Firefox Down

Aubrey, as a distraction, picked up a sheaf of the photographs that had been transmitted over the wireprint from Eastoe's Nimrod. They were all pale, shining with the ghostly light of the advanced infra-red cameras that had produced them. Men almost in negative in the very last of the daylight and the ensuing darkness.

He looked at the prints of the lake. Broken ice near the neck of the lake, but very little of it. A small, shrinking patch of black water. Yet the Firefox had to be underneath the water, beneath the healing ice. The remaining pictures, of the wreckage at the point of explosion, were uninteresting. Aubrey, without study and without expert advice, knew that nothing of the MiG-31 lay there.

Pybtt glanced at Aubrey. 'Number Ten is being very reluctant over this, Kenneth,' he began, seeking an ally.

'Because the Cabinet Defence Committee has always pooh-poohed the Firefox, I wonder? The P.M. isn't bullying them any more, I suppose?' He turned to Buckholz. 'Is the President applying the right amount of pressure, Charles?' Buckholz nodded. 'Everyone would like to walk away, except for Washington.'…

'The usual restrictions, of course, Kenneth — if you're caught, we'll deny everything.'

'We work with those every day — they're not important. It's doing something — and quickly — that is important.' He stared meaningfully at Pyott, who held up his hands, wrists pressed together to represent unseen bonds. 'Tied they may be, Giles- but really.'

'What can I do?' Pyott asked softly.

'Look at them!' Aubrey returned, his hand flapping towards the scattered enlargements. 'Gant may be alive — he knows where the body is buried, as do we. If they get to him, they will know! We must at least establish what is beneath the ice — before we decide our response.' He looked at Buckholz, and shook his head. 'I don't think there's anything we can do for poor Gant — I can't order military units into that area.'

'I know that. So will he. He knows he's on his own.'

Aubrey nodded lugubriously, plucking at his lower lip. Then, as suddenly and superficially as a child, his mood changed. He turned on Pyott and said, in an intense whisper, almost hunching over the enlargements on the plot- table, 'You already have Waterford standing by with a four-man unit at Kirkenes. Their diving equipment is loaded onto a Royal Norwegian Air Force Lynx helicopter. You have the agreement of Commander, Allied Forces Northern Norway, for this flight under the guise of a search-and-rescue mission… Giles, please make up your mind to act-!'

'I have other people to please apart from yourself, SIS, or even the CIA…' Pyott began, then clamped his lips tightly shut. He shook his head, 'Unofficially, JIC wishes something done — so do the Chiefs of Staff, but Cabinet opinion is against any exacerbation of the situation. They'll settle for the loss of the two — the only two — production prototypes of the Firefox. The expert reasoning is that the Bilyarsk project will have been put back by at least two, even three years by what has happened. The Russians may even scrap the whole, hideously expensive project.'

'And if the Firefox is intact? And the Russians ask their friendly neighbours, the Finns, for their toy back?' Aubrey demanded with withering irony, his face red with frustration. His hands were clenched at his sides.

'Yes,' Pyott admitted.'Yes, I know.'

'Washington will carry the day, you know that,' Aubrey observed. 'Gresham, as P.M., and the rest of the Cabinet will have to sanction whatever the President wishes to happen — however much they dislike the medicine.'

'But they have not yet done so — '

'And we have run out of time.'

Momentarily, Giles Pyott's cheeks glowed with anger, then he turned on his heel. 'Very well,' he snapped, 'very well.'

Aubrey hurried after him as he mounted the ladder to the communications gallery. 'Tell Waterford he must check this KGB activity,' he called. Pyott stopped and turned.

'No!'

'Yes,' Aubrey insisted. 'We have to know whether or not Gant is alive — we have to know when, and if, they take him alive. Everything could depend upon it.'

Pyott paused, his brow furrowed, his cheeks hot. Then he nodded. He, too, could not escape the conclusions Aubrey offered; could not escape his imprisonment within the situation. Aubrey — the covert world that he and Buckholz represented — was his jailer. He saw himself within a fortress, a castle. The politicians had erected the outer walls; they could be breached, or removed, or their existence could be denied as circumstances dictated. But Pyott knew himself to be imprisoned within the keep of the castle, and the walls of the keep had been made by Aubrey and Buckholz and the MiG — and its pilot. The walls were impenetrable, inescapable. He nodded.

'Very well,' he announced angrily. 'Very well.'

He opened the door to the communications gallery. Aubrey scurried in behind him.

* * *

He was floundering through the snow now. They still had not released the dogs, but he could hear them barking close behind him. The snow was deep, almost solid, restraining him, pulling him back. He had abandoned the floor of the shallow valley, keeping to the slope, but even here the snow lay heaped and traplike near bushes and boulders. He slipped often. The effects of the hot food were gone. He was utterly weary.

When he had halted last, he had checked the map. More than three miles from the village, perhaps another sixteen — fifteen now, or a little more? — to the Norwegian border, to villages, to police, to another state where he might be safe. Safe — ?

They wouldn't let him remain. They would take him back.

He stumbled, his wrist hurt as his weight collapsed on it, the .22 rifle ploughed into the snow. Furiously, he shook the barrel; snow fluttered away from it. The sky was black and clear, the stars like gleaming stones. Silver light from a thin paring of new moon lay lightly on the snow. He climbed groggily to his feet and looked behind him. Noise of dogs, and a glimpse of lights. The distant sound of one of the helicopters. He did not know where the choppers were, and it worried him. They buzzed at his imagination like flies, as audible in his head as if they were physically present, their belly-lights streaming along the floor of the valley searching for his footprints. One of them had to be ahead, its platoon already fanned out and sweeping slowly back towards him, in radio contact with the pursuit behind him.

Radio -

He had known, had hidden the fact from himself.

Radio.

It winded him like a blow, the admission of their technology, their ability to communicate. Even now, at that precise moment, he was pinpointed.

He looked up at the black sky with its faint sheen, its glittering stars. At any moment, the choppers would come. The pursuit was too close now not to be able to locate him.

Somewhere along the valley floor, just — there…

A finger was tracing contours; the twisting course of the valley. A helicopter would bank, turn-

He ran. Ice glittered on a bush, and he brushed savagely against the obstacle. The rifle pumped against his thigh, against the heavy waterproof trousers. His chest hurt with the temperature of the.air he was inhaling. The survival pack bumped and strained and dragged at his back. He glanced behind once more -

Lights.

Noise — ahead-

Men had been dropped out of earshot, ahead of him, and were working their way back down the valley from the northwest towards him. Pincer.

He stopped running, bent double. He listened. A thin breeze had carried the noises. Shuffling, the clinking of metal, the slither of cross-country skis. The barking of a single dog. Behind him, more dogs, more men, and wobbling flashlight beams. No rotor noise. Nothing. Surprise.

The two groups of Russians were no more than a few hundred yards apart. He began to struggle up the slope, out of the valley. Icy rock betrayed him, a hollow trapped his leg with soft, deep snow. His chest heaved, his back bent under the weight of the survival pack so that his face was inches from the glittering snow. He climbed,