Winter Hawk (12 page)

The door slammed behind them. He spoke to the colonel who captained and flew the transport. "Yes, Colonel," he acknowledged. "You can engine-start. We're in your hands." He switched off the portable phone and thrust it into his clothing.

Almost at once, he heard the first rising whine of the four huge engines. The wind had disappeared. In its place, the noises of activity, the sounds of routine. Twelve-five. The note of the engines rose and strengthened.

The two helicopters sat on pallets near the tail, rotors folded like the wings of great insects. One mechanic was peeling away a stencil card from the flank of the gunship Gant would fly, the 24D, to reveal white numerals. Unit, base, designation, something of the kind. The U.S. Army drab in which the two ships had been painted during training had disappeared, to be replaced by the olive and yellow camouflage of Soviet Aviation Army units on duty in Afghanistan. Below the camouflage, the bellies of the gunships were painted a sharklike gray. Another stencil was peeled away after white paint had puffed from a spray gun. Cyrillic lettering. Warnings, red stars, instructions were all blossoming on the flanks of the two MiLs. Bolted and tied to their pallets, the two machines appeared strange, unknown. Becoming once more the two helicopters he had seen captured in the Lebanese desert.

The scene oppressed Anders with the sense of its fragility. The machines might be almost ready; it was the crews who were not. Gant himself, Mac, his gunner, and the second crew, headed by Garcia. None of them, not even Gant, was ready. There were too many factors in the matrix, like a complicated jigsaw puzzle knocked from a table, the pieces all separated and making no sense.

The cockpits of both MiLs were open. Heads and upper torsos bobbed, appearing and disappearing as the flight systems were checked. Anders had a fleeting impression that the machines were still under construction, unfinished. The on-board computers and moving-map displays were being updated. The main cabin doors, too, were open. Auxiliary tanks had been fitted to both helicopters to increase their range. Only by carrying twice his normal fuel and having the 24A similarly fueled could Gant make the thousand-mile journey from the Pakistan border to Baikonur and retain sufficient resources for the return flight. They would abandon the 24A once they had transferred its fuel to the other gunship, and make the return crowded into the 24D, together with Kedrov—the lost scientist, he added bitterly.

Weapons, too. Disguised or adapted U.S. weapons to complete the MiL's armories. On the short, stubby wings, four rocket pods and four missiles, four-barreled machine guns mounted in each nose. The weapons were real, but their purpose was disguise. It was a charade required for Afghan airspace, a charade played hour after hour—weapons, markings, call signs, IDs, Gant's ability to speak Russian—thin, so thin as to be almost transparent. Later, hour after hour in Soviet airspace . . . transparent.

Mac and the transport helicopter's crew moved toward Gant and himself. The Galaxy seemed to shrug at a weight of air pressing on it, against the wind, then began to roll out of the hangar. It was as if the cargo hold was suddenly bathed in a greater light, or some charge of static had built up. Everything seemed clearer, skeletal, stark. A long row of fold-down seats lined the bulkhead.
Fasten your seatbelts, extinguish your cigarettes
—time to go.

Work continued on the two helicopters.

Anders sat down and slipped the belt across his lap. He felt the huge Galaxy turn. Through the window at his side, he saw the maw of the hangar, like a whale's mouth lit from within, retreat into the darkness of the night. Sunday night.

He studied the crews like a diagnostician looking at X-ray plates. Mac was the best of them. Garcia, the second pilot, was good, but no better than good. His copilot was older, wiser, but no better than Garcia. Chameleon Squadron had lost a better pilot two months before, when their only surviving MiL crashed in East Germany. Before the Israelis had been blackmailed into stealing these.

Lane, the copilot, was OK. Kooper, Garcia's gunner, was better. Gant—was Gant; he'd chosen the 24D, Anders knew, because there was no copilot. Just a gunner. And Gant trusted Mac.

The Galaxy turned again. Anders glimpsed runway lights and felt the aircraft pause.

"At least those guys got off their butts!" Garcia exclaimed, sitting down with a nod to Anders, ostentatiously buckling his belt. "Jesus, are we lucky?"

