forehead and nose. Gritty dust was whirled against his face. Lights were dotted and clumped on the hills around the airfield, and helicopters drifted unseen, their noises muted, across the plain. Light spilled from the open hold of the Galaxy as the first of the two MiLs was pushed down the ramp from the rear doors and onto the tarmac.
The tail boom of the Hind-D, Gant's MiL, dropped like a signaling arm, then the fat body of the helicopter rolled down the ramp. With furious, controlled haste, the Galaxy's load crew unshipped and rerigged the rotors, as Gant had done on the sandbar. He watched the crewmen descend, move away. Almost immediately, its rotors began to wind up, after the car backfire of the engine-start. The noise grumbled upward, toward the final whine. He held the transceiver absently to the side of his face, where his mouth wetted the fur trim on the hood of his parka. Each time the wind dropped or idled, he could vaguely feel the radiated heat from the Galaxy's huge engines. They had landed no more than seven minutes before from Karachi; it was almost seven-thirty, local time. Seven-thirty, too, in Baikonur, a thousand miles to the north of them. Gant had to be in—and out—while the darkness of this single night persisted. He had perhaps twelve hours—eleven . . .
Anders shivered, from the cold and from the accumulated tension of the flight from Karachi, from the tensions of the entire day. It was as if they had infected and reinfected one another in the Galaxy's hold with bad nerves, doubts, anticipatory fear, so that the dimensions of that huge space had diminished, pressing in on all of them. He could still see Gant pacing the hold like an animal in a cage while his MiL was checked and cleaned; Garcia sitting apart, being worn from within by his anxiety; the others quarreling over hands of poker.
He dismissed the images. It was out of his hands now. He, like an actor whose lines have all been spoken, had to retire from the stage. Whatever their condition, it was up to them. However hard that was to accept.
Gant shunted the MiL farther away from the ramp, juggling the stick and the pitch lever to keep the wheels on the tarmac. The second MiL, the 24A tanker helicopter, began to roll down the ramp into the windy night. Anders was a mere spectator. Swiftly, the 24A's rotors, too, were rerigged for takeoff. The two Isotov engines coughed into life, and the rotors began moving, shimmering in the thin moonlight. Hard stars glinted between banks of white cloud. Involuntarily, he glanced away from the two Soviet helicopters, toward the mountains, into Afghan airspace. He cocked his head, no longer able to hear anything except the noise of the MiLs; the decoy helicopters patrolling up and down the border did not seem convincing.
The MiLs bobbed, their wheels hardly in contact with the tarmac of the runway farthest from the tower and the airfield buildings. He depressed the button of the transceiver. His hps tasted the fur of the parka's hood as he spoke.
"Gant? Are you receiving me?"
"Yes," came the monosyllabic, detached reply; as if its owner had already departed.
"Good luck and Godspeed," was all Anders could find to say after a moment of hesitation. He shivered. His voice had seemed high and piping amid the turmoil of engine noise and the quiver of his nerves. This is what he had wanted, and now, somehow, he felt guilt approach like a sly messenger, with bad news. It—well, it seemed futile; the MiLs were toys, despite their noise.
"Sure," Gant replied. His tone might have been mocking, but Anders could not be sure. "And—yeah, you did OK, Anders. See you." It hadn't mocked, then.
Gant's Hind-D, its camouflage paint palely mottled in the moonlight, rose to the hover and then immediately passed over Anders' head. The downdraft clutched at him, tugged at his clothing, and dust whirled in his face. When he looked again, after furiously rubbing his eyes, he saw through a wet veil the shadows of the two MiLs moving away to the northwest. The Pakistani helicopters waited only a few miles away to shepherd them to the pass that was their chosen crossing point into Afghan airspace. After that, Gant and the others were entirely on their own. He could do nothing; nobody could.
Everything has been triple-checked
, he caught himself silently reciting like a litany.
All the IDs, the call signs, the unit, the cover story, everything, everything, over and over . . .
He felt himself to be an adult attempting, through fear or a crushing sense of inadequacy, to recapture the unquestioning innocence of a child. The litany did not work, it was merely the prayer of an unbeliever.
