Winter Hawk (44 page)

Priabin felt success about to be snatched from him; Serov's GRU people, with their vaster resources of men and machines, might have pinpointed the agent-in-place and be simply waiting for a signal to close in—just as his men were waiting for a signal.

Go in now, then. Claim the bloody prize. Get your hands on Kedrov before they do—wait for the collector to arrive. If he comes, another part of his thoughts answered more pessimistically. If he bothers, seeing the opposition in the area ... go in now! Serov's people might well get their hands on whoever was coming to Ked-rov's aid—and GRU troops would be there soon, he'd heard enough of their radio chatter to know how thoroughly they were searching— so get your hands on Kedrov.

"OK, OK," he murmured, teeth chattering, gloved hands rubbing furiously together as if to ignite a fire. "We're set. Make no moves, Dudin. Just let whoever the rescuers are come on—close in behind them."

"Colonel."

"Katya, you found him, you can come in with me. Dudin, when you spot them, only then contact me by transceiver."

"Colonel. You think they'll come in force, then?"

"I don't know." He glanced down at the screen. Kedrov had begun pacing once more—good. Creaking planks and the noise of his footsteps would cover their approach. "Once I report we're in, and have Kedrov, get your men to remove the borescope and the cable. I don't want whoever's coming to spot them."

"Shall I get the dog from the car, sir?" Katya asked.

"No. Kedrov doesn't appear to be armed. I think he's pretty much beaten already. Let's go in now."

He turned as if to issue another order to Dudin, or to check Previous instructions, then waved his hand apologetically; even grinned. He stepped out of the windbreak, out of the shadow of the clump of bushes and stunted trees, down the slope onto the ice. ^reading warily. The wind hurled itself against him so that he staggered. The ice creaked unnervingly. As Katya caught up with him, be looked at his watch. Three twenty-four. He walked, leaning slightly backward, square-footed like a fatter man, feeling his overcoat plucked and whirled like a cape around his legs. Katya hurried at his side, gun already drawn, body hunched forward. The ice betrayed their passage, as if muttering to Kedrov.

The jetty, then. Priabin climbed the rotting steps carefully, easing his weight onto each one, then to the one above. He kept his hand away from the rail. Eventually, he crouched at the top of the steps, and Katya, moving with much less noise, joined him. Her breathing was rapid, excited.

A helicopter passed above them, perhaps no more than a couple of hundred feet. Still scouting. The moon was old and low in the sky; they were just two shadows amid shadows. But Kedrov must be getting panicky at the insistent overflights. Priabin wanted to hurry, scuttle on all fours like a dog along the jetty, bang open the cabin door, gun in hand, make certain of his quarry.

"Come on," he whispered. "Follow me."

The helicopter's noise diminished toward the south. Priabin, bending low, hurried forward, caution no longer expedient or even desired. It was not a stalking game now, but a kill—Kedrov was his now.

He scurried beside the limp snake of the borescope cable, still carrying the images of the houseboat's interior. He was thirty yards, twenty-five—

—stopped. Because of Rodin.

He was playing for ridiculously high stakes. Kedrov, his would-be rescuers . . . Rodin and
Lightning.
Katya reached him, leaned into his body for shelter, looked up at him urgently.

"What is it?"

"What?" It was all too risky, too dangerous. He had been blinded by the dazzle of complete success. He had wanted it all. "I"—he shook his head—"nothing. Come on," he urged. The
wind
was at his back, blowing him toward the rotting houseboat like a scrap of paper. If he were quick, sudden—

He had whole minutes yet and a great desire to see shock subside into fear and defeat on Kedrov's face before he returned to Rodin.

"Come on."

He was running without caution. Clattering along the jetty, his noises masked by the wind and the protests of the old boat. He jumped onto the deck, drawing the Makarov pistol from his holster. His open overcoat flew aside. He raised his right boot at the doors, two steps down from the deck, and kicked savagely at them, as if already cheated and circumvented by events. The doors flew open, crying and splintering. He stumbled down the steps. The wind caused Kedrov's shadow to flicker and enlarge, then shrink, as the oil lamp's flame wavered and smoked.

