He spat toothpaste and saliva into the wash basin, swilled out his mouth. Strangely, there was still that stale taste.
The scent of the turbine fuel was heady and sweet on the chilly, dark desert air. The smell hung about the Antonov because the late night was windless and empty. The faint hissing of the fuel in the hose and the whirring of the pump could not be heard above the Antonov's feathering engine. The wing quivered beneath his feet. He had to keep the engine idling to operate the pump driving the fuel from the chemical tank into the tanks in the wings. He had squatted on his haunches on the wing, the light of the flashlight dimly illuminating the pages of the school atlas open on his knees. The yellow-brown of desert stretched around the position of his index finger. He was two and a half hours from Baikonur and foui hundred miles to the southwest of the complex—there, still more than a hundred miles east of the Caspian Sea. He fixed the point in his mind where he would cross the coast, then traced his route toward the oil wells marked southeast of Baku. Their flares in what remained of the night would give him a visual fix as he passed to the south of them, just above the water.
He closed the atlas with a snap, listening to the noise of the engine. Everything was familiar, gave confidence. The noises of an airplane, the empty night. He stood up and stretched.
Stretched away tiredness and cramps. The five hundred and more miles ahead of him, the four hours' flying, distanced him from Past and future. They would not find him, not while it remained dark and the land was empty; and he had no need, not yet, to consider the dawn and the trap waiting to be sprung at first light. It was
e
asy to understand what Rodin would decide, and easy, for the moment, to ignore it. It was like a time-out called by both teams. He'd seen the distant navigation lights of aircraft against the stars. Heard voices on the radio, picked up glimpses of them on radar. But it had all been unreal, not dangerous.
He looked up at the night. The moon had gone. Five in the morning, local time. His westward flight extended the night, as if he carried darkness with him like a cloak, which would disappear
a
hundred miles short, almost an hour before he reached the Turkish border. As soon as they saw him—and he knew they would—he would scream Mayday on the broadest wave band; scream the whole story.
Gant shook his head.
He had begun to believe in his survival. He did not want to envisage daylight. He rubbed his eyes. Navigating by compass and the stars—and the school atlas—tired him, the noise of the Antonov was a constant assault, but those things did not matter. They were elements of surviving, and familiar. He could cope. Distance from Baikonur was like a constant, measured flow of adrenaline.
In every direction, emptiness undulatingly stretched away from him. The uninhabited northern part of the Kara Kum Desert. Somewhere, a rock split, the noise like gunfire, startling him. The shock had no reverberation. He was calm. The whole ballgame now, that was what he wanted. The videotape cassette delivered; the means of winning. It meant he had to survive, cross the frontier. It was him now, against everyone and everything, and the idea did not unnerve him. Not yet.
The wing tanks should be almost full by now.
"One half-orbit distance achieved,
Kutuzov "
"Roger, control. Forty-five minutes since satellite release. Countdown to PAM ignition at—fifteen seconds and mark. Over."
"Roger,
Kutuzov.
Fifteen seconds and counting."
Rodin was smiling. It was as if there were two smiles on his lips at the same moment. The small one at the fiction of referring to the laser weapon as a satellite—in the event of transmission interception and decoding—and the larger satisfaction of the countdown, like that of a cat with cream on its whiskers. Ten seconds were all that remained until the payload assist modules small
solid-propellant
motors automatically fired to lift the laser battle station toward its thousand-mile-high orbit over the Pole.
Kutuzov
was in a two-hundred-mile-high orbit, circling the
earth
every ninety minutes. Its cargo doors had opened an hour and a half before, the shuttle had maneuvered into position, the laser weapon on its motors had been set spinning in the hold, then unlocked to drift away from the shuttle. Now, half an orbit later, its motors were about to fire. Five seconds.
Priabin stood at the back of the narrow command room like a newspaper reporter allowed to observe events without playing any part in them.
Everything nad gone smoothly, there had been no hitches. Rodin was winning his race with Gant and with his own country. To watch him was like being told that one's calm, elderly neighbor was a dangerous madman, then becoming alert for signs of disorder, irrationality, even violence. But there was nothing. The general was blithe, tense at moments, jocular, expansive, silent in turn. There were no signs of madness, simply the sense that this room and the vast control room below its windows were his entire world. Institution. They were all mad here. And unstoppable. He knew that with only too great a certainty. He was there because it amused Rodin to have him witness his own helplessness.
Watching history unfold, mm, Priabin?
he had snapped at him at one moment, when the cargo doors of the shuttle opened and the camera displayed the action on a dozen screens at once. A
rare privilege,
he had added,
for a mere policeman.
Laughter in the crowded, orderly room.
They had no thought of consequences, only of authority. The demonstration of their power. Outside this institution of theirs, with its intoxicating illusion of omnipotence, there existed only the Politburo. No other world, no populations, no enemy country, no other superpower. They were engaged in a struggle with their political masters—soon their servants? Priabin nodded in gloomy confirmation. If they didn't cause a war, they'd win what they wanted. The institution would control everything.
The madhouse. The efficient, normal-seeming, clubby madhouse.
Ignition of the PAM's motors. Priabin winced and waited for the voice of the shuttle's commander to confirm motor ignition. He could clearly envisage the laser weapon flashing up into the darker darkness, away from the earth. Rodin was as remote as
Kutuzov
and the now moving
Lightning
weapon.
T plus ten seconds.
"Baikonur, this is
Kutuzov."
"Go ahead,
Kutuzov
The voices were uttering feed lines to arouse the pleasure of this room's inhabitants. He glanced at a screen beside him.