The noise of the two helicopters, now Hind-D and Hind-A, gunship and troop transport purporting to belong to the Soviet Frontal Aviation Army and attached to a unit serving in Afghanistan, diminished toward the border. He shivered again and stared at the empty Galaxy. The night surrounded the hard light from the hold and the shadow of the fuselage. The transport aircraft was a remote island in the inhospitable sea of the airfield. The two vanished MiLs were no more than bottles on water; a cry for help. Unreal, fragile.
Now he knew it wouldn't work. Too much could go wrong. It was all too risky.
TWO
MASTERS OF WAR
In a world of steel-eyed death And men fighting to be warm . . —Bob Dylan, "Shelter from the Storm"
7:
Bid the Players Make Haste
Gant ran through the
moving-map display, projected on the main tactical screen, surveying their entire crossing of Afghanistan, a thin, silver snail trail across the fleeting sequence of maps. Peshawar to Kabul, but keeping well to the east of the capital and its radars and air force units, and flying through the foothills of the Hindu Kush, which formed a bony radar and infrared shield. Laghman Province, then Nuristan and Takhar and Kunduz provinces, before reaching the thick purple line that represented the Soviet border.
Their course stayed as much in the mountains as possible, as far east of the main areas of military activity as satellite surveillance and CIA secret reports from the
mujahideen
fighters could place them. Gant canceled the run-through. The main tactical screen went blank. He was flying visually. No infrared or radar emissions to be picked up. He updated the map display once more, reinstating the current section, matching it to the landscape around him, which undulated now like some great living thing. It was not a mountain range with valleys and hollows and peaks and knifelike passes, but a great coiling snake, and as dangerous.
The flanks of the mountains gleamed with snow in the bright moon. Garcia's MiL, in his mirrors, was silvered by the light and appeared mottled like a cow because of its camouflage. Mac's helmet, in the gunner's cockpit below him, was like a silver dome. Lights from Mac's screens and displays winked and shone beyond the gunner's shoulders.
Gant glanced at the fuel gauges. They would not have to set down to refuel until they were far inside Soviet territory, maybe not for two or three hundred miles. The return flight had a critically
small margin of fuel. Once they abandoned the second MiL, they would have just enough,
just
enough, to fly the same route home— —while
they
waited, alerted and watching for them, all along the thousand miles of desert and mountain.
He dismissed the thought. It interfered with this phase of the mission, to remain undetected in Afghan airspace.
They were seventy miles northeast of Kabul, skirting the mountains that contained the fertile Panjshir Valley. Ahead of them, another hundred and fifty miles to the Soviet border. An hours flying at their present speed and without deviating from their plotted course, which was already in the onboard computer.
Aircraft activity was heavy, but it was related to a known new push against rebel tribesmen. No one was looking for them, not yet. But it meant that a lot of aircraft and helicopters were in the air— his cover, but also his peril. One visual sighting, or straying onto any one of thirty or forty radar screens, and he would be called to identify himself. He wanted to use his radar instead of relying on eyesight, but it would be like making ripples on a pond, attracting hunting fish. The last time he had briefly employed the radar—counting the seconds it was operating with a mounting breathlessness—he had spotted a high-flying reconnaissance aircraft, slow-moving enough to be an Ilyushin 11-18, moving westward well to the north of them. The flick, too, of a low, fast fighter moving away. They remained undetected. He had switched off the radar gratefully, sweating with relief.
Now his own radar, and those of Soviet aircraft, were virtually useless in the mountains. The ELINT systems on the lumbering reconnaissance aircraft were incapable of picking them out from the ground scatter of hills, valleys, snow, rock, rushing water. You're safe, he told himself once more, but the thought struck hollow.
He banked the MiL around the sheer face of a cliff, tilting the rotors away from it. Garcia duplicated his maneuver, then he, too, leveled his helicopter. Far below, water gleamed in a thin crack. Snow mottled a high peak and lay more thickly in a mountain pass. A black-and-white landscape. At any moment, an aircraft or helicopter could appear, startling him, calling on him for his IDs. That danger remained and did not seem to lessen. Minute by minute, it stretched undiminishing into the hours ahead.
