by Craig Thomas
The door of the hut opened. The wind's noise entered, seeming to blow Thorne into the room. As he closed the door, he said, 'It's just about possible - now. In two minutes, even better. What do you want, sir?'
The smell of paraffin was heavy in the air. Blue smoke rolled near the low ceiling. Gant had turned from the window. He crossed to the nearest bed and picked up his flying helmet.
'I'm afraid - ' Aubrey began.
'Me, too,' Gant replied, standing directly in front of Aubrey. His stance was somewhat challenging.
'I meant -'
'I know what you meant. It doesn't make any difference.'
'Mitchell - listen to me, please. You can't be forced to do this… in fact, I'm beginning to believe that you shouldn't even try. Time - time has run out for us. You couldn't survive even if you take off. You know that.'
'Maybe.' Gant's face was bleak. 'I'm not letting them all be wasted, Aubrey. I don't care what it was all for, or whether it really matters a damn - but they're dead and I owe them.' He tucked his helmet under his arm. 'Wish me luck.'
Aubrey nodded, but could not speak. Curtin said, 'Good luck, Mitchell. Great good luck.'
'Sure.'
The door closed behind Gant. Aubrey remained silent. There was a clock on the wall of the hut, an old, bare-faced electric clock with two thick black hands and a spider-leg, red second hand. Aubrey's gaze was drawn to it. The clock of the operation's last phase had begun running. Gant's clock. The second hand passed the figure twelve, beginning a new minute.
An hour, he thought. In an hour, it will be all over. Everything…
FOURTEEN:
Whirlpool
The Harrier was an approaching roar which became a misty, uncertain shape against the heavy cloud; a falcon about to stoop. Waterford felt himself able to envisage the scene that confronted the pilot. Whiteness; little more than white-out. A picket-fence of pencilled trees fringing the lake. Contourless, featureless almost.
The shape enlarged, dropping slowly. Roundels, camouflage paint, a grey shark's belly. The undercarriage legs, almost at the wingtips like a child's approximation to their position, hung ready to contact the ice. The fuselage wobbled. Two hundred feet, a hundred and fifty feet…
Now, Gant and the pilot could see their faces; begin to see the ridges and bumps of the ice and drifted snow. See Moresby's splashes of red paint.
Waterford saw the wings flick, the descent unsettled by a whipping reminder of the wind. Snow flurried across the ice, flew through the clearing air. Fifty feet. He wondered whether the pilot would abandon the attempt and rise again as if riding a funnel of air until he was at a safe altitude. But the Harrier continued to drop. Hovering, hesitating…
An image from his boyhood; the stoop of the falcon, then its violent, brute rise back up from the long grass, the rabbit beneath it kicking feebly, wounded through by the talons. The Harrier's port undercarriage touched an instant before the starboard. Then the nosewheel dropped with an audible thump. Someone - perhaps as many as half a dozen - cheered. Others ran to secure the aircraft through another flurry of snow.
'He's here,' Buckholz said to Waterford, unnecessarily; merely expelling tension.
'Who? Superman?' Waterford turned to look at the Firefox, then back towards the lake. Two men were already clambering over the Harrier's coekpit sill. 'Yes,' he added more quietly. 'Poor bloody Superman. How the hell does Aubrey con them?'
'Us, you mean?' Buckholz asked, smiling. Without waiting for an answer, he moved down to the ice, raising his arm to signal to Gant, who was removing his flying helmet.
'Us,' Waterford agreed.
Buckholz opened his arms to welcome Gant.
'Buckholz.'
'Mitchell - am I pleased to see you, boy!'
'Later.' Gant was already looking beyond Buckholz, towards the Firefox. Snow petered out against his flying suit. The wind was a thin, high whine. 'Is she ready?' he asked.
'No-'
'Then get her ready, Buckholz!' Gant snapped.
'Wait a minute, Gant - '
'Later.' He hurried past Buckholz and Waterford towards the aircraft. Moresby stood protectively in front of it, his technicians and engineers still clambering over the fuselage and wings, and crouching beneath its belly. An auxiliary generator hummed, providing power to test the aircraft's electronic systems. Gant hesitated in front of Moresby, as if the man demanded respect, politeness. 'Moresby?' he asked.