"Kedrov, you're done!" Priabin shouted, almost laughing, pleasure welling up in him.

Kedrov was stunned, then further startled to see Katya's small frame emerge from behind Priabin's coat, her.gun, too, trained on him. His mouth plopped open and shut, open and shut, like that of a goldfish. Priabin clasped Katya's shoulder, and said:

"You can arrest him, Katya—you found him."

She moved carefully toward the bunk. Kedrov's shadow, their own shadows, danced and mingled and loomed at one another all around the room. A beer can rolled to Priabin's feet. He kicked it with the kind of pleasure he might have felt kicking back a boy's football in a park. Katya motioned to Kedrov to extend his hands. She handcuffed him. The man's mouth continued to open and close He could find nothing to say. Katya stood back, her narrow face flushed with excitement, her gun steady.

Priabin moved to the table. Tapped the transistor radio with the barrel of his pistol.

"Works without its batteries, I see," he murmured knowingly. Further shock was impossible on the stretched, blanched mask of Kedrov's face. He spoke, however.

"How—?" Like an actor forgetting his lines, he dried after the single word.

"We know someone's coming," Priabin said, offering no explanation of his knowledge, not even referring to the borescope. "We'll all just sit and wait for him, shall we?" His voice was still musical with success. Katya, too, was smiling.

"When's he due to arrive? Soon, I should think, the way you keep looking at the door. Soon? Good—excellent."

Priabin looked at his watch. Three twenty-eight. He'd give it until four. Then the worries returned. Rodin—I should have told Mikhail to watch Rodin, stay with him.

Would he somehow be made to pay for this success? He felt himself almost superstitious, needing signs and portents. The ticket to Moscow on the morning flight was waiting at the Aeroflot desk. He'd simply checked the Aeroflot computer from the KGB offices; the airline, thank God, was still KGB rather than army, even out here. Mikhail had the tape of his conversation with Rodin. Yes, that was safe. The little incantations of his successes that night calmed his breathing, cooled his body. He looked at Kedrovs face, crumbling like waxy, old cheese; the portrait was almost complete. Kedrov's rescuers next, then Rodin . . . the thought of Rodin was like the hollow tooth to which the tongue inevitably returns. He winced. But if he had not left the boy, he would have just continued to refuse, even threatened Priabin with his father, denied everything. He had had to be left alone with his growing fears. Through them, Priabin might come to help.

His anxiety would not go away. To allay it, he snapped at Kedrov: "What do you know about
Lightning,
my friend?"

As if he had been practicing his response to just that question, Kedrov flung back at him: "Nothing. Nothing at all. What are you talking about?"

"You know something, Kedrov—you know," Priabin murmured. "It's in your eyes." Priabin felt calm once more, albeit temporarily, he suspected. The cabin seemed less shadowy and cramped. Katya and Kedrov and he formed a still, restful painting as they waited.

Until four o'clock.

Then Rodin would have to become his absolute priority.

His speed was no more than ninety miles per hour. The Hind wove its way along the channels and roads and railway tracks of a derelict silo complex. Canallike gouges in the flat land. The complex had been abandoned in the early seventies, when all passages and missile railways had been tunneled underground. Satellite photography had shown this place unchanged for more than fifteen years. Dust flew up behind the helicopter. Kedrov's transponder was less than five minutes away now.

He jerked the Hind aside violently, avoiding a fallen power cable that had suddenly draped itself in front of the cockpit as if hanging from the dark sky. The helicopter rolled, then he righted it.

He studied the map display. He was working to the largest scale now, and the details were more sketchy, adapted from
countless
satellite pictures. The thin, dark trail of
a
shallow stream, barely running on the surface at all, lay ahead
of
the white dot that
repre
sented the helicopter. He lifted out of a gully. In his mirrors, skeletal gantries and towers leaned or remained upright
without
purpose. Beyond them, the bathing place was lost to sight.
On the
map, fireflies moved now that he was
in
open sky. Russian
crackled
and flew in his headset.

