He jumped the MiL-2 into the air like a startled cat. It jerked rather than flowed upward, and the rockets passed like a firework shower beneath the helicopter's belly. Explosion as they diverged, one striking the wall of the building, penetrating the corrugated iron, another exploding on impact. The remaining rockets raced on, their flame suddenly dying out.
He rolled the helicopter in a banked turn over the roof of the building and slipped into the darkness beyond it. He
increased
speed.
The four gunships were controlled, but they had lost
formation,
purpose had become almost hysterical. They would leave gaps, blind spots; Serov insisted on retaining command of the helicopters. It was a weakness, it had to be exploited. Serov was relying on radar, visual sightings, positional reports all reaching him in a constant stream, but there were whole seconds that passed between information, decision, response. Chinks, tiny gaps of time—he had to slip through one of them.
The Hind was back in
his
mirrors, lumbering until it
reached
open darkness and then bearing down with frightening speed. If he had only been armed, he could have taken it easily.
Outmaneuvered
it, gotten behind it or above or beneath and ripped it open with rocket and cannon fire.
The Hind seemed to have discovered patience. It was noW merely stalking him. Gant increased his airspeed, and the pilot in the Hind matched it but made no move to overtake him. Gant rose to a couple of hundred feet, as if declaring a surrender. He was visible now. He saw the other gunships on his radar, all close, too close, and dropped the MiL savagely down in the steepest descent possible. Somehow, now that they had reassumed a pattern and a definite purpose, he had to rid himself of one of them. Create a gap of time and air through which to escape.
"... she's dead!" he heard Priabin cry out. It did not matter. Priabin's grief or lack of hope did not matter, just as the woman's death was irrelevant; no more than the distant announcement of an aircraft's departure. His sole interest lay in his own survival.
He could not shake off the Hind astern of him. A stream of positional fixes flowed from the copilot-gunner back to Serov, pinning him down, like a moth to a card. Darkness was unusable, hugging the ground was no longer an advantage. They had him, they were closing at almost maximum speed.
Radar dishes, gantries, pylons, radio masts. He was approaching the vast power and tracking network to the east of the main control and assembly area and south of the principal launch facility. Scattered lights, a network of roads strung with pale globes, lights shining from huts, from portacabins and even caravans. A strange suburb of Baikonur. It was a minefield designed to assault helicopter rotors, but it was cover, too. It was too precious to be damaged in a wild attack. They would be cautious, almost as if unarmed. They wouldn't be able to use—
As if sensing Gant's intent, the Hind trailing him launched from one of its underwing rocket pods. A flare, then the quick leap of the unguided rockets toward him, enlarging in his mirrors, rushing out the night.
He jerked at column and pitch lever.
Too close, too close.
The
amphitheater of tiered seats and rows of screens and monitors that was Baikonur's mission control was only an audience to
w
hat was happening down on the room's vast floor, fifty yards or more away from the nearest spectator behind his telemetry screen
a
nd console.
A
strange, vivid frenzy of voices, movement, panic, imminent success, like a dramatic, surprising play.
Military
personnel mingled on the stage, at the center of which nere was a huge, upright map rising from a
wheeled
dolly. Cables
snaked away from the map across the concrete floor. A small jumble of screens and consoles had accreted like mussels on a rock around the map. VDUs and terminals, radio and radar screens were like fragments broken from the orderly rows of equipment of the security section of mission control.
Voices called and bellowed, squeaked or rang metallically. The air was filled with sharp ozone. And tension and excitement and the sense of imminent death. Rodin looked up at the maps surface as a new area of Baikonur was displayed, keyed in from the console that controlled the fiber-optic projection. At once, a single red light jerked across the map and settled. An operator pointed a long rod toward the red light, his face intent upon the information flooding into his earphones. He acknowledged, and wiped the pointer like a wand across the grid-referenced projection. The red light remained where it was, but a snail trail of light drawn by the pointer showed its heading, speed, its changed position on the map. Amid the telemetry and tracking complex. Two other operators traced in the paths of the two closest gunships with similar snail trails, one blue, one green. Gant's track was red, like his light.
