"OK." Silence, then the sliding back of the cabin's main window on the port side, directly behind him. The main observation window. Priabin must be leaning out, watching the assembly complex slide closer like a great fungus of light. Then he heard Priabin say: "Gant?" His voice seemed to hold a threat, but was without excitement.
"What?"
"I've just remembered how much I want to kill you."
Gant's wrists jumped with reaction, his body shivered.
"I don't need it, Priabin. Not here and now. Just do the job."
Then he attended to the call signs trickling through the ether. Headings, ground speeds, reports, requests. Headings . . . They were moving back, closing on mission control, he presumed, from where the hunt was being coordinated. A point only two miles or so behind him. He was the fly in the center
of
the web. The
closest
helicopter, by his guess, was little more than five minutes from him, coming in from the northwest.
Haifa mile. Less than a minute. He could see the main assembly building quite distinctly, ahead of him. Scattered trucks, the locomotives that would tow the shuttle out to the pad, soldiers gathered like ants around their parked vehicles. It all seemed enlarged, as if viewed through a telescope of exposed nerves. One quarter of a mile. He flicked off the lamp in the MiL s belly because now it drew attention, conspicuous in so much light. He banked the small helicopter lazily and hung tilted sideways in the hard-lit evening, approaching the vast building that rose like a line of cliffs. He ascended gradually, innocently, into the air until he could see beyond its vast corrugated roof to where Baikonur vanished into the dark.
He glanced at soldiers staring up at him disinterestedly; a glimpse of the yellow locomotives, the grouped trucks, a sense of the renewed wind as it banged at the fuselage. Then as he leveled, he could see only the huge, sloping roof beneath and around him. Target. He drifted the MiL slowly, very slowly, along the gully that ran between the two sloping cliff faces of corrugated sheets. Looking for the skylight he needed.
The channel between the two slopes of corrugated iron seemed endless, so slowly was the MiL moving forward. Noise beat back like blinding sunlight from the roof, deafening him, making it almost impossible to hear Priabin's shouts in the headset. His eyes scanned the length of the roof on either side, studied the mirrors, looked ahead, again and again. As if he expected the helicopters to jump into sight like giant fleas.
Tension beat like quick, successive waves of a storm; his ears throbbed. Too slow, too slow—
Yet he spoke calmly to Priabin, enunciating clearly; the volume a yell, the tone one of encouragement. "You can see it?" Twelve, he counted. Twelve of the skylights on either side already passed. How many? "Where will it be? Remember it."
Priabin was counting, too, as he leaned out of the cabin window. But he had to lean back inside each time he spoke and shout above the rotor noise, holding his microphone against his lips.
"Shuttle—moved to middle—building . . . laser weapon—cargo hold. Middle, middle of the building—eighteen, eighteen windows. "
Gant strained to hear, and to believe. It had to be like an X ray, and as accurate. He had to be above the right skylight, he had to be able to see the shuttle and its cargo hold on the tiny TV screen in front of him. To point the camera lenses downward, hold steady, let the videotape soak up the images below like litmus paper—all the while juggling the MiL in the wind that howled down the channel between the two slopes of iron.
"OK, OK," he replied. "One eight, eighteen."
Fourteen, fifteen—close now. The clock ticked in his head as precisely as ever. The closest gunship was less than three minutes away.
He couldn't use the IR sensors on board. Too much icy metal directly around and beneath, too vast a space within. It had to be guesswork, relying on what Priabin had already described of his last visit to the assembly building—rubbernecking like a tourist—and his estimation of the present position of the shuttle and its by-now adjacent or even loaded cargo. He had to be able to see.
. seventeen, the helicopter seemed to hang like a model in a wind tunnel; undulating, disturbed, but not flying. Seventeen . . . eighteen—eighteen.
He held the MiL-2 at an angle that was difficult to maintain, its whole fuselage tilted away from the roof's slope. The skylight was blacked out, as he had expected.
"Eighteen!" he yelled.
