Something flicked at the edge of eyesight as disturbed water birds rose in the night. The white dot on the map converged on the islet curled like a sleeping cat and the other that was kidney-shaped—the agreed rendezvous!
He adjusted the contrast to improve the low-light TV picture on the main screen. Gray shapes glowed unreally. He bobbed over
a
rise—airspeed seventy—drew the Hind s shadow like a black cape across a stretch of ice, glanced to starboard . . . yes?
Then rose onto radar screens once more, but he had to be sure—a hundred, two hundred feet, then the shape of the islet re
vealed
itself. Catlike—kidney-dish islet lying across a stretch of
frozen
water from it, the skeletal shadow of a rotting jetty.
He dropped the Hind, as if determined to break through the gleaming ice. Navigation lights around him were lost in the background of stars. The wind seemed no longer to hurl itself against the helicopter. The agreed rendezvous. He was there; target. The white dot that represented the Hind was as still as the Bethlehem star.
He flicked away, keeping low, making the reeds bend into the wind with his passage. Stunted trees in the foreground, jutting out of the land's slight undulations. He slowed his speed, judging distances, watching the screens, the radar altimeter, port and starboard of him, the ground . . . where were the lights from the MiL-8? He could not see them. He put the helicopter into the hover. Dropped the undercarriage onto a slight incline, bounced the Hind, rolled it forward, wheels hardly in contact with the frozen ground, until the dwarf firs seemed to surround it. Switched off the engines.
Silence.
The wind, then—
—and nothing else. Reeds grew as high as the miniature trees, as if springing up that moment around the helicopter. He felt like a gazelle in veldt grass; there were lions out there he could not see. Still, cooling, the Hind could be overlooked from above. The world consisted of only two dimensions. The reeds were almost as tall as the fuselage. Good enough.
He opened the cockpit door. He did not concern himself with Adamov, who was securely tied and gagged. He drew a sketch map from his flight overalls, checked the compass display on his watch, oriented himself. Islets to the southeast of him. He could see the clump of trees standing up like frightened hair from the knoll's scalp. Half a mile.
Searchlights—
—leaping onto the ice in front of him, cutting off his glimpse of both knoll and trees. As the belly of the MiL-8 lumbered into view, he pressed against the fuselage of the Hind.
Two hundred yards away, the transport helicopter moved across his sight, walking on its searchlight legs, something like an umbilical cord dragging from its belly and tossed by the wind—a ladder, a rope ladder. He heard a dog bark, more than one dog, and glanced Wildly around him, the noise of the rotors beating in his head. The noise had come from within the MiL. The dogs were still aboard, but the cabin door was wide now; light spilled from it outlining a human form. Dogs, men, guns.
The transport moved away, oblivious of him. He saw a bulky shadow starting to descend the rope ladder a quarter of a mile away. They were beginning to drop men and dogs in their prescribed places. They were looking for Kedrov— —go.
He could not move, not for a long moment, not until the MiL-8 had moved farther off and its noises were less insistent. Then compass, sketch, night glasses, visual sighting of the knoll and islet where the jetty was, then—
He clambered down the slight incline, onto the first stretch of ice, sedge and reeds scraping like steel against his legs. His hand on the pistol—
—Kalashnikov. He turned, scrambled back up the slope, breathing already harsh, and opened the cabin door. Adamov's white face resented him. He climbed in, took down one of the rifles from its clips, checked its magazine, its weight in his hands, looking only once at Adamov, forcing himself to wink, tossing his head to emphasize a gesture he did not feel. He shut the cabin door behind him. Jogged more easily, familiarly, down the incline onto the ice. Continued to jog, leaning into the wind, head down, rifle clutched across his chest. Half a mile. Three-fifty.