His conflicting emotions had receded, lost in routines, in flying the helicopter. There was an abiding sense of moving closer to the
center
of
a
web, of deliberately putting his foot on a branch-covered pit. Otherwise, the fear had diminished, the sense of panic that had made him turn west and begin to run was under control. He was
wound
tight as a spring, but there was an unreality about the danger and
an
excitement that welled in him. He believed he could get to Kedrov, believed he could get him out—despite the odds against him. He had recovered his ego. There was a cold, machinelike exhilaration about his attempt that swept even self-preservation aside, for the moment. But the whole thing was narrowing like a blind alley. It was going to be close, very close.

He noticed sedge waving and bowing like corn beneath the Hind's belly as he was approaching the salt marshes. The troop transport, a heavy MiL-8 Hip, had collected the GRU search party and was moving on a course almost parallel to his own. If he glanced to port, he could just make out the distant white legs of twin searchlights walking across the landscape, shining down from the MiL-8's belly. Collision course between himself and as many as two dozen armed GRU soldiers. He dropped over a low bank into the winding course of the stream, which led into the heart of the salt marshes. Ice gleamed like fragments of a broken mirror.

He lost sight of the two walking legs of light and of the forest of abandoned gantries behind him. Airspeed, eighty-five. Time—he glanced at the clock on the main panel—three forty-two. He looked up as the Hind's shadow skimmed a stretch of frozen water. No navigation lights, only the cold stars. He was sweating freely now. Distance to target, four miles. A clump of dwarf bushes leaned from the bank of the stream. Icy sedge stood out from both banks like the spikes of an insect-devouring plant, ready to close over the helicopter.

Call signs, reports, instructions rang in his ears. Though he knew they were not aware of his presence, not yet.

KGB helicopter, routine flight, would be his story. By the time they checked him out—despite the absence of a flight number on their radars, which would make them curious—he would have completed ingress, be on his way out again ... be there Kedrov, be there, you bastard.

The padding of his helmet above his eyebrows was damp, and rubbed as he moved his head from side to side. He was too hot in the leather jacket.

As the marshes spread out more flatly, he glanced to port. Yes, the lights walked on in the distance. The MiL-8 was now slightly ahead of him, or so it seemed. Stunted trees in a clump. The Hind rose—

—flicked aside. Violently, as the rotors of another helicopter caught the moonlight, and cockpit lights enlarged in his vision. He swung to one side of the MiL-2 and slightly higher. Altitude, six hundred feet, rising like a bobbing cork onto every radar screen monitoring the area.

Russian bursting from the headset, a stream of oaths and curses and a challenge that was without suspicion; just simple fear and relief flooding the ether.

"Calm down, comrade," he heard himself saying through clenched teeth. The other MiL was turning in his mirrors, to face after him. Reeds and frozen water flowed beneath the Hind. "No damage done," he continued to soothe. "KGB flight Alpha-Three, what more do you want? Fucking around the sky like a swarm of flicking locusts." He listened then.

"... purpose of flight?"

"None of your fucking business. We have choppers, too, comrade." He flew on, watching the MiL recede in his mirrors, watching its blind face turn slowly away as if to resume its inspection of a plotted route. He heard its pilot or copilot reporting the near-colli-sion, reporting his cover story. He was logged in. Now the questions would begin. He dropped down to fifty feet, disappearing from radar.

Islets, stretches of reed-filled ice, stunted trees. The marshes. Navigation lights to port and starboard, but patrolling, not converging. The MiL-8 s searchlights a dull glow away to port, but closer now. Collision course. He felt weak but forced himself to study the map display, to draw his gaze away from the clock on the panel, to ignore the fireflies superimposed on the sketchy landscape.