and squeezed its lever. Fuel flowed after the click. Gant felt as if he had drunk cold, fresh water. Oasis. The fuel's transfer was sweet. The headlights were flat beams now, colliding with the wood and metal of the garage. Ice sparkled on the corrugated roof above him and on the weedy pavement. Stiff grass rattled in the wind.
Gant remembered needlelike outcrops rising over the hills through which the Hind had flitted. Minarets and mosques sparkling with ice in the hard moonlight. Perhaps Bukhara, perhaps some other town. His flight over Soviet Central Asia had been like Ashing down some narrowing tunnel: hills, stretches of sand that seemed red even by moonlight, dry rivers, oases, encampments where camels lumped together like full sacks on the ground, as still the tents near them. Fires dying down, scuttling and alarmed figures moving. Herds of goats, trading caravans. Still irrigation water and reservoirs. It was as if the oncoming headlights illuminated the past hours. They were now clear, confined by the emerging dark shape around them that had become a truck. The Uzbek looked up from the nozzle of the pump without real interest. Gant's hands tensed, bunched into fists, and his face twisted to the beginnings of some cry of protest. Army?
Civilian.
He sighed audibly with relief. The hours of avoiding radar, other aircraft and helicopters, towns and villages had worn at him like waves at an old cliff. He stood more erect, as if to deny his weariness. The truck drew onto the pavement. The Uzbek made a noise in his throat that might have signaled recognition. The truck pulled to a halt. Gant heard the hand brake scratching on.
The young man who got down almost at once from the passenger side of the canvas-hooded truck was wearing an army uniform. Gant's heart banged in his chest. He was grinning as he stared, hands on his hips, at the Hind drawn up at the pumps.
Uniform? How—?
The canvas covering the back of the truck rattled in the icy breeze. The driver, who wore a sleeveless sheepskin jacket and a cloth cap, got down from the cab. Only the passenger was in uniform.
And was approaching.
Russian, not Uzbek. White skin in the moonlight, white teeth, a white hand raised in greeting. A captain, but young. A yawn, one hand stretching away a cramp. The driver hung back, as if out of respect. The young man grinned again. Gant felt his attention mesmerized by the uniform, the shoulder flashes.
At seven yards, Gant saw that the captain was GRU, military intelligence—
— and went toward the younger man, disarming him with a smile, an extended hand.
The captain took his hand, shook it. Despite the icy wind, the GRU mans hand was still warm from the heated cab. His features registered a slight shock at the coldness of Gant's grip. There was a sharp smell of vegetables — cabbages? — in the air; presumably the truck's cargo.
Why was a GRU captain stepping out of that vehicle?
Cabbages, onions, the earthiness of potatoes. Gant's sense of smell was heightened by nerves. The name of the firm on the truck was in Uzbek, not Cyrillic. He wrenched his mind away from the irrelevant. The captain's scrutiny was inexperienced, but nevertheless there. No hint of suspicion, but questions were forming in his eyes — a military helicopter, there?
Gant's own rank matched that of the captain, but the younger man would assume the precedence of GRU over Aviation Army rank. Gant's attention concentrated, narrowing every perspective, on the shoulder flashes, the arm badges — the tiny, untwinkling jewels of the man's significance.
'You're a long way from home, comrade,' he announced heartily.
'— words out of my mouth,' the captain replied. Laughed. Finally released Gant's grip. 'A bloody helicopter at a filling station? You must be the squadron joker!'
'Ran out of fuel,' Gant complained.
'Long way from home. Not as far as you, man. I'm just hitching a ride to Bukhara, then on to Samarkand.' His accent was Moscow, perhaps Ukrainian — Kiev? European Russia. The master race. Gant's own accent — his mother's accent — was distinctive. 'You're Georgian, by your accent?' the young captain added.
'Yes,' Gant replied. 'From Surami — you know it, the thermal resort.' His shoulders shrugged.
'Away from the Black Sea?' Gant merely nodded. 'Don't know it,' the captain continued. 'One-horse town, is it?'
'Just about.' His voice was easier, lighter. He spun the web of conversation, rank, and comradeship. Then the captain asked:
'Afghanistan, if I'm not mistaken?' His eyes were sharper as he studied Gant. They were alert, as if studying some mental list of explanations. The night and the distances leaped at Gant, reminding him that the Hind was misplaced by hundreds of miles, was suspicious here.
He was suddenly aware of his own cover story. Where was he going? From where? Alma-Ata, army headquarters, was eight hunted miles to the east. His cover was now outdated, an obvious fake.
Beneath their conversation, their camaraderie and humor, the fear continued to flow like a river. Gant shivered. The wind seemed to be strengthening. Yet the two Uzbeks seemed oblivious to it; they were smoking near the pumps. Gant heard his teeth chattering and the captain grin.
'Adamov,' the captain announced.
What is my name? His identity lay in his breast pocket, with his papers.
What is my name?
He had forgotten his cover name.
The captain s eyes glazed with suspicion.
9: Heart of the Matter
'Let's find ourselves some coffee. This Uzbek moron can fill the helicopter on his own. My driver can keep him company.'
Gant realized that the captain's words, as he gestured toward the low wooden bungalow, were meant to extend the moment of suspicion. Just how long would this pilot take to introduce himself, explain himself? The moment was a rubber band being stretched to breaking.
'What in hell are you doing getting down from a cabbage truck, comrade?' Gant exclaimed, forcing laughter. 'A captain in the GRU — not quite the right sort of transport, huh?' His hands came out, palms up. Friend, harmless, they suggested, while his voice asked
The captain was disconcerted, but it might have been no more than his resentment of the familiarity of Gant's tone. It was the captain who should patronize, if either of them did.
'Just finished a job up-country,' he replied, his hand still patting at Gant's shoulder and turning him toward the wooden building, where a grubby light filtered through thin, unlined curtains. The wind moaned, rattling the corrugated plastic above his head, making drooping rotor blades of the Hind quiver. There was a sense of Mutual cursing in the conversation between the truck driver and the parage owner; racial suspicion and hatred. 'Some of these fucking Muslims are giving trouble — don't want to fight their Islamic brothers in Afghanistan. You know what they're like. Pigs.' He spat obviously and loudly, turning toward the two Uzbeks as he did so. The wind carried the gobbet of spitde and splashed it against the side of the gas pump, near the bending garage owner's head, which did not ^rn or look up. The truck driver's eyes flickered, but the expression died as easily as a match flame in the wind. 'Pigs,' the GRU captain repeated, evidently convinced of the manifest truth of his generalization. 'We shot a few — a number of the conspirators and mutineers were tried and executed according to military law,' he corrected himself solemnly. His eyes were smiling and flinty with satisfaction. Then he belched, and Gant smelled the drink on his breath for the first time. 'All done by the book, according to the book, for the book.' Captain Adamov grinned. 'Bang!' He strutted a few steps, hand curled at the end of his outstretched arm. His trigger finger squeezed perhaps half a dozen times as he paused behind remembered necks, watched remembered corpses.
Gant, controlling the shiver that the mime had induced, watched Adamov as he returned to his side, nudging him. 'The rest of them have been shipped off now,' he remarked. 'A few more GRU and GLAVPUR people among their officers, of course.'
'Where—' Gant cleared his throat, glancing at the dial of the gas pump still spinning as his tanks filled. After the underbelly tanks, the auxiliary tank in the cabin. It would be minutes yet. 'Where was this, comrade?' The driver
