muffled lights of a small village.
'More important things to do,' Waterford muttered, his hands clenched on his thighs as if gripping something tightly. He could hear himself grinding his teeth. To have missed him by a yard —
'They've dropped back — shaking sticks at us, I expect, now that we have been seen off the property.' Gunnar chuckled. 'Are you all right, Major!'
'No.'
'You don't like losing?'
'I
'We were too lucky ever to find them — it could not hold.' Gunnar altered course. Two white dots registered on the radar. 'Ah. They are heading east, very quickly now. Soon we will lose track of them, they are very low.' The dots already appeared to lose sharpness, becoming pale smears. There were other smudges on the screen from the general ground-clutter. The MiLs and the Lynx were all too low for effective radar tracking; which had exaggerated their luck in stumbling onto the Russians.
'A matter of minutes.' Cloud was building above the canopy of the cockpit, the sliver of moon threatened. To the east, it might already be snowing on the Russian border. 'In a few minutes, we can return to the lake.'
'We're all fucked if that plane's in one piece!' Waterford growled.
///
'Well done, Colonel — well done!'
It was difficult not to smile at Andropov's enthusiasm — smile
'My congratulations, too, Colonel,' Vladimirov added into the microphone. He and Andropov watched one another until they heard the Border Guard commander's reply.
'Thank you, Comrade General — thank you.'
'What of the other helicopter?' Andropov asked Vladimirov. 'It was Norwegian, I presume?'
'The Nimrod knew we were looking. It, too, was looking.
Andropov leaned towards the transmitter once more. The operator seemed to flinch slightly from the proximity of the Chairman of the KGB. 'Transfer him to Murmansk with all possible speed, Colonel — then he'll be flown to Moscow He turned away from the transmitter, and added to Vladimirov: 'Midday tomorrow, at the latest. He'll be here by midday.' Andropov removed his spectacles and wiped them. His narrow features sagged. 'It has been a very long day,' he said nonchalantly, 'and now I feel tired.' He suppressed a yawn.
'I, too.' Vladimirov watched the Chairman replace his gold-rimmed spectacles. When he looked up once more, brushing the disturbed wings of hair above his ears, his confidence had returned. Pleasure had been succeeded by calculation. It was evident that the capture of Gant was of some kind of political significance to Andropov. Already, the incident was being prepared as a piece of propaganda, something to be used against the military, or employed to impress the rest of the Politburo. Their temporary, uncomfortable alliance was at an end.
'Of course, General.' The remark was a sneer, a comment upon energy, on advancing age. Vladimirov straightened his form, standing three or four inches taller than Andropov. The Chairman turned away. His grey suit could not match the uniform and he realised it.
The Border Guard commander acknowledged his orders, almost unnoticed.
'I'll arrange for a transport aircraft to be standing by. The weather is worsening east of Murmansk, but there will be no delay. A detachment of GRU troops will provide an escort for the American — '
Andropov turned sharply. 'Make certain they fulfil their duties, Comrade General,' he snapped icily.
Vladimirov's cheeks burned. 'Of course.'
'Then I will say goodnight,' Andropov offered without mollification, as a bodyguard placed the Chairman's overcoat over his shoulders and then handed him his fur hat. He tipped his gloves to his forehead in salute to Vladimirov, and then exited from the War Command Centre.
Vladimirov turned to the map-table. On impulse, almost as if reaching for a bottle or a sedative, he said, 'Give me the area of the capture again.'
Slowly, tantalisingly, the north of Finnish Lapland and the coast of Norway at the northern edge of the projection, appeared then hardened on the table. It was a relatively small area, it had to be… the man had not used his parachute, he must have
Or survived a crash-landing.
North to south, no more than fifty or sixty miles, east to west, eighty miles — it could be narrowed down within that area by time, by Gant's condition, by his rate and mode of travel. He
Where?
His hand stroked the surface of the table, glowing white and green and blue as it moved, catching the colours, fuzzy bright colours…
Vladimirov blinked and yawned. He was bone-weary; he needed sleep.
He could sleep, he told himself with an undistinguished thrill of satisfaction, until the following midday. Gant knew, Gant would tell them…
He stifled another yawn, and blinked the hypnosis of the map and its colours out of his head.
'Stand down all personnel — transfer the transmission monitoring to the operations room here,' he instructed quickly, anxious now to get out into the cold night air, to reinvigorate himself with the chill. 'And — well done, all of you. Well done.'
A chorused murmur of satisfaction and assent vanished behind him as he closed the door of the War Command Centre. In the compartment aft of it lay his cap, uniform greatcoat, and his gloves. How long ago had he laid them down? When he had boarded this aircraft in Moscow; on his way to witness the weapons trial of the production prototype — a million years ago… yesterday…?
He looked at his watch. Eleven. No, today still. Early that morning.
He rubbed his eyes and picked up his greatcoat.
Brooke reached out his hand and stroked the metal of the fuselage, just behind the headlike nose and cockpit. It was like stroking some huge, sleeping pet whose body retreated out of the fuzzy glare of his lamp into the dark water. He had swum down the length of the airframe, lifting slowly over the huge wing, gripping the edges of the massive tailpipes as he rounded the tail section, his lamp dancing wildly off the contours of the plane. He had propelled himself forward towards the second great spread wing. His flippers had touched against the metal as he lifted over it, before he returned to the nose section.
It had taken no more than minutes to find the intact airframe. His sergeant had been first down, after he had checked and then hidden the satellite commpack which would carry any transmissions from the site direct to a geostationary communications satellite, and on to London. Almost at once, Sergeant Dawson had been confronted by the blunt, ugly nose of the MiG-31. His lamp had disappeared beneath the new thin coating of ice, for which Brooke was grateful, since their search would be undetectable from the air. He had made the preliminary inspection while Brooke and the two corporals had scouted the shore of the lake, the closest trees and the ice itself for the homing device whose carrier wave Eastoe had picked up. They had searched most carefully where the ice had congregated into rougher, jerry-built shapes, presumably from the break-up after the MiG had landed. They had found it jammed between two resoldered plates of ice, after Dawson had returned to the surface and was warming himself with coffee. Brooke had switched it off, and then listened to Dawson's preliminary damage report. The undercarriage door appeared to have been buckled, there was cannon damage in the port wing and in two places along the fuselage where fuel lines might have been ruptured, but the cockpit was closed — some water inside, but not much — and the aircraft appeared to have been fully shut down, presumably by Gant.
Brooke understood the significance of the report. The intact airframe was more dangerous, a hundres times more dangerous, than shards and pieces of wreckage on the floor of the lake. The Bilyarsk project continued to exist. He had dived himself the moment Dawson had finished, instructing one of the corporals — the best among