Before the shuttle commander could reply, he heard someone say in a surprised, even pained voice: "Comrade General, we're not getting a confirm signal from the PAM."
Then the
Kutuzov
voice: "Baikonur, PAM ignition nonfunctional. Repeat, we do not have PAM burn."
Rodin's cry broke in the room, startling men who, a moment earlier, had been somnolent with anticipated pleasure.
"What has happened? Answer me. What's wrong,
Kutuzov—
what has gone wrong?" It shook Priabin to attention. On the screen beside him, the fiber-optic map showed the twin wiggles, red and white, of the two shuttles' orbits, separated by half the world. On a second screen, the open cargo doors of the
Kutuzov
and the empty cargo bay.
No ignition, then—
No ignition!
"Baikonur, this is
Kutuzov.
We're showing a nonignition on the PAM's motors."
"Backup!" Rodin cried.
"Backup systems show nonignition, sir."
"Manual emergency trigger!"
"No response from the PAM motors, sir."
There was a tight, stifling silence in the room, the only chatter from machines, the humming and clicking of electrics.
"Sir, telemetry reports tracking the—satellite." The officer remembered the fiction. "It hasn't left orbit, sir. It's not moving."
Priabin glanced toward a clock on the wall. Six forty-five. Recognition of time made him think of Gant. Two and a half hours or more since he had taken off, incinerating Serov and a gunship crew to enable him to do so. Perhaps he was halfway, or less, to Turkey. Time, time . . . delay.
"Not moving?" It was a challenge rather than a question.
"Telemetry confirms the weapon is stationary in its original orbit."
"Where it cannot be targeted and fired!" Rodin stormed.
Time . . .
Had the solid-fuel motors on the weapon fired, there would have been a maximum of two hours before the battle station
reached
its final altitude and been ready to fire at the American shuttle. Time-" how much time now? A systems failure in the ignition of the PAM had elongated time like elastic, stretching it in—
Gant's favor?
No, Gant would be stopped at the border. Daylight would be the brick wall with which he would collide and die.
Priabin found himself staring across the room at Rodin, who was glaring in his direction; as if he were the jinx who had caused this ill-luck. But the time was unusable. He was Rodin's prisoner, he reminded himself, now aware of the lounging guard—a new one, the other having been relieved an hour before.
Rodin was huddled with his senior officers. Voices debated, urged, and rejected. Radio channels crackled, the voices of mission control and the shuttle waited. Priabin edged toward the windows. Looking down, he saw the huge map; colors flared, lights winked and moved. The combined forces of two military districts were being mobilized, marshaled into the shape of a trap. A team hand-picked by Rodin controlled, by proxy, hundreds of aircraft and helicopters, thousands of men. He turned away from the depressing vision it formed. He realized that all the delay to the firing of the laser weapon would do would be to prevent Rodin from destroying the
Atlantis
before Gant died. Nothing had changed.
And Rodin seemed to realize it, too. His face was still angry, and filled with cold authority. But his eyes and mouth were calm. His hands unclenched. A temporary setback; revert to original timetable. Gant, then the shuttle.
"Kutuzov
, this is Rodin," Priabin heard him say. "I want a linkup with the—satellite during your present orbit of the earth, and an EVA to inspect and repair the system's failure. Acknowledge.
A man floating in space, repairing the malfunctioning motors. A matter of hours, no more. Rodin's features gleamed with satisfaction when the shuttle commander acknowledged. He put down the microphone and slapped his hands together loudly, like a noise to frighten children engaged in a party game in the dark.
"Gentlemen, we have work to do," he cried. "As tight a schedule ^ possible—and no more delays." He glanced again in Priabin's direction, then beckoned him. "Come, Colonel, you can give us Vour expert opinion on the preparations we're making for Major Gant "
18: Acts of . Desperation
A
Sukhoi fighter
, too eager, flashed across the nose of the Antonov, the sun glistening on its silver fuselage. Then it was gone. Gant craned to follow its path, and saw it winking like a signal lamp as it banked then began to climb out of the sand brown of the country below into the pale morning sky.
And others . . .
Full daylight. Eight o'clock, and they had found him. The radio could not be retuned to their Tac channels, and the radar was too rudimentary to show more than a smudged impression of the hostile landscape ahead. After crossing the Caspian and the flat marshes and plain to the west of it, he had sneaked through the mountains like a thief, for hours it seemed. Sliding around and over and through, hugging the contours of the country as the night faded into gray, then blue. Temperature mounting, the past hours becoming no more than a mocking illusion of safety and cleverness, tension holding him like a straitjacket. Now morning and the aircraft.
He flung the lumbering, though small, Antonov severely
to
port, shocked at the leap of
a
mountain into the center of the
cockpit
windshield. He wrenched on the steering handles of the
column,
throwing the crop sprayer away from the mountain
's
snow
-streaked
flank. At once, he was straining to relocate the Sukhoi, the
Fencer
variable-geometry fighter. He had glimpsed the pilot's helmet
and
the aircraft's eagerness. He ignored the other occupant of the cockpit, the weapons officer. It was the pilot's skill that would kill him-
As the fighter flipped into a looping turn and came back
toward
him, he saw the flare of a missile igniting. He pulled up the An-tonov's nose as if reining in a wild horse. Sky swung crazily
across
the windshield, the tail of the aircraft seemed as if tearing free of thick mud; then the thin, steamlike trail from the missile passed away beneath him. The peaks of the mountains around him gleamed with sunlight. The Sukhoi rushed below him and flicked belly outward around an outcrop of brown, snow-marked rock. And was a mile away before it began to turn.