Winter Hawk (54 page)

He wanted to press his hands to his ears, as if the words were still being spoken and he could shut them out. But Serov was silent, standing back like a painter to observe the effect of his last brush strokes. No way out, no way out . . .

. . . Anna, Gant, Rodin, Kedrov, Anna, Gant . .

No way out.

There must be some way . . .

. . . some way.

There must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief.

God, why Dylan now? The song ran in his head together with Serov's taunt. No way, some way, no way out, some way out, no way out of here, some way out of here ... It was like contemplating the onset of madness, his mind was so helpless in its desperate attempts to avoid the idea. No way, some way . . .

—thief, thief,
thief!

Gant!

He whirled around. Serov was smiling. Priabin's hand slapped against his empty holster. Serov laughed, raising his arms in a mocking gesture of surrender. His whole face was violent with laughter. Priabin had no scheme, no inkling, no—

Thief!

He snatched up the heavy, long letter opener from Serov's desk and before the man could move had thrust it against his neck, pricking the skin just above the collar, near the jugular. He grabbed the pistol from Serov's holster and stepped away quickly as Serov's boots lashed out to try to cripple him. Priabin moved around the desk holding the pistol on his opponent, fighting to close his mind against the emptiness that suddenly loomed after his desperate movements.

Serov dabbed his neck with a handkerchief, swiveled in his chair. His eyes shone, and his features were flinty with contempt.

All Priabin could hear was the beating of his heart and their mutually ragged, tense breathing. He sat gingerly on his chair, both hands holding Serov's pistol, gripping it tightly, almost inexpertly, to still the quiver his hands were transmitting to the barrel of the gun. He steadied its aim on Serov's body with a huge effort. Gantries, pylons, power cables, radar dishes stretched away behind Serov, to the indistinct, distant horizon, which offered no sense of escape. Army territory out there, all of it, for mile after mile.

"You bloody fool. That has got you precisely nowhere. There's no way out. Don't you realize that? No way—you're as good as dead."

The office she had shared with Zhikin was pressing in on her. His desk stood near the window, its surface slatted and barred with shadow and pale gold like an animal's hide as the afternoon seeped through the
Venetian
blinds. His death was in the room with her, as was her awareness of his murderers' identities. A prologue to Pri-abin's tragedy. She tried to rid her consciousness of the desk by reducing it to veneer, leather, papers, a swivel chair. But it was in those freer moments that her husband's image proved most strong. Uniformed, smiling sardonically, he seemed to stand at her side like a pedagogue. He was there to represent the army. The memory of him, her knowledge of him, convinced her more than anything else of the truth of Priabin's wild allegations and fears. Her husband would have been breathless with excitement and ambition at something as fantasic as
Lightning.
His image seemed to voice a thousand words of contempt for politicians, for the civilian population—for anyone not in the army.

Priabin was convinced that they were enacting their most dangerous fantasy, and she could not help but believe him.

She got up from her desk, her hands twisted together. She remained well away from the blinds-striped desk that threatened near the window, and began pacing the room, not for the first or even the tenth time. The dog watched her, his tail flapping idly, aware of her tension, aware that he was ignored.

"Why did you have to tell me?" she almost wailed. Her conscious thoughts were filled with blame for Priabin. What was she doing, trying to justify the fact that she wanted to help? Or disguising her fears for Priabin's safety? "Leave me alone!" she shouted. The dog looked up. She growled at him not to move. It was even his dog! Its eyes became hurt, even wounded. "Oh, God." Her mind was like a boiling mud pool; bubbles of escaping ideas and imaginings and emotion kept breaking the surface. Her hands knotted into fists as if she was about to beat the air about her head. She had never felt so—so trapped.

Priabin had enlisted her, that's what he had done. He had known she would help him if she could, had relied on the fact. She should be keeping out of sight, but instead she was frantic with concern for his safety, even in the midst of her self-concern. It couldn't possibly come to a war, it just couldn't.