'Yes, lad. Now, up with you into the cockpit - tell me what it looks like. You have a lot of work to do in the next half-hour.' The tone was light, but Gant saw that Moresby's face was grim and uncertain.
He said, 'Buckholz said she isn't ready.'
'Yes, sir - had a lot of cars in today.'
'How unready?'
'You have to do all the final checks - we have to refuel… that shouldn't take long. You're not going far.'
'What have you got?'
'Trolley-pump - bit slow, I'm afraid.'
'Fill the tanks.'
'You only need enough for a short hop to - '
Even as he prepared to climb into the cockpit, Gant pointed his thumb at the clouds. 'You know what they'll have waiting up there - fill the tanks.'
'You're right, Gant - but, then again, you're wrong. There's no warranty on the vehicle…' He paused, seeming to lean his face towards Gant, as if to confide some secret. Then he said, 'I wouldn't guarantee this aircraft for the couple of hundred miles to Bardufoss. Anything could happen - ' He raised his hand as Gant appeared about to interrupt. 'Listen to me, Gant - please listen carefully. Any kind or amount of damage could have occurred to any or every part of that aircraft while it was submerged. It all looks all right - it all checks out. But - under stress - combat conditions…' He paused again, calculating the effect of his next words. 'You may not break up under combat stress, Gant - but I wouldn't say the same was bound to be true of the Firefox. Do you understand?'
Gant glared at him, then turned and mounted the steps. He swung his legs over the sill, and settled into the pilot's seat. After a moment, he looked down at Moresby, his face white and bleak.
'I understand you good, Moresby,' he said. 'Real good. She could break down, fall to pieces, any time. You don't know, you can't say - ' He broke off, seeming to stare at the instrument panel in front of him. His hands reached out towards the control column. 'How long are you going to be refuelling her?' he asked eventually in a clipped, professional tone.
'Thirty to forty minutes.'
'Then I want her out on the ice - now.'
'What-?'
Gant snapped: 'If I'm not sitting there at the end of the runway when they come over, they may never give me the chance. Get her out onto the ice.'
'Quite right,' Moresby replied, unabashed. 'OK - sit tight.' Moresby moved away, already raising his voice, summoning and briefing his engineers and technicians.
Gant sat in the pilot's couch. The tremor in his hands subsided. It hadn't been fear. Anticipation. Moresby's warning had had no effect apart from a momentary anger. Now, all he felt was an impatience to be gone. There was an arrogance like that of a bird of prey. The activity around him was no more than the means of returning the aircraft to his control. Anna seemed to have retreated from him, down a long, narrowing perspective. Other figures followed her; the dead and the living alike.
He heard the tractor tug's engine start up. The bright yellow vehicle chugged along the shoreline towards him, creaking and grinding over the MO-MAT. It skirted him almost respectfully, and its towing bar was clamped to the undercarriage leg beneath the Firefox's nose. Gant turned up his thumb, the driver of the tug returned the signal, then exhaust fumes billowed as Gant felt a shudder through the airframe. Reluctantly at first, the Firefox began to move backwards. As the tug manoeuvred him, he used the mirror like a car-driver almost as if he were reversing into a parking place. The Firefox rolled protestingly along the MO-MAT.
Buckholz stood watching the aircraft move. Other people, too, had paused
in their tasks. Incongruously, it was moving backwards. For a moment, he had intended protesting the moving of the airplane, before he realised that camouflage was pointless, the trees did not protect against grenades and rockets. Gant would need every second, even half-second of advantage.
Slowly, the aircraft reversed onto the ice, dropping down the shore, pausing, then settling level on the last yards of the portable runway. The tug continued to push her until the Firefox cleared the MO-MAT and turned a reverse half-circle on the ice so that her nose was facing north, up the lake. The snow had almost stopped now and Buckholz could see perhaps for some hundreds of yards before the chill, grey air seemed to solidify into a rough blanket hung across the scene. From the cockpit, he guessed that Gant could see no more than one-third of the total length of ice-runway he would require to take off.
He hurried towards the Firefox. People returned to their work, the marines took up defensive positions beside the aircraft once more. More like a guard of honour than a force to be employed, Buckholz thought.
