fuselage behind him. The large-scale local maps lay open on the copilot's seat, an adjustable light dimly glowing on their contours. Beneath them, a school atlas. He had found it thrust into a door pocket, and could not imagine why it was there or what it had ever been used for. On a cramped, ridiculous scale, desert stretched away for hundreds of miles in every direction. Gant did not concern himself with it.
He bent forward, craning his head in order to quarter the dark sky. Stars still in their vast orbits, no firefly movements among them. Luck was holding, had to hold.
He watched the needle on the torque meter as the wheels of the undercarriage jolted the aircraft onto the edge of the runway. Tyuratam and Baikonur were like a false dawn along the starboard horizon. He turned the aircraft, paddling the rudders, his two hands gripping the old-fashioned, primitive column. Old-fashioned but familiar.
He sensed the fat tires sitting on the runway, sensed the engine revs reach his requirement, sensed the slipstream buffet the rudder; sensed the flaps, all and every detail of the old Antonov. He was ready. Airborne, he would quickly become lost in the vastness surrounding the Baikonur complex. His luck was holding. He increased the power to the engines, sensed the light breeze, watched the starlit sky and its few weary, lumbering clouds, released the brakes, wanted to cry out as the airplane skipped forward on its tires.
He switched on the radio. Before, he had to remain silent and unknowing so that he might effect his escape, but now it did not matter, he needed to hear where they were. — moving lights, even before he began tuning the radio. They had come. He saw the billows of the nearing navigation lights as the gunship dropped out of the darkness toward him. Ahead of him!
The radio blurted. He had gone on tuning it automatically, with dull and cold fingers. Challenge. Bellowing in the noisy cockpit.
He felt the confidence of only seconds before retreat like a shock wave through his body; chest, stomach, legs—. — then the shock wave of the gunship's downdraft was the one sensation that was real as the Antonov shivered throughout its length. The two-handed column quivered in his hands. He sensed then saw the gunship's shadow settle over him like a cloak, darkening the stars. The radio yelled orders at him. The situation had been snatched from him just as the whirlwind around him threatened to snatch away the control column. The Antonov wobbled, swerved, as fragile as a child's bicycle out of control.
Serov's voice.
'You will stop the aircraft, Major Gant. You will come to a complete halt.'
Stars winking to the west, ahead. The runway rose gently to a close and false horizon; like a springboard that could fling him into the air. Dust whirled around the cockpit, stiff uprooted blades of grass rattled on the Plexiglas, tiny stones and grit showered and bounced like hail. His vision was rapidly becoming obscured. Air intake. Dust clogging it, stones damaging it, wrecking the engine, the propeller. The gunship sat above him like a squat black beetle with a gray underbelly. He watched it, keeping the Antonov's heading along the runway but cutting its speed to a crawl. It was no longer an airplane, only a toy.
The gunship moved slightly farther ahead of him and lowered as if on a thread. It was blocking his path. The undercarriage was down. The wheels alone could do enough damage. Serov would undoubtedly crash the machine into him if that were the only way to Prevent his taking off. And in the downdraft, he could not rely on the Antonov's stability and lift. He could not take off.
'You will stop the aircraft and switch off the engine. You will leave the aircraft—'
Gant could see his face and form at the main cabin door. Micro-Phone and loudspeaker. Imperatives.
The engine coughed with an almost human noise on the surrounding dust. The Antonov was barely moving forward. Serov Wanted him alive, wanted that triumph.
He could see the hangar, the low moon stained brown by the dust, the feeble stars, the fading runway ahead of him, the fuel store.
The cockpit shrank around him, its elements encroaching. Other voices answered and bayed with Serov's over the open channel. Call signs, acknowledgments, eagerness, and confidence. They had crept up on him in the darkness. The cockpit impinged, each element like a sharp needle. The maps, the ridiculous school atlas opened to a vast area of the Soviet Union, each instrument — radio, gyrocompass, altimeter — useless. Temperature, fuel, revs… fire extinguisher, flare pistol, Mayday, Mayday…
'You will halt the aircraft and leave it with your hands in the air.
