88 round had lanced through the armor of his tank, setting the ammo racks afire while he'd brought his 76mm gun around for one last shot and extinguished that Kraut gun crew while his clothing burned. The injury had left him with only fifty percent use of his right arm, but despite it, he'd led what was left of his regiment nearly two more days in the Kursk Bulge. If he'd bailed out with the rest of his crew-or been evacuated from the area at once as his regimental surgeon had recommended-perhaps he would have recovered fully, but, no, he knew that he could not have not fired back, could not have abandoned his men in the face of battle. And so he'd shot, and burned. But for that Misha might have made General, perhaps even Marshal, he thought. Would it have made a difference? Filitov was too much a man of the real, practical world to dwell on that thought for long. Had he fought in many more campaigns, he might have be killed. As it was, he'd been given more time with Elena that could otherwise have been the case. She'd come nearly every day to the burn institute in Moscow; at first horrified by the extent of his wounds, she'd later become as proud of them as Misha was. No one could question that her man had done his duty for the Rodina.
But now, he did his duty for his Elena.
Filitov walked out of the apartment to the elevator, a leather briefcase dangling from his right hand. It was about all the side of his body was good for. The babushka who operate the elevator greeted him as always. They were of an age, said the widow of a sergeant who'd been in Misha's regiment, who also had the gold star pinned on his breast by this very man.
'Your new granddaughter?' the Colonel asked.
'An angel,' was her reply.
Filitov smiled, partly in agreement-was there any thing as an ugly infant? — and partly because terms like 'angel' had survived seventy years of 'scientific socialism.'
The car was waiting for him. The driver was a new draftee fresh from sergeant school and driving school. He saluted the Colonel severely, the door held open in his other hand. 'Good morning, Comrade Colonel.'
'So it is, Sergeant Zhdanov,' Filitov replied. Most officers would have done little more than grunt, but Filitov was a combat soldier whose success on the battlefield had resulted from his devotion to the welfare of his men. A lesson that few officers ever understood, he reminded himself.
The car was comfortably warm, the heater had been turned all the way up fifteen minutes ago. Filitov was becoming ever more sensitive to cold, a sure sign of age. He'd just been hospitalized again for pneumonia, the third time in the past five years. One of these times, he knew, would be the last. Filitov dismissed the thought. He'd cheated death too many times to fear it. Life came and went at a constant rate. One brief second at a time. When the last second came, he wondered, would he notice? Would he care?
The driver pulled the car up to the Defense Ministry before the Colonel could answer that question.
Ryan was sure that he'd been in government service too long. He had come to-well, not actually to like flying, but at least to appreciate the convenience of it. He was only four hours from Washington, flown by an Air Force C- 21 Learjet whose female pilot, a captain, had looked like a high-school sophomore.
Getting old, Jack, he told himself. The flight from the airfield to the mountaintop had been by helicopter, no easy feat at this altitude. Ryan had never been to New Mexico before. The high mountains were bare of trees, the air thin enough that he was breathing abnormally, but the sky was so clear that for a moment he imagined himself an astronaut looking at the unblinking stars on this cloudless, frigid night.
'Coffee, sir?' a sergeant asked. He handed Ryan a thermos cup, and the hot liquid steamed into the night, barely illuminated by a sliver of new moon.
'Thanks.' Ryan sipped at it and looked around. There were few lights to be seen. There might have been a housing development behind the next set of ridges; he could see the halolike glow of Santa Fe, but there was no way to guess how far off it might be. He knew that the rock he stood on was eleven thousand feet above sea level (the nearest level sea was hundreds of miles away), and there is no way to judge distance at night. It was altogether beautiful, except for the cold. His fingers were stiff around the plastic cup. He'd mistakenly left his gloves at home.
'Seventeen minutes,' somebody announced. 'AH systems are nominal. Trackers on automatic. AOS in eight minutes.'
