Aeroflot computer from the KGB offices; the airline, thank God, was still KGB rather than army, even out here. Mikhail had the tape of his conversation with Rodin. Yes, that was safe. The little incantations of his successes that night calmed his breathing, cooled his body. He looked at Kedrovs face, crumbling like waxy, old cheese; the portrait was almost complete. Kedrov's rescuers next, then Rodin… the thought of Rodin was like the hollow tooth to which the tongue inevitably returns. He winced. But if he had not left the boy, he would have just continued to refuse, even threatened Priabin with his father, denied everything. He had had to be left alone with his growing fears. Through them, Priabin might come to help.
His anxiety would not go away. To allay it, he snapped at Kedrov: 'What do you know about
As if he had been practicing his response to just that question, Kedrov flung back at him: 'Nothing. Nothing at all. What are you talking about?'
'You know something, Kedrov — you know,' Priabin murmured. 'It's in your eyes.' Priabin felt calm once more, albeit temporarily, he suspected. The cabin seemed less shadowy and cramped. Katya and Kedrov and he formed a still, restful painting as they waited.
Until four o'clock.
Then Rodin would have to become his absolute priority.
His speed was no more than ninety miles per hour. The Hind wove its way along the channels and roads and railway tracks of a derelict silo complex. Canallike gouges in the flat land. The complex had been abandoned in the early seventies, when all passages and missile railways had been tunneled underground. Satellite photography had shown this place unchanged for more than fifteen years. Dust flew up behind the helicopter. Kedrov's transponder was less than five minutes away now.
He jerked the Hind aside violently, avoiding a fallen power cable that had suddenly draped itself in front of the cockpit as if hanging from the dark sky. The helicopter rolled, then he righted it.
He studied the map display. He was working to the largest scale now, and the details were more sketchy, adapted from countless satellite pictures. The thin, dark trail of a shallow stream, barely running on the surface at all, lay ahead of the white dot that represented the helicopter. He lifted out of a gully. In his mirrors, skeletal gantries and towers leaned or remained upright without purpose. Beyond them, the bathing place was lost to sight. On the map, fireflies moved now that he was in open sky. Russian crackled and flew in his headset.
His conflicting emotions had receded, lost in routines, in flying the helicopter. There was an abiding sense of moving closer to the center of a web, of deliberately putting his foot on a branch-covered pit. Otherwise, the fear had diminished, the sense of panic that had made him turn west and begin to run was under control. He was wound tight as a spring, but there was an unreality about the danger and an excitement that welled in him. He believed he could get to Kedrov, believed he could get him out — despite the odds against him. He had recovered his ego. There was a cold, machinelike exhilaration about his attempt that swept even self-preservation aside, for the moment. But the whole thing was narrowing like a blind alley. It was going to be close, very close.
He noticed sedge waving and bowing like corn beneath the Hind's belly as he was approaching the salt marshes. The troop transport, a heavy Mil-8 Hip, had collected the GRU search party and was moving on a course almost parallel to his own. If he glanced to port, he could just make out the distant white legs of twin searchlights walking across the landscape, shining down from the Mil-8's belly. Collision course between himself and as many as two dozen armed GRU soldiers. He dropped over a low bank into the winding course of the stream, which led into the heart of the salt marshes. Ice gleamed like fragments of a broken mirror.
He lost sight of the two walking legs of light and of the forest of abandoned gantries behind him. Airspeed, eighty-five. Time — he glanced at the clock on the main panel — three forty-two. He looked up as the Hind's shadow skimmed a stretch of frozen water. No navigation lights, only the cold stars. He was sweating freely now. Distance to target, four miles. A clump of dwarf bushes leaned from the bank of the stream. Icy sedge stood out from both banks like the spikes of an insect-devouring plant, ready to close over the helicopter.
Call signs, reports, instructions rang in his ears. Though he knew they were not aware of his presence, not yet.
