Winter Hawk

without playing any part in them.

Everything had gone smoothly, there had been no hitches. Rodin was winning his race with Gant and with his own country. To watch him was like being told that one's calm, elderly neighbor was a dangerous madman, then becoming alert for signs of disorder, irrationality, even violence. But there was nothing. The general was blithe, tense at moments, jocular, expansive, silent in turn. There were no signs of madness, simply the sense that this room and the vast control room below its windows were his entire world. Institution. They were all mad here. And unstoppable. He knew that with only too great a certainty. He was there because it amused Rodin to have him witness his own helplessness. Watching history unfold, mm, Priabin? he had snapped at him at one moment, when the cargo doors of the shuttle opened and the camera displayed the action on a dozen screens at once. A rare privilege, he had added, for a mere policeman. Laughter in the crowded, orderly room.

They had no thought of consequences, only of authority. The demonstration of their power. Outside this institution of theirs, with its intoxicating illusion of omnipotence, there existed only the Politburo. No other world, no populations, no enemy country, no other superpower. They were engaged in a struggle with their political masters — soon their servants? Priabin nodded in gloomy confirmation. If they didn't cause a war, they'd win what they wanted. The institution would control everything.

The madhouse. The efficient, normal-seeming, clubby madhouse.

Ignition of the PAM's motors. Priabin winced and waited for the voice of the shuttle's commander to confirm motor ignition. He could clearly envisage the laser weapon flashing up into the darker darkness, away from the earth. Rodin was as remote as Kutuzov and the now moving Lightning weapon.

T plus ten seconds.

'Baikonur, this is Kutuzov.'

'Go ahead, Kutuzov

The voices were uttering feed lines to arouse the pleasure of this room's inhabitants. He glanced at a screen beside him.

Before the shuttle commander could reply, he heard someone say in a surprised, even pained voice: 'Comrade General, we're not getting a confirm signal from the PAM.'

Then the Kutuzov voice: 'Baikonur, PAM ignition nonfunctional. Repeat, we do not have PAM burn.'

Rodin's cry broke in the room, startling men who, a moment earlier, had been somnolent with anticipated pleasure.

'What has happened? Answer me. What's wrong, Kutuzov— what has gone wrong?' It shook Priabin to attention. On the screen beside him, the fiber-optic map showed the twin wiggles, red and white, of the two shuttles' orbits, separated by half the world. On a second screen, the open cargo doors of the Kutuzov and the empty cargo bay.

No ignition, then—

No ignition!

'Baikonur, this is Kutuzov. We're showing a nonignition on the PAM's motors.'

'Backup!' Rodin cried.

'Backup systems show nonignition, sir.'

'Manual emergency trigger!'

'No response from the PAM motors, sir.'

There was a tight, stifling silence in the room, the only chatter from machines, the humming and clicking of electrics.

'Sir, telemetry reports tracking the — satellite.' The officer remembered the fiction. 'It hasn't left orbit, sir. It's not moving.'

Priabin glanced toward a clock on the wall. Six forty-five. Recognition of time made him think of Gant. Two and a half hours or more since he had taken off, incinerating Serov and a gunship crew to enable him to do so. Perhaps he was halfway, or less, to Turkey. Time, time… delay.

'Not moving?' It was a challenge rather than a question.

'Telemetry confirms the weapon is stationary in its original orbit.'

'Where it cannot be targeted and fired!' Rodin stormed.

Time…

Had the solid-fuel motors on the weapon fired, there would have been a maximum of two hours before the battle station reached its final altitude and been ready to fire at the American shuttle. Time-' how much time now? A systems failure in the ignition of the PAM had elongated time like elastic, stretching it in—

Gant's favor?

No, Gant would be stopped at the border. Daylight would be the brick wall with which he would collide and die.

Priabin found himself staring across the room at Rodin, who was glaring in his direction; as if he were the jinx who had caused this ill-luck. But the time was unusable. He was Rodin's prisoner, he reminded himself, now aware of the lounging guard — a new one, the other having been relieved an hour before.

Rodin was huddled with his senior officers. Voices debated, urged, and rejected. Radio channels crackled, the voices of mission control and the shuttle waited. Priabin edged toward the windows. Looking down, he saw the huge map; colors flared, lights winked and moved. The combined forces of two military districts were being mobilized, marshaled into the shape of a trap. A team hand-picked by Rodin controlled, by proxy, hundreds of aircraft and helicopters, thousands of men. He turned away from the depressing vision it formed. He realized that all the delay to the firing of the laser weapon would do would be to prevent Rodin from destroying the Atlantis before Gant died. Nothing had changed.

And Rodin seemed to realize it, too. His face was still angry, and filled with cold authority. But his eyes and mouth were calm. His hands unclenched. A temporary setback; revert to original timetable. Gant, then the shuttle.

'Kutuzov, this is Rodin,' Priabin heard him say. 'I want a linkup with the — satellite during your present orbit of the earth, and an EVA to inspect and repair the system's failure. Acknowledge.

A man floating in space, repairing the malfunctioning motors. A matter of hours, no more. Rodin's features gleamed with satisfaction when the shuttle commander acknowledged. He put down the microphone and slapped his hands together loudly, like a noise to frighten children engaged in a party game in the dark.

'Gentlemen, we have work to do,' he cried. 'As tight a schedule ^ possible — and no more delays.' He glanced again in Priabin's direction, then beckoned him. 'Come, Colonel, you can give us your expert opinion on the preparations we're making for Major Gant '

18: Acts of Desperation

A Sukhoi fighter, too eager, flashed across the nose of the Antonov, the sun glistening on its silver fuselage. Then it was gone. Gant craned to follow its path, and saw it winking like a signal lamp as it banked then began to climb out of the sand brown of the country below into the pale morning sky.

And others…

Full daylight. Eight o'clock, and they had found him. The radio could not be retuned to their Tac channels, and the radar was too rudimentary to show more than a smudged impression of the hostile landscape ahead. After crossing the Caspian and the flat marshes and plain to the west of it, he had sneaked through the mountains like a thief, for hours it seemed. Sliding around and over and through, hugging the contours of the country as the night faded into gray, then blue. Temperature mounting, the past hours becoming no more than a mocking illusion of safety and cleverness, tension holding him like a straitjacket. Now morning and the aircraft.

He flung the lumbering, though small, Antonov severely to port, shocked at the leap of a mountain into the center of the cockpit windshield. He wrenched on the steering handles of the column, throwing the crop sprayer away from the mountain's snow-streaked flank. At once, he was straining to relocate the Sukhoi, the Fencer