Another sound clamoured for the attention of his fogged awareness — an alarm, a fire-alarm, he decided. He knew then what the diversion was, responding to stimuli as he was. He knew that it signalled an increase in the urgency of his efforts. It marked another stage passed, a new tempo introduced. He began to struggle with the lacing, the all-important lacing that was his only protection against the disastrous effects of the G-forces he would encounter in the Firefox. It was a skilled job, it required more of him than he was able to give. Yet it had to be right — it might kill him, as surely as any mechanical malfunction in the aircraft, more surely. He tried to concentrate.
It was not easy, but it was familiar. He knew what he was doing. He forced himself to pay attention, his own harsh breathing roaring in his ears.
The bleep is the alert; wait for the continuous noise, which is the summons, Baranovich told him, above the panic of the blood.
At last he had finished. The suit was hot, choking, sticky with his frantic efforts. He had no time to put on dry underclothes. He picked the pilot's helmet from its shelf, glanced inside it, and could make nothing of the contacts and sensors of the thought-system. They had been checked by Baranovich the previous day.
He tugged on the helmet, snapped down the visor, and the image of flame roared up in his imagination, the dying effort of the dream to swallow his consciousness.
Wait for the continuous noise, which is the summons. Baranovich whispered above the noise of the flames.
He realised that the bleep had vanished. There was a continuous, penetrating cry from the receiver on the locker. He reached into the locker, and picked from the shelf the innards of the transistor radio. He looked at the small black object, like a cigarette case now its disguise of transistors and batteries had gone. In the radio it had appeared nothing more sinister than a circuit-board.
The continuous noise is the summons.
He moved swiftly towards the door.
The crowd simply seemed, as if by a communal awareness and command, to disappear, to drift to either side of the two Jews. They were alone, and marked. There was nowhere to hide, no shelter for them. A group of guards in a semi-circle was advancing slowly towards them, through the smoke that was filling the hangar, rolling like a pall towards the open doors. Tsernik's head was hidden by the loud-hailer he had raised to his lips, and they heard his amplified, mechanical voice call to them.
'Put down your weapons — now, or I will order them to open fire! Put down your weapons — immediately!'
There seemed little else to do. The fire-tender had been joined, raucously, by its twin, and the fire-fighting units were soaking the aircraft and the hangar floor with foam, choking out Semelovsky's fire, Semelovsky's funeral pyre. There were people all around them now, backing away, as from something diseased or deformed — men in white coats, others in overalls, the technicians and scientists who had rushed towards the fire, then retreated from it like an ebbing wave. Baranovich and Kreshin were between the crescent of the approaching guards, and the crescent of the fire-fighters behind them. Baranovich felt the drop in temperature as the foam choked the life from the fire beneath the second Mig. Around the first one, around Gant's plane, the circle of guards had thinned, though they had not disappeared, not all left their posts.
Where was Gant? He had turned over the switch. The summons should have brought him by now. If he did not appear within seconds at the door leading to the security-building and the pilots' rest-room, the guards would have arrested them, and re-formed around the aircraft. The gleaming silver flanks of the plane reflected the light of the dying flames. The fuel tanks of the second Mig had not caught fire as Baranovich had hoped. With luck, for the Soviets, it would still fly.
There seemed noise like a wall behind him, pushing against him with an almost physical force. In front of him, there was a cone of silence, with Kreshin and himself at the point, and the semi-circle of closing guards embraced within it as they moved slowly forward. It was one of the most powerful visual images of his life, the approaching guards and then, beating at his ears, a palpable silence.
A gun roared at his side and its sound, too, seemed to come from far away, as if muffled. He saw a guard drop, and a second one lurch sideways. It was too easy, he thought, they are too close together, as he had once seen advancing Germans in the defence of Stalingrad — too close… His mind did not tell him to open fire. His own gun lay uselessly in his pocket.
'Drop your weapons, or I shall order them to open fire!' he heard the distant, mechanical voice say.
He did not hear the command, but he saw the flames from the rifles, sensed, rather than saw, Kreshin plucked away from his side. Then, with growing agony and the terrible revulsion of the awareness of death, he felt his own body plucked by bullets, his coat ripped as if by small detonations. He felt old. He staggered, no longer sure of his balance. He stumbled back a couple of paces, then sat untidily down on the ground, like a child failing a lesson in walking. Then it seemed as if the hangar lights had been turned off, he rolled sideways from the waist, like an insecure doll flopping onto its side. His eyes were tightly closed, squeezed shut, to avoid the terrible moment of death and, as his face slapped dully against the concrete floor, he didn't see Gant, a dim shadow in the dull green pressure-suit, standing at the entrance to the hangar from the security building. Baranovich died believing that Gant would not come.
Gant could see from where he stood something in a white coat on the ground, and the closing, cautious semi-circle of guards approaching it. He saw Kreshin's blond head, and his limbs flung in the careless attitude of violent death. The aircraft was thirty yards from him, no more.
There had been a fire at the other end of the hangar. He could see the two fire-tenders, and the foam-soaked frame of the second prototype now being rolled clear of the smouldering materials that had begun, and sustained, the fire. Already, he realised, the occupants of the hangar were in a position to begin to turn their attention back to the Firefox. He was almost too late — he might, in fact, be too late. The excuse for rolling the plane out of the hangar was almost over, the fire out. He saw a spurt of flame near the wall of the hangar, and an asbestos-suited fireman rear back from it. He heard the dull concussion of a fuel-drum explode.
The second prototype was clear of the flame, but the men towing it with a small tractor hurried to get it further off. It was his chance.
His legs were still stiff, rebellious, from the hysterical paralysis of the dream, but he forced them to stride out, to cross the thirty yards of concrete to the Firefox.
The pilot's ladder that Baranovich had used for his supervision of Grosch's work was still in place, and he began to climb it. As he bent over the cockpit, a voice at the bottom of the ladder called up to him.
'Colonel Voskov?'
He looked round, and nodded down at the young, distraught, sweating face below him. The man was in the uniform of a junior officer in the KGB. His gun was in his hand.
'Yes?' he said.
'What are you doing, Colonel?'
'What the devil do you think I'm doing, you idiot? Do you want this plane to be damaged like the other one? I'm taking it out of here, that's what I'm doing.' He swung his legs over the sill, and dropped into the pilot's couch. While he still looked down at the young KGB man, his hands sought for the parachute straps, and he buckled himself in, following this by strapping himself to the couch itself.
The young man had stepped back a couple of paces, so that he could still see Gant clearly. The tinted face-mask of the helmet, combined with the integral oxygen-mask, made it impossible for him to tell that it wasn't Colonel Voskov in the pilot's position. He was at a loss what action to take. He glanced swiftly down the hangar. It was true that the second Mig-31 was being towed towards him from the far end of the hangar and, although it appeared under control, there was still smoke and flame from the fire there. He had been told by Tsernik that no one, on the express orders of Colonel Kontarsky, was to be allowed near the plane. But did that apply to the pilot?