Firefox

He levelled out at sixty-two thousand feet, throttling back the engines until there was just sufficient power to maintain the function of the generators. At that height, he would be at about twenty-seven thousand feet when he arrived at the tanker's location. It would be enough. He checked the screen. Nothing.

There was only one thing to hope — that it remained as clean of activity as it was at that moment.

The bearing of the signal remained dead ahead of him. The distance read-out gave him eighty-eight miles to target. He still wondered how much fuel remained, and the thought nagged at him. He began to think that he might have overplayed the safety margin, with regard to his zoom climb. It must have drained the emergency tanks.

Ahead of him, far ahead, he saw the grey heaviness of cloud building up. The screen remained empty of activity. The Firefox glided silently through an empty sky, the dark blue canopy of the thin upper layers of the atmosphere above, the tiny, silent greyness of the northern limits of the Barents Sea below. Ahead of him, far ahead, beyond where the cloud seemed to be building, there was an edge of whiteness in sight — the polar- pack.

* * *

United States Navy Captain Frank Delano Seerbacker lay on his cramped bunk in his cramped quarters aboard the USS Pequod, a nuclear-powered 'Sturgeon' class submarine, as it drifted beneath the ice-floe whose southward path it had imitated for the past five days. Seerbacker's submarine had passed beneath the polar-pack near the western coast of Greenland and, rigged for silent running, had slithered out into the Barents Sea after fourteen days at sea.

The journey had possessed three distinct phases for the captain, his officers and the crew. There had been the top-speed dash from the submarine's concealed base on the Connecticut coast, then the claustrophobic passage beneath the polar ice — and since then, the captain thought again with irritation, they had been drifting without engines, averaging three-point-one miles a day beneath the floe.

The Pequod was unarmed, another fact which Seerbacker bitterly resented. The submarine's torpedo room and forward crew's quarters were flooded with high-octane paraffin, fuel for the super- plane that the CIA was stealing for the good old U.S. of A.

Seerbacker's craggy, lined face creased in a frown of contempt. His long nose flared. He disliked, he decided, the CIA — especially when that crud organisation told him to sit under a damn ice-floe and wait for a super jet to land on it!

He stirred on his cot, raising his knees merely for the sake of altering the position of his limbs. His hands were behind his head, and he was staring sightlessly at the ceiling. He and his men were sick, he decided, of the whole monotonous routine of the mission; sick to death, following the ice-floe's unvarying, snail-like course southward.

It wasn't, he thought grimly, as if they'd even had the change of routine involved in looking for a suitable floe. The floe — the so-called runway, he thought with contempt — had been selected from the study of hundreds of satellite photographs, in the first instance, the findings of which had been checked and confirmed by a Lockheed Orion which had collected both photographs and visual findings. Proven satistical data from oceanographic surveys allowed experts at Langley to make a firm prediction about the floe's ability to take the weight of the Firefox. Seerbacker had merely been told where to find it. He realised he was being merely bloody-minded in cursing the domination of machinery, but he went on doing so anyway. There was after all, he told himself, damn all else to do except to curse the temporal powers and their crazy ideas, who had got him into this mess, who had messed up his boat with their paraffin!

There was a soft knock at his door.

'What?' he said, irritated rather than thankful at being roused from his fruitless reverie. A crewman handed him a sheaf of flimsy. On it, in the hand of his Exec., who was acting as weather-officer, he read the information that he had been expecting, but which was doubly unwelcome when it came. The temperature of the air above the floe was dropping much too rapidly. Cloud was building up in the area, cloud that would mask from Gant the position and dimensions of the floe.

Seerbacker tossed his head at the information. It was his bloody luck, just his godawful luck! He disissed the crewman. He needed no further information. If there was anything else, then the Exec, would send it to him. He had no need to go to the control room, not yet. He cursed again the constant trimming of the tanks, the regular, futile checks to be made on the paraffin that flooded the tubes and the forward quarters, and on the weather, the surface temperature of the floe, the condition of the ice surface… It was, he decided, no job for a man with twenty years in the service, and with one of the best crews in the Navy.

He considered the information concerning the air temperature. It was dropping rapidly, which could, and probably would, mean a change in the weather conditions which had been unusually settled and mild for those latitudes and the time of year. The change, when it came, could so easily become freezing fog, localised in then area, spreading perhaps as little as a few square miles. In freezing fog, Seerbacker did not have to know anything about aircraft and pilots to know that there was no way Gant could land on the floe. They had no navigational aids aboard that could help him, allow him to make an automatic landing — nothing except the transmitter that would tell Gant where they were. Already, as the message had told him, there was a local build-up of cloud. Perhaps Gant might not be able to get down, even in that…

The introduction of doubt prompted his mind to review the emergency procedures. In the final event, he was to avoid capture at all costs. It could never be admitted by Washington that a submarine of the U.S. Navy had been a part of the scheme to steal the Firefox — he was to destroy the Pequod, if necessary, to prevent its capture by the Russians.

His mind winced away from the secret orders he had opened at sea; if Gant failed to land on the floe, or if he crashed onto the ice, or into the sea in the vicinity of the Pequod, then he was to make every effort to rescue the pilot — and an even greater effort to capture the plane, and tow it home beneath the icepack. The havoc that would cause with his crew, and his navigation, he was not prepared to consider. It was, he knew, theoretically feasible, but he hoped that none of this would be necessary and that Gant was good enough to set the Firefox down like a feather.

The trouble was, Seerbacker admitted to himself finally — Gant was late. He had been briefed as to the performance and range of the Firefox, and the ETA for the plane over the floe had already passed — was minutes past. And with that plane, he knew, minutes were really huge gaps of time — a big enough gap for a man's death. He would not know whether Gant had even stolen the plane until it appeared, or failed to appear, on the submarine's infra-red. Up through the ice was thrust a single metal spike, camouflaged in white, carrying the transmitter of the homing-signal tuned to Gant's 'Deaf Aid', the complex changing signal that he should be picking up. It was his one and only link with the American pilot.

Seerbacker cursed the British designer for not including a facility, built-in, so that Gant could identify himself — but it was strictly one-way. The Pequod transmitted, and the Firefox received — at least, until the aircraft was close enough for the transponder in the homing device to emit an identification signal, and that distance was within visual range anyway. As his Exec. had commented — if General Dynamics had fitted it as standard equipment in 'Sturgeon' class subs, it would dispense Coca-Cola, along with doing the laundry and playing canned music. Seerbacker's lips twisted in a reflective smile.

When Gant appeared over the floe, the frequency of the signal he received would change, and he would hear the equivalent of an instantaneous echo, as on sonar. Then no doubt, to his appalled mind it would become clear that he would have to land on an ice-floe — in cloud, Seerbacker added vitriolically, perhaps in freezing fog. This would probably mean scraping the pilot off the ice, sinking the remains of the plane, and towing it thousands of miles back to Connecticut. It didn't bear thinking about.

Gant was late. The thought nagged at him. Minutes only — but late. His fuel must be shot to hell by now, Seerbacker thought savagely. Must be. He thought about going down to the control-room, almost swung his long, thin legs off the cot, and then decided against it. After five days, he couldn't start showing a yellow flag as soon as the guy was a couple of minutes overdue. He reflected that there was very little aerial activity in the area — even if that lack of activity included Gant.

There was no comfort to be found, he decided. None at all…

* * *

Surprisingly, it was Buckholz, massive, self-confident, almost silent Buckholz, who cracked first. Aubrey had been aware of the tension rising in the room as the morning wore on, after Shelley had cleared the breakfast remains, and they had finished with the coffee. Then, suddenly, there had been nothing to do. The tension in the