Winter Hawk

1: Distant Thunder

A moment of respite, within the storm of tension that he was experiencing, during which he remembered those faded, black-and-white snapshots his parents had always kept. It must be because of the camera near his hand and the sequence of photographs he was trying to obtain. They had kept their pictures in a used, threadbare brown envelope. They comprised a sequence, a story, even: of the building of the block of flats in which they had been allocated accommodation soon after their marriage. They must have gone every day, certainly a few times each week, and taken pictures of the slowly rising skeleton, of the piles of bricks, of the dumper trucks and concrete mixers — everything.

The moment of respite was already beginning to pass. His hand jumped on the clipboard, which rested on the rail of the walkway. His parents had, as he was doing, watched something grow, keeping a record of it. His record was not of a block of workers' flats, but of a weapon.

Below Filip Kedrov lay the laser battle station's components, close to final assembly. The main tube for the laser beam and the large mirror rested like a lance and shield, inert upon two vast benches in the assembly complex's main workshop. Robot arms and lifting gear hung motionless above them; still as items on a building site at the weekend. He knew he must pause for only a moment, there must be no suspicion, no sense of lingering; but he could almost savor the extremities of tension because this was the last time, the final day. His spying was almost over.

The past confused and excited him, flying into his thoughts even he tried to concentrate on the disguised camera and the shots he was trying to assess. His mother's face when young, hopeful; somehow seeming to reprove herself for the audacity of choosing to be photographed, or cautioning herself against all the hopes represented by the building being constructed behind her. Kedrov felt he must complete his photographic record, just as his father had done when posing his mother next to a silent concrete mixer and in fronl of the newly hardened front streps of the completed flats. In thai picture, his mother had been frowning at the sun over her husband'! shoulder and smiling cautiously with even, white teeth. What that! final picture in the record had meant to his father, so this last roll of microfilm meant to Filip. In the nature of a triumph, a completion-!

The segments of the laser weapon's main mirror, composed of glass coated with vaporized silicone bound by a graphite fiber reinforcement, were all but fitted to the framework. Each segment was capable of being adjusted by the orbiting battle station's computer,^ using actuators. They enabled the slight distortions caused by the laser beam's heating of the mirror to be smoothed out — necessary if the beam was to be focused and directed accurately at its targets. They'd had trouble with some of the actuators during final testing, but now the mirror worked satisfactorily. He'd told the Americans that a week ago; just as tonight he must tell them that the launch date had been fixed.

Breath small, tight in his chest as he thought of that. Overhearing that piece of gossip, of all pieces of gossip in the whole of Baikonur! The good luck, the momentousness of it, made him gasp, even hours later. His nerves jumped and bubbled like an overheating saucepan on the stove, but somehow they did not boil over; completion kept them in check, the idea of finishing, of getting out, of reaching…

America.

His breath was again tight as he recognized the little time left, the proximity of safety, of success, of dreams made real.

He had passed everything to the Americans, just as they had asked. All that was left were the rolls of film he had taken, which would travel with him — three weeks of films, a record begun as soon as they got the disguised camera to him. Now he had to hold on to them until they came for him.

And tonight, tonight he would tell them they must come. He had the proof, they would know the launch date, they would need him.

Yes, they would. Satisfaction hugged him like a warm coat — a fur jacket, a sheepskin jacket, because it was never as cold in a centrally heated country like America. Or a cashmere topcoat, cashmere sweaters… slacks and loafers…

Because they would reward him — for this, there was no price too high. Perhaps he remembered that block of flats now, with such piercingly clear recollection, because of the life he could envisage for himself, just a few days ahead? He did not know. All he knew was that dreams made him calmer, suppressed the extremes of tension and fear and danger he had anticipated, driving to work that morning. Half an hour just to start the ancient, unreliable car! Knowing all the time that the last day of his spying had begun.

His eyes cleared. He moved a little along the clattering metal gantry. Below him, in the rest of the huge workshop, the miniature spacecraft of the laser battle station s outer casing lay open, appearing cracked like the shell of some sea creature already extracted. Beside it, the huge tanks that would contain the lasing gases waited to be fitted and filled. Nearer, the long, still-innocent tube of the laser with its cylindrical nozzle, and finally the mirror, which would be mounted at the nose end of the miniature spacecraft.

Four days. In exactly four days, on Thursday, the battle station would, fully assembled, be aboard the space shuttle, which would carry it into orbit. Within two months, eleven more laser weapons would be placed in orbit around the earth. That was not his concern; he had only to signal the Americans that evening, from Orlovs shop, that the launch's exact timing had been fixed, and they would come and collect him. He had been told how, and when… give us the date, Filip—or Cactus Plant, as they persisted in labeling him— give us the date and bring us convincing photographic proof the weapon exists — and you can come out, come to the West.

A reach-and-recover mission, they said. A helicopter would come for him, a Russian helicopter. Time and place of his rendezvous was already arranged with them. Before the laser weapon arrived in Baikonur from the scientific research unit of Semipalatinsk, a thousand miles away, he had spied for the money, barely generous though they were with him. He had been an American agent at Baikonur for almost three years.

Now he knew he was the most important spy the Americans had anywhere in the world. Filip Kedrov understood, with blinding clarity, that his importance could not be overestimated. He had alerted the CIA to the existence of a laser weapon, and the intention to place it in orbit, little more than four weeks before, when the pieces of the weapon had arrived from Semipalatinsk by special train. He had heard rumors of its nature and purpose, then overheard scientific gossip, then confirmed it by some casual questions — and told the Americans, who had panicked. Their treaty with the Soviet Union was imperiled, was being flouted, danger, danger, danger.

Kedrov cared little. They wanted everything, but they would pay. No, not money….. What, then?… The West, when I get you the proof you must have….. Very well, we agree.

As soon as he signaled, that same evening, they would come for him. He suppressed a sudden yawn of tension or excitement. The next day, the day after, two days' time, they would be here and he would be on his way to the West, he and his priceless rolls of tiny film. They would have to hurry. They needed the films before Thursday.

The clipboard was trembling beneath his hand, as if registering the shock of a very distant earthquake. His left hand, meanwhile, in the pocket of his white coat, touched around, weighed, smoothed the remote control unit, which looked no more suspicious than a bulky felt-tip pen. The camera it operated — the tiny, tiny camera with motor drive — was contained in the large, bright-green, silly paper clamp that held a sheaf of computer printouts and graphs to the plastic of the clipboard. The clamp was shaped like a frog, a fat green frog with orange spots. Many of the scientific and technical staff of the cosmodrome at Baikonur used such things — joke clamps, highly colored clipboards, stickers that poked fun, irreverent badges, huge felt pens like the one Walesa used to insult the authorities when he signed Solidarity's agreement with them. It was all part of the thumbed nose to the army, which ran Baikonur — the two raised fingers. In a small and allowed way, of course. A teenage subculture, just like the Western pop tapes, the samizdats of satiric novels, the weekend promiscuity, the heavy drinking.

Filip s green frog was as expected and normal as his fornications and his singing-drunk weekends. It had been his own idea, based on a toy he had seen in Detsky Mir on his last Moscow leave. He'd bought one for his sister's little girl. Of course, hers did not possess a lens in its right eye or a silent motor drive, or tiny cassettes of film in its belly and a separate remote-control unit.

His thumb once more squeezed the cap of the thick pen in his pocket. He strained to hear, as he always did, but there was indeed no noise whatsoever from the motor as it moved the film on inside the frog. He had practiced with it, tested it time and again in complete, breath-held silence, waiting for some tiny, betraying noise. But never a whisper — thank God.

Already this Sunday morning he had filmed, again with this abiding sense of completion, the cracked seashell of the battle station's outer casing and the tanks for the lasing gases. And the computer. Now he was above the last telltale image, the mirror shield and the lancelike long nozzle. Shown on television — which was obviously what the Americans planned — to the rest of the world, that little cluster of pieces could not fail to represent themselves for what they were. They were not the bits of a telescope or a weather satellite; they were the components of an orbiting laser battle station, the first of twelve. Enlargements of the tiny strips of film would tell, reveal, inform, accuse, shock, horrify—

— and make Filip Kedrov the most famous face on television and a hero and a very rich American citizen.

Someone glanced up at the catwalk and saw him. Filip's hand twitched on the clipboard and he stopped pressing the remote control. Smile, smile, you silly bugger, he instructed himself.

He smiled. The detached, confident, almost-finished-almost-rich part of his mind, controlling what he did and felt, rescued him from his own assault of nerves. He pressed the frogs humped back, and it croaked. The technician below him laughed and waved. Someone else looked up, grinning. The guards would look up only if he stayed too long. He pressed the remote control. Fifteen, sixteen… twenty-one, twenty-two, moving the clipboard slightly after each shot to draw the frog's gaze across the expanse of the workbenches, from mirror's edge to laser's tail. He moved his hand through a practiced, measured, even arc; moving the frog's bulging eye, moving — twenty-four, — six, — eight… go, go now— He picked up the clipboard and held it against his chest. Finished, this part of the story, this part of the building work. He remembered once more his father's snapshots, Mother posed by the concrete mixer, her thin cotton dress swollen with Filip's imminent arrival. Now it was as if he had a record of his new life, the one he had built for himself in America, on those tiny strips of film stored safely in his garage, in the cans of paint. Everything the Americans had demanded, desired, wanted. They could refuse him nothing now. Now they would have to come.

