The countdown clock in the security room had been readjusted once more as Rodin shaved further minutes from the launch procedures. Serov glanced up at it. It seemed to bear little relationship to the activities of the room and its occupants; as if the tinted windows comprising the wall between himself and the rest of
mission
control had become completely opaque. The scenes on the television screens were unaccompanied by noise or words. Launch pad, the strange steam of vaporizing fuel, the garish lights, the
images
from the flight deck of the shuttle; all somehow less real than the fiber-optic map and the radio connection with one corporal
driver.
"Why not?" he repeated. "Why can't you raise him?" He addressed the words to the ceiling. If the man failed to pick up his words, they would be repeated by the radio operator. He
wished
to remain detached.
But why did the countdown clock intrude at the very edge
of
his peripheral vision? It had nothing to do with the American. He
could
not ignore it. Thirteen minutes thirty. It was three-forty in the morning, his eyes were gritty with tiredness, his body stale and beginning to acquire an odor within its uniform. Yet his brain refused to be weary; it leaped and jumped with electricity.
He turned his back completely on the countdown clock.
"Well?" he demanded.
. . no idea, comrade Colonel," he caught by way of reply.
"And there were two aircraft in that hangar?"
"Yes, comrade—"
He interrupted: "You were certain they were unusable?"
"The chief engineer explained—"
"What did he say—exactly?" Three forty-one. Time seemed to be accelerating. His mind obeyed the diminishing time, not with anxiety or fear but with a sense of keeping pace, even overtaking. His body itched for action. "Exactly."
All the checks, all the calls they had made, and only one failure to respond—this one a GRU private guarding two aircraft.
"One of them was stripped right down. We could see that for ourselves."
"And the second one?" His tone was at one level of intensity, the volume of his words raised but constant; as if addressing a large crowd.
"... battery on charge ready to—" he caught, but his mind had plucked up his attention. He was ahead of the explanation outrunning the passing moments.
'Then it is only the battery!" he bellowed at the ceiling, his head spinning, the windows now completely black and opaque. "If the battery were replaced in the aircraft it could fly!"
"Comrade Colonel, I don't—"
"Idiot!" he yelled. There was a triumph in his voice, large and unarticulated. But even as he shouted the single word, he felt that foilure had gripped his throat, constricting it. He could already, he could—dear God, the American had an aircraft! The windows no longer seemed opaque. The whole of mission control's huge extent rushed against the glass, clearly visible. He could at once pick out Rodin on the far side of the room, behind a glass panel similar to the °ne that divided him from the main room. Opponent. "Idiot!" he choked. "And now we can't raise your companion. Do you think by
a
ny remote chance he might be dead?" He waved his hand. "Cut that clown off. Get me the collective's chief engineer—whoever knows about that plane. Hurry."
He paused on some mental outcrop. He glanced at the upright toap, its violent colors shifting and blending and then standing out starkly like lights at evening. What should he—? What decision? A wrong move and—
What, what,
what?
Serov dimly felt his nails digging into his palm. He was aware of mission control, aware of the countdown clock, which now seemed to have raced ahead of him. What should he do?
Voice of the radio operator calling the collective. No one would be attending to the radio at this time in the morning. Mistake—
"Cancel that call," he yelled, surprising them and himself. Their faces turned to him, expectant, even demanding.
American . . . aircraft that needed only a battery . . . three forty-three in the morning . . . the temperature of the room, his mind a vast darkness lit with fires ... his collar tight, faces looking in his direction, looking for direction.
Noise from the radio, another radio, a gunship calling in—map, colors flowing, then solid for a moment, white like a star. Gunship—
"Order—order," he repeated more clearly, growling his throat free, "that gunship to pick me up—now. Order the nearest gunship to pick me up. Order the others to rendezvous at, at the collectives hangar. Immediately." He sounded breathless, young and somehow absurd. But they obeyed. "Ask how long rendezvous will take, how long it will take to pick me up here." His hands waved like those of a conductor, drawing sense from the chaos in his own head. "At the collective, wait until I get there. Hurry."
He grabbed up his overcoat and cap, even his gloves, from the chair against the windows where he had left them a long time before. Saw Priabin, who was at that moment looking up at him. From his hand of cards.
Serov almost raised his hand, almost clenched his fist at the KGB colonel, to threaten, to crush all in a single gesture. But did not. Priabin. His time was close. The American first.
"Hurry."
Three forty-four. Ten minutes to launch time.
Ten minutes to launch time. Dimly, Priabin could make out Serov's bulk, his saturnine features beyond the tinted glass.
Three
forty-four on half the clocks in the room, ten minutes to
launch
on the other half. And the countdown ringing mechanically through the whole vast area. Cards in his hand—ridiculous, crazy. Serov's imag
e
more real at the glass for a moment than anything else. Then the man disappeared. Something of the urgency with which his
shadow
vanished communicated itself to Priabin, and his voice faltered in his bid. Bridge. Himself, surprisingly the guard—patronizing thought—and two computer technicians whose tasks were completed. At a loose end, like many others; catered for by a rest area in one corner of the huge room, marked off only by a ring of chairs. Cards, tobacco—no drink, naturally—the atmosphere of some company's staff club. Ludicrous.
Serov's sudden urgency worried Priabin.
"What was that, Colonel?" the guard asked almost affably. His tone suggesting Priabin wasn't a prisoner. "What did you bid?"
"Two clubs," he replied automatically. Serov's purpose—himself or Gant? It had to be one or the other. Immediately, his bruises ached again, his face a mask of dull pain. "Two clubs," he repeated like a spell.
