Kedrov was standing at the base of the platform, looking up. Smooth, sheer metal for thirty feet, impossible to climb. Hopeless. Metal gleamed and shone, mocking him. The platform hummed with electricity and purpose. The winking eye of the dish aerial halted in its movements. Stared directly at some invisible target.
'It's locked on!' Kedrov shouted in his ear. 'Locked on!'
The cables, bunched into a rope, traveled back into the silo shaft, down hundreds of feet to Rodin's finger on the button. The signal was about to be transmitted.
He swung the jack handle at the cables, disturbing them and leaving no mark on the heavy nylon sheathing that protected the wiring. He felt his left hand forced open. He released his grip on whatever he was holding. Kedrov knelt by the bunched cables, straining with the heavy pliers. Groaning as he did so, veins standing out on his forehead, sweat sheening it. The wind sang through the transmitters and aerials in an unearthly, crowing noise.
Priabin knelt down, too, and took the cables in both hands. Heaved at them.
Kedrov wrenched rather than cut. His hands were white with effort. It was no use — if it was, Kedrov would electrocute himself as soon as the metal touched the wires inside.
Priabin heaved again at the reluctant cables. What did he think he was doing anyway? He gazed upward and then wildly around him.
Frenzied, he wrenched the Kalashnikov from his shoulders and pointed it at the cables, as if about to fire into them. His head whirled madly. The weapon was useless to him. He raised it as if to throw it aside. He'd never even learned to fire it accurately, years before during basic training. Cleaning, loading, aiming, even bayonet practice — the thing was useless, useless!
Then he remembered. Yes! He knelt down, his hands fumbling to detach the bayonet in its scabbard from above the magazine. 'Get away!' he yelled at Kedrov, whose shadow interfered with the light. He struggled with the bayonet then threw the gun away from him and held up the tool he had constructed.
The instructor. They'd laughed in the junior officers' mess afterward—
He attacked the sheathing of the cables, hacking, sawing, shearing at it. Strips of nylon, cord within, bare copper gleaming — one, two, three, four. He worked like a madman, mutilating the cables. His hands were torn and bloody from frayed wiring and the sharpness of the nylon.
Eventually he finished.
The interlocked bayonet-and-scabbard tool rattled and clunked as it slid down the silo shaft. Priabin lay on his back, chest heaving, staring at the sky. Kedrov was no more than a shadow in his peripheral vision. His body was a single, feverish ache. Nothing mattered now, nothing.
Rodin. Rodin…
He let the name fade in his mind, like a figure retreating down a long, empty corridor.
The sky was clean.
Except for Kedrov's shadow.
'I don't know if we were in time,' Kedrov said, his voice hardly audible above the noise of the wind through the aerials. 'They may have transmitted the firing command — we wouldn't know.'
When the words had taken effect on Priabin's consciousness, he groaned, rolling on to his side as if to hide under nonexistent bedclothes.
Rodin, Rodin.
Train.
Almost at once, he could smell the smoke. The tunnel thrust the locomotive's bellow of steam and damp smoke along its length toward him. The rail beneath his left boot quivered, then thudded rhythmically. His heart thudded like the rail, but with relief; almost threatening to overwhelm him. He could only lean back against the wet brickwork and watch. The locomotive and its burden roared down the tunnel toward him.
His parka became sodden almost at once from the running water washing down the wall. The smoke made his eyes water, his throat constrict. And yet he knew he had to move, however terrifying this huge rush of metal. The train blocked the entrance to the tunnel, preventing any gunship from making its descent to cut off his escape.
There was a halo of light dimly marking the train's outline, a tiny gap of air between its bulk and the walls. Sparks, the billowing of wet smoke and steam, the glow of the boiler's fire. He turned his cheek to the rough brickwork, and wetness soaked into his taut skin. Already the realization seeped in — they would be working their way along the same wall, thinking they, too, could use the train's passage. He had to move now.
He began to slide-run along the curve of the wall. His shoulder scraped against the bricks and the jutting rock, his feet unbalanced and his whole body leaning like a drunk into the wall, away from the track. The train enlarged, yelling and threatening. Seeming too big for the tunnel. The dim halo of light had disappeared. He checked in midstride.
The breath he snatched at was foul with smoke, making him cough. His ears were filled with the din of the locomotive. Sparks jumped and spat like fireworks only a hundred yards away as the train rushed toward him.
Somehow, he made himself run on, toward the thing that filled the darkness with noise and fire. The beam of its lamp, polishing the track but eluding him. His shoulder pressed against the wall. The pressure and inertia of the train quivered in the brick, the gravel under his feet seemed like quicksand.
And then it was passing him, and moving with a totally unexpected slowness, laboring up the canyon's long incline. One man in the locomotive's cab was bent to the raging fire, the other stood as still as a statue commemorating a long-ago war. Then the first of the freight cars was level with him, and some animal or other lowed like a fog warning. Other beasts joined its cry. Cattle cars. Helpless animals, in transit to an abattoir.
His cheek was still warm from the blaze of the fire. He had to pause to beat at sparks that had flown onto his legs from the flanged wheels of the cars. Then moved on in his unbalanced fashion, down the length of the long, slow train, which creaked and thudded and clanked; and lowed.
Smoke roiled about him so that he could hardly breathe. He was terrified by the sight of cattle snouts jutting through slats into the tunnels madness. He heard hooves banging against the floors and sides of cars as they lurched past.
The train was incredibly long. Its noise seemed as if it would never stop. He felt he would never rid himself of the lowing of the cattle. He had to be in the open before the end of the train entered the tunnel. The trucks moved by so slowly. He couldn't be running that slowly. Then he saw the light increasing.
The second locomotive, at the rear of the train, pushing it up the long incline toward Yerevan's slaughterhouses, was at the maw of the tunnel and was then swallowed. The driver's face, looking down at him, was white and shocked, and the glow of the fire was dimmed by the early-afternoon light. The track ahead of him was clear.
He saw the bridge, and heard the throb of rotors, and the scream overhead of the first MiG or Sukhoi fighter. He felt shrunken, a tiny figure on a narrow thread of track that ran from tunnel to bridge. He stared wildly around and above him, looking for the gunship, waiting for its attack; hearing, despite the noise of its approach, the sound of trucks moving on the highway below him. He felt pinioned by noise. Then he saw the gunship beating down toward him, rotors tilted, snub nose head-on to him. He would never — even if he could move — make the bridge before it opened fire. The passage of the train still rumbled in the ground beneath his feet. He raised the Kalashnikov in a futile gesture as the helicopter enlarged, its black tinted glass and snub nose sweeping over his head, the downdraft plucking at him as if to cuff him aside.
There was black glass everywhere as it turned to face him, swinging violently into the hover, so that he could see the gun and the missile pod. It hung in the air, its skis only feet above the railway track — between him and the bridge. Olive-drab paint.
He knew quite certainly that he would die there, framed in the tunnel entrance. They could be no more than thirty yards or so away now. He was trapped between the
Familiar?