Success flushed through him, a wave that excited yet somehow lulled and calmed him. The detached part of his mind remembered to press the frog so that it croaked its farewell. His shoes clicked along the gantry above the workshop. The clipboard was now under his arm, and his other hand was out of his pocket, away from the remote control. Success, a sense of triumph as quick and shallow as the feeling after winning a race at school or scoring in a soccer match, continued to rush through him like a scalding drink.

He glanced down at the frog, at the ID clipped to his pocket, just above the round yellow badge that instructed everyone to smile. He had every right to be in the main assembly workshop, of course — and that, too, added to the sense of exhilaration, the beauty and self-satisfaction of the completed task. He had been made responsible for the transfer of the lasing gases to their tanks. He had even helped to write the computer program for the operation.

And his luck had not simply been there, and held; it had improved once they had gotten the camera to him, once he had begun his task. Even the military and their security had hardly impeded him, once he'd gotten into his stride, so to speak.

He was unwary and unworried about his dreamlike state of euphoria. His job was finished, and well finished. Behind Mother, they were completing the plumbing and the wiring for the new flat. Would they let him live in Manhattan? He grinned. The number of times his parents had made him and his sister look at that series of boring, slowly changing snapshots! His shoes clattered down the ladder at the end of the catwalk. He would be able to get into the old town, Tyuratam, and get his last signal off, that evening. Before he did so, he had to store the film cassette with its companions, wrapping it in polyethylene and sinking it out of sight inside an old can of paint.

Filip Kedrov, Cactus Plant, nodded to two technicians who were wheeling an auxiliary power unit through the open doors of one of the main stockrooms. He nodded and smiled to the bored, unsuspicious GRU guard as he passed him, hardly registering the harmless rifle slung across his chest, then stepped through a personnel door into a cold, narrow corridor. A long line of bulky outdoor clothing hung from pegs above a line of boots. He found his own overcoat, scarf, boots, gloves and donned them.

He smiled to himself, hardly concerned with the importance of what he had done, except insofar as it impinged on his personal circumstances.

Impinged? Changed — utterly changed his circumstances. It was all that mattered. America. Money and America, money to live in America, to enjoy America. The thoughts chased in his head as he wrapped his scarf around his already cold cheeks and made for the exit.

He opened the outer door on the below-zero day and the high, pale sky. Manhattan. It was as if the famous skyline, which he had seen in films the scientific and technical staff were allowed to watch, lay before him now. Yes, Manhattan. He would request an apartment on the east side of Central Park — yes…

He blinked, and the buildings retreated from the pale Sunday morning, into the near future. A few days away, that was all. He would send that final signal. Tightness gripped his chest and stomach once more. It was so close! Come and fetch me, my American friends. Pay up!

Lines of high, tinted-glass towers. Fifth Avenue, Sixth. He would at last be leaving that block of workers' flats in front of which his mother had stood so proudly.

He made for the technicians' parking lot.

Before he reached his old, third-hand gray Moskvitch, his mood changed. The glow vanished, as if the outside temperature had robbed his body of all its heat. He was shivering with fear. Not simply in reaction to what he had done, now that it was over…:

… it was because of the two men in the car parked near the entrance to the parking lot. He knew they were the same two men, in the same car, who had followed him to work that morning. He had been so careful of late, so scrupulous in looking for any surveillance, all the time believing himself to be safe. Now he knew he wasn't. He fumbled his key into the stiff, cold lock. His gloved hand was shaking. He had managed to forget them, forget that he had been followed to work. His quick breathing clouded the car's window. He felt his stomach become watery, then tightly knotted. He wasn't imagining it. He couldn't cling to the fiction that he was mistaken, not now that he was about to summon them to come for him. He had to admit the truth — he was being watched.

"He's going on TV tomorrow — Monday," John Calvin announced heavily. "I've just had the ambassador here to inform me of the fact. The guy was almost laughing."

The President seemed not to have grasped the significance of Cactus Plant's final signal. The director of the CIA fumbled emotionally and mentally to catch Calvin's mood. The transcript of the signal from Baikonur lay on the President's desk like a piece of old and abandoned legislation, as unimportant as someone's grocery list. The director had hurried from Langley to the White House with it, his mood one or unqualified triumph. An edge of danger, of course, because of the drastic shortening of the time factor, but a real sense that they could win. But Calvin seemed concerned only with his television encounter with the Soviet president. They had to hurry. Kedrov was spooked, there was no doubt of that. This was the last signal. He might already have gone into hiding, and roused a search for him by the GRU. Time squeezed down and narrowed in every direction. Yet to Calvin it seemed less important than—

Four days away. Calvin already knew that, though — from the Soviet ambassador, of all people.

"Monday," Calvin repeated with a deep sigh that threatened to become both a groan and an accusation.

The director looked up from the briefcase still balanced on his knees.

"We still have time to get our agent out," he began.

"The guy's off and running!" the President accused.

"Mr. President, if you study his signal, he's confirmed where to pick him up. He knows how our people will come, what to expect. He can estimate times, that kind of—"

"Thursday! While we're all in Geneva, Bill, they're going to put the first of their laser battle stations into orbit, under the guise of a satellite placement mission and a linkup in orbit with our shuttle, Atlantis. They're laughing up their sleeves on this one, Bill — laughing at us." There was evident blame in Calvin's features and in his eyes. He had been let down, left holding the bag.

"We can get him out, sir."

"Bill, you're asking me to stake this country's future on a Russian technician on your payroll."

"He was always our only chance," the director replied softly, firmly. What had Calvin expected, some miracle? He was unnerved by the timetable, by the proximity of the signing of the treaty and the launch of the laser weapon. It was tight, yes, dangerous without doubt — but it could be done.

"What does he have, Bill? Films, rolls of film. Is that going to be enough to convince the world it's being given the biggest shaft in history?" Calvin's confidence of voice, East Coast with Harvard overtones, had deserted him. It had begun to complain, almost to whine. His hand waved without vigor, dismissing Kedrov and his films and the glimpse of hope they offered. He shook his head. "It isn't going to be enough, Bill," he murmured vaguely.

The director brushed the dottle from his cold pipe off the leather of his briefcase. He pondered for some time, weighing the President's mood and his own words. Then he looked up and said, "Sir, you approved all of this. You believed, as I did, as Dick Gunther did, that this was the only way of obtaining proof in the time we had — four weeks maximum." He spread his hands. He reached up and took the Cactus Plant signal by its edge, pulling it from the desk onto his lap. He smoothed the paper. Calvin's shoes paced across the eagle and the scroll woven into the center of the deep-green carpet of the Oval Office. The director cleared his throat. From somewhere outside the thick green glass of the windows, he heard muffled church bells.

"The timetable's more crucial," the director continued, "because we now know it's Thursday for the launch. Before, working on Kedrov's estimates, we assumed another week to ten days."

"Time we no longer have."

"I know that, sir."

Calvin continued to pace, dressed in checked shirt and jeans, his hands rubbing through his mop of gray hair. His face was cleaned by shock, blank and tired. When his hands were not busy with his hair, they waved uncertainly, as if fending off the circumstances of the morning.

The winter's morning was bright even through the reinforced glass of the windows. He could still hear the bells. Midmorning services. Kedrov had sent his signal — oh, sometime early Sunday evening, his time. Ten hours ahead of Washington. Come and fetch me, my friends. I am afraid.

The director went on: "We have to bring Winter Hawk to immediate readiness, sir. Today. The mission profile has a forty-eight-hour maximum time span. That's two days, and the agent and the evidence can be inside a friendly border. Transmission, editing, anything you require done with the films won't be any problem. Sir, it's nine thousand miles to Peshawar from Nevada, a thousand to the target area, a thousand back. Those are the only parameters that really matter. Forty-eight hours maximum, once the mission clock starts running. That's Tuesday or Wednesday — you could blow this up in their faces on the eve of the signing, sir!" The director's hand was clenched into a fist. Unaware, he had screwed Kedrov's final signal into a damp, gray ball of paper. The sight of it shocked him quite out of proportion to the act. As if he had crushed, abandoned…

He shook his head, dismissing the idea. Kedrov was all they had, priceless and unique.

Winter light, aqueous through the tinted glass, fell chill upon Calvin's profile as he continued to pace the room. It gave his features the pointed, marble lifelessness of a corpse. The Washington Monument beyond the glass thrust like a spike at the pale morning sky. Or a launch vehicle, the director could not help thinking. Baikonur, Thursday — close, damn close.

As if to reassure himself as much as Calvin, he reiterated: "Forty-eight hours maximum. Gant and the other crew can do it, sir. Give me the authority to bring Winter Hawk to readiness."

"Are they ready, Bill? How long have they trained on those gunships? No more than a couple of weeks? Less? Are they ready?"

"They have to be, sir. They have to be." The director found himself struggling against Calvin's unmollified expression. He waded upstream against the current Calvin was giving the room. He had hurried there with anxious triumph, to find the party had ended and the guests moved on to another place. Calvin did not share his sense of success. "They have to be," he repeated once more, looking down.

