Winter Hawk (8 page)

Priabin nodded. "OK. It's a bit late in the day to let him go on running around. Time to chop off that particular chicken's head. We'll go in at dawn—warn the teams. You and I will supervise Or-lov's arrest. I want that transmitter, and no cock-ups."

Zhikin smiled. "Great," he said. "Fine—sir."

"Sure."

Threat, insolence, superiority, arrogance, contempt—he'd seen all those on Rodin's face. And fear, too, together with concern, self-accusation, anxiety—and a clear sense of danger.

Lightning.
It meant something, something vitally important concerning the laser weapon.
Lightning.

What the hell did it mean?

Snow was blowing across the tinted green windows, making their color colder, almost repellent. The illuminated spike of the Washington Monument looked even more than ever like some spacecraft waiting to be launched. Anders felt uncomfortable in the Oval Office. He wanted to loosen his tie, relax his sitting posture. It wasn't awe, or even tension. It was the weight of events.

New Year's, he thought. Just New Year's—and now this. He looked down at the sheet covered with his own handwriting.
Come for me at once, before they find me. I must go into hiding, the agreed rendezvous. Hurry
_y
come immediately.

Kedrov's panic button, his cry for help. He was terrified. Of something he referred to as
Lightning
, though he didn't explain.
1 know about
Lightning,
and they know I know. Hurry.
The desperation was clearly there. Kedrov had gone into the undergrowth. Gant and his people were stalled at Nellis in Nevada. It was coming un-glued, the whole operation.

Kedrov might even have been picked up by now

Because of the tension, Anders felt cut off from the outside. Langley, across the Potomac, was separated from him by a vast gulf. He was there to report, at the director's insistence, as mission officer for
Winter Hawk.
But there was nothing to report. The Galaxy transport aircraft was still sitting in its hangar at Nellis AFB in Nevada, two hours after the mission was activated. Three hours now.
Winter Hawk
was stalled.

As if rebuffing the tension, the defeat in the room's air, Calvin was rehearsing old speeches, old hopes.

"We fell for it—we were suckered into this treaty, Dick. We thought they were so frightened they had to agree—they just wanted to divert some defense spending. Years ahead of us all the time, and oveijoyed when we offered to save them billions of rubles so they could spend it on their own SDI! We threw in Talon Gold, our AS AT program, all in good faith, hoping to encourage them to do the same, went ahead with the surveillance satellite program instead—and all the time they had their own laser weapon program going. By God—I won't be forgiven for this—none of us will," he added darkly, turning to face the others.

Gunther looked down, as did the director, seated next to Anders. The silence loomed, waiting to be filled. Calvin was staring at him, accusingly, it seemed to Anders.

"And now you tell me our last chance is on hold," he snapped.

Anders glanced at the row of television screens along one wall. The mission room at Langley appeared on four of them in glaring color, from different angles. The scene appeared slow, underwater, almost inactive.

"Mr. President, the repairs they have to effect to one of the two gunships can't be done while they're in the air."

"How long, Mr. Anders, how long?"

"They can't give me a closer estimate than—maybe tonight."

"Maybe tonight?"

"I'm sorry, Mr.—"

"That isn't good enough, Anders, and you know it." Calvin turned his accusing gaze on the director. "Bill, you pleaded with me to initiate this operation. Forty-eight hours, maximum, that's what you said. They haven't taken off from Nellis yet, and three of your forty-eight have already disappeared."

The director shifted awkwardly on his chair like a chastened schoolboy.

Calvin sat at his desk, almost an interloper masquerading as President. His eyes looked lost and afraid.

"There's nothing I can say, Mr. President," the director offered apologetically. There was only disappointment in his voice, and an overwhelming sense of past events.

"What's the extent of the damage to the transport helicopter?" Dick Gunther asked.

"It's in the rotor head," Anders replied. "And in the hydraulic control jacks below the rotor head" Calvin appeared impatient with detail, as if he suspected lies or excuses. "They thought they had time to work on it—they're flat out now, Mr. President," he said mollifyingly. "It's a long and difficult job. They can't adapt U.S. parts to fit, not easily—"

"The hell with it, Mr. Anders," Calvin snapped. "Just chalk it up as another Company mistake—in your catalog of errors, Bill. You advised me to leave this guy in place in Baikonur until the last moment, you insisted the crews weren't ready to undertake the mission, that more weeks of training were required—and all that it's gotten us is nowhere. We've lost the game, Bill. You've fumbled the pass."

"I'm sorry, Mr. President."

Anders was angry, but he controlled his features. His brow began to perspire, and his body felt as if wrapped in hot, constricting towels rather than dressed in his gray suit. Calvin was manifestly unfair. He, too, was angry, but angry only that
Winter Hawk
would not have its chance—risky, sure, but their only chance.

He glanced at the Oval Office clocks in turn. One of them, a French clock, gilded and ornate, was placed on a low, darkly shining table. It was the First Lady's choice, he assumed. Its blue-num
_:
bered face showed a little after three. Sunday afternoon. The snow flew beyond the green glass as wildly as the recriminations in which Calvin had indulged.

"Why the hell did they go ahead?" Calvin was asking. "Why didn't they trust us?"

No one replied. The director lit his pipe. Anders was aware of the lighter tapping softly with nerves against the pipe's bowl. Blue smoke rose in the room, drifting across the windows toward the flag. Anders' gaze slid over Calvin's face, and he was shocked afresh by the deep stains beneath the man's eyes. The thick gray hair no longer added distinction to a strong face; it was no more than an old man's good fortune. He entertained an alternative image of Calvin, coming down the steps of Air Force One, returning to Washington from Vienna. Hands raised like a victorious fighter, grin broad, step quick and confident, almost running to the lectern with a genuine excitement, a need to tell. That had been after the first summit of his term of office, his first meeting with Nikitin. They had agreed on the principles of the arms reduction treaty, and the timetable for negotiation.

