Firefox (21 page)

‘On the contrary. Colonel, it is you who are responsible,’ the First Secretary replied, in a voice bereft of menace, bereft of humanity. ‘Proceed.’

‘He infiltrated the compound here with the aid of various dissident Jews, who are now all dead.’

‘Mm. But not before they told you what you wished to know, I presume?’

Kontarsky looked down into the broad, lined face. It was a strong face. He had always thought so. The eyes were Jike chips of grey stone.

‘We - learned nothing…’ he managed to say.

There was a silence. He noticed that the radiooperator was sitting more upright in his chair, as if tense. When his eyes returned to the circular table, he could see the First Secretary’s strong, veined hand tapping at the sleeve of the Chairman’s dark, sober business suit, as if restraining him.

‘You - do not know what the destination of the Mig-31 will be?’ he heard the First Secretary ask.

‘You know nothing?’ Kutuzov interposed, shocked. Kontarsky saw the First Secretary glance swiftly at the ageing Marshal who was in full uniform, the sombre blue tinselled with insignia and overlapping decorations. The old pilot fell silent.

‘No.’ Kontarsky said, and his voice was small and flat, as if the room were deadened, without reverberation.

‘Very well,’ the First Secretary intoned after a moment of heavy, oppressive silence. At that moment Kontarsky saw his ruin. For the First Secretary, and for the others, military personnel and KGB, gathered round the circular table, he had ceased to exist. ‘You will place yourself under close guard. Colonel.’ Kontarsky’s lip trembled, and he looked once into the First Secretary’s eyes. It was like looking in a mirror that refused’ to reflect his physical presence. ‘You are dismissed.’

When Kontarsky had left the room, the door closing behind him softly, the First Secretary glanced in the direction of the Marshal. He nodded, once, and then turned his head to look at Andropov. He said: ‘There is no time now for recriminations. That will come later. It appears obvious to me that this is a CIA venture, a desperate attempt to cancel the huge advantage in air superiority that the aircraft would have given to the Soviet Union. We know nothing else than the man’s name, and his official file. It would tell us nothing of use. As each moment passes now, the Mig-31 moves further and further away from us, towards … where, Mihail Ilyich?’

The Marshal of the Soviet Air Force glanced over his shoulder at the back of an operator at a small console.

‘Give us the “Wolfpack” map of the U.S.S.R., quickly!’ he said.

The operator punched buttons in instant obedience and, as the men seated at the table withdrew thenhands, and packets of cigarettes and cigar-cases, the surface of the table registered a projection-map of the Soviet Union, clustered with tiny dots of varying colours. There before them on the screen of the table lay the diagram of the immense outer defences of the Soviet Union. The First Secretary leaned forward across the table, and tapped at the map.

‘Bilyarsk,’ he said. His finger traced a circle round the area he had indicated. ‘Now, in which direction has he gone?’

‘We do not know. First Secretary,’ Kutuzov said, his voice gruff. He had had an operation for cancer of the throat two years earlier, and it had left his voice a tired, dry whisper.

He looked across the table, across the glowing projection of the map, at Vladimirov, the tall, lean-faced officer with grey hair and watery blue eyes who sat opposite him. The ruthlessness, the confidence, of that face helped him to regain a little of his calm, after the blow of the theft of the Mig. He had been winded, temporarily paralysed, by what had happened. It had been even more of a body blow than Belenko’s defection in a Foxbat four years before. He could still see, in his mind, the bright, swift glint of the fuselage as the aircraft had pulled away from the Tupolev, climbing swiftly. A glimpse, that had been all he had.

Over the UHF, then, had come the information that an unauthorised aircraft had taken off from the single main runway below them in the strengthening light. He had known, with a sudden, sick realisation, what aircraft it had been; before confirmation had flowed in, even as they touched down and the big plane had skipped once and then settled on the runway. Someone, an American, had stolen the greatest aircraft the Soviet Union had ever produced - stolen it.

‘What do you think, Vladimirov?’ he said.

The tall, lean-faced man glanced down at the map, then looked up, addressing his remarks to the First Secretary. General Med Vladimirov, commandant of the tactical strike arm of the Soviet Air Force, the ‘Wolfpack’, as it was designated, was worried. He, too, understood the problem - how to trace an untraceable aircraft - but he did not intend to allow the First Secretary to see his doubts. Then, as lethargy seemed to have left him, he spoke.

