The entrance to the cavern had to be big enough.
He could see crumbled sections of rock face, openings, the gouge of the river bed waiting for the spring. Boulders littered the floor.
He edged the Hind toward the eastern wall of the valley. He glanced continually in his mirrors, quartered the sky through the cockpit Plexiglas. Nothing, yet.
The imperative overcame the qualification. He needed time to think, to plan, to revise, a time when he wasn't flying. He turned the helicopter slowly nose on to the cavern and shunted the machine gently toward it.
'Horizontal clearance — nineteen meters… vertical, six meters thirty, skipper,' Mac's voice murmured from the transceiver. The mouth of the cave was wide enough, tall enough, though it was close.
'OK, Mac.'
He whirled the Hind on its axis like a matador's cape, scanning the clifftop above him, the valley around them, the empty sky, pinpricked with stars, lighter where the wash of moonlight spread from the full, pale disk. No shadows, no silhouettes, nothing. He poised the helicopter opposite the mouth of the cavern.
'IR lamp on,' he announced, tugging the infrared goggles over his helmet and adjusting them. A gray world, the light from the lamp splashing like dull paint into the blackness. The sense of the cavern's size impinged upon him; the place, opened out behind the entrance, retreated in every direction beyond the reach of the lamp.
He shunted the Hind forward, its undercarriage hanging just above littered boulders. Most of all, he was aware of the rotors whirling above his head. The dimensions of the cavern's mouth were as clear in his mind as if he were reading them on white paper. Mac's voice murmured the changing clearances on the right or left. The main panel glowed; he scanned it continuously with the rapidity and repetition of a child avoiding cracks in the pavement to fend off bad luck.
Ice glittered. The cavern mouth loomed as if about to swallow them.
He suppressed a shiver. The rotor tips caught the infrared lighting thrown back from dark, cold walls. The rotors formed a dish, not touching the walls of rock. Not touching. Mac was inside the cavern, then so was he. Rotor noise boomed in the enclosing, retreating dark. The pale, ghostly light from the IR lamp made the interior open up into dusky, shadowy heights like the nave of an ill-lit cathedral. The goggles revealed hanging ice, drifted snow, rock, undulations like those of the seabed, and a roof stretching upward beyond the light. His breath eased out, controlled. Mac exhaled noisily. 'Cold in here,' was his only comment.
Gant turned the Hind slowly in the hover. He flicked off the IR lamp and pulled off his goggles. The mouth of the cavern was pale with moonlight.
'Mac?'
'I can't hear anything, skipper. I'll go take a look.'
Gant lowered the undercarriage until it bounced and the Hind settled. He switched off the two Isotov engines, and the rotors grumbled down to stillness. Silence seemed audible after the last echoing noises died away. He opened the cockpit door. Icy cold assailed him like a bully. Mac opened the hinged canopy of the gunner's cockpit and dropped to the floor. Gant removed his helmet. The cavern was huge around him. He felt the darkness as if it were moving. He jumped from the door, a lamp flicking on in his hand. Mac's lamp wobbled its light toward the mouth of the cavern. Gant waved the powerful, inadequate beam around him as if to locate a dangerous animal. A dry gouge in the floor stretched away toward the back of the cavern; the course of the former river or tributary that had excavated this hole in the rocks. He saw the lamp's beam glance off a waterfall of ice. There were no stars or moonlight above him, only at the entrance.
His head still rang with the noise of the rotors, as if he had been flying the Hind for days without pause. He had in fact been in the air for two and a half hours. He leaned for a moment against the fuselage, his hand and arm remaining numb from his fierce grip on the control column.
'Mac? OK?' he whispered into the transceiver he had detached from its fitting in the cockpit.
'Skipper,' Mac's hoarse whisper replied; it seemed loud in the silence. 'I can hear the MiG — turning, I guess. Coming this way, for sure. Jesus, I'm cold.' His tone was expressive. He hardly needed to add: 'What the hell got into Garcia?' for Gant to understand the force of his reaction. Gant, having flicked off the lamp, focused his night vision, and could pick out Mac's body at the entrance, hunched as if in illness.
'OK, Mac, OK,' he replied, realizing there was a shiver of reaction in his own voice. 'OK.'
He heard the approaching noise of the MiG wash into the darkness.
'She's coming,' Mac announced, his teeth chattering. 'Skipper — shit, did you
«v»»
I saw.
The Flogger howled down the valley, its engine noise booming against the cliffs and into the cavern. Almost at once, the noise began to retreat. It was maybe five or six minutes since Gant had picked up the MiG. It had already flown perhaps as much as three hundred miles of its combat radius. In another five minutes, it would be forced to return to Kunduz to refuel, but a replacement would be in the air before then and on-station when the Flogger turned for home. They would still be trapped in the cavern; but he couldn't regret his decision, not even in the moment when the darkness was beaten like a gong by the noise of the MiG's engine. He could never have outrun the fighter, never have avoided its missiles — Garcia hadn't been able to.
'He just broke up,' Gant murmured into the transceiver.
'Where does that leave us?' Mac almost wailed from the entrance. 'Skipper — this situation is shit!'
'Maybe. What about the gunships?'
'I can hear one, maybe both — no, just one.'
'I'm coming to take a look.'
After he had walked a few paces, he looked back at the Hind. There was the faintest glow from the main instrument panel in the cockpit, but the bulk of the helicopter was in total darkness. It would not be seen from outside except, maybe, by means of an infrared lamp. The mouth of the cavern was a pale expression of surprise. Stars glinted. Mac's bulk, to one side of the entrance, was pressed back against the rock. He was holding the bulky Noctron night viewer to his face. Its range was more than five hundred meters, maybe better than that with bright moonlight. Gant could hear the approaching MiL.
'The second one's moved off to the south,' Mac whispered as Gant reached him. 'This guy's gonna get swallowed by this cave mouth if he don't slow down.' He ducked farther into the shadow.
Gant looked around. A lamp might just reach the Hind — just.
'Here, let me take a look.'
'Sure.' Mac handed him the night viewer. His voice seemed fierce now, angry. He appeared able to suppress his realization about the loss of their reserve fuel, hide it inside his rage at Garcias death. The thought of the fuel made Gant shiver; the darkness spread around him like the inhospitable country in which he was stranded.
He leaned gently out of the shadow.
The gunship hovered in the valley, moonlight splashing on its camouflage paint. It was a twin of the helicopter behind them, a 24D. No troops, then, just the crew — no, if it didn't have an auxiliary tank aboard it could still be holding up to eight soldiers. He watched it. The main door remained closed. Its blunt head turned toward them. The Isotov engine intakes were like insect eyes above the squat, gleaming cockpit. Its noise masked the engine of the coursing MiG, away out of sight.
Only minutes, Gant thought. Because of the rock that surrounded them, he could no longer monitor the Soviet Tac channel. If only they would give him a gap, a sliver of time between the departure of the Flogger and the arrival of its replacement. He could not even listen to the Mil talking to its base. If only they sent more helicopters, not more fighters; fighters were virtually useless for the kind of work the Soviets needed to do in the search for him. They had to, he decided. It was too obvious a tactic to ignore. Helicopters — this gunship and the Flogger had, doubtless, already requested backup. Excitedly reporting the one kill, the temporary loss of the second target — yes, they'd send out more gunships.
Auxiliary tanks? The Flogger had been carrying one under its belly, but no wingtip tanks. It had been flying a lo-lo-lo mission, with no high-altitude work. Its combat range would have been severely reduced. It should be leaving.
He saw the MiG, winking like an intruding star, high above the valley. Then it banked to the southwest and was gone almost at once.
