Winter Hawk

nothing came. Slowly he stood upright.

He picked up the haversack, listened but heard nothing, no alarm, and went to the roof's edge. Four stories down, the garages. Out of the question. He would have to abandon the car and the rolls of film — most of all, the rolls of film in the paint cans. He wouldn't tell the Americans, definitely not.

He crept along the edge of the roof, aware of the man below, at the corner, in shadow. Aware of the car parked at the front. Aware of the drainpipe. Overhang, gutters, drains, pipes. Explored long before with the bravado of imagination rather than the desperation of necessity. Drainpipe at the side of the building farthest from the streetlamps.

He felt weak. Looked back at the fallen washing. The shirt now looked like a murdered man. He gasped at the image. Fumbled his arms into the haversack's straps, balanced its sudden, new heaviness, then cocked his right leg over the edge of the roof. The concrete alleyway below swam darkly, as if he were suffering from vertigo rather than fear. His hands gripped. He straddled the edge of the roof. Then climbed over, hands icily cold but holding on tightly, feet scrabbling for the ledge and the point of emergence of the drainpipe. The gutter was a channel in the gravelly roof, the drain directly opposite his eyes. His feet found the drainpipe, the tiny ledge, the first clamp. He rested, sweat coldly blinding him for a moment. Then hunched downward into a squatting position, holding on to the thick metal drainpipe. One foot, then the other. Second clamp. He'd even practiced, for God's sake.

Kedrov lowered himself gingerly, fearfully down the drainpipe. His hands were lumps unfeelingly placed at the ends of his aching arms, his feet were numb, so that they hardly sensed the concrete until he had hunched almost into a sitting position in the alleyway. Then he realized and leaned his forehead against the pipe, clinging to it still to prevent himself falling and lying — like the shirt.

He got up slowly, weakly, and pressed into the shadows.

Nothing. Silence. A car passing — jump, then relief — and a television blaring in a ground-floor room. Across the alleyway a block of offices rose six stories. Throwing deep shadow. A ground floor comprising a bookshop, a grocer's, a liquor store. The liquor shop was still open. Just.

Walk now. Quickly.

He stepped out stiffly, as if marching like a bloody soldier. Lessened his stride, tried to appear to be walking easily, without terror's robotism. Held the haversack at his side, almost casually. Turned into the lights, poor as they were they were still bright, and hurried to the door of the liquor shop. Turned for one glance only, then walked past the door and the spilled light that tumbled over him, into further shadow. Passing two people, beginning to hurry once in darkness again, listening, listening with all his body, all his senses, but hearing nothing.

They had assumed, even if they'd seen him, that he'd already been inspected and passed by the watcher near the garage. Anyway, he hadn't emerged from the front doors of the block of flats, so to them he wasn't a resident. Sweat enveloped him, drying now j cold. He bent forward into his hurrying gait. On his own n< alone. Just the call to Orlov, the cry for help.

Come at once, please — please come at once.

They had to, they must come, before the army realized he 1 disappeared and began hunting for him in earnest. Because Lightning, most of all because of Lightning. The film did not mat now; they had to know what he had discovered. They must co quickly.

2: A Flash of Lightning

'Sorry, Major, but you're dead — two times!'

There was a boyish exhilaration in the voice that remained undistorted or diluted by the radio's rush of static. Gant watched the F-15 curve up and away above the desert, into the pale-blue winter morning. Its wings waggled in mocking salute, then speed and altitude transformed it into no more than a straggling, bright, late star. In another moment it was gone, heading back to Nellis, its practice sortie against his helicopter successfully completed.

Gant was unreasonably, violently angry. Mac began speaking over the headphones like a soothing aunt.

'Shut up, Mac,' he warned. 'I don't need it.'

'Skipper,' his gunner insisted, 'we ain't ready for this. The guy had us on the plate and served for breakfast before—'

'Mac, can it.'

Gant swung the Mil-24D around a weathered outcrop of brown rock standing like a chimney out of the desert floor. He felt the machine was as heavy and lifeless as a toy airplane at a fairground, whirling around a tower on a steel rope. He had been caught like a rookie pilot fresh out of school by the F-15 attacker that had been sent to hunt them down in this simulation of combat. The F-15 had found him five minutes up from Nellis, and within another minute and a half he'd recorded two kills. Gant had been unable to even begin to maneuver the lumbering helicopter evasively, not even with the tumbled, broken desert landscape to aid him. He wasn't ready, not by maybe a couple of weeks.

Below him, on a wide, flat ledge perched above the desert, the MiL-24A sat silently, rotors still, the crew of three already relaxed. One of them waved, infuriating him further. Garcia and his crew were even less ready, and now their ship had rotor head trouble and was stranded.

'Garcia, you called home yet?' he snapped, dropping the unwieldy Russian helicopter toward the flat outcrop of rock.

The ether crackled, but no one answered him. Garcia could not hear him because he was out of the cockpit. Angry, Gant eased the Mil in the backwash of its downdraft off the cliff face until its undercarriage settled. Then he switched off the engines and opened his door. Garcia was ambling across the dust-filled gap between the two helicopters.

'You called them?' Gant shouted.

'Sure thing — right away, skipper. They're sending out a big Tarhe helicopter to lift us off of here.' Garcia was grinning, very white and irritatingly. He brushed one hand through his hair now that the movement of Gant's rotors had stopped. 'Say, the guy really zapped you, Major — like that!' His right hand motioned like a gun firing.

'We're not ready, Garcia. I know it, you know it.'

'We ain't going any place, Major, not till they can repair what's wrong with my ship — one hell of a noise and some really wild—'

'Save it, Garcia. Tell the repairman when the tow truck gets here.'

As he turned away, he saw Mac waggle one hand at Garcia to silence him. Gant's mood darkened further.

'Coffee, Major?'

Coffee.

He did not reply, walking away from the machines and the four men who appeared content to wait for the crane helicopter to reach them, lift the Mil off the ledge, and carry it back to Nellis, forty miles northeast. He reached the edge of the flat outcrop. The sun was warm, though the occasional breeze was thin and chilly. The desert below him stretched away on every side, toward mountains to the south, west, and north. Las Vegas lay fifty miles southeast. Nevada. Gant breathed slowly, deeply, and evenly to calm himself; squinting into the pale, empty sky…

… except for the far brown dot, like a speck of dust, which signified an eagle riding thermals up the face of a mountain. He watched the dot float without effort, riding its own element, and felt the sluggish responses and the unfamiliarity of the heavy Russian helicopter through his hands and arms. It was as if he was bound, immobilized both by the machine and the mock dogfight in which he had just engaged.

Unsuccessfully.

Miles away across the desert, a narrow plume of dust followed some invisible vehicle or horseman. Behind Gant, the two Russian helicopters waited like a threat. Chameleon Squadron had been halved in size when their only serviceable Mil had crashed in East Germany and killed its crew and the agents they had picked up on a search-and-rescue flight. These machines were new and unfamiliar. They needed time. Time before they could begin Winter Hawk. The failure in the rotor head of Garcia's machine cut into the time