Firefox [antikvár]

The man lay on the bed in his hotel room, his hands raised like claws above his chest, as if reaching for his eyes. His body was stretched out, rigid with ten-sion. A heavy perspiration shone on his brow and darkened the shirt beneath his arms. His eyes were wide open, and he was dreaming.The nightmare did not come often now; it was like a fading malaria. He had made it that way^he had, not BtLckholz or the psychiatrists at Langley.^ He despised them. He had done it himself. Yet, when the dream did come, it returned with all its old force, the fossilization of all memory and all conscience. It was all that was left of Vietnam. Even as he suffered, sweated within its toils, a cold part of his mind observed its images and effectscharts ing the ravages of the disease.In his dream he had become a Vietnamese, Viet-Cong or peasant it did not matterand he was burning to death, slowly and horribly; the napalm that the searching Phantom had dropped was de-vouring him. The roar of the retreating jets was drowned in the roar of the flames as he singed, burned, began to melt In the flames, too, other times and other images flickered; flying sparks. Even as his muscles withered, shriveled in the appalling heat, he saw himr self, as if from a point far at the back of his brain, flying the old Mig-21 and frozen in the moment of catching the USAF Phantom in his sights . then the drugs in Saigon, the dope that had led to the time when he had been caught in the sights of a Mig . . . then there was the breakdown, the months in the Veterans^ Hospital and the crying, bleeding minds all around him until he teetered on the verge of madness and wanted to sink into the new darkness where he would not hear the cries of other minds or the new shrieks of his ouon brain.Then there was the work in the hospital, the classic atonement that had turned to a vile taste at the back of his throat. Then there was the Mig,HEAD OF SIS TO PM - EYES ONLY 4/2/76Dear Prime Minister,You asked for fuller information concerning the Mikoyan project at Bilyarsk. I therefore enclose the report I received last Autiunn from Aubrey, who is controller of the espionage effort there. You wiU see he has a rather radical suggestion to make! Your comments woixld be illuminating.Sincerely,Richard Ctmningham ft * -fy EYES ONLY HEAD OF SIS18/9/75My dear Cxmningham,You have received the iisual digests of my full reports with regard to the espionage effort being made against the secret Mikoyan project at Bilyarsk, which has received the NATO codename "Firefox." In asking for my recommendations, I wonder whether you are sufficiently prepared for what I propose.You do not need me to outline Soviet hopes of this new aircraft. Something amounting to a defense contingency fimd has been set aside, we believe, to cope with eventual mass-production of this aircraft. Work on the two scheduled successors to the current Mig-25, the "Foxbat," has or is being run down; the Foxbat will remain the principal strike plane of the Soviet Air Force imtil that service is re-equipped with the Mig-31, the "Firefox." At least three new factory-complexes are planned or under construction in European Russia solely, one suspects, to facilitate the production of the Mig-31.As to the aircraft itself, I do not need to reiterate its potency. If it fulfills Soviet hopes, then we will have nothing like it before the end of the eighties, if at all. Air supremacy will pass entirely to theI