found him again, and the idea had been broached… the Firefox.
His playing at being Orton amused Aubrey — was necessary. With true and utter single-mindedness, however, Gant viewed it merely as a prelude. It got him nearer to the Firefox.
Gant had always possessed a self-belief that amounted almost to illness. He had never lost that belief. Not in the nightmares, in the drugs, in the hospital, in the breakdown, in the attempted atonement. He had never ceased to think of himself in any other way than as a flyer — and as the best. Buckholz had known that, the bastard, Gant reflected — and he had used that because it was the lever that would work, the only one… He couldn't run away. The job in Los Angeles — that had been a fake, a drop-out as real as putting on a disguise. Before that, the hospital, and the white uniform he had adopted — they had been disguises, too. He had tried to hide from the truth, the truth that the best could be afraid, that he could overtax himself, that he could, might fail.
That had been the real nightmare. Gant's precarious world, the whole person that he was, was threatened, by stretched nerves, by too many missions, by too much danger and tension.
Gant rubbed a hand across his brow, and looked down at his damp fingertips. He wore an expression of distaste, almost disgust, on his face. He was sweating now. It was not reaction from the goddam stupid games he was beginning to have to play with the KGB, on their home field — not that; rather the memory of his attempts to escape.
'Gant came from a family of nonentities. By the time he entered his teens, he despised his parents, and brother, the insurance salesman who was a conspicuous failure. He despised, though he could not help loving, the elder sister who was an untidy slut with four kids, and a drunk for a husband. He had come from a dirt town in the vast, featureless expanse of the Mid-West — Clarkville, pop. 2763, the signposts had read — together with the legend 'A Great Little Town'. Gant had hated Clarkville. Every moment he spent within its confines, or locked within the rolling, flat corn-belt that buried it, he had been nothing, had felt himself nothing. He had left Clarkville behind him long ago, and he had never been back, not even for the funeral of his mother, or the comfort of his ageing father. His sister had written to him, once, berating and pleading in turns. He had not replied. The letter had reached him in Saigon. Gant had never escaped from Clarkville. He carried it with him, wherever he went. It had shaped him.
He wiped the sweat from his forehead on the leg of his dark trousers. He closed his eyes, and tried not to think about the past. It had been the dream, he thought. That damned dream had started this. That, and his nettled, irritated pride because smug, patronising Aubrey had looked down his nose at him. Gant's hands bunched into fists on the plastic seat. Like a child, all he wanted to do now was to show them, show them all, just as he had wanted to show them in Clarkville, that dead town of dead people. There was only one way to show Aubrey. He had to bring back his airplane — the Firefox.
Kontarsky was on the telephone, the extension that linked him with his superior officer within the Industrial Security Section of the 2nd Chief Directorate, of which the 'M' department formed a small, but vital, part. Dmitri Priabin watched his chief carefully, almost like a prompter following an actor, script open on his knees. Kontarsky seemed much more at ease than during their interview the previous day, as if action had soothed him during the last twenty-four hours.
During that elapsed period, Kontarsky had received an up-to-date report from the KGB unit at Bilyarsk, and surveillance of the underground cell had been increased. There had been no unaccountable arrivals in Bilyarsk during the past forty-eight hours, and only the courier, Dherkov, had left the small town. His grocery van had been thoroughly searched on his return from Moscow. Kontarsky had ordered searches of all vehicles arriving in the town, and a thorough scrutiny of all personnel passing inside the security fence of the factory. Dog patrols had been intensified around the perimeter fence, and the number of armed guards in the hangars had been trebled.
Once those things had been done, Kontarsky and Priabin had both begun to feel more at ease. Priabin himself was to leave for Bilyarsk that night by KGB helicopter, and take over effective command of the security forces from the officer on the spot. Effectively, within hours, he could seal Bilyarsk tight. Kontarsky had decided not to travel with the First Secretary and his party, but to impress by being on the spot himself twenty-four hours before the test-flight. They would arrest the members of the underground only a matter of hours before the flight, and at the time of arrival of the First Secretary, they would already be undergoing interrogation. It would, he calculated, be sure to impress the First Secretary and Andropov who would be part of the entourage. Both Priabin and Kontarsky anticipated extracting the maximum satisfaction from the interrogations. Baranovich, Kreshin, Semelovsky, Dherkov and his wife, would be snatched out of their false sense of security in a theatrical and impressive display of ruthless KGB efficiency.
Kontarsky put down the telephone receiver. He smiled broadly at his aide, and at the third person in his office — Viktor Lanyev, assistant KGB security chief at Bilyarsk. Lanyev had been flown to Moscow to make a report, thereby doubling Kontarsky's sense of security after having received a written report from Tsernik, the chief security officer at Bilyarsk. After listening to Lanyev's meticulous diary of the movements and contacts of the three men under observation, Kontarsky had been relieved, had set himself on a course of optimism, at the end of which journey he could already envisage a successful conclusion.
The security arrangements at Bilyarsk were a minor classic, entirely orthodox, without imagination — a policy of overkill. There were the resident, declared hierarchy of KGB officers, and their select squad from the 2nd Directorates; as a support group, there were personnel of the GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence, who performed as guards and patrols both at the airstrip and in the town; thirdly, there were the 'unofficial' members of the KGB, the informants and civilian spies closest to the research and development teams. All three groups were focusing their attention on four men and a woman. They watched everything, saw and knew everything.
Kontarsky, prematurely luxuriating in the congratulations of his superior, said, after a while, steepling his fingers as he leaned back in his chair: 'We will make doubly-sure, my friends. We must take no risks at this point — this late point in time. Therefore, I suggest we commandeer a special detachment from the 5th Chief Directorate, one of their Security Support Units. You agree?'
Lanyev, the man on the spot, seemed somewhat insulted. 'There is no need, Comrade, Colonel.'
'I say there is —
Kontarsky was smiling at Lanyev. The middle-aged man, who had risen as high in the ranks of the KGB as he would ever achieve, looked down, and shook his head.
'No, Comrade Colonel, I would not wish to do that,' he said quietly.
'Naturally — and we are not asking that you should, Viktor Alexeivich, no.' He beamed at his two subordinates. Priabin sensed the swing of Kontarsky's mood. At times, his chief struck him as portraying many of the symptoms of the manic-depressive in miniature.
Now the doubts of the previous day were deeply buried. Kontarsky would, almost, not have recognised himself had he confronted the frightened man of yesterday.
'How many men, Colonel?' he asked.
'Perhaps a hundred — discreetly, of course — but a hundred. We may run the risk of frightening them off, but that will be better than failing to catch them at whatever they have planned.'
'Comrade Tsernik does not believe that anything is planned, Comrade Colonel,' Lanyev interpolated,
'Mm. Perhaps not. But we must act as if they intend to sabotage the test-flight — something wrong with one of the missiles, or with the cannon… a mid-air explosion. I do not have to draw pictures for either of you. Production of the Mig-31 would be put back, perhaps reconsidered. Either that, or we should all,
'I must check with the Political Security Service as to which of the informers we have been —
