Firefox (3 page)

He took off his hat and leaned sideways, so that he saw the long, sleek, vividly-chromed saloon in the driver’s mirror. Then the driver of the taxi engaged the gears and they pulled out of the airport, onto the motorway that would take him south-east into the centre of Moscow - the wide, prestigious Leningrad Avenue. He settled back in his seat, being careful not to glance behind him through the tinted rear window.

The black saloon would be behind him, he knew.

So, he thought, feeling the tension drift down and vanish, Alexander Thomas Orton had passed his first inspection. He was not sweating - the taxi had an inefficient heater, and the temperature inside was low.

Yet, he admitted, he had been nervous. It had been a test he had to pass. He had had to play a part already familiar to his audience, so familiar that they would have noticed any false note. He had had to become totally self-effacing, not merely behind the mask of Orton’s greasy hair, spectacles, and weak jaw, but in his movements, his voice. At the same time, he had had to carry with him, like the scent of a distinctive after-shave, an air of suspicion, of seediness. Thirdly, and perhaps most difficult for him, he had had to possess a certain, ill-fitting, acquired Englishness of manner and accent.

As he considered his success, and was thankful for the solid lack of imagination and insight of his interrogator, he acknowledged the brilliance of Aubrey’s mind. The little plump Englishman had been developing Gant’s cover as Orton, a cover merely to get him unobtrusively into Russia, for a long time. For almost two years, a man looking very much as Gant did now, had been passing through customs at Cheremetievo. An exporter, touting with some success a range of plastic toys. Apparently, they sold rather well in GUM, in Red Square. A fact that had amused Aubrey a great deal.

There was, naturally, more; Alexander Thomas Orton was a smuggler. The KGB’s suspicions had been carefully aroused concerning Orton’s possible activities in the drug-smuggling line a little more than a year before. Orton had been watched carefully, closely - yet never harried so openly before. Gant wondered whether Aubrey had not turned the screw on him. The big, dumb KGB man had expected to find something in his luggage, that was certain. And, now that his suspicions, aroused and then frustrated, had remained unfulfilled, Gant was being tailed to his hotel.

The taxi passed the Khimky Reservoir on the right, the expanse of grey water looking cold and final under the cloudy, rushing sky. Soon, they were into the built-up, urban mass of the city and Gant watched the Dynamo Stadium sliding past the window to his left.

Aubrey, Gant knew, had been unimpressed by him.

Not that he cared. Gant, for all his involvement in the part he was playing, had never intended to impress. He was at the beginning of his journey and, if he felt any emotion at all. it was one of impatience. Only one thing had mattered to him, ever since Buckholz had found him, in that dead-beat pizza palace in Los Angeles during his lunch-break, when he had been working as a garage-hand - it had been the first, and only time, he had left the Apache group, the tame Migsquadron belonging to the USAF, and only one thing had ever mattered. He would get to fly the greatest airplane in history. If Gant possessed a soul any longer, which he doubted, it would be in that idea, enshrined perhaps, even embalmed therein. Buckholz had got him to fly again, on the Mig-21, and then the Foxbat; then he had left, tried to run away. Then Buckholz had found him again, and the idea had been broached … the Firefox.

His playing at being Orton amused Aubrey - was necessary. With true and utter single-mindedness, however, Gant viewed it merely as a prelude. It got him nearer to the Firefox.

Gant had always possessed a self-belief that amounted almost to illness. He had never lost that belief. Not in the nightmares, in the drugs, in the hospital, in the breakdown, in the attempted atonement. He had never ceased to think of himself in any other way than as a flyer - and as the best. Buckholz had known that, the bastard, Gant reflected - and he had used that because it was the lever that would work, the only one … He couldn’t run away. The job in Los Angeles - that had been a fake, a drop-out as real as putting on a disguise.

Before that, the hospital, and the white uniform he had adopted - they had been disguises, too. He had tried to hide from the truth, the truth that the best could be afraid, that he could overtax himself, that he could, might fail.

That had been the real nightmare. Gant’s precarious world, the whole person that he was, was threatened by stretched nerves, by too many missions, by too much danger and tension.

Gant rubbed a hand across his brow, and looked down at his damp fingertips. He wore an expression of distaste, almost disgust, on his face. He was sweating now. It was not reaction from the goddam stupid games he was beginning to have to play with the KGB, on their home field - not that: rather the memory of his attempts to escape.

