Winter Hawk (33 page)

However precisely and carefully he described the landscape to himself—with whatever assumed detachment—he knew he was unraveling like wool in a cat's claws. Panic had approached, and he was conscious of forcing a mental door shut against its increasing pressure. Soon—perhaps even before the fuel ran out—he would not be able to control it.

The MiL had drifted closer to the single main road running parallel with the river, between
it
and the railway line.
Occasional
headlights, and once the smoke and blaring light
of a locomotive
glanced across his vision. On the moving-map display, the
desert
appeared to stretch infinitely away beyond the river, road, and railway tracks. He had deluded himself, pretending that
a
solution
lurked
unformed at the back of his mind. He had run because there was nothing else he could do. He had, he admitted, run in the
wrong
direction. Mac's shape spread on the ground came back to him vividly, as did the sense of having abandoned the body.

Lumped, broken country stretched away to the north. To the
south
lay a plateau of ugly gray rock and sand. The Hind, with Gant imprisoned within it, hugged the ground on the last of its fuel. He had disappeared successfully into the landscape after crossing the border. His whereabouts were unknown. They would remain that way.

Fuel gauges on Empty. All of them. Wool in a cat's eager claws; unraveling . . .

The road was less than a mile away now. Unconsciously, he was drifting toward it, as if it were a solution. It wasn't. Straggling closer than the road was the gleam of the river.

Think,
think.

His mind was empty, except for the seeping of panic, and the urge to survive, like the noise of a rat scrabbling at the cage; frantic and desperate. His arms quivered with the effort of holding the Hind's course and height. Its shadow drifted over the broad, straggling, gray river. Was there something at the edge of his mind? He couldn't think, he was too hot, .his mind too jumpy and unfocused. He needed to be clearheaded. The Hind glided now, as if grace were to be its last skill. The water seemed shallow and muddy, more like a creek than the force that had formed the landscape around him. The dim glow from some encampment stained the night farther to the south, beyond the road and railway. His whole body leaped in anticipation, even as he dismissed it. They would have no fuel, and they would kill him for his clothes before they stripped the helicopter naked. Ignore it, ignore—

The campfire glowed like a promise. Deliberately, he slowed the helicopter to a crawling speed above its shadow. His arms ached with tension, and fear. His brow and the back of his overalls were Wet with perspiration. Not here, not in this lost place, he heard his thoughts repeating. Another mile, another ten, fifty . . . please.

He was at the hover, sand drifting off the side of a nearby dune, hanging like some vague curtain. The Hind was in a hollow, sur-^unded by low dunes. Not in this place—keep going, keep going,
ⁿ
°t in this God-forsaken place.

His resolve snapped in his head like an old dry stick. His body quivered. He could hear his teeth chattering. He could not clear his head.

The undercarriage bumped, then settled. He released the controls. Dust whirled around the cockpit. He switched off the engines, and the rotors whined down through the scale and slowed with a sense of finality. He cursed the weakness that had made him land even as he opened the pilot s door and jumped to the ground, coughing immediately because of the sand and dust.

He groaned aloud. As soon as he had walked away from the settling dust, he breathed deeply, again and again. He looked behind him. The Hind was already cold and lifeless, and the suggestion of its immobility was like a great, icy wave breaking against him. He was shivering, though he hardly noticed the small, biting wind. His hands clenched and unclenched in futility.

His father returned, then. Machines—his fathers only use to people, and only then when he was sober. The memory was a supreme mockery now. His father could repair any machine: irons, refrigerators, lawnmowers, sprinklers, cars—anything you wanted fixed * . until he had been beaten by a machine in the end, when Gant had switched off the life support. His father seemed to be watching him now—not gloating for once, just detached and judging.

Painfully, slowly, he climbed the shivering, rattling sand of the dune. Immediately, the glow of the campfire—no! The flash of a vehicle's headlights miles away along the road. No suffused glow of a town or village or barracks. He rubbed his hands through his hair, the presence of the silent helicopter pressing against the back of his head like a migraine.

Machine, machine . . . His father watched. Think, t-h-i-n-k . . •
think . . .

He stared at the empty road. Heard the thin wind and
shivered
in it. Heard the oily sliding of the river and the silence of the helicopter. Empty country, empty road. He was breathing rapidly and deeply, despite the ache of the icy air in his lungs. The beginnings of a terminal attack. Empty road, empty . . . something, something, Christ! Empty road—its very emptiness was the clue, the answer, empty—stretching away like, like—

Roads home. Roads at home. Slow rise and fell of seemingly endless roads, empty most of the day.

A gravel road in Iowa, and—an old biplane sagging down out of an empty morning sky onto the road and taxiing toward—the gas
station. An
airplane—his Saturday job, to serve at the gas station where hardly anyone called, and where he spent his time reading magazines about air aces and dogfights. The biplane might have jumped from the pages of one of the magazines—that first airplane, the first one he'd ever sat in. It had just rolled slowly up to the gas pumps, and the pilot had looked down, grinned, and said,
Get the windshield, check the tires.

And filled the airplane s tank from the pump.

Gant whirled around and stared in utter shock at the Hind resting in the hollow. Turned back to the empty road. Looked again at the helicopter, his panic becoming urgent again, but eager now, not final.

There had been something in his memory, he hadn't merely panicked—a single-engined, prop-driven biplane, flown by an ex-air force pilot disgruntled with postwar America. An itinerant crop sprayer, taxiing with complete arrogance on a road in Iowa to fill his fuel tank at a gas station.

