Winter Hawk (9 page)

The lump of the malfunctioning satellite appeared to one side of the screen. Anders sipped his beer, his hand tightening involuntarily on the can. The tire man backpacked toward the satellite. The earth below him remained untouchably, impossibly beautiful.

Frustration gripped Anders.

"Christ, Gant, how can you just sit there?" he burst out. "Don't you care?"

"Plenty. What good will it do, Anders? I can't repair rotor heads. They're working as fast as they can."

"We don't have any time, Gant."

Gant ostentatiously looked at his watch. It was seven in the evening, local time, as near as it mattered. Ten o'clock in Washington. Soon Anders would have to call the Oval Office—again. He squeezed the can in his hand. Gant was like a pressure forcing itself against him; immobile like a Buddha, silent again now that he was not being spoken to. Then he looked at Anders.

"It could take four hours, it could take all night. You've seen."

The room oppressed Anders even more. He felt an imposter in his borrowed flying overalls. His body ached from the unfamiliarity of the copilot's seat of the EF-111 in which he had been flown from Andrews to Nellis. Gant's apparent indifference enraged him.

"The man expects you to succeed, Gant," he said waspishly.

Gant turned his head, his eyes glinting. "So? The man expects?" He gestured with the beer can. "When the repairs are through, we go. What the hell else do you want from me?"

"He wants, Gant—he wants. You have to give him this agent on a plate,
and
his holiday movies. Can you do that?"

"I'm not his wife, Anders. Just one of the slobs working in the guy's factory, underpaid and underfed." He grinned quickly, looking suddenly boyish. "We're not ready, Anders. You know that. Not even me."

There was a certainty about Gant's pronouncement, negative though it was. The room around him said little or nothing about the man. A pennant from Vietnam on one of the buff-colored walls, a few photographs of aircraft, a younger Gant posed in front of a Phantom jet, pilot's helmet under his arm. Little or nothing—yet Anders was impressed by the force with which Gant occupied the room.

"You—have to be ready," Anders said.

Gant shrugged. "It doesn't change the facts. We should have had another week, minimum. Those machines are pigs to fly. Tell the man that when you talk with him." He looked at his watch once more. "Isn't it time to call home?" His features wore an undisguised cynicism that angered Anders. Gant was contemptuous of him, of the President—of the mission?

"Where in hell are you coming from, Gant?" he snapped. "What is it with you? I don't need all this crap from you."

"But you need me, Anders. So does the man. My misfortune, but you do. This idea was crazy from the beginning. Now it's suicidal."

"You want out, Gant? Is that what you want?" Anders sneered, the can squeezed almost flat in his fist.

Gant shrugged expressively. "Out? Why?" He gestured around the bare room. "You told me, once, Anders, why I work for you. For the rest of the assholes in the Company. Because you let me fly. Huh?" He dismissed Anders with a wave of his hand and turned back to the television as he said, "I'm in, Anders. I don't have any hankering to face charges that have been tailored to fit me—maybe even a list of charges." He snorted in derision. "I'm a big boy, Anders—I tie my own shoelaces and I know the score. I just get parked here till you need me. I'm going just as soon as they fix Garcia's ship."

"OK." Anders sighed. He leaned heavily against the door. He realized he had never really entered the small room. It and its occupant baffled him. Gant was cocooned, somehow apart. Perhaps he really did despise the very people who needed him, to whom he was valuable. Anders added in a tone that was intended to mollify: "If we can have the agent and the material by Thursday, we can still win, Gant. We can bargain."

Gant studied Anders' angry, tired face. Anders could not change his expression. His muscles were set in defeated lines.

Gant said: "Maybe.
If
and
maybe."

"What the hell else can we do?" Anders cried out. The can in his hand was crushed flat.

Gant shrugged. "Nothing. But the idea is still crazy."

