Winter Hawk

window.

'Comrade General?'

'Where will they make for, Serov? What will they attempt?'

'Telephone — radio?' Serov replied dully. 'Priabin will want to talk to Moscow Center.'

'Exactly. Where, then?'

'Aral'sk is the closest office with the necessary comm—'

'Then do something about Aral'sk I don't care what it is — close the office, commandeer the equipment, destroy the place if you have to — just make it impossible for them to use Aral'sk KGB. Understand?'

'Yes, comrade General, at once.'

'Driver — you can go.'

* * *

The lamp set beneath the MiLs belly was on. The black-and-white television picture, four inches square and set above the control panel, showed the uneven ground over which the Mil passed with grainy inexactitude. Gant flicked off the camera. The surveillance equipment was effective in searching for moving figures and vehicles — it would have to be good enough from the roof of the main assembly building. Distance to target, seven miles. Ground speed, less than forty miles an hour.

Ten minutes now. Occasionally, in his headset, their voices barked and called. Areas clear, coordination with ground troops, consultations with the command post. Serov's voice was back, strangely weak and old, but decisive with what Gant sensed was desperation. The other voice had disappeared. They were concentrating the search to the south of him, to the west, too. Looking for a fleeing animal. He was within the net, but they were still casting it and not pulling it tight. He huddled close to the terrain, slipped beneath power cables, nosing like a dog rather than flying— but he had reached the curving rampart of silos, tracking radars and the power grid at the perimeter of the military launch complex to the north of Tyuratam.

Noises in his ears. Nothing, clear… sweep of area completed— and always Serovs angry dissatisfaction whipping them on. Silos like craters surrounded him, passed below his sight and the cockpit coaming. Priabin had been silent for a long time. Occasionally, he heard the woman coughing or moaning. He deliberately dissociated the noises from any human experience. They were only the distant night sounds he had heard in Vietnam; monkeys calling or men burning. Eventually they merged and lost identity.

The network of power cables straddled the road he was following. He slid gently beneath them, crossed another road, two parallel railway lines. The craters of the silos slipped behind him; radar dishes stared like blind eyes, ahead and around the MiL.

With the lamp on, at his speed and lack of height, they were no longer looking for him; he belonged with them, as familiar as a uniform or a waving hand. The wind, however, waited to ambush him. Rocked and jolted the MiL, rendered it egglike and fragile.

Six miles, five and a half. Lights along the flank of a low building, presumably a factory. He lifted a little and passed over it, splashing the light like a declaration of intent over the roof and the shadows that clung about the eaves. Dropped the Mil behind the building, moved on northeast. A truck stationary on a minor road, the glimpse of searchlights playing amid fuel storage tanks. A soldier looked up, his face white in the light for an instant, his eyes blind, his hand—

— waving.

Gant exhaled noisily.

'Priabin?' he said softly. 'Priabin? Is the girl… how is she?' Asking after her, assuming sympathy, was like touching wood, or crossing his fingers.

'Unconscious again.' Priabin's voice was dragged by pity and sadness. 'Gant—'

'Don't say it,' he warned.

'But, afterward—' Something continued to protest within Priabin, like a qualm of conscience he could not be rid of.

'Afterward, we hide until the cavalry comes for us,' Gant confirmed. 'Serov would kill us — you — as soon as he could. I might be valuable. You wouldn't be. You took him — he'll kill you even if everything's blown up in his face. Understand?'

'Yes, yes, dammit, Gant, I understand,' Priabin breathed, as if not wishing to be overheard.

Four miles now—

A haze of lights, like a stadium's glow after dark. The assembly buildings for Soyuz, G-type boosters, satellite final assembly, Salyut construction and training, shuttle craft assembly… laser battle station assembly… target. Three and a half miles and five minutes away. Gant felt himself tense.

A net of moonlit roads, the trails of purposeful snails. Cars and trucks moving, swaying and bouncing their lights. The navigation lights, the downward-thrust searchlight of one of the hunting gunships away to the north, another walking white limb of light to the southwest. He felt the tension constrict like drying bandages Wound much too tightly. It was a moment of drowning extended for minute after minute, mile after mile; holding his breath for longer and longer.

The haze of lights was nearer, and individual stars of light had begun to appear. A row of streetlights along a road, clusters of lights over loading bays and railway tracks. Two miles, a little over three minutes—

— dogs barking. Area clear, directions and orders, new headings, call signs. He had begun to understand their movements, recognize and determine the position of each helicopter that reported. They had reached the point of farthest travel and were turning to trawl back in; they were on the point of pulling the net tight around him.

A mile and a half.

There was no escape afterward. Merely hiding, if they survived.

'Aral'sk,' he said gruffly through his nerves. 'They still standing by?'

'Yes.'

It had suddenly seemed important to ask, as if Aral'sk hung by a slender thread, another spider dangling as dangerously as the Mil he was flying. His helmet chafed where sweat had sprung on his forehead and neck, then dried, then appeared again; tidemarks of his successive fears.

'OK, you understand what you have to do?'

'Yes.' A boy's small voice, reluctant but obedient.

'The battle station — don't finesse, Priabin. Just use the zoom to close in on it, and hold the shot. Let them see the shuttle, then what's in the hold.'

'We won't need—'

'Damn you, just do as you're told. You don't know shit about the ten seconds that follow what you're asked to do. You don't know anything. We need all the ammunition we can lay our hands on.' Stop it. Wasted energy, he told himself. 'You're the backup,' he continued in a calmer, more official tone. 'Just get the shots, OK?'

'OK.' Silence, then the sliding back of the cabin's main window on the port side, directly behind him. The main observation window. Priabin must be leaning out, watching the assembly complex slide closer like a great fungus of light. Then he heard Priabin say: 'Gant?' His voice seemed to hold a threat, but was without excitement.

'What?'

'I've just remembered how much I want to kill you.'

Gant's wrists jumped with reaction, his body shivered.

'I don't need it, Priabin. Not here and now. Just do the job.'

Then he attended to the call signs trickling through the ether. Headings, ground speeds, reports, requests. Headings… They were moving back, closing on mission control, he presumed, from where the hunt was being coordinated. A point only two miles or so behind him. He was the fly in the center of the web. The closest helicopter, by his guess, was little more than five minutes from him, coming in from the northwest.

Haifa mile. Less than a minute. He could see the main assembly building quite distinctly, ahead of him. Scattered trucks, the locomotives that would tow the shuttle out to the pad, soldiers gathered like ants around their parked vehicles. It all seemed enlarged, as if viewed through a telescope of exposed nerves. One quarter of a mile. He flicked off the lamp in the Mil s belly because now it drew attention, conspicuous in so much light. He banked the small helicopter lazily and hung tilted sideways in the hard-lit evening, approaching the vast building that rose like a line of cliffs. He ascended gradually, innocently, into the air until he could see beyond its vast corrugated roof to