Calvin was obsessed with the political coup the Soviet president had gained. Nikitin would coerce a promise to appear at the signing in Geneva, which would give Calvin no room in which to maneuver. He would have to promise the world, in advance, that he would honor the Nuclear Arms Reduction Treaty in its present form—

— which excluded all reference to orbiting laser weapons systems, since they did not exist — had not existed until four weeks before, so far as the CIA and everyone else thought.

Calvin said urgently, "Damn your timetable now, Bill. It s fallen down behind the wardrobe. I am going to have to agree to meet him on Thursday. It wasn't supposed to be Thursday, Bill, it was to be in two weeks' time. I have to agree to meet him or Congress will crucify me, the American people will help them put in the nails, the press has the hammer, and the whole damn world is going to watch while they do the job!" He rubbed his hands through his hair. "We just ran out of options. They're calling the tune in Moscow right now. I'm hamstrung, Bill."

He turned his back on the director and pressed a buzzer on his desk. Almost immediately, as if he had been hovering at the door,

Dick Gunther entered. National security adviser to the President. His smile at the director was brief, gloomy, his eyes studying Calvin like those of a concerned wife.

"Well?" he murmured, moving close to Calvin, behind the huge desk, near the windows.

Calvin shook his head. "No change," he muttered. The director felt like a terminal patient in a hospital room. Calvin and Gunther turned lugubrious looks on him. He felt very young, irresponsible, seated in his chair.

"Dick, you explain it to the director," Calvin said. "I can't make him see we're fresh out of options." The President's tone was sharp, almost vindictive.

He walked away, opened a small door that led to a washroom, then closed it behind him on a glimpse of white towels, gold faucets, dark wood gleaming like satin. The director dimly heard running water, then turned reluctantly to Gunther, who merely shrugged.

"Bill, I think he's right," he said eventually. His tone attempted to soothe, but the director felt lumpy and uncomfortable in his suit, as if his mood had creased and soiled it. He shook his head, staring at the crumpled transcript and the briefcase on his knees. "We re fresh out of options. There's nowhere to go with this."

In the director s briefcase was the entire Laserwatch file: a thin and now outdated collection of signals from Baikonur, reports and assessments from DARPA, presidential demands for action — demands, orders, pleas. When he had received Kedrov's last signal, he had felt the peril of the moment, but also its possibilities. Now they could act, use the gunships to go in and get Kedrov. But he had been upstaged, outsmarted. Nikitin wanted the treaty signed on Thursday. How they must be laughing at his country. Suggesting a rendezvous in orbit, a party up there, for Christ's sake, after they'd launched their first laser weapon!

"He's on the hook," Gunther continued. "Nikitin isn't fooling around on this. He's going on TV to dare the President not to appear in Geneva next Thrusday. The man can't not be there, and Nikitin knows that."

The director sighed, spreading his large hands.

"Dick, I understand all that. There's no answer, nothing but Winter Hawk. Dammit, the President has to let us try." He glanced at a group of small, silver-framed photographs ranged near him on the desk. Calvin as college football player, Calvin as naval officer, Calvin receiving an honorary degree in England, Inauguration Day, waving beside the First Lady. The roles the man had played. 'There's no other way the agency can help, Dick."

"You have to, Bill."

"How? You want a solution to this mess? Five weeks ago we didn't have the faintest idea the Soviets were within fifteen years of developing a weapon like this and placing it in orbit. We never had an agent at Semipalatinsk — all we had was Cactus Plant, a low-grade agent-in-place at Baikonur, useful for tipping us off when a launch was about to happen and for telling us what kind of satellite they were putting up. Then, he stumbles on — this. We're four days away from the launch date of the first of a dozen satellites, and we haven't even gotten our second wind on this thing." His voice was firm, but tight and small in his throat; angry, guilty, and maybe afraid, too. "We're four days away from this country becoming a third-class power, and the President wants a nice neat answer?" Calvin would be listening, of course, but he had to hear it was hopeless unless they relied on Winter Hawk.

Gunther's voice was soothing when he replied, but it rubbed like sandpaper, the implacables of the situation scoured.

"All that's history, Bill, already history. He's delayed as much as he possibly can, but no one can work miracles. We can't get the ring of Nessus surveillance satellites into operation in time to detect the launching of these weapons. Nessus and everything else is going to be at their mercy. That's why Nikitin is hurrying everything forward. The President can't be seen to be dragging his feet now — it's his treaty, dammit. Once the document is signed, there's a two-month ratification period, and by then every ICBM we have left, every satellite — Big Bird, Navstar, Milstar, the whole bag of tricks — will be at the mercy of the laser battle stations. The man is terrified he's going to go down in history as the President who gave his country away on a silver plate. Give him some room to maneuver, Bill — a little elbow room. Work a miracle."

Gunther had perched himself on the edge of the desk, leaning intently toward the director as he spoke. Now he stood up and walked to the window as he continued speaking. The director felt no slackening of the tension and depression throughout his body.

"He blames everyone, Bill — you, me, our agencies, the chiefs of staff, just about everyone — like he's been betrayed." The chill light of the windows palsied Gunther's cheek. "This was his treaty from the beginning. He blames all of us for not guessing what the Soviets were doing at Semipalatinsk. He blames us for advising that he agree to the Soviet suggestion not to bother to include orbiting weapons systems in the treaty. Neither side had them or could have them inside fifteen years, so what the hell, we all said. It was science fiction two years ago, Bill."

"And now its not. It's a reality."

Gunther turned from the window. "Bill, give him something," he pleaded.

Gunther had raised his voice, as to give a theatrical cue, and Calvin reentered the room. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans and walked to the desk. Gunther moved to one side.

"Have you explained?" he asked Gunther, his voice clipped and hard. The winter daylight was again cold on his face.

"I have, Mr. President."

"Well, Bill, well?"

The director nervously and with great reluctance shook his head. Then he said: "We have Winter Hawk, Mr. President, and that's all we have. If we initiate now—"

"It won't work!"

"It has to."

The silence was stormy, the director's temples throbbed with the beginnings of a headache. Calvin slapped his hand on his desk, then slumped into his swivel chair. He stared out at the White House lawns, deep in snow, at the pale spike of the monument. Stared into a close and ugly future.

He announced to the window: "I have to have irrefutable photographic evidence that these weapons exist. With that much, I can go to Geneva and denounce the Soviets — get their laser weapons included in the treaty. If I don't have it, world opinion will break me and this country." He turned to face the director. "OK, Bill," he added, raising his palms outward in what might have been surrender. "Do it. Initiate Winter Hawk today — now. Get those guys off their butts in Nevada and into the air before this afternoon. Forty-eight hours maximum, you said. Bill, I'm holding you to that. Tuesday, on my desk — proof!"

Sunday nights he was always drunk. Just like now, but not usually here, in his own flat, because he was afraid to go out, or be seen anywhere. Filip Kedrov looked at his shaking hands, quivering in front of his face. His eyes filled with a leaky self-pity, his body was possessed by an ague of terror. Christ! He'd tried not to drink any more after he returned to the flat, because of what he knew lay ahead of him, but it had been no good. He'd had to calm himself down, or try to — he was so frightened! He'd been back an hour and he was still shaking like a leaf. He had literally fled from the officers' club they allowed people like him to use on weekends, fled because of that telemetry officer opening his big mouth in the toilet while Filip was in one of the cubicles. Christ, why had he had to listen? It was terrible, terrible.

His fear was real and deep, in every part of his body like a fever. He clutched the hand he had been inspecting beneath his arm as if he had been caned in school. He folded his arms.

He knocked over his half-filled glass. Beer foamed on the thin carpet, then soaked into it.

Sick with fear, he wandered toward the window, avoiding the low coffee table. It wasn't in a sensible position, but it disguised a threadbare patch in the carpet. He reached for the curtain, knowing he would not pull it aside because of the watchers out there.

He walked away. His eyes scanned the room as if he were making an inventory for some insurance claim. Hi-fi, bottles, a cupboard, cheap dining table and chairs. Some pieces that had belonged to his mother, but mostly standard-issue furniture appropriate to his status. His eyes flitted, unable to settle, like his body. He'd tried not to drink anymore, to keep the remains of a clear head.

Not drunk. Just terrified. Tomorrow he would have had to evade the people outside anyway, so he'd gone out to the club because he always did, so as not to show he knew they were watching him. But he shouldn't have gone. Now he knew he must leave tonight, at once. The big-mouthed officer had seen to that. They'd be looking for him, and when they discovered who he was, they'd be right over to shut his mouth — for good. God, they'd kill him for what he'd overheard.

His stomach cramped agonizingly, and he doubled up, groaning and retching dryly. Why couldn't the drunken pig have kept his big mouth shut? Why had he had to overhear what they were saying while they pissed in the urinal? Why, oh, God, why?

Slowly, the pain retreated. Filip's head cleared a little. His brow felt hot.

There were two men in a car at the front of the block of flats at that moment. A third man was in the shadows at the rear, near the garage. He could place them precisely just by closing his eyes. That's where they'd been when he went out, and to where they'd return after following him back from the club. Closing his eyes made him giddy. There were only three of them, and they still had no orders to close in.

But the army would be looking for him now, not just the KGB. It was awful just thinking about it.

He groaned aloud in desperation. He looked at his watch, then at the clock on the tiled mantelpiece. Eleven o'clock, Sunday evening. The small screen of the television set stared back at him, as blank as his own gaze. Eleven o'clock.

