'If I try and pull myself out, I'll end up on my belly!'
Looking over the side of the cockpit, he saw Seerbacker's face looking up at him. Seerbacker was openly grinning. Steam billowed around him, snow flew up around the cockpit of the Firefox as the superheated steam was played carefully over the embedded wheels. Gant had not needed to warn Peck that if he played too much steam onto the tyres, at too high a pressure, he would, literally, melt them.
Peck had understood. He emerged from beneath the fuselage, looked up at Gant, and said into his handset: 'O.K., Major Gant — now, for God's sake, get out of here!'
Gant signalled him with the thumbs-up, closed the hood once more, checked the gauges, and opened the throttles, until the rpm gauge once more showed fifty-five per cent. He released the brakes, the aircraft jolted out of the pits which the wheels and the applied steam had made, and rolled forward. Peck, Seerbacker an the others were moving away swiftly, tugging the thick, snaking hoses after them. Already, men were emerging from the Pequod, dressed in civilian parkas, the decoy scientists and technicians who should, by virtue of Seerbacker's ploy, occupy the floe when the Russians arrived. Gant turned the aircraft, and headed down the floe, directly in the line of the runway. He kept the Firefox completely straight on course. He would need his own tracks on his return.
The grey sea was ahead of him. He searched for any sign of the Russian submarine. There was nothing. Probably, the captain had decided not to surface until he arrived and stopped engines at the Pequod's position, something to do with psychological surprise. Whatever it was, Gant was grateful on behalf of Seerbacker and his crew. No one would visually sight the Firefox.
He turned the plane in a semi-circle, lined up on his own tyre tracks in the surface snow, and opened the throttles. Almost immediately, he felt the restraint of the surface snow, the inability of the aircraft with normal take-off power to accelerate sufficiently. He could not use too much power. It would have the effect of digging in the nose, changing the relative airflow over the surfaces of the plane. He would, in fact, slow the plane if he used more power. There was little impression of speed until he passed over the spot on the ice where he had parked, and joined the smoothed, polished surface of the ice-runway blasted out for him by Peck and his men. Only now could he see the ridge, a tiny hump ahead of him. He could not see, in the poor visibility, the gap of thirty feet that had been carved in its face. The undercarriage shook free of the restraining snow, and he felt the plane lurch forward as if freed from glue or treacle. Now he was able to open the throttles, push up the rpm, and gather speed. The only impression of speed was from the crinkled, roughened edge of the runway as it flowed past him at an increasing rate. He had to be right in the centre of the crude runway because he couldn't use the brakes to steer on the ice. They would have no effect. The rudder would not operate effectively until he reached a speed of eighty-five knots. At that moment he was at a little more than fifty.
As his eyes strained into the shredding mist, he heard, coming from a great distance, but with utter clarity, Seerbacker's voice.
'Good luck, man. Can't stop to talk, we've got visitors!' The voice had come from the handset.
His body was chilled, but he sweated. The second it took for him to pass into that region of speed which returned the power of steering to him seemed like an age. Then his speed topped ninety knots, and he centred the Firefox smoothly on the runway. He eased open the throttles, and the rpm needle seemed to leap with a jerk across the face of the dial. He saw the gap rushing at him; now that his eyes had a point of focus in the diffused whiteness of the floe, he was suddenly aware of his speed, transferred from his dials to the landscape. In cold air, he recited to himself, he needed less distance for take off. He did not believe it, not for a split-second.
The gap leapt at him, the distance it had been from him eaten by the huge engines. He was through the gap at 150 knots, and 170 was his take-off speed. He shoved the throttles into reheat, and pulled back on the stick. He dare not now plough back into the soft surface snow where Peck had had no time to clear the runway.
He could see the snow — he swore that he could see it, the point where the runway of ice ended. It was impossible. It passed under the plane's belly as he hauled back on the stick. He knew the undercarriage was clear of the floe, yet there was no impression of climbing.
In the rear-view mirror, Gant saw a cloud of snow belly out behind him, caused by the sudden downthrust of the jets. The Firefox squatted, it seemed for an instant, nose-high, then, like a limb tearing itself free of restraining, glutinous mud, the aircraft pulled away from the floe. Gant trimmed flaps up, and retracted the undercarriage. The airspeed indicator flicked over, and he pushed the throttles forward. The plane kicked him in the back, and he felt the anti-G suit compensate for the sudden surge of acceleration. He checked the fuel flow, saw that all the needles were in the green, and hauled the aircraft into a vertical climb.
The climb towards the cloud took no more than a few seconds. As he entered the cloud, the Mach-meter crossed the figure 1 — then 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4…
The Firefox burst out of the cloud at 22,000 feet, into dazzling sunlight, cloudless, vast blue.
He had taken off heading due north. Now he set his course, punching out the coordinates for his crossing-point on the Finnish coast. He banked the plane round to a heading of 210 degrees, still climbing. The maximum altitude of which the Firefox was reputedly capable was in excess of 120,000 feet — more than twenty-five miles high. Gant intended to use as much of that staggering height as he could. It was unlikely, he knew, that he would be able to avoid infra-red detection, even at that height. However, moving as fast as the aircraft was capable, in a vast leap over the Barents Sea, it would be impossible for any interception to take place. A little before he crossed the coast, he would descend to sea level, and begin his complicated, top-speed dash across Finland to the Gulf of Bothnia, and Stockholm.
There was no aircraft that could touch him, no missile that could home on him, at that height, that speed. He smiled to himself as the altimeter indicated 50,000 feet and still climbing. Now, he thought, now he could put the Firefox through its paces, really fly the great plane…
There was a fierce, cold joy in him, his closest approximation to an ecstatic emotion. There was nothing to compare, he knew, not with this.
He had read the army psychiatrist's report in Saigon — he had broken into the records office, late at night. An emotional cripple, that's what they had called him, though not in those words — an emotional cripple scarred for life by his early experiences. That Clarkville crap that he had fed the head-shrinker, he'd based his judgement on that, his judgement of a man who had flown more than fifty combat missions, who was the best, the judgement of a fat-assed head-shrinker hundreds of miles from the nearest 'Cong soldier, or missile-launcher.
He calmed the adrenalin that was beginning to course through his system. There was no point, he told himself, no point at all. He was the best. Buckholz knew it, knew it when he picked him. The Firefox climbed through 60,000 feet.
There was no thought for Upenskoy, for Baranovich, and Kreshin, and Semelovsky, and all the others. Since he had left Bilyarsk, they had dropped from his mind, gone more completely than faded, sepia photographs of the dead on wall and mantel.
Tretsov saw him punching through 60,000 feet, the vapour-trail ahead and below him was clear against the grey sea across a gap in the cloud. He knew it was Gant. There was infra-red, but no radar image on his screen. It had to be the stolen Mig-31.