"We can't tell if the engines will flame out at the end of a landing roll, or maybe the fuel will run out three hundred feet in the air and half a mile from touchdown, or flameout might happen twenty miles out and five thousand feet in the air—how can I tell you, Major?"
Gant bared his teeth and snapped: "I take priority, skipper." His tone grated like sandpaper. 'The mission takes priority over everything else—the cargo. Interrogate the flight management system and find out if by trading off fifty thousand pounds of cargo against higher fuel consumption at a low altitude, you come out in credit." He added, with a glint of malice in his eyes: "What happens after that doesn't concern me. Do it, skipper."
He removed the headset. Anders was watching him, not with anticipation, but as if studying some different species.
"We can't land at Karachi, we don't have clearance. The air force and the government would both oppose any landing there. Anyway, we can't even make Karachi," Anders recited in a tired voice. He had remained unaffected, grasping only dim elements of Gant's objective, scattered pieces of a puzzle he could not interpret. "Langley would have to get Washington to talk to Islamabad."
"Then make it happen, Anders—now."
"What are you going to do?" His head was already shaking as he began to perceive the design.
Gant ignored him, staring at the litter of maps and at the console. Then he glared up at Anders.
"I'm going to find a beach on which these guys and their load-master can kick those pallets out the back door." His hand waved toward the MiLs and the fuel drums.
Ridicule and protest formed in Anders' eyes even before he opened his lips.
"I tolerated your bizarre private life—much as it shamed me— just so long as it never involved matters of security," General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin growled, angered even further by the feeble, damp-eyed protests of his only son. "Then yesterday, I discovered you had been—insecure." It seemed a species of aberration far greater in the general's eyes than sexual deviation. His voice, filled with threat, seemed to loom over the young man on the sofa.
"It wasn't anything—I swear to you it wasn't a serious mistake," Valery Rodin protested, his throat and chest filled with a tight anguish. Fear and the sense of the huge, heavily furnished room surrounded him. The general's apartment was on one of the upper floors of the Cosmonaut Hotel in Leninsk. Outside its windows, the morning sky was clean and remote. To Valery, it offered an illusion of freedom and escape.
"You swear to me, and yet, when your little friend rings, baying for help because the KGB have become interested in him precisely because you were loose-tongued in front of that Colonel Priabin, you immediately throw the whole sorry mess into Serov's lap. Serious? Not serious? It was profoundly serious, Valery."
The general walked to one of the wide windows and appeared to look out in deep concentration at the square far below his floor of the hotel. Then he turned to look at his son, and said: "How many of your precious little circle of perverts know as much as the actor apparently did?"
"No one else, I swear it."
"No one? Then how did the actor know? Did you whisper it during your sweaty bouts of sodomy?" the general raged. At one time, in the past, he had been unable to use language to confront his son's nature; now he found that words could be used as weapons, as a means of distancing the
thing
from himself—even from the son he had watched grow up. "Did you?"
Valery was appalled. His father knew and hated what he was; but though he had spoken like this before, there had never been such a degree of contempt, such vividness in the insults. He now realized just how much his father hated and despised him. "No, no, no," he sensed himself saying, while part of his awareness reflected on his surroundings. The thick carpet, Oriental rugs, paintings, heavy drapes, dark furniture; the apartment of a powerful man. Power that was now directed against him. He quailed. Without his father, he was nothing. A sitting target, without protection. If his father abandoned him now . . .
"No," he said carefully. "It was just something that—slipped out. Sacha—just panicked unnecessarily."
His father sighed, appearing to accept the careful lie. What did it matter now? Sacha was dead. Valery swallowed a hard lump of grief in his throat.
"You little fool." Rodin was wearing a silk robe. Normally at that time of the morning he would be at the complex, at his duties. He had waited two hours for this interview with his son.
The breakfast cart stood in the middle of the room, near an occasional table delicately inlaid with perhaps six different woods. Valery recognized it. It had once adorned his mother's small sitting room. The general had not even offered him as much as a cup of coffee. "He didn't need to kill him, that mad dog Serov!" he blurted, immediately regretting the outburst. It was just the way his father swaggered in the big room, and the memory of his mother that the table had evoked.
"What else was he to do, in the time available? You had interested the KGB in matters they should know nothing about. They were about to squeeze your friend like a lemon. An accident silenced him and warned them. Of course Serov had to use violence."
"You told them to kill Sacha," Valery said, hir eyes suddenly damp and weak.
"No, no, all that was at Serov's discretion. But what he did, I would have done. He shut the actor up. Closed the door on your insecurity. Even then you could not stay away. The KGB colonel was there, and he saw your, your disgraceful behavior. Weeping openly at the roadside for an actor!"
Valery did not look up, merely shuffled his booted feet on the carpet. His movements raised little tufts of loosened pile around him. They had killed Sacha like a dog, a rabid dog.
He groaned aloud, then heard the general's breath explode like a condemnation.
"Pull yourself together!" he bellowed. "For my sake and for your own, try to behave like a man!"
Valery wailed what might have been a single word of protest, but if it was, even he failed to discern its meaning. His father's strong face hardened, his eyes gleamed above his prominent, sharp-cut cheekbones. The face was smooth from a recent shave, the skin still firm though veined and traced with age. Still the hero his mother had married, obeyed, worshiped, feared. The rising star of the Strategic Rocket Forces for more than twenty years, until he stood level with the very pinnacle. He was the hidden peak, the
eminence grlse—
—and one of the principal authors of
Lightning.