Gant came from a family of nonentities. By the time he entered his teens, he despised his parents, and his brother, the insurance salesman who was a conspicuous failure. He despised, though he could not help loving, the elder sister who was an untidy slut with four kids, and a drunk for a husband. He had come from a dirt town in the vast, featureless expanse of the Mid-West - Clarkville, pop. 2763, the signposts had read together with the legend ‘A Great Little Town’. Gant had hated Clarkville. Every moment he spent within its confines, or locked within the rolling, flat corn-belt that buried it, he had been nothing, had felt himself nothing. He had left Clarkville behind him long ago, and he had never been back, not even for the funeral of his mother, or the comfort of his ageing father. His sister had written to him, once, berating and pleading in turns. He had not replied. The letter had reached him in Saigon. Gant had never escaped from Clarkville. He carried it with him, wherever he went. It had shaped him.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead on the leg of his dark trousers. He closed his eyes, and tried not to think about the past. It had been the dream, he thought. That damned dream had started this. That, and his nettled, irritated pride because smug, patronising Aubrey had looked down his nose at him. Gant’s hands bunched into fists on the plastic seat. Like a child, all he wanted to do now was to show them, show them all, just as he had wanted to show them in Clarkville, that dead town of dead people. There was only one way to show Aubrey. He had to bring back his airplane - the Firefox.

Kontarsky was on the telephone, the extension that linked him with his superior officer within the Industrial Security Section of the 2nd Chief Directorate, of which the ‘M’ department formed a small, but vital, part. Dmitri Priabin watched his chief carefully, almost like a prompter following an actor, script open on his knees. Kontarsky seemed much more at ease than during their interview the previous day, as if action had soothed him during the last twenty-four hours.

During that elapsed period, Kontarsky had received an up-to-date report from the KGB unit at Bilyarsk, and surveillance of the underground cell had been increased. There had been no unaccountable arrivals in Bilyarsk during the past forty-eight hours, and only the courier, Dherkov, had left the small town. His grocery van had been thoroughly searched on his return from Moscow. Kontarsky had ordered searches of all vehicles arriving in the town, and a thorough scrutiny of all personnel passing inside the security fence of the factory. Dog patrols had been intensified around the perimeter fence, and the number of armed guards in the hangars had been trebled.

Once those things had been done, Kontarsky and Priabin had both begun to feel more at ease. Priabin himself was to leave for Bilyarsk that night by KGB helicopter, and take over effective command of the security forces from the officer on the spot. Effectively, within hours, he could seal Bilyarsk tight. Kontarsky had decided not to travel with the First Secretary and his party, but to impress by being on the spot himself twenty-four hours before the test-flight. They would arrest the members of the underground only a matter of hours before the flight, and at the time of arrival of the First Secretary, they would already be undergoing interrogation. It would, he calculated, be sure to impress the First Secretary and Andropov who would be part of the entourage. Both Priabin and Kontarsky anticipated extracting the maximum satisfaction from the interrogations. Baranovich, Kreshin, Semelovsky, Dherkov and his wife, would be snatched out of then-false sense of security in a theatrical and impressive display of ruthless KGB efficiency.

Kontarsky put down the telephone receiver. He smiled broadly at his aide, and at the third person in his office - Viktor Lanyev. assistant KGB security chief at Bilyarsk. Lanyev had been flown to Moscow to make a report, thereby doubling Kontarsky’s sense of security after having received a written report from Tsemik, the chief security officer at Bilyarsk. After listening to Lanyev’s meticulous diary of the movements and contacts of the three men under observation, Kontarsky had been relieved, had set himself on a course of optimism, at the end of which journey he could already envisage a successful conclusion.

The security arrangements at Bilyarsk were a minor classic, entirely orthodox, without imagination - a policy of overkill. There were the resident, declared hierarchy of KGB officers, and their select squad from the 2nd Directorates; as a support group, there were personnel of the GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence, who performed as guards and patrols both at the airstrip and in the town; thirdly, there were the ‘unofficial’ members of the KGB, the informants and civilian spies closest to the research and development teams.

All three groups were focusing their attention on four men and a woman. They watched everything, saw and knew everything.

