He watched Gant pick up a parka and wrap it around himself then he followed him from the room. The TV set was showing cartoons. To Anders, there was little appreciable difference between the dashing cat and mouse and the program that had preceded their antics. Gant had similarly failed to remark the change. Just stared at the screen, hunched within himself, saying little. Anders had left him alone for long periods, hurrying between the hangar and the secure fine to the Oval Office. A heavy weight fell on the cat, which shattered slowly like an old vase. It seemed significant, especially as he followed Gant's retreating form along echoing corridors and out into the chill of the night.
Cold moonlight made the snow-covered hills ghostly around the air base. Light snow flew across the gap of darkness between them and the hangar. The massive bulk of the C-5 Galaxy transport was nose-out from the hangar, its engines still silent.
Anders felt the desert wind cut through his warm clothing. The cartoon image of the shattering cat remained in his mind.
They walked beneath the huge port wing and its two Pratt & Whitney turbofans. The wind hurled itself into the hangar and around the fuselage. The place was filled with people, and it dwarfed them, as did the aircraft. He nodded to the engineering officer who had reported completion to him. The gunship had already been stowed in the cargo hold of the Galaxy. He took the portable phone from his parka and began speaking into it even as he climbed the personnel steps aft of the wing, behind Gant.
The door slammed behind them. He spoke to the colonel who captained and flew the transport. 'Yes, Colonel,' he acknowledged. 'You can engine-start. We're in your hands.' He switched off the portable phone and thrust it into his clothing.
Almost at once, he heard the first rising whine of the four huge engines. The wind had disappeared. In its place, the noises of activity, the sounds of routine. Twelve-five. The note of the engines rose and strengthened.
The two helicopters sat on pallets near the tail, rotors folded like the wings of great insects. One mechanic was peeling away a stencil card from the flank of the gunship Gant would fly, the 24D, to reveal white numerals. Unit, base, designation, something of the kind. The U.S. Army drab in which the two ships had been painted during training had disappeared, to be replaced by the olive and yellow camouflage of Soviet Aviation Army units on duty in Afghanistan. Below the camouflage, the bellies of the gunships were painted a sharklike gray. Another stencil was peeled away after white paint had puffed from a spray gun. Cyrillic lettering. Warnings, red stars, instructions were all blossoming on the flanks of the two MiLs. Bolted and tied to their pallets, the two machines appeared strange, unknown. Becoming once more the two helicopters he had seen captured in the Lebanese desert.
The scene oppressed Anders with the sense of its fragility. The machines might be almost ready; it was the crews who were not. Gant himself, Mac, his gunner, and the second crew, headed by Garcia. None of them, not even Gant, was ready. There were too many factors in the matrix, like a complicated jigsaw puzzle knocked from a table, the pieces all separated and making no sense.
The cockpits of both MiLs were open. Heads and upper torsos bobbed, appearing and disappearing as the flight systems were checked. Anders had a fleeting impression that the machines were still under construction, unfinished. The on-board computers and moving-map displays were being updated. The main cabin doors, too, were open. Auxiliary tanks had been fitted to both helicopters to increase their range. Only by carrying twice his normal fuel and having the 24A similarly fueled could Gant make the thousand-mile journey from the Pakistan border to Baikonur and retain sufficient resources for the return flight. They would abandon the 24A once they had transferred its fuel to the other gunship, and make the return crowded into the 24D, together with Kedrov — the lost scientist, he added bitterly.
Weapons, too. Disguised or adapted U.S. weapons to complete the MiL's armories. On the short, stubby wings, four rocket pods and four missiles, four-barreled machine guns mounted in each nose. The weapons were real, but their purpose was disguise. It was a charade required for Afghan airspace, a charade played hour after hour — weapons, markings, call signs, IDs, Gant's ability to speak Russian — thin, so thin as to be almost transparent. Later, hour after hour in Soviet airspace… transparent.