He'd gone to the club after sending the final signal to the Americans, his mood almost euphoric despite the car tailing him. Orlov's shop, he'd called innocently… God, he would have to go back there, or call Oriov now, to send another message. God, the look the captain had given him when he emerged from the cubicle and tried to sneak away!

Kedrov rubbed his cheeks as if scouring them. Why had he had to hear? His hands flitted from his cheeks to his ears — unwise monkey. The captain had realized he'd been overheard, almost at once. He had all but moved, almost shouted after him. He had hurried away and out of the club — but they knew.

He whirled his body in an ache of fear around the center of the room, spinning as if to create some spell of invisibility. God, Christ, Hell, God — he had to get out now!

They may not have reported him because they were the ones who'd been insecure, but they'd surely come looking once they found out who he was, where he lived. Christ, it was awful.

Lightning, he'd called it. Not Linchpin, the code name for the launching of the battle station. Lightning. It was so awful they would have to kill him to silence him. He shouldn't know what he knew.

Lightning.

He stared at the large, bulkily filled haversack on the dining table. As soon as he'd gotten back, he had feverishly filled it with cans, provisions, spare clothing, aware all the time of the men outside. Especially the one at the back stamping hr feet with cold, breathing out clouds of smoky breath, rubbing his gloved hands as he watched the garages. Filip saw him every time he went into the flat's tiny kitchen.

He'd packed the haversack, ready for flight. And immediately postponed any attempt at escape. He walked stiffly, jerkily toward the dining table and gripped the shoulder straps of the canvas haversack. Then dropped them as if they were charged with a current.

He couldn't risk going to the shop again. He must call Orlov, not on the bugged telephone in the hall, but from a phone booth, and tell him to send the message: Hurry, come at once, I am in danger, I have the most — most terrible — important news, I know about Lightning.

Orlov could send the signal, then close down the transmitter; disassemble it, hide the bits. If only he could get out of the flat.

The signal was easy. The rendezvous — he'd decided that long ago, with the Americans. The salt marshes, a pinprick-size island. They had maps, satellite pictures of the exact location. He had confirmed the pickup point in his last signal. All he had to say was Hurry, please.

If only he could move.

He gripped the shoulder straps of the haversack and did not release them. Hefted the sack, felt the flat's chill and the darkness outside and the three KGB watchers… and the captain who had been loose-tongued and was the most dangerous threat of all to his safety, rescue — survival. Hurried, opened the door, checked the empty, cabbage-smelling corridor, closed his door behind him with no sense of finality, only with haste. The lock clicked loudly.

He hurried along the corridor, up the uncarpeted concrete stairs behind the fire door toward the roof. Unlocked the roof door with fumbling hands, opened it, walked through—

— face embraced, arms held—

He struggled blindly, gasping but not crying out, flailing his arms—

— the clothesline collapsed, the shirts stiff with frost, the troupers, the underwear and the sheets, draped along the dirty, ice-pooled, gravel-covered roof. He doubled over, choking back his coughs, sick with fear and relief. Staring at a shirt lying like a spread-eagled upper torso at his feet, arms akimbo in surrender. He heaved, but nothing came. Slowly he stood upright.

He picked up the haversack, listened but heard nothing, no alarm, and went to the roof's edge. Four stories down, the garages. Out of the question. He would have to abandon the car and the rolls of film — most of all, the rolls of film in the paint cans. He wouldn't tell the Americans, definitely not.

He crept along the edge of the roof, aware of the man below, at the corner, in shadow. Aware of the car parked at the front. Aware of the drainpipe. Overhang, gutters, drains, pipes. Explored long before with the bravado of imagination rather than the desperation of necessity. Drainpipe at the side of the building farthest from the streetlamps.

He felt weak. Looked back at the fallen washing. The shirt now looked like a murdered man. He gasped at the image. Fumbled his arms into the haversack's straps, balanced its sudden, new heaviness, then cocked his right leg over the edge of the roof. The concrete alleyway below swam darkly, as if he were suffering from vertigo rather than fear. His hands gripped. He straddled the edge of the roof. Then climbed over, hands icily cold but holding on tightly, feet scrabbling for the ledge and the point of emergence of the drainpipe. The gutter was a channel in the gravelly roof, the drain directly opposite his eyes. His feet found the drainpipe, the tiny ledge, the first clamp. He rested, sweat coldly blinding him for a moment. Then hunched downward into a squatting position, holding on to the thick metal drainpipe. One foot, then the other. Second clamp. He'd even practiced, for God's sake.

Kedrov lowered himself gingerly, fearfully down the drainpipe. His hands were lumps unfeelingly placed at the ends of his aching arms, his feet were numb, so that they hardly sensed the concrete until he had hunched almost into a sitting position in the alleyway. Then he realized and leaned his forehead against the pipe, clinging to it still to prevent himself falling and lying — like the shirt.

He got up slowly, weakly, and pressed into the shadows.

Nothing. Silence. A car passing — jump, then relief — and a television blaring in a ground-floor room. Across the alleyway a block of offices rose six stories. Throwing deep shadow. A ground floor comprising a bookshop, a grocer's, a liquor store. The liquor shop was still open. Just.

Walk now. Quickly.

He stepped out stiffly, as if marching like a bloody soldier. Lessened his stride, tried to appear to be walking easily, without terror's robotism. Held the haversack at his side, almost casually. Turned into the lights, poor as they were they were still bright, and hurried to the door of the liquor shop. Turned for one glance only, then walked past the door and the spilled light that tumbled over him, into further shadow. Passing two people, beginning to hurry once in darkness again, listening, listening with all his body, all his senses, but hearing nothing.

They had assumed, even if they'd seen him, that he'd already been inspected and passed by the watcher near the garage. Anyway, he hadn't emerged from the front doors of the block of flats, so to them he wasn't a resident. Sweat enveloped him, drying now j cold. He bent forward into his hurrying gait. On his own n< alone. Just the call to Orlov, the cry for help.

Come at once, please — please come at once.

They had to, they must come, before the army realized he 1 disappeared and began hunting for him in earnest. Because Lightning, most of all because of Lightning. The film did not mat now; they had to know what he had discovered. They must co quickly.

2: A Flash of Lightning

"Sorry, Major, but you're dead — two times!"

There was a boyish exhilaration in the voice that remained undistorted or diluted by the radio's rush of static. Gant watched the F-15 curve up and away above the desert, into the pale-blue winter morning. Its wings waggled in mocking salute, then speed and altitude transformed it into no more than a straggling, bright, late star. In another moment it was gone, heading back to Nellis, its practice sortie against his helicopter successfully completed.

Gant was unreasonably, violently angry. Mac began speaking over the headphones like a soothing aunt.

"Shut up, Mac," he warned. "I don't need it."

"Skipper," his gunner insisted, "we ain't ready for this. The guy had us on the plate and served for breakfast before—"

"Mac, can it."

Gant swung the Mil-24D around a weathered outcrop of brown rock standing like a chimney out of the desert floor. He felt the machine was as heavy and lifeless as a toy airplane at a fairground, whirling around a tower on a steel rope. He had been caught like a rookie pilot fresh out of school by the F-15 attacker that had been sent to hunt them down in this simulation of combat. The F-15 had found him five minutes up from Nellis, and within another minute and a half he'd recorded two kills. Gant had been unable to even begin to maneuver the lumbering helicopter evasively, not even with the tumbled, broken desert landscape to aid him. He wasn't ready, not by maybe a couple of weeks.

Below him, on a wide, flat ledge perched above the desert, the MiL-24A sat silently, rotors still, the crew of three already relaxed. One of them waved, infuriating him further. Garcia and his crew were even less ready, and now their ship had rotor head trouble and was stranded.

"Garcia, you called home yet?" he snapped, dropping the unwieldy Russian helicopter toward the flat outcrop of rock.

The ether crackled, but no one answered him. Garcia could not hear him because he was out of the cockpit. Angry, Gant eased the Mil in the backwash of its downdraft off the cliff face until its undercarriage settled. Then he switched off the engines and opened his door. Garcia was ambling across the dust-filled gap between the two helicopters.

"You called them?" Gant shouted.

"Sure thing — right away, skipper. They're sending out a big Tarhe helicopter to lift us off of here." Garcia was grinning, very white and irritatingly. He brushed one hand through his hair now that the movement of Gant's rotors had stopped. "Say, the guy really zapped you, Major — like that!" His right hand motioned like a gun firing.

"We're not ready, Garcia. I know it, you know it."

"We ain't going any place, Major, not till they can repair what's wrong with my ship — one hell of a noise and some really wild—"

"Save it, Garcia. Tell the repairman when the tow truck gets here."

As he turned away, he saw Mac waggle one hand at Garcia to silence him. Gant's mood darkened further.

"Coffee, Major?"

Coffee.

He did not reply, walking away from the machines and the four men who appeared content to wait for the crane helicopter to reach them, lift the Mil off the ledge, and carry it back to Nellis, forty miles northeast. He reached the edge of the flat outcrop. The sun was warm, though the occasional breeze was thin and chilly. The desert below him stretched away on every side, toward mountains to the south, west, and north. Las Vegas lay fifty miles southeast. Nevada. Gant breathed slowly, deeply, and evenly to calm himself; squinting into the pale, empty sky…

… except for the far brown dot, like a speck of dust, which signified an eagle riding thermals up the face of a mountain. He watched the dot float without effort, riding its own element, and felt the sluggish responses and the unfamiliarity of the heavy Russian helicopter through his hands and arms. It was as if he was bound, immobilized both by the machine and the mock dogfight in which he had just engaged.