‘I suggest a staggered sector scramble. First Secretary,’ he said directly, ‘in two areas. We must put up as many planes as we can, along our southern and northern borders.’

‘Why there?’

‘Because, First Secretary,’ he said, looking down at the map, ‘this lunatic must refuel if he is to fly the aircraft to a place of complete safety. He will not refuel in the air - we would know if some mother-plane were waiting for him over neutral or hostile sky.’

‘What is the range of this aircraft?’ General Leonid Borov asked, seated next to Vladimirov. Borov was commandant of the ECM (Electronic Counter-Measures) section of the Soviet Air Force. He, it would be, in the event of a pre-emptive strike by the West, who would coordinate the radar and missile defences with the air defences.

‘It would be fully fuelled,’ Kutuzov said. ‘Almost three thousand miles maximum, depending on what this American knows, and how he handles the aircraft.’

‘Which would put him here - or here,’ Vladimirov said, his hand sweeping the Arctic Ocean, then drifting across the expanse of the table to indicate the Iranian border, and then the Mediterranean.

‘Why would he go either north or south, Vladimirov?’ the First Secretary asked. His voice had become impatient now, and his body seemed eager for activity, as if the blood were tinglingly returning to his limbs after cramp.

‘Because, First Secretary, any pilot who ran the risk of the Moscow defences would be committing suicide even in a plane that allows no radar trace!’

There was a brief silence. All of them there, the five men round the circular table, and the team of guards, ciphermen, radiooperators and aides to the ranking officers, all of them understood that the unvoiceable had been uttered. Now that the American had stolen the Mig he had turned that unique fact to his advantage, the fact that the airplane’s defences incorporated an antiradar system.

‘It works too well!’ Kutuzov growled in his characteristic whisper. ‘It works too damn well!’

‘The American knows of it?’ Andropov said, speaking for the first time. Heads turned in the direction of the bland, urbane Chairman of the KGB. He seemed unabashed by the failure sustained by one of his officers, the monumental failure. Vladimirov smiled thinly. Perhaps he thought, with a hardline pro-Stalinist First Secretary, the Chairman considered himself untouchable. He continued looking at the man across the table from him, who looked like nothing so much as a prosperous, efficient Western businessman, rather than the head of the most powerful police and intelligence force in the world.

‘He must know,’ Vladimirov said, ice in his voice, ‘Your man’s security must have been full of holes, Chairman, for the CIA to have got him this far.’

The First Secretary’s hand slapped the table once, the projection-map jiggling momentarily under the impact.

‘No recriminations! None. I want action, Vladimirov - and quickly! How much time do we have?’ Vladimirov looked at his watch. The time was sixtwenty-two. The Mig had been airborne for seven minutes.

‘He has more than a thousand miles to go before he crosses any Soviet border. First Secretary. He will travel at sub-sonic speed for the most part, because he will want to conserve fuel, and because he will not want to betray his flight-path with a supersonic footprint - we have more than an hour, even should he fly directly…’

‘One hour?’ The First Secretary realised he was in a foreign element, that Vladimirov and the other military experts would possess a time-scale where minutes stretched, were elastic - in which all things could be accomplished. He added: ‘It is enough. What do you propose - Kutuzov?’

‘As “Wolfpack” Commandant suggests. First Secretary, a staggered sector scramble. We must institute a search for this aircraft, a visual search. We must put in the air a blanket of aircraft, a net in which he will be caught. All our “Wolfpack” and “Bearhunt” squadrons know this sequence clearly. It leaves no holes, no gaps. We merely have to institute it in reverse order.

“Bearhunt” will begin, seeking the American within the area three hundred miles within our borders - “Wolfpack” can be scrambled at the same time, patrolling the borders themselves.’

‘I see.’ The First Secretary was thoughtful, silent for a moment, then he said: ‘I agree.’