Be there*
Gennadi Serovs imagination prickled with points of information just as the night sky, seen through the window of the speeding car, seemed alive with the cold, separate lights of stars. There was a comfort in the analogy, just as there was exhilaration about the details of the report rendered by the team leader and the doctor. They were now seated in silence in the rear of the car, Serov preferring to ride next to his driver. He felt light-headed—yes, that was apt— with the risk he had taken and was still running. It had been a dangerous, even a challenging, move to have young Rodin killed, but therein lay its greatest satisfaction. When the body was discovered, the general would be deeply wounded. And if he
became
suspicious, asked for causes, occasions, reasons, Serov would
plant
evidence of KGB surveillance in the empty flat across the
street
from Rodin's apartment. After all, they had been there.
Routine reports, issuing from the radio, washed over him like the sensation of a warm bath. The helicopter search, the cars,
and
the troops on foot had not yet located Kedrov. They would do so;
and
if they did not, General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin would have
enough
to distract him when the body of his son was discovered.
Apparently,
Valery Rodin had subsided quite easily, even strangely. Given up, as if his heart or will had surrendered. The tranquilizers had been administered via the tube. It had all been over in a few minutes; they had left Rodin so deeply unconscious he would never recover.
The car coursed through the traffic-less streets of Leninsk-Kuznetskiy, the science city of Baikonur, heading southeast from Tyuratam toward GRU headquarters, a complex of white buildings close to the Cosmonaut Hotel. Out of Baikonur itself, there was something commercial about it, business rather than army or science. Serov enjoyed the separation of the GRU from army headquarters—detachment implied independence. To the north of them, the complex was bathed in light from a hundred sources, the sky softened by its glow. To the south, over the darkened city, the stars burned. The car was passing an ornamental fountain at the entrance to a leisure park. The wind had shaped the spray into a peacock's tail before the temperature had frozen it, despite the antifreeze they mixed with the water.
Radio reports, radio noise. He sighed. Kedrov was unimportant, only the general's anxiety made him otherwise. A dozen helicopters, a hundred men or more, all looking for this one pathetic little shit. Even out as far as the marshes. Perchik might have a good idea there, might not . . .
He closed his eyes. Details of the reports sparkled like jewels in the darkness behind his lids.
Snapped open. He sat upright. His driver was looking at him expecting to receive a change of orders.
"What?" he asked.
His driver handed him the radio mike. Serov depressed the Transmit button and demanded: "Repeat that last information, Unit?" He turned to his driver, clicking his fingers impatiently.
Unit
Air-7," he added when given the designation. The driver steered the car
to
the curb, and they slowed to a halt. The hand brake rasped on. "Unit Air-7, what was your report?" Serov barked.
This
is Serov, understand? Your report."
His fingers drummed on the dashboard. Through the window, listing a little with his sudden tension, he could see a war memorial doming at the end of the wide thoroughfare. They were no more than two minutes from the office. Yet the driver had been correct to stop until this matter was dealt with—had he misheard?
. . helicopter we can't account for, just sitting under
some
trees. Engines stopped, no sign of the pilot," the report continued. When the pilot of Air-7 had finished, Serov was silent for a few moments. Why had it awakened him? It was strange, but not sinister or threatening. In the silence, the pilot added: "A gunship, sir. And it's not a member of our
zveno.
Stranger."
"What markings is it carrying?" he asked. "Can you see?" He forgot to add "Over," but the pilot of Air-7 seemed to divine that he had finished; or was, perhaps, simply frightened into efficiency. An unidentified gunship? From outside Baikonur?
. picked up the engine heat on IR," the pilot explained, his voice distant and unreal, but somehow enlarging the significance of the abandoned MiL-24. ". . . see it now on low-light TV . . . army, sir, not ours or KGB. Joyrider, comrade Colonel?"
"Don't be stupid." It was possible, however, in a place like Baikonur—studentlike stunts and stupid acts of indiscipline; boredom. Most of the GRU's work had to do with things like that. But in a gunship? Nevertheless, he added: "If you can't see his white arse going up and down in the reeds, then it may not be a joyride. Get down there and check it out—now, sonny."
He threw the radio mike toward his driver and rubbed his chin. Intuition was pressing at the back of his thoughts, attempting to bully its way in. Why? How much significance should he attach to this?
