"Madre de Dios,
we made it!"
And behind Garcia's rushing, nervous relief were the noises of his crew, equally stunned. Gant had seen the main canopy of Garcia's pallet open, seen the helicopter snatched like a dandelion clock through the clamshell of the open doors; then the sand had obscured everything. The scene had lurched like the image from a joggled camera—sand, lush vegetation, the water, all rushing beneath him, then settling to a steadier image as the transport passed out over the edge of the tide. The white scraps of paper of the pelicans, distressed and alarmed, settled slowly once more on the water.
The Galaxy continued on its turn, lazily and as if time and fuel consumption were of no importance; Gant considered that the sense of detachment belonged only to himself.
No—already, the scene below was remote. At an altitude of two hundred feet, it was still impossible to make out details on the beach. The mirror into which he looked quivered because of the mild turbulence outside the Galaxy—
—sand beneath the open doors once more, not the glittering water. He felt his body tense, then consciously relaxed.
"The fuel drums are all over the fucking place!" he heard in the cockpit. Garcia over the transceiver. His body tensed once more. "No spillage. We'll try to move—"
"Gant?" he heard in his headset. "Yes, skipper?"
"We're going to have to let you down nearer the water, to keep you out of the way of those fuel drums."
"Your decision." He resented the admission. "Thanks. Good luck." v
The distances, timings, speed recited by the navigator and the copilot became a background, no more. Voices from the flight deck relayed to Garcia what Gant had been told. In his mirrors, he saw the huge shadow of the Galaxy's tail, dark and cool on the whiteness.
He braced his feet. His hands seemed superfluous in their lack of occupation. He might as well have folded them across his chest, like a child in class told to sit quiet, waiting for the school bell.
He smiled, in spite of his tension. The edge of the water seemed to glint in his mirrors, then the pilot adjusted the heading of the Galaxy. Height, speed, heading all seemed right to his sixth sense. The sand wasn't really firm enough for a palletized drop, but Garcia had made it—nothing to concern him, nothing.
The loadmaster raised his arm. His eyes were fixed on the red light ten paces from the MiL's nose. Gant breathed in deeply, snatching at the breath. Nerves jumped; he was helpless, it wasn't under his control.
The loadmaster's arm snapped down. Then his body seemed to lurch away, as if a blow had knocked the man aside. The beach tilted in Gant's mirrors, and the impressions he received were like reflections in a broken glass. A twitch ran through the huge fuselage, as if the aircraft had attempted some impossibly tight turn; a whale imitating the maneuvers of a shark. Anders' voice in the transceiver, wishing him good luck, broken by the pilot's expletive. The green light, the lurch, and the breaking open of the drogue chute—
—beach at the wrong angle,
wrong anglel
Sky in the corner of the tiny screen formed by one mirror, dark-green trees, the beach— dotted fuel drums, the half-buried pallet of the other MiL, a great stiff wave of sand thrown up on the beach—but all seen wrongly, as if he were drunk and falling—
—scraps of paper, red-white, white, red, red-white, white, scraps of paper all around him even as he was thrust against his harness, and the image of a slow-motion film of an accident test returned to his mind. He was the dummy flung slowly and grotesquely through the car windshield . . . the harness bit into his chest and shoulders, restraining him.
Scraps of paper, red-white, white, whirling and spinning. A pelican's body, headless, thudded against the cockpit, nauseating him; he understood what had happened. The course of the Galaxy had been closer to the water s edge, to the sandbank and the drifting, nervous birds. They had scattered into the air in front of the Galaxy as if thrown up by a giant hand, startling the pilot, making him twitch the stick and jerk the transport off course for an instant.
The main canopy opened its colorful mouth behind him, obscuring everything else. The MiL was tilting nose up, falling. The bird's decapitated body had disappeared from the Plexiglas, leaving a red smear that shadowed the glint of the sun. Other scraps of white flew or twisted above and beyond the MiL.
