ground, using the sighting plane as the guide to his whereabouts. In addition, as long as he went on monitoring the read-out on the tiny screen of the 'Nose', he would know where, and in what pattern, missile-radars on the ground below him were.
Gant knew what form the search for him would take. The Russians would guess he would head either direct north or direct south — that to the east was only, eventually, and long after he ran out of fuel, the People's Republic of China, while to the west, between himself and a friendly country, lay the massive defences that surrounded Moscow. He knew that 'Bearhunt' squadrons would be up looking for him, and he also suspected the Russians would be using their sound-detection system — NATO-designated, with inappropriate levity, 'Big Ears' — which in the unpopulated interior of the Russian heartland was designed to detect low-flying aircraft that might have eluded the radar net. Gant had no idea of how numerous might be such installations, nor how efficient they were in obtaining accurate bearings on machines moving at more than six hundred miles an hour — nor did he know at what altitude the system ceased to be effective.
One other thing, he reminded himself. Satellite photography, high-speed and infra-red. He didn't know whether it would be effective within the tiny time-scale of his flight. But it was something else to worry about. He was fighting an electronic war. He was like an asthmatic man with heavy, creaking boots trying to move through a room of insomniacs without disturbing them.
Gant had no idea of the nature, or precise location, of his refuelling point. In his memory were a sequence of different coordinates which he was to feed into the inertial navigator.
He had left the UHF channel open, knowing that they would attempt to contact him from Bilyarsk. In fact, he hoped and expected that they would do so. As soon as he spoke, anybody within a range of two hundred miles of him, using UDF equipment would not only pick up the broadcast, but would be able to obtain, with the assistance of two other fix lines, an almost instant fix on his position. In his case, it would only help to confirm the decoy of his journey south.
He suspected that the silence since his take-off was caused by the take-over of command by the War Command Centre on board the First Secretary's Tupolev. He waited with impatience, a surge of vanity in him wanting, above the desire of being asumed to be heading towards the southern borders of the U.S.S.R., to hear from the First Secretary, or the Marshal of the Soviet Air Force, at the least. He wanted to feed upon their anger, their threats.
The radio crackled into life. The voice was one he recognised from newsreels, from interviews — that of the First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. Involuntarily, his eyes flicked to the instruments, checking his heading and speed, checking the conformity of the dials and readouts.
'I am speaking to the individual who has stolen the property of the U.S.S.R.,' the voice said, levelly, without inflection, almost as if on purpose to disappoint him. 'Can you hear me, Mr. Gant? I presume you have discarded your military rank since you became employed by — shall we say,
Ever since the U-2 incident, he thought. Softly, softly. It was not to be admitted, not yet, that he was working for the CIA, even that he was an American.
He said: 'Go ahead — I'm listening.'
'Are you enjoying your ride, Mr. Gant — you like our new toy?'
'It could be improved,' Gant said laconically.
'Ah — your expert opinion, Mr. Gant.'
Gant could almost see the big man, with the strong, square face, sitting before the transmitter in the War Command Centre, while the frenzy of activity around him went almost unnoticed. Already, no doubt, someone had pushed beneath his gaze the details of the fix they had obtained on him. At that moment, however, it was between the two of them, between one man in an airplane, and another man with the powers of a god at his disposal. Yet Gant held all the cards, the voice seemed to say. Gant remained unfooled. He understood the fury of the search for him. He was being played like a fish, lulled, until they found him.
'You could say that,' he said. 'Don't you want to threaten me, or something?'
'I will do so, if that is what you wish,' was the level reply. 'But first, I will merely ask you to bring back what does not belong to you.'
'And then you'll forget the whole thing, uh?'
There was what sounded like soft laughter at the other end of the UHF. Then: 'I don't think you would believe that, Mr. Gant — would you? No, of course not. The CIA will have filled your head with nonsense about the Lubyanka, and the security services of the Soviet Union. No. All I will say is that you will live, if you return immediately. It is calculated that no more than forty flying minutes would be required before we would be able to sight you back over Bilyarsk. It has been a nice try, Mr. Gant, as you would say — but now, the game is most definitely over!'
Gant waited before replying, then said: 'And the alternatives…?'
'You will be obliterated, Mr. Gant — simply that. You will not be allowed to hand over the Mig-31 to the security services of your country. We could not allow that to happen.'
'I understand. Well, let me tell you, sir — I
'I see. Mr. Gant, as you will be aware, I am not interested in the life of one rogue pilot with a poor health record — I was hoping to save the millions of roubles that have been poured into the development of this project. I see that you won't allow that to happen. Very well. You will not, of course, make it to wherever you are heading. Goodbye, Mr. Gant.'
Gant flicked off the UHF and smiled to himself behind the anonymity of the flying mask. All he really had to worry about, he told himself — the one factor in the game which could cancel out all his advantages — was burning in the hangar at Bilyarsk: the second Firefox. If they could continue to trace him, and put that up against him… He shrugged.
The civilian flight from Moscow to Volgograd took him by surprise. Suddenly, there was a glint of sunlight off duralumin, and he was on top of it. The vapour trail, at that hour of the morning in those air conditions, had become visible very late. He had intended to cross the nose of the Tupolev, but there was the short contrail away to port. He switched off the auto-pilot.
He rolled the Firefox onto a wingtip, felt the pressure-suit perform its anti-G function, tightening then loosening round his thighs and upper body, and he pulled the aircraft round. The bright, hard glint of the Tupolev Tu-134 was almost directly ahead of him now. He had to give its flight-crew the opportunity to make a positive visual identification, and he had to be heading south as he crossed the nose.
He banked away to port, accelerating into a dive. He moved away from the airliner, losing sight of it. It registered as a bright green blip near the centre of the radar screen. When he had decided that he had slid across and behind it, and accelerated sufficiently to overtake it again, he straightened onto his original course, watching the blip attempt to regain its position to one side of the screen's centre line. He steadied the Firefox like an eager horse as the airliner moved into visual range to starboard, and he could see the contrail and the tiny glint of sunlight. He eased open the throttles, and the Firefox surged forward on what would appear a collision course to the pilot of the airliner.
There was never a moment when he considered he might have misjudged the distance, the heading. He rolled the plane onto a wingtip, and dived away from the oncoming Tupolev, now filling his starboard window. They would have seen him, and panicked, since their radar screens would be stupefyingly empty. The slim fuselage, and the huge engines of an unknown aircraft, suddenly appearing, would be imprinted on their minds by fear. He rolled the plane into a Mach descent, a thousand feet below the airliner, and listened to the chatter of the pilot over the Russian airline frequency, smiling in satisfaction.
The ground rushed at the Firefox as he screamed down from 15,000 feet. He trimmed slightly nose-up, then pulled out of the suicidal dive, levelling at little more than two hundred feet above the flat terrain of the steppes. The pressure on the G-suit was evident, uncomfortable, as he was thrust back into the pilot's couch. His vision blurred, reddened, and then cleared, and he read off the instruments before him.
He switched in the auto-pilot and fed in the next coordinates that he had memorised so exactly, and the inertial navigator took over, settling the Firefox onto its new course. He had been seen, and the sighting would confirm the UDF fix they must have. They would have confirmed the fact that he was heading south, beyond Volgograd, towards perhaps the border with Iran, and some kind of rendezvous in Israel, or over the Mediterranean.
