Firefox (26 page)

‘Where is it?’ he said aloud.

‘Where is what?’ the First Secretary asked. His face was creased with thought, with his approaching decision.

‘The refuelling ship … or aircraft, whatever it is!’ Vladimirov snapped in reply, without looking up from the map.

‘Why?’

A thought struck Vladimirov. Without replying to the First Secretary, he said, over his shoulder: ‘Any trace on infrared or sound-detectors further west, either from Firechain bases, or from coastal patrols?’ There was a silence for a moment, and then the noncommital voice replied: ‘Negative, sir. Nothing, except the staggered sector scramble in operation.’

‘Nothing at all?’ Vladimirov said with a kind of desperation in his voice.

‘No, sir. Completely negative.’

Vladimirov was at a loss. It was like staring at a jigsaw puzzle that didn’t make sense, or a game of chess where unauthorised moves had been suddenly introduced, to leave him baffled and losing. He realised he had operated too rigidly as a tactician, and that the people who had planned the theft of the Mig had been experts in the unexpected - security men like Andropov. He glanced quickly in the Chairman’s direction. He decided not to involve him. Realising that he was perhaps committing Kontarsky’s crime, he decided to handle it himself.

There had to be an answer, but he could not see it. The more he thought about the problem of Gant’s refuelling, the more he became convinced that it was the key to the problem.

But, how?

He glared at the map as though commanding it to give up its secrets. On it, every single light represented a Soviet vessel, except for a British trawler-fleet on the very edge of the map, in the Greenland Sea, west of Bear Island.

He wondered, and decided that it was too far. Gant would not have sufficient fuel to make it - and how did the British navy expect to conceal an aircraft carrier inside a trawler-fleet? The idea was ludicrous. No. The map didn’t hold the answer. It told him nothing.

His hand thumped the map, and the lights jiggled, faded and then strengthened. ‘Where is he?’ he said aloud.

After a moment, the First Secretary said: ‘You are convinced that he is still alive?’

Vladimirov looked up, and nodded.

‘Yes, First Secretary. I am.’

There its was, Aubrey thought, a single orange pinhead on the huge wall map. Mother One. An unarmed submarine, hiding beneath an icefloe which was drifting slowly south in its normal spring perambulation, its torpedo room and forward crew’s quarters flooded with precious paraffin to feed the greedy and empty tanks of Gant’s plane.

He coughed. Curtin turned slowly round, then the spell that had seemed to hold them rigidly in front of the map was broken by the entry of Shelley, preceded by a food trolley. Aubrey smelt the aroma of coffee. With a start, he realised that he was hungry. Despite being envious of Shelley who was shaved and washed and had changed his shirt, Aubrey was not displeased by the sight of the covered dishes on the trolley.

‘Breakfast, sir!’ the younger man called out, his smile broadening as he watched his chief’s surprise grow, and then become replaced by obvious pleasure. ‘Bacon and eggs, I’m afraid,’ he added to the Americans. ‘I couldn’t find anyone in the canteen who could make flapjacks or waffles!’

Curtin grinned at him, and said: ‘Mr. Shelley - a real English breakfast is the first thing we Americans order when we book into one of your hotels!’ Shelley, absurdly pleased with himself, Aubrey thought, was unable to grasp the irony of Curtin’s remark. Not that it mattered.

‘Thanks,’ Buckholz said, lifting one of the covers. Aubrey deeply inhaled the aroma of fried bacon, left his chair and joined them at the trolley.

They ate in silence for a little time, then Aubrey said, his knife scraping butter onto a thin slice of toast, his voice full of a satisfied bonhomie: ‘Tell me. Captain Curtin, what is the present condition of the icefloe beneath which our fuel tanker is hiding?’

Curtin, eating with his fork alone in the American style, leaned an elbow on the table around which they sat, and replied: ‘The latest report on the depth of the ice, and its surface condition, indicates all systems go for the landing, sir.’

Aubrey smiled at his excessive politeness, and said: ‘You are sure of this?’

‘Sir.’ As he explained, his fork jabbed the air in emphasis. ‘As you know, sir, all signals from Mother One come via the closest permanent weather-station, and are disguised to sound, if anyone picked them up, just like ordinary weather reports or ice-soundings. So we don’t know what Frank Seerbacker in his ship really thinks, only what he sends. But the conditions are good, sir. The ice surface hasn’t been changed or distorted by wind, and the floe still hasn’t really begun to diminish in size - take it perhaps another three or four days to get south enough to begin melting.

