insufficient time to become shock and alarm before he was struck behind the ear by a terrible, killing blow. He never saw the face of his assassin — the floor rushed up, unseen, as he keeled over from the force of the blow which flung him halfway across the room.
Gant flicked on the light, and crossed to the inert body, rubbing the fist that had delivered the blow. Then, like some great exhalation, the nerves exploded in him, shaking his body like a wind. He had been able to kill Voskov, coldly and mechanically and with his hands, when even Buckholz had sometimes wondered about it. But the reaction continued to shake him, and it was what seemed like minutes before he could kneel steadily by the dead man. Then, gently, as if a medical expert, he felt for the pulse he knew would not be evident. Voskov was dead.
Gant rolled the body onto its back and looked down at the dead face of Voskov. The man was older than Gant, in his early forties, perhaps. He felt no remorse. He had removed a necessary piece from the board, that was all. He merely wondered how good Voskov had been.
Suddenly galvanised into action, he tugged the body across the carpet towards the tall steep lockers ranged against one wall. Dumping Voskov in a heap, he fished in his jacket pocket for the master key that Baranovich had supplied, and opened one of the lockers. It was, as he had expected, and had been told to expect, empty. Holding the door ajar with his foot, he pushed the head and shoulders of the body into the locker. Then, as if engaged in some grotesque, energetic dance in slow-motion, he heaved at the body, until it stood as if alive, upright in the locker. Swiftly, he closed the door and locked it, hearing the soft concussion of Voskov's body as it leaned forward against the door. Then he pocketed the key.
Opening another of the lockers, he inspected the pressure-suit that hung there — Voskov's. Voskov was about his own build. At least, they were sufficiently alike for Gant to be able to use the Russian's pressure-suit. Fortunately, it was merely an adaptation of the normal aircraft pressure-suit, not something tailor-made like a NASA space-suit Had that been the case, the slightest difference in form, height, build, would have made the wearing of Voskov's suit impossible.
Having completed his inspection, Gant began to remove his GRU uniform. It was three-forty-six in the morning. Gant felt his nerves beating his stomach, a fist. As he removed his shirt, he looked at the bleeper device taped beneath his arm that would summon him to the hangar.
He had two-and-a-half hours to go.
Five
THE RIP-OFF
Kontarsky glanced at his gold wrist-watch. It was four o'clock. From where he was standing in the open doorway of the main hangar, he could survey the scene of quiet, intense activity within. He had seen the guards become aware of him, not only those on the doors, but those at then stations close to the aircraft became suddenly more aware, more intent in their scrutiny. Many of the scientists and technicians took no notice of him — though he had seen Kreshin look up and then mutter something to Semelovsky, who stood next to him. Baranovich he could see as a hunched figure, swallowed to the waist by the open cockpit, giving instructions to the technician seated in the pilot's couch of the Mig-31.
Kontarsky had no aesthetic or military feelings concerning the aircraft. Its aerodynamic lines, its potency, the huge gaping mouths of its air intakes, were nothing to him but a problem in security. And with that problem, he had taken every precaution he possibly could.
He ought to have felt a comfortable self-pride, he realised. Such a feeling, however, eluded him. The night had remained mild, but he felt cold. He was chewing on an indigestion tablet now as he stood outside the hangar. It seemed to be having no effect whatsoever.
The Production Prototype One was less than a hundred feet from him; behind it, ignored by the team of patient, hardly moving technicians, a second aircraft — the PP Two — stood near the rear of the giant hangar.
Kontarsky wondered whether to speak to the guards near the aircraft, but decided against it. They were all picked men, and he had briefed them thoroughly before they went on duty. To have inspected them now at close quarters would have been an error of leadership, a sign of absent confidence, and he knew it. Reluctantly, he crossed the strip of light spilling from the open doors, and rejoined his personal bodyguard who was in conversation with one of the door-guards. Nodding to him to fall in behind him, he headed for the second hangar, the one in which the Mig-31 had been built — it was locked and in darkness, but it would not hurt to have the guards who ringed it make one more interior search.
Priabin was, at that moment, he knew, running the agent to earth. As the hours of the night had limped by, he had become more and more open to his aide's suggestion that the man must be some kind of technical expert, sent to talk to Baranovich and the others before they were arrested, as would be inevitable as soon as the trials were successfully completed, and to observe as much as he could of the trials themselves. What kind of equipment, other than his eyes, he had brought with him, Kontarsky had no idea. As he crossed the bright, stark space between the hangars, he looked out beyond the fence, seeking some vantage-point from which such an observer might consider he had a good view of the runway. There was no hillock, no rising ground.
When he had completed his inspection of the production hangar, he told himself, it would be as well to send out dog patrols beyond the fence — just in case.
Despite his decision, he still felt that the man was inside the fence, a part of the complex, in some disguise or other. He would have the whole area searched again.
Baranovich watched the form that he recognised as belonging to Kontarsky as it crossed the black hole of the night, and vanished in the direction of the production hangar. When he looked down again from his perch on top of a pilot's ladder wheeled against the fuselage of the Firefox, he saw the squat, flattened features of the mechanic in the pilot's couch looking up at him, grinning. Baranovich, with as much aplomb as he could muster, smiled back and the mechanic, who had expected and wished to see fear, or unsettlement at the least, on Baranovich's face, scowled and turned back to his work. He was in the process of checking the circuits within the weapons-guidance system. Part of the instrument panel on the left-hand side was removed, and the intricate wiring and miniature circuits of the system were exposed. Under Baranovich's direction, the final check proceeded slowly.
Baranovich knew that the mechanic was KGB. For months now, as he had installed and perfected the system on which he had been forced to work originally while still in the scientific prison of Mavrino, he had had assigned to his technical team this man, Grosch, an electronics technician of high capability. Grosch was the child of a German scientist captured by the Red Army early in 1945; there was no more loyal member of the Party.
Baranovich felt no anger at the man — not because his father was a Nazi, or because he himself was a secret policeman. If Gant had been able to see the look on his face as he gazed down at the top of Grosch's cropped head, he would have recognised that look of painful wisdom, of detached pity, which he had seen at Kreshin's quarters. Baranovich looked unobtrusively at his watch. Four minutes after four. He looked round him at the security within the hangar as Grosch absorbed himself in checking a printed circuit. He had decided already on the method of diversion he would use.
He looked back over the tail-unit of the Firefox, to where the second production prototype stood, rather shunted into a corner. The aircraft, seemingly in shadow, unglamorous, lacking the pristine deadliness of the model atop which he stood, was fully fuelled, in a state of readiness for take-off against some kind, any kind, of airborne attack upon the factory. All Soviet aircraft, whether prototype, production model, or service aircraft, as long as they were military, remained in a maximum twenty-four-hour condition of readiness while on the ground.
Therefore, Baranovich concluded, there was only one thing that could be done when Gant escaped at the controls of the first aircraft. They would send the second one after him. There would be a delay, of course, while it was fully-weaponed — perhaps an hour, including a quickest possible check of systems and controls. And the second aircraft would be refuelled in mid-air, unlike Gant, who would have to refuel on the ground, wherever that ground was. Unless he, Kreshin and Semelovsky could put that second aircraft out of action, Gant could be caught, and destroyed, by the only plane capable of doing both to him — PP Two.
Fire: he knew the answer. A hangar fire would create a panic, and allow Gant to climb aboard as the pilot, and taxi the aircraft onto the taxi-way outside without suspicion. Two birds with one stone, he remarked to himself. Gant away, and the pursuit of him prevented at the same time. There was so much fuel, oil, timber and other
