Winter Hawk

to the landscape around him, which undulated now like some great living thing. It was not a mountain range with valleys and hollows and peaks and knifelike passes, but a great coiling snake, and as dangerous.

The flanks of the mountains gleamed with snow in the bright moon. Garcia's MiL, in his mirrors, was silvered by the light and appeared mottled like a cow because of its camouflage. Mac's helmet, in the gunner's cockpit below him, was like a silver dome. Lights from Mac's screens and displays winked and shone beyond the gunner's shoulders.

Gant glanced at the fuel gauges. They would not have to set down to refuel until they were far inside Soviet territory, maybe not for two or three hundred miles. The return flight had a critically small margin of fuel. Once they abandoned the second MiL, they would have just enough, just enough, to fly the same route home — while they waited, alerted and watching for them, all along the thousand miles of desert and mountain.

He dismissed the thought. It interfered with this phase of the mission, to remain undetected in Afghan airspace.

They were seventy miles northeast of Kabul, skirting the mountains that contained the fertile Panjshir Valley. Ahead of them, another hundred and fifty miles to the Soviet border. An hours flying at their present speed and without deviating from their plotted course, which was already in the onboard computer.

Aircraft activity was heavy, but it was related to a known new push against rebel tribesmen. No one was looking for them, not yet. But it meant that a lot of aircraft and helicopters were in the air— his cover, but also his peril. One visual sighting, or straying onto any one of thirty or forty radar screens, and he would be called to identify himself. He wanted to use his radar instead of relying on eyesight, but it would be like making ripples on a pond, attracting hunting fish. The last time he had briefly employed the radar — counting the seconds it was operating with a mounting breathlessness — he had spotted a high-flying reconnaissance aircraft, slow-moving enough to be an Ilyushin 11–18, moving westward well to the north of them. The flick, too, of a low, fast fighter moving away. They remained undetected. He had switched off the radar gratefully, sweating with relief.

Now his own radar, and those of Soviet aircraft, were virtually useless in the mountains. The ELINT systems on the lumbering reconnaissance aircraft were incapable of picking them out from the ground scatter of hills, valleys, snow, rock, rushing water. You're safe, he told himself once more, but the thought struck hollow.

He banked the Mil around the sheer face of a cliff, tilting the rotors away from it. Garcia duplicated his maneuver, then he, too, leveled his helicopter. Far below, water gleamed in a thin crack. Snow mottled a high peak and lay more thickly in a mountain pass. A black-and-white landscape. At any moment, an aircraft or helicopter could appear, startling him, calling on him for his IDs. That danger remained and did not seem to lessen. Minute by minute, it stretched undiminishing into the hours ahead.

He dodged and slunk through the high mountains, the noise of his rotors booming back from rock faces, hollowing down long, narrow valleys.

There were over two hundred assault helicopters stationed in Afghanistan, by Langley's expert reckoning. Two extra could easily be overlooked, especially if their pilots wanted it that way.

On the moving-map display, he could pick out the main Soviet air base at Parwan, the most northerly on their route before they crossed the border. Radar would tell him what kind and degree of activity there was around it, but he resisted the clamoring temptation. He flew into an opening where the mountains seemed to part to west and north, and exposed him like curtains being drawn back on a huge, open stage of dark air. He sensed, as well as saw, the moonlight flowing over the MiL, saw its shadow flit and tremble across the valley below. The empty, open sky stretched away on every side—

— hide-and-seek. His eyes quartered the night. Hide-and-seek. He increased his airspeed to one seventy, and waited, relieved when the noise of the rotors hammered back at him from rock faces as the mountains closed in once more. Cover; the safety of rock.

A stream of Russian, blurting in his headset, alarmed him like the sudden cry of discovery. The radio had been tuned to the principal Soviet TAC (secure tactical communications) channel as soon as they crossed the Pakistan border. It had been mostly silent until now. The codes Frontal Aviation Army units in Afghanistan used had been broken by Langley; the radio set itself had been reconstructed by DARPA specialists. The voices had been little more than distant, vague whispers.

Until now.

Something was close, perhaps too close.

He turned up the set's volume as the signal frequency locked. It was a… helicopter pilot, talking to the AWACS Ilyushin. A quick-fire, sudden, excited burst. What was it? What—? Unidentified radar trace, which had disappeared from the Ilyushin's long-range radar screens… your sector, he heard, chilled.

He had been picked up by the patrolling early-warning aircraft, either he or Garcia; it didn't matter which. He listened, knowing that the alerted helicopter would now climb, try to look down, find him again. The interference of the mountains would be like a washing shoal of fish crossing the enemy radar screens. It would obscure any clear blip he might make. At least, he had to hope that would be the case.

Where was it? There was no heading, no positional reference. Where? The Russian continued on the HF set, itself made intermittent by the surrounding mountains. Where? South—southeast, he heard, and then the distance. Looking at the moving-map display, he knew the Mil was close enough to be dangerous. He must have erupted onto one of the Ilyushin's screens in a clear gap of air where no helicopter flight was logged or expected. He had been visible for long enough to be pinpointed, but there was no identifying IFF number alongside the blip to explain who he was. To the Uyushin, he was — unofficial. If the Ilyushin really started looking…

He wished himself alone, without Garcia trailing behind him and already wound tight as a watch spring. He could not spare the effort, if it really came to hide-and-seek, to watch out for Garcia and his crew when all his energies were needed to stay alive. It was a simple, brute fact.

More voices in the headset; two more call signs and positions. A routine patrol instructed to alter course, to overfly the sector in which two unidentified contacts—there was a boyish excitement in the pilots' responses. No one could imagine what kind of unidentified aircraft would be this deep into Afghan airspace; it was probably a false alarm, someone with a damaged radio T u/s IFF transponder, but it would be good practice to seek and find, a game, good fun.

'Major?'

'Shut up, Garcia,' Gant snapped into the transceiver near his head. 'Stay close to me.'

He dipped the MiL's blunt nose. Mac raised his hand in the gunner's cockpit. The helicopter's shadow rushed over gleaming snow, down into the cleft of a dark valley. He hugged the ground clutter like a hedgehog rolling itself in disguising leaves, and pulled the airspeed back to just above one hundred mph. Nap-of-the-earth flying, a feature of all the textbooks. No instruments, no systems; eyesight and reflexes. He felt the exhilarating danger of his plunge. The altimeter unwound with stunning quickness. Garcia, behind him, seemed to fall more slowly than he.

Come on, come on, Garcia—

He leveled the helicopter. Rotor noise boomed back from the pressed-close cliffs on either side. He skimrtied down the long funnel of a deep valley cleft, his eyes and hands aware of each other, his shoulders tense as if the residence of all his reflexes and experience. Stars gleamed at the end of the funnel where the land dropped away. They were cutting across the mountains at the eastern end of the Panjshir and moving northeast. Off-course, for the moment. Garcia's Mil bobbed in his mirrors like a cork afloat on a rocky sea.

Radio — nothing down here. He had dived into deep water, escaping almost like a submarine by going deep. It was lightless down there, and he had no idea of the whereabouts of the dangerous fish that were hunting him. Safety was a two-edged sword.

Stars, snowfields, a sense of flatness—are they above? — a scattering of small lights away to the east of him. The hard stars overhead betrayed no gaps or shadows that might have been the fuselage of a searching aircraft.

Radio — nothing. On the moving map, he pinpointed his position as one hundred miles northeast of Kabul, fifty miles from the air base at Parwan. Radio?

Radio.

Russian again. A mobile listening post, for Christ's sake. Here, here, close, too damn close.