Around the aircraft, under the supervision of the Royal Engineer captain, men began clearing the packed and drifted snow. A gang of children clearing the front path, or the driveway from the garage to the street for their father's car.
Gant was looking down at him.
'You want the take-off run cleared now?'
'Sooner the better.'
'I'll get right on it.' Buckholz turned away, then looked back at Gant. 'You don't have to do this, you know. Take a risk with this, I mean.' Gant did not reply. Buckholz moved back towards him, and touched the side of the fuselage below the cockpit. 'Moresby must have told you about the risks involved. I'm just telling you, Mitchell - you don't have to go through with it.'
Gant looked down at him. There was something uncomfortably distant and arrogant about his face. 'Get those choppers aloft, Buckholz…' He paused, then added without grace or warmth: 'And - thanks.'
'OK - I just don't want you beefing at me when she falls out of the sky like a black brick.'
'I promise.'
Buckholz waved, and then undipped his R/T from his parka. 'Come in, Gunnar - Gunnar?'
Gunnar's reply crackled in the freezing air. 'I hear you, Mr. Buckholz - go ahead.'
'Get the brushwork done - man here has to get to work on time,' Buckholz said with a faint grin. Then he turned to watch the far shore of the lake, a misty, uneven line. The trees were emerging from the thick air like spars of an old pier. He could hear, quite clearly, the rotors of the two Lynx helicopters starting up, and waited for them to lift out of the grey, dirty haze.
Gant watched as Moresby's technicians wheeled the trolley-pump down the shore towards him. Two of the air transportable fuel cells were clumsily rolled forward onto the ice. A hose from the first of them was dragged to the port wing and attached to the fuel filler pipe. Gant waited, almost stirring in his seat with impatience, until the noise of the pump starting up calmed him. Moresby watched the whole operation with an unchanging grimness of expression. Fuel began to flow into the port tanks.
Moresby swiftly crossed the ice to the aircraft and climbed the pilot's steps until his head was above the sill and he was looking down on Gant. He activated the stopwatch on the main instrument panel. Its second hand moved jerkily. Moresby glanced at his own stopwatch, hung around his neck.
'Right,' Moresby announced. 'We've been working our backsides off for nearly eight hours now, laddie. Let's see how quickly you can get things done, shall we?'
Gant looked into the senior engineering officer's face, and nodded. 'OK, Moresby. Let's get started.'
'And don't switch on the ignition while we're pumping in fuel, will you?'
'Sure - but if I call for hot refuelling…'
Moresby growled. 'Don't - if you can avoid it.' He raised his eyes, and then added, 'Sixteen minutes and twelve, thirteen seconds have elapsed since you look off from Kirkenes. Let's get cracking, shall we, old man? We've been through everything we can… you'll know if the read-outs seem different in any way.' Moresby glanced down from the pilot's steps and paused in his instructions until the auxiliary power unit had been wheeled up to the aircraft's flank and reconnected to the Firefox. Then he said, 'Right - run through the pre-flight check, taxi and pre take-off as far as you can - I'll keep the tally.'
Gant hesitated, savouring the moment. Then his hands moved. He switched on the Master Electrics, and immediately heard a whirring noise that slowly mounted in pitch.
'Good. Gyro instruments winding up,' Moresby murmured. 'Emergencies pressure normal-check… Flying controls. Normal feel and full travel… ?'
Gant's thumb left the throttles and depressed a spade lever. 'Sixty degrees, and indicating,' he announced as the flaps lowered.
As he raised the flaps again, the heel of his left hand nudged a lever and the airbrakes extended with a mild thump which gently rocked the airframe. He waited, then. Moresby sensed his uncomfortable impatience. He looked away from Gant as the two Lynx helicopters lifted above the trees on the opposite shore and moved across the ice towards them, perhaps two hundred feet above the lake. Gant, too, had turned his head.
They curtsied and sidled as they hovered near the Firefox, before dropping slowly like fat black spiders at the ends of invisible threads. With Gunnar's helicopter in the leading position, they moved slowly away up the lake. Snow billowed around them in the downdraught, rolling like dust thrown up by a scything, horizontal wind. When it cleared there were ridges of frozen snow amid the smoother, cleaned expanse of ice.
