Winter Hawk

on the screen was one more cruel fiction.

He cleared his throat, but Gant did not turn his head.

'You know most of those guys,' Anders offered.

Gant glared at him, as if disturbed from pleasure.

'Sure, I know some of them — Wakeman, the mission commander — yeah, I know them.' He seemed to lose interest in the conversation and sipped once more at his beer.

Anders felt oppressed by the narrow, bare room. Bed, table, two upright chairs, two government-issue easy chairs, a strip of carpet. It might have been a waiting room at some downtown doctor's office where all the patients were either black or Mexican. A small refrigerator, metal lockers instead of a closet or chest of drawers. There was a door to a tiny kitchen, another to a bathroom. Yet Gant must have chosen these quarters. His rank entitled him to a bungalow on the base. This was like — like a closet for storing machines not in use.

He opened the refrigerator, disturbed by his own metaphor, and took out a can of beer. Pulled the ring. Gas plopped softly. Gant had turned down the music accompanying the program. The quiet of the room oppressed. Gant's presence seemed to charge it with static electricity. Anders shook his head. He did not understand Gant. From his context — this room — he received no clues as to the man's present or past — or future. He looked at the television screen as if through a window onto a larger perspective.

Atlantis had been in orbit for a week. A long scientific mission including the disposition of two new surveillance satellites. The crew was also scheduled to repair other satellites and, he remembered once more, to rendezvous with their Soviet counterparts on Friday, the day after the signing in Geneva. There was even TV talk that the shuttles might land at each other's home bases. Silly talk, but it nevertheless disturbed Anders. The world's present mood was evident in it. The party had begun in earnest, and no one could call it off now.

On the screen, the Pacific occupying almost half of it now, the earth looked like some huge flower bowl on which petals of desert, grassland, and cloud floated. The shuttle's robot arm hung like a great elbow joint in one corner of the screen, and a Michelin tire man, one of the crew on a spacewalk, hovered above the Spacelab in the shuttle's cargo bay. It was a reshowing of the repair job the shuttle had performed five days earlier. The whole program was a rerun of one long peace slogan.

The lump of the malfunctioning satellite appeared to one side of the screen. Anders sipped his beer, his hand tightening involuntarily on the can. The tire man backpacked toward the satellite. The earth below him remained untouchably, impossibly beautiful.

Frustration gripped Anders.

'Christ, Gant, how can you just sit there?' he burst out. 'Don't you care?'

'Plenty. What good will it do, Anders? I can't repair rotor heads. They're working as fast as they can.'

'We don't have any time, Gant.'

Gant ostentatiously looked at his watch. It was seven in the evening, local time, as near as it mattered. Ten o'clock in Washington. Soon Anders would have to call the Oval Office — again. He squeezed the can in his hand. Gant was like a pressure forcing itself against him; immobile like a Buddha, silent again now that he was not being spoken to. Then he looked at Anders.

'It could take four hours, it could take all night. You've seen.'

The room oppressed Anders even more. He felt an imposter in his borrowed flying overalls. His body ached from the unfamiliarity of the copilot's seat of the EF-111 in which he had been flown from Andrews to Nellis. Gant's apparent indifference enraged him.

'The man expects you to succeed, Gant,' he said waspishly.

Gant turned his head, his eyes glinting. 'So? The man expects?' He gestured with the beer can. 'When the repairs are through, we go. What the hell else do you want from me?'

'He wants, Gant — he wants. You have to give him this agent on a plate, and his holiday movies. Can you do that?'

'I'm not his wife, Anders. Just one of the slobs working in the guy's factory, underpaid and underfed.' He grinned quickly, looking suddenly boyish. 'We're not ready, Anders. You know that. Not even me.'

There was a certainty about Gant's pronouncement, negative though it was. The room around him said little or nothing about the man. A pennant from Vietnam on one of the buff-colored walls, a few photographs of aircraft, a younger Gant posed in front of a Phantom jet, pilot's helmet under his arm. Little or nothing — yet Anders was impressed by the force with which Gant occupied the room.

'You — have to be ready,' Anders said.

Gant shrugged. 'It doesn't change the facts. We should have had another week, minimum. Those machines are pigs to fly. Tell the man that when you talk with him.' He looked at his watch once more. 'Isn't it time to call home?' His features wore an undisguised cynicism that angered Anders. Gant was contemptuous of him, of the President — of the mission?

'Where in hell are you coming from, Gant?' he snapped. 'What is it with you? I don't need all this crap from you.'

'But you need me, Anders. So does the man. My misfortune, but you do. This idea was crazy from the beginning. Now it's suicidal.'

'You want out, Gant? Is that what you want?' Anders sneered, the can squeezed almost flat in his fist.

Gant shrugged expressively. 'Out? Why?' He gestured around the bare room. 'You told me, once, Anders, why I work for you. For the rest of the assholes in the Company. Because you let me fly. Huh?' He dismissed Anders with a wave of his hand and turned back to the television as he said, 'I'm in, Anders. I don't have any hankering to face charges that have been tailored to fit me — maybe even a list of charges.' He snorted in derision. 'I'm a big boy, Anders — I tie my own shoelaces and I know the score. I just get parked here till you need me. I'm going just as soon as they fix Garcia's ship.'

'OK.' Anders sighed. He leaned heavily against the door. He realized he had never really entered the small room. It and its occupant baffled him. Gant was cocooned, somehow apart. Perhaps he really did despise the very people who needed him, to whom he was valuable. Anders added in a tone that was intended to mollify: 'If we can have the agent and the material by Thursday, we can still win, Gant. We can bargain.'

Gant studied Anders' angry, tired face. Anders could not change his expression. His muscles were set in defeated lines.

Gant said: 'Maybe. If and maybe.'

'What the hell else can we do?' Anders cried out. The can in his hand was crushed flat.

Gant shrugged. 'Nothing. But the idea is still crazy.'

'You'll be in Soviet helicopters, you have all the call signs, the channels and frequencies, you'll be there maybe a half hour—'

'They'll shoot a guy on a bicycle on sight, Anders. That place is going to be sewn up tight — and I mean tight.' He looked down at his own can, shook it — it made no sound — then lobbed it into a waste-basket. He closed his hands together as if in prayer. 'And the guy's jumped, Anders. You don't even know if he'll show up when we do.'

'He said. Kedrov knows where to be. He has a transponder only you will be able to pick up. The rendezvous island in the salt marshes is pinpointed. Winter Hawk is something they won't be expecting, not in a million years.'

'So you say.'

'So the President says, Gant. To quote him exactly, he said, Tell that guy to get his ass over there — and no foul-ups.' His message is clear, Gant.'

'Sure. Otherwise it's a long vacation somewhere where they're always losing the keys. I know.'

'We don't do that.'

'This time he will. I have the ball, Anders.' He returned his gaze to the screen. The terms of the treaty were still rolling softly up the screen, the shuttle still floated invulnerably and apart above the ocean.

'I have to make that call,' Anders said, throwing his can at the wastebasket. It struck the side and clattered on the floor. Gant smiled.

He looked toward Anders as if weighing him. Then he said: 'Give the man my compliments. Tell him Captain Fantastic is just raring to go.' Once again, he snorted in derision.