"You'll be in Soviet helicopters, you have all the call signs, the channels and frequencies, you'll be there maybe a half hour—"

"They'll shoot a guy on a bicycle on sight, Anders. That place is going to be sewn up tight—and I mean tight." He looked down at his own can, shook it—it made no sound—then lobbed it into a waste-basket. He closed his hands together as if in prayer. "And the guy's jumped, Anders. You don't even know if he'll show up when we do."

"He said. Kedrov knows where to be. He has a transponder only you will be able to pick up. The rendezvous island in the salt marshes is pinpointed.
Winter Hawk
is something they won't be expecting, not in a million years."

"So you say."

"So the President says, Gant. To quote him exactly, he said, Tell that guy to get his ass over there—and no foul-ups.' His message is clear, Gant."

"Sure. Otherwise it's a long vacation somewhere where they're always losing the keys. I know."

"We don't do that."

"This time
he
will. I have the ball, Anders." He returned his gaze to the screen. The terms of the treaty were still rolling softly up the screen, the shuttle still floated invulnerably and apart above the ocean.

"I have to make that call," Anders said, throwing his can at the wastebasket. It struck the side and clattered on the floor. Gant smiled.

He looked toward Anders as if weighing him. Then he said: "Give the man my compliments. Tell him Captain Fantastic is just raring to go." Once again, he snorted in derision.

3: Gathering
Stonn

"—gone, sir
. He must have vanished some time during the night, over the roof. We—"

"You were there!" Priabin shouted into the cars radio microphone. "You stupid buggers were on the spot all night!"

"Sir, we had all the exits covered," the voice began once more, its note of apology more calculating and less shocked.

In the Zil's front passenger seat, Viktor Zhikin sighed angrily and banged the dashboard with his gloved fist. His murmur was an echo of Priabin's sentiments.

"Find him!" Priabin barked, his voice unnerved. The silence around him in the car was thunderous. The driver had turned off the music from the black-market cassette.

"Sir?" Zhikin asked as Priabin threw him the microphone.

"Don't let's allow Orlov to go the same way, shall we?"

Zhikin snapped into the mike: "All units—move in at once. Now." Acknowledgments crackled in the car

"Come on," Priabin snapped. "Orlov will know where his little friend is." I hope so, he added to himself. I hope so.

He opened the rear door and climbed out. The temperature assailed him, biting through his heavy overcoat, his boots. The black car was clothed with heavy frost.

Dear Christ, he thought, the idea striking him cleanly, they've lost Kedrov. Anger welled up at once, almost choking him. He had to find him; his whole career, his return to Moscow, depended on it. If it was discovered he let an American spy escape, he would be well and truly finished. Panic coursed through him like the effects of a drink. He almost lost his footing on the icy pavement. It glinted dully in the red, early light.

He steadied himself against the car, hardly squinting as he looked into the heavy, swollen ball of the sun that had just heaved itself above the flat horizon. Like a heavier-than-air balloon. Its dull red disk was bisected and trellised with launch gantries, the skeletons of radio masts, and radar dishes.

Zhikin crossed the narrow, cobbled street just ahead of him. It was veined with gray ice. The blinds of Orlov's shop were closed. Paint peeled from the wooden door. The shop's sign was weathered almost to illegibility. A word-of-mouth clientele, Priabin reminded himself humorlessly. Cassettes, expensive stereo items from the West, even the more usual currency of denim. Orlov supplied to the young and to the scientific and technical communities; the army had its own semiofficial pipeline, which flowed with more regularity, bringing the prized and scarce consumer luxuries. For the army it was a perk, not a crime.

Anger swelled once again in Priabin's throat. He banged on the door with his gloved fist, quickly, repeatedly. He realized Zhikin was watching him disapprovingly, head to one side. He went on banging, yelled Orlov's name in the quiet morning of the narrow, old street. Zhikin put his finger to the bell at the side of the door. What if, what if—? Priabin's mind drummed, as if to accompany the beat of his fist.

"Orlov!" he yelled. "Orlov, open this bloody door!" Voice becoming higher.

