The rudders were slow in responding, the helicopter had acquired a determination, growing every second, to drift to port. He touched at the rudders with his feet. The MiL was drunk, hard to keep on its heading or to maneuver.
He emerged from the tracking network's forest almost at once. The passive radar warning had been improved on this helicopter; none of the gunships behind him had radar locked on. For the moment they'd lost him, just as he had hoped.
The MiL yawed, almost zigzagging as he struggled to bring it back onto its heading, southeast toward the road and the river that marked the boundary of Baikonur. Darkness, space, lack of habitation, he'd seen it on the moving map and decided to lose himself and the pursuit there, then—
But the lack of plan no longer mattered. He wrestled with the increasingly drunken helicopter, his injured hand on fire, the veins standing out on his wrists, his muscles in arms and now legs aching like overstretched—
No radar pickup anywhere. They were still blind. Tyuratam glowed away to starboard, but darkness pressed on him. Undulating ground, gritty sand flying in the downwash of the rotors. Stars overhead—he could see them now. He groaned aloud as it took whole seconds to swing the blunt nose of the helicopter back to face the heading he demanded of it. Southeast. He was flying much too slowly, much too drunkenly. If the remaining three gunships in the Baikonur
zveno
acted in concert, if Rodin directed them coldly rather than in rage, they'd find him before he got ten more miles.
Radio noise . . . silence, apart from the hiss of ether escaping like a gas. They'd switched to a secure frequency. He had lost them, just as they had lost him. The radio silence intensified in his head, as he struggled to maintain his heading against another lurch of the MiL to starboard. The lights of Tyuratam stayed directly ahead for whole seconds before they slid back to starboard.
"We can't get another ten miles in this machine," he finally announced. "It's shot, Priabin. Understand? It's over. Finished."
15: The Limits of the €age
It seemed the icy wind
blew the fleeting sunlight like frozen scraps across the tarmac of Geneva's Cointrin Airport toward the rostrum and the band and the guard of honor and the dignitaries and Air Force One. It glanced from the airport buildings in splinters of brightness that hurt Calvin's tired, stinging eyes. The cards on which his address was printed in large, black handwriting appeared about to be plucked away by the wind. His hands were already almost numb with cold.
The anthem completed, he heard the silence that seemed to stretch away on every side until the wind filled it. He glanced down once more at his speech, then his eyes roamed almost without focus or purpose across the scene; an undirected camera. Cameras—
He alerted himself, adjusting his features, to the battery of long-lensed cameras and the bobbing, shoulder-resting TV and film cameras. The scene closed in as the clouds once more masked the sun and the surrounding mountains seemed to retreat; even the snow on their flanks appeared gray.
He began speaking. Below and to one side, Remsburg, the secretary of state, Danielle, and Giordello, the chief negotiator, were arranged like figures in a tableau. In front of him, the guard of honor, the military band, the cameras; the rest of the world. He coaxed depth, vigor, honesty into his voice, adding the ingredients like a careful but dishonest chef, while fragments of his situation
s
Pun like slow coins in his memory and imagination. The slowing down of the U.S. laser program, Talon Gold, and the other projects, because of cost and by his orders ... the frantic race they would now be in to recover the lost years ... his country's inability to
m
atch the Soviets for at least five years, so DARPA claimed ... the contumely that would haunt him to the end of his life and beyond once the existence of the Soviet weapon became known, as it must . . the terrible, helpless clarity with which he saw the whole awful race to destruction beginning once more. During the last strains of the anthem, his heart had been beating sullenly under his hand as he saluted.
". . . to the people of the whole world, I say this: We are here to make an end of the beginning. This is a time of hope—as an illustrious predecessor of mine once said, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. I ask all of you to remember that. Fear is an old coat we can, thankfully and by the blessing of God, throw away." The wind seemed to catch the emphasis in those words and fling it away, so that he hardly caught the sound of his own voice. Nervously, he glanced down at his wife, who smiled. Remsburg was watching him keenly, Giordello's dark features displayed only rigid formality as he stared ahead. Then Danielle, sensing that his thoughts were wavering, urged him on with the address with a quick, decisive nod of her head.
