come via the closest permanent weather-station, and are disguised to sound, if anyone picked them up, just like ordinary weather reports or ice-soundings. So we don't know what Frank Seerbacker in his ship really thinks, only what he sends. But the conditions are good, sir. The ice surface hasn't been changed or distorted by wind, and the floe still hasn't really begun to diminish in size — take it perhaps another three or four days to get south enough to begin melting.
'And — it's thick enough?' Aubrey persisted. Shelley smiled behind another mouthful of bacon and egg poised on his fork. He recognised the signs. Whenever Aubrey was at a loss in the matter of expertise, as he plainly was in the area of polar ice and its nature and behaviour, he repeated questions, sought firmer and firmer assurances from those who posed as experts.
'Sir,' Curtin nodded with unfailing courtesy. 'And it's long enough and wide enough,' he added, with the hint of a smile on his lips. 'Gant, if he's anything of a pilot, can land that bird on it.'
'And the weather?' Aubrey continued.
Buckholz looked up, grinned and said: 'What's the matter, Aubrey? Indigestion, or something?'
'And the weather?' Aubrey persisted, not looking at Buckholz.
'The weather is, at the moment, fine — sir,' Curtin informed him. He was silent for a moment, then he said: 'It's abnormally fine for the time of year, in that sort of latitude…'
'Abnormal?'
'Yes, sir. It could change — like that.' Curtin snapped the fingers of his disengaged hand.
'Will it?' Aubrey asked, his eyes narrowing, as if he suspected some massive joke at his expense. 'Will it?'
'I can't say, sir. Nothing large is showing up, not on the last batch of satellite pictures.'
'What of the reports from the submarine itself?'
'Nothing yet, sir. The weather's perfect. The sensors are being thrust up through the floe from the submarine's sail every hour, on the hour. The local weather's fine, sir — just fine.' Curtin ended with a visible shrug, as if to indicate that Aubrey had bled him dry, both of information and reassurance.
Aubrey seemed dissatisfied. He turned his attention to Buckholz.
'It's a lunatic scheme — you must admit that, Buckholz, eh?'
Buckholz glowered at him across his empty plate. He said: 'I'm admitting no such thing, Aubrey. It's my end of the business, this refuelling. You got him there, I admit that — a great piece of work, if that's what you want me to say — but I have to get him home, and you just better trust me, Aubrey, because I'm not about to change my plans because of your second thoughts.'
'My dear chap,' he said, spreading his hands on the table in front of him, 'nothing was further from my thoughts, I assure you.' He smiled disarmingly. 'I just — like to be in the picture, so to speak, just like to be in the picture. Nothing more.'
Buckholz seemed mollified. 'Sure, it's a crazy scheme landing a plane on a floating ice-floe, refuelling it from a submarine — I admit that. But it'll work, Aubrey. There's just no trace of that sub, not at the moment, because it's under the floe, and showing up on no sonar screen anywhere, except as part of the floe. It comes up out of the water, fills up the tanks, and our boy's away.' He smiled at Aubrey. 'We can't use disguises, not like you, Aubrey. Out there, on the sea, you can't disguise a ship to look like a pregnant seal!'
There was a moment of silence, and then Aubrey said: 'Very well, Buckholz. I accept your rationale for using this submarine. However, I shall be a great deal happier when the refuelling is over and done with.'
'Amen to that,' Buckholz said, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the percolator. 'Amen to that.'