Split seconds . . . the sun blinded . . . Mac was muttering, but he hadn't reached his third expletive when the pallet struck the sand. The impact rendered him breathless. For an instant, he
was
the life-size dummy in an accident test. He fought for breath. Feeling returned in the gouging of the harness. His eyes opened. He could see nothing. A huge mask of flying sand had been thrown up all around the MiL. Water glinted and sparkled within it, raining down on the Plexiglas like a storm on corrugated tin. Darkness.
"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus. ..." Mac recited his litany.
The straps of the harness bit. Gant realized his body was at the wrong angle. He was sitting tilted forward and to one side in his seat. Hanging there. Splintering noises. Great, aching, tearing noises, and now a steadier though intermittent groaning; the occasional snap.
The sun came back.
"Gant, are you all right? Gant?" It was the pilot.
"Alive," he murmured, unconcerned. The inquiry was irrelevant. "Mac?" he asked.
"Christ! OK, skipper." Mac's voice was small and shaky, as if lost inside his stunned frame.
"Major? Major?" Garcia over the transceiver.
"OK, Garcia, OK."
The great pall of sand and spray fell lazily, half translucent, half opaque, into the sea, all around him; even the pelicans were beginning to fall easily out of the pale sky, to settle gingerly on the water, farther off from the—the sandbank, jutting out from the beach, half enclosing the little bay of cool water.
The sand slid down the Plexiglas like a drawn-back curtain. It stuck to the pelican blood, was plastered in streaks by the water that had been thrown up with the sand. Light flashed through the streaked cockpit from the Galaxy's wing as the aircraft curved gently away in a climbing turn.
The pallet had landed at an angle. Gant realized he was staring into the water—transparent, mercury-veined
1
water, smooth once more after the pall of sand's disturbance.
With a shuddering lurch, the MiL shook off the remaining sand like a dog discarding water from its coat. The horizon was more tilted, the water discernibly nearer. A cold chill gripped his heart. When he looked up, the Galaxy had altered course, heading away behind him, toward its landfall at Karachi. Its diminishing seemed like an act of desertion. The voice of the pilot and the anxious murmurs of Anders filled his headset.
"OK, OK," he snapped. "Get out of my head!" His voice was urgent, tinged with panic. The broken pallet beneath the helicopter groaned, then slithered. The cockpit lurched.
"Skipper—"
"Mac, stay cool. Stay still," he warned. "Don't move."
"Your angle of impact," the pilot was repeating, his words irrelevant. The cockpit seemed as close and final around him as—as the oxygen tent that had shrouded his father's last days. He shuddered, shaking off the image.
"Skipper—and you, Anders—there's nothing you can do, nothing. Get the hell out of here."
"Gant—"
"Don't bother me now."
He flicked off the VHF set, then reached up and drew off his helmet. The cries of pelicans like the magnified tearing of paper or cardboard. The almost still lapping of the tired, cool water. The creaking of the pallet's remnants as they moved uncertainly—downward.
Garcia's voice in the cockpit. Figures along the beach, running as if labored and laden through the sand. The glinting, retreating dot of the Galaxy. Spars and slivers and torn spears of wood littering the sandbar.
"Just stay cool," Gant murmured, releasing his harness gently from his bruised body. Slowly, he levered himself up from his seat and reached for the pilot's door. Gripped its handle, turned it.
The MiL lurched, sliding another foot and more toward the water—
—which, he saw clearly, was not as shallow as it seemed, but was deep enough to submerge the helicopter as far as the main cabin.
He looked up. The locked rotors lay along the fuselage. The MiL could not fly; it was drowning.
There was nothing he could do. As he swung the door gently open over the water, the MiL slid again, with an accompanying groan from the broken pallet. The sea idled, deceptively innocent, less than a foot below the sill of the cockpit. When it moved again, water would begin to slop in. He looked down over the gunners cabin. Mac's face stared up at him, bemused and afraid. The water lapped against the Plexiglas, level with Mac's arm.