The Soviet army at Baikonur had gone to their Code Green customary security status a day early, but there was nothing in that; they wouldn't launch earlier than scheduled because they were safe, in no hurry, no sweat . . . Gant was lost.
"All of you have seen the nuclear arsenals of our two nations being declared, withdrawn, dismantled. This is no game, no quick popularity stunt. We mean business!" At the hustings, at a rally, that would have brought an explosion of shouting and applause. Here, in the wind and the briefly returned sunlight, only a ripple of diplomatic applause.
"You have heard, many times over the past weeks and
months,
of the importance of this place and this time. I can only repeat that to you now, and to echo the words of the great writer, Charles Dickens—we must begin the world. Let us begin the world together. Thank you and God bless you."
A moment's pause, then he raised his right hand and waved. A drowning man, he saw himself to be. A man of destiny, so his features proclaimed and the occasion suggested. He stepped down from the rostrum into the company of the Swiss president and the members of the Federal Council, the members of his own party, the Soviet ambassador and his retinue. A shoal of black Mercedes sedans drew slowly toward them like the constituents of a funeral pr cession. He shook hands with warm automatism, smiled, and offered a suitable
gravitas
to everyone who looked in his direction.
On the hoods of the cars, stiff and rattling little flags. The flag of his country, the hammer and sickle, the United Nations blue, the Swiss white cross and the flag of the city of Geneva, the eagle and the key. The same symbols cracked and writhed outside the main terminal building. The eagle and the key—the American eagle and the key to the prison. He could not avoid the idea.
John Calvin climbed into the rear of the appointed Mercedes and felt himself slump like an invalid into the soft upholstery. Danielle clutched his hand as if to comfort and congratulate in a single gesture. He gripped her hand, patting it up and down on his thigh, as if measuring solemnly the passage of some short, remaining peripd of time.
The plantation of firs surprised him, coming out of the evening darkness with the sudden leap of something animate and mobile. He lifted the MiL, restrained its swing to port, and leaped the trees as if they were part of a racecourse. Then slowed the helicopter even further, so that it hung lazily above the ground. The nose yawed to port, the rudder pedals were spongy and unresponsive. Whatever the damage sustained, it was intermittent, but each time it returned it was like the nearing crisis of a fever, shaking the helicopter more violently, making its control all but impossible. His hands and feet and body and awareness all knew that the MiL-2 was becoming un-flyable. Ten miles or ten minutes—no more. There were no additional factors in the equation. The MiL was finished.
—lurch, yaw, the trembling sense of fragility as the whole airframe shuddered with his effort to reestablish control. The tail rotor bit. swinging the tail back into alignment. Sweat dampened his forehead and armpits. He looked down at the small plantation of firs, curved like a windbreak. Moonlight revealed light, bare soil stretching away southward, a cluster of small, warm lights beyond. Farming country, reclaimed desert. Irrigation channels and ditches scarred the flatness. Dikes and canals.
The passive radar receiver was silent. They'd lost him. Maybe they considered him still inside Baikonur, couldn't yet believe he'd slipped through the net. The radio was silent, too. He could not find the Tac channel they had switched to, hadn't the freedom of his right hand to reach forward to do so. He had to grip the controls fiercely every moment, despite the throbbing ache in his bruised hand, fighting the sensation of lack of control, of the emptiness that lay under his feet. They'd find him soon—a car or cart on a road, a former's ear, a soldier, a disturbance of ducks or cattle . . . something would give him away.
He held the MiL in the hover, in a small space of relief when the rudder pedals responded. What to do? He felt empty at any thought of abandoning the MiL, however fragile and damaged, yet he knew he would find no secure cover that would enable him to examine the aircraft and possibly repair it. He would become the honey pot as soon as he put down for any length of time.