He believed it. She could not refute it, just as she could not wave her husband from her mind.
You don't understand
—he always prefaced his remarks with some such phrase.
You don't begin to understand.

Katya's rage expended itself on the image of her husband. She held her head in her clenched hands as in a vise, to squeeze Yuri out of her imagination. She wanted to escape him and she wanted to rid herself of loyalty, affection, duty, terror, even self-preservation and leave her mind clean and empty. She growled in her anger. The dog's tail signaled the animal's anthropomorphic sympathy. After all, what could she do—what could she possibly do? It was already too late to help Priabin. Serov had him, and she could not get out of Baikonur, just as he had been unable to do.

She sat down quickly behind her desk and lit a cigarette with trembling fingers. The hiss of gas from the cheap lighter was audible, and somehow frightening for an instant before the flame spurted. Her head was tight almost to bursting. Her hands would not stop shaking; it was the same earth tremor that Priabin must have experienced when Rodin first told him about
Lightning.
Must be.

What could she possibly do?

She drew at the cigarette as at oxygen, as the boiling mud pool seemed to threaten to choke her. One hand clutched the other while her whole body trembled at the thought of what she must attempt. She tapped ash feverishly into the full ashtray. She was unable to move from her chair, hunched slightly forward in it. Yuri had vanished, gone to his habitual place at the far back of her mind; but he was like an accident that leaves shock behind. She felt, perhaps for the first time in her life, real terror. Quaking terror—

Telephone. Her arrest? Priabin's implicating her? Serov?

She snatched up the receiver. "Grechkova," she cried in a high voice, holding the receiver with both hands against her cheek as if expecting news of a death.

"Katya—is that you? What's—?" His voice was strained. But it was him! How?

"Colonel."

"Yes. Are you alone, Katya?"

"Yes, why? How are you able—?"

"Listen." His desperation was clear. Had he told them about her? "Listen to me, Katya. No, don't say anything." She thought she caught the noise of soft laughter, further from the mouthpiece into which he was speaking.

"What is it?" she pleaded.

"I need your help. I have to have your help, Katya. Now." He paused, but she could say nothing. Eventually, he said: "Katya—are you still there?" Again she heard the distant noise. Who was it, laughing like that? Then she knew—Serov was there.

Trap, trick, deceit—

"Yes," she answered. "I'm here." She felt very cold, yet still. Serov's image ushered the chill. He would be listening on an extension, enjoying every word, watching his prisoner reel in his accomplice; prove that she knew about
Lightning.

"Listen, Katya—you're the only one who can help me," he cried excitedly, fearfully. "You've got to."

"I can't help you, Colonel," she announced with a dull, empty calm.

"You must!" he almost wailed. Again, the indistinct sound of Serov's laughter. "You're my only hope, Katya."

"I can't help you, Colonel," she repeated. "I know nothing, I can do nothing."

The noise was louder. She shivered at the sound of
Serov
's voice, though she could not make out the words.

"Katya—please!"

"I can't," she began. Then she heard Serov's roar of
triumphant
laughter, heard him yelling.

"... scared shitless . . . knew it would happen, should have asked me . . . rats deserting ..." Laughter again, almost choking off the triumph. She lost the words and clung to the tone in
which
Serov went on.

Deceit?

He hadn't, hadn't. . . Serov was laughing at him, at her Mure to help him. It wasn't a trick.

"Colonel, Colonel—what is it? What do you want?" Then, more carefully: "What can I do to help?"

The silence crackled like a bad connection between them. She could hear his breathing, filled with phlegm and tension as he attempted to calm himself. She no longer heaj*d the laughter from further in the room. What had he done, managed to do?

"Thanks," he said eventually.

"Can you talk?" she asked, becoming the eager partner.

"What? Oh, yes. Serov's here, of course. I have his pistol."

"What?"