Gant's body felt frozen, immobile, as he waited for the next, inexorable movement of the MiL into the sea.
"He was there and yet you managed to miss him? He eluded your search?" General Lieutenant Rodin asked. Serov's admission had distracted him from the ponderous, dinosaur movement of the vast platform on which lay the booster that would carry the laser battle station into orbit aboard the
Raketoplan
shuttle craft.
Serov studied his superior's features before he replied. They were pale and drawn into intent, grim planes by his mood. Rodin was taller than the GRU colonel, and seemed especially aware of the feet at that moment, even though both of them were dwarfed by the booster. The diesel locomotives protested outside the vast hangar as they strained to move the booster's platform from the assembly building along the first yards of the miles of double railway track to the launch pad. The noises of the platform's first movements were hideous, making Serov's teeth ache.
"Yes, he had indeed been there," he confirmed in a neutral voice. "My people may—or may not—have alarmed him. Anyway, there was no trace of him in the warren of tunnels and rooms. We were thorough."
"And what are you doing now?" Rodin asked in an imperious tone. It was as if he drew something of an added authority from the scene around him; as if he had chosen a setting that displayed him to advantage. Serov had not dared keep the information regarding Kedrov a secret from Rodin. His temerity in suggesting the son be sent away from Baikonur would have earned a greater rebuke if
Rodin
had
found
out about Kedrov's disappearance from anyone but himself. He had, of course, minimized the extent of the carelessness the telemetry officer had displayed.
Serov was aware of the scents and noises of the place, aware of the technicians swarming over the platform and the booster, whose great bunch of rocket engines had passed out of the hangar into the pale winter sunlight. The chill of the day stood next to him in the assembly hangar like a heavy body leaning against his frame. His breath clouded around his head.
"Extending the search. Surveillance on all known associates. Well get him, comrade General," he added reassuringly, with studied deference. Rodin seemed to smile in a thin-lipped, momentary way, as if sensing the change that had occurred in their relative positions since their telephone conversation. "I think Kedrov will head for open country now. He knows we'll be looking for him."
"And you're certain he knows little or nothing about
Lightning?"
"Less than the actor, I imagine," Serov replied quietly.
Rodin turned away abruptly. Serov enjoyed the general's brief discomfiture.
A flock of technicians and members of the scientific staff walked funereally in the wake of the platform. Rodin was watching them as if—as if he owned them, Serov thought. At the far end of the hangar, where the light appeared dusty and inadequate, the shuttle craft lay on a similar, much smaller platform. Teams of people swarmed over it, bees around honey, obscuring any sight from where Serov stood of the almost assembled laser weapon. He had a minimal interest in it as a machine; its power interested him a great deal more. Mere technology wearied him. It was, ultimately, a civilian world.
Chessboard patterning decorated the stages of the booster. Gleaming metal, curving, strong lines, a sense of massiveness; power, too. Serov, with Rodin's back to him, shook his head with cynical ruefulness. A gigantic badge of authority and power.
"I—have confined my son to his apartment for—the remainder of this week," Rodin announced without turning around.
"Very well, General. As long as—"
"He will speak to noone, he will not leave the place. Is that clear? Meanwhile, warn his friends to stay away from him."
"Yes, comrade General," Serov murmured. It had to be accepted. Rodin was using the advantage of Kedrov's disappearance to ensure that his decision was accepted.
As if pressing home his reasserted authority, Rodin asked: "What of the KGB's interest in this Kedrov?"
"Pure accident—drugs, we believe."
"Perhaps. But what consequences might follow?"
A group of senior officers was moving toward them. The third stage, the smallest, of the booster passed their position like a slow, submarine creature, out into the sunlight. There was sufficient clear sky for the American spy satellites to observe the moving of the booster. But then, a Soviet shuttle flight had already been announced to the world by Nikitin as a gesture. A rendezvous with the American shuttle in a mission of peace to symbolize the implementation of the treaty. Rodin merely flicked one hand toward the approaching group, and they halted, still some distance away.