'AOS?' Ryan asked. He realized that he sounded a little funny. It was so cold that his cheeks were stiff.
'Acquisition of Signal,' the Major explained. 'You live around here?'
'Forty miles that way.' He pointed vaguely. 'Practically next door by local standards.' The officer's Brooklyn accent explained the comment.
He's the one with the doctorate from State University of New York at Stony Brook, Ryan reminded himself. At only twenty-nine years old, the Major didn't look like a soldier, even less like a field-grade officer. In Switzerland he'd be called a gnome, barely over five-seven, and cadaverously thin, acne on his angular face. Right now, his deep-set eyes were locked on the sector of horizon where the space shuttle Discovery would appear. Ryan thought back to the documents he'd read on the way out and knew that this major probably couldn't tell him the color of the paint on his living-room wall. He really lived at Los Alamos National Laboratory, known locally as the Hill. Number one in his class at West Point, and a doctorate in high-energy physics only two years after that. His doctor's dissertation was classified Top Secret, Jack had read it, and didn't understand why they had bothered-despite a doctorate of his own, the two-hundred-page document might as well have been written in Kurdish. Alan Gregory was already being talked of in the same breath as Cambridge's Stephen Hawking, or Princeton's Freeman Dyson, Except that few people knew his name. Jack wondered if anyone had thought of classifying that.
'Major Gregory, all ready?' an Air Force lieutenant general asked. Jack noted his respectful tone. Gregory was no ordinary major.
A nervous smile. 'Yes, sir.' The Major wiped sweaty hands-despite a temperature of fifteen below zero-on the pants of his uniform. It was good to see that the kid had emotions.
'You married?' Ryan asked. The file hadn't covered that 'Engaged, sir. She's a doctor in laser optics, on the Hill. We get married June the third.' The kid's voice had become as brittle as glass. 'Congratulations. Keeping it in the family, eh?' Jack chuckled.
'Yes, sir.' Major Gregory was still staring at the southwest horizon.
'AOS!' someone announced behind them. 'We have signal.'
'Goggles!' The call came over the metal speakers. 'Everyone put on their eye-protection.'
Jack blew on his hands before taking the plastic goggles from his pocket. He'd been told to stash them there to keep them warm. They were still cold enough on his face that he noticed the difference. Once in place, however, Ryan was effectively blinded. The stars and moon were gone.
'Tracking! We have lock. Discovery has established the downlink. All systems are nominal.'
'Target acquisition!' another voice announced. 'Initiate interrogation sequencing? first target is locked? auto firing circuits enabled.'
There was no sound to indicate what had happened. Ryan didn't see anything-or did I? he asked himself. There had been the fleeting impression of? what? Did I imagine it? Next to him he felt the Major's breath come out slowly.
'Exercise concluded,' the speaker said. Jack tore off his goggles.
'That's all?' What had he just seen? What had they just done? Was he so far out of date that even after being briefed he didn't understand what was happening before his eyes? 'The laser light is almost impossible to see,' Major Gregory explained. 'This high up, there isn't much dust or humidity in the air to reflect it.'
'Then why the goggles?'
The young officer smiled as he took his off. 'Well, if a bird flies over at the wrong time, the impact might be, well, kind of spectacular. That could hurt your eyes some.'
Two hundred miles over their heads, Discovery continued toward the horizon. The shuttle would stay in orbit another three days, conducting its 'routine scientific mission,' mainly oceanographical studies this time, the press was told, something secret for the Navy. The papers had been speculating on the mission for weeks. It had something to do, they said, with tracking missile submarines from orbit. There was no better way to keep a secret than to use another 'secret' to conceal it. Every time someone asked about the mission, a public-affairs officer would do the 'no comments.'
'Did it work?' Jack asked. He looked up, but he couldn't pick out the dot of light that denoted the billion-dollar space plane.
'We have to see.' The Major turned and walked to the camouflage-painted truck van parked a few yards
