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The room was filled with the crackles and bleeps of exchanged communications. The Kola squadron flight leaders, the surviving Foxbat pilot, the AWACS captain. An energising electronic chatter. Easy to picture them, translate the moving dots into planes and men and tactics and search-patterns. His fingers circled the area where the Foxbat had been destroyed by Gant's last missile. In there, he's in there…

The First Secretary's impatience was evidently growing. To do nothing, to abdicate the display of power, was anathema to him. Vladimirov suspected that the impotence of inactivity had determined the Russian leader's order for the Tupolev to return to Moscow. The physical location of the War Command Centre was a matter of indifference to Vladimirov. The First Secretary studied the map, he glanced from face to face, he listened to the reports. He watched the red second-hand of the largest of the room's many clocks moving like a spider-leg around the white face. He watched time pass without the search locating the MiG-31. One minute… a minute and a half… two minutes… three… Vladimirov controlled his features, controlled his sense of rising body temperature.

Gant was out of fuel — he should be hugging the ground — the weather satellite shows broken cloud, he can't run around inside the cloud forever — he should be hugging the ground, making a run… when would the American's nerve break, when would he run for cover, skimming across Finland like a flat stone before his engines sighed and surrendered…?

Four minutes… four and a half… five… six…

Then: 'Got him! He's run out of cloud!' The operator had increased the volume so that the Foxbat pilot's ringing, boyish voice was audible above the cheer in the command centre. 'He's at zero feet and travelling sub-sonic, perhaps four hundred knots, no more. I'm going down!' Then, more formally, he added: 'What are your orders, Comrade General?'

'His exact position and heading!' Vladimirov snapped, then to the room at large: 'Alert the search to home in on the MiG-25 — repeat speed and altitude just — '

'Give the order to attack!' the First Secretary announced, glaring at Vladimirov. 'No more games — no strategy. Tell them to destroy the MiG-31 on sight!'

Ground-clutter, ground-clutter, clutter, ground-clutter, his mind kept repeating as the Firefox leapt at the landscape at an altitude of less than a hundred feet, the automatic pilot and the terrain-following radar preserving it from the snow-softened folds and contours of Finnish Lapland. Invisible, invisible, he chanted almost as a prayer. The clutter of images from the landscape would mask the Firefox from any searching eyes — other than those of the MiG-25F still on his tail, less than two miles behind him.

Two pilots with no more to do than choose the moment for the kill; to select, savour, review, revise, re-select the optimum moment. Two pilots — one with four AA-6 missiles, the other with cannon fire and empty tanks. Effectively, he and the pilot of the Foxbat were alone, skimming across the surface of Finnish Lapland. The squadrons of searching MiGs above them were rendered doubly blind — the anti-radar protected him, the ground-clutter masked his pursuer from assistance. The pilot of the Foxbat was transmitting a stream of positional fixes to his newly-arrived colleagues, but he was offering old news, history. The Firefox flicked, twisted, whipped through the landscape at four hundred knots — a butterfly that refused to be pinned to the card.

Until it ran out of fuel, finally…

The threat had hung over him for so long — perhaps fifteen minutes' flying time since he had first noticed his fuel state — that he had begun to disbelieve the gauges. They claimed he could have as much as six minutes' flying time left at his present speed. Yet each evasive manoeuvre squandered fuel, and even more fuel streamed away behind him. And he still could not shake the pursuing Foxbat. It followed him indefatigably. Over his headset, Gant heard the frantic but assured reports of his pursuer. There was a gap of time to be traversed, the optimum moment for the kill still lay in the future, but there was no doubt of the outcome.

He'd heard, too, the strong voice that had first addressed him after the take-off from Bilyarsk. The Soviet First Secretary. This time, he had heard it snapping orders, not addressed to him but to every particle of the pursuit. Kill, eliminate, obliterate. Destroy the MiG-31. The First Secretary's voice had cut across that of the strategist, the man who had weighed and watched and planned and guessed. The gambler. The man who, if Gant could outwit him, offered the chance of escape. He had pride and self-confidence and he believed he would win. Therein lay. the potential for error, for opening the wrong door just long enough for Gant to take his chance. But the Soviet leader's voice expressed only power, accepted only certainties. He wished to end the game — now.

Landscape, suddenly rushing at him with a new ferocity. Mountains, hills, ridges, folds. Lake Inari, the sacred lake of the Lapps, had been no more than a brief glimpse of ice-blocks, ice-sheets, snowbound wooded silent islets and the occasional glimmer of windows in sudden disappearing villages. Now the land creased and folded as if to baffle the terrain-following radar, confuse his eyesight. The Firefox bucked, nose up, then dipped again over the brow of a snow-covered hillock. Gant's stomach settled, and the pressure-suit relaxed its reassuring grip on his frame. Snow flew and boiled in the wake of the Firefox, flung up by the passage of his slipstream across the treetops. It made the rear mirror blind, but he knew that his pursuer remained behind him. Waiting for the moment to launch one of his missiles. The Foxbat would be carrying two infra-red homing missiles, and two which homed on radar. The rocket motors of the missiles were capable of propelling them at speeds far in excess of the Mach 3 that was the MiG-25's top speed. Gant knew that with full tanks he might have outrun a launched missile; but not now. He would have to wait. The range of the missiles was perhaps twelve miles. His pursuer, clear of his rearward-looking radar sensors, was less than two miles behind him.

Gant's course was north-west, towards the nearest point of the Norwegian border.

Wait-

It was all he could do. The two Turmanskys continued to roar but, at ground level, he was wasting the last of his fuel…

Wait -

Two narrow frozen lakes, smooth-surfaced, then white-clad forest, then the narrow valley of a frozen river. Snow flew and rumbled down behind him from the sides of the steep, knife-cut valley. He watched the rearward screen. He was travelling in a straight line, it was a moment of calm in the violent changes of course demanded by the landscape.

Optimum moment…?

A dot detached itself from the pursuing Foxbat, which had entered the valley. There was nothing in the mirror but rolling clouds of snow. Out of that would spring -

The AA-6 missile leapt up towards the centre of his screen, homing on his exhaust heat. A tenth-of-a-second, a fifth, a quarter… Gant's hands were still on the throttles. The right thumb had already armed the tail-decoy system. His left hand twitched on the throttle-levers. The missile moved dementedly, like a virulently-poisoned insect, coming at him at perhaps more than Mach 4. He hesitated… point-seven of a second, point-eight… point-nine -

He released the tail-decoy. Almost immediately, it ignited and the snow was a dazzling, torn-apart curtain, hurting his eyes. Then it brightened further, and he felt the shock wave of the explosion overtake him and shudder through the airframe. His teeth chattered. There was nothing on the radar except the pursuing Foxbat, which had broken to port to avoid the debris and had then dropped back into the narrow valley. It was already accelerating, too. Less than a mile and closing.

A hillock ahead. Without conscious thought, Gant cancelled the automatic pilot and terrain-following radar. He banked the Firefox to starboard, slowing his speed as he did so. The pursuing Foxbat swung left of the long, white, whale-backed hillock, and Gant knew that the pilot had made an error. He anticipated catching Gant broadside.on, an unmissable target for cannon fire or another missile. If he just hadn't slowed enough, however. Gant had time to form the thought in the second he was hidden from the Foxbat, and then he realised that the valley was a closed one. He would have to lift over the ridge, exposing the Firefox's flank to attack — he'd made the mistake, not the Russian. The hillock had tricked him. The valley wall rose in front of him. He pulled back on the control column, sweating with new fear.