Unsuccessfully.

Miles away across the desert, a narrow plume of dust followed some invisible vehicle or horseman. Behind Gant, the two Russian helicopters waited like a threat. Chameleon Squadron had been halved in size when their only serviceable Mil had crashed in East Germany and killed its crew and the agents they had picked up on a search-and-rescue flight. These machines were new and unfamiliar. They needed time. Time before they could begin Winter Hawk. The failure in the rotor head of Garcia's machine cut into the time available. The eagle now floated higher, up toward the peak of the mountain, effortlessly carried by rising currents of warmer air. The wind picked at him coldly.

"Coffee, skipper," he heard Mac repeat at his side.

He nodded and took the plastic beaker. Swallowed the hot dark drink.

Mac had interrupted the return of peace. The desert had at least given him that. Long journeys, weekends, and even whole weeks. He could recuperate. The instructorship at Nellis AFB had given him something more satisfying than companions. Now he needed to work with these people — Mac, and Garcia, who would pilot the 24A, and his crew, Lane and Kooper. They were young, inexperienced. Valens had died in Germany the month before and injured this mission in the same moment he burned to death with his experienced crew. Mac was OK — there was Vietnam to share, and reliability. The others…?

"What about that?" Mac asked conversationally, gesturing behind him.

"The men or the ship?" Gant replied, sipping the coffee.

"You ain't fair on them, Major."

"Maybe."

"They're good, Major, my word on—"

"Maybe."

"You can't play loner on this one, Major, you know that."

"Maybe." Gant continued to sip the coffee, watching the distant frail of dust and the dot of the eagle. Mac confined him on the ledge just as certainly as the damage to the rotor head and the fact that he had been no match for a fighter aircraft, not even with the terrain working in his favor. "Yeah, maybe, Mac. They're just not ready. Then, after a pause, he added, "No one is."

'Three weeks, minimum," Mac commented sourly, spitting near his feet. Then, more brightly: "You'll get used to us being around,! Major."

"I have to, Mac."

Mac walked away, back toward people he knew and understood. Gant did not turn to watch him, but continued to squint at the eagle in the dazzling morning air. Just warm enough to lift the huge bird, just warm enough. The trail of dust seven or eight miles away was fading, leaving the desert empty once more.

The mission was unlucky; hasty and unprepared. As if the acquisition of the two Russian machines was in itself enough to guarantee success. He'd flown maybe six or seven squadron missions behind the Curtain, using captured or stolen or mocked-up Russian aircraft. But not, one like this.

They should never have told them the stakes involved — not even him. They were too high, they'd never be ready. They should not have been told. Garcia and his crew hid from the risks by adopting a casual, callow arrogance. He simply tried to prepare, knowing the time was too short. Eighteen months since he'd brought home the MiG-31, the Firefox, from Russia. That mission had had more) chance of success.

He finished the last of the coffee and heard Mac's voice calling him. He realized he had half understood there was a radio call. He turned. Mac was running toward him.

"— today!" he shouted. "Nellis on the set — skipper, they've brought the mission forward to today!"

"Crazy," was all Gant said in reply. It made no sense. He could not believe it, despite Mac's nods, the emphasis of his eyes, and his flushed cheeks. "Those assholes in Washington are crazy, out of their skulls, Mac," he added as belief gripped, forcing anger. "What the hell did they say about that?" He waved his hand violently toward the crippled helicopter.

"Washington don't know yet, Major."

"Then why in hell doesn't someone tell them?"

He turned away from Mac. Not because of the message, or because Mac's face was beginning to mirror his own, but because he had seen another dot in the high, clean desert air. Not the eagle— the lumbering crane helicopter from Nellis coming to collect the

Mil-24A. Its symbolism clashed with that of the bird and the trail of dust on the desert floor. Too violently.

'There's no way," he said breathily. "Just no way."

He could no longer see the eagle. The dust from the distant vehicle had finally settled. The desert before him appeared painted, a vast, empty canvas, no longer real.

Colonel Dmitri Priabin of the KGBs Industrial Security Directorate and head of nonmilitary security at the cosmodrome of Baikonur, turned away from the young man lounging with a shallow but arrogant confidence in the office's single easy chair, stifled a yawn and a desire to rub his shadowed cheeks, and clasped his hands behind his back as he stared out into the darkness of the winter night.

Across the expanse of low buildings in front of him lay the main assembly complex and the vast hangar that housed the G-type heavy-booster launch vehicle. Its bouquet of huge rockets was splashed with white light within the open hangar doors; they were end-on to him like the mouths of some enormous multiple gun.

The scene was distant but by no means toylike or unreal. It was all too vast to become miniaturized by mere distance. And it was thrilling, undeniably so. At least, whenever he could forget the purely personal, could step aside from himself for a moment and discover emotions he could share with others, then it was thrilling. He could experience pride, awe, satisfaction, secrecy, even nationalism. A rainbow of cliched emotions. When he could forget Anna and his past.

His office was warm, yet he wore frill uniform, including tie and jacket. The pale self that stared back from the dark square of the windowpane was tired, drawn, but neat. The uniform was not to impress the young man who had been brought in for questioning, but rather to impress himself. To remind him of who and what he was, and to exclude other, less respectable images. The brown uniform and the colonel's shoulder boards were a plaster cast inside which he slowly mended.

The rollout of the G-type heavy booster would begin on Tuesday morning. Powerful locomotives waited in a siding near the hangar, to Pull the booster on its flatcars the six miles — a short distance by Baikonur's sprawling standards — to the new launch pad. On two parcel sets of railway fines and within a vast erector cage, the booster would make the painfully slow journey. At least, the first three stages; the Raketoplan shuttle vehicle would follow in its wake as soon as the assembled laser weapon had been installed in its cargo bay.

He stifled another yawn, which might have become a sigh. He felt excluded from the simple emotions aroused by the scene outside. He was excluded by the presence of the general's son behind him, lounging in his chair; excluded, precisely, by his sense of the stupid mistake he had made in arresting the boy at all. Why the devil had he? Bravado, machismo, recklessness — lack of thought? Dmitri Priabin profoundly regretted his actions.

It would take nearly twenty-four hours for the first stages to reach the launch pad, and another half a day to move the shuttle and raise it atop the remainder of the rocket. By Thursday noon everything would be ready for that afternoon's launch.

He still felt excluded, felt his own concerns press in on him. It could well be a matter of self-preservation — and yet, the boy irritated him so much. He whirled on his heels to face the young man, whose eyes were now dull with tiredness rather than drug-brightened, as they had been when Priabin had arrested him. Tired though they might be, the eyes flickered with a pale gleam of contempt, a growing fire of anticipated satisfaction — wait till Daddy hears about this, the eyes promised childishly, maliciously. Not only was this little shit a general's son — a Baikonur general's son — but he was also GRU, military intelligence. Priabin realized, with a growing nervousness, that he had opened the trapdoor to a snake pit — a can of worms, didn't the Americans say? It was the boy's expectation, almost his right, to hold the KGB in contempt. GRU really ran security at Baikonur, it was the army that was really in control.

"You still refuse to identify the — source of the drugs, Lieutenant?" he asked with careful authority. "We really have wasted enough time on this already."

'Then let me go," the young man replied, pouting with thin, pale hps. Pale eyebrows, pale hair, faded blue eyes. Almost ghostly. He might have been some aristocrat's jaded, old-young offspring. Perhaps he was, in a Soviet sense — certainly the son of a powerful and dangerous man.

Why wouldn't he let the boy go? Spite? Possibly; the boy was homosexual. Spite might even have been the motive for the anonymous tip-off. One of the boy's circle, offended or jealous, a quarrel, a lack of tenderness? Whatever, he had arrested Valery Rodin, officer of the GRU, on charges of possessing cocaine. Once he had discovered the boy's rank and connections, why had he bothered to bring him in? He could have taken the drugs and kept his mouth shut. But the boy's contempt had stung him, made him angry…

Bad dreams of Anna the previous night, contempt for the face he saw in the shaving mirror just before the call had come — they'd played their part, too.

"You realize how serious an offense you've committed, Lieutenant?"

Rodin shrugged. His tie was loose at his throat, his uniform jacket was unbuttoned. The remains of a plate of sandwiches and an empty beer glass rested on Priabin's desk, near the boy's elbow. It might have been his office.

Anger. Useless, harmful anger, doing him definite harm and no damn good whatsoever, but he couldn't bring himself to let this arrogant, criminal little shit go free.

"I know who reported me," Rodin hissed. "The pretty little queen." He did not bother to disguise his homosexuality, despite its magnitude as a criminal offense under Soviet law, as if he were immune to KGB charges.

Which he was.

Neither joke nor crime; just a fact about a young man whose father was a senior officer of the Strategic Rocket Forces, the army's most elite service. A man who was one of the triumvirate of staff officers running Baikonur, for God's sake.

You bloody fool, tangling with that lot.

General Lieutenant Rodin. His son could have worn makeup and a dress on duty, and little if anything of consequence would have happened to him. And the boy knew that as clearly as he knew who his father was.