'It's working,' Moresby commented.
'Annunciator panel and warning lights - test,' Gant prompted.
He pushed switches on the panel. The noise of the helicopters drummed and echoed around the lake. Royal Engineers were already using hot-air hoses and shovels to flatten and disperse the low, sword-edged dunes of frozen snow. He saw that most of them were already marked with something that might have been red paint.
The check lights on the panel glowed in the correct sequence.
- - -
Eventually, Gant said, 'Anti-G control - on… and check.'
'Now the UHF,' Moresby announced. 'Select the Soviet Tac-channel. Then we can listen to what our friends are up to. No transmission test yet.'
'OK - then what day is it?'
'Thursday.'
Gant removed a small card from its holder on the radio control box. He required the sequencing code to lock onto the secure Soviet Tac-channel, since the pattern of frequencies was altered each day.
'Got it,' he announced.
He switched on the radio, then slipped the Russian flying helmet onto his head. He plugged in the communications and thought-guidance jackplug at the side of the couch. Then he pressed the selector buttons, keying in the sequencing code, and almost at once the two red dots locked on, stuttering as they followed the changes of frequency. Moresby was looking at him. He concentrated on the crackling lash of voices in his ear. Activity, activity, he waited, hardly breathing. The stopwatch informed him that eighteen minutes had passed. Nothing was airborne. Everything was, however, fuelled and ready, awaiting the order to take off. Repeated references to the location of the lake, of tactics, of the pattern of overflights, selected squadron altitudes and search areas…
He switched off. 'It's OK,' he announced. It wasn't. He felt a creeping numbness, a reluctance to go on. They would be waiting for him. Perhaps ten or fifteen aircraft, expecting him to be visible only on infra-red, waiting in specific, clever patterns, as if they held nets between them and would cast for him the moment they saw the heat of his exhaust as he lifted from the lake.
The cloud of snow was retreating. Ridges and drifts were being smoothed and erased. The two Lynx helicopters were distant, unreal black dots at the far end of the lake.
He would have no chance.
There was no other way. He swallowed, and in a dry voice, he said, 'Repeat.'
'I asked you about the anti-radar and the thought-guidance. We don't know ho
w they work so we can't reassure you as to whether they will work or not. Was there anything on the panel in connection with the anti-radar?'
Gant shook his head. 'There was no electrical or mechanical action to be taken.' He looked at Moresby. 'I don't know - '
The Lynxes were lost again in the cloud that was now moving slowly down the lake towards them.
'Damn,' Moresby muttered. Then he punched one mittened hand into the other. 'Got it!' He bent his head, placing his lips close to his R/T. Thorne - Thorne?' His voice was eager and querulous. Gant glanced across at the Harrier. He could see Thorne's hand wave in acknowledgement.
'Yes, sir,' he replied punctiliously.
'Be a good chap and see if you can see us, will you?' Moresby asked with affected casualness. 'On your radar, naturally.'
'But-'
'No buts. Just do it, my boy.'
'Sir.'
'Meanwhile,' Moresby said to Gant, 'you can check out pressurisation and air conditioning.'
'OK,' Moresby climbed down the pilot's steps as Gant closed the cockpit. He heard Moresby attach a lead to the landline. socket on the fuselage, so that they could communicate. He locked the canopy. He was isolated in the Firefox. He connected his oxygen supply. The oxygen content and pressure were satisfactory. All that remained was to check the warning systems for pressurisation, since cockpit pressure could only be checked at altitude. The lights all glowed comfortingly as soon as he summoned them. He could not check heating and demisting until the engines were ignited and running. Again, he checked the warning lights. They, too, glowed instantly. 'All check,' he said.
'Good. Now, wait a minute while we unload these missiles, then you can check the thought-guidance system. I'll give you the word…' Gant felt the two jolts as the AA-6 missiles were removed from their wing pylons. Then Moresby's face appeared outside the cockpit hood, his thumb erect in front of his features. Gant hesitated, then gave a mental command in Russian to fire a port wing missile. The sequence of lights stuttered across the panel. He counted them, remembered them. It appeared to work.
He opened the canopy. 'OK,' he said, removing the helmet.