To abandon the MiL ... on foot? Find a car, any vehicle, drive—the thousand miles to Turkey or Pakistan? Or just to—the nearest surviving KGB office. And what happened to him, then? After the success, when Priabin turned around with the look from the houseboat on his face? Gant shivered; the airframe was obedient, like a grazing horse around and beneath him.
What should he do?
He turned the MiL gingerly, like a child balancing on one leg and turning through a complete circle . . . gently, gently. The wind had lessened, as if satisfied the damage provided a sufficient complication of the situation, but he was still wary of it. He held his breath as the nose swung slowly like the lens of a surveillance camera, remote and obedient. He was through eighty, ninety degrees, the tail stabilized, the MiL steady on the spot and at a constant height—fifty or sixty feet. One hundred and ten degrees—
—buffet of wind, then, as if displeased at his skill. The tail swung, the nose yawed violently. Rudder pedals more necessary because he had passed the downwind position of the turn and the rate of turn had speeded up. The extra force of the wind demanded more rudder—too much, too quickly. The MiL turned on its side like someone about to die, and as he righted the machine the thin, rippling darkness of the fir plantation was instantly closer. The MiL was shivering throughout its fuselage. The nose was swinging out of control, the helicopter was becoming a wild sycamore leaf at the mercy of the windy air—north, west, south, east... the helicopter began to turn like a dancer in some mad balletic spin, foster and fester . . . north, west, south, east, north, west... it would fell in * moment, undirected and on open ground near the firs.
Terrified a*
the thought of fire, he stopcocked the engines and then pushed the main electrics switch to Off. All he had left was rotor inertia between himself and the trees—he had to control the crash. He drove the MiL downward the last few feet, felt the undercarriage touch, then dig and skid and snap . . . saw the rotors eating at the trees like flailing saws, saw the tail as he looked over his shoulder lurch against young firs and gouge and snap them—then crack open. Rotors grinding with a sick and hideous noise, then one snapped, and the MiL lurched into a slide, a fall, a stillness.
Still.
He heard silence ascend through the scale and become as real as noise. It had taken only moments. He had thought nothing, imagined nothing, simply waited for the crash to be over. He had known it would not kill or injure him; it had just been the end of the MiL.
Then he breathed, raggedly and loud and often. And heard Priabin in his headset. Shaky-voiced, almost afraid to do anything but whisper.
"Gant? Gant—are you all right?"
Gant stared through the Plexiglas, through fir branches and smeared resin. A small gap of starlight and moon-sheened sky. No huge tear in the fabric of the plantation; good. The MiL was tilted, but there was no surviving tail to thrust out of the trees.
"OK," he murmured absently before the minutes ahead invaded his thoughts. "OK. You?"
"OK, I think."
There was a quiet horror in his voice, from the other side of shock, on behalf of the dead woman. Now Priabin would blame him more than ever. Become dangerous. That was the future, and he dismissed it, sliding back the door of the cockpit. He heard a thin branch snap, felt the chill of the evening invest the cockpit. Released his straps, climbed awkwardly up and out, dropped to the ground. Branches cracked under his feet. He smelled seeping fuel on the cold air.
He looked up—-cover? Almost. He had driven into the firs sideways on, at a downward angle. Some of the trees had bent and slipped back like dark curtains while others had snapped or leaned drunkenly. Night—all night, perhaps. Unless they came very close, they'd see little until daylight.
Hie main cabin was intact. The tail boom had snapped off behind the aerial lead-in, a third of the way along its length. It stood like a ruined statue less than thirty yards away, masked by trees.
The
door of the cabin swung open.
He
turned quickly to face ftiabin, then took off his helmet and threw it aside. Immediately he
listened to the night, his ears still ringing from the headset's confinement. First, the disturbed cries of birds, then the sighing of the wind in the firs. Nothing else. Baikonur's single gunship
zveno
had lost his scent.