nothing about. They were about to squeeze your friend like a lemon. An accident silenced him and warned them. Of course Serov had to use violence.'
'You told them to kill Sacha,' Valery said, his eyes suddenly damp and weak.
'No, no, all that was at Serov's discretion. But what he did, I would have done. He shut the actor up. Closed the door on your insecurity. Even then you could not stay away. The KGB colonel was there, and he saw your, your disgraceful behavior. Weeping openly at the roadside for an actor!'
Valery did not look up, merely shuffled his booted feet on the carpet. His movements raised little tufts of loosened pile around him. They had killed Sacha like a dog, a rabid dog.
He groaned aloud, then heard the general's breath explode like a condemnation.
'Pull yourself together!' he bellowed. 'For my sake and for your own, try to behave like a man!'
Valery wailed what might have been a single word of protest, but if it was, even he failed to discern its meaning. His father's strong face hardened, his eyes gleamed above his prominent, sharp-cut cheekbones. The face was smooth from a recent shave, the skin still firm though veined and traced with age. Still the hero his mother had married, obeyed, worshiped, feared. The rising star of the Strategic Rocket Forces for more than twenty years, until he stood level with the very pinnacle. He was the hidden peak, the
— and one of the principal authors of
'I–I am sorry, Father,' Valery began, calculating and cowed in the same moment. His father's moral and physical presence oppressed him, like the imminence of a storm. The pale clean sky outside seemed a great distance away. 'I am sorry if—'
'No good apologizing,' his father snapped. 'Just try to stay away from actors and drugs for a while.' His hands clenched and unclenched. He moved toward his son as if to strike him. Valery flinched, and the general's face betrayed an appalled and violent surprise. Then bitter distaste. Walking away, he continued: 'Serov has suggested you be shipped out of here for a while — somewhere quiet, until this is all over. I — have not decided what should be done.' He cleared his throat. His voice was more impersonal, businesslike. He turned to his son again, and made as if to reach out. But his hand did not move more than a few inches, as if some moral stroke rendered such gestures impossible. 'But he will undoubtedly warn all your friends to keep away from you. Also, you will confine yourself to your apartment. Do you understand? You will remain entirely incommunicado for the rest of this week. After that, I will decide what is to become of you. I think, perhaps, it is time you attended the academy to — further your military career.'
'No—'
'It will not be your decision, Valery, but mine.' He paused.
Through his misery — and relief that his father intended nothing more for the moment — Valery heard his father s stertorous breathing and his own ragged inhalations.
'Do you understand?' his father repeated. 'You see no one, you talk to no one. You stay indoors. You do not answer the telephone. Is that clear?'
'I — understand.'
'Good. You've babbled quite enough already. A week of silence, and then enlistment at the academy, will help all of us.' The Frunze Academy, the school for elite career officers. His father's influence could get him a place there — dammit. 'Very well.' The voice was unsoftened, and merely pretended to familiarity, to a common humanity between them. 'Now, go. Go, Valery.'
Valery made a grab at the generals hand, but his grip closed on air. The hand had been snatched away like that of some czar displeased with a menial ambassador.
'Go,' the general breathed from near the windows.
Through the wetness of his tears, the sky appeared almost colorless to Valery Rodin; his father's figure a looming dark shadow against it.
A map was spread near his right boot, pictures unrolled on the screen of the moving-map display like a series of hurried-through slides. He might have been thumbing through some familiar reference book for information he knew it contained.
The three hundred and fifty miles of the coastline between the Iranian border and Karachi flashed by in sections. Narrow coastal strip before the coastal range. Blue of the sea. No islands, no coral atolls, no sandbanks of any size. Just the isolated coastal strip. A few small holiday resorts, a handful of villages. His eyes glanced from the magnified images to the map on the floor, as if seeking reassurance or in growing desperation.
There were people around Gant, silent and expectant, and that expectancy was fading, turning cold and sour. He was hardly conscious of them or their changing mood. Aware only of the headset he wore as he sat in front of the display, which was no larger than a Portable typewriter.
A box with keys below a small screen — a box without answers.
He could not be sure. He had to choose blind, sensing the precise length of a beach, assuming its width between surf and palm, assuming its emptiness — all before they overflew it to check it out
If he was wrong in any of those parameters, they would have no time or fuel to find a second dropping zone. And all he had in the way of backup was one of the flight crew acting as an observer, standing between pilot and copilot, binoculars ready for the earliest possible visual sighting of the dropping zone he proposed. By the time the beach took on dimension and form in the observers glasses, it would be too late to make any changes. It would be either go or no go.
Anders was in the secure communications room behind the flight deck, talking via satellite with Langley — with the White House by now for all Gant knew. Squeezing permission out of Karachi's military and Islamabad's government. Pressuring the director and the President to bribe the Pakistanis.
Gant muttered to himself, flicking back, flicking forward once more through the sequence of map sections. Holding, weighing, discarding, hurrying on. The stain of yellow-brown was clearer through the small window. It wore a line of green above it now and, more mistily, a jagged line of brown hills. Beach, trees, hills. The dropping zone had to be on the beach, but where, along this length of coast?
The three pallets would be loosed from the rear doors — fuel, Garcia's MiL, then his own helicopter. Parachutes opening and dragging, the impact of it like landing on the deck of a carrier — and he'd done that, scores of times, though Garcia hadn't and didn't like the idea. With great good luck, the pallets would remain intact and upright and they could release the MiLs, unlock the rotors and rig them, fuel up, and take off, to rejoin the Galaxy in Karachi, always praying the transport had made it.
If he could find the beach.
One road along the coast, no more than a wide dirt track. The villages and tiny resorts and occasional isolated bungalows were strung along it like weak and intermittent fairy lights. He heard the pilot's voice against his cheek.
'It's getting critical, mister.' He no longer used either Gant's name or his rank. Gant was CIA, not air force; an obscure kind of enemy. He was intent upon wrestling the mission to a new shape, and the pilot was no longer in command of the tanker crew. Gant might just kill them with his scheme. 'Our best estimate is — ETA over the coast in six minutes. That will leave you, at most, another four minutes of flying at zero feet before I have to ditch, or you re out the back door and I can still make Karachi. Got that?'
'I understand,' Gant replied, waving one hand to silence the fierce whispering the pilots ultimatum had created. 'Where do we cross the coast, on your present heading?'
'Somewhere — Charlie?' Gant heard the navigator muttering, then: 'West of some God-forsaken place called — what? Ras Jaddi— village called Pasni on a low headland. Got it?'
Gant flicked through the sections of map on the cassette loaded into the display. 'I got it.' Ras Jaddi, a tiny headland, a speck of atoll? No, nothing except beach, the narrow strip before the trees. That yellow smudge he could see through the window. Ras Jaddi.
'Well, mister?'
Between Ras Jaddi and Ras Shahid, then. Within that fifty-mile stretch. He flicked at the buttons, watched the map unroll backward now, from east to west. Where was there a beach?
He had told Anders to pressure Langley s satellite photography experts into some immediate response. Supply background data, consult photographs, records, files — all the while knowing that there would be time only for a blind guess, the one quick overflight and look-down, then the decision of yes or no.
Beach—