Anders watched Gant's face twitch with mistrust. Anders sensed Gant's dislike of Garcia. The second pilot's tension seemed too febrile, wild; like the reaction of a man who had too heavily mixed his cocktails.

Anders studied the others, then the fold-down table near them, the plugged-in computer terminal, the screen, the rolls of charts and sheafs of photographic prints. Too much, there was still too much to do—thin, thin, transparent, his thoughts chorused.

The Galaxy surged forward. Anders felt tension grip and hold him. He saw Gant staring at him. The man's eyes were blank and yet fierce; alien, somehow.

Men were sitting down hurriedly now, at the sound of a horn through the hold. The MiLs were left alone, vulnerable. The load-master was talking to the flight deck over a telephone link. The show was about the hit the road. For a second, Anders thought of voicing the idea, but Gant's stare disconcerted him. He looked away, at the table. He could distinguish the highest-resolution images of the Baikonur area—one area in particular. A tiny island, kidney-shaped, surrounded by wet salt marshes. Reeds, swirls of shallow water, a white smear in one corner of one picture that might have been water fowl taking off. Could Gant find that at night, with minimal use of the gunship's lamp? That agreed rendezvous?

Be there, Anders thought involuntarily. You Russian son of a bitch, be there!

He felt his body molded to the fold-down seat as the Galaxy lifted away from the runway. Its undercarriage thudded up moments later. He looked at the MiLs.

Banks, glittering shoals, islets, one like an animal curled up, another kidney-shaped. Would they get as far as ... ? The thought faded.

Be there, he thought firmly.
Be there.

The tracked army recovery vehicle was nose down in the river, like a fishing bird. Its powerful crane, mounted over the turret of the converted tank chassis, slowly drew the Zil sedan out of the mud and water. Great broken plates of ice, gray and wallowing like a ship's wreckage, lurched in the space of open water the accident and the recovery operation had created in the frozen river. The water was little more than a soupy dark swirl beneath a clouded sky. The afternoon was already beginning to darken. There was a tiny flurry of sleet in the chill wind, one of Baikonur's very irregular and unexpected snowfalls.

The car's windows and flanks streamed as it was swung over the SKP-5 vehicle toward the shallowly sloping bank, which was churned and printed with caterpillar tracks—

—and the narrower, half-obscured tire prints from the Zil, Priabin thought, shaken into wakefulness by the sight of the car and the knowledge of its passengers and their condition. The somber, chilly scene disturbed him.

When he'd finished with Orlov—the old man knew no more than he had already told, he was convinced of it—he'd stopped for tea in the canteen, then made his way up to Viktor's office. To find that Viktor and the actor had not returned. Three hours after his telephone call. Immediately, he had begun to worry. He sensed danger, even violence. The actor had called someone—Rodin, it had to be. What had happened to Viktor?

Eventually, as if only confirming something he already knew, a police patrol found signs of—an accident, a car had evidently gone into the river ... on the route Viktor had said he would take. Yes, yes, I'll come at once. What? The army? To get the car out. . . very well, you've called in the army . . .

Holding the Zil aloft like some cup or trophy contested for and won, the SKP-5 ground and chugged its way back out of the water. The disturbed plates of gray ice slid and grumbled together, as if healing the breach in the river. The streaming car hung nose down; something tilted and restrained pressed against what remained of the shattered windshield. Army frogmen, who had attached the crane's cables and hooks to the car after it was located on the riverbed, half buried in the thick ooze, walked out of the freezing water. Other frogmen, in reserve, hurried toward them with tea or coffee and blankets and warm capes and parkas. Their interest in the Zil was minimal now that it was coming ashore.

Priabin blew sleet from his open mouth and pulled the hood of his parka closer around his head. Like a gesture of mourning. Viktor Zhikin's body threatened to loll out of the broken windshield and across the car's hood; it would then slide like an awry tailor's dummy, Ml into the riverbank mud.

He shuddered. The car was carefully set down at the top of the bank; almost a car again, intact for a moment in the poor light. He hurried up the slope, his rubber boots slipping on the churned mud, while police and army crowded gingerly around the wreck. The SKP-5 was uncoupled and chugged away, slithering lizardlike toward the tarmac of the road.

