Gant wanted to throw up. He choked on his vomit, preventing it from filling the face-mask and suffocating him. The mind invaded the body, and he realised that he was shaking all over.
While he remained capable of effort, he switched in the auto-pilot and then punched in, hesitantly and with a vast effort of memory, the coordinates of his course. The Firefox banked round, steadied, and headed for Finland, while he lay back in the couch, weak, empty, shaking.
Eventually he knew he would recover. Then he would take over the manual control of the plane. But not yet, not just yet…
The Mig-31, NATO codenamed Firefox, and the single, priceless example of its type, cruised at 80,000 feet, at a speed of Mach 3.7, towards the hidden coast of Finland.