"Eighteen!" Priabin cried back at him, his voice almost lost in the noise and the wind.
"Are you ready?" Gant estimated the skylight was directly beneath one of the wheels of the tricycle undercarriage. Priabin had to check.
"Yes!"
" Camera?"
"Check!"
* Go!"
He strained his hearing but caught no sense of Priabin's boots clatter onto the corrugated iron when he dropped. Then he saw a bent, hunched, almost reclining figure just ahead of the MiL
's nose;
waving. Overcoat flying, boots losing purchase, camera straining at its straps, face white with fear and tension. He was frantically directing the nose of the helicopter away. Gant shunted delicately in the wind, with a vast expense of energy and adrenaline. He
waited,
arms and shoulders crying out, until Priabin stopped waving;
raised
his thumbs. He was so close Gant would have seen the gesture clearly without the aid of the lamps splash of light, which he'd switched on once more. Now—
He dropped the MiL's starboard wheel. He heard the noise, felt the damage, the restraint of the skylight's remains as he tugged the undercarriage clear and righted the helicopter; returning it to its abseiling posture against the slope of the roof..
TV screen. Priabin was waving wildly like an excited child. TV screen. He studied the viewfinder's image. The crater of twisted metal, broken wood, splinters of glass, shards of wooden blackout.
Focus.
There—
—what he had come for. There.
He caught his breath. On the tiny television screen the view-finder's black-and-white image wobbled, blurred, and then re-focused. The maw of the shutde's cargo bay gaped, the long-nosed metal anteater of the laser weapon hung over it, suspended from a crane. Caught in the act.
Gant could see Priabin at the farther edge of the skylight he had broken with the undercarriage, his hands waving and pointing, the video camera clutched against his chest—then operating. The light from the MiL's lamp splashed into the skylight. Wait, wait—
He switched on the videotape, holding the image firmly, with vast effort, his muscles aching with the strain of holding the MiL against the buffeting wind. The tape began running; evidence, proof—he'd done it, he had it all.
Then the alarm, even as he cautioned himself once more. Wait—
—the first shooting, from inside the assembly building. Andike figures staring, running, posed to attack or panic. Glass still showering down, shards of wood and buckled metal rattling and bouncing
0n
the flanks of the shuttle, smaller than its target,
Atlantis.
Gant's thoughts raced, uncontrolled. Hie alarm would be reaching the closing gunships: shock, response, orders, further concerted response.
p
ull speed, heading certain—kill, kill, kill. . . now the closest MiL
Was
half a minute away from the corrugated roof. The knifelike channel was like a cul-de-sac, trapping him. The videotape slid softly, J^th aching slowness, gathering the images that were required. Bullets struck the belly of the MiL, whining away, their high noise audible in the roar of the rotors. In their panic they risked the MiL "eing damaged and crashing through the roof, onto the shuttle.
Priabin had drawn back, stunned by noise and the bullets. Gant yelled into his microphone.
"Get back inside. That's enough—enough!"
Priabin looked toward the cockpit with the sudden movement of a startled deer. His headphones and their lead had been forgotten; Gant's voice had boomed in his head. He raised his arms in acknowledgment and scuttled back beneath the MiL's shadow. Television screen. The helicopter bucked in the wind's violence and the videotape recorded the corrugations of the roof for six seconds until he juggled the image of the shuttle and the laser weapon back onto the screen. Soldiers, too, and gesticulating ants. He could not prevent the surge of success catching at his breathing again, making his whole frame weak.
A flea jumped; a giant flea—up over the lip of the roof and down the slope toward him; seconds to weigh, decide, obey the voice that was crying in Gant's headset—kill them, kill them.
