'OK,' he said, and handed the headset to Anders. 'Tell him,' he said softly. 'Everything's ready.' His fierce whisper contained no element of temptation, merely inevitability. 'We have to go. You can clean up after the horses have left. Do it.'
Anders took the headset as if it might explode in his large hand. His eyes were troubled and vague. For him, the beach ahead of them was not deserted but mined with diplomatic catastrophes. His career, too, was endangered by Gant s simple recklessness.
He glanced at the MiLs, at the voice-filled hold, the hurrying cargo crew, the sea, and the nearing strip of sand. Then seemed to look into the distances clouded with heat.
'Can you make Karachi, skipper — afterward?'
'If you're praying real hard, Mr. Anders, then maybe.'
'And you, Gant, can you make Karachi?'
Gant nodded. The coast was less than five miles away. The transport was closing in on it, beginning to turn onto a new, westward heading. White sand.
Anders urged: 'We can get down just by declaring an emergency. It's you they have to let land, after we've reneged on the original deal — you're not supposed to be seen.'
'I know it. Look, we have camouflage nets, the works. We'll wait for you to contact us. Send for the rest of the family when you're settled in the new job, huh?'
Anders nodded. 'You have clearance, skipper. My authority. Good luck.'
'Thank you, Mr. Anders. ETA, thirty seconds. Gant?'
'Yes?'
'We'll set up the visual markers. You'll hear us, but don't give me trouble. It's out of your hands. OK?'
'OK.' Gant sounded reluctant, but took off the headset.
During the first overflight of the beach, the flight crew would select visual markers, make their fixes, define exact distances. Making the strip of sand a grid, a pattern — a dropping zone.
He looked at Anders. ''Thanks.'
'For what?'
'Seeing the inevitable.'
'Shouldn't you—?'
'I want to see that beach.'
They stared through adjacent windows. Perhaps six hundred feet up now, no more. The sea stretched away from them without wrinkling, without waves, like some vast lagoon. The edge of the tide flowed beneath the Galaxy's belly. Its huge shadow, coldly black on the white sand, wing tip over the water's edge. Gant glanced at the frozen frame of the map display, and began to recognize the shallow curve of the beach, the knoll of palms, the cradling arm of the sandbank. The transparent water seemed to run with silver veins, like mercury flowing over a blue-green glass slide. There were no rocks littering the beach, just the sand. He glanced across the hold. Trees flickered in the windows like an old, dark film, beyond the starboard wing.
Straight, flat, wide. The DZ.
'Good luck,' Anders murmured.
'What? Oh, yes. Keep in touch.'
'Wait for my—'
'Sure. It's in the bag. They won't want two Russian choppers sitting on one of their beaches for too long. See you, Anders.'
He left the window. The Galaxy, having completed its check run, was beginning to climb and turn. The flight deck conversation, relayed to the hold, became more desultory. His stomach felt hollow. Nerves gripped him, shaking his body until he clenched down on them. A flight of seabirds, cormorants or pelicans, had risen agitatedly into the air from near the sandbank as the Galaxy flew over them. The captain's voice dismissed them as a possible hazard. Pelicans, he decided. Huge beaks and white bodies. Now settling like scraps of blown paper onto the cool, transparent water.
He winked at Mac, who was already strapped into his seat in the gunner s separate cockpit. Mac grinned.
He strapped himself into his seat, fitted his helmet, checked the cabin for anything not stowed or fixed. Fuel tanks empty. There was no way they could have risked a drop with fuel aboard. They'd fuel up from the drums, using the hand pump on the third pallet.
'Mac?'
'OK, sir.' Mac seemed relieved, fitting once more into his role, their relationship.
'Then just hold on tight. Like the roller coaster, that's all it is.'
The Galaxy was still turning in its great loop to approach the beach from its original heading. The loadmaster appeared below the pilot's cabin. Gant raised his thumb, the loadmaster responded, then turned to watch the drop-signal lamps. He pressed the right earpiece of his headset against his ear and raised his left arm as the red lamp glowed. When the green light replaced it, he would drop his arm and the crewman next to the ramp panel would press the toggle. The drogue chute would be ejected into the slipstream of the Galaxy. The main canopy would trail after it, and then jerk open folly, pulling the first pallet out in an instant, a mere twenty feet above the sand. fie could not tune the VHF set to the Galaxy flight deck's frequency. The intercom system operated by wire, like a telephone. He must sit in ignorance, in silence, until the loadmaster's arm indicated he was on his way. He would know nothing until the drogue chute opened, beginning to pull him through the doors. The feces of the Galaxy's cargo crew, harnessed and helmeted, would be the last thing he saw inside the transport, before they began rushing past him, as if seen from a speeding train. Red light, green light, moving arm, the jerk of the parachutes.
'Garcia?' he asked.
'Major?' Formality seemed to assist Garcia, just as it did with Mac. Or were they still distancing themselves from his decision? Garcia s voice issued from the walkie-talkie secured to the cockpit framework. They would use them for close-proximity communications over Afghanistan and inside Soviet airspace, thus reducing the chances of any radio transmissions being detected.
He flicked to Transmit.
'You OK?'
'Sure, Major.' Garcia's voice was too quick, too hollow.
'Just cool it. Never been backward out of a Galaxy before?' The mild joke went unappreciated, and Gant merely shrugged. 'Just hang in there, Garcia.'
The Galaxy's course was straight and level once more. Its engines rushed distantly, like a wind. The cockpit seemed to close in around Gant. His hands touched the inert controls of the MiL. He glanced in his mirror—
— jaws opening.
The rear cargo doors of the Galaxy were slowly opening, seemingly in preparation to take some huge bite at the whiteness flowing beneath. Gant held his breath, looking down the flank of his own helicopter, past the 24A and the fuel drums. The doors widened their gape. White sand, the edge of the ripple-less tide, the darkness of trees.
Zero feet. Gant glanced at the loadmaster and the operator over whom he seemed to be leaning.
Three seconds, two—
Green light, glowing to one side of the hold, splashing on the flank of Garcias MiL. The sand rushed now, a white runway as the Galaxy gave the illusion of landing.
'Sweet Mother of Jesus,' someone was muttering. Garcia?
Edge of the water. Sand. Green light.
Go—
In his mirror, Gant saw the pallet of secured fuel drums lurch toward the mouth of the cargo hold, its drogue chute out in the sunlight, the main canopy opening like a painted mouth.
5: Flotsam
