decision to commit suicide by remaining on his present course. He would have been incapable of understanding what he was doing in the light of self-immolation. He was a flyer, and the enemy target was ahead of him — a minute ahead.
It was then that the 'Deaf-Aid' shrieked at him. He was frozen in his couch. He could not look at the visual read-out on the face of the 'Deaf-Aid'. He did not want to know by how little he had missed, how little the time was between living and dying. The missile cruiser and the submarines closed on the radar screen even as he watched them. Distance to target read-out was thirty seconds. Because of his near zero height, he had been on top of them before he knew. Now it was too late.
The 'Deaf-Aid' signal was a continuous, maddening noise in his headset, like a frantic cry, a blinding light. He stared ahead of him, waiting for the visual contact with the missile cruiser, waiting to die.
Eight
MOTHER ONE
It could have been no more than a fraction of a second, that pause between fear and activity, that tiny void of time before the training that had become instinct flooded in to occupy the blank depth of his defeat, his numb, stunned emptiness. Nevertheless, in that fraction of time, Gant might have broken — the resolution of despair, suddenly shattered by the clamour of the homing signal, and the read-out which told him that the distance was less than one hundred and forty-six miles to his refuelling point, to fuel and life — but he did not break. The huge blow to his system was somehow absorbed by some quality of personality that Buckholz or his psychologists at Langley must have recognised in his dossier, must have assumed to be still present in him. Perhaps it had only been the assumption by Buckholz that an empty man cannot break.
There was a fierce thrill that ran through him. A cold anger. A restrained, violent delight. He was going against the Russian missile cruiser. He clung to that idea.
Swiftly, coolly, he analysed the situation. The homing device indicated that the source of the signal-emission, whatever it was, lay in an almost-direct line beyond the cruiser. His fuel-gauge told him he could not take avoiding action. The shortest distance between two points… and he was looking for the shortest distance. He had to. He had to commit himself. Even if he wanted to live — and he realised, with a cold surprise, as if suddenly finding something he had lost for years, that he
Radar analysis indicated that the two submarines were approximately three miles to port and starboard of the cruiser, providing a sonar and weapons screen for the big ship. Now they had surfaced, and would be training their own infra-red systems in his direction. If he remained at zero feet, they would be on his horizon, making an accurate fix by their fire-control difficult — with luck, he would have only the cruiser to worry about. The submarine closest to him, depending on which side he passed the cruiser, would not dare to loose off infra-red missiles in close proximity to the cruiser and its huge turbines.
Swiftly he analysed the capability of the cruiser's weapons against the Firefox. At his speed, any visual weapon control was out of the question. The torpedo-tubes were for submarines only, as were the mortars, four in twin mountings. The hunter-killer helicopters might be in the air, but they might not have yet been armed with air- to-air weapons to do him any damage — though they were there, he acknowledged, and their fire control was linked into the central ECM control aboard the cruiser. The guns, 60 mm mounted forward of the bridge, would be controlled by the same electronic computerised fire-control system, linked to the search radar, which operated also in infra-red. Yet they were not important. At speed, at zero feet, they could, in all probability, not be sufficiently depressed to bear on him if he flew close enough to the ship.
He stripped the cruiser of its armaments, one by one. There was one only left — the four surface-to-air missile launchers of the advanced SA-N-3 type. Neither the surface-to-surface, nor the anti-sub missiles, had any terrors for him. But the SA missiles would be infrared, heat-seeking, armed and ready to go.
He remembered the Rearward Defence Pod and prayed that it would work. The SA missile twin-launchers were located forward of the bridge superstructure, leaving the fattened, widened aft quarter of the ship for the four Kamov helicopters. Hoping to present the smallest target possible to him, the ship would be directly head-on to his course. There was no time now for any attack on the cruiser itself. Gant abandoned the idea without regret of any kind. He was part of the machine he flew, now, cold, calculating, printing-out the information recovered from his memory of his briefing.
He wondered how good the cruiser captain's briefing had been. Had he been told of the tail-unit, of the armament of the Firefox, or its speed? He assumed not. The Soviet passion for secrecy, for operating the most compartmentalised security service in the world, would operate like a vast inertia, the inertia of sheer habit, against the Red Navy officer being told more than was necessary. He would have received an order — stop the unidentified aircraft by any means possible.
The read-out gave the time-to-target as twenty-one seconds, distance to target as two point two miles. Soon, within seconds, he would see the low shape ahead of him. It was the Firefox against the… He wished he knew the name of the cruiser.
A long, low ice-floe slipped beneath the belly of the Firefox, dazzlingry white against the bitter, unreflecting grey of the Barents Sea. He had passed over other floes during the past few minutes, the southernmost harbingers of the spring drift of the impermanent pack. Then he saw the cruiser, a low shape on the edge of the horizon which neared with frightening rapidity. He felt that moment of tension, as the adrenalin pumped into his system, and the heart hammered at the blood, the precursor of action.
He wondered whether the cruiser would wait like a complacent animal, to swallow him in its fire, or whether it would launch a brace of missiles while he was still more than a mile away. Infra-red was imprecise — technology had been unable to narrow the inevitable spread of a heat-source as it registered on the screen. It was not a good way to obtain an accurate fix. Nevertheless, fire-control aboard the cruiser, using infra-red missiles, did not need to be precise.
He knew he was now visible to the men on the bridge, a grey petrel seemingly suspended just above the surface of the icy water. He watched the screen, waiting for the sudden bloom of missile-exhausts to emerge from the bulk of the cruiser. At the moment of launch, any SA missile would show up as a bright orange pinprick.
On the radar screen, he picked up what he guessed was one of the cruiser's Kamov helicopters, and his ECM read-out calculated height and range. He decided to launch one of his own AA missiles as a diversion, let the electronic adrenalin of the information flood the cruiser's fire-control computer, let the physical diversion of a hit on the chopper add another dimension to the chessboard across which he moved towards the cruiser.
He launched. The missile pulled away, and whisked up and out of his view. He watched it tracking across the screen, homing on the helicopter which, he knew, would have picked up the missile, and would be scuttling to take avoiding action. Gant bared his teeth behind his facemask. The eletronic war that was all he had ever known thrilled him to the bone, every nerve and muscle fulfilled. War was reduced to a game of chess, to an elaboration upon elaboration of move and counter-move. And he was the best.
The deck of the cruiser bloomed with pale fire, brighter spots on the screen. They had waited, anticipating that he would pull away from the threat of the submarines and the helicopters. Yet he had maintained the same course, heading directly towards them. The fire-control on the bridge, as he had hoped, had been triggered by his own attack upon the Kamov — the helicopter burst into flames in the sky above him, but he saw it only peripherally as a sudden orange flower, petals falling…
They had wanted to drive him between the cruiser and one of the submarines, expected him to pull up and away from them. But he had kept coming at them. Whatever the Soviet captain knew or did not know, he would have been told of the perilous estimate of the Firefox's fuel supply. That would have driven him to action. The Soviet captain had jumped the gun, triggered by Gant into a reflex action.
The ship was only hundreds of yards ahead of him as the SA missiles leapt from the twin-launcher forward of the bridge. Gant pulled away, sliding with exposed underbelly to port, to pass the cruiser. On the screen in front of him, he saw the missiles deviate from their original track, to close on him with frightening speed. Then, at his silent command as he reached the optimum moment, the thought-guided weapons-system triggered the tail-unit. Behind
