smoke rolled and billowed amid the suspended lights. He looked up toward tinted windows of the GRU's security room. Squinting, he real-*fed that one of his people was waving urgently to him. The immediate leap of tension and the beat of his heart enforced his fear of the Edition of his nerves. Could it—?
He nodded to the unseeing Rodin, who was insisting that another ten minutes be trimmed from the hand- over ingress routines, the crew boarded. Then Serov hurried across the cable-lit-red floor toward the door. Along the cold, concrete corridor. He clattered up an iron spiral staircase, careful not to knock his broken arm in his haste. He could clutch it now, protect it. He hurried down the narrow corridor to a single door. He thrust it open, entering the security room, surprising its half-dozen occupants. Ozone again, VDUs, radios, fiber-optic maps. The hunt for Gant was once more their business, returned to their charge by Rodin.
'Is—?' he began.
The lieutenant was nodding. 'Yes, Colonel, they've found it, on the ground, too — here.' His finger dabbed at a screen that displayed a map — where? South of the river? Yes.
'Thank Christ!' he could not help but exclaiming. Then: 'Are Jiey still with the machine?'
'Priabin, the KGB colonel, sir — he's there.'
'But Gant is not?'
The man shook his head. Serov did not even bother to recall his name; no requirement to be congratulated or commended officially. He was just the bearer of a report. Yet a small, secret pleasure welled from his stomach to his chest. He felt the knife tickle at his collar again, the pain in his elbow surged through him as he remembered — then cleared as he anticipated. Priabin would pay, he'd beat the little shit to a pulp, with one hand tied behind… He grimaced. With his one good fist then.
'What does Priabin have to say?'
'Do you want to talk to—?'
'Just give me the gist of it, man!' he roared.
'Sorry, Colonel.' The man lowered his eyes and rushed on. 'He said he was waiting for — our people to turn up. Sir, that's exactly what he said. The woman you wounded is dead, sir. The Mil suffered damage during its encounter with the
Serov realized how muddy, how defeated his thoughts had been-The impact of what he heard struck him only after the lieutenant had finished his summary. Then he hit his head as if to jolt his mi*1 to activity.
'Then he's on foot.'
'Yes, sir.'.
'Thank Christ for that. You realize what it means? He's as good as in the bag. He can't possibly get anywhere on foot. My God, we've won, we've stopped it. Tell them, the gunships, the ground patrols, everyone — two hours to find the American. Two hours.'
He turned away, walking across the room toward the windows. Immediately, he located Rodin. Right, you old bastard, he thought carefully, precisely. I'm no longer here on sufferance. I have a right.
Quenching a sneer of triumph, he turned* quickly toward the door. He'd tell Rodin now.
Resolve and will had turned against him, robbing him of strength as they, too, ebbed. His imagination was using energy at a suicidal rate. His legs had become leaden, hard to move, and his head felt light. The sense that it was hopeless, that he could go on for only a little longer, waited at the door of his conscious mind, pushing it slowly open.
Moonlight, gleaming on snaking ice, sheened on the early frost glittering across the stretches of sand and dirt. Clouds moved across die sky like great dark shoulders heaving at something that resisted their solid force. The rifle banged against his ribs as he jogged with repeated, sapping blows. The others — the dead woman and the KGB man he hardly knew who had wanted so much to kill him, even Serov and the pursuit — were increasingly behind him, distant and unreal. His head was becoming fuzzy with exertion and defeat. There was nothing in front of the next few heavy thumps of his boots, nothing behind other than the slow distance he had come.
How many miles? Three, four since the last glimpse of the map? He gritted his teeth, hearing his breath roar in his ears, his blood pound. Nothing had come near him, no other vehicle, no helicopter. They had no idea where he was.
They'd find him before daylight, for sure.
The certainty grew that he was merely expending energy to no Purpose. His body ran with sweat, the rifle banged, even the videotape cassette weighed heavy in one pocket of the parka. The ground beneath his boots seemed to shift, become uncertain and ^dy. Trees filtered the moonlight darkly, as if hoarding it.
Trees.
He staggered to a halt, his head reeling like a drunks, his body Quivering. He looked around him wildly, as if he had been ordered to halt. He dropped to one knee, flicking on the flashlight, waggling j*16 maps creased folds beneath its thin beam. The map shivered in ^ hand, but not from the wind, which distressed his hair and was chilly on his damp neck and throat. His eyes traced the way he had come — flatness, flatness, a small plantation, yes, he remembered it, a narrow, clattering bridge across a main irrigation channel, two other planklike crossings, yes — this small fir plantation? His mind jogged back along the track. He did not remember, and shook his head in puzzlement and fear. Like a driver on a long straight highway, startled to realize that the last miles were a blank in his memory. At any moment, they might have surprised and taken him; at any moment. He shivered. The wind was increasingly cold, his body small and vulnerable. The track was a pale, moonlit strip running between the two dark, high banks of trees. Stars glinted coldly. Warmer light insinuated between the narrow boles of the farthest trees of the plantations — warmer light, represented a danger now to his exhausted mind, not a destination. He stood up slowly, like an old, arthritic man.
Breathed deeply to calm himself, but felt only colder because he was not moving. Gripped the rifle with gloved hands, but thought it to be little more than a harmless stick he had gathered somewhere. He looked up, his gaze swinging across the strip of sky he could see. It was empty, but the fact brought no reassurance.
A cloud hid the moon.
Startling him. He studied his watch, holding the dial close to his eye. It was already eight-fifty in the evening. Again he shivered in reaction at his inability to account for the past half an hour. How long since the UAZ had driven away?
The landscape refused to become less than alien, however much it resembled Nevada in its sandy barrenness. He had struggled to make it familiar, but it had resisted him, remaining a place a thousand miles inside hostile borders, a place where he had no resources and no future.
He doubled over with stomach cramps, thrusting the rifle against his abdomen to resist the pain. It was psychological or it was hunger, it was not fear, it was not isolation, it was not fear — he repeated the formula of words, breathing stertorously, groaning softly. He would not kneel, would not rest against a tree, but stood in an invalid crouch as if retching silently, the gun hurting his stomach and pelvis. Eventually, the griping waves of pain receded and he was able to stand erect gingerly. His mouth was wet, his hands shaking* his body cold with drying sweat. He did feel more awake; shaken or startled into wakefulness. He squinted, studying the pale but warmer lights sparkling between the boles of the separate firs. had to be the farm buildings of the collective. He listened, but heard only the wind, the stir of the young trees, the tiny noise of gritty dust against his parka and across the boots he wore — he looked down as if surprised to find himself still wearing the KGB uniform the dead woman had brought. His mind pursued the recent past, concluding that Priabin was no danger because he had no idea in which direction Gant had gone. Even when they found the wreck of the MiL, the wreck of Priabin, they would learn nothing except that he was on foot.
He moved cautiously, with new alertness, keeping in the shadows of the trees, just off the dirt track, painted once more by the returning moon. The trees gradually opened like dark curtains— buildings, low and functional, with an abandoned air despite the lights that shone from them. Two, three, five, half a dozen, scattered like the counters of some abandoned game. Seven buildings, all one-storied, some large, the largest of all in darkness. The quiet noise of a radio creeping toward him. No other human sound, nothing moving. There were numerous windows aglow, many of them in the same building. Barns, tractor and cultivator stores, grain silos most distant of all, other huts that had all the frontier appearance of bunkhouses from an American past. He could not see a single vehicle as he crouched in the shadows of the outlying firs. As his eyes registered more and more of the scene, he saw the dim