It happened in the slowest of motion. He glanced at the scene through the skylight, the frozen arm of die crane, the dangling ant-eater of the battle station, the shuttle's gaping maw—and the movement of the gunship seemed just as frozen and recorded. Sense of the tilted MiL, the noise of the cabin door banging shut, the movements of his hands like those of an old man—then his MiL jumping away as if to continue some rapid abseil. The gunship bore down and over him, and he sensed the machine he flew falling backward, then dodging like a small, agile opponent as the cannon beneath the gunship's nose opened fire. Tracer rounds hurt Gant's eyes by their proximity.
"Gant!" Priabin yelled, then cut off his voice, realizing his helplessness.
The MiL-2 rose up the opposite corrugated cliff, as if backing away from the belly of the gunship. He hopped the helicopter over the peak of the roof, flinging it like a stone away from the assembly building and up into the darkness. The gunship turned like an angry adult toward a disobedient child, the cannon still firing in short, awful bursts of tracer.
He turned on the radar. There was no point, no purpose in concealment; he needed to see them, even as his peripheral
vision
glimpsed winking navigation lights less than a quarter of a mile off to starboard.
Never this close, never this close before. Obsolete fighter air
craft tactics and maneuvers gleamed like false lights in his mind. Useless to him.
'Transmission!" he yelled. "Do they acknowledge in Aral'sk?"
"Yes—yes!" Priabin shouted in his ears after a silence that was filled with the noise of the MiL and the woman's moaning. 'They want to know what it is." Priabin seemed almost amused, a feverish excitement making his voice high and boyish.-
'Tell them to retransmit." Gant yelled, his eyes flicking from the scene beyond the Plexiglas to the radar screen. Three of them now, including the gunship still firing its gleaming bursts of tracer, unstitching the darkness. Gant was caught in a wash of light for a moment as he drove downward and beneath a great sagging loop of cable. Unnerve, unnerve, he told himself, his hands twitchy with anticipation, his body bathed in sweat. 'Tell them to retransmit now." It was as if he projected his own immediate fear as far as the Aral'sk KGB office. "Now!"
In his mirrors, the heavy Hind-D, like the one he had flown into Baikonur, hopped over the power fines and came on. Gant estimated distances. The rocket pod beneath one of the Hind's stubby wings bloomed orange. Voices yelled and countered in his headset.
He was half a mile from the main assembly building, heading east. He banked savagely, the whole area of his mirrors seeming to be blinded by the orange glow from the Hind's port wing. Capable of penetrating eight inches of armor, thirty-two rockets to each pod, four pods on this gunship. One hundred and twenty-eight chances to kill. The first burst passed alongside his flank as the helicopter lay on its side in the air for an instant. Range, twelve hundred meters— he was almost out of range. The smaller MiL could, just, out-maneuver the Hinds at low speed. He flung the helicopter toward a long, low warehouse. Shut up, he yelled silently as the woman cried out in pain and terror in the cabin behind him. The Hind possessed Poor low-speed handling qualities. But there were four of them
n
ow, the second closest perhaps less than a mile away, the others °onverging as orders were screamed and reiterated over the radio, ^ant hurled and twisted the MiL through the low canyons of the
w
arehouse complex.
M
. . . lost them," he heard in his headset.
' What?" he shouted back. The engines of the helicopter whined
a
J*d screamed as he turned violently. He felt the whole airframe Judder. The MiL's shadow loomed like a hunchback on the wall of a building, light spilled from an open door. The mouth of a furnace glowed. Industrial support unit. He was still heading east, his undercarriage skimming the concrete, his twists and turns as tight and violent as he could make them. The woman must be in agony at the assault of G-forces.
"Lost them. Gone dead," Priabin shouted. The mirrors were clear for an instant, as if he were alone.
"Dead?"
"Just cut off—middle of conversation. About to transmit on to Baku, for the satellite."
"Forget them. They won't be able to help."
"—happened?" was all he heard in reply.
"They're dead—you said it yourself."
The single videotape was all the evidence that existed. A Hind turned into view at the far end of a long corridor formed by the walls of two buildings. Smoke, sparks flaring from beside the cockpit, another welding job or a small electrical furnace—sparks, flash from the eager Hind astern. Rockets.