'Yes — yes!' Priabin shouted in his ears after a silence that was filled with the noise of the Mil and the woman's moaning. 'They want to know what it is.' Priabin seemed almost amused, a feverish excitement making his voice high and boyish.-
'Tell them to retransmit.' Gant yelled, his eyes flicking from the scene beyond the Plexiglas to the radar screen. Three of them now, including the gunship still firing its gleaming bursts of tracer, unstitching the darkness. Gant was caught in a wash of light for a moment as he drove downward and beneath a great sagging loop of cable. Unnerve, unnerve, he told himself, his hands twitchy with anticipation, his body bathed in sweat. 'Tell them to retransmit now.' It was as if he projected his own immediate fear as far as the Aral'sk KGB office. 'Now!'
In his mirrors, the heavy Hind-D, like the one he had flown into Baikonur, hopped over the power fines and came on. Gant estimated distances. The rocket pod beneath one of the Hind's stubby wings bloomed orange. Voices yelled and countered in his headset.
He was half a mile from the main assembly building, heading east. He banked savagely, the whole area of his mirrors seeming to be blinded by the orange glow from the Hind's port wing. Capable of penetrating eight inches of armor, thirty-two rockets to each pod, four pods on this gunship. One hundred and twenty-eight chances to kill. The first burst passed alongside his flank as the helicopter lay on its side in the air for an instant. Range, twelve hundred meters— he was almost out of range. The smaller Mil could, just, out-maneuver the Hinds at low speed. He flung the helicopter toward a long, low warehouse. Shut up, he yelled silently as the woman cried out in pain and terror in the cabin behind him. The Hind possessed Poor low-speed handling qualities. But there were four of them now, the second closest perhaps less than a mile away, the others converging as orders were screamed and reiterated over the radio, ^ant hurled and twisted the Mil through the low canyons of the warehouse complex.
M… lost them,' he heard in his headset.
' What?' he shouted back. The engines of the helicopter whined and screamed as he turned violently. He felt the whole airframe judder. The MiL's shadow loomed like a hunchback on the wall of a building, light spilled from an open door. The mouth of a furnace glowed. Industrial support unit. He was still heading east, his undercarriage skimming the concrete, his twists and turns as tight and violent as he could make them. The woman must be in agony at the assault of G-forces.
'Lost them. Gone dead,' Priabin shouted. The mirrors were clear for an instant, as if he were alone.
'Dead?'
'Just cut off — middle of conversation. About to transmit on to Baku, for the satellite.'
'Forget them. They won't be able to help.'
'— happened?' was all he heard in reply.
'They're dead — you said it yourself.'
The single videotape was all the evidence that existed. A Hind turned into view at the far end of a long corridor formed by the walls of two buildings. Smoke, sparks flaring from beside the cockpit, another welding job or a small electrical furnace — sparks, flash from the eager Hind astern. Rockets.
He jumped the Mil-2 into the air like a startled cat. It jerked rather than flowed upward, and the rockets passed like a firework shower beneath the helicopter's belly. Explosion as they diverged, one striking the wall of the building, penetrating the corrugated iron, another exploding on impact. The remaining rockets raced on, their flame suddenly dying out.
He rolled the helicopter in a banked turn over the roof of the building and slipped into the darkness beyond it. He increased speed.
The four gunships were controlled, but they had lost formation, purpose had become almost hysterical. They would leave gaps, blind spots; Serov insisted on retaining command of the helicopters. It was a weakness, it had to be exploited. Serov was relying on radar, visual sightings, positional reports all reaching him in a constant stream, but there were whole seconds that passed between information, decision, response. Chinks, tiny gaps of time — he had to slip through one of them.
The Hind was back in his mirrors, lumbering until it reached open darkness and then bearing down with frightening speed. If he had only been armed, he could have taken it easily. Outmaneuvered it, gotten behind it or above or beneath and ripped it open with rocket and cannon fire.