There was a relaxation of suspense in the War Command Centre of the Tupolev. It was from that room that the First Secretary, if ever the need arose, would order Armageddon to commence - a replica, except for its size, of the War Command Centre in the heart of the Kremlin. For the Soviet leader, and those members of the High Command who were present, it was the only stroke of fortune that early morning, that they possessed, in portable form, the nerve-centre of the Soviet defence system. The suspense that vanished was replaced by the heady whiff of tension, the tension of the runner on his blocks, the tension that precedes violent activity.

‘Thank you. First Secretary,’ Vladimirov said. He got to his feet, his thin figure stooping over the table, studying the coloured zones overlying the topography of the map, picking out the spots of colour that indicated his squadron bases, and their linked missile bases. ‘Bleed in the “Bearhunt” status map,’ he ordered. As he watched, the numbers of coloured dots increased, filling the inland spaces of the map at regular intervals. He brushed his hand across the table, smiled grimly to himself, and said: ‘Scramble, with Seekbriefing, and in SSS sequence, squadrons in White through Red sectors, and Green through Brown sectors. Put up “Bearhunt” squadrons, same briefing, G through N.’ He rubbed his chin, and listened to the chatter of the cipher machines, waited for the transmission of the coded signals to the Communications Officer, a young Colonel seated before a console behind him, with his team of three ranged beside him.

When the high-speed transmission had begun, Vladimirov looked at the First Secretary, and said: ‘What do you wish done when they sight the Mig?’

The First Secretary glared at him, and replied: ‘I wish to talk to this American who has stolen the Soviet Air Force’s latest toy - obtain the frequency - if he will not land the aircraft as directed, then it must be destroyed - completely!’

The inertial navigator that had been fitted into the Firefox was represented on the control panel by a small display similar to the face of a pocket calculator. It also possessed a series of buttons marked, for example, ‘Track’, ‘Heading’, ‘Ground Speed’, and ‘Coordinates’.

He could feed into it known navigational information and the on-board computer would calculate and display such information as distance to travel, time for distance. By starting the programmes in the computer at a known time and position, the computer could measure changes in speed and direction, and keep track of the aircraft’s position. Standard procedure required the data displayed to be confirmed by more conventional means - such as visual sightings of landmarks.

Gant had an appointment to keep in the airspace north-west of Volgograd, with the early morning civilian flight from Moscow, a rendezvous which would establish him as travelling towards the southern border of the Soviet Union - a fact he very much wanted to establish in the minds of those who would be controlling the search for him.

He throttled back slightly, keeping his speed at little more than six hundred and fifty knots. He had not pushed the Firefox to its supersonic speeds because, travelling at his present height of almost 15,000 feet, the supersonic footprint he would leave behind him would act like a giant arrow as to his direction for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. There were another twenty-three minutes to his rendezvous. He had made a minute inspection of the equipment packed into the Firefox. Most of it, communications and radar especially, had been built into the simulator at Langley, and was of a type which closely paralleled U.S. developments in the same fields. They weren’t the reason why he was stealing the Firefox. One reason lay in the two mighty Turmansky turbojets which produced in excess of 50,000 Ibs of thrust each, giving the plane its incredible speed in excess of Mach 5. Another reason was in the magic of its antiradar system which, as dead Baranovich had suggested, was non-mechanical, but rather some kind of treatment of, or application to, the skin of the aircraft, and a further reason lay in the thoughtguided missiles and cannon Firefox carried.

The sky ahead of him was clear, pale blue, the rising sun to port of him dazzling off the perspex, the glare diffused and deadened by the tinted mask of the flying helmet. There was nothing to see.

Gant had no interest in the stretching, endless steppe below him. His eyes hardly left the instrument panel, especially the radar which would warn him of the approach of aircraft, or of missiles. One of his ECM devices, which Baranovich had explained in his final briefing was a constant monitor of the radar-emissions from the terrain over which he passed. Effectively, the ‘Nose’, as Baranovich had called it, sniffed out radar signals directed at him. The ‘Nose’ seemed unnecessary to Gant, since he could not be picked up on any radar screen on the ground or in the air but, Baranovich had explained and he had seen, a visual sighting of him would lead to intense radar activity on the ground, using the sighting plane as the guide to his whereabouts. In addition, as long as he went on monitoring the readout on the tiny screen of the ‘Nose’, he would know where, and in what pattern, missile-radars on the ground below him were.