'I'm coming out. Good work.'
He thrust the receiver loudly back onto its rest. Half out of the beanbag, as if born from its depths, Rodin's face cracked into desperation as the call ended.
Priabin looked at him for a moment. Perhaps the concierge wouldn't inform the general, without being asked… he might just play it safe anyway. Even the KGB could give him a lot of trouble… no time to worry about it. Quickly, leave him.
He felt cheated and was enraged at the fact. He could have made him talk, he was certain of it, with another shot of cocaine to clear his head, loosen his tongue. He was so close—
His hand clenched into a fist.
Leave—
He hurried into the hall and to the door. Listened. Opened the door, heard footsteps below. Closed the door softly and ran up the short flight of stairs to the top floor.
Holding his breath, he watched General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin use a key to open the door of his son's flat. From the bend in the staircase, he peered down at the top of the general's cap. The door shut behind him.
'Damn — oh, damnation,' he breathed, grinding his teeth. He was possessed by the certainty that he would never have another opportunity to talk to Valery Rodin about
Anders stood in the chill darkness. The wind from the mountains around Peshawar cut at the small exposed areas of his cheeks and forehead and nose. Gritty dust was whirled against his face. Lights were dotted and clumped on the hills around the airfield, and helicopters drifted unseen, their noises muted, across the plain. Light spilled from the open hold of the Galaxy as the first of the two MiLs was pushed down the ramp from the rear doors and onto the tarmac.
The tail boom of the Hind-D, Gant's MiL, dropped like a signaling arm, then the fat body of the helicopter rolled down the ramp. With furious, controlled haste, the Galaxy's load crew unshipped and rerigged the rotors, as Gant had done on the sandbar. He watched the crewmen descend, move away. Almost immediately, its rotors began to wind up, after the car backfire of the engine-start. The noise grumbled upward, toward the final whine. He held the transceiver absently to the side of his face, where his mouth wetted the fur trim on the hood of his parka. Each time the wind dropped or idled, he could vaguely feel the radiated heat from the Galaxy's huge engines. They had landed no more than seven minutes before from Karachi; it was almost seven-thirty, local time. Seven-thirty, too, in Baikonur, a thousand miles to the north of them. Gant had to be in — and out — while the darkness of this single night persisted. He had perhaps twelve hours — eleven…
Anders shivered, from the cold and from the accumulated tension of the flight from Karachi, from the tensions of the entire day. It was as if they had infected and reinfected one another in the Galaxy's hold with bad nerves, doubts, anticipatory fear, so that the dimensions of that huge space had diminished, pressing in on all of them. He could still see Gant pacing the hold like an animal in a cage while his Mil was checked and cleaned; Garcia sitting apart, being worn from within by his anxiety; the others quarreling over hands of poker.
He dismissed the images. It was out of his hands now. He, like an actor whose lines have all been spoken, had to retire from the stage. Whatever their condition, it was up to them. However hard that was to accept.
Gant shunted the Mil farther away from the ramp, juggling the stick and the pitch lever to keep the wheels on the tarmac. The second MiL, the 24A tanker helicopter, began to roll down the ramp into the windy night. Anders was a mere spectator. Swiftly, the 24A's rotors, too, were rerigged for takeoff. The two Isotov engines coughed into life, and the rotors began moving, shimmering in the thin moonlight. Hard stars glinted between banks of white cloud. Involuntarily, he glanced away from the two Soviet helicopters, toward the mountains, into Afghan airspace. He cocked his head, no longer able to hear anything except the noise of the MiLs; the decoy helicopters patrolling up and down the border did not seem convincing.
The MiLs bobbed, their wheels hardly in contact with the tarmac of the runway farthest from the tower and the airfield buildings. He depressed the button of the transceiver. His hps tasted the fur of the parka's hood as he spoke.
'Gant? Are you receiving me?'
'Yes,' came the monosyllabic, detached reply; as if its owner had already departed.
'Good luck and Godspeed,' was all Anders could find to say after a moment of hesitation. He shivered. His voice had seemed high and piping amid the turmoil of engine noise and the quiver of his nerves. This is what he had wanted, and now, somehow, he felt guilt approach like a sly messenger, with bad news. It — well, it seemed futile; the MiLs were toys, despite their noise.
'Sure,' Gant replied. His tone might have been mocking, but Anders could not be sure. 'And — yeah, you did OK, Anders. See you.' It hadn't mocked, then.
Gant's Hind-D, its camouflage paint palely mottled in the moonlight, rose to the hover and then immediately passed over Anders' head. The downdraft clutched at him, tugged at his clothing, and dust whirled in his face. When he looked again, after furiously rubbing his eyes, he saw through a wet veil the shadows of the two MiLs moving away to the northwest. The Pakistani helicopters waited only a few miles away to shepherd them to the pass that was their chosen crossing point into Afghan airspace. After that, Gant and the others were entirely on their own. He could do nothing; nobody could.
He felt himself to be an adult attempting, through fear or a crushing sense of inadequacy, to recapture the unquestioning innocence of a child. The litany did not work, it was merely the prayer of an unbeliever.
The noise of the two helicopters, now Hind-D and Hind-A, gunship and troop transport purporting to belong to the Soviet Frontal Aviation Army and attached to a unit serving in Afghanistan, diminished toward the border. He shivered again and stared at the empty Galaxy. The night surrounded the hard light from the hold and the shadow of the fuselage. The transport aircraft was a remote island in the inhospitable sea of the airfield. The two vanished MiLs were no more than bottles on water; a cry for help. Unreal, fragile.
Now he knew it wouldn't work. Too much could go wrong. It was all too risky.
TWO
MASTERS OF WAR
In a world of steel-eyed death And men fighting to be warm…
7: Bid the Players Make Haste
Gant ran through the moving-map display, projected on the main tactical screen, surveying their entire crossing of Afghanistan, a thin, silver snail trail across the fleeting sequence of maps. Peshawar to Kabul, but keeping well to the east of the capital and its radars and air force units, and flying through the foothills of the Hindu Kush, which formed a bony radar and infrared shield. Laghman Province, then Nuristan and Takhar and Kunduz provinces, before reaching the thick purple line that represented the Soviet border.
Their course stayed as much in the mountains as possible, as far east of the main areas of military activity as satellite surveillance and CIA secret reports from the