And that's what enrages you, Priabin told himself, precisely that — look at his face now. He choked on a bile of silent rage. The conversation finished hours ago, as far as he's concerned. Priabin knew he was already on a list of petty revenges to be exacted as soon as the boy was released. In this case, a ruinous revenge if the father took an interest.

"Lovers' tiff, was it?" he asked quietly, unable to prevent himself. The boy set his teeth on edge, infuriated him beyond all measure.

Rodin laughed, not even blushing, not even angry.

"If you like," he replied, shrugging insolently. Priabin's rank meant nothing, nothing at all.

Somewhere in the building, the damning evidence of the cocaine he had found would have disappeared by now, to placate the general's anticipated anger and the son s petty revenge.

"You don't seem to care much, either way."

"Should I? After all, what can happen?"

There, he'd finally said it. Priabin, angry as he was, still felt chilled, and cursed the shame brought on by his shaving mirror; cursed Rodin's initial insolence as his locker was searched; cursed self-consciousness.

It was almost as if he carried within him some urge toward self-destruction. That was the Anna part of him, not the part of him that still worked, slept, ate, shaved, obeyed orders and stared at his uniformed self in mirrors, idled away his posting at Baikonur… a cushy number, you re bloody lucky to get it, after everything that's happened, they had said in Moscow. Not even demoted… yes, he was lucky to have gotten it after the American's escape and Anna's death. The part that wanted to convict Rodin, make him sweat, belonged to Anna; the wailing, never-to-be-comforted child she had left behind her, frozen in grief like a corpse trapped in thick ice.

Guilt, of course, overwhelming guilt for that moment when the border guards had opened fire, when his shouting had panicked them, when Gant…

He snatched his mind away from the images, from the round blue hole in her forehead. The effort to wrench his mind away from that one last image in particular was as violent as snatching his hand back from a flame. It was that image which, even now, returned more than any other. Often when he tried to remember her smiling, or making love, or concentrating on documents, or cooking, her forehead seemed to wear that final badge, the round blue hole. It was clearer and more terrible even than the blood from the back of her head, which had stained his hand and his overcoat.

He could not remember her alive, not for whole days at a time. She was always dead on the icebound road at the Finnish border where Gant had escaped him — and caused her death.

His voice was thin and angry, surprising Rodin out of his slouching posture.

"Listen to me, Lieutenant. Listen carefully. I may be just a policeman to you, but you're guilty of an offense that could land most people with a life sentence — the Gulag." Already, Rodin's thin lips had regained their sneering smile. Priabin would have liked, dearly liked, to strike that soft, half-formed face. "A life sentence," he repeated. "I don't want you, I want the supplier. Who supplies the cocaine, the hashish, all the uppers and downers used — people like you use? Who supplies? Who fixes?"

"And if I don't tell you?" Rodin asked tauntingly.

"Just tell me." Priabin sighed, arms folded across his chest. He leaned his head slightly to one side, as if studying Rodin. "No."

"Even the general wouldn't — I don't say couldn't, you observe— but he wouldn't like to keep the fid on this. It might cause him a certain amount of — embarrassment?"

Rodin's features were blank with surprise. Then they looked haughty. The aristocrat's ruined son again.

"You wouldn't tell him. You think he'd want you to tell him? You must be mad."

"If you're charged, he begins to be involved."

"And you're finished!" The voice was, satisfyingly, a little higher, uncertain — in the upper atmosphere of Rodin's confidence, where it was more difficult to breathe. "You know that, for fuck's sake. You know you'd be finished!"

"Lose my cushy billet here, you mean?"

"I heard you were lucky to get it."

He had been — oh, yes, he had been lucky. They had blamed Anna, the double agent, not himself. He had lied and concealed and clumsily accounted for his presence at the border, and they had accepted his version of events. It had been the woman who had helped the American pilot to escape; he was still loyal. He had been disloyal, of course — to Anna. Saved himself by exposing her treachery — which he had only that day stumbled upon, when he realized that his mistress was trying to smuggle the American out of the Soviet Union. Yes, yes, yes, the woman was a traitor, and better dead. Executed, not murdered. Yes, yes, yes, he had gone along with it— all of it.

His anger became directed at the weak, dissolute, living young man in the chair.

"Be careful," Priabin snapped, his face flushed with anger, tightened into hard lines. Rodin could not muster the satisfied smile that should have followed the gibe.

Why was he doing this? Was he looking for resurrection or oblivion, pursuing this dangerous young man whose father was a general? He was desperate, he admitted to himself; he didn't care.

"Rodin, whatever the reason or the consequence, I'll charge you.

You believe it. Papa would not be pleased with you, whatever his attitude to me. It's not your first — escapade, is it?"

"Don't be stupid, Priabin. Just look the other way. I won't make trouble for you."

"Uncomfortable?"

"Get lost!"

"Ever thought Papa might grow tired of dragging his queer brat out of the shit, time after time?"

"What are you trying to do, Priabin? Make things difficult for yourself?"

"Maybe."

"Got something against gays?"

"No. Just against drugs. Against you, almost certainly."

"A Socialist!" Rodin exclaimed with bright sarcasm.

"Aren't we all, comrade?"

"Just walk away, Priabin," Rodin warned, straightening his tie, preparing to button his jacket. "Just drop it. Nothing of importance is happening in here; it's all happening out there." He waved his hand toward the window: pale, long-fingered.

Priabin knew he had been monumentally stupid. The general would be angry at any interruption, four days from the launch. He shook his head. Monumentally stupid.

"Well?" Rodin asked. His jacket was buttoned and smoothed, his cap in his hand.

Priabin rubbed a hand through his dark hair. Nodded.

"You still refuse to tell me?"

"I have nothing to say." A mere formality of a reply.

"Very well." Priabin sighed, waving a dismissive hand.

Immediately, Rodin stood up. Smiled. Walked across the carpet with what might have been a strut of pleasure, with an authority that made his movements more masculine. He grinned into Priabin's face, his eyes no longer tired, his mouth continuing to sneer.

Dmitri Priabin ignored him, staring out of the window. Beyond the giant assembly building and the glowing hangar, the lights of a dormitory town threw a faint stain on the clouds. The lights of the old town, Tyuratam, illuminated the sky to the south. He could just make out the skeletal gantries of the nearest launch pads against the glow. Across the flat country, toward the eastern horizon, groups of lights appeared like the encampments of units in some vast, invisible army. Missile silos, watch towers, factories, railway yards, power stations, the airport, towns, villages. The vast settlement of Baikonur; the army's Baikonur.

Now he wished he had let Rodin go at once; never even arrested him. He was angry with his former mood of bravado. He did want to keep his nose clean, keep his cushy billet until — until he used the tool that had been given him to ensure his return to Moscow Center with some sort of small triumph. Now he might need Kedrov's arrest just to fend off the general's anger… Shit.

"Just keep looking through your window," Rodin purred close to his ear. "You'll have plenty to look at in the next four days. It should keep you occupied." Priabin glanced at him. He seemed inebriated with release and his sense of superiority over the KGB colonel. His mood seemed excessive, but promised trouble for Priabin. "You can watch Lightning get under way."

Because the words seemed choked, bitten off, Priabin looked up.

"Lightning? What's that?"

"I—" Hesitation? Confusion? Rodin seemed regretful, nervous; emotions pursued a hurried course across his narrow face. Concluding in a tight-mouthed self-assurance and a glance around the office as if to dismiss any authority that might reside within it. "I meant Linchpin—the launch… Linchpin."

"Linchpin," Priabin echoed dubiously. "The launch of the laser battle station?"

"Yes. Just that." His face was close to Priabin s eyes. Priabin could smell the meat from the sandwiches on his breath, scent the last whiff of the boy's heavy cologne. "I said nothing else — understand? Nothing." He moved away, then drawled affectedly and without real conviction: "I can go now?"

"Yes."

Rodin nodded, placed his cap on his pale hair, clicked his boot heels in an ironic gesture, and left the room. Priabin heard him whistling in the outer office. The noise faded in the corridor.

Why had he been threatened? Rodin had forgotten everything else, even his petty revenge, because of that one word, his slip of the tongue. Lightning? Rodin had quite evidently and deliberately threatened him, told him to forget the slip.

Lightning? What the devil was Lightning?

It was important, and it was a secret…

He was startled by the opening of the door, having failed to register the polite knock. Viktor Zhikin, his second-in-command, appeared relieved.

Tm glad you — dropped the matter," he said at once.

"What? Oh." Priabin attempted a broad, dismissive smile. "Why try to buck the system, Viktor? who wants the heartache, mm?"

Zhikin moved his hand almost as if to pat Priabin s shoulder. Priabin grinned unconvincingly. His awareness returned to—

— Lightning. Not Linchpin, as the first of the laser weapons was code-named. Lightning.

"What?" he mumbled, aware that Zhikin was speaking once more.

"Sorry — are we going to pull Kedrov and the cycle-shop owner in for questioning? The surveillance teams want to know. You said tonight." Zhikin's voice was firm, even parental. It reminded Priabin of his responsibilities. It reminded him, too, that the spy was perhaps the key to his own future, now that he had made an enemy of Rodin, even of the boy's father. "They want to know if they should go in and try to find the transmitter. It doesn't look as if Kedrov is going to go back there since he was spooked by those clods following him." Zhikin was angry, self-critical.