Serov stood beside Rodin, his headset awry on his right ear so that he could hear the general. His arm was clutched in a makeshift sling, his face was drawn and dusty gray in color. Rodin had once more assumed control of the hunt, superseding Serov, using the facilities of the main control room rather than the security room that was Serovs headquarters.
"This American is good—dangerously good," Rodin murmured, looking down at Serov.
"We have him, comrade General," Serov asserted without the energy to perform any but a subordinate role. Weak hatred
swilled
in him like something slowly draining from a leaking water cask, but he simply could not assert any strength. His arm hurt vilely. "He s moving very slowly."
"We can't achieve a kill, not while he's in there,' was Rodin s clipped, scornful reply. "We can't risk any damage before
tomorrow.
Obviously,"
he
added with an extra sting
of
contempt.
He rubbed
his chin while voices and acknowledgments flew about them. "Move two mobile patrols out to the area. Their
rifle
fire should drive him out—up and out. Then he's naked." Rodin pronounced the
word
with a curious, even salacious relish.
Hie operators wiped their trails of light across the map. Their earlier markings were visibly decaying.
Gant
and the
two
gunship
s
were treading slowly, like men in a minefield, through the tracking and power grid network. The remaining two Hinds, the other members of the gunship helicopter flight, stayed outside the network, awaiting orders and a clear field of fire. The American could not remain there indefinitely. As long as they tracked him closely, carefully, they would have him. More gunships would have helped, but Baikonur had had no need of them. Security £tt Baikonur had been, until now, an internal matter, and had been effective. Should he call up units from air bases to the west and northeast? MiGs would be unusable here; more gunships? Flying time? Too long. He would destroy the American with what he already had in the air and on the ground.
The colored trails glowed and diminished in brightness on the screen. A slow, balletic dance, like the streamers used in a Cossack wedding dance, whirling, curling, twisting in the air . . . He was clever, the American.
Serov attended to a voice in his headset, nodding occasionally, his face grayly satisfied within the pain it registered. Then he announced to Rodin:
"Aral'sk KGB office is out of commission. Permanently. No doubt the work of terrorists," he added with a flash of his former vivid competence.
"What did our people discover?"
"A recording of the transmission we monitored from the surveillance camera on the MiL."
"It had not—"
"No. No onward transmission. The recording was destroyed. There is no shred of evidence, outside Baikonur itself."
Rodin nodded, his cheeks flushing slightly at the ease of success. His hand closed into a fist, squeezing air or an image in his mind.
"Good. Then it is contained."
Something on the screen struck his attention, then riveted it, as tf the trails of light were whirling hypnotically. He became fascinated, absorbed; and there was an edge of excitement, too. Gants ^iL had increased speed, weaving and dodging like a cornered rat; the two gunships lumbered more slowly, picking their way through
0r
over the obstacles in their paths.
The voice of the Hind's pilot was breathless and excited. Rodin Pressed the headset close against his head with both hands, as if to keep the words secret. He smelled the ozone from the electrical equipment festooning the floor, growing around him like a small, rank garden, felt his heart pause, his breath fade.
"He had to lift over the cables—a moment. . . there's a patch of empty ground beyond . . . bring him down there?" the voice yelled. "He's lifting now—a hundred feet up, a clear shot—"
"No!" Rodin shouted into his microphone. "Wait. He must be over clear ground."
". . . turning now, high-G turn . . . he's over the open area, now—waiting . . . ? He's banking and turning as tight as he can, spinning like a top—why? Clear shot, General—clear!"
"Make absolutely certain," Rodin said. "Damage must be avoided at all costs. Kill only the American—not our project." Then he waited. He stared at the map, listened to the voice, his hands gripped on the earphones of his headset like claws. His chest ached with tension.
