length of wire away from him like a reckless gesture of success.
He paused, then started the tractor once more, creeping the lumbering vehicle slowly toward the open doors. The image of the KGB hangar's similarly open doors kept flashing like a strobe light on the retinas of his eyes, making his body jump and tremble with anticipated disaster: just the tip of one wing, just the merest collision, just, just… the doors of that other hangar kept grinding closer together.
He gripped the wheel fiercely, yet his touch on its movements was delicate as he held the tractor to the center of the gap. Five yards, four… the tractor passed through the doors, they were alongside then behind him. Already, the propeller blades were glinting with moonlight in the tractor's side mirror.
He glanced back quickly, then relied upon the mirror to his right, watching the Antonov's starboard wings, watching the longer upper wing of the biplane, watching, watching… he wasn't breathing, his head was light with concentration… watching…
Through.
He grunted aloud. The Antonov rolled gently out into the open. He immediately turned the tractor's wheels, heading the aircraft through a wide semicircle toward the fuel dump at the back of the hangar.
Sweat bathed his forehead, freezing to an ache almost at once The noise of the tractor dinned at his eardrums.
Two forty-five.
The moon was old, low, sliding toward morning near the horizon. Daylight, a thousand miles.
'Gentlemen, another countdown adjustment — it is now T minus fifty minutes and counting.'
Cheering, diffuse and roaring like a distant sea from beyond the tinted glass.
'Turn that bloody thing off,' Serov barked. 'For Christ's sake, you're like a bunch of fucking kids.' Someone moved to switch off the only television screen relaying the scene in mission control, then to the PA speaker on one wall. Serov drew angrily on his cigarette. The ashtray on the table was filled with crushed and twisted butts. A dozen or more cardboard filters. 'Let Grandpa Rodin get on with his game. You've got your work cut out right here.'
The security room was hazy with smoke, stale-smelling and crowded, though there were no more than half a dozen in the search coordination team. The cheering died away beyond the tinted glass. They were all tired, all frustrated, all edgy, none more so than he. Childish rage brought no rewards, but seemed necessary. He waved a hand.
'All right, all right — back to work, back to work.' Like a hen fossing. It wasn't their fault — but it would be his fault if they didn't locate and bring in the American pilot. He looked at his watch.
Three-ten. Dear Christ, three in the morning. Gant had been out of his hands since before four-almost twelve hours.
Had Priabin still been his prisoner — well, who could have said, he admitted with a grin, whether he would still have been alive— though why Rodin kept him hanging around him like a court buffoon, God alone knew the answer.
Was there any danger there? He'd asked himself that question fifty, a hundred times, mostly with confident indifference. But he realized Rodin could no longer believe Priabin had driven his son to suicide. Had he still done so, he wouldn't have been able to bear the sight of him, would have had him locked up, even shot.
Serov patted his pocket. The tapes from Mikhail. Should he give them to Rodin, or not? They'd convince, almost by themselves, that the pressure of Priabin's interrogation had snapped Valery Rodin's reason, driven him to a desperate act of suicide — wouldn't they? Perhaps they should be used?
He wandered to the line of tinted windows. Almost at once, he located Rodin surrounded by his staff, in front of the huge telemetry map that showed the snaking orbit of the American shuttle. Pointing, waving his arms — completely mad. Serov felt detached from the whole vast room down there. Where was Priabin? Had Rodin gotten rid of him at last?
No, there he was, still guarded. Playing — dear Jesus, playing cards with his guard and two white-coated technicians, away in one corner. Cards! The scene was surreal. What was he doing? Why was he still there? *
He would not admit that Priabin worried or unnerved him.
He turned abruptly from the windows and the thought. The radio reports, the replies of his team, filled the stale air of the room with their own urgency. Priabin's image nagged at his thoughts for a moment or two, then Gant replaced him. He had to have the American. That would be the basis of any standoff, would be the yardstick. Even the lifeline, he admitted with great reluctance.
And yet all these reports and acknowledgments are empty, negative.
The team had their backs to him like chastened pupils. Bent over radios, VDUs, maps. The large screen standing vertically on its stand in one corner was no more technological or revelatory than an empty blackboard in a classroom. Its colors and markings faded, flowed like dyes running in woolen garments, the kind of cheap rubbish they sold in many stores, the colors reformed in a new pattern-
The map was computer-controlled, constantly updated from its accompanying console. Fifty different images of nothing had been its contribution thus far.
Serov strode over to it, confronting it, a new cigarette between his lips on which he drew loudly, repeatedly. Baikonurs southwestern quadrant occupied the fiber-optic screen. Marks and dots and squiggles crawled and moved on its surface like small flies on a pale wall. He studied the map, replacing its images with as many of the locations as he could recall. The river, bending away toward the bottom of the map, the old town straggling out into the desert, and the country reclaimed and cultivated through irrigation. The bottom half of the projection was a grid pattern like the aerial view of some American or new Siberian city. Collectives, clumps of trees, the tracks and roads that wound through the canal and dike system, individual cottages and huts; barns, stores, sheds, hen coops, garages. Every building was represented. And yet he wanted to lash out at the map with his good hand — the fist that had so damaged Priabin's pretty face — and reduce the map to a jigsaw puzzle of colored shards on the floor.
Every man at his disposal, army, GRU, and even police — he had excluded Priabin's KGB and confined some of them
He refused to believe it. The unit designations wobbled and disappeared, then reappeared as positional reports were updated. The map did everything, it was supremely sophisticated, advanced. And utterly useless.
'What else can we do?' he exploded. He saw their shoulders twitch, heads snap up. One or two of them turned at once to look at him; others were more cautious. Yet it was not anger so much as frustration he expressed. 'Tell me, boys, tell me. What the hell are we missing?'
They had all turned now, except the map operator, feeding in Vst another stream of positional information. Clear here, clear, nothing, nothing — and yet he's in there somewhere.
'Well?' he asked again, attempting bluffness. 'What are we hissing?'
'Sir — nothing.' It was the lieutenant who had brought him the news about the Mil — and brought him Priabin.
'Nothing?' he replied acidly, barely controlling another outburst of temper. 'Nothing?'
'Sir, we've never done anything as thoroughly as this.' He had accepted the role of spokesman, reluctantly, of course. 'We've covered everything. He hasn't got a vehicle — we've traced everything on wheels out there. He can't have got back into Leninsk or Tyuratam on foot.' The lieutenant's face was screwed up like that of a child seeking an answer; a genuine attempt to help the teacher. But his shoulders shrugged at the same time.
'All right. I'm not criticizing,' Serov began. Then he bellowed: 'Shit — for Christ's sake! All this equipment, all the routines, the systems — how much are they worth now? Two fucking kopecks is about the mark, wouldn't you say?' He turned his back on them and strode across the room toward the tinted windows. Saw Priabin immediately. Still playing cards. The man was laughing at him!
He turned back to the men in the room, his face enraged. Gant was on foot, he had to be, or holed up somewhere. On the collectives, they were turning out their bedrooms, their cupboards, their privies for any sign of him. Everything had been or was being searched. It was ridiculous, unbelievable that they could find no trace of him.
'Ask them,' he said hoarsely, waving a hand in front of him. It was an admission of bafflement, of weakness,
