Winter Hawk

Military. Olive drab. Insect eyes.

Familiar?

The helicopter stared at him, no more than twenty yards away. The helicopter — the, the — Hughes Defender stared at him. and a* the same unnerving moment that he identified the aircraft he saw an arm waving him forward from the port insect eye — the eye was a door that had swung open. The helicopter was American!

Relief… disbelief. The conflicting feelings seemed to shake him like a storm. It had to be an illusion, it couldn't be a Hughes, a Hughes couldn't be here—

— even as he began running toward it, obeying the still waving arm.

The Defender lifted slightly, delicately adjusting itself in the air, then settled on to its skis. Then all he saw was the arm, waving once more. But he had glimpsed the white star on the helicopter's flank and the legend u.s. army. The pilot had shown them to him like a guarantee. Ten yards away, five. The gesticulating arm came closer, closer, closer…

He staggered against the fuselage. Bullets clanged against the metal. He looked down with what might have been surprise. His left thigh was burning with pain and stained with something dark and wet, which spread even as he watched it. His whole frame began to quiver. Fuzzily, he could see two soldiers at the tunnel entrance, one of them kneeling, taking better aim, the other standing as stiffly as a member of a firing squad.

He groaned with pain. Something pulled at his shoulder, then a hand grabbed his arm, wrenching him off his feet. The rotors idled noisily above his head, the two soldiers were still and patient and certain, his leg shrieked as he was dragged into the cockpit of the helicopter and it twisted under him. The whole of his thigh seemed black with blood as he looked drunkenly down, slumped in the copilot's seat. His face leaned against the pilot's uniform. The flying overalls bore the name Pruitt. Then he was pushed away from Pruitt, to loll in his seat as the rotors picked up speed and volume. Bullets careened off the metal of the fuselage.

'Fasten your seat belt, Major,' Pruitt snapped, his hand pointing forcibly at Gant's lap. Instinctively, Gant moved to obey, and his leg cried out again. 'You all right?'

The Hughes was twenty feet or so up in the air, hardly moving. Gant groaned, then shouted:

'For fuck's sake — go!'

He tightened the seat belt automatically, then fumbled with his belt. The small helicopter flicked into the air like a spun coin, dizzyingly, making his leg protest with a flash of red behind his clenched eyelids. He felt sick. He forced himself to open his eyes, as if in response to the noise of bullets against the Defenders fuselage. Pale flickers of flame down on the track. A bullet flew off the cockpits Plexiglas, scarring it. The Hughes yawed wildly before Pruitt corrected its course. Gant felt the aircraft drop like a loosened boulder, down the canyon wall.

With a feebly waving hand, he pointed urgently toward—

— the military highway and its tunnel. Brdad tunnel. Even as he saw the first of the Mil gunships, its stubby wings overloaded with rockets and missiles, dive in pursuit of them. There was a second one, farther off. Gant tightened his belt into a tourniquet around the top of his thigh, grinding his teeth against the increased pain. Each maneuver of the Hughes seemed to wrench at the damaged sinews and muscles and act like a pump on the blood he was trying to staunch.

Pruitt drove the Defender downward. Rotor span twenty-seven feet — only twenty-seven, Gant told himself, the words taking the pattern of his grinding teeth and accompanying their noise inside his head. He slumped back in the copilot's seat. Pruitt abruptly leveled the helicopter before the mouth of the road tunnel, so that Gant yelled aloud. Then the tunnel swallowed the tiny aircraft.

'Shit!' he heard Pruitt distantly exclaim, his head filled with pain as if it were noise, the lights set in the tunnel's roof seeming to hurt his eyes, as if they, too, were connected with his wound. He had clamped his hand over his thigh. His finger and thumb had felt the entry and exit wounds of the bullet's passage. He was bleeding more slowly.

The tunnel was wide enough to take a Mil-24, not just the smaller Hughes, but they'd have to be more careful. The second gunship could hop to the other end of the tunnel, but the Hughes was armed with missiles and a Chain gun, and they'd have to be careful, too.

He was hardly conscious, because now the tunnel lights seemed hypnotic, extending into a blur. The pain in his thigh steadily mounted through his whole frame and seemed to throb in rhythm with the passage of the lights. Pruitt's wild elation was no more than a distant sighing.

The tunnel ended like a bright mouth opening.

The Plain of Ararat. Daylight and gunships. They were as unreal, as unimportant to Gant as smears on the Plexiglas. He vaguely glimpsed a border crossing, poles and booths and vehicles straggling across the highway. Then it was gone He could not be certain he had seen it, was increasingly unaware of the dimensions of the cockpit around him, the presence of the pilot. Then Pruitt jerked the helicopter up and away.

Something exploded astern of them against the canyon wall. Gant did not turn his head to look back. He felt an increase in the Defender's speed, and sensed the ground farther away below. The plain spread out ahead of them, as gray-white and unfeatured as an unrolled bale of cloth. His head felt heavy, and yet without substance.

Turkey. He knew that.

More gunships.

Hughes helicopters, and a Bell Hueycobra. Their shapes familiar, comforting. Jets higher and farther away. Turkey. The border was already invisible behind the last slopes of the foothills as the Defender skimmed the snowbound plain. The whiteness, he could see now, was smeared by the passage of a steam train and trellised by cleared roads and highways. The twin peaks of Mt. Ararat gleamed in the distance.

A second Hughes Defender slid up close to port. Its pilot raised a thumb. An unarmed Turkish air force Jetranger rose like a cork to the surface of water and took up station behind them. It was a target for any missile that might be launched across the border. The Hueycobra bobbed to starboard as they closed ranks around Pruitt, around Gant. He was protected, safe. His leg burned with a fresh agony. There was something he had to do besides sleep, besides surrender to the pain — something…

His hands groped toward the instrument panel. Pruitt, understanding his feeble efforts, thrust the copilot's headset into his hands and opened the Tac channel. As if lifting a great weight, Gant slowly slid the headset on. Voices blurted in his ears, showering the ether with congratulation.

'Come on, Major!' he heard Pruitt urge, but the pilot's voice was very faint.

The pain threatened afresh. He began talking quickly, afraid it might finally overwhelm him. They had to be told; they had to know. The cockpit was as vague and unfeatured as the pale sky and the carpet of snow. The instruments were blurred, his sense of Pruitt beside him diminished.

'… Winter Hawk' he felt himself repeating, over and over. His own exclamations of pain were more real. He heard himself grinding his teeth as a noise inside his head, as if bones were being moved in his skull.'… I have the proof, yes… definite proof…..' It did not matter who was listening, how far up that staircase in his mind he had climbed in less than a minute. Some general, a CIA deputy director — who cared? He remembered something else, then, with a huge, sickening effort, and said: 'They have the weapon, it's — already in orbit… intend to use it, against the shuttle—Atlantis….'It was so difficult to remember the shuttle's name. A cleared road lay below him, Pruitt was following its gray line through the snow. Someone asked him a question — one of the voices that babbled at him and kept him from sleep, allowing the pain to enlarge. He merely repeated: '… the target is the shuttle, yes — I saw the launch, the weapon is in orbit at this — moment….' Then, finally: 'Man, I don't give shit what you do, just do it!'

Fuzzily, as he leaned forward to cut off the channel, he saw a helicopter bearing a gigantic red cross drift like a dirigible across their course. He sighed, and surrendered to the pain and to his weariness. His head burned as intensely as his leg. It's all right now, he assured his wound. All right. He'd survived. His message and what they did about it did not matter anymore. He'd survived.

POSTLUDE