aim again.
The Hip was already turning away, though, stumbling in flight as smoke billowed from the rotor head. He could hear the grinding in the rotor mechanism; he’d hit something important. The pilot was attempting to set the aircraft down in the field before he lost control entirely.
Dean broke and ran then, leaping the canal and racing south toward the river. Hip-Cs like these two were primarily used as troop transports, and the odds were good that there were a number of soldiers on both. In a few moments, this field was going to be swarming with twenty or more very angry Russian FSB troops.
Dean wanted to be as far away as possible when that happened.
10
Akulinin’s voice was coming over the speaker in the Art Room’s ceiling. “Keep going! Kick, Masha!
They heard the splashing, heard Akulinin’s gasps as he breathed between shouted encouragements.
“Ilya!” they heard a woman’s voice call, ragged with terror. “Don’t leave me!”
“I’m right … here! You’re doing … fine!”
In the distance, they could hear the helicopters.
“I wish we could see,” Marie Telach said. On the large display, zoomed in now to show only the area near the Panj River a few miles upstream from the bridge, a single green icon slowly moved in the middle of the river. Two red triangles showed just to the north and farther upstream.
“NATO One-Three is five minutes out,” Vic Klein said. “Delta Green One is eight minutes.”
NATO One-Three was a flight of German Tornado combat aircraft with Tactical Reconnaissance Wing 51 “Immelmann,” deployed to Afghanistan as a part of the NATO force there. Delta Green One was the rescue helo out of Kabul.
“Just … hang on to … the pants,” Akulinin’s voice said. “We’re—” The voice was lost in a burst of static. Then, “Relax … keep kicking …”
Radio signals from the implant transceiver were blocked by just a foot or so of water. As long as Akulinin was floating or swimming on the surface, enough of the antenna in the belt around his waist was close enough to the surface that they could still pick up his signal. But every once in a while, he let his legs sink as he either treaded water or stood on the bottom, trying to keep Alekseyevna from floundering.
“… pants … losing … air!”
“It’s okay … almost across … I’ve got you …”
“We just lost one of the Hip-Cs,” Telach reported. On the screen, one of the two red triangles had winked out. It might have crashed — or it might have simply landed. There was no way the E-3 Sentry’s radar could distinguish between the two.
“We have more hostiles inbound,” Klein added. “That stretch of riverbank is becoming a war zone.”
Cautiously, Charlie Dean raised his head. One Hip-C had just set down in the cotton field, smoke streaming from its engines and rotor head. The other hovered a few hundred yards off. The rear ramp on the grounded aircraft was open, and Russian soldiers were spilling out.
There was no sense in getting into a firefight with these people. They were unlikely to be willing to cross the river, but they would be beating through the fields looking for him very soon now.
The river was fifty yards to Dean’s back. It was time to leave beautiful, mountainous Tajikistan and see what the climate was like south of the Panj.
He turned away and crawled.
Gasping for breath, Ilya Akulinin struggled forward, felt mud beneath his feet, and almost shouted his triumph. He had one arm around Masha, who still clung desperately to the half-inflated uniform trousers.
“I feel the bottom, Masha! We made it!”
Masha choked and spat water, then dragged in a ragged lungful of air. Too exhausted to reply, she managed a nod, however, and began kicking even harder.
As they’d entered the river on the other side, Akulinin had pulled his own belt out of his trousers and threaded it through the handle of the briefcase, bucking it to create a loop that he’d slung over his head and one shoulder. The briefcase had floated at first, but about two-thirds of the way across it had begun to fill with river water and now dragged against his neck as it tried to sink. Akulinin stumbled a few feet farther toward the south bank, then held Masha with one arm as he pulled the belt off again and began dragging the half-sunken briefcase behind him.
He’d dropped the black bag with its high-tech burglary kit and the AKM in the river once he’d had to stop wading and start swimming. Masha tried to stand now, thrashing in the water. He reached under her arm and hauled her up and forward, dragging her the last few steps onto the muddy riverbank.
“This is a hell of a way to teach someone to swim,” she said.
“Sink or swim,” he told her. “It’s the only way.”
The two of them dropped onto the bank, trying to catch their breath. Akulinin looked back across the river, toward the flat green cotton fields beyond, looking for Charlie Dean, knowing he wouldn’t be able to see him.
One helicopter appeared to have landed, but the other was hovering motionless perhaps four hundred yards to the north, its nose aimed directly at the two of them on the south side of the river.
Then the aircraft’s nose dipped slightly, and it began to move, flying directly toward them.
“Come on!” he shouted, grabbing the woman’s arm.
The FSB sergeant pointed over the pilot’s shoulder, and Lieutenant Colonel Vasilyev raised his binoculars, studying the swampy area just beyond the river. He could see two people at the water’s edge, stumbling through the waist-high marsh grass.
Vasilyev slapped the pilot’s shoulder. “Move across the river!” he ordered. “We will put troops down to encircle the bastards!”
“Sir! That’s Afghanistan over there!”
“Don’t give me a damned political lecture! Just fucking do it!”
The helicopter roared south across the Panj.
