Winter Hawk (65 page)

They were in the cab almost immediately. The engine fired noisily in the silence. A face looking out, a white, momentary spot, then the UAZ moved, and he could have squeezed the trigger and damaged the vehicle as well as killing the men, but did not, cursing silently. The UAZ roared noisily away, raising a slight flurry of icy dirt as it trundled along the embankment. He had waited too long. The radio had summoned them peremptorily elsewhere, they had moved with the speed of guilty dawdlers and were gone. Awkwardly, he scrabbled out of the ditch, sliding over its lip on his stomach.

He stood upright. The UAZ was already out of sight, hidden by the height of the embankment. Not even the glow of its taillights. He cocked his head, listening, despite the intensity of his disappointment. There was a silence in the air except for the whistling of the wind. The gunships and the troop-carrying MiL-8s were elsewhere. This empty farmland to the south of the river was still, being beyond the security perimeter, the periphery of their hunt. Perhaps that very embankment represented the outer ring, the edge . . . ?

Wearily, he climbed the slope, his body hunched into the parka, the Kalashnikov clutched across his chest. He hoisted his heavy body onto the track and straightened. Two dim red eyes in the distance, obscured by dust. The UAZ was gone, and he felt he had been abandoned. Turning through a full circle, he scanned the empty sky, the empty country, flat and featureless; lightless, too.

He bent on one knee and took the small flashlight from a pocket of the parka. Unfolded one of the much-creased maps, flicked the beam across the map's surface, then drew its light back more slowly.
Dotted
buildings, scattered like specks of dirt. He found the embankment, found the direction he sought—west, after the UAZ— found the closest speck to the embankment—no, two, three, six specks. The name of a collective. A car? His breath seemed to come
^s
ballowly at even the thought of a car. This—none of it—could be rationally pursued. A thousand miles lay out there in the darkness.

He turned to the northwest, where light ran along the whole of the horizon like a false dawn. Where, he knew, Rodin the general would be not just hunting him, but making damn sure that
Lightning
went ahead. Precisely because he was still running around loose they'd want to make sure he didn't screw up the party. The timetable would be moved up—what difference could they make to the launch schedule? Halve it—no, down to two thirds, with God's good grace, two thirds. He had until dawn, until the early morning light. A thousand miles . . .

He stood up groggily, swaying in the wind as it buffeted him. He held the rifle like a comforter. The collective was maybe two miles west, a dotted collection of buildings in the middle of nowhere. Farm headquarters, barns, and maybe a car or a truck.

He forced his legs into motion, forced his frame into a quick jog, despite the huge inertia of disappointment and futility that weighed on him. A car or truck would mean quicker movement away, would be a means of staying alive that he did not possess while on foot. It wouldn't take him a thousand miles, maybe not a hundred, but it was better than this, better, better, better. His heavily pounding boots drummed and reiterated the word, as did his pounding ears. He would stay alive, stay free for twice as long, three times as long as on foot . . . better, better . . .

His elbow seemed to pain him more in Rodin's presence, like an old wound reacting to imminent changes in the weather. He did not cradle it with his good hand, however, not before Rodin's gray, almost fanatic stare. There was a madness about the damn old man, he decided, even though he felt, along with the others in the room, that Rodin was right to pursue
Lightning
with all possible speed.

Eight-fifty, Wednesday evening. Digital clocks and calendars
lit
tered the walls like urgent graffiti, adding to the tensions and pressures of that vast, humming room. Serov smelled the ozone of
^a
hundred screens and keyboards and fiber-optic maps. Banks of mission controllers retreated like an audience into the shadows
behind
and almost above the lights.
On
the huge upright map
nearest
to him and Rodin, the American shuttle
Atlantis
weaved the slow pan
¹
of a weary fly;
a
poisoned fly about to die. Serov's vitriol was slug'
gish
without the antifreeze of his best health. The elbow
drained
him like a disease rather than a fracture. It was an effort to hold h*
^s
features clear of pain, even during those short periods when
Rodin*
turning occasionally from his senior officers and technical stan>
looked
directly at him. His courtiers were sycophantic and filled with enthusiasm, fired with the old man's purpose. Serov knew that if they lost this one chance—bows and arrows and menial tasks,
cleaning
shithouses like Afghanistan, training the fucking Cubans and Palestinians and Shiites in half a dozen countries. It was as plain as the nose on Rodin's face—the army's last chance to keep its grip on the Politburo's collective balls.

Rehearsing the old war cries kept the pain at a tolerable level.

"Where is he now, Serov?" Rodin hissed at him, his head snapping around to fix his gray gaze on the shorter man. "Where is your American and his little KGB friend? You haven't come to tell me you've caught them, by any chance?" Almost languid, almost joking. Almost.

Serov shook his head, his features grave. "Not yet, comrade General," he said with regretful confidence. "It is, of course, only a matter of time."

"It had better be." And yet Rodin was detached from the fate of Gant and that stupid little prick Priabin. The screens that curved in a crescent to their left showed the shuttle moving toward the distant launch pad, showed the waiting booster, showed the crew in their quarters, intruding on their sleep like spy cameras. The murmurs, if one concentrated, were a chorus of instructions, orders, reports, checks.
Atlantis
moved on the screen, the weaving line that traced its course slipping across Africa. "It will be," Rodin murmured, and turned back to one of his people, launching into an immediate discussion on the shaving of minutes from the boarding and preflight checks by the crew. Serov waited to be dismissed.

He gazed at the screens, the huge map, other maps, a chart of the pattern of radar and telemetry stations across the Soviet Union that would follow the shuttle in orbit, the banks of controllers at their screens and keyboards, rendered identical by the shadows and ty their each wearing a headset and microphone. Cigarette smoke rolled and billowed amid the suspended lights. He looked up toward

tinted windows of the GRU's security room. Squinting, he real-*f
^e
d that one of his people was waving urgently to him. The imme-
^la
te leap of tension and the beat of his heart enforced his fear of the Edition of his nerves. Could it—?