A car had crashed, skidding on the icy surface of the road that ran alongside the river. Two people had, unfortunately, drowned. That's all there was to it, Priabin thought. It was simply a coincidence that the car happened to be driven by his KGB second-in-command. Viktor.

He pushed the others aside, his emotions supported by his rank. People parted. He touched at, then lifted Viktor's head. Water seeped from Viktor's lips and nostrils. Bruising begun and halted by death. Gashes. He touched the face, feeling the embedded glass pricking and cutting his fingertips, his palm. His eyes watered with the cold wind and with the contact of the dead man's cold, wet skin. He snatched his hand away, sniffing. Moved around the car to the passenger door, tugged it open—no damage to the car, no evidence of a collision to drive it off the road, no violent skid marks on the tarmac behind it?—and a second body flopped dutifully and dramatically out of the door like dirty water escaping; to loll lifelessly as a doll, wet hair touching the churned mud at the roadside.

The little actor, Rodin's lover. As expected. Priabin felt an unreasoning hatred well up in him at the cause of Viktor's death. No skid marks? An accident?

Viktor might have died just because this little poof had panicked, tried to grab the wheel perhaps? Viktor might have died that way, but instinct, damn instinct, made him suspect other hands, an arrangement, a plan.

He was aware of the army uniforms that surrounded him, and aware that they outnumbered the KGB uniforms present. Why did he suspect that this was not an accident? Because it had killed Viktor? Was it simply grief getting in the way of reason, like a powerful bully? He stared at the actor's still head. You, he thought, you made a phone call from the theater, you spoke to someone—and then this happened. You'd have been shit-scared, because you were in real trouble and you knew what we wanted to ask you about—
Lightning.
The logic of the sequence was as tight and aching as a band of cold steel around his temples. He could not remove it. What had he heard? Loose talk because of the cocaine, mock toasts, murmured in-jokes? Enough to know what was meant, what was intended?

Viktor, Viktor, he thought. Why did you let him make that call? He must have called Rodin, yes. Priabin sighed. Coming out from his office, to this spot, driving through the failing afternoon light beneath the low, uncommon cloud cover, he had become convinced there had been no accident; he had been summoned to witness a design, a deliberate thing. Someone had wanted the actor shut up— and they'd shut Viktor up, too.

He felt his chest and throat fill with misery and useless rage. He glanced again at the actor's head near a frozen puddle. The voices of those around him had retreated to desultory murmurs, like those of people attending a funeral. The actor's bald spot was streaked with strands of water-darkened hair. Then he looked across the car at Viktor's graying temples above the scratched, glass-filled cheeks. It would have been so easy—an army patrol to stop the car, quick, decisive blows, a just-as-quick shove to the car, and down the river-bank and into the water . . . slipping out on the ice, breaking through it, vanishing up to the level of the roof. It must have been like that.

He wiped his eyes and nose. Lit a cigarette, hunching into the folds of his parka to do so. The first exhaled smoke was whisked away by the wind; as insubstantial as any protest, any action he might contemplate.
Lightning
had killed Viktor, he was certain of it. Rodin had threatened him after his slip of the tongue, and he had been frightened, too. Kedrov had used it as a lever, a bribe, to make the Americans sure to rescue him; the little queer actor had panicked as soon as
Lightning
was mentioned, panicked enough to make a desperate phone call.

Every mention of it was like spiffing gold; people rushed to retrieve it.

"What?" Priabin snapped, startled back into the cold wind and the enclosing, bare, low hills that hemmed the scene. He glared at Dudin, the senior KGB officer for the town of Tyuratam. The man's expression was still shocked, but in a less personal way than Priabin knew must be true of his own features.

"I said, sir"—Dudin was careful with the occasion and Priabin's rank; Captain Dudin—"can I get the bodies loaded aboard the wagon now? Or do you want Forensic to inspect the car with—while they're still in place?" Dudin shuffled his feet, blew on his gloved hands.