"Not your fault, Viktor — they should never have been spotted by an amateur like him. Idiots." He rubbed his chin.

"Where's the dog?"

"What? Oh, Grechkova's taken him for his walk. Now, what do we do about Kedrov?"

"Where is he?"

"Still in his flat.'

"And Orlov?"

"In bed above the shop."

Priabin looked at his watch. Midnight. Rodin had been there since early evening. He wouldn't have liked that, he'd want some revenge for the — the inconvenience he'd been put to. Yes, it would be better to have the agent and his transmitter man in the bag before the shit hit the fan.

Priabin nodded. "OK. It's a bit late in the day to let him go on running around. Time to chop off that particular chicken's head. We'll go in at dawn — warn the teams. You and I will supervise Orlov's arrest. I want that transmitter, and no cock-ups."

Zhikin smiled. "Great," he said. "Fine — sir."

"Sure."

Threat, insolence, superiority, arrogance, contempt — he'd seen all those on Rodin's face. And fear, too, together with concern, self-accusation, anxiety — and a clear sense of danger.

Lightning. It meant something, something vitally important concerning the laser weapon. Lightning.

What the hell did it mean?

Snow was blowing across the tinted green windows, making their color colder, almost repellent. The illuminated spike of the Washington Monument looked even more than ever like some spacecraft waiting to be launched. Anders felt uncomfortable in the Oval Office. He wanted to loosen his tie, relax his sitting posture. It wasn't awe, or even tension. It was the weight of events.

New Year's, he thought. Just New Year's — and now this. He looked down at the sheet covered with his own handwriting. Come for me at once, before they find me. I must go into hiding, the agreed rendezvous. Hurryy come immediately.

Kedrov's panic button, his cry for help. He was terrified. Of something he referred to as Lightning, though he didn't explain. 1 know about Lightning, and they know I know. Hurry. The desperation was clearly there. Kedrov had gone into the undergrowth. Gant and his people were stalled at Nellis in Nevada. It was coming unglued, the whole operation.

Kedrov might even have been picked up by now

Because of the tension, Anders felt cut off from the outside. Langley, across the Potomac, was separated from him by a vast gulf. He was there to report, at the director's insistence, as mission officer for Winter Hawk. But there was nothing to report. The Galaxy transport aircraft was still sitting in its hangar at Nellis AFB in Nevada, two hours after the mission was activated. Three hours now. Winter Hawk was stalled.

As if rebuffing the tension, the defeat in the room's air, Calvin was rehearsing old speeches, old hopes.

"We fell for it — we were suckered into this treaty, Dick. We thought they were so frightened they had to agree — they just wanted to divert some defense spending. Years ahead of us all the time, and overjoyed when we offered to save them billions of rubles so they could spend it on their own SDI! We threw in Talon Gold, our AS AT program, all in good faith, hoping to encourage them to do the same, went ahead with the surveillance satellite program instead — and all the time they had their own laser weapon program going. By God — I won't be forgiven for this — none of us will," he added darkly, turning to face the others.

Gunther looked down, as did the director, seated next to Anders. The silence loomed, waiting to be filled. Calvin was staring at him, accusingly, it seemed to Anders.

"And now you tell me our last chance is on hold," he snapped.

Anders glanced at the row of television screens along one wall. The mission room at Langley appeared on four of them in glaring color, from different angles. The scene appeared slow, underwater, almost inactive.

"Mr. President, the repairs they have to effect to one of the two gunships can't be done while they're in the air."

"How long, Mr. Anders, how long?"

"They can't give me a closer estimate than — maybe tonight."

"Maybe tonight?"

"I'm sorry, Mr.—"

"That isn't good enough, Anders, and you know it." Calvin turned his accusing gaze on the director. "Bill, you pleaded with me to initiate this operation. Forty-eight hours, maximum, that's what you said. They haven't taken off from Nellis yet, and three of your forty-eight have already disappeared."

The director shifted awkwardly on his chair like a chastened schoolboy.

Calvin sat at his desk, almost an interloper masquerading as President. His eyes looked lost and afraid.

"There's nothing I can say, Mr. President," the director offered apologetically. There was only disappointment in his voice, and an overwhelming sense of past events.

"What's the extent of the damage to the transport helicopter?" Dick Gunther asked.

"It's in the rotor head," Anders replied. "And in the hydraulic control jacks below the rotor head" Calvin appeared impatient with detail, as if he suspected lies or excuses. "They thought they had time to work on it — they're flat out now, Mr. President," he said mollifyingly. "It's a long and difficult job. They can't adapt U.S. parts to fit, not easily—"

"The hell with it, Mr. Anders," Calvin snapped. "Just chalk it up as another Company mistake — in your catalog of errors, Bill. You advised me to leave this guy in place in Baikonur until the last moment, you insisted the crews weren't ready to undertake the mission, that more weeks of training were required — and all that it's gotten us is nowhere. We've lost the game, Bill. You've fumbled the pass."

"I'm sorry, Mr. President."

Anders was angry, but he controlled his features. His brow began to perspire, and his body felt as if wrapped in hot, constricting towels rather than dressed in his gray suit. Calvin was manifestly unfair. He, too, was angry, but angry only that Winter Hawk would not have its chance — risky, sure, but their only chance.

He glanced at the Oval Office clocks in turn. One of them, a French clock, gilded and ornate, was placed on a low, darkly shining table. It was the First Lady's choice, he assumed. Its blue-num: bered face showed a little after three. Sunday afternoon. The snow flew beyond the green glass as wildly as the recriminations in which Calvin had indulged.

"Why the hell did they go ahead?" Calvin was asking. "Why didn't they trust us?"

No one replied. The director lit his pipe. Anders was aware of the lighter tapping softly with nerves against the pipe's bowl. Blue smoke rose in the room, drifting across the windows toward the flag. Anders' gaze slid over Calvin's face, and he was shocked afresh by the deep stains beneath the man's eyes. The thick gray hair no longer added distinction to a strong face; it was no more than an old man's good fortune. He entertained an alternative image of Calvin, coming down the steps of Air Force One, returning to Washington from Vienna. Hands raised like a victorious fighter, grin broad, step quick and confident, almost running to the lectern with a genuine excitement, a need to tell. That had been after the first summit of his term of office, his first meeting with Nikitin. They had agreed on the principles of the arms reduction treaty, and the timetable for negotiation.

The voice had been full and resonant as he stood at the row of microphones. The cameras had continued to click and whir, the lights to flash, as he made his historic announcement.

My fellow Americans…

Calvin turned like someone afraid he was being followed and gazed out of the windows at the flying snow. It was as if he sensed the comparison of images in Anders' mind.

… today, President Nikitin and myself have committed ourselves and our two countries to a resolute search for peace and for genuine, verifiable reductions in our nuclear arsenals…

Anders remembered the emotions and the wild excitement the speech had aroused even in himself, a senior career intelligence officer, though he would not have remembered the words except that TV stations had been replaying the damn occasion, over and over, all that week. In the four weeks before, ever since they had first known about Baikonur, the words had become increasingly hollow. Now, at this crisis, the speech — that first one of all of them — was no more than the naive utterance of a duped politician. The signing of the treaty should have crowned Calvin's first term and assured a second. Now he stared ruin in the face; historic and historical repugnance was his inheritance. No wonder the man looked old and weary

… we have agreed that there will be no special cases, no exclusions. Every weapons system currently deployed or in the development stage is to be on the table, on both sides…

The confident Harvard tones had been singing a siren song, and the world had listened greedily. Hoping, at last hoping.

A new beginning. Half the Pershings and cruise missiles and half the Soviet SS-20s had been withdrawn at once, the following day, as a gesture of mutual good faith. The world could hardly believe its luck.

But the world still believed in its luck. It didn't know what the men in that room knew. Anders' face twisted in bitterness. He felt betrayed — yes, that was it, betrayed, as anyone would. As they will when they hear — if they ever hear.

They will, he concluded. The news will leak out some day — this year, next year, the one after that. The Soviets have us by the short hairs, they've got Star Wars instead of us. We're all washed up.

The world had gone on cheering for two whole years, Anders with them. Until Cactus Plant's bombshell out of Baikonur—They have transported a laser battle station for launching—Christ! Two years had dropped hollow, like counterfeit coins hitting the pavement.

My fellow Americans…

Now those raised arms looked like surrender, like newsreel shots of weary and defeated Marines emerging from the hostile Vietnamese jungle. Eventually, Calvin would have to tell the world what had gone wrong, and that he had no answer to the Soviet laser weapons because he'd slowed down the research programs, cut the funds, believed the Russians. They'd crucify him.

Anders realized Calvin was looking at him intently. He felt his cheeks warm under the piercing, accusatory gaze. It was as if Calvin were reading his thoughts.

"You think I've given up, Mr. Mission Officer?" the President asked slowly, acidly. His eyes looked inward, with something like distaste.

"No, Mr.—"

"Never mind. I want your butt on the copilot's seat of a military jet inside of an hour. Get the air force to fly you to Nellis. It should take you three hours, no more. And you're responsible for getting those gunships airborne today. Understand me? Today!"

Mitchell Gant appeared to sip at the can of beer in his hand with the wary delicacy of a cat. Seated in a crouch on the narrow bed against one wall of his cramped room, he seemed absorbed by the television set, as if he were trying to exclude Anders from his awareness. On the screen, the space shuttle Atlantis floated above California while the full text of the NAR Treaty, clause after clause of it, rolled as sofdy as movie credits, superimposed on the shuttle's image.