He nodded to the unseeing Rodin, who was insisting that an-
^0t
her ten minutes be trimmed from the hand-over ingress routines, the crew boarded. Then Serov hurried across the cable-lit-
^re
d floor toward the door. Along the cold, concrete corridor. He

clattered up an iron spiral staircase, careful not to knock his broken arm in his haste. He could clutch it now, protect it. He hurried down the narrow corridor to a single door. He thrust it open, entering the security room, surprising its half-dozen occupants. Ozone again, VDUs, radios, fiber-optic maps. The hunt for Gant was once more their business, returned to their charge by Rodin.

"Is—?" he began.

The lieutenant was nodding. "Yes, Colonel, they've found it, on the ground, too—here." His finger dabbed at a screen that displayed a map—where? South of the river? Yes.

"Thank Christ!" he could not help but exclaiming. Then: "Are Jiey still with the machine?"

"Priabin, the KGB colonel, sir—he's there."

"But Gant is not?"

The man shook his head. Serov did not even bother to recall his aame; no requirement to be congratulated or commended officially. He was just the bearer of a report. Yet a small, secret pleasure welled from his stomach to his chest. He felt the knife tickle at his collar again, the pain in his elbow surged through him as he remembered—then cleared as he anticipated. Priabin would pay, he'd beat the little shit to a pulp, with one hand tied behind ... He grimaced. With his one good fist then.

"What does Priabin have to say?"

"Do you want to talk to—?'

"Just give me the gist of it, man!" he roared.

"Sorry, Colonel." The man lowered his eyes and rushed on. "He said he was waiting for—our people to turn up. Sir, that's
exactly
what he said. The woman you wounded is dead, sir. The MiL suffered damage during its encounter with the
zveno,
just as they suspected—rudder controls inoperable, the report says. The
American
was forced to crash-land, about two and a half hours ago. Gant has a videotape of the—assembly building with him, a rifle, food. He's on foot. Priabin has no idea where he's gone, and says he
couldn
't && less."

Serov realized how muddy, how defeated his thoughts had been-The impact of what he heard struck him only after the lieutenanj had finished his summary. Then he hit his head as if to jolt his mi*
¹
to activity.

"Then he's on foot."

"Yes, sir." .

"Thank Christ for that. You realize what it means? He's as goo° as in the bag. He can't possibly get anywhere on foot. My God,
we
've won, we've stopped it. Tell them, the gunships, the ground patrols, everyone—two hours to find the American. Two hours."

He turned away, walking across the room toward the windows. Immediately, he located Rodin. Right, you old bastard, he thought carefully, precisely. I'm no longer here on sufferance. I have a right.

Quenching a sneer of triumph, he turned* quickly toward the door. He'd tell Rodin now.

Resolve and will had turned against him, robbing him of strength as they, too, ebbed. His imagination was using energy at a suicidal rate. His legs had become leaden, hard to move, and his head felt light. The sense that it was hopeless, that he could go on for only a little longer, waited at the door of his conscious mind, pushing it slowly open.

Moonlight, gleaming on snaking ice, sheened on the early frost glittering across the stretches of sand and dirt. Clouds moved across die sky like great dark shoulders heaving at something that resisted their solid force. The rifle banged against his ribs as he jogged with repeated, sapping blows. The others—the dead woman and the KGB man he hardly knew who had wanted so much to kill him, even Serov and the pursuit—were increasingly behind him, distant and unreal. His head was becoming fuzzy with exertion and defeat. There was nothing in front of the next few heavy thumps of his boots, nothing behind other than the slow distance he had come.

How many miles? Three, four since the last glimpse of the map? He gritted his teeth, hearing his breath roar in his ears, his blood pound. Nothing had come near him, no other vehicle, no helicopter. They had no idea where he was.

They'd find him before daylight, for sure.

The certainty grew that he was merely expending energy to no Purpose. His body ran with sweat, the rifle banged, even the videotape cassette weighed heavy in one pocket of the parka. The ground beneath his boots seemed to shift, become uncertain and ^dy. Trees filtered the moonlight darkly, as if hoarding it.

Trees.

He staggered to a halt, his head reeling like a drunks, his body Quivering. He looked around him wildly, as if he had been ordered to halt. He dropped to one knee, flicking on the flashlight, waggling j*
¹⁶
maps creased folds beneath its thin beam. The map
shivered in
^ hand, but not from the wind, which
distressed
his hair
and
was chilly on his damp neck and throat. His eyes traced the way he had come—flatness, flatness, a small plantation, yes, he remembered it, a narrow, clattering bridge across a main irrigation channel, two other planklike crossings, yes—this small fir plantation? His mind jogged back along the track. He did not remember, and shook his head in puzzlement and fear. Like a driver on a long straight highway, startled to realize that the last miles were a blank in his memory. At any moment, they might have surprised and taken him; at any moment. He shivered. The wind was increasingly cold, his body small and vulnerable. The track was a pale, moonlit strip running between the two dark, high banks of trees. Stars glinted coldly. Warmer light insinuated between the narrow boles of the farthest trees of the plantations—warmer light, represented a danger now to his exhausted mind, not a destination. He stood up slowly, like an old, arthritic man.

Breathed deeply to calm himself, but felt only colder because he was not moving. Gripped the rifle with gloved hands, but thought it to be little more than a harmless stick he had gathered somewhere. He looked up, his gaze swinging across the strip of sky he could see. It was empty, but the fact brought no reassurance.

A cloud hid the moon.