leather flying helmet, throwing it aside. Bending low he gripped the hot door handle and opened the cabin door. Smoke was opaque, choking. He clutched his handkerchief over his nose and mouth. His last glimpse through the cockpit windshield had shown him new stars winking as they approached and the mountains beginning to loom ahead of the course he had set.
He fumbled in the cabin like a blinded animal. Caught up the kit bag that contained the cassettes of film and videotape. Rifle next, snatched from its mount on the fuselage. Orange fire glowing at the end of the cabin. Smoke everywhere. Now the burning of systems, ailerons, struts, linkages, control mechanisms. At any moment, the Antonov would be unable to respond to the autopilot and begin to fall out of the morning.
Glasses, rifle, spare ammunition clips, cassettes… chute, chute — his mind raced toward being out of control. Emergency pack, compass… the linkages were buckling, beginning to distort-He felt the Antonov lurch tiredly, then resume its illusion of calm passage.
He heaved the chute from its locker and awkwardly, hunched and coughing, wrestled his arms into the harness. Then touched the ripcord. He eased around the chemical tank and reached the door — flung it open. Smoke was torn and hurled around him. The wind cried. The fire leaped nearer. The biplane lurched again, then seemed to decline into a lazy, certain fall, banking over the valley toward the nearest hillside. Brown and snow- streaked. The slipstream tore at Gant's clothing, flapping the parka like stiff folds of tarpaulin. He gripped the edges of the door frame with white hands. Looked down, then quartered the sky as the Antonov's dying fall moved his vision like a lazy camera.
The Sukhoi Fencer was coming head-on now, and he could hear the boom of its engines echoing off the hills. The boy would hang a curtain of shells and rockets just ahead of the biplane, into which the old Antonov would lumber like a weary tiger into a pit. As he squinted into the slipstream, his eyes watering, Gant saw the Sukhoi growing in size, until the ripple of little ignitions beneath its wings indicated the hanging of the curtain. The Fencer was nose up, then it pulled steeply away and banked, slipping behind a creased mountain flank. Two new silver fuselages winked in the sun.
Gant poised himself. The Antonov's fall was almost graceful, delicate. He glanced at the tail plane, then at the fire behind him. He thrust out from the cabin door into the slipstream, feeling it leap on him, buffet and move his body even as he fell away from the Antonov. Altitude, five hundred and fifty feet, no more. It was low to jump — just all right? The mountains loomed — all round him, it seemed — and the biplane curved eerily toward it. He swiveled his gaze but could not see the Fencer.
Impact. Not with the mountainside but with the curtain of shells and rockets. The Antonov disintegrated. Skeletal remains were illuminated like black matchsticks within the ball of orange fire, which became smoke. Debris drifted down—
— like himself.
Ripcord.
Jerk as if someone were wrestling with him and trying to break his back. He looked up. The chute opened slowly, like a demonstration.
Where was the Fencer? how near the closest of the others? how long to fall…?
The snow filled the valley, now wide enough to be a plain. The ^ind drifted him toward the huge mountain. His hands tugged, altering his course minutely. Perhaps two hundred feet up now, no more. Where was the Fencer? How close was the nearest gunship?
The Fencer pilot had not seen him jump. Perhaps the others were too far off to reach him. One hundred fifty feet. He felt himself hanging in the wind like a target in a fairground booth.
The lower slopes of the mountain gave him his best chance. The pall of smoke from the biplane hung above him, as the debris raced him toward the snow. He was too close to the mountainside to reach the flat terrain covered with soft snow. The wind drifted him, and he fought against it, tacking like a sailor with a hundred tiny adjustments to avoid being thrown against the rock face. He was unaware of his own breathing, his mind was at a great distance. Hands only, his weight, the force of the wind, the brown, snow-streaked rocks, the trees below.
And the sky, the silver fuselages taking on distinct shape and proximity. And the first gunship no bigger than a beetle as yet. Mayday. There had been no other way. He could not have survived in the sky.
He jerked on the chute's cords, feeling his body swing away from hard rock, then he seemed to plummet into a narrow crevasse. Feet struck, cold and shock registering together. He rolled, covered at once in snow, his nostrils and mouth filled with it, choking him. It buried him, cutting out all light and air. He could just make out the noise of firing and registered the thud of cannon fire or rocket attack through the rock beneath and around him. Darkness. Suffocation.
Time passed somnolently on the giant screen portraying the repairs to the laser weapon's payload assist module. The sensation of such lumbering slowness scratched at Priabin's nerves. It was as if time itself imprisoned him, not the bored and chewing guard who lounged opposite him. He wanted to scream away the tension thai gripped his chest and made it difficult to breathe. Ten o'clock in the morning. Already half an hour of daylight on the Turkish border. The idea brought a fresh choking sensation. There was nothing he could do, however much he wanted to.
The repair work had been in progress for more than three hours. On the screen, the bloated form of one of the cosmonauts hung m the blackness alongside the laser weapon. The faulty payload assist module had been detached and returned to the
The cosmonauts, even wearing their backpacks, seemed dwarfed by the two machines they now had to reunite. It was perhaps a matter of less than two hours, then a further two hours, and—
Rodin — where was Rodin? He looked up toward the windows of the command room. Figures behind glass. Yes, there he was, arms moving in emphasis, the mad conductor of this mad orchestral score. Unable to settle or remain still. Moving between
On the screen, the payload assist module was nudged toward the laser weapon, approaching it with the caution of a servant bearing bad news. The two cosmonauts, using their backpacks and yet still moving with almost stonelike slowness, closed on one another, handling the inertia of the PAM, slowing it, directing its bulk beneath the waiting battle station. Time was elephantine, yet it hurried, making him want to shriek. This was all the time there was. Four hours — and when they had passed, the world would have changed.
He rubbed his hand through his hair. Then drank cold coffee. The guard, on the other side of the foldaway table on which breakfast had been served — with a sense of mockery clearly emanating from Rodin, who must have organized the meal — belched softly, then picked his back teeth with a used matchstick. Priabin had eaten as if on holiday — or like the proverbial condemned man, he corrected himself.
On the giant screen, the two cosmonauts danced with heavy, slow movements around the PAM, maneuvering it into position. Their dialogue and the replies and instructions of mission control were no more than a background noise, like Muzak.
The hours of Gant's continuing escape had been like a mounting fever, maddening Rodin. His figure had vanished from the windows of the command section. Priabin, itching with a renewed assault of tension, watched the door below the line of windows. As if waiting for an actor to enter, stage right. Hearing a babble of sound that could not submerge itself into the dialogue with
At the map table, someone was looking up toward the door into the main room, other officers were bending closer to the table. The excitement was unignorable. They'd found him, he'd been sighted…
Rodin strode across the room toward the table. Priabin stood up. The guard seemed indifferent to his movement. Rodin's voice was peremptory with inquiry, but bearing an undercurrent of congratulation in it, too. His staff officers crowded around, peering, gesticulating. There was no doubt about it. The dialogue with the shuttle and the images on the giant screen were peripheral, almost subliminal. The center of the room was the map table.
Priabin felt physically sick with utter weariness. He tasted the fat in which his breakfast had been cooked; the coffee seemed lodged at the back of his throat. He tasted too many cigarettes. He understood why he had watched the passage of slow time only on the screen and not looked at any of the numerous clocks in mission
