He banked away to port, accelerating into a dive. He moved away from the airliner, losing sight of it. It registered as a bright green blip near the centre of the radar screen. When he had decided that he had slid across and behind it, and accelerated sufficiently to overtake it again, he straightened onto his original course, watching the blip attempt to regain its position to one side of the screen's centre line. He steadied the Firefox like an eager horse as the airliner moved into visual range to starboard, and he could see the contrail and the tiny glint of sunlight. He eased open the throttles, and the Firefox surged forward on what would appear a collision course to the pilot of the airliner.
There was never a moment when he considered he might have misjudged the distance, the heading. He rolled the plane onto a wingtip, and dived away from the oncoming Tupolev, now filling his starboard window. They would have seen him, and panicked, since their radar screens would be stupefyingly empty. The slim fuselage, and the huge engines of an unknown aircraft, suddenly appearing, would be imprinted on their minds by fear. He rolled the plane into a Mach descent, a thousand feet below the airliner, and listened to the chatter of the pilot over the Russian airline frequency, smiling in satisfaction.
The ground rushed at the Firefox as he screamed down from 15,000 feet. He trimmed slightly nose-up, then pulled out of the suicidal dive, levelling at little more than two hundred feet above the flat terrain of the steppes. The pressure on the G-suit was evident, uncomfortable, as he was thrust back into the pilot's couch. His vision blurred, reddened, and then cleared, and he read off the instruments before him.
He switched in the auto-pilot and fed in the next coordinates that he had memorised so exactly, and the inertial navigator took over, settling the Firefox onto its new course. He had been seen, and the sighting would confirm the UDF fix they must have. They would have confirmed the fact that he was heading south, beyond Volgograd, towards perhaps the border with Iran, and some kind of rendezvous in Israel, or over the Mediterranean. The search would flatten in that sector of the Soviet defence system. Now he had need of at least some fair proportion of the Firefox's speed capability. He opened the throttles and watched the rpm gauges swing over, and the Mach-counter which was his only intimation, other than his ground speed read-out, that he was travelling faster than the speed of sound. He was heading east, towards the mountain chain of the Urals, seeking the shelter, he hoped, of their eastern slopes before turning due north. He could not employ the real cruising capability of the plane. Nevertheless, it was with satisfaction that he watched the numbers slipping through the Mach-counter… Mach 1,1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5…
Just below him, the flat, empty, silent expanse of the steppes fled past, receded. The buoyancy he had felt, the clearness and pleasure of the first moments of the flight, returned to him. He was flying the greatest war-plane ever built. It was a meeting of that aircraft, and the only human being good enough to fly it. His egotism, cold, unruffled, calculating, was fulfilled. A visual sighting at the height he was travelling became less and less likely. The supersonic footprint of his passage was narrow at two hundred feet, and there was little below him of human manufacture or human residence to record it. All he needed to avoid was the 'Big Ears' sound detection network. He had no idea of its capability, or location. In the Urals, however, the echoes set up by his passage would confuse any such equipment.
Suddenly, in a violent alteration of mood, he felt naked and his equilibrium seemed threatened. He was running for cover. Despite his better judgement, he pushed the throttles forward and watched, with satisfaction, as the Mach-counter reeled off the mounting numbers. Mach 1.8, 1.9, Mach 2, 2.1, 2.2…
He knew he was wasting fuel, precious fuel, yet he did not pull back the throttles. He watched the numbers mount until he had reached Mach 2.6, and then he steadied the speed. Now, the terrain below him was merely a blur. He was in a soundless cocoon, removed from the world. He began to feel safe as he switched in the TFR (Terrain Following Radar) which was his eyes and his reactions, operating as it did via the autopilot. He had not expected to need it until he entered the foothills of the Urals, but at his present speed of almost two thousand mph, he had to switch them in. He was no longer flying the aircraft. The Urals were only minutes away now and there, safe, he would regain control of the Firefox. His sense of well-being began to return. The sheer speed of the aircraft deadened the ends of nerves. The steadied figure of Mach 2.6 on the Mach-counter was brilliantly clear in his vision. At this speed, despite the draining-away of the irreplaceable kerosene, a visual sighting was as good as impossible. He was safe, running and safe…
'Give the alert to the contingency refuelling locations at once, would you?' Aubrey said blandly. He was speaking via a scrambler to Air Commodore Latchford at Strike Command, High Wycombe. He had, that moment, received a report from Latchford which indicated a definite lift-off by Gant from Bilyarsk. The AEWR (Airborne Early Warning Radar) had recorded signs of a staggered sector scramble amongst border squadrons of the Red Air Force and this, in conjunction with radio — and code-monitoring which had shown signs of furious code-communication between sections of the Red Air Force, and between the First Secretary and the Admiral of the Red Banner Northern Fleet, as well as Russian ships in the Mediterranean — all of this evidence amounted to a sighting of Gant lifting clear of the runway at Bilyarsk.
Latchford affirmed an immediate alert for both contingency refuelling points to begin transmission of the homing-signal which operated on the very special frequency of Gant's transistor-innards which would lead him home.
'Mother Two and Mother Three will go on alert now,' the Air Commodore said. 'You'll take care of Mother One yourself — at least, I presume you will, since I have no idea where to find her?' There was a chuckle at the other end of the line. Latchford had had to know about the two contingency refuelling points, but had been kept in the dark concerning the one Gant was expected to use. Aubrey sensed a communion of tension, of suppressed excitement.
'Yes, Captain Curtin will take care of Mother One,' Aubrey assured him, and then added: 'Thank you, Air Commodore — your news comes, if I may say, like a ray of pure sunshine. Many thanks.' He listened to Latchford's throaty chuckle for a moment, seeming to draw comfort from the sound, and then replaced the receiver.
Buckholz, elbows on his desk, was watching him intently as he looked up. 'They confirm? All that activity isn't just because they caught our boy?' he enquired.
Aubrey shook his head. 'No, my dear Buckholz,' Aubrey said blandly. 'AEW Radar confirms the pre-dieted activity on the part of the Red Air Force, northern and southern borders — Gant is in the air.'
Buckholz breathed deeply, his breath exhaling loudly. He turned to Anders, almost asleep next to him, and grinned with the pure self-satisfaction of a child.
'Thank God,' he whispered.
There was a silence, broken by Curtin's creaking descent from the step-ladder. When he regained the floor, he said to Aubrey: 'I didn't reckon on doing the office-boy's job when I volunteered for this!' He grinned as he said it. 'You want me to tell Washington to alert Mother One, Mr. Aubrey?'
Aubrey nodded. 'Yes, my boy — do that now, would you? If the weather's still holding, that is.'
Curtin walked back to the map, picked up a pointer and tapped at a satellite weather-photograph pinned high on the wall. 'That's the latest — two a.m. your time. All clear.'