reconciliation, then began to wobble back along the raised track. Calls, casual obscenities, exclamations against superior officers and the chill of the night. Gant felt the hem of his parka rustled and fingered by the bitter wind that kept the sky clean.
Once, one of the remaining three gunships had passed low overhead, but had not caught him in the glare of its downward-probing searchlight. It had droned away toward the southeast. He had jogged, crept, dodged, weaved his six miles — the first six of the thousand — in good time, but this forced halt was fetal to confidence; movement was its own justification.
He bit his hp, not simply to prevent his teeth from chattering. His body pressed against the chill ground, his feet shuffled in tiny movements to retain a foothold. Ten or twelve feet below him, the ice was cloudy with the pale moonlight. He had passed a couple of low dwellings — a cart beside a barn at one of them, a parked tractor at another. He could not even find a car.
U-A-Z. The three letters appeared separately, distinctly in his mind. Two men. For the first time, he felt the rifle between his stomach and the side of the ditch. UAZ. An army vehicle, an army radio. He wouldn't be out of touch, he'd know where they were. He listened to their voices — they were drinking something. They were fifty yards away. If he climbed out of the ditch, he would have to cross fifty yards of moonlit open ground — or be certain of killing them at this distance with a rifle not fitted with a nightsight. U-A-Z. It tempted like luxury. He ground his teeth in indecision. Eased the rifle from beneath his body, hanging on with one hand, his feet scrabbling audibly to keep him where he was. Then wriggled upward until his elbows held him on the rim of the ditch. The rifle was in his hands. He heard the crackling chatter of a radio. Darkness faded as the moon emerged from behind a cloud. The UAZ, the intervening ground — the fire zone — was silvered, the men more solid, tinged with color and dimension. He picked out paintwork, camouflage patching, the stretched folds of the canvas hood, the gleam of glass and metal. One of the two was partially masked by it, but clearly visible, the other was silhouetted against the haze from Tyuratam and glisteningly illuminated by the moon. Two good targets. He could even see the thin stream of urine glittering in the moonlight as the man farthest from the vehicle relieved himself. Slowly, carefully, Gant took aim with the Kalashnikov, the pressure on his elbows making his forearms quiver.
Should he? Wouldn't it be like waving a flag, pointing to himself, calling out to them? But it was a vehicle, it was movement. Fifty miles an hour, sixty, seventy, the main highway, the camouflage of driving an army vehicle, and he was in uniform already, spoke Russian. He felt his temperature rise, felt the tremor still in his forearms, noticed that the man had finished relieving himself, heard the other's coarse comment on his performance… heard the radio crackle again, a tinny, angry little voice flying like an insect across the fifty yards that separated him from the UA&. His finger closed on—
They were in the cab almost immediately. The engine fired noisily in the silence. A face looking out, a white, momentary spot, then the UAZ moved, and he could have squeezed the trigger and damaged the vehicle as well as killing the men, but did not, cursing silently. The UAZ roared noisily away, raising a slight flurry of icy dirt as it trundled along the embankment. He had waited too long. The radio had summoned them peremptorily elsewhere, they had moved with the speed of guilty dawdlers and were gone. Awkwardly, he scrabbled out of the ditch, sliding over its lip on his stomach.
He stood upright. The UAZ was already out of sight, hidden by the height of the embankment. Not even the glow of its taillights. He cocked his head, listening, despite the intensity of his disappointment. There was a silence in the air except for the whistling of the wind. The gunships and the troop-carrying Mil-8s were elsewhere. This empty farmland to the south of the river was still, being beyond the security perimeter, the periphery of their hunt. Perhaps that very embankment represented the outer ring, the edge…?
Wearily, he climbed the slope, his body hunched into the parka, the Kalashnikov clutched across his chest. He hoisted his heavy body onto the track and straightened. Two dim red eyes in the distance, obscured by dust. The UAZ was gone, and he felt he had been abandoned. Turning through a full circle, he scanned the empty sky, the empty country, flat and featureless; lightless, too.
He bent on one knee and took the small flashlight from a pocket of the parka. Unfolded one of the much- creased maps, flicked the beam across the map's surface, then drew its light back more slowly. Dotted buildings, scattered like specks of dirt. He found the embankment, found the direction he sought — west, after the UAZ— found the closest speck to the embankment — no, two, three, six specks. The name of a collective. A car? His breath seemed to come shallowly at even the thought of a car. This — none of it — could be rationally pursued. A thousand miles lay out there in the darkness.
He turned to the northwest, where light ran along the whole of the horizon like a false dawn. Where, he knew, Rodin the general would be not just hunting him, but making damn sure that
He stood up groggily, swaying in the wind as it buffeted him. He held the rifle like a comforter. The collective was maybe two miles west, a dotted collection of buildings in the middle of nowhere. Farm headquarters, barns, and maybe a car or a truck.
He forced his legs into motion, forced his frame into a quick jog, despite the huge inertia of disappointment and futility that weighed on him. A car or truck would mean quicker movement away, would be a means of staying alive that he did not possess while on foot. It wouldn't take him a thousand miles, maybe not a hundred, but it was better than this, better, better, better. His heavily pounding boots drummed and reiterated the word, as did his pounding ears. He would stay alive, stay free for twice as long, three times as long as on foot… better, better…
His elbow seemed to pain him more in Rodin's presence, like an old wound reacting to imminent changes in the weather. He did not cradle it with his good hand, however, not before Rodin's gray, almost fanatic stare. There was a madness about the damn old man, he decided, even though he felt, along with the others in the room, that Rodin was right to pursue
Eight-fifty, Wednesday evening. Digital clocks and calendars littered the walls like urgent graffiti, adding to the tensions and pressures of that vast, humming room. Serov smelled the ozone of a hundred screens and keyboards and fiber-optic maps. Banks of mission controllers retreated like an audience into the shadows behind and almost above the lights. On the huge upright map nearest to him and Rodin, the American shuttle
Rehearsing the old war cries kept the pain at a tolerable level.
'Where is he now, Serov?' Rodin hissed at him, his head snapping around to fix his gray gaze on the shorter man. 'Where is your American and his little KGB friend? You haven't come to tell me you've caught them, by any chance?' Almost languid, almost joking. Almost.
Serov shook his head, his features grave. 'Not yet, comrade General,' he said with regretful confidence. 'It is, of course, only a matter of time.'
'It had better be.' And yet Rodin was detached from the fate of Gant and that stupid little prick Priabin. The screens that curved in a crescent to their left showed the shuttle moving toward the distant launch pad, showed the waiting booster, showed the crew in their quarters, intruding on their sleep like spy cameras. The murmurs, if one concentrated, were a chorus of instructions, orders, reports, checks.
He gazed at the screens, the huge map, other maps, a chart of the pattern of radar and telemetry stations across the Soviet Union that would follow the shuttle in orbit, the banks of controllers at their screens and keyboards, rendered identical by the shadows and ty their each wearing a headset and microphone. Cigarette
