grasp the answer. Each answer, each source of knowledge, had crumbled between his fingers. He felt trapped.
Priabin was out of breath when he answered his superior's call. Kontarsky heard his voice clearly, though there was some quality of distance about it that might have been elation. His own stomach jumped at the proximity of a solution.
'Colonel — we've got him. He's been identified!' he heard Priabin say, 'Colonel, are you there?'
'Quickly, Priabin — tell me?' One or two of the nearest heads looked up, at the sound of Kontarsky's choked, quiet whisper. They sensed that the breakthrough had come.
'He's a pilot… Mitchell Gant, an American…'
'American?' Kontarsky repeated mechanically.
'Yes. A member of their Mig squadron, the one they built to train their pilots in combat with Russian machines, the Apache group, they call it, designated by the Red Air Force and ourselves as the Mirror- squadron.'
'Go on, Priabin. Why him?'
'Obviously, sir, he knows our aircraft as well as anyone. He'd be a good choice for sabotage, or for analysis of information. Perhaps he intends a — close inspection of the Mig-31?' There was a silence at the other end of the line. The truth, huge and appalling, struck both men at the same moment. In the silence, Kontarsky's voice dropped like a feeble stone.
'He —
'No, sir, surely not. They couldn't hope to get away with it!'
Kontarsky's voice trembled, as he said: 'Thank you, Dmitri — thank you. Well done.' The receiver clanged clumsily into its rest as he replaced it Kontarsky looked out over the team for a few moments, then he picked up the receiver again. He dialled the number of the guard-post at the hangar, and drummed his fingers as he waited.
'Tsernik — is that you? Arrest Baranovich and the others — now!'
'You've had news, sir?'
'Yes — dammit, yes! I want to know from them where this agent is — at once. And let no one near that aircraft — no one, understand?'
'Sir.' Tsernik replaced his receiver. Kontarsky looked around the room again, at the men at their futile paperwork. Then he looked at his watch. Eleven minutes past six. 'Some of you — all of you!' he shouted. 'Get down to that hanger now — no, half of you there, the rest search this building — quickly!'
The room moved before him, as men gathered their coats, checked their weapons.
One voice, distant, said: 'Who are we looking for, sir?'
'A pilot — dammit, a
Baranovich watched the slight figure of Semelovsky as he emerged from the lavatory at the end of the hangar. The little man stepped away from the door and began crossing the hangar, unconcernedly it appeared at that distance: Baranovich waited. A guard had followed Semelovsky to the lavatory. Baranovich wondered whether he would emerge.
Semelovsky reached the shadow of the PP Two, and the guard had still not appeared. Baranovich smiled, a smile of fierce success. Semelovsky, probably with a spanner or wrench, had killed the guard. He loosened the white coat which he wore on top of his overalls, not against the temperature, but to conceal the automatic thrust into the waistband of his trousers. Then he nodded, without looking in Kreshin's direction. He knew he would be watching for his signal.
The work on the aircraft had been completed a little after six. Grosch, suspecting that Baranovich was dalaying completion of the work, but misconstruing the motive as simple fear, had returned to the restaurant, together with most of the other technicians and scientific team-leaders. One man, Pilap, an electronics expert like himself, had deliberately passed him as he left, nodding rather helplessly in his direction. Baranovich had been touched by the gesture, despite its futility.
He reached into the pocket of his coat, and flipped over the switch on a tiny transmitter. Inaudibly, it transmitted to the beeper taped to Gant's arm, a one-to-the-second noise that would alert him to the fact that the diversion had begun. When Baranovich turned the switch over, the signal would become a continuous bleep, Gant's signal that he was to make his way to the hangar as quickly as possible. He turned his head to survey the distance between himself and the nearest guard. He estimated it at about twelve yards. The guards were still much in evidence — he counted four within twenty-five yards and, despite the hour of the morning, they did not seem tired, or inattentive. They had been changed too frequently to become thoroughly bored or fatigued.
He looked to the far end of the hangar. He thought, as his heart leapt in anticipation, he detected the flare of Semelovsky's lighter or matches. Almost immediately, burning across his gaze, a column of flame shot up. He could not any longer see Semelovsky's bending figure, and had no way of knowing whether the man had immolated himself in the sudden blaze.
He turned, drawing the gun from his waistband Already, the moment before the column of flame had shot up, to roll out under the roof of the hangar, there had been cries from the booth, away behind him. Holding the gun across his stiffened forearm, he shot the nearest guard through the stomach, and then moved swiftly towards Kreshin and the other end of the hangar. A bullet plucked at the fuselage above his head as he ran in a ducking crouch, and then someone screamed for the firing to stop, because it was endangering the Mig. He smiled to himself as he pushed at the immobile, frozen form of Kreshin, caught as if in a spotlight, so that the two of them were running towards the fire, together with other forms.
The alarm bell began to clatter its hysterical note and, despite the fire drills that had been endlessly practised, Baranovich got the impression of a surge of people in the direction of the gouting flames. He had a confused, jolting image of a small figure in a white coat, burning like a torch, and he knew it had to be Semelovsky. He thrust the automatic back in his pocket and, shoulder to shoulder with Kreshin, he paused, in a shifting, purposeful group, the heat from the flames like a desert wind striking his face. He flipped over the switch on the transmitter in his pocket, praying that his now continuous signal was reaching Gant. Pushed aside by an unseeing guard tugging a hose behind him, then another, he glanced down at his watch. Six-thirteen. He looked over his shoulder. Over the heads of the crowd pressing behind him, he could see the guard's body near the Firefox and saw, too, the ring of security men surrounding the aircraft. He knew they had discovered, or guessed, what was intended by the diversion, who the agent in Bilyarsk was, and what he intended.
Somehow the distraction was understood for what it was, and the Mig had not been left temporarily unguarded. He could see the squat form of Tsernik directing the formation of the ring of guards, and the junior officer in charge of hangar-security detailing men to fight the fire. A voice crackled over the loudspeaker system, above the noise of the flames, which seemed to have made the watchers oblivious to their danger. Flame spilled across the hangar floor beneath the second aircraft, like swift lava, and the pall of smoke was beginning to engulf them, masking the most forward of the guards with their hoses and extinguishers.
The loudspeaker ordered them to clear the area, clamouring for their attention above the racket of the alarm and the new, added note of the fire-tender, rushing into the chaos of the hangar from its station near the development-hangar.
There was only one thing to do, he realised, the flames at his back now as he watched the fire-tender and the movements of a second group of hurrying guards, the off-duty squad hastily recalled. They were looking for him, and for Kreshin. There was only one thing to do — he had to show himself, draw their fire, draw away, if possible, the ring around the Mig. He began to move in the direction of the retreating tide of spectators as the bulk of the fire-tender edged its way through them. He glanced towards the door through which he knew Gant must enter the hangar. There was no sign of him.
At first, the signal from the bleeper was a muscular tic, not even a sound to Gant as he was consumed by the flames of his dream. He was still in the posture of defeat, sagging stiffly, immobile, on the lavatory seat, his body damp with sweat. Something pulsed in his arm, he was aware of it, but he could not move his hand to scratch it, to rub the spot. The dream was drawing towards an end, and he was patiently waiting for his release. There was no need to move, no need to fight. It had been bad, but it was ebbing now, the separate images flung off like frozen sparks, photographs of his past in a flickering album.
The noise ate down into his mind, the one-to-the-second bleeping of the receiver. A part of Gant's mind, the