The voice had been full and resonant as he stood at the row of microphones. The cameras had continued to click and whir, the lights to flash, as he made his historic announcement.

My fellow Americans . . .

Calvin turned like someone afraid he was being followed and gazed out of the windows at the flying snow. It was as if he sensed the comparison of images in Anders' mind.

. . . today, President Nikitin and myself have committed ourselves and our two countries to a resolute search for peace and for genuine, verifiable reductions in our nuclear arsenals . . .

Anders remembered the emotions and the wild excitement the speech had aroused even in himself, a senior career intelligence officer, though he would not have remembered the words except that TV stations had been replaying the damn occasion, over and over, all that week. In the four weeks before, ever since they had first known about Baikonur, the words had become increasingly hollow. Now, at this crisis, the speech—that first one of all of them—was no more than the naive utterance of a duped politician. The signing of the treaty should have crowned Calvin's first term and assured a second. Now he stared ruin in the face; historic and historical repugnance was his inheritance. No wonder the man looked old and weary

. . we have agreed that there will be no special cases, no exclusions. Every weapons system currently deployed or in the development stage is to be on the table, on both sides . . .

The confident Harvard tones had been singing a siren song, and the world had listened greedily. Hoping, at last hoping.

A new beginning. Half the Pershings and cruise missiles and half the Soviet SS-20s had been withdrawn at once, the following day, as a gesture of mutual good faith. The world could hardly believe its luck.

But the world still believed in its luck. It didn't know what the men in that room knew. Anders' face twisted in bitterness. He felt betrayed—yes, that was it, betrayed, as anyone would. As they will when they hear—if they ever hear.

They will, he concluded. The news will leak out some day—this year, next year, the one after that. The Soviets have us by the short hairs, they've got Star Wars instead of us. We're all washed up.

The world had gone on cheering for two whole years, Anders with them. Until Cactus Plant's bombshell out of Baikonur—
They have transported a laser battle station for launching
—Christ! Two years had dropped hollow, like counterfeit coins hitting the pavement.

My fellow Americans . . .

Now those raised arms looked like surrender, like newsreel shots of weary and defeated Marines emerging from the hostile Vietnamese jungle. Eventually, Calvin would have to tell the world what had gone wrong, and that he had no answer to the Soviet laser weapons because he'd slowed down the research programs, cut the funds, believed the Russians. They'd crucify him.

Anders realized Calvin was looking at him intently. He felt his cheeks warm under the piercing, accusatory gaze. It was as if Calvin were reading his thoughts.

"You think fve given up, Mr. Mission Officer?" the President asked slowly, acidly. His eyes looked inward, with something like distaste.

"No, Mr.—"

"Never mind. I want your butt on the copilot's seat of a military jet inside of an hour. Get the air force to fly you to Nellis. It should take you three hours, no more. And you're responsible for getting those gunships airborne today. Understand me? Today!"

Mitchell Gant appeared to sip at the can of beer in his hand with the wary delicacy of a cat. Seated in a crouch on the narrow bed against one wall of his cramped room, he seemed absorbed by the television set, as if he were trying to exclude Anders from his awareness. On the screen, the space shuttle
Atlantis
floated above California while the full text of the NAR Treaty, clause after clause of it, rolled as sofdy as movie credits, superimposed on the shuttle's image.

All three major networks were running the same compilation of images and the treaty's text. As it ran, the shuttle was shown over every area of the planet covered by its orbit, all recorded daylight shots, countries and oceans immediately recognizable from two hundred miles above the earth. To Anders, each clause that appeared on the screen was one more cruel fiction.

He cleared his throat, but Gant did not turn his head.

"You know most of those guys," Anders offered.

Gant glared at him, as if disturbed from pleasure.

"Sure, I know some of them—Wakeman, the mission commander—yeah, I know them." He seemed to lose interest in the conversation and sipped once more at his beer.

Anders felt oppressed by the narrow, bare room. Bed, table, two upright chairs, two government-issue easy chairs, a strip of carpet. It might have been a waiting room at some downtown doctor's office where all the patients were either black or Mexican. A small refrigerator, metal lockers instead of a closet or chest of drawers. There was a door to a tiny kitchen, another to a bathroom. Yet Gant must have chosen these quarters. His rank entitled him to a bungalow on the base. This was like—like a closet for storing machines not in use.

He opened the refrigerator, disturbed by his own metaphor, and took out a can of beer. Pulled the ring. Gas plopped softly. Gant had turned down the music accompanying the program. The quiet of the room oppressed. Gant's presence seemed to charge it with static electricity. Anders shook his head. He did not understand Gant. From his context—this room—he received no clues as to the man's present or past—or future. He looked at the television screen as if through a window onto a larger perspective.

Atlantis
had been in orbit for a week. A long scientific mission including the disposition of two new surveillance satellites. The crew was also scheduled to repair other satellites and, he remembered once more, to rendezvous with their Soviet counterparts on Friday, the day after the signing in Geneva. There was even TV talk that the shuttles might land at each other's home bases. Silly talk, but it nevertheless disturbed Anders. The world's present mood was evident in it. The party had begun in earnest, and no one could call it off now.

On the screen, the Pacific occupying almost half of it now, the earth looked like some huge flower bowl on which petals of desert, grassland, and cloud floated. The shuttle's robot arm hung like a great elbow joint in one corner of the screen, and a Michelin tire man, one of the crew on a spacewalk, hovered above the Spacelab in the shuttle's cargo bay. It was a reshowing of the repair job the shutde had performed five days earlier. The whole program was a rerun of one long peace slogan.