, the wake of the first.

Vladimirov knew it would take Tretsov less than an hour to reach Novaya Zemlya on Gant’s trail. As far as he was concerned, it was a waste of time. He looked at the First Secretary.

‘Of course. First Secretary,’ he said politically, judging the man’s mood correctly. The First Secretary nodded in satisfaction. With an inward relief, Vladimirov called over his shoulder: ‘Summon Major Tretsov at once. And tell the Tower and inform all forces to stand by for take-off of the second Mig within the next few minutes.’

The refuelling planes would need to be alerted. At a point somewhere on the coast west of Gant’s crossing point, the Mig-31 would be refuelled in the air from a tanker. He ordered the alert. He realised that he had to play the farce to its conclusion. It would be impolitic, more than that, to voice his feeling that Gant was not going to reach his fuel supply, or that he was confident that-the Riga would bring him down.

The latter, he knew, would be a very unwise thing to say, at this juncture.

He looked down at the map again. There was nothing more to do. Now, it was up to the Riga, and her attendant submarines. It was most certainly not, he thought, up to Tretsov baring off into the blue in pursuit.

There was still no signal from the ‘Deaf Aid’. Gant’s fuel-gauge registered in the red, and he was flying on what he presumed was the last of the reserve supply. He had switched in the reserve tanks minutes before. He had no idea of their capacity, but he knew he was dead anyway unless he heard the signal from his fuel supply within the next couple of minutes, and unless that signal was being transmitted from close at hand.

The sea was empty. The radar told him the sky was empty of aircraft. He was dead, merely moving through the stages of decomposition while still breathing. That was all.

It occurred to Gant that Buckholz’s refuelling point had ben an aircraft, one that had attempted to sneak in under the DEW-line - one that had been picked up, challenged, and destroyed. There had been a refuelling tanker, but it no longer existed.

He did not think of death, not in its probable actuality, drowning, freezing to death, at the same time as the plane slid beneath the wrinkled waves. Despite what one of Buckholz’s experts had described as a tenuous hold on life, Gant was reluctant to die. It was not, he discovered, necessary to have a great deal to live for to be utterly opposed to dying. Death was still a word not a reality - but the word was growing in his mind, in letters of fire.

The radar screen registered the presence ahead of a surface vessel of large proportions. Even as he moved automatically to take evasive action, and his mind moved more slowly than his arm to question the necessity of such action, the screen revealed two more blips, one on either side of the surface vessel. He knew what he was looking at. Nothing less than a missile cruiser would merit an escort of two submarines. He was moving directly on a contact-course towards them.

The read-off gave him a time of one minute at his present speed to the target. He grinned behind his facemask at the word that formed in his mind. Target. A missile cruiser. He, Gant, was the target. No doubt, the ship’s infrared had already spotted him, closed his height and range, tracked his course and fed the information into the fire-control computer. There was, already, no effective evasive action he could take.

If he was to die, he thought, then he wanted to see what the Firefox could really do. He made no conscious decision to commit suicide by remaining on his present course. He would have been incapable of understanding what he was doing in the light of self-immolation. He was a flyer, and the enemy target was ahead of him a minute ahead.

It was then that the ‘Deaf-Aid’ shrieked at him. He was frozen in his couch. He could not look at the visual readout on the face of the ‘Deaf-Aid’. He did not want to know by how little he had missed, how little the time was between living and dying. The missile cruiser and the submarines closed on the radar screen even as he watched them. Distance to target readout was thirty seconds. Because of his near zero height, he had been on top of them before he knew. Now it was too late.

The ‘Deaf-Aid’ signal was a continuous, maddening noise in his headset, like a frantic cry, a blinding light. He stared ahead of him, waiting for the visual contact with the missile cruiser, waiting to die.

MOTHER ONE

It could have been no more than a fraction of a second; that pause between fear and activity, that tiny void of time before the training that had become instinct flooded in to occupy the blank depth of his defeat, his numb, stunned emptiness. Nevertheless, in that fraction of time, Gant might have broken - the resolution of despair, suddenly shattered by the clamour of the homing signal, and the readout, which told him that the distance was less than one hundred and forty-six miles to his refuelling point, to fuel and life - but he did not break. The huge blow to his system was somehow absorbed by some quality of personality that Buckholz or his psychologists at Langley must have recognised in his dossier, must have assumed to be still present in him. Perhaps it had only been the assumption by Buckholz that an empty man cannot break.