He dodged and slunk through the high mountains, the noise of his rotors booming back from rock faces, hollowing down long, narrow valleys.
There were over two hundred assault helicopters stationed in Afghanistan, by Langley's expert reckoning. Two extra could easily be overlooked, especially if their pilots wanted it that way.
On the moving-map display, he could pick out the main Soviet air base at Parwan, the most northerly on their route before they crossed the border. Radar would tell him what kind and degree of activity there was around it, but he resisted the clamoring temptation. He flew into an opening where the mountains seemed to part to west and north, and exposed him like curtains being drawn back on a huge, open stage of dark air. He sensed, as well as saw, the moonlight flowing over the MiL, saw its shadow flit and tremble across the valley below. The empty, open sky stretched away on every side—
—hide-and-seek. His eyes quartered the night. Hide-and-seek. He increased his airspeed to one seventy, and waited, relieved when the noise of the rotors hammered back at him from rock faces as the mountains closed in once more. Cover; the safety of rock.
A stream of Russian, blurting in his headset, alarmed him like the sudden cry of discovery. The radio had been tuned to the principal Soviet TAC (secure tactical communications) channel as soon as they crossed the Pakistan border. It had been mostly silent until now. The codes Frontal Aviation Army units in Afghanistan used had been broken by Langley; the radio set itself had been reconstructed by DARPA specialists. The voices had been little more than distant, vague whispers.
Until now.
Something was close, perhaps too close.
He turned up the set's volume as the signal frequency locked. It was a . . . helicopter pilot, talking to the AWACS Ilyushin. A quick-fire, sudden, excited burst. What was it? What—? Unidentified radar trace, which had disappeared from the Ilyushin's long-range radar screens . . .
your sector
, he heard, chilled.
He had been picked up by the patrolling early-warning aircraft, either he or Garcia; it didn't matter which. He listened, knowing that the alerted helicopter would now climb, try to look down, find him again. The interference of the mountains would be like a washing shoal of fish crossing the enemy radar screens. It would obscure any clear blip he might make. At least, he had to hope that would be the case.
Where was it? There was no heading, no positional reference. Where? The Russian continued on the HF set, itself made intermittent by the surrounding mountains. Where? South—
southeast
, he heard, and then the distance. Looking at the moving-map display, he knew the MiL was close enough to be dangerous. He must have erupted onto one of the Ilyushin's screens in a clear gap of air where no helicopter flight was logged or expected. He had been visible for long enough to be pinpointed, but there was no identifying IFF number alongside the blip to explain who he was. To the Uyushin, he was—unofficial. If the Ilyushin really started looking . . .
He wished himself alone, without Garcia trailing behind him and already wound tight as a watch spring. He could not spare the effort, if it really came to hide-and-seek, to watch out for Garcia and his crew when all his energies were needed to stay alive. It was a simple, brute fact.
More voices in the headset; two more call signs and positions. A routine patrol instructed to alter course, to overfly the
sector in which two unidentified contacts
—there was a boyish excitement in the pilots' responses. No one could imagine what kind of unidentified aircraft would be this deep into Afghan airspace; it was probably a false alarm, someone with a damaged radio
T
u/s IFF transponder, but it would be good practice to seek and find, a game, good fun.
"Major?"
"Shut up, Garcia," Gant snapped into the transceiver near his head. "Stay close to me."
He dipped the MiL's blunt nose. Mac raised his hand in the gunner's cockpit. The helicopter's shadow rushed over gleaming snow, down into the cleft of a dark valley. He hugged the ground clutter like a hedgehog rolling itself in disguising leaves, and pulled the airspeed back to just above one hundred mph. Nap-of-the-earth flying, a feature of all the textbooks. No instruments, no systems; eyesight and reflexes. He felt the exhilarating danger of his plunge. The altimeter unwound with stunning quickness. Garcia, behind him, seemed to fall more slowly than he.