". . . climbing, twisting to get away, I'm following him. Yes—no, almost, yes . . . climbing and turning, descending again now, climbing again, turning, turning, tight high-G turn again, yes, gone. ..." The pilot was waiting to use one of the missiles slung beneath the wings, radio-guided. At that range, it could not miss, but the pilot was waiting for the optimum moment while Gant squirmed and wriggled like a fish on a hook.
Rodin sighed loudly.
". . . tighter turn, in a descent . . . now he's climbing again, we've got him now—tight turn, follow, then—" There was the noise of a thud. It was quite distinct, as distinct as the alarm in the pilot's voice, which became a cry that was all but a scream of terror. Then his voice disappeared, there was a grinding, rending assault upon the metal of the gunship, then the hissing ether.
"What happened?" Rodin roared.
". . . crash," he heard dimly a few moments later. The pilot of the second, observing gunship had begun to report, his voice distant with shock.
"High-G maneuvers—like the early days in Afghanistan," he murmured. "The American made him follow a high-G turn the MiL-24 just can't make, the rotor struck the tail boom—seen it happen before in the mountains—he forgot it. He cut off his own
arse,
shredded the rotors, comrade General."
"Is, is—?"
"Burst into flames when it crashed, comrade General. The American fined them, sir!" It was an outraged wail.
Rodin tugged off his headset and threw it aside. He raged at Serov, as if in pain: "Kill the American! I don't care how, just do it now! Understand? Do it now!"
Flames spurted and died quickly fifty feet below and a hundred yards away. The gunship was incinerated, out of the game. His body was wracked with the pitch of tension the maneuvers had effected.
Now, carefully . . . Their low-light TVs and thermal imaging and infrared were all blind; flaring into indistinctness because of the fire on the crashed gunship. That had been a bonus. He could not have planned the lurch of the stricken Hind into a radio mast, then a radar dish, its tail broken but still flailing like that of a maddened insect, its rotors churning the icy ground—its fuel tanks erupting into a volcano.
Quick, then. He had drawn in the other three, they had converged like an audience acquired by a juggler, wondering what sleight of hand was in progress. He had twisted and turned and lifted and dropped the agile little MiL more and more puzzlingly, more and more hypnotically. And always over that bare, dark space of sloping ground where the Hind would think it safe to kill. Until it had begun to attempt to match his movements, to get behind or above or alongside for long enough to ensure a kill. Following him, turning tighter and tighter. He'd seen it happen on guerrilla film smuggled out of Afghanistan by the CIA. Finally, the pressure on the rotors from the created G-forces was sufficient to slap the rotor tip down onto the tail boom like a knife of dramatic sharpness slicing through flesh. A stagger in the air, a maddened, dervish whirling, then the crash and the explosion . . .
. . . seconds ago already. He edged the MiL-2 through and beyond a sprouting clump of subsidiary radar dishes. Firelight flickered and washed over them, threw his shadow.
Tracer roared and flashed past the cockpit, the fuselage of the MiL jumped and bucked, struck by cannon fire. He lowered the helicopter even closer to the slightly undulating ground, his airspeed minimal, his body twitching and shifting in his seat as if he ^ere trying to maneuver only his physical form through the jungle of cables and pylons and dishes that confronted him. He attempted to steady the MiL, tense against a renewed burst of firing. Changed course once, again, again, as he waited for the damage to the MiL to become apparent, even deadly. Instinct compelled him to dodge ^d evade even as his mind explored his body, the cockpit, his sense of the main cabin. Something was wrong with the MiL; his shadow had been spotted, one of the gunships had loosed off cannon rounds more in desperation than certainty, but something was wrong with the MiL—the sensation of tight bonds becoming looser, the sense of a car's brakes becoming spongy, its steering soft, unresponsive. He could feel it in his hands, in—in his feet!