He could see the hangar, the low moon stained brown by the dust, the feeble stars, the fading runway ahead of him, the fuel store.
The cockpit shrank around him, its elements encroaching. Other voices answered and bayed with Serov's over the open channel. Call signs, acknowledgments, eagerness, and confidence. They had crept up on him in the darkness. The cockpit impinged, each element like a sharp needle. The maps, the ridiculous school atlas opened to a vast area of the Soviet Union, each instrument—radio, gyrocompass, altimeter—useless. Temperature, fuel, revs . . . fire extinguisher, flare pistol, Mayday, Mayday . . .
"You will halt the aircraft and leave it with your hands in the
»
air.
Call signs, acknowledgments, eager anticipation in every voice. All coming at maximum speed, location confirmed. Icy panic. He had two minutes before the next gunship, less than that before the first ground patrol in a UAZ or a truck arrived. General alert—all units to converge. Imperatives.
Two minutes. One gunship was sufficient, blocking his vision as its gray belly loomed out of the dust cloud. Stones rattled on the Plexiglas, the engine coughed.
—leave the aircraft."
Mayday—
The gunship was no more than fifteen feet off the ground, ready to anticipate and counter any move he made. Hanging in the night, blocking the runway. Fifteen feet up, no more.
The idea came slowly, as if he were squeezing juice from an old, dry lemon. Mayday—
Hangar, fuel store, the litter of empty drums, the, the—
full drums
—Mayday, Mayday!
He maneuvered the aircraft slowly, innocently, off the runway. The gunship slid alongside and slightly ahead, wary but
confident
and alert. Serov was poised in the cabin doorway, braced against the frame, microphone in one hand, the other holding the
loudspeaker,
waving imperiously.
The MiL's pilot was assured, expert. Serov assumed that surrender lay in getting the Antonov off the runway. Gant felt the biplane bounce and roll, then he slid back the cockpit window.
Dust
swirled in. Ground speed less than ten miles an hour; crawling to a halt. Serov was waving him on now, the loudspeaker gesturing hi!*
1
toward the hangar.
"You will now halt the aircraft."
Call signs, acknowledgments, airspeeds, distances. Just above a minute and a half. It had to be now.
Mayday.
He reached carefully for the emergency flare pistol and cocked it. Headlights in the distance bounced through dark trees. The gunship hovered close to the fuel store, fifteen feet above ... a second more, two seconds, above, above—now!
He fired the flare pistol into the dense mass of fuel drums. Vapor from the fuel he had spilled and from half-used drums glowed like a frosty haze before it ignited. The tarpaulin flared like old straw. Then a moment in which the whole fuel store glowed. Before—
Orange flame. Gant choked on the smoke and the dust in the cockpit. His eyes watered. A huge roar of orange. Serov was clearly visible for a moment, burning. Then he fell into the bonfire Gant had created. The gunship lurched, then toppled, slowly at first, flame inside the cockpit as well as surrounding it.
Gant watched in his mirror as he turned the Antonov, opening the throttles to hurry the machine away from the fire. The MiL sagged onto the bonfire like a weary bird onto a nest. Phoenix. Serov
wouldn't
rise from the ashes.
He saw then only a rectangle of orange light stippled with flashes of greater heat. There was no detail in the mirror. The wheels of the Antonov bounced onto the runway. He turned the aircraft to head west, and the first rise of the undulating runway rushed toward him. The raging fire to port of him was no more than the burning of stubble. Orange, white plumes, rolling smoke, the gunship dissolving, breaking open. Nothing left alive.
He looked at his ground speed. Forty-five. The rise was like a mouth opening to swallow him. Fifty miles an hour. The wingtips glowed with reflected orange light, the whirling propeller was made visible by the glare, so that it became a mirror. The interior of the cockpit and his hands on the column were daubed by splashes of the same livid color. A false dawn. He lifted the Antonov into the air; his body seemed to return, but it felt light, buoyant. The aircraft climbed fragilely but steadily. Sixty, seventy mph, a hundred . . . time was opening and spreading now like a great ripple, becoming safer with each second that passed. A couple of hundred feet up.
Gant leveled the aircraft below radar height. Invisible. In a moment, he would bank to the southwest, after everyone on the ground who might have seen him could swear he headed directly west. Pale desert stretched away on every side. The feeble dark clumps of firs were like the remnants of a buried fortress wall. There was nothing out there, nobody. Double back, he thought, show them where you are just once more—or fly southeast?
The fire below remained in his mirror as it dulled on the wing-tips and inside the cockpit.
A pillar of fire ascended to starboard, to the north. It was as if some gigantic mirror caught the light from the bonfire of the gunship. The column of flame rose hundreds of feet into the night and went on climbing. Its cloudy base spread, roiled and then faded. The pillar of smoke and flame continued to rise. He knew what it was.
It surged thousands of feet, whole miles, into the sky. He knew.
Lift-off. Launch commit. Lift-off.
He was alive, but he had already lost. They'd launched the shut-tie, and the laser weapon was aboard.
Lightning.
They'd begun it.
A fireworks display. But the analogy diminished the event. The huge map with its winking lights representing radar stations and the wiggling course of the American shuttle seemed shrunken. Instead, Priabin's gaze and that of everyone in the control room had become fixed on the large-screen projection against a distant wall. The column of smoke, lit from within, the falling aside of the skeletal structure of the launch gantry, the boiling fumes, the huge, enveloping, frightening roar of fire were all somehow slowed, so that he could sense the great forces, the huge weight to be thrown into the sky. The needle of the vast missile, the fragile toy of the
Raketoplan
perched on it as if impaled by the great steel spear. He found it hard to breathe, and then only shallowly. The whole room seemed not to be breathing.
There was only the magnified voice of the countdown.