There was a fierce thrill that ran through him. A cold anger. A restrained, violent delight. He was going against the Russian missile cruiser. He clung to that idea.

Swiftly, coolly, he analysed the situation. The homing device indicated that the source of the signalemission, whatever it was, lay in an almost-direct line beyond the cruiser. His fuel-gauge told him he could not take avoiding action. The shortest distance between two points … and he was looking for the shortest distance. He had to. He had to commit himself. Even if he wanted to live - and he realised, with a cold surprise, as if suddenly finding something he had lost for years, that he did want to live - he still had to go against the missile cruiser and its horrendous firepower. Now that there was no alternative, it was the path to life and not to death, and the thought gave him a grim satisfaction.

Radar analysis indicated that the two submarines were approximately three miles to port and starboard of the cruiser, providing a sonar and weapons screen for the big ship. Now they had surfaced, and would be training their own infrared systems in his direction. If he remained at zero feet, they would be on his horizon, making an accurate fix by their fire-control difficult - with luck, he would have only the cruiser to worry about. The submarine closest to him, depending on which side he passed the cruiser, would not dare to loose off infrared missiles in close proximity to the cruiser and its huge turbines.

Swiftly he analysed the capability of the cruiser’s weapons against the Firefox. At his speed, any visual weapon control was out of the question. The torpedotubes were for submarines only, as were the mortars, four in twin mountings. The hunterkiller helicopters might be in the air, but they might not have yet been armed with air-to-air weapons to do him any damage - though they were there, he acknowledged, and their fire control was linked into the central ECM control aboard the cruiser. The guns, 60 mm mounted forward of the bridge, would be controlled by the same electronic computerised fire-control system, linked to the search radar, which operated also in infrared. Yet they were not important. At speed, at zero feet, they could, in all probability, not be sufficiently depressed to bear on him if he flew close enough to the ship.

He stripped the cruiser of its armaments, one by one. There was one only left - the four surface-to-air missile launchers of the advanced SA-N-3 type. Neither the surface-to-surface, nor the antisub missiles, had any terrors for him. But the SA missiles would be infrared, heatseeking, armed and ready to go.

He remembered the Rearward Defence Pod and prayed that it would work. The SA missile twin-launchers were located forward of the bridge superstructure, leaving the fattened, widened aft quarter of the ship for the four Kamov helicopters. Hoping to present the smallest target possible to him, the ship would be directly head-on to his course. There was no time now for any attack on the cruiser itself. Gant abandoned the idea without regret of any kind. He was part of the machine he flew, now, cold, calculating, printing-out the information recovered from his memory of his briefing.

He wondered how good the cruiser captain’s briefing had been. Had he been told of the tailunit, of the armament of the Firefox, or its speed? He assumed not. The Soviet passion for secrecy, for operating the most compartmentalised security service in the world, would operate like a vast inertia, the inertia of sheer habit, against the Red Navy officer being told more than was necessary. He would have received an order - stop the unidentified aircraft by any means possible.

The readout gave the time-to-target as twenty-one seconds, distance to target as two point two miles. Soon, within seconds, he would see the low shape ahead of him. It was the Firefox against the … He wished he knew the name of the cruiser.

A long, low icefloe slipped beneath the belly of the Firefox, dazzlingly white against the bitter, unreflecting grey of the Barents Sea. He had passed over other floes during the past few minutes, the southernmost harbingers of the spring drift of the impermanent pack. Then he saw the cruiser, a low shape on the edge of the horizon, which neared with frightening rapidity. He felt that moment of tension, as the adrenalin pumped into his system, and the heart hammered at the blood, the precursor of action.

He wondered whether the cruiser would wait like a complacent animal, to swallow him in its fire, or whether it would launch a brace of missiles while he was still more than a mile away. Infrared was imprecise - technology had been unable to narrow the inevitable spread of a heatsource as it registered on the screen. It was not a good way to obtain an accurate fix. Nevertheless, fire-control aboard the cruiser, using infrared missiles, did not need to be precise.