Mitchell Gant

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Mitchell Gant is a fictional US Air Force major who stole the Russian MiG-31 Firefox fighter aircraft prototype in the Craig Thomas novel and Clint Eastwood movie of the same name.

[edit] Biography

During the Vietnam War, Gant's F-105 Thunderchief was shot down by a surface-to-air missile, and he would have been taken as a prisoner of war had it not been for the arrival of allied aircraft. The experience left him with post-traumatic stress disorder, causing him to have frequent flashbacks.

In Firefox Down, the immediate sequel to Firefox (which, unlike its predecessor, has not yet been adapted into a film), Gant was forced to land the MiG-31 on a lake in Finland, but when its weight broke the lake's frozen surface and sank into freezing-cold water, he was forced to abandon it. He was captured by Soviet forces, but escaped back into Finland and recovered the aircraft with the help of a Russian double agent named Anna Akhmerovna, who was killed before Gant could complete his mission.

Gant's next role was in the novel Winter Hawk. Originally, Gant's mission was to smuggle scientist and spy Filip Kedrov out of Russia, as Kedrov had information on a spaceborne directed-energy weapon the Red Army planned to use against the American space shuttle. However, Gant and Kedrov were both captured by the KGB, and unexpectedly ended up allying themselves with KGB Col. Dmitri Priabin (who had previously menaced Gant during the Firefox mission), after he was double-crossed by a GRU officer involved in the laser weapon project.

Gant's final appearance to date was the novel A Different War, in which he is a member of the National Transportation Safety Board. In this novel, he investigates the crashes of two examples of a fictional airliner, and discovered that they were both sabotaged by a former CIA agent working for a rival aircraft manufacturer. In the epilogue, it is mentioned that Gant was awarded a Medal of Honor following the events of the novel. It is also revealed that he was an F-117 Nighthawk pilot and instructor during the Persian Gulf War.