Almost as soon as the last of the coastal fog vanished and the bitter grey surface of the Barents Sea was sliding beneath him, strangely unreflective of the pale blueness of the sky, Gant was on top of the trawler. He was travelling at a fraction more than 200 mph, idling by the standards of the Firefox, heading for the twin islands of Novaya Zemlya, his next visual coordinate checkpoint, and the trawler was suddenly almost directly beneath him. As he flashed over the deck, at a height of less than a hundred feet, he saw, in the briefest glimpse, a white upturned face. A man had been emptying slops over the side. Then the trawler was gone, become a point of green light on the radar screen and he cursed the fact that he had confidently switched off his forward-looking radar when he crossed the coast. Now, too late, he switched it on again. In the moment of success against the Badger, he had been careless, excited. In the moment he had glimpsed the white, upturned face, he had seen something else, something much more deadly. As if to confirm his sighting, the ECM register of radar activity indicated powerful emissions from a source directly behind him, and close. What he had the vicious bad luck to pass over was an Elint ship, a spy trawler. Even now, they could be following his flight-path on infra-red.
He pushed the stick forward and the nose of the Firefox dipped, and the grey, wrinkled sea lifted up at him, threateningly. He levelled off at fifty feet, knowing that, with luck, he was already out of electronic view, at his present height. The Elint ship's infra-red operators would have seen him disappear from their screens, even as they informed the captain of their trace, even as the man with the empty slop-bucket raced towards the bridge, mouth agape at what he had seen. They would have some kind of fix on him, a direction in which he had been travelling. He was heading for Novaya Zemlya — a blind man could pass that information back to whoever was coordinating the search for him.
He glanced at the fuel-gauge, and once more cursed the panic that had made him run for the Urals after visual sighting by the Soviet airliner north-west of Volgograd. If only…
He had no time, he realised, to concern himself with the futile. He could, he decided, do nothing except follow the course outlined, and to make the next, and final, course adjustment when he reached Novaya Zemlya.
His hand closed over the throttles. There were missile sites on Novaya Zemlya, abandoned as a testing- ground for Russia's nuclear weapons and now serving as the most northerly extension of the Russian DEW-line, and its first Firechain links. The Firefox was capable, he had proven, of Mach 2.6 at sea-level. How fast it could really travel he had no idea; he suspected at height its speed might well touch Mach 6, not the Mach 5 he had been briefed to expect. In excess of four-and-a-half thousand miles per hour. And perhaps two-point-two-thousand miles per hour at sea-level. The Firefox was a staggering warplane.
He pushed the throttles open. He
The Firefox was nothing more than a blur towing a hideous booming noise in its wake to the spotters above the missile site at Matochkin Shar, at the south-eastern end of the narrow channel between the two long islands of Novala Zemlya. On the infra-red screens, he was a sudden blur of heat, nearing, then just as suddenly, a receding trace as he flashed through the channel at less than two hundred feet. Gant was flying by the autopilot and the TFR — if a ship was in the narrow channel, he would have no time to avoid it in the split-second between his sighting it and his collision with it; but the TFR would cope. His eyes were glued to his own screen, waiting for the glow that would tell him of missile-launch. None came.
As the cliffs of the channel, a grey curtain of unsubstantial rock, vanished and the sea opened out again, he felt a huge, shaking relief, and punched in the coordinates the Firefox was to fly. Automatically, the aircraft swung onto its new course and, slowly, he eased off the throttles, claiming manual control of the aircraft again, desperate to halt the madness of his fuel consumption.
As the aircraft slowed to a sub-sonic speed, like the return of sanity after a fever, Gant realised why no missiles had been launched in his wake. Any missile launched at a target at his height might well have simply driven itself into the opposite cliff, without ever aligning itself on a course to pursue him.
Now he was flying on a north-westerly course, a course which would eventually, long after his fuel ran out, take him into the polar ice-pack at a point between Spitzbergen and Franz Josef Land. Long before he reached it, he would be dead. The bitter grey sea flowed beneath him like a carpet, looking almost solid. The sky above him was pale blue, deceptively empty.
The loneliness ate at him, ravenous. He shivered. The 'Deaf Aid' gave him no comfort. It remained silent. He began to wonder whether it worked. He began to wonder whether there was something, somebody, up ahead of him, waiting to refuel the Firefox. The screen was empty, the sky above empty, the sea devoid of vessels. The Firefox moved on, over a flowing, grey desert, eating the last reserves of its fuel.