"Very well, Vassily, drive on." He banged the dashboard as if to startle a horse into motion. The driver started the engine, put the car into gear, and pulled away. The war memorial, sword uplifted in threat rather than reconciliation or sorrow, loomed closer. It was a huge shadow against the lights of the square behind it. Should he order the MiL surrounded, as intuition seemed to demand? No, wait.
The car rounded the dark memorial, crossed the square. The empty ether hissed from the radio. What was it? Why did he still feel it important?
"Sir—Colonel, sir." A different voice, perhaps the copilot.
"What?" This time he remembered. "Over."
"Sir, an officer—one our ours, GRU, tied up in the cabin. Sir, he's claiming he was kidnapped."
Serov wanted to laugh, especially as the car skidded rounding a
corner
as Vassily's surprise transmitted itself to the steering.
"What kind of joke—?" Instinct pressed: he added urgently: "Get his story. Better still, get him to the radio. And get help to stake out that helicopter. Do it now! Get that idiot, whoever he is, to the microphone."
Vassily whistled through his teeth. Serov could feel the mystified excitement of the two in the back prickle the hair on his neck. What in hell was going on? His fingers drummed on the dashboard with an increased urgency as the car drew into the courtyard, then beneath the archway of GRU headquarters. Serov did not even spare a glance toward the hotel or the windows of General Rodin's suite. The square was nakedly empty, as was the inner courtyard of the building.
"Where is that idiot?" Serov bellowed into the mike.
The trunk of the dwarf fir seemed to collide with his back, so violently did he lean against it to conceal himself. A helicopter's shadowy belly slid above the ice between him and the rotting jetty. He forced himself to observe it through the night glasses. The fleecy lining of his jacket, near the collar, was icily damp from his exerted breathing. It numbed his cheek as he leaned back, lowering the tiny pair of binoculars. The helicopter passed northward. He tried to listen, but nothing other than the retreating MiL and the cry of the wind came to him. The landscape might just be deserted.
Gant clutched the Kalashnikov against his chest, made himself study the open space of ice across which his path lay. Empty, gleaming palely as if lit from far below its surface. Deserted. He raised the glasses once more. Starlight and moonlight were intensified. He scanned the stretch of frozen water. Carefully, repeatedly.
He saw nothing, but could not trust the evidence of his eyes. There could be men out there, hidden and waiting or simply approaching in a search pattern laid down for them. He would not know. He understood his limitations. This was not his element; here he was ordinary, dangerous to himself. He looked at his watch. Three fifty-eight. His approach had been careful and slow, but it had been textbook, not instinctual. What had he missed? He studied the jetty and the houseboat through the glasses. Thin bars of light stood out, indicating a source of light inside the boat. It had to be Kedrov. This was the agreed rendezvous. He scanned the ice again, then the sedge and the reed beds, then the clumps and tufts of trees and low bushes. They were impenetrable, could hide an army. He shivered, hating the thought of the Hind half a mile behind him. It seemed like a home he had abandoned.
He moved slowly through the reeds and out onto the ice. Time urged him, and he moved quickly across the frozen marsh toward the jetty, until he pressed against groaning wood, into the shadows cast by the jetty. He listened. Heard the wind. Saw distant navigation lights. No dogs . . . listen for the dogs. The MiL-8 had dropped men and dogs at their appointed places in the pattern of the search. Could he hear dogs? He held his breath, listening into the wind. Distant rotor noise, nothing more.
He climbed the steps, crouching at the top, sensing the skin on his back and buttocks and neck become vulnerable. He felt colder, as if naked. The rifle seemed unreal, held in numb hands that gripped like claws. The boat was only yards away. He could see the bars and strips of light clearly. He scanned the open ground once more with the glasses. Nothing. Then he ran in an awkward crouch, the wood of the jetty announcing each quick footfall, the wind seeming encouraged to unbalance him by the cramped and difficult posture he adopted. He stepped carefully onto the boat's deck. Eased along the side of the cabin, bent down.