where Baikonur vanished into the dark.
He glanced at soldiers staring up at him disinterestedly; a glimpse of the yellow locomotives, the grouped trucks, a sense of the renewed wind as it banged at the fuselage. Then as he leveled, he could see only the huge, sloping roof beneath and around him. Target. He drifted the Mil slowly, very slowly, along the gully that ran between the two sloping cliff faces of corrugated sheets. Looking for the skylight he needed.
The channel between the two slopes of corrugated iron seemed endless, so slowly was the Mil moving forward. Noise beat back like blinding sunlight from the roof, deafening him, making it almost impossible to hear Priabin's shouts in the headset. His eyes scanned the length of the roof on either side, studied the mirrors, looked ahead, again and again. As if he expected the helicopters to jump into sight like giant fleas.
Tension beat like quick, successive waves of a storm; his ears throbbed. Too slow, too slow—
Yet he spoke calmly to Priabin, enunciating clearly; the volume a yell, the tone one of encouragement. 'You can see it?' Twelve, he counted. Twelve of the skylights on either side already passed. How many? 'Where will it be? Remember it.'
Priabin was counting, too, as he leaned out of the cabin window. But he had to lean back inside each time he spoke and shout above the rotor noise, holding his microphone against his lips.
'Shuttle — moved to middle — building… laser weapon — cargo hold. Middle, middle of the building — eighteen, eighteen windows. '
Gant strained to hear, and to believe. It had to be like an X ray, and as accurate. He had to be above the right skylight, he had to be able to see the shuttle and its cargo hold on the tiny TV screen in front of him. To point the camera lenses downward, hold steady, let the videotape soak up the images below like litmus paper — all the while juggling the Mil in the wind that howled down the channel between the two slopes of iron.
'OK, OK,' he replied. 'One eight, eighteen.'
Fourteen, fifteen — close now. The clock ticked in his head as precisely as ever. The closest gunship was less than three minutes away.
He couldn't use the IR sensors on board. Too much icy metal directly around and beneath, too vast a space within. It had to be guesswork, relying on what Priabin had already described of his last visit to the assembly building — rubbernecking like a tourist — and his estimation of the present position of the shuttle and its by-now adjacent or even loaded cargo. He had to be able to see. seventeen, the helicopter seemed to hang like a model in a wind tunnel; undulating, disturbed, but not flying. Seventeen… eighteen — eighteen.
He held the Mil-2 at an angle that was difficult to maintain, its whole fuselage tilted away from the roof's slope. The skylight was blacked out, as he had expected.
'Eighteen!' he yelled.
'Eighteen!' Priabin cried back at him, his voice almost lost in the noise and the wind.
'Are you ready?' Gant estimated the skylight was directly beneath one of the wheels of the tricycle undercarriage. Priabin had to check.
'Yes!'
' Camera?'
'Check!'
* Go!'
He strained his hearing but caught no sense of Priabin's boots clatter onto the corrugated iron when he dropped. Then he saw a bent, hunched, almost reclining figure just ahead of the MiL's nose; waving. Overcoat flying, boots losing purchase, camera straining at its straps, face white with fear and tension. He was frantically directing the nose of the helicopter away. Gant shunted delicately in the wind, with a vast expense of energy and adrenaline. He waited, arms and shoulders crying out, until Priabin stopped waving; raised his thumbs. He was so close Gant would have seen the gesture clearly without the aid of the lamps splash of light, which he'd switched on once more. Now—
He dropped the MiL's starboard wheel. He heard the noise, felt the damage, the restraint of the skylight's remains as he tugged the undercarriage clear and righted the helicopter; returning it to its abseiling posture against the slope of the roof..
TV screen. Priabin was waving wildly like an excited child. TV screen. He studied the viewfinder's image. The crater of twisted metal, broken wood, splinters of glass, shards of wooden blackout.
Focus.
There—
— what he had come for. There.
He caught his breath. On the tiny television screen the view-finder's black-and-white image wobbled, blurred, and then re-focused. The maw of the shuttle's cargo bay gaped, the long-nosed metal anteater of the laser weapon hung over it, suspended from a crane. Caught in the act.
Gant could see Priabin at the farther edge of the skylight he had broken with the undercarriage, his hands waving and pointing, the video camera clutched against his chest — then operating. The light from the MiL's lamp splashed into the skylight. Wait, wait—
He switched on the videotape, holding the image firmly, with vast effort, his muscles aching with the strain of holding the Mil against the buffeting wind. The tape began running; evidence, proof — he'd done it, he had it all.
Then the alarm, even as he cautioned himself once more. Wait—
— the first shooting, from inside the assembly building. Andike figures staring, running, posed to attack or panic. Glass still showering down, shards of wood and buckled metal rattling and bouncing on the flanks of the shuttle, smaller than its target,
Priabin had drawn back, stunned by noise and the bullets. Gant yelled into his microphone.
'Get back inside. That's enough — enough!'
Priabin looked toward the cockpit with the sudden movement of a startled deer. His headphones and their lead had been forgotten; Gant's voice had boomed in his head. He raised his arms in acknowledgment and scuttled back beneath the MiL's shadow. Television screen. The helicopter bucked in the wind's violence and the videotape recorded the corrugations of the roof for six seconds until he juggled the image of the shuttle and the laser weapon back onto the screen. Soldiers, too, and gesticulating ants. He could not prevent the surge of success catching at his breathing again, making his whole frame weak.
A flea jumped; a giant flea — up over the lip of the roof and down the slope toward him; seconds to weigh, decide, obey the voice that was crying in Gant's headset — kill them, kill them.
It happened in the slowest of motion. He glanced at the scene through the skylight, the frozen arm of die crane, the dangling ant-eater of the battle station, the shuttle's gaping maw — and the movement of the gunship seemed just as frozen and recorded. Sense of the tilted MiL, the noise of the cabin door banging shut, the movements of his hands like those of an old man — then his Mil jumping away as if to continue some rapid abseil. The gunship bore down and over him, and he sensed the machine he flew falling backward, then dodging like a small, agile opponent as the cannon beneath the gunship's nose opened fire. Tracer rounds hurt Gant's eyes by their proximity.
'Gant!' Priabin yelled, then cut off his voice, realizing his helplessness.
The Mil-2 rose up the opposite corrugated cliff, as if backing away from the belly of the gunship. He hopped the helicopter over the peak of the roof, flinging it like a stone away from the assembly building and up into the darkness. The gunship turned like an angry adult toward a disobedient child, the cannon still firing in short, awful bursts of tracer.
He turned on the radar. There was no point, no purpose in concealment; he needed to see them, even as his peripheral vision glimpsed winking navigation lights less than a quarter of a mile off to starboard.
Never this close, never this close before. Obsolete fighter aircraft tactics and maneuvers gleamed like false lights in his mind. Useless to him.
'Transmission!' he yelled. 'Do they acknowledge in Aral'sk?'