Gant ran stumblingly down the dune, sand flying and slithering. Urgency possessed him, as if the engines of the Hind were still running and he were using fuel by his very movements. He clambered into the cockpit and flicked on the moving-map display. He summoned the largest-scale maps, hearing his breathing hoarse and loud in the confined space, hearing the humming excitement in his ears, his heart pounding. He searched the map feverishly for signs of human habitation. Road, railway, river, all heading toward the Aral Sea—along the road, follow the road . . .

North, east, and west the land opened up, becoming ever more empty. Damn the emptiness of this place.

Desert shading into green on the maps as he ran them again. Temperate. Soil, not desert sand. Trees, crops—people. Northwest, where the river turned like an enormous python up toward the Aral Sea, its vast, eroded valley like a huge skin it had already shed. Green—people . . .

Engine-start.

The Hind jumped like a flea into the night, out of the hollow. The cockpit was solidly around him, no longer a fragile eggshell. He ^w the road, the river, as if for the first time.

Along that road. Main road. Gas.

He tried to grin. The gauges had registered Empty for miles already. How much?

He did grin. The machine wasn't going to beat him. He would survive.

"We're gonna make it—I promise, Mac." And then he remembered that the gunner s cockpit was empty and Mac was dead and already hundreds of miles behind him. His voice Med.

In its greed, which now reflected his own, the Hind hurried through the empty landscape. As he flicked over the crest of a dune, the river gleamed to starboard, and the road was a pale trail to port.

Suddenly, he began to fear once more that the machine would win.

Hie urgent bleeping of the radio woke Priabin. Ridiculous, he realized in the moment of waking; he'd fallen asleep in his car while it was parked outside his office building. The lights, he saw fuzzily, were still on in his office. He scrabbled at the dashboard, reaching for the radio mike, half expecting the dog to bang its paws on the back of his seat and lick his ear and neck. But the dog was with Katya. He clenched the mike, flicked the switch, and said:

"Priabin. Yes?"

Her voice was breathy, excited. Priabin was sharply disappointed. He wanted the call to be about Rodin, but knew that Katya must be calling about Kedrov.

"—found him!" the woman almost shouted. "I've found Kedrov in the marshes. Colonel, he's here!"

He glanced up at the lights in his office. Security pressed down on him like a constricting weight; survival, too.

"Katya—hang on, I'm in the parking lot. Wait until I can listen on the office scrambler—"

"Sir!" Her frustration amounted to outrage.

"Katya," he snapped in reply. 'The car isn't secure." Kedrov, Rodin, the GRU, the military, Viktor dead—anything to do with Kedrov was important, might be dangerous. "Just give me a minute, Katya, then we can use the secure channel."

"Yes," Katya replied automatically.

Priabin dropped the mike and flung open the door of the car. Now Rodin was distanced in importance. Katya had found Kedrov. Hie pieces of the broken ornament that was his future were miraculously coming back together. He hurried across the frosty concrete. The wind flung itself into his face. He ran up the steps and thrust open the twin glass doors into the building, surprising the foyer guard, who instantly relaxed and saluted as he recognized Priabin.

He fumed at the doors of the elevator until they opened. Fumed as
it
ground its slow way upward. Ran along the thinly carpeted
corridor,
and unlocked his door.

Locked it once more behind him.

"Katya?" he said breathlessly into the radio, switching on the scrambler unit as he did so. "Katya—tell me everything."

Kedrov—Viktor . . . they were linked, too. Like Viktor was bound to Rodin and
Lightning.
It was all of a piece; his future was restored. Dear God, the girl had done well.

He flicked on the desk lamp. In its pool of light, he saw the map of the salt marshes. As he dragged a notepad and pencil toward him, she said: "I knew he'd be here."

"Well done, well done, you clever girl," he replied lightly. It was infectious. The drowsiness induced by lack of sleep and the car's heater had—well, simply vanished. He felt reinvigorated. He was denied access to Rodin, but now he had Kedrov, who knew something about
Lightning.
He had the answer in the palm of his hand.

Katya's story spilled out excitedly. He listened, enthralled; asked her to repeat details merely in order to savor them; scribbled on his pad, marked the position of the houseboat on the map that lay like an untidy tablecloth across his desk. When she had finished, he said, chuckling:

"Well done—oh, sweet girl, well done." He heard her moment of hesitation almost as if she audibly demurred from his praise, sensing patronage. Then he heard her laughing, and added, more soberly: "Do nothing—no, don't argue, don't do anything. This is too important—no, it's too dangerous, too. You wait there. I'll call Du-din at once. I'll come out with him and his men, and we'll all take him together—no, no bullshit, no heroics. We'll make certain we take him."

His free hand was clenching and unclenching near the pencil and the notepad. He was racked with impatience like a child.

"Yes, sir," Katya replied, reconciled to good, sensible precautions. "But please hurry."

"Look, don't worry. Just sit in your car and play that Paul Simon tape I know you bought last week from one of the back-street dealers in town, and we'll be right with you. All right?"

"Yes, Colonel," she replied in a sobered, careful voice.

"You know Paul Simon's not only an American, but also a Jew— and very subversive," Priabin added. He joined her laughter, then said: "Well done, Katya, really well done. Hang on—we'll be right With you."

He switched off the radio. He would make certain that Katya s part in this was recognized by the committees, just as he would use the capture of Kedrov as his return ticket to Moscow Center. He had begun to dial Dudin's number, but his hand, as if understanding his mood, had replaced the receiver. He found himself staring at the dark square of the window as if at some screen upon which long-anticipated images would shortly be projected. It was only gradually that the haze of light from the distant launch complex made itself apparent against the glass. He rubbed his chin, then watched his fingers drumming with growing impatience on his desk. But the moment was good, and he deliberately held on to it for as long as he could. His fingers were pale in the lamp's pool of white light. Slowly, almost luxuriously, he made those impatient fingers reach toward the dial—Dudin, and the capture of Kedrov.