Firefox

Craig Thomas Firefox

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to acknowledge the invaluable help given to me, in time and expertise, by T. R. Jones, with all the technical matters connected with the experimental aircraft that features so prominently in the book.

I am indebted also for their assistance with matters geographical to Miss Audrey Simmonds and Mr Graham Simms; I would also like to thank Mr. Peter Payne, whose enthusiastic scepticism kept me alert, but hopeful, during the writing of the book.

I am indebted finally to various publications, particularly to John Barron's highly informative and invaluable book, KGB, and to the admirable series of Jane's publications — particularly to current editions of All the World's Aircraft, Fighting Ships, and Weapons Systems, from each of which I gleaned much valuable technical information.

Craig Thomas

Lichfield

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

W. B. Yeats

The man lay on the bed in his hotel room, his hands raised like claws above his chest, as if reaching for his eyes. His body was stretched out, rigid with tension. A heavy perspiration shone on his brow and darkened the shirt beneath his arms. His eyes were wide open, and he was dreaming.

The nightmare did not come often now; it was like a fading malaria. He had made it that way — he had, not Buckholz or the psychiatrists at Langley. He despised them. He had done it himself. Yet, when the dream did come, it returned with all its old force, the fossilisation of all memory and all conscience. It was all that was left of Vietnam. Even as he suffered, sweated within its toils, a cold part of his mind observed its images and effects — charting the ravages of the disease.

In his dream he had become a Vietnamese, Viet-Cong or peasant it did not matter — and he was burning to death, slowly and horribly; the napalm that the searching Phantom had dropped was devouring him. The roar of the retreating jets was drowned in the roar of the flames as he singed, burned, began to melt…

In the flames, too, other times and other images flickered; flying sparks. Even as his muscles withered, shrivelled in the appalling heat, he saw himself, as if from a point far at the back of his brain, flying the old Mig-21 and frozen in the moment of catching the USAF Phantom in his sights… then the drugs in Saigon, the dope that had led to the time when he had been caught in the sights of a Mig… then there was the breakdown, the months in the Veterans' Hospital and the crying, bleeding minds all around him until he teetered on the verge of madness and wanted to sink into the new darkness where he would not hear the cries of other minds or the new shrieks of his own brain.

Then there was the work in the hospital, the classic atonement that had turned to a vile taste at the back of his throat. Then there was the Mig, and learning to fly Russian, think Russian, be Russian… Lebedev, the defector with the Georgian accent, they had brought in to coach him, thoroughly — because he had to be fluent…

Then the training on the American-copied Mig-25, and the study of Belenko's debriefing, Belenko who had flown a Foxbat to Japan years before… and the days and weeks in the simulator, flying a plane he had never seen, that did not exist.

The napalm and the flames and Saigon…

The smell of his own burning was heavy in his nostrils, vividly clear, the bluish flame from the melting fat… Mitchell Gant, in his hotel room, burned to death in agony.

HEAD OF SIS TO PM — EYES ONLY

4/2/76

Dear Prime Minister,

You asked for fuller information concerning the Mikoyan project at Bilyarsk. I therefore enclose the report I received last Autumn from Aubrey, who is controller of the espionage effort there. You will see he has a rather radical suggestion to make! Your comments would be illuminating.

Sincerely,

Richard Cunningham

EYES ONLY — HEAD OF SIS

18/9/75

My dear Cunningham,

You have received the usual digests of my full reports with regard to the espionage effort being made against the secret Mikoyan project at Bilyarsk, which has received the NATO codename 'Firefox'. In asking for my recommendations, I wonder whether you are sufficiently prepared for what I propose.

You do not need me to outline Soviet hopes of this new aircraft. Something amounting to a defence contingency fund has been set aside, we believe, to cope with eventual mass-production of this aircraft. Work on the two scheduled successors to the current Mig-25, the 'Foxbat, has or is being run down; the Foxbat will remain the principal strike plane of the Soviet Air Force until that service is re-equipped with the Mig-31, the 'Firefox'. At least three new factory-complexes are planned or under construction in European Russia solely, one suspects, to facilitate the production of the Mig-31.

As to the aircraft itself, I do not need to reiterate its potency. If it fulfils Soviet hopes, then we will have nothing like it before the end of the eighties, if at all. Air supremacy will pass entirely to the Soviet Union. We all know the reasons for SALT talks and defence cuts, and it is too late for recriminations. Suffice it to say that an unacceptable balance of power would result from Russian possession of the production interceptor and strike versions of this aircraft.

With regard to our own espionage effort, we are fprtunate in having acquired the services of Pyotr Baranovich, who is engaged on the design and development of the weapons-system itself. He has recruited, as you are aware, two other highly-qualified technicians, and David Edgecliffe has supplied the Moscow end of the pipeline — Pavel Upenskoy, his best native Russian agent. However impressive it all sounds — and we both know that it is — it is not sufficient! What we have learned, or are likely to learn will be insufficient to reproduce or neutralise the threat of the Mig-31. Baranovich and his team know little of the aircraft outside their own specialisations, so compartmented is the secrecy of the research.

Therefore, we must mount, or be preparing to mount within the next five years, an operation against the Bilyarsk project. I am suggesting nothing less than that we should steal one of the aircraft, preferably a full production prototype around the time of its final trials.