Booster ignition . . . we have a launch commit . . . shuttle craft
Kutuzov
has cleared the tower . . .
Cheering beginning like the slow opening of one great mouth. The sound elongated like the slow-moving film he could see on the screen. His chest felt tight.
. . . principal stage engines look good . . . T plus four seconds . . .
A jolt to the image on the screen as the rocket motors of the principal stage of the booster passed out of the camera's field, to be replaced by the image from a more distant camera. The pillar of cloud was glowing from the fire within it as it rose above the launch pad, climbing into the night; extinguishing darkness. Little else could be seen. The cameras peered into the dark, but the weather-cock-like shuttle riding on top of the hundred meter-high needle was invisible. The cameras swung upward, as if raised by the cheering and self-congratulatory voices in mission control.
Atlantis'
orbit writhed like a long white worm on the principal map, which winked now with new lights; telemetry stations tracking the launch.
The noise of success went on and on.
T plus fifty seconds. Mach 1. One minute and twenty seconds to first stage separation . . .
Kutuzov,
you're still looking good.
Strange that the very jargon of the launch was so American, so much an imitation of what happened in Florida and Texas. Kedrov, he thought, Kedrov with his foolish dreams of America would have been wounded by the ironies of mission control's single voice.
Thinking of Kedrov and realizing that the man was probably dead already, Priabin glanced up at the row of tinted windows behind which lay the security room. And what Serov had left behind of his team.
Gesticulating hands and arms. Signals of anger, surprise. A uniformed officer was standing close to the windows, and Priabin could see him quite clearly. The noises of mission control were becoming more routine, less excited, as if they, too, were intrigued by the scene in the security room. Two men facing each other now, shouting silently; like a domestic quarrel behind glass.
. . . altitude fifteen miles and looking good
, Kutuzov. On the big projection screen, the pillar of cloud was thin and without the power to impress, the orange flame at its tip hardly visible.
T plus two minutes, first-stage separation . . . Control, this is
Kutuzov—
ready for first-stage separation . . .first-stage burnout, we have first stage burnout.
Priabin glanced again at the tinted windows. They were still arguing, hands being rubbed almost desperately through untidy hair. The projection screen showed the tiny flick of light and smoke as the giant first stage of the booster fell away and the second stage motors ignited.
Ignition of second stage successful . . . Roger,
Kutuzov,
we can see that. You are negative return,
Kutuzov . . .
Roger, mission control, we are negative return . . .
They could no longer return to Baikonur, they were too high and too far into the flight. Priabin turned away from the screen and ignored the voices because there was no possibility of doing anything . . but that—argument? Why were they shocked and panicking up there in the security room? Gant?
They moved away from the windows. The officer had been staring in Rodin's direction for some seconds before turning away. What was it?
He turned to his guard, lounging in his chair, idly watching the projection screen and the fiber-optic map. Winking telemetry, the worm of the American shuttle's plotted orbit, the new red stripe that revealed the course of the
Kutuzov.
"I want to go up to the security room," he announced.
The guard shrugged, and seemed to study Priabin's bruised and swollen features. "OK," he said. "I'll have to come, Colonel." Priabin nodded and turned toward the tinted windows. What was it? They were frightened. He could tell that almost as easily as if he had been in the room. A peculiar sensation plucked at his chest as he climbed the concrete steps. The corridor was chill and unfinished. It had been little more than a gray blur when he followed Rodin along it, having been rescued from Serov's malevolence. Had something happened to—? Pray God it has, he replied to his own silent question. The guard's boots pursued with leisurely clicks and echoes. He opened the door of the security room.
A high voice strained and shouting from the radio. A still panicked reception of the words. ". . . still burning. No, there's no bloody hope of anyone being alive in that mess! Burned to a crisp, the whole bloody crew! What would you expect, you prick?"
"Calm down!" the lieutenant cried back at the microphone that abused him. Sweat was a gray sheen on his pale forehead, his narrow, dark features were lopsided with indecision and imagined pain; someone else's agony. What had—?
"What the hell's going on?" Priabin asked the nearest member of Serov's team, a corporal with radio operator's flashes on his sleeve. He shook him excitedly. "What is it?"
The corporal ran thick fingers over cropped fair hair. His
eyes
were blank with shock. "American bastard got the colonel," was the one thing Priabin heard with clarity.
A fierce, even shameful delight spread through him. He
grasped
the fact, the implications immediately. And was glad. Serov was dead. Gant had killed Serov?
"How? How, man, how?" He was shaking the corporal by the upper arms. The lieutenant's eyes were narrow with suspicion.
From a wall speaker, the voice of mission control continued; seemingly incongruous now.
. . . second-stage separation complete—looking good
y
Kutuzov.
Altitude, eighty miles, speed eighteen thousand kilometers per hour . . .
The distances and speeds were hard to grasp, the dialogue flip and stagy—Serov was dead! He felt his body 'shiver with relief.
The lieutenant snapped: "Your American friend blew up a fuel dump—incinerated the colonels helicopter. That's how." There was awe, and shock, but the respect implied by the use of Serov's rank seemed imposed only by death.
"And Gant—the American?" Priabin returned.
"Gone. Taken off. Certainly not destroyed."
The lieutenant's hand waved toward the room's fiber-optic map and the console operator beside it who was feeding in the search coordinates. He alone seemed unaffected by the incineration of the gunship.
On the map, the elements of the search buzzed like frantic fireflies, small lights maddened by an insecticide. Gunships, other aerial units, ground units. Small lights, but giant, awkward, lumbering attempts to form a net. Gant, he knew, was already gone. The rat in the corner did not panic—it bit the weakest ankle, then fled as it was hunted with increasing desperation. That was Gant. His survival was his only priority.