'Disappointed?' he replied scornfully. 'We're not going to a fancy-dress party and you haven't torn a hole in your Robin Hood tights! Another tanker?'
'To fill up the tanks we can use? I've asked, dammit! Nothing could reach us before we fall in the water.'
'Can you land anywhere?'
Anders was watching Gant with a kind of stunned admiration, a beaten fighter eyeing his opponent, wondering at the degree of energy, rage, and skill that had combined against him.
Gant's mind whirled out ahead of conscious thought, like a rope thrown across a chasm. The water already seemed much nearer. Around him, the hold seemed to enclose him firmly; a trap now, no longer the thin shell that kept them from the numbingly cold air outside. The sea, cleared of its pearly wash, glittered. There was no land in sight, not even the yellowy smudge of a beach, a small atoll, a sandbar. The cargo hold was the clinging interior of a Venus-flytrap.
He shook the image away. Anders' face was pale, his eyes staring through one of the windows, downward. Mac, Garcia, and the others formed a loose, silent group watching him and Anders. They'd heard, but now, after their initial babble of surprise and nerves, they were silent. Waiting.
His hands clenched more tightly. He waggled the headset's jack plug as if it might be a weapon. His body felt hot with frustration.
'There's nothing,' Anders murmured. 'It's fucked, Gant, completely fucked up.' His fist banged the bulkhead, which boomed flatly. Then he was quiet once more.
Despite the illusion of the sea nearing, the Galaxy was climbing slowly, conserving its remaining fuel at the highest effective altitude. Pointlessly. It might as well already be falling. They would ditch in the sea, lose the MiLs, and
Gant turned to the window. Far to the north of the Galaxy lay a strip of smudgy yellow-brown. Land, but no landfall. The narrow, hardly inhabited coast of southern Pakistan. No runways, no airfields, no flatness of sufficient area; they'd already looked at the maps. Nothing. The coast taunted him with its inaccessibility. The sky was empty and clean, stretching upward and becoming purple and seemingly infinite — all that sky, with the Galaxy hanging on it as on a cliff edge of air, about to loosen its grip and fall. Two specks of dirt on the Plexiglas seemed to hang in the sky. He rubbed at them. For a moment, they had seemed like other, smaller aircraft, drifting away from the Galaxy—
'A beach!' he shouted. He was looking at the MiLs, all neatly palletized for easier loading and storage. Anders seemed startled, and the others turned toward him as if expecting an announcement, or a reprieve. 'A beach!'
He stared down the length of the huge hold. The MiLs rested on large pallets, rotors folded and locked along each fuselage. The railway for the pallets ran the length of the Galaxy, to allow straight-through loading and unloading, to save time. On a third pallet, closest to the tail, there were drums containing their fuel load and reserve. All ready to be off-loaded under cover of evening darkness in Peshawar, a thousand miles away.
'A beach.' He plugged in the headset at the nearest jack point. 'Skipper — skipper, could you make Karachi empty — and I mean empty?'
'Empty?'
'Without your cargo, man!' Silence. 'Well?'
He heard the pilot consult his flight engineer, but caught only the silence and not the sense of the mumbled reply. The pilot was angry when he spoke.
'We can't tell if the engines will flame out at the end of a landing roll, or maybe the fuel will run out three hundred feet in the air and half a mile from touchdown, or flameout might happen twenty miles out and five thousand feet in the air — how can I tell you, Major?'
Gant bared his teeth and snapped: 'I take priority, skipper.' His tone grated like sandpaper. 'The mission takes priority over everything else — the cargo. Interrogate the flight management system and find out if by trading off fifty thousand pounds of cargo against higher fuel consumption at a low altitude, you come out in credit.' He added, with a glint of malice in his eyes: 'What happens after that doesn't concern me. Do it, skipper.'
He removed the headset. Anders was watching him, not with anticipation, but as if studying some different species.
'We can't land at Karachi, we don't have clearance. The air force and the government would both oppose any landing there. Anyway, we can't even make Karachi,' Anders recited in a tired voice. He had remained unaffected, grasping only dim elements of Gant's objective, scattered pieces of a puzzle he could not interpret. 'Langley would have to get Washington to talk to Islamabad.'
'Then make it happen, Anders — now.'
'What are you going to do?' His head was already shaking as he began to perceive the design.
Gant ignored him, staring at the litter of maps and at the console. Then he glared up at Anders.
'I'm going to find a beach on which these guys and their load-master can kick those pallets out the back door.' His hand waved toward the MiLs and the fuel drums.
Ridicule and protest formed in Anders' eyes even before he opened his lips.
'I tolerated your bizarre private life — much as it shamed me— just so long as it never involved matters of security,' General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin growled, angered even further by the feeble, damp-eyed protests of his only son. 'Then yesterday, I discovered you had been — insecure.' It seemed a species of aberration far greater in the general's eyes than sexual deviation. His voice, filled with threat, seemed to loom over the young man on the sofa.
'It wasn't anything — I swear to you it wasn't a serious mistake,' Valery Rodin protested, his throat and chest filled with a tight anguish. Fear and the sense of the huge, heavily furnished room surrounded him. The general's apartment was on one of the upper floors of the Cosmonaut Hotel in Leninsk. Outside its windows, the morning sky was clean and remote. To Valery, it offered an illusion of freedom and escape.
'You swear to me, and yet, when your little friend rings, baying for help because the KGB have become interested in him precisely because you were loose-tongued in front of that Colonel Priabin, you immediately throw the whole sorry mess into Serov's lap. Serious? Not serious? It was profoundly serious, Valery.'
The general walked to one of the wide windows and appeared to look out in deep concentration at the square far below his floor of the hotel. Then he turned to look at his son, and said: 'How many of your precious little circle of perverts know as much as the actor apparently did?'
'No one else, I swear it.'
'No one? Then how did the actor know? Did you whisper it during your sweaty bouts of sodomy?' the general raged. At one time, in the past, he had been unable to use language to confront his son's nature; now he found that words could be used as weapons, as a means of distancing the
Valery was appalled. His father knew and hated what he was; but though he had spoken like this before, there had never been such a degree of contempt, such vividness in the insults. He now realized just how much his father hated and despised him. 'No, no, no,' he sensed himself saying, while part of his awareness reflected on his surroundings. The thick carpet, Oriental rugs, paintings, heavy drapes, dark furniture; the apartment of a powerful man. Power that was now directed against him. He quailed. Without his father, he was nothing. A sitting target, without protection. If his father abandoned him now…
'No,' he said carefully. 'It was just something that — slipped out. Sacha — just panicked unnecessarily.'
His father sighed, appearing to accept the careful lie. What did it matter now? Sacha was dead. Valery swallowed a hard lump of grief in his throat.
'You little fool.' Rodin was wearing a silk robe. Normally at that time of the morning he would be at the complex, at his duties. He had waited two hours for this interview with his son.
The breakfast cart stood in the middle of the room, near an occasional table delicately inlaid with perhaps six different woods. Valery recognized it. It had once adorned his mother's small sitting room. The general had not even offered him as much as a cup of coffee. 'He didn't need to kill him, that mad dog Serov!' he blurted, immediately regretting the outburst. It was just the way his father swaggered in the big room, and the memory of his mother that the table had evoked.
'What else was he to do, in the time available? You had interested the KGB in matters they should know
