By that time, he would have ejected. In order to die of frostbite and exposure. He would freeze to death in Finnish Lapland. All this he knew, and despite his fierce grip on the control column, his forearms quivered. His body felt weak, helpless. And filled with a self-accusation that burned him. He should have checked. After the dogfight he should have checked! He had been caught like a rookie pilot on his first solo flight.
His mistake had killed him. He was almost out of fuel, despite the mockery with which the two huge Turmansky turbo-jets behind him continued to roar as violently as ever. The noise was like their own, last protest -
Fifty-two thousand feet.
What? Where?
He couldn't land the Firefox in neutral Finland, that had been made clear to him from the beginning. Never, under any circumstances… Nor Sweden, because of the same neutrality. There was only Norway. But where? Bardufoss was far to the north-west by now — he was well south of Kirkenes. Both of those airfields were, effectively, closed to him by distance.
Oslo was hundreds of miles ahead of him still.
Did he have more than twenty minutes left? He could not believe he did.
The Firefox's nose nudged round as the aircraft altered course once more, mockingly obedient to its computer instructions. A chicken with its head cut off, still running.
What — ?
He glanced down at the map strapped to his knee. He released the control column with his right hand, stilled its quivering, and estimated distances. Kirkenes was less than ten miles from the Soviet border with Norway. Bardufoss was perhaps another hundred miles further from his present position, but it was a NATO base.
How — ?
Climb.
Climb, he thought, climb, climb… The sweat ran freely down his arms and sides. His whole body arched in a sigh of relief. His facemask was misty when he finally exhaled. Zoom climb. As he had done before, before he found the ice-floe and the American submarine with its priceless cargo of fuel. Climb.
He hesitated for no more than a moment, then switched off the auto-pilot and cancelled the on-board computer's instructions. Once more, Gant controlled the Firefox. Out over the Arctic Ocean, ignorant of the location and nature of the rendezvous, he had had to glide on over the sea, slowly dropping towards it, the Arctic ice-cap white on his horizon. Now, he knew the distances, he could calculate the length of his glide. He would make it.
He moved the control column and the Firefox banked, altering course for Bardufoss airfield. Altitude, forty-nine thousand feet. He pulled back on the column and eased the throttles forward, wincing as he did so; then he recalculated. Seventeen minutes' flying time left to him. The engines roared steadily. He lifted the nose further. The sky was dark blue almost deepening to black ahead of him. And empty. Gant felt competence return, an almost-calm. Every panic was shorter now. He came out of his helplessness more and more quickly each time. He would make it -
The aircraft began to climb. He had to assume virtually empty tanks by the time he reached Bardufoss. To glide the whole distance, he would require an altitude of more than one hundred and thirty thousand feet. Once he reached the required altitude, he would set up the engines for maximum range. Then all that remained to him was to fly until the engines failed through lack of fuel. Bardufoss was — he tapped at the tiny keyboard of the inertial navigator display, summoning a distance-to-target readout. Almost at once, the dark green screen declared in glowing red — Bardufoss was two hundred and twenty-four-point-six miles away. He calculated his best speed to be two hundred and sixty knots. Even if the engines suddenly cut at one hundred and thirty-two thousand feet, gliding at that speed he would make it all the way.
He watched, edgy as a feeding bird, as the altimeter needle ascended through the fifties, then the sixties — seventy-two, seventy-four thousand. The sky darkened; deep purple-blue. Almost space. Eighty. He listened to the Turmansky engines. They roared steadily, healthily. Eighty-four, eighty-six…
Come on, come on -
His left hand twitched on the throttles, and he had to restrain himself from pushing them forward. It was an illusion. His speed was OK, all he needed to reach the required altitude.
Ninety-eight thousand feet. Purple-black above and ahead and around. The curve of the earth was evident even in the mirror. One-zero-nine.
The engine note remained steady, comforting. Not quite empty. One hundred and twenty thousand. Almost there, almost…
He pulled back the throttles, retaining only sufficient power to keep the generators functioning. He almost heard the thin, upper-atmosphere slipstream outside the cockpit. The Firefox quivered in its flow as he began his glide.
Yes. He'd make it now. They'd need the new Arrestor Barrier at Bardufoss to help him brake. He'd have no reverse thrust by the time he arrived. The last of the fuel was trailing behind him now in a thin crystal stream.
It didn't matter. Then a warning noise bleeped in his headset. He saw that two bright blips of light had appeared on his passive radar screen. Two aircraft, climbing very fast towards him. The power used in the zoom climb must have betrayed his position to infra-red. Two jets, small and fast enough to be nothing else but high-level interceptors. The closest one was already through ninety-five thousand feet and still climbing at more than Mach 2.
Foxbats. Had to be. MiG-25s. And if they were Foxbat-Fs, they had a high enough ceiling to reach him. Two of them. Closing.
He could see them now, far below him. Gleaming.
The read-out confirmed contact time at six seconds.
The windows in the fuselage of the Tupolev Tu-144, the Russian version of the Concorde, were very small, no larger than tiny, oblong portholes. Nevertheless, Soviet Air Force General Med Vladimirov could see, in the clear, windy afternoon sunlight, the crumpled, terrified figure of KGB Colonel Kontarsky being escorted from the main security building towards the small MiL helicopter which would return him to Moscow. In the moment of the destruction of the second prototype Firefox, KGB Chairman Andropov had remembered the subordinate who had failed, and given the order for his transfer to the Lubyanka prison. His dismissive, final tone had been as casual as the whisking away of a noisy insect. Watching the defeated and fearful Kontarsky climbing into the interior of the green helicopter, Vladimirov witnessed an image of his own future; bleak, filled with disgrace and insult, and short.
He turned reluctantly to look back into the cigar-shaped room that was the Soviet War Command Centre. The map-table was unlit and featureless. Already a box of matches, a packet of cigarettes, a full ashtray, an untidy sheaf of decoded signals had invested the smooth grey surface. It was a piece of equipment for which there was no further use. The personnel of the command centre remained at their posts, seated before consoles, encoders, avionics displays, computer terminals. Motionless. Machines no longer of use. Air Marshal Kutuzov leaned his elbows on the map-table. The Soviet First Secretary of the Party stood at attention, strong hands clasped together behind his back, pinching the coat-tail of his grey suit into creases. His head was lifted to the low, curving ceiling of the room, cocked slightly on one side. He listened as if to music.
The only sound in the room, loud enough to mask the hum of radios and encoding consoles, was Tretsov's voice. The First Secretary had ordered the tapes of Tretsov's last moments to be replayed, almost as if he could edit them, alter their message, create victory rather than defeat. Despite himself, Vladimirov listened as Tretsov died in playback. The command centre was hot. He was certain of it. It was not himself nor the rush of anticipation through him, it was the ambient temperature. The air-conditioning must have failed. He was hot.