'True." There was almost a chuckle in his voice. "He's a bit annoyed about it, as you'd expect... I'm wasting time. I can't get out of here without your help. Will you—"

"Yes. I promise. Whatever."

"I want our surveillance helicopter ready for takeoff. As soon as possible. Go there yourself and check it out. Don't take any bullshit, just get them to do the full preflight check, fuel up, everything—my orders."

"Yes, yes."

"And then bring a uniform here, to Serov's office. Don't worry, Serov will tell them to let you in—won't you?" he added with a kind of malevolent amusement, talking into the room, to be answered by silence. "He will, anyway. Now, do you understand all that?"

"I don't understand why—"

"Dammit, you don't have to understand why, woman—just do it!" he bellowed. Then, almost immediately, he soothed: "No, no, I'm sorry, Katya. But please do as I ask. The helicopter first. It has to be ready to fly immediately, tell them. Then the uniform. Got it?"

Strangely, through the thicket of questions that confronted her, one emerged; the silliest, least vital—or so it seemed to her.

"What—what size should the uniform—"

"Size?" he yelled as if at a dim and truculent pupil. "The American pilot's size, of course!"

"What a brilliant scheme," Serov observed. He scratched the side of his broad nose with a fingertip, his body leaning back in his chair, which creaked as he shifted his weight in a pose of lei-sureliness. Priabin returned to his own chair, the pistol held in both

hands with the same suggestion of inner conflict and desperate urgency. Serov's face mocked him. "Brilliant." He sighed. Then he leaned forward in his chair. Sunlight fell across one side of his face, removing any trace of expression. Specks of dust whirled as his hands waved dismissively. "You aren't going to make it, Priabin. That I can confidently predict. You're falling apart too quickly, too much. You aren't going to make it."

"Shut up, Serov. Pick up the telephone."

Serov waved his hands across his desk, as if quickly wiping crumbs from a tablecloth. "Not yet—perhaps not at all," he murmured. "Listen to me, schoolteacher's son."

"You think I'm soft because my father wasn't a horny-handed son of the soil like yours? If you even know who he is."

Serov's eyes glinted, but he roared with laughter. "You're just a little boy in a grown-up world. Little Mitya, his mummy's pretty, darling son. You won't make it. Still, I'll make sure you merit a disused mine shaft as your final resting place—I promise you that. Somewhere quite quiet, and lonely."

"Pick up the telephone!" Priabin yelled.

Serov shook his head. "I've told you no—not yet, anyway. It's two-thirty already, Priabin. Time is on my side. You can't walk out of here without me—they'd stop you, or check with me at the very least before they let you pass. So you can do nothing to me, not even make me pick up the telephone. Is that clear, Priabin? You ceased to exist the moment you entered this room."

Priabin stood up, snatching up the receiver. "Get the American brought up here—now."

Again, Serov shook his head. "Impatient boy." He sighed, enjoying his situation. Even with the pistol in his hand, Priabin appeared impotent; Serov possessed that degree of power that rendered bullets harmless. Priabin's body jumped and twitched with possibilities, as if its muscles responded to the rapidity of his thoughts. "Sit down, Priabin. You look foolish."

Priabin replaced the receiver, sat down obediently. He placed the pistol harmlessly across his lap.

"What have you got?" Serov asked. "One girl who may or may not be in love with you—not much to rely on, love, in this situation, I'd say—getting your helicopter ready. Where will it take you? I'd say Aral'sk, wouldn't you?" He grinned as Priabin felt his face redden with confession. "I thought so. Where you were making for by road. But you need a pilot, and you need a witness. All right, 111 pick up the receiver for you, but to make a call of my own—no, you can listen on the extension. Ill show you you haven't a chance."

He dialed swiftly. Priabin felt the situation beyond his grasp, beyond recovery. Something in him had surrendered to the room's trap; to the central heating, the sunlight dazzling through the window, to Serov's authority. It hadn't been a scheme, something rationally developed, just a madcap insight, a momentary instinct of survival.