"No bid," one of the technicians murmured, tapping ash from his cigarette, after pausing for a moment to regard the magnified voice of the countdown.
"Nine minutes thirty and counting."
The room murmured, called, moved around them like a tropical forest, its noises and activities lush and dense. Unreal. If he turned his head even slightly Priabin could see, through the glass panels of the command booth, Rodin and his senior staff grouped like visiting dignitaries. He felt anesthetized. The room worked on him like a strange new drug, inducing a pleased, satisfied tiredness. The guilt had left him; even the heap of coats under which he had buried Katya was no longer clear in his imagination. Anna and Valery Rodin had retreated to an even greater distance. There was only the room and the lunacy of playing bridge with his captors while the countdown rushed toward launch time.
"T minus nine minutes and counting."
Serov emerged from the door below the tinted glass windows of the security room. Hurrying, urgent, almost possessed. And yet he spared a glance for Priabin. And a quick, greedy smile. Priabin's head cleared. It could only be Gant.
Serov strode toward one of the control room's doors, pursued by two of his team. Overcoat over his arm, cap in hand, hurrying as if tate for an appointment. Priabin turned to where Rodin stood amid his staff officers. He hadn't noticed Serov's departure.
Serov had
found
Gant, at
least knew where he could lay
his
hands
on him. And seemed
assured of doing so.
The
grin of success. tViabin
was shaken out of
his lassitude. Rodin—Rodin had simply
walked away from him at the top of the steps, after his confidences regarding his wife. Simply walked away and had addressed no word to him since then. Obsessed with the countdown, the launch.
And now Serov, too, was preoccupied. Rodin would launch and Serov would capture Gant.
Lightning
would happen.
Gant released the brake. It seemed a massive effort. The Antonov struggled forward, unleashed and awkward, then bumped and rolled across the sand and straggling grass toward the flattened, undulating runway. The wind was light, less than five knots, and blowing at an angle across the runway. No problem.
He increased the engine power. The Antonov bucked over the uneven ground. Its power was feeble, yet it was enough for him. The din of the engine banged like hammers in the cockpit and echoed down the narrowing fuselage behind him. The large-scale local maps lay open on the copilot's seat, an adjustable light dimly glowing on their contours. Beneath them, a school atlas. He had found it thrust into a door pocket, and could not imagine why it was there or what it had ever been used for. On a cramped, ridiculous scale, desert stretched away for hundreds of miles in every direction. Gant did not concern himself with it.
He bent forward, craning his head in order to quarter the dark sky. Stars still in their vast orbits, no firefly movements among them. Luck was holding, had to hold.
He watched the needle on the torque meter as the wheels of the undercarriage jolted the aircraft onto the edge of the runway. Tyuratam and Baikonur were like a false dawn along the
starboard
horizon. He turned the aircraft, paddling the rudders, his two hands gripping the old-fashioned, primitive column. Old-fashioned but familiar.
He sensed the fat tires sitting on the runway, sensed the
engine
revs reach his requirement, sensed the slipstream buffet the rudder; sensed the flaps, all and every detail of the old Antonov. He was ready. Airborne, he would quickly become lost in the vastness surrounding the Baikonur complex. His luck was holding. He
increased
the power to the engines, sensed the light breeze, watched the starlit sky and its few weary, lumbering clouds, released the brakes, wanted to cry out as the airplane skipped forward on its tires.
He switched on the radio. Before, he had to remain silent
and
unknowing so that he might effect his escape, but now it did not matter, he needed to hear where they were.
-—moving lights, even before he began tuning the radio. They had come. He saw the billows of the nearing navigation lights as the
gunship
dropped out of the darkness toward him. Ahead of him!
The radio blurted. He had gone on tuning it automatically, with dull and cold fingers. Challenge. Bellowing in the noisy cockpit.
He felt the confidence of only seconds before retreat like a shock wave through his body; chest, stomach, legs—.
—then the shock wave of the gunship's downdraft was the one sensation that was real as the Antonov shivered throughout its length. The two-handed column quivered in his hands. He sensed then saw the gunship's shadow settle over him like a cloak, darkening the stars. The radio yelled orders at him. The situation had been snatched from him just as the whirlwind around him threatened to snatch away the control column. The Antonov wobbled, swerved, as fragile as a child's bicycle out of control.
Serov's voice.
"You will stop the aircraft, Major Gant. You will come to a complete halt."
Stars winking to the west, ahead. The runway rose gently to a close and false horizon; like a springboard that could fling him into the air. Dust whirled around the cockpit, stiff uprooted blades of grass rattled on the Plexiglas, tiny stones and grit showered and bounced like hail. His vision was rapidly becoming obscured. Air intake. Dust clogging it, stones damaging it, wrecking the engine, the propeller. The gunship sat above him like a squat black beetle with a gray underbelly. He watched it, keeping the Antonov's heading along the runway but cutting its speed to a crawl. It was no longer an airplane, only a toy.
The gunship moved slightly farther ahead of him and lowered as if on a thread. It was blocking his path. The undercarriage was down. The wheels alone could do enough damage. Serov would undoubtedly crash the machine into him if that were the only way to Prevent his taking off. And in the downdraft, he could not rely on the Antonov's stability and lift. He could not take off.
"You will stop the aircraft and switch off the engine. You will leave the aircraft—"
Gant could see his face and form at the main cabin door. Micro-Phone and loudspeaker. Imperatives.
The engine coughed with an almost human noise on the sur-^unding dust. The Antonov was barely moving
forward.
Serov Wanted him alive, wanted that triumph.