A helicopter drummed and grumbled overhead. He looked up. A vapor trail crossed the sun. Across the street, he heard the driver's radio. What if Orlov had gone underground along with Kedrov, slipped away in the night? If the army found out about Kedrov—they must, now that the man had disappeared from his work—he'd be bloody ruined.

"Orlov. Orlov, you old bastard, open up!"

He had to get Kedrov back at once. Then he might win the game that had suddenly turned deadly.

Zhikin's hand was firm on his arm.

"OK, sir?" he asked, his face concerned and cautioning.

"What?"

"You need—to calm down. Orlov will be no help if you . . ."He did not need to finish the sentence. Priabin glared, then swallowed and nodded.

"OK, Viktor, OK. Usual style, old techniques—sure." Come on, come on—

He craned toward the door and heard the slow shuffle of something—slippered feet or an old dog's noises—coming through the shop. A bolt slid back. A sigh escaped Priabin's lips, a smoky signal of relief. Zhikin's face settled into satisfied lines.

Another bolt, then a security lock. A gnarled hand slid up the blind. Orlov's face appeared, blinking at them like a threatened mole, its tunnel blocked behind it. Orlov wore thick glasses, was thin and elderly, but cunning—already counting them, assessing their mood. His head was bald, liver-spotted like the back of the hand still holding the raised blind. A shrunken but loose stomach sagged like a phantom pregnancy under a stretched gray cardigan.

He opened the door slowly. Priabin wanted to drive through it, rush into the shop bellowing Kedrov's name. But he knew the spy would not be there.

"Yes?" Orlov asked, his voice cautiously deferential, testing their mood like an antenna. His tongue licked his gray lips and his eyes blinked again. "Yes, comrade Colonel? I'm not open—"

"You are to us," Zhikin replied wearily, holding up the red ID card in its plastic folder.

"Yes, of course," Orlov replied. "Please come in, comrades. How can I help you?" Priabin, enraged by the man's calculated replies, realized he had been forewarned. He had been practicing his part all night.

Careful, careful . . . Viktor's right—Priabin could almost smell Kedrov upstairs, above the shop. He must have come; was he still here? What message had he sent? Steady, steady . . . Orlov's setting the pace just now.

They entered the shop. Bare floorboards, dust; the smells of lubricating oil, heavier greases, welding gas, paint. A litter of parts, a couple of complete bicycles; a new, bright-green man's bike in the shop's bay window that bulged into the narrow street outside. It was ready to be exposed to envying eyes as soon as the blinds and the security meshes were removed when the shop opened. Orlov seemed unwilling to invite them farther into the shop's secret reaches.

Priabin's excitement was evident in his voice. "Where is he?" he blurted. Zhikin's face disapproved.

Orlov stood behind the counter of the shop, as if to serve them. On its surface, yesterday's paper was covered with oil and a bicycle chain. Then he was startled by the noise of locks being smashed at the rear of the building. His head turned wildly. Priabin nodded to Zhikin.

"Search everywhere," he whispered insistently.

Zhikin seemed to weigh his mood and find it acceptable, and nodded. "I don't think he's here," he commented, then passed behind the shop counter into the rear of the building. Orlov had begun to whine.

"I—what do you want? I let you in, there was no need to break the door. ..." His voice trailed off as Priabin approached the counter, more like an intruder than a customer. He touched the day-old local Tyuratam paper—its reports seeming to indicate a separation of existence between Baikonur and the old town—shunting its edges parallel with those of the counter. The bicycle chain slithered like an almost dormant snake. Priabin looked up from the newspaper into Orlov's gray features.

A little money on the side, that's all it was. He'd call it providing a service, probably. Always reasonably safe, since the KGB bought their new stereo headphones or styluses or pop tapes here, too. Got their Jap hi-fi repaired by Orlov. Priabin himself had done so on one occasion, after the officially approved electrical shop in the town had buggered his cassette player. Orlov was safe—

—until he wanted to start playing in the first division, with the big boys. Being the transmitter man for Kedrov.