The wipers cleared the cockpit screen. In the mirror, he saw the ice open up, but the black snaking branches of the cracks caused by the rocket's impact lagged behind him, out of breath and tired.
Fierce elation. Almost delight. The airspeed indicator read one hundred and twenty knots. He still could not see the far end of the lake. The airframe was shaking as the wheels careered overridges and bumps. His teeth chattered painfully, his hand shuddered as it gripped the control column. One hundred and forty knots. The aircraft was almost skipping and bouncing as the wheels discovered every tiny indentation in the ice. One ridge that had been missed, he thought — then quashed the idea. It persisted for another moment-just one, and the undercarriage would snap -
One-fifty, one fifty-two -
He began to ease back on the column, beginning to lift the aircraft's nose. In the mirror, he saw the MiL loom up again as it pursued him. Fire billowed from its wing-pods; rockets. They struck the ice behind him, around, ahead. He was showered with fire which burst into boiling snow and ice. Something clattered against the fuselage. A huge crack in the ice to starboard snaked towards him at terrible speed — then he was past it. The scene behind him was completely obscured.
One-sixty knots.
Then he saw the second MiL, directly ahead of him, the end of the lake behind it; the trees like pencil-marks against the white-grey sky. The MiL wasn't moving. Hovering. Helicopter and shore filled his vision.
It was directly in his path. He was airborne, accelerating through one sixty-five knots. The MiL had positioned itself — it had shunted slightly a moment earlier — directly in the path of his climb-out. It enlarged, an enormous black beetle, hanging there.
He hauled back on the column, sweat bathing his body, his lips stretched to point at the clouds.
The MiL rushed forward anticipating his action, prepared for suicide. Missiles armed. He pulled the column back almost against his chest. The Firefox seemed to stand erect on its exhaust and stagger into the air as if tearing free of a swamp rather than a frozen lake. The MiL was huge in his vision. He retracted the undercarriage as the helicopter seemed to move its nose in, so that he almost expected a shark-mouth to open and tear at the belly of the Firefox. The aircraft leapt at the low cloud. The MiL had vanished; become no more than a wide dot on his scope. A missile's infra-red trail pursued him for a moment, then fell away, unable to match his rate of climb. It would have been wire-guided, for use against ground targets.
He was at ten thousand feet, climbing at the rate of five hundred feet a second. The airframe quivered and shuddered, like a human body that was chilled and growing rapidly colder, as the storm thrust and battered outside the aircraft. His fingers trembled on the control column. The throttles were all the way forward, through the detent and into reheat. The Mach-meter clicked rapidly upwards. Mach.8, 9, 1.0, Mach 1.2…
Eleven thousand feet. He studied the radar. Three glowing dots were moving towards the scope's centre. He demanded contact time from the computer, and the read-out appeared almost immediately. Twenty seconds. They were at fifty thousand feet, and they could see him on radar -
He would break through the cloud ceiling at twenty-four thousand feet, into a searing blue sky, and he would be under a roof of interceptors. Already other, paler dots were appearing at the edge of the screen. His body was still shaking from the aftermath of the almost-collision. Had he kept the Firefox beneath the MiL, he would have ploughed into the shore and the trees and exploded…
He tried to dismiss the past.
Don't think about it, don't think about it, his mind kept repeating. Don't think about it…
He pulled back on the throttles and scanned the instrument panel. No warning lights. Fuel-flow, rpm, radar, avionics, inertial navigator, armaments. The airplane functioned. It was an airplane again, not salvage.
Altitude, eighteen thousand feet and climbing. The grey cloud slid and writhed past the cockpit. The bright white blips on the screen were nearer. Ten seconds to contact.
No anti-radar. They can see you, he reminded himself.
Remember that -
The MiGs were too close to outclimb. Stand-off missiles, heat-seeking, would overtake him even if the fighters that launched them could not. Six aircraft, all closing. All of them could see him. Already, they would have reported that fact, and would have deduced the failure of the anti-radar. The adrenalin would begin to flow, now that they knew. They would consider it easy, consider it already accomplished…
Hide.
Ground-clutter -
Dive.
Course — Bardufoss.
Twenty-one thousand feet. Contact time six seconds. Feverishly, he punched in the co-ordinates to the inertial navigator, and began to alter course. Hide — ground-clutter. Deceive the radars. Five seconds, four-and-a-half, three.
He saw the infra-red flare. A missile launched at Mach 3, then a second and a third. He banked savagely, flinging the aircraft into a steep dive, twisting into a roll so that the thicker, heavier grey cloud was now beneath his canopy. Then he completed the roll and the nose of the Firefox was driving through the cloud, the altimeter unrolling, the streaks of the missile exhausts still pursuing him across the screen. The white blips behind them had altered course and were following him down.
He banked savagely again, feeling the G-pressure build until it was painful. The suit he was wearing, not tailored for him or the aircraft, was slow to adapt to the abilities of the Firefox. His head hurt, his vision was hazy for a moment. Ten thousand feet. The missiles were pursuing a different course, dropping away towards the ground because they had lost his infra-red scent. The effects of the savage turn drained away. He eased the aircraft into a steeper dive. The three closest white blips still pursued him.
Five thousand feet. He began to pull out of the dive, slowly and easily. Four thousand feet. Three, and the aircraft was beginning to level out. Two-five, two, one-five, then he was flying level. He flicked on the terrain-following radar, then the autopilot. The inertial navigator altered the aircraft's course immediately, directing it towards Bardufoss. From the readout, he knew he was already in Norwegian airspace. Somewhere over the Finnmark, inland of the Porsangerfjord.
The Russians, too, were inside Norwegian airspace.
The Firefox twisted, banked, flicked like a dart through the unseen mountains. Gant felt as if he were watching a grey blank screen ahead, through the haze of. snow swept aside by the slipstream. There was nothing. Except the sense of the mountains of the Finnmark around him intruding, seeping like a gas. He could not help but feel their solidity, their massive obstruction. They were a maze through which the TFR and the autopilot flung him. He was like a runner off-balance on a treacherous surface. So long as his flight was headlong, arms flailing, he kept upright, leaping from foot to uncertain foot. TFR — autopilot. Keeping him alive. He felt, too, the constant, chilly quivering of the fuselage as it met the impact of the storm outside. It was as if his own body was growing colder and colder; shivering violently.
The three Russian interceptors followed, but they were slowly dropping back. They might have been MiG-25s, or even MiG-27s. They were not the Firefox. They were confused by ground-clutter, they had to trail him at an altitude above the mountains, they had to employ their manual skills. With each change of course, he gained upon them. He glanced at the map strapped to the thigh of his suit. His finger traced his course. Over the mountains east of the Lyngenfjord — flicking through that valley there, wings trembling as the aircraft banked and banked again through the turbulent air, following the valley's turns and twists…