Kontarsky, prematurely luxuriating in the congratulations of his superior, said, after a while, steepling his fingers as he leaned back in his chair: ‘We will make doubly-sure, my friends. We must take no risks at this point - this late point in time. Therefore, I suggest we commandeer a special detachment from the 5th Chief Directorate, one of their Security Support Units. You agree?’

Lanyev, the man on the spot, seemed somewhat insulted. ‘There is no need. Comrade Colonel.’

‘I say there is - every need!’ Kontarsky’s eyes were angry, commanding. ‘I must have the most complete assurances that nothing will, or can, go wrong at Bilyarsk. Are you prepared to guarantee - in the most definite, unequivocal way - that nothing can go wrong?’

Kontarsky was smiling at Lanyev. The middle-aged man, who had risen as high in the ranks of the KGB as he would ever achieve, looked down, and shook his head.

‘No, Comrade Colonel, I would not wish to do that,’ he said quietly.

‘Naturally - and we are not asking that you should, Viktor Alexeivich, no.’ He beamed at his two subordinates. Priabin sensed the swing of Kontarsky’s mood.

At times, his chief struck him as portraying many of the symptoms of the manic-depressive in miniature. Now the doubts of the previous day were deeply buried. Kontarsky would, almost, not have recognised himself had he confronted the frightened man of yesterday.

‘How many men. Colonel?’ he asked.

‘Perhaps a hundred - discreetly, of course - but a hundred. We may run the risk of frightening them on, but that will be better than failing to catch them at whatever they have planned.’

‘Comrade Tsemik does not believe that anything is planned. Comrade Colonel,’ Lanyev interpolated.

‘Mm. Perhaps not. But we must act as if they intend to sabotage the test-flight - something wrong with one of the missiles, or with the cannon … a mid-air explosion. I do not have to draw pictures for either of you.

Production of the Mig-31 would be put back, perhaps reconsidered. Either that, or we should all, all of us, be - heavily disgraced?’ Kontarsky was still smiling.

For a moment, there was a worried drawing together of the eyebrows, and then he shook off the doubts. He could face his fear now, because he could not see or envisage how he might fail. Mere multiplication gave him confidence. Almost two hundred men at Bilyarsk not to mention the informers…

‘I must check with the Political Security Service as to which of the informers we have been - loaned - are most reliable,’ Kontarsky went on briskly. ‘We should not need them - but they will be inside the factory complex, and therefore closest to the dissidents. They will be armed, under your direction, Viktor Alexeivich.’ Lanyev nodded. ‘And issued with communicators. Now, where will our three traitors be in the hours before the flight, when the aircraft is being armed?’

Lanyev consulted his notes.

‘All three of them will be inside the hanger itself, Comrade Colonel - unfortunately.’

‘Yes, indeed. Three times as dangerous as they might otherwise be. Give me details.’

‘Baranovich has worked on the weapons system itself. Comrade Colonel - as you know.’

‘He will be working on the aircraft during the night, until it takes off-‘

‘Yes. Comrade Colonel.’

‘He cannot be replaced?’

‘Not possibly.’

‘Very well! What of the others?’

‘Kreshin and Semelovsky are both little more than highly-favoured mechanics. Comrade Colonel,’ Lanyev supplied. ‘They will be concerned with the fuelling, and the loading of the missiles and the other weapons. Also, the Rearward Defence Pod. But they are most familiar with the systems, and not easy to replace.’

‘They can be watched?’

‘Very closely. Our informers will be shoulder-to-shoulder with them throughout the night.’

‘As long as our informers know enough to recognise attempted sabotage when they see it!’

“They do. Comrade Colonel.’

‘Good. For that, I can take your word. Dherkov, naturally, will be at home, sleeping with that fat wife of his.’ Kontarsky smiled. His mood was being sustained by what he was hearing, by the action he appeared to be taking, the decisiveness of his manner, his voice … ‘Yes. May I sum up, gentlemen? Our a GRU colleagues will throw a ring around Bilyarsk that will be impregnable; our borrowed Security Support Unit will arrive tomorrow, and will assist the guards on the perimeter fence, the hangars, the factory, and the boundaries of the town itself. Our three dissidents will be very closely watched - especially Baranovich. Have I left anything out, Dmitri-‘