The Hind seemed to have discovered patience. It was now merely stalking him. Gant increased his airspeed, and the pilot in the Hind matched it but made no move to overtake him. Gant rose to a couple of hundred feet, as if declaring a surrender. He was visible now. He saw the other gunships on his radar, all close, too close, and dropped the Mil savagely down in the steepest descent possible. Somehow, now that they had reassumed a pattern and a definite purpose, he had to rid himself of one of them. Create a gap of time and air through which to escape.
'… she's dead!' he heard Priabin cry out. It did not matter. Priabin's grief or lack of hope did not matter, just as the woman's death was irrelevant; no more than the distant announcement of an aircraft's departure. His sole interest lay in his own survival.
He could not shake off the Hind astern of him. A stream of positional fixes flowed from the copilot-gunner back to Serov, pinning him down, like a moth to a card. Darkness was unusable, hugging the ground was no longer an advantage. They had him, they were closing at almost maximum speed.
Radar dishes, gantries, pylons, radio masts. He was approaching the vast power and tracking network to the east of the main control and assembly area and south of the principal launch facility. Scattered lights, a network of roads strung with pale globes, lights shining from huts, from portacabins and even caravans. A strange suburb of Baikonur. It was a minefield designed to assault helicopter rotors, but it was cover, too. It was too precious to be damaged in a wild attack. They would be cautious, almost as if unarmed. They wouldn't be able to use—
As if sensing Gant's intent, the Hind trailing him launched from one of its underwing rocket pods. A flare, then the quick leap of the unguided rockets toward him, enlarging in his mirrors, rushing out the night.
He jerked at column and pitch lever.
Too close, too close.
The amphitheater of tiered seats and rows of screens and monitors that was Baikonur's mission control was only an audience to what was happening down on the room's vast floor, fifty yards or more away from the nearest spectator behind his telemetry screen and console. A strange, vivid frenzy of voices, movement, panic, imminent success, like a dramatic, surprising play. Military personnel mingled on the stage, at the center of which here was a huge, upright map rising from a wheeled dolly. Cables snaked away from the map across the concrete floor. A small jumble of screens and consoles had accreted like mussels on a rock around the map. VDUs and terminals, radio and radar screens were like fragments broken from the orderly rows of equipment of the security section of mission control.
Voices called and bellowed, squeaked or rang metallically. The air was filled with sharp ozone. And tension and excitement and the sense of imminent death. Rodin looked up at the maps surface as a new area of Baikonur was displayed, keyed in from the console that controlled the fiber-optic projection. At once, a single red light jerked across the map and settled. An operator pointed a long rod toward the red light, his face intent upon the information flooding into his earphones. He acknowledged, and wiped the pointer like a wand across the grid- referenced projection. The red light remained where it was, but a snail trail of light drawn by the pointer showed its heading, speed, its changed position on the map. Amid the telemetry and tracking complex. Two other operators traced in the paths of the two closest gunships with similar snail trails, one blue, one green. Gant's track was red, like his light.
Serov stood beside Rodin, his headset awry on his right ear so that he could hear the general. His arm was clutched in a makeshift sling, his face was drawn and dusty gray in color. Rodin had once more assumed control of the hunt, superseding Serov, using the facilities of the main control room rather than the security room that was Serovs headquarters.
'This American is good — dangerously good,' Rodin murmured, looking down at Serov.
'We have him, comrade General,' Serov asserted without the energy to perform any but a subordinate role. Weak hatred swilled in him like something slowly draining from a leaking water cask, but he simply could not assert any strength. His arm hurt vilely. 'He s moving very slowly.'
'We can't achieve a kill, not while he's in there,' was Rodin s clipped, scornful reply. 'We can't risk any damage before tomorrow. Obviously,' he added with an extra sting of contempt. He rubbed his chin while voices and acknowledgments flew about them. 'Move two mobile patrols out to the area. Their rifle fire should drive him out — up and out. Then he's naked.' Rodin pronounced the word with a curious, even salacious relish.
Hie operators wiped their trails of light across the map. Their earlier markings were visibly decaying. Gant