‘And - it’s thick enough?’ Aubrey persisted. Shelley smiled behind another mouthful of bacon and egg poised on his fork. He recognised the signs. Whenever Aubrey was at a loss in the matter of expertise, as he plainly was in the area of polar ice and its nature and behaviour, he repeated questions, sought firmer and firmer assurances from those who posed as experts.

‘Sir,’ Curtin nodded with unfailing courtesy. ‘And it’s long enough and wide enough,’ he added, with the hint of a smile on his Ups. ‘Gant, if he’s anything of a pilot, can land that bird on it.’

‘And the weather?’ Aubrey continued.

Buckholz looked up, grinned and said: ‘What’s the matter, Aubrey? Indigestion, or something?’

‘And the weather?’ Aubrey persisted, not looking at Buckholz.

‘The weather is, at the moment, fine - sir,’ Curtin informed him. He was silent for a moment, then he said: ‘It’s abnormally fine for the time of year, in that sort of latitude…’

‘Abnormal?’

‘Yes, sir. It could change - like that.’ Curtin snapped a the fingers of his disengaged hand.

‘Will it?’ Aubrey asked, his eyes narrowing, as if he suspected some massive joke at his expense. ‘Will it?’

‘I can’t say, sir. Nothing large is showing up, not on the last batch of satellite pictures.’

‘What of the reports from the submarine itself?’

‘Nothing yet, sir. The weather’s perfect. The sensors are being thrust up through the floe from the submarine’s sail every hour, on the hour. The local weather’s fine, sir - just fine.’ Curtin ended with a visible shrug, as if to indicate that Aubrey had bled him dry, both of information and reassurance.

Aubrey seemed dissatisfied. He turned his attention to Buckholz.

‘It’s a lunatic scheme - you must admit that, Buckholz, eh?’

Buckholz glowered at him across his empty plate. He said: ‘I’m admitting no such thing, Aubrey. It’s my a end of the business, this refuelling. You got him there, I admit that - a great piece of work, if that’s what you want me to say - but I have to get him home, and you just better trust me, Aubrey, because I’m not about to change my plans because of your second thoughts.’

‘My dear chap,’ he said, spreading his hands on the table in front of him, ‘nothing was further from my thoughts, I assure you.’ He smiled disarmingly. ‘I just like to be in the picture, so to speak, just like to be in the picture. Nothing more.’

Buckholz seemed mollified. ‘Sure, it’s a crazy scheme landing a plane on a floating icefloe, refuelling it from a submarine - I admit that. But it’ll work, Aubrey. There’s just no trace of that sub, not at the moment, because it’s under the floe, and showing up on no sonar screen anywhere, except as part of the floe. It comes up out of the water, fills up the tanks, and our boy’s away.’ He smiled at Aubrey. ‘We can’t use disguises, not like you, Aubrey. Out there, on the sea, you can’t disguise a ship to look like a pregnant seal!’

There was a moment of silence, and then Aubrey said: ‘Very well, Buckholz. I accept your rationale for using this submarine. However, I shall be a great deal happier when the refuelling is over and done with.’

‘Amen to that,’ Buckholz said, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the percolator. ‘Amen to that.’

Almost as soon as the last of the coastal fog vanished and the bitter grey surface of the Barents Sea was sliding beneath him, strangely unreflective of the pale blueness of the sky, Gant was on top of the trawler. He was travelling at a fraction more than 200 mph, idling by the standards of the Firefox, heading for the twin islands of Novaya Zemlya, his next visual coordinate checkpoint, and the trawler was suddenly almost directly beneath him. As he flashed over the deck, at a height of less than a hundred feet, he saw, in the briefest glimpse, a white upturned face. A man had been emptying slops over the side. Then the trawler, was gone, become a point of green light on the radar screen and he cursed the fact that he had confidently switched off his forward-looking radar when he crossed the coast. Now. too late, he switched it on again. In the moment of success against the Badger, he had been careless, excited. In the moment he had glimpsed the white, upturned face, he had seen something else, something much more deadly. As if to confirm his sighting, the ECM register of radar activity indicated powerful emissions from a source directly behind him, and close. What he had the vicious bad luck to pass over was an Elint ship, a spy trawler. Even now, they could be following his flight-path on infrared.