"I—I am sorry, Father," Valery began, calculating and cowed in the same moment. His father's moral and physical presence oppressed him, like the imminence of a storm. The pale clean sky outside seemed a great distance away. "I am sorry if—"
"No good apologizing," his father snapped. "Just try to stay away from actors and drugs for a while." His hands clenched and unclenched. He moved toward his son as if to strike him. Valery flinched, and the general's face betrayed an appalled and violent surprise. Then bitter distaste. Walking away, he continued: "Serov has suggested you be shipped out of here for a while—somewhere quiet, until this is all over. I—have not decided what should be done." He cleared his throat. His voice was more impersonal, businesslike. He turned to his son again, and made as if to reach out. But his hand did not move more than a few inches, as if some moral stroke rendered such gestures impossible. "But he will undoubtedly warn all your friends to keep away from you. Also, you will confine yourself to your apartment. Do you understand? You will remain entirely incommunicado for the rest of this week. After that, I will decide what is to become of you. I think, perhaps, it is time you attended the academy to—further your military career."
"No—"
"It will not be your decision, Valery, but mine." He paused.
Through his misery—and relief that his father intended nothing more for the moment—Valery heard his father s stertorous breathing and his own ragged inhalations.
"Do you understand?" his father repeated. "You see no one, you talk to no one. You stay indoors. You do not answer the telephone. Is that clear?"
"I—understand."
"Good. You've babbled quite enough already. A week of silence, and then enlistment at the academy, will help all of us." The Frunze Academy, the school for elite career officers. His father's influence could get him a place there—dammit. "Very well." The voice was unsoftened, and merely pretended to familiarity, to a common humanity between them. "Now, go. Go, Valery."
Valery made a grab at the generals hand, but his grip closed on air. The hand had been snatched awav like that of some czar displeased with a menial ambassador.
"Go," the general breathed from near the windows.
Through the wetness of his tears, the sky appeared almost colorless to Valery Rodin; his father's figure a looming dark shadow against it.
A map was spread near his right boot, pictures unrolled on the screen of the moving-map display like a series of hurried-through slides. He might have been thumbing through some familiar reference book for information he knew it contained.
The three hundred and fifty miles of the coastline between the Iranian border and Karachi flashed by in sections. Narrow coastal strip before the coastal range. Blue of the sea. No islands, no coral atolls, no sandbanks of any size. Just the isolated coastal strip. A few small holiday resorts, a handful of villages. His eyes glanced from the magnified images to the map on the floor, as if seeking reassurance or in growing desperation.
There were people around Gant, silent and expectant, and that expectancy was fading, turning cold and sour. He was hardly conscious of them or their changing mood. Aware only of the headset he wore as he sat in front of the display, which was no larger than a Portable typewriter.
A box with keys below a small screen—a box without answers.
He could not be sure. He had to choose blind, sensing the pre
c
ise length of a beach, assuming its width between surf and palm, assuming its emptiness—all before they overflew it to check it out
If he was wrong in any of those parameters, they would have no time or fuel to find a second dropping zone. And all he had in the way of backup was one of the flight crew acting as an observer, standing between pilot and copilot, binoculars ready for the earliest possible visual sighting of the dropping zone he proposed. By the time the beach took on dimension and form in the observers glasses, it would be too late to make any changes. It would be either go or no go.
Anders was in the secure communications room behind the flight deck, talking via satellite with Langley—with the White House by now for all Gant knew. Squeezing permission out of Karachi's military and Islamabad's government. Pressuring the director and the President to bribe the Pakistanis.
Offer them anything—everyone always wants guns, missiles.
Gant muttered to himself, flicking back, flicking forward once more through the sequence of map sections. Holding, weighing, discarding, hurrying on. The stain of yellow-brown was clearer through the small window. It wore a line of green above it now and, more mistily, a jagged line of brown hills. Beach, trees, hills. The dropping zone had to be on the beach, but where, along this length of coast?
The three pallets would be loosed from the rear doors—fuel, Garcia's MiL, then his own helicopter. Parachutes opening and dragging, the impact of it like landing on the deck of a carrier—and he'd done that, scores of times, though Garcia hadn't and didn't like the idea. With great good luck, the pallets would remain intact and upright and they could release the MiLs, unlock the rotors and rig them, fuel up, and take off, to rejoin the Galaxy in Karachi, always praying the transport had made it.
If he could find the beach.
One road along the coast, no more than a wide dirt track. The villages and tiny resorts and occasional isolated bungalows were strung along it like weak and intermittent fairy lights. He heard the pilot's voice against his cheek.
"It's getting critical, mister." He no longer used either Gant's name or his rank. Gant was CIA, not air force; an obscure kind of enemy. He was intent upon wrestling the mission to a new shape, and the pilot was no longer in command of the tanker crew. Gant might just kill them with his scheme. "Our best estimate is—ETA over the coast in six minutes. That will leave you, at most, another four minutes of flying at zero feet before I have to ditch, or you re out the back door and I can still make Karachi. Got that?"
"I understand," Gant replied, waving one hand to silence the fierce whispering the pilots ultimatum had created. "Where do we cross the coast, on your present heading?"
"Somewhere—Charlie?" Gant heard the navigator muttering, then: "West of some God-forsaken place called—what? Ras Jaddi— village called Pasni on a low headland. Got it?"
Gant flicked through the sections of map on the cassette loaded into the display. "I got it." Ras Jaddi, a tiny headland, a speck of atoll? No, nothing except beach, the narrow strip before the trees. That yellow smudge he could see through the window. Ras Jaddi.
"Well, mister?"
Between Ras Jaddi and Ras Shahid, then. Within that fifty-mile stretch. He flicked at the buttons, watched the map unroll backward now, from east to west. Where was there a beach?
He had told Anders to pressure Langley s satellite photography experts into some immediate response. Supply background data, consult photographs, records, files—all the while knowing that there would be time only for a blind guess, the one quick overflight and look-down, then the decision of yes or no.