KGB helicopter, routine flight, would be his story. By the time they checked him out — despite the absence of a flight number on their radars, which would make them curious — he would have completed ingress, be on his way out again… be there Kedrov, be there, you bastard.
The padding of his helmet above his eyebrows was damp, and rubbed as he moved his head from side to side. He was too hot in the leather jacket.
As the marshes spread out more flatly, he glanced to port. Yes, the lights walked on in the distance. The Mil-8 was now slightly ahead of him, or so it seemed. Stunted trees in a clump. The Hind rose—
— flicked aside. Violently, as the rotors of another helicopter caught the moonlight, and cockpit lights enlarged in his vision. He swung to one side of the Mil-2 and slightly higher. Altitude, six hundred feet, rising like a bobbing cork onto every radar screen monitoring the area.
Russian bursting from the headset, a stream of oaths and curses and a challenge that was without suspicion; just simple fear and relief flooding the ether.
'Calm down, comrade,' he heard himself saying through clenched teeth. The other Mil was turning in his mirrors, to face after him. Reeds and frozen water flowed beneath the Hind. 'No damage done,' he continued to soothe. 'KGB flight Alpha-Three, what more do you want? Fucking around the sky like a swarm of flicking locusts.' He listened then.
'… purpose of flight?'
'None of your fucking business. We have choppers, too, comrade.' He flew on, watching the Mil recede in his mirrors, watching its blind face turn slowly away as if to resume its inspection of a plotted route. He heard its pilot or copilot reporting the near-collision, reporting his cover story. He was logged in. Now the questions would begin. He dropped down to fifty feet, disappearing from radar.
Islets, stretches of reed-filled ice, stunted trees. The marshes. Navigation lights to port and starboard, but patrolling, not converging. The Mil-8 s searchlights a dull glow away to port, but closer now. Collision course. He felt weak but forced himself to study the map display, to draw his gaze away from the clock on the panel, to ignore the fireflies superimposed on the sketchy landscape.
Something flicked at the edge of eyesight as disturbed water birds rose in the night. The white dot on the map converged on the islet curled like a sleeping cat and the other that was kidney-shaped — the agreed rendezvous!
He adjusted the contrast to improve the low-light TV picture on the main screen. Gray shapes glowed unreally. He bobbed over a rise — airspeed seventy — drew the Hind s shadow like a black cape across a stretch of ice, glanced to starboard… yes?
Then rose onto radar screens once more, but he had to be sure — a hundred, two hundred feet, then the shape of the islet revealed itself. Catlike — kidney-dish islet lying across a stretch of frozen water from it, the skeletal shadow of a rotting jetty.
He dropped the Hind, as if determined to break through the gleaming ice. Navigation lights around him were lost in the background of stars. The wind seemed no longer to hurl itself against the helicopter. The agreed rendezvous. He was there; target. The white dot that represented the Hind was as still as the Bethlehem star.
He flicked away, keeping low, making the reeds bend into the wind with his passage. Stunted trees in the foreground, jutting out of the land's slight undulations. He slowed his speed, judging distances, watching the screens, the radar altimeter, port and starboard of him, the ground… where were the lights from the Mil-8? He could not see them. He put the helicopter into the hover. Dropped the undercarriage onto a slight incline, bounced the Hind, rolled it forward, wheels hardly in contact with the frozen ground, until the dwarf firs seemed to surround it. Switched off the engines.
Silence.
The wind, then—
— and nothing else. Reeds grew as high as the miniature trees, as if springing up that moment around the helicopter. He felt like a gazelle in veldt grass; there were lions out there he could not see. Still, cooling, the Hind could be overlooked from above. The world consisted of only two dimensions. The reeds were almost as tall as the fuselage. Good enough.
He opened the cockpit door. He did not concern himself with Adamov, who was securely tied and gagged. He drew a sketch map from his flight overalls, checked the compass display on his watch, oriented himself. Islets to
