Winter Hawk

them impatiently back on the bedclothes. 'Hell, what can we do?'

'John,' he heard Danielle say, her voice strangely pained. He looked up. Her dark hair clouded around her small face. 'He's alive. It doesn't matter…..' Her voice trailed away into the empty shadows of the room. He nodded, as if she had been his spokesperson and voiced exactly what he had intended to say.

Gunther stepped back as Calvin swung his legs out of bed, stood up, and put on his robe. One of his jokes. Donald Duck across the shoulders of the toweling material. And a NASA shuttle badge sewn on the breast pocket. But as if he had donned a uniform, his movements became at once crisper, more alert. He rubbed his hair to tidiness.

'You'll come down?' Gunther began.

'Yes. At once.' He thrust his feet into his slippers, and held Danielle's wrists briefly as she handed him coffee. The presidential seal minutely painted on the white china. He nodded reassuringly at his wife. Her face seemed a mirror of his own. Hope fading, the anxiety mounting. 'Yes, I'll come down to the code room. What monitoring do they have down there?'

'Full links with the Pentagon, the NSA, Langley.'

'Good. What have we—?'

'There's a KH-11 satellite over the Caucasus. Full daylight and little cloud cover. Good transmission situation. Washington can see quite a lot of the activity. Gunships, fighters, troop transports. And now troops on the ground in numbers.'

'Terrain?'

'Mountainous, all the way to the border. Difficult for him.'

'And for them.'

'How far inside is he?'

'Between ten and fifteen miles, their best estimate.'

'That little?'

'That little. Maybe that's as bad as a hundred, even a thousand. They have crack troops swarming all over the place.'

'Dick, don't say that. The man got out of Baikonur in an airplane — now how the hell did he do that? He could—'

But Gunther was shaking his head. 'They can't afford to let him.'

'He has to stay alive. He has to make it — for Christ's sake, we can't lift a finger to help the guy!'

'Not unless you want to start the next war.'

Calvin nodded absently. 'I realize that, Dick,' he murmured. 'At least' — he looked up, grinning suddenly before his face reassumed its solemn expression—'part of me does. OK, we can't go after Gant. But we can have people on the border, right on the border, and we can be watching from the air. What do we have up?'

'AWACS is watching the whole thing.'

'Good. Then I have to talk to the Turkish president right away.'

'We anticipated that, Mr. President.'

'Right, then let's be clear what we're talking about here. We have to enlist the aid of one of our NATO allies… wait. Would they cross into…?'

Gunther looked gloomy. 'They want him awful bad,' was all he said.

Calvin rubbed his hair.

'Then I have to prepare one of our allies for a possible Soviet troop incursion into their territory — if Gant makes it that far. God knows what I tell the Turkish president.' He was pacing the room urgently, as if attempting to walk off the last lingerings of the Valium; or of fear. 'Ten miles — maybe as little as that?' Gunther nodded. Calvin turned slowly, looking at the room as if it were some kind of command center reflecting the powers of his office. And shook his head. 'All we can do is make sure we're there to meet him, if he gets out. And he has the proof we need.' The tone was singular, not plural. He felt a thrill of enraged frustration that deepened almost at once into fear. He was racked by hope and terror. The proof I need, the proof, he heard again and again in his head. The proof I need.

'Mr. President?' Gunther began.

'Yes, yes, I'm coming. Give me just a moment to dress.'

Tree line.

The tree line was what had saved him, he admitted once more. Temporarily saved him; just as it temporarily concealed him.

His back was against a rock, he was sitting hunched on pine needles. The snow was patchy beneath the trees, much of the forest floor tinder-dry. He held the small glasses he had taken from the Antonov to his eyes, and watched them moving below, around, opposite. All of them…

… all of them spetsnaz, experts.

The morning was icy cold and clean. Sound was restricted to the occasional crackle of a distant radio or transceiver carried on the sharp air, and the throb of troop helicopters and gunships winding through the mountains or floating above the wide plain of Ararat. Beyond the troops and the machines hanging in the air and the occasional fattening stripe of a vapor trail, he could see Turkey in the distance, where the landscape seemed cardboard and flat through the glasses. The twin peaks that dominated the plain to the west were those of Mt. Ararat, in Armenia — Turkish Armenia. Gant knew that from the pages of the school atlas. And knew little more than that.

Far below, the main road paralleled the border. To the northeast, a haze of industry hung where the city of Yerevan must be. Snow, brown flanks, foothills, the wide plain, and the river Araks, followed in swift, blurred succession as he swung the glasses down. He was in the niche of border between three countries.

Spetsnaz…

He involuntarily looked at his watch. The sleeve of the parka crackled with dried, half-frozen snow melt as he tugged it back from his wrist. Nine-fifteen. Just over an hour since he had bailed out. And they had attempted to obliterate him with rocket fire from the first of the gunships to reach him. Had he been able to control the chute as well as he would have chosen — he would have struck the snow of the plain dead. In pieces; burning rags of clothing and flesh hanging loosely from the cords of the chute. He shivered, and was chilled through.

The shallow crevasse had saved his life. Trees had beckoned below, and he'd struggled feverishly down the precipitous slope, coughing and spitting out melted snow, banging against rocks, tripping often. Then he'd reached the first stunted trees, rolling over and over beneath them until a slim bole winded him and fetched him up half lying, half sitting, breath heaving. It had taken them three quarters of an hour to land the spetsnaz troops or parachute them in. In that time, he had worked his way farther down the mountain, beneath the thickening, stronger trees. To wait, and recover. Now he must move again.

He raised the glasses. A slow vapor trail streaked the sky to the west, across the border in Turkey. As if it were some kind of signal that they had received his Mayday call.

A gunship slid up the side of the mountain, dragging its shadow like a cloak across the snow. Irrelevant. They couldn't find him, not beneath the tree cover. The spetsnaz could—

— and would.

They worked, like most special forces, in four-man units. Or, as now, in multiples of four. And in touch with each other. They could napalm the mountainside from gunships or MiGs, but he knew they wouldn't. They had to be sure, positively sure, he had died. They wanted the cassettes that were the evidence, and they wanted the body. Perhaps most of all that. They wanted the body, to be certain.

It was time to move. To survive. The nearest troops that he could see were perhaps four or five hundred yards away, below and to his left, trudging up a snow-hidden track, backs bent, guns clearly visible. A four-man unit.

Far below and across the plain, a train appeared as if sliding wormlike out of the undulating earth, smoke billowing up into the air. Railway, road, river; border. Open country. Gant rose onto one knee.

They were toiling alertly up the slope where the trees opened out to reveal a winding track. Rifles slung across their chests — new AK-74s, not like the old Kalashnikov he held in his hands — packs, camouflage overalls; other weapons — a Dragunov snipers rifle carried by the sergeant, and slung at one trooper's side, an RPG-7 rocket launcher. If they found only the remaining bits of him, it would be enough.

Four hundred yards.

Everything had become simple, even stark. They wanted him dead, and the proof recovered. He was the only