Call signs, acknowledgments, eager anticipation in every voice. All coming at maximum speed, location confirmed. Icy panic. He had two minutes before the next gunship, less than that before the first ground patrol in a UAZ or a truck arrived. General alert — all units to converge. Imperatives.
Two minutes. One gunship was sufficient, blocking his vision as its gray belly loomed out of the dust cloud. Stones rattled on the Plexiglas, the engine coughed. — leave the aircraft.'
Mayday—
The gunship was no more than fifteen feet off the ground, ready to anticipate and counter any move he made. Hanging in the night, blocking the runway. Fifteen feet up, no more.
The idea came slowly, as if he were squeezing juice from an old, dry lemon. Mayday—
Hangar, fuel store, the litter of empty drums, the, the—
He maneuvered the aircraft slowly, innocently, off the runway. The gunship slid alongside and slightly ahead, wary but confident and alert. Serov was poised in the cabin doorway, braced against the frame, microphone in one hand, the other holding the loudspeaker, waving imperiously.
The MiL's pilot was assured, expert. Serov assumed that surrender lay in getting the Antonov off the runway. Gant felt the biplane bounce and roll, then he slid back the cockpit window. Dust swirled in. Ground speed less than ten miles an hour; crawling to a halt. Serov was waving him on now, the loudspeaker gesturing hi!*1 toward the hangar.
'You will now halt the aircraft.'
Call signs, acknowledgments, airspeeds, distances. Just above a minute and a half. It had to be now.
Mayday.
He reached carefully for the emergency flare pistol and cocked it. Headlights in the distance bounced through dark trees. The gunship hovered close to the fuel store, fifteen feet above… a second more, two seconds, above, above — now!
He fired the flare pistol into the dense mass of fuel drums. Vapor from the fuel he had spilled and from half- used drums glowed like a frosty haze before it ignited. The tarpaulin flared like old straw. Then a moment in which the whole fuel store glowed. Before—
Orange flame. Gant choked on the smoke and the dust in the cockpit. His eyes watered. A huge roar of orange. Serov was clearly visible for a moment, burning. Then he fell into the bonfire Gant had created. The gunship lurched, then toppled, slowly at first, flame inside the cockpit as well as surrounding it.
Gant watched in his mirror as he turned the Antonov, opening the throttles to hurry the machine away from the fire. The Mil sagged onto the bonfire like a weary bird onto a nest. Phoenix. Serov
He saw then only a rectangle of orange light stippled with flashes of greater heat. There was no detail in the mirror. The wheels of the Antonov bounced onto the runway. He turned the aircraft to head west, and the first rise of the undulating runway rushed toward him. The raging fire to port of him was no more than the burning of stubble. Orange, white plumes, rolling smoke, the gunship dissolving, breaking open. Nothing left alive.
He looked at his ground speed. Forty-five. The rise was like a mouth opening to swallow him. Fifty miles an hour. The wingtips glowed with reflected orange light, the whirling propeller was made visible by the glare, so that it became a mirror. The interior of the cockpit and his hands on the column were daubed by splashes of the same livid color. A false dawn. He lifted the Antonov into the air; his body seemed to return, but it felt light, buoyant. The aircraft climbed fragilely but steadily. Sixty, seventy mph, a hundred… time was opening and spreading now like a great ripple, becoming safer with each second that passed. A couple of hundred feet up.
Gant leveled the aircraft below radar height. Invisible. In a moment, he would bank to the southwest, after everyone on the ground who might have seen him could swear he headed directly west. Pale desert stretched away on every side. The feeble dark clumps of firs were like the remnants of a buried fortress wall. There was nothing out there, nobody. Double back, he thought, show them where you are just once more — or fly southeast?
The fire below remained in his mirror as it dulled on the wing-tips and inside the cockpit.
