Darkness. The belly of a gunship hung over the ravine like the stomach of a huge, bloated spider. A face peering down from the main cabin. A scattering of seed, even as he fired upward and the face and hand were withdrawn. Seed falling stonily, rattling into the ravine. He stumbled as he ran, hearing single shots behind him, hearing the hideous, magnified rattling of the grenades. He fell, rolled and skidded, bullets passing over his head, slid on, head tucked into his arms, body fetal, feet in the air because he did not want any braking effect from his boots, rifle tucked into his belly, kit bag containing the cassettes following him down the headlong slope of frozen water. Explosions, cracks rushing after him jaggedly — he could see them as the flame of the grenades faded on his retinas. He was still being carried forward and downward by inertia and the slope, but the cracks raced more swiftly, seeming to overtake him, until they petered out.
Banging against an outcrop, aching in a new place, he looked up. The MiL's belly was fat and dark above him again, and the face was looking down cautiously. He raised the old AK-47 and fired a short burst. The face became surprised, then marked, then unassembled as the rounds destroyed it. The body fell away from the helicopter to hang grotesquely by its safety harness, just on the lip of the ravine.
Moments. He had bought a few precious moments.
He could not accept the information of his eyes. A blank, black wall of rock fifty or sixty feet from him. Even with the hollow circles of fuzzy light still in the center of his vision, he was certain, though he could not accept it. It had to be an illusion, not a dead end.
He forced himself to listen. The gunship had moved away with a roaring noise. His ears seemed deafened. The body was gone. The cracks in the ice had not reached within twenty yards of him. His two pursuers were being more cautious now.
The glimmer of the frozen stream simply became black rock. It turned to neither side. It just ended.
He crawled toward it, the hollow rings of light on his retinas vanishing. To confirm the dead end. There was no possibility of self-deception now. It was there, black and a hundred feet high, a solid wall of rock.
He groaned as he paddled down the slope on his stomach. Dead end.
His head turned to look up. The Mil had not returned, the pursuers were still out of sight. They had all the time they needed. The surface of the ice seemed to cloud like a mirror with his exertions, his hands were numb. In the strange quiet he could hear his own efforts — heart, lungs, boots scrabbling, hands sliding, weapon scratching at the frozen stream like an ineffectual icepick. All he became aware of was himself. His head was empty. There was no Vietnam, no father, no past, nothing…
The frozen stream disappeared, dropping like old lava into a hole it had carved in the rocks during slow millennia. Flung out from the lip of the hole, it was like a silver, jutting beard. Gant stared unrealizing over the lip of what might have been a dark cauldron where nothing boiled. Heart, lungs, the other noises stilled. The whack of rotors seeping back in. And before that noise loudened, he heard a radio's crackling and orders snapping muzzily down the funnel of the ravine. He was outside himself once more.
A dark hole in the floor of the ravine. The river dodging beneath some too-hard outcrop, the cliff face he had thought was a dead end. Dropping into — what?
Flash of a lamp like a splash of water somewhere on the ravine wall behind him. Radios, the urgency of the hunt overriding stealth. The rotors banging down like a yell into the cleft, echoing deeper into the ground through the hole into which he stared.
Gap.
Rough, contoured, ragged rock. Handholds, footholds. He glanced behind him as he turned around, then backed with the utmost, panicky care into the hole. Just as he had done into the ravine itself. Toes, hands, rifle rattling against the frozen water, the noise of dripping echoing in the blackness below him… around him as his head came below the lip of the hole and he moved sideways where his feet sensed, then discovered, a narrow ledge. He scrabbled his left hand in the kit bag, clutching the flashlight after touching the cassettes of videotape and film. He flicked on the flashlight and looked down into undefined, uncertain depth. Icicles— stalactites — but nothing growing up from the floor of what the light suggested was a cave, even a cavern. He could not see the floor, but wiped the flashlight's beam over the immediate rocks, and their contours were stark and easy to traverse. Having put the flashlight back into the bag, he slowly began to move to his right.
A sense of burial alive and of safety, conflicting and battling in his chest. He hung there for long moments, wrestling with and overcoming the claustrophobia. Eventually, he felt his heartbeat becoming calmer.
His hands became more confident. His feet shuffled and tested as he moved away from the hole in what was now the roof of the cavern; moved away, too, from the glimmering sheet of silver that trailed away into the blackness.
He caught the sounds of hammering, less real than the dripping of the water around and below him. Hammering—?
A lamp flashed down the frozen length of the stream, and some thing hissed as it fell in the darkness away to his left. The lamp had dazzled him. Then he heard the noises of a body lowering itself into the cavern. He had heard a piton being hammered in, a rope uncoiled and dropped.
His hands seemed frozen to the rock, his feet rooted. His own breathing became audible once more.
The guard, who had been sleeping on a chair opposite Kedrov's bed when Priabin had entered the room, stared at them, his eyes, above the torn sheet used to gag him, filled with sullen dislike. His hands were tied behind his back, then to his feet. Kedrov seemed unable to ignore the man, or to accept Priabin's desperation as genuine.
Twelve twenty-six. Priabin had been in that room for eight minutes. There was a corporal in the garage who might recover at any moment, a doctor might walk in, Kedrov's guard was tied up the dialogue continued in his head, snapping back and forth across the widening chasm of his nerves. But he couldn't force Kedrov to leave, the man had only to open his mouth to alarm the whole of GRU headquarters. He had walked into the tiger's cage to rescue— a piece of meat that did not have the consciousness to want to be saved.
Leave him, then.
'Look, come with me now, trust me,' Priabin pleaded once more.
Kedrov looked dazed by the remark, as if by tragic domestic news. Priabin guessed there was less than two hours before final target acquisition by the laser battle station on the helpless American shuttle — and this, this dummy won't move, won't wake up! 'Trust me,' he repeated, but his harsh tone alarmed Kedrov, who flinched into the corner of the room. He was standing like some mental defective, cowering even though he was standing upright, hands flat against the walls.
'No.' Kedrov sighed plaintively. He was in some sort of suspension here, a place out of time. He felt safe. Even the armed guard had become familiar. Priabin had roughly rearranged his tiny world and frightened him with its new, uglier image.
'For Jesus Christ's sake, man, I'm here to save your life,' Priabin hissed, his voice dropping violently in volume after the first two words as he remembered the corridor outside, the danger of the building around this room. His hands went forward in a plea. 'Look, you have to come, you have to help me — you have to save your own life, don't you?' He shifted on the chair, his impatience heating his body, his back aware of the door behind him against which the chair and his weight were placed.
Kedrov seemed puzzled, as at some advanced mathematical concept. How much damage had Serov's drugs done to him? Would he be of any help anyway? Jesus — twelve twenty-seven.
The guard's removed uniform, even his boots, lay on the bed like a spread corpse. It would be easy for them to get out if only Kedrov would put on the uniform — put it on, you stupid bugger, for God's sake!
He couldn't explain his plan to Kedrov, not in front of the guard, who would eventually be found… knock him out, place the unconscious form under the bedclothes, it might be hours before… but Kedrov remained intractable.
He stood up, wary of leaving the door, jammed the chair beneath the door handle. Kedrov stood in his corner, for all the world as if he had wet his trousers, his face helpless, bruised by the mystery and danger brought into the room by Priabin. Priabin moved toward him, hands held out in front of him, palms outward.
'Listen,' he said confidingly. 'Listen. Serov's dead, you know that, but that isn't the end of it, Filip — yes, I was after you, too, I admit that — but you know about
He was standing only a yard from the man now. Thin, pale hair awry, his face wizened and aged by the past