All three major networks were running the same compilation of images and the treaty's text. As it ran, the shuttle was shown over every area of the planet covered by its orbit, all recorded daylight shots, countries and oceans immediately recognizable from two hundred miles above the earth. To Anders, each clause that appeared on the screen was one more cruel fiction.

He cleared his throat, but Gant did not turn his head.

"You know most of those guys," Anders offered.

Gant glared at him, as if disturbed from pleasure.

"Sure, I know some of them — Wakeman, the mission commander — yeah, I know them." He seemed to lose interest in the conversation and sipped once more at his beer.

Anders felt oppressed by the narrow, bare room. Bed, table, two upright chairs, two government-issue easy chairs, a strip of carpet. It might have been a waiting room at some downtown doctor's office where all the patients were either black or Mexican. A small refrigerator, metal lockers instead of a closet or chest of drawers. There was a door to a tiny kitchen, another to a bathroom. Yet Gant must have chosen these quarters. His rank entitled him to a bungalow on the base. This was like — like a closet for storing machines not in use.

He opened the refrigerator, disturbed by his own metaphor, and took out a can of beer. Pulled the ring. Gas plopped softly. Gant had turned down the music accompanying the program. The quiet of the room oppressed. Gant's presence seemed to charge it with static electricity. Anders shook his head. He did not understand Gant. From his context — this room — he received no clues as to the man's present or past — or future. He looked at the television screen as if through a window onto a larger perspective.

Atlantis had been in orbit for a week. A long scientific mission including the disposition of two new surveillance satellites. The crew was also scheduled to repair other satellites and, he remembered once more, to rendezvous with their Soviet counterparts on Friday, the day after the signing in Geneva. There was even TV talk that the shuttles might land at each other's home bases. Silly talk, but it nevertheless disturbed Anders. The world's present mood was evident in it. The party had begun in earnest, and no one could call it off now.

On the screen, the Pacific occupying almost half of it now, the earth looked like some huge flower bowl on which petals of desert, grassland, and cloud floated. The shuttle's robot arm hung like a great elbow joint in one corner of the screen, and a Michelin tire man, one of the crew on a spacewalk, hovered above the Spacelab in the shuttle's cargo bay. It was a reshowing of the repair job the shuttle had performed five days earlier. The whole program was a rerun of one long peace slogan.

The lump of the malfunctioning satellite appeared to one side of the screen. Anders sipped his beer, his hand tightening involuntarily on the can. The tire man backpacked toward the satellite. The earth below him remained untouchably, impossibly beautiful.

Frustration gripped Anders.

"Christ, Gant, how can you just sit there?" he burst out. "Don't you care?"

"Plenty. What good will it do, Anders? I can't repair rotor heads. They're working as fast as they can."

"We don't have any time, Gant."

Gant ostentatiously looked at his watch. It was seven in the evening, local time, as near as it mattered. Ten o'clock in Washington. Soon Anders would have to call the Oval Office — again. He squeezed the can in his hand. Gant was like a pressure forcing itself against him; immobile like a Buddha, silent again now that he was not being spoken to. Then he looked at Anders.

"It could take four hours, it could take all night. You've seen."

The room oppressed Anders even more. He felt an imposter in his borrowed flying overalls. His body ached from the unfamiliarity of the copilot's seat of the EF-111 in which he had been flown from Andrews to Nellis. Gant's apparent indifference enraged him.

"The man expects you to succeed, Gant," he said waspishly.

Gant turned his head, his eyes glinting. "So? The man expects?" He gestured with the beer can. "When the repairs are through, we go. What the hell else do you want from me?"

"He wants, Gant — he wants. You have to give him this agent on a plate, and his holiday movies. Can you do that?"

"I'm not his wife, Anders. Just one of the slobs working in the guy's factory, underpaid and underfed." He grinned quickly, looking suddenly boyish. "We're not ready, Anders. You know that. Not even me."

There was a certainty about Gant's pronouncement, negative though it was. The room around him said little or nothing about the man. A pennant from Vietnam on one of the buff-colored walls, a few photographs of aircraft, a younger Gant posed in front of a Phantom jet, pilot's helmet under his arm. Little or nothing — yet Anders was impressed by the force with which Gant occupied the room.

"You — have to be ready," Anders said.

Gant shrugged. "It doesn't change the facts. We should have had another week, minimum. Those machines are pigs to fly. Tell the man that when you talk with him." He looked at his watch once more. "Isn't it time to call home?" His features wore an undisguised cynicism that angered Anders. Gant was contemptuous of him, of the President — of the mission?

"Where in hell are you coming from, Gant?" he snapped. "What is it with you? I don't need all this crap from you."

"But you need me, Anders. So does the man. My misfortune, but you do. This idea was crazy from the beginning. Now it's suicidal."

"You want out, Gant? Is that what you want?" Anders sneered, the can squeezed almost flat in his fist.

Gant shrugged expressively. "Out? Why?" He gestured around the bare room. "You told me, once, Anders, why I work for you. For the rest of the assholes in the Company. Because you let me fly. Huh?" He dismissed Anders with a wave of his hand and turned back to the television as he said, "I'm in, Anders. I don't have any hankering to face charges that have been tailored to fit me — maybe even a list of charges." He snorted in derision. "I'm a big boy, Anders — I tie my own shoelaces and I know the score. I just get parked here till you need me. I'm going just as soon as they fix Garcia's ship."

"OK." Anders sighed. He leaned heavily against the door. He realized he had never really entered the small room. It and its occupant baffled him. Gant was cocooned, somehow apart. Perhaps he really did despise the very people who needed him, to whom he was valuable. Anders added in a tone that was intended to mollify: "If we can have the agent and the material by Thursday, we can still win, Gant. We can bargain."

Gant studied Anders' angry, tired face. Anders could not change his expression. His muscles were set in defeated lines.

Gant said: "Maybe. If and maybe."

"What the hell else can we do?" Anders cried out. The can in his hand was crushed flat.

Gant shrugged. "Nothing. But the idea is still crazy."

"You'll be in Soviet helicopters, you have all the call signs, the channels and frequencies, you'll be there maybe a half hour—"

"They'll shoot a guy on a bicycle on sight, Anders. That place is going to be sewn up tight — and I mean tight." He looked down at his own can, shook it — it made no sound — then lobbed it into a waste-basket. He closed his hands together as if in prayer. "And the guy's jumped, Anders. You don't even know if he'll show up when we do."

"He said. Kedrov knows where to be. He has a transponder only you will be able to pick up. The rendezvous island in the salt marshes is pinpointed. Winter Hawk is something they won't be expecting, not in a million years."

"So you say."

"So the President says, Gant. To quote him exactly, he said, Tell that guy to get his ass over there — and no foul-ups.' His message is clear, Gant."

"Sure. Otherwise it's a long vacation somewhere where they're always losing the keys. I know."

"We don't do that."

"This time he will. I have the ball, Anders." He returned his gaze to the screen. The terms of the treaty were still rolling softly up the screen, the shuttle still floated invulnerably and apart above the ocean.

"I have to make that call," Anders said, throwing his can at the wastebasket. It struck the side and clattered on the floor. Gant smiled.

He looked toward Anders as if weighing him. Then he said: "Give the man my compliments. Tell him Captain Fantastic is just raring to go." Once again, he snorted in derision.

3: Gathering Storm

"— gone, sir. He must have vanished some time during the night, over the roof. We—"

"You were there!" Priabin shouted into the cars radio microphone. "You stupid buggers were on the spot all night!"

"Sir, we had all the exits covered," the voice began once more, its note of apology more calculating and less shocked.

In the Zil's front passenger seat, Viktor Zhikin sighed angrily and banged the dashboard with his gloved fist. His murmur was an echo of Priabin's sentiments.

"Find him!" Priabin barked, his voice unnerved. The silence around him in the car was thunderous. The driver had turned off the music from the black-market cassette.

"Sir?" Zhikin asked as Priabin threw him the microphone.

"Don't let's allow Orlov to go the same way, shall we?"

Zhikin snapped into the mike: "All units — move in at once. Now." Acknowledgments crackled in the car

"Come on," Priabin snapped. "Orlov will know where his little friend is." I hope so, he added to himself. I hope so.

He opened the rear door and climbed out. The temperature assailed him, biting through his heavy overcoat, his boots. The black car was clothed with heavy frost.

Dear Christ, he thought, the idea striking him cleanly, they've lost Kedrov. Anger welled up at once, almost choking him. He had to find him; his whole career, his return to Moscow, depended on it. If it was discovered he let an American spy escape, he would be well and truly finished. Panic coursed through him like the effects of a drink. He almost lost his footing on the icy pavement. It glinted dully in the red, early light.

He steadied himself against the car, hardly squinting as he looked into the heavy, swollen ball of the sun that had just heaved itself above the flat horizon. Like a heavier-than-air balloon. Its dull red disk was bisected and trellised with launch gantries, the skeletons of radio masts, and radar dishes.

Zhikin crossed the narrow, cobbled street just ahead of him. It was veined with gray ice. The blinds of Orlov's shop were closed. Paint peeled from the wooden door. The shop's sign was weathered almost to illegibility. A word-of-