Mac and the transport helicopter's crew moved toward Gant and himself. The Galaxy seemed to shrug at a weight of air pressing on it, against the wind, then began to roll out of the hangar. It was as if the cargo hold was suddenly bathed in a greater light, or some charge of static had built up. Everything seemed clearer, skeletal, stark. A long row of fold-down seats lined the bulkhead.
Work continued on the two helicopters.
Anders sat down and slipped the belt across his lap. He felt the huge Galaxy turn. Through the window at his side, he saw the maw of the hangar, like a whale's mouth lit from within, retreat into the darkness of the night. Sunday night.
He studied the crews like a diagnostician looking at X-ray plates. Mac was the best of them. Garcia, the second pilot, was good, but no better than good. His copilot was older, wiser, but no better than Garcia. Chameleon Squadron had lost a better pilot two months before, when their only surviving Mil crashed in East Germany. Before the Israelis had been blackmailed into stealing these.
Lane, the copilot, was OK. Kooper, Garcia's gunner, was better. Gant — was Gant; he'd chosen the 24D, Anders knew, because there was no copilot. Just a gunner. And Gant trusted Mac.
The Galaxy turned again. Anders glimpsed runway lights and felt the aircraft pause.
'At least those guys got off their butts!' Garcia exclaimed, sitting down with a nod to Anders, ostentatiously buckling his belt. 'Jesus, are we lucky?'
Anders watched Gant's face twitch with mistrust. Anders sensed Gant's dislike of Garcia. The second pilot's tension seemed too febrile, wild; like the reaction of a man who had too heavily mixed his cocktails.
Anders studied the others, then the fold-down table near them, the plugged-in computer terminal, the screen, the rolls of charts and sheafs of photographic prints. Too much, there was still too much to do — thin, thin, transparent, his thoughts chorused.
The Galaxy surged forward. Anders felt tension grip and hold him. He saw Gant staring at him. The man's eyes were blank and yet fierce; alien, somehow.
Men were sitting down hurriedly now, at the sound of a horn through the hold. The MiLs were left alone, vulnerable. The load-master was talking to the flight deck over a telephone link. The show was about the hit the road. For a second, Anders thought of voicing the idea, but Gant's stare disconcerted him. He looked away, at the table. He could distinguish the highest-resolution images of the Baikonur area — one area in particular. A tiny island, kidney-shaped, surrounded by wet salt marshes. Reeds, swirls of shallow water, a white smear in one corner of one picture that might have been water fowl taking off. Could Gant find that at night, with minimal use of the gunship's lamp? That agreed rendezvous?
Be there, Anders thought involuntarily. You Russian son of a bitch, be there!
He felt his body molded to the fold-down seat as the Galaxy lifted away from the runway. Its undercarriage thudded up moments later. He looked at the MiLs.
Banks, glittering shoals, islets, one like an animal curled up, another kidney-shaped. Would they get as far as…? The thought faded.
Be there, he thought firmly.
The tracked army recovery vehicle was nose down in the river, like a fishing bird. Its powerful crane, mounted over the turret of the converted tank chassis, slowly drew the Zil sedan out of the mud and water. Great broken plates of ice, gray and wallowing like a ship's wreckage, lurched in the space of open water the accident and the recovery operation had created in the frozen river. The water was little more than a soupy dark swirl beneath a clouded sky. The afternoon was already beginning to darken. There was a tiny flurry of sleet in the chill wind, one of Baikonur's very irregular and unexpected snowfalls.
The car's windows and flanks streamed as it was swung over the SKP-5 vehicle toward the shallowly sloping bank, which was churned and printed with caterpillar tracks—
— and the narrower, half-obscured tire prints from the Zil, Priabin thought, shaken into wakefulness by the sight of the car and the knowledge of its passengers and their condition. The somber, chilly scene disturbed him.
When he'd finished with Orlov — the old man knew no more than he had already told, he was convinced of it