He pushed the stick forward and the nose of the Firefox dipped, and the grey, wrinkled sea lifted up at him, threateningly. He levelled off at fifty feet, knowing that, with luck, he was already out of electronic view, at his present height. The Elint ship’s infrared operators would have seen him disappear from their screens, even as they informed the captain of their trace, even as the man with the empty slop-bucket raced towards the bridge, mouth agape at what he had seen. They would have some kind of fix on him, a direction in which he had been travelling. He was heading for Novaya Zemlya - a blind man could pass that information back to whoever was coordinating the search for him.

He glanced at the fuel-gauge, and once more cursed the panic that had made him run for the Urals after visual sighting by the Soviet airliner north-west of Volgograd. If only…

He had no time, he realised, to concern himself with the futile. He could, he decided, do nothing except follow the course outlined, and to make the next, and final, course adjustment when he reached Novaya Zemlya.

His hand closed over the throttles. There were missile sites on Novaya Zemlya, abandoned as a testing-ground for Russia’s nuclear weapons and now serving as the most northerly extension of the Russian DEW-line, and its first Firechain links. The Firefox was capable, he had proven, of Mach 2.6 at sea-level. How fast it could really travel he had no idea; he suspected at height its speed might well touch Mach 6, not the Mach 5 he had been briefed to expect. In excess of four-and-a-half thousand miles per hour. And perhaps two-point-two-thousand miles per hour at sea-level. The Firefox was a staggering warplane.

He pushed the throttles open. He had to use precious, diminishing fuel. Almost with anguish, he watched the Mach-counter slide upwards, clocking off the figures … Mach 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 … The Firefox was a pelican, devouring itself.

The Firefox was nothing more than a blur towing a hideous booming noise in its wake to the spotters above the missile site at Matochkin Shar, at the south-eastern end of the narrow channel between the two long islands of Novala Zemlya. On the infrared screens, he was a sudden blur of heat, nearing, then just as suddenly, a receding trace as he flashed through the channel at less than two hundred feet. Gant was flying by the autopilot and the TFR - if a ship was in the narrow channel, he would have no time to avoid it in the splitsecond between his sighting it and his collision with it; but the TFR would cope. His eyes were glued to his own screen, waiting for the glow that would tell him of missile-launch. None came.

As the cliffs of the channel, a grey curtain of unsubstantial rock, vanished and the sea opened out again, he felt a huge, shaking relief, and punched in the coordinates the Firefox was to fly. Automatically, the aircraft swung onto its new course and, slowly, he eased off the throttles, claiming manual control of the aircraft again, desperate to halt the madness of his fuel consumption.

As the aircraft slowed to a sub-sonic speed, like the return of sanity after a fever, Gant realised why no missiles had been launched in his wake. Any missile launched at a target at his height might well have simply driven itself into the opposite cliff, without ever aligning itself on a course to pursue him.

Now he was flying on a north-westerly course, a course which would eventually, long after his fuel ran out, take him into the polar icepack at a point between Spitzbergen and Franz Josef Land. Long before he reached it, he would be dead. The bitter grey sea flowed beneath him like a carpet, looking almost solid. The sky above him was pale blue, deceptively empty.

The loneliness ate at him, ravenous. He shivered. The ‘Deaf Aid’ gave him no comfort. It remained silent. He began to wonder whether it worked. He began to wonder whether there was something, somebody, up ahead of him, waiting to refuel the Firefox. The screen was empty, the sky above empty, the sea devoid of vessels. The Firefox moved on, over a flowing, grey desert, eating the last reserves of its fuel.

The report from the Elint ship, followed by the confirmatory information from Matochkin Shar had angered the First Secrtary. It was suddenly as if he had accepted Vladimirov’s doubts and precautions purely in the nature of a academic exercise; now he knew that they had been necessary, that Gant had not been destroyed in the explosion of the Badger.

It was perhaps the fact that he had been taken in that caused him to be so furiously angry that he turned on Vladimirov, and berated him, in a voice high, gasping with anger, for not having destroyed the Mig-31.

When his anger had subsided, and he had returned shaking and silent to his chair before the Arctic map on the circular table, Vladimirov at last spoke. His voice was subdued, chastened. He had been badly frightened by the outburst of the First Secretary. Vladimirov now knew he was playing with his own future, professional and personal. Gant had to die. It was as simple, and as difficult, as that.