'Yes, Colonel, of course. I will get onto that right away — and his wife.'
Gant heard no more. He passed inside the door, the guards remaining at attention until he was inside. Once there, he leaned against the wall in a narrow corridor, hardly noticing the guard posted there in his sudden, overwhehning relief, until the guard said: 'Are you all right, Captain?'
Gant looked at him, startled. The guard saw a white face, sweaty and strained, and a hand gripping the stomach — and the uniform.
'I — just indigestion. Think I've got an ulcer,' he added, for the sake of veracity.
'Would you like a drink, Captain?' the guard was solicitous.
Gant shook his head. He had to move away now. The incident was already becoming too memorable, his face too familiar; the story would be recounted in the other ranks' mess when the guard went off-duty. He smiled, a poor imitation of the real thing, and straightened himself.
'No — thanks, soldier. No. Just comes in spasms…' Then he realised he was being far too human, he was responding as if he did have an ulcer. He brushed his jacket straight, and jammed his cap on his head. He glared at the soldier, as if he had in some way offended rank by noticing his officer's difficulties, then strode off down the corridor, his boots clicking loudly along the linoleum. In front of him were the stairs up to the officers' mess, and to the pilots' rest-room.
As he mounted the stairs, the images of the last minutes dying in his mind, the feverish pulse slowing, he hoped to his God that Dherkov, the courier, did not know what he looked like. He glanced at his watch.
Still not three o'clock. More than three hours. He wondered how brave a man the grocer was.
There were five of them now in Aubrey's secluded operations room: the two CIA men and the two representatives of the SIS had been joined by a man wearing the uniform of a Captain in the U.S. Navy — Captain Eugene Curtin, from the office of the Chief of Naval Operations, USN. Curtin it was who had been responsible for the arrangements for the refuelling of the Firefox, presuming Gant to be able to steal it on schedule, and head in the right direction — north, towards the Barents Sea.
Curtin was in his forties, square-built, the uniform stretched across his broad shoulders and back. His hair was clipped so short it seemed he had recently survived an internment in some POW camp. His face was large, square, chiselled, and his eyes were piercingly blue. He had just completed some amendments to the huge projection of the Arctic seas, marking the latest reported positions of Russian surface and sub-surface vessels. To Aubrey's eye, there appeared a great many of them — too bloody many, he reflected wryly, as Shelley might have said. Also, Curtin had brought with him a new set of satellite weather photographs, as well as sheets of more local weather reports, and some of the numerous SAC radar and weather planes flying over the seas to the north of Soviet Russia.
Curtin saw Aubrey regarding his amendments to the wall-map, and grinned at him.
'Looks bad — uh?' he said.
Aubrey said nothing, but continued to regard the wall. He disliked the disconcerting honesty that Curtin shared with Buckholz, and other Americans he had encountered in the field of intelligence, whether operational, or merely analytical. The Americans, he considered, had a penchant for being disconcertingly blunt about things. It simply did not do to assume that Gant had no chance of success — the only way to prevent such gloomy reflections was not to think too far ahead — one step at a time.
Aubrey sipped at the cup of tea that Shelley had poured for him, and continued to study the map without any apparent reaction on his features.
Curtin joined Buckholz and his aide, Anders, at their desk where they were analysing the weather reports linking them with the latest positions of the Soviet trawler fleets supplied by the office of Rear-Admiral Philipson over the telephone.
'Well?' Curtin asked softly, his eye on Aubrey.
Buckholz looked up at him. 'It looks good,' he said adopting the same conspiratorial whisper. He picked up his coffee and swallowed the last of it. He pulled a face. He had let the coffee get cold in the bottom of the cup. He handed the empty cup to Anders, who went away to refill it.
'The weather up there can change like — that,' Curtin said amiably, clicking his thumb and forefinger.
'It's been good for the last four days,' Buckholz pointed out.
'Means nothing,' Curtin observed unhelpfully. 'That means there's four days less of good weather left to play with.'
Buckholz scowled at him. 'How bad can it get?' he said.
'Too bad for Hotshot ever to find the fuel he's going to need,' Curtin replied, 'If he ever gets off the ground at Bilyarsk. What about that information Aubrey received?'
'I don't know. Our British friend plays it very close to his chest.'
Curtin nodded. 'Yeah. I don't understand why. But, if they're onto Hotshot — what chance has he got?'
'Some,' Buckholz admitted reluctantly. 'These guys at Bilyarsk on Aubrey's payroll are no fools, Curtin.'
'I never said they were. But I heard the KGB were pretty good at their job, too. If they find out we sent a flyer to Bilyarsk, Hotshot will never get near that damn plane.'
'I know that,' Buckholz appeared suddenly irritated with Curtin. He was being too honest, too objective — breezing in late, like a cold wind, disrupting the close, confined, suppressed subjectivity of the mood of the four intelligence operatives. Sometimes, Buckholz considered, there was a right time for a little deceptive hope. And now was the right time.
'Sorry,' Curtin said with a shrug. 'I'm only the Navy's messenger boy — I just bring you the facts.'
'Yeah, I know that, too.'
Curtin looked down at the mass of papers on Buckholz's desk, and observed: 'Jesus, but this is a half-cock operation.'
'Yeah?'
'Uh-huh. I wonder why you let the British do all the planning, Buckholz. I really do.'
'They had the men on the ground, brother — that's why.'
'But — so much depends on — so many people.'
'It's called the element of surprise, Curtin.'
'You mean — it's a surprise if it works?' Curtin said, his eyebrow raised ironically. 'Maybe — maybe.' Buckholz looked down at the papers before him, as if to signal the end of the conversation. Curtin continued to regard him curiously.
Buckholz, he knew, had survived, even benefited from, the purges which had followed the Congressional enquiry into the activities of the CIA, following Watergate. In fact, it had placed him as Head of the Covert Action Staff within the coterie of top advisers that surrounded the Director himself. It was he, seemingly fired by Aubrey's crack-brained scheme to steal the new Mig, who had pushed through the arrangements for the theft, laid on, in his own bulldozing, dogged fashion, the refuelling arrangements, the radar-watch, the coordination of SAC and USN assistance he required. He had persuaded the Chief of Naval Operations to second Curtin to his staff until the completion of 'Operation Rip-Off', a fact for which Curtin was only dubiously grateful. It had handed him immense, if temporary, power, but it was an operation that could write
The details of Russian surface and sub-surface strength in the Barents Sea and the Arctic Ocean that he had transferred to the wall-map rilled Curtin with doubt. He, better than anyone there, knew the current strength of the Red Banner Northern Fleet of the Red Navy, and how swiftly and thoroughly it could be brought to operate against any discovered intruder into what were considered by the Kremlin to be Soviet waters. So far, the refuelling vessel had not been detected — at least, no moves had been made against her, which ought to have meant the same thing. But, in the upheaval which would follow the theft of the aircraft, in the comprehensive radar and sonar searches by missile cruisers, spy trawlers and submarines — who could say?
As he headed for the coffee percolator on a trolley in one corner of the room, he said to Buckholz, who continued studiously to ignore him: 'He hasn't got a hope in hell, brother — not a hope in hell!'
It was after three-thirty when Lieutenant-Colonel Yuri Voskov arrived in the pilots' rest-room on the second floor of the security building attached to the Firefox's hangar at Bilyarsk. He paused inside the door, and his hand reached for the light switch. When that hand encountered another guarding the light switch, his surprise had
