Firefox Down

any more than steal a few of its systems and instruments and samples of its airframe materials… and photographs. Countless photographs.

Buckholz understood Aubrey's refusal to surrender to the inevitable. But he could not share the man's new, impossible scheme. Which, he reminded himself, Aubrey was conjuring out of thin air just because he left himself without any fall back plan!

'Hot air blowers,' Moresby snapped as if the information was being extracted by physical pain. 'Undercover job, drying the airframe. That takes care of the airframe. Now you have a dry lump of metal. Do you wish me to go on? Over.'

'Please continue, Squadron-Leader. All this is most interesting. Over.'

Moresby sighed at the sarcasm in Aubrey's voice. Buckholz watched the three orange flags dancing like great butterflies above the dark, soupy water as the ropes strained.

'Engines next, then. Drying out — then you have problems with igniters, lubrication, barometric controls, engine ancillaries, and fuel, of course. Number three — hydraulics and pneumatics. They could be OK, after such a short immersion, but everything, repeat everything, would have to be thoroughly checked otherwise you could end up without undercarriage, airbrakes, flaps. Four — the electrics. It would depend on what level of operation would be acceptable. Again, everything would have to be thoroughly checked, and any damage would have to be made good. You do have a private pipeline into the Mikoyan production line, so that we have easy access to Russian spares, I suppose?' Moresby snorted; a noise not much like laughter but which Buckholz assumed was the air force officer's means of expressing amusement. 'Five — instruments… the air-driven ones may be OK, since the water may not have got into the instrument heads — but, the electrically-driven gyro ones — I wouldn't even like to speculate on that. Over.'

Buckholz sensed that Moresby had flung a great douche of cold water in Aubrey's direction and expected his ploy to work. He imagined Curtin scribbling furiously, shaking his head almost without pause. When he heard Aubrey's voice, however, he realised that he was undaunted.

'What about armaments? Over.'

'For Heaven's sake, Aubrey!' Moresby exclaimed. 'You'd have to talk to my armourer, but my guess is that you're on to a hiding to nothing on that tack.'

'I see. But, thus far, apart from things mechanical and electronic, I would need experts in airframes, engines, hydraulics, control systems, electrics, avionics, instruments and weapons… in other words, a full ground-crew who would be experienced in servicing military aircraft. That doesn't seem too tall an order… Over?'

'Don't forget the runway, fuel, oxygen, a set of jacks, tools that fit — I simply cannot see any way in which it is feasible. Impossible in less than twenty-four hours, which is what we have. Impossible in three days or more, even at Abingdon — never mind Lapland!'

'Get off the guy's back, Aubrey!' Buckholz snapped. 'You haven't got a chance with this. You couldn't even get the stuff he needs here, never mind the men. Forget it. Arrange for that Chinook to pick us up at dusk tomorrow. Jesus — !'

'What's the matter! Over.'

'She — she's on her way up, Aubrey — she's on her way up!'

He had noticed the silence. Now, cheering filled it. The winches paused, the orange marker flags danced. Pearls of water dropped from the taut nylon lines. Cheering.

The nose of the Firefox had slipped above the water, black and snoutlike, ugly and still threatening. Above it, like eyes, the perspex of the cockpit canopy stared at them. It was a sea creature, Aubrey's Nessie. Watching them, waiting for them to be foolish enough to enter the water.

'Is she-?' he heard Aubrey ask in a quiet voice.

'Beautiful,' Buckholz said. 'Dangerous and beautiful. My God, when Gant first saw that — '

'Now tell me not to try. Over,' Aubrey replied sardonically.

'It's still impossible,' Moresby interrupted. The winches began again. Inch by inch, the snout and cockpit slipped higher out of the water, sometimes lost in the flurries of snow, sometimes clearer and more deadly in appearance.

'The weather, Kenneth?'

'At dawn, something of a lull is anticipated… enough for a Hercules to make a low-level drop. One drop, of everything you need. Then the weather will close in again.'

'So no one gets out of here?'

'The Met reports anticipate another such lull, late in the afternoon. The fronts will allow two windows in the weather, at dawn and around dusk. Over.'

'That means less than twelve hours, Aubrey — '

'I realise that, Squadron-Leader. However, you could have everything you need dropped on the lake at first light. If it doesn't work, I promise you will have my reluctant permission to utterly destroy the aircraft. Over.'

Involuntarily, Buckholz's head flicked round so that he was looking at the Firefox. The leading edges of its huge wings were beginning to emerge. Now, it looked like something captured, caught in a net and dragged from its own element into the snowy air; a great manta ray rather than an aircraft. It mounted the slope, moving slowly, very slowly out of the water. Menaced. Yes, Buckholz thought, it already exuded menace, even though there was no possibility it could ever fly again.

'I see,' Moresby replied.

'It doesn't have a runway and we don't have any way of putting it back on the ice,' Buckholz said quickly, aghast at the clear sound of disappointment in his voice. 'Over.'

'Tractor tug and a great deal more MO-MAT,' Moresby snapped. 'Over.'

'Gentlemen,' Aubrey said calmly, all trace of satisfaction carefully excluded from his voice. 'How long before the aircraft is ashore? Over.'

'Two hours at least. Over.'

'Then we have two hours, Squadron-Leader, Charles. I suggest we begin talking in true earnest, don't you? Over.'

Before he replied, Buckholz glanced at the Firefox. And felt Aubrey's stupidity in having no fall-back, and his illogical, desperate brilliance in daring to assume the airplane could fly out of Lapland. And, he admitted, he too wanted her to fly again. She had to fly -

He glanced at Moresby, who shrugged. Then the air force officer nodded, even smiled. A tight little movement of his lips beneath his clipped moustache. 'Very well,' he breathed in the tone of an indulgent parent. 'Very well.'

'OK, Kenneth. Give us a few minutes to round up some people whose opinions we need — then we'll throw it on the porch and see if the cat laps it up!' Buckholz felt a strange, almost boyish exhilaration. In front of him, the wings continued to emerge from the water. The black snout seemed to seek him, the cockpit to stare at him.

Menace.

'Just make sure you don't lose Superpilot at the last fence, uh, Kenneth?'

* * *

Vladimirov yawned. It was an exhalation of his tension rather than an expression of weariness. He quickly stifled it. The room was small and cramped, the tape-recorder on the folding table almost its only furniture apart from a number of chairs stacked against one wall. The bare room accommodated himself, Andropov, and the senior interrogator from the KGB Unit on the Mira Prospekt. All three of them leaned their elbows on the table in the attitude of weary gamblers. A sheaf of pages — hurriedly typed and corrected and now overlain with the interrogator's scribble — lay near the recorder. Vladimirov had a pad and a ball-point pen in front of him. He was no longer concerned to disguise the fact that he doodled occasionally. There were few words on his pad, and little meaning. Andropov's pad was clean, unmarked.

Vladimirov had lost his eagerness to hear Gant's sufferings under drugs, his hallucinations and illusions, his terror at dying and his attempts to persuade them that he was not. He had listened to the two interrogations several times in that cramped and almost foetid room, and he loathed something in himself that had actually anticipated the experience. When they had first arrived he had wanted to hear them. Now, he did not.

The tape continued in silence. Gant had hit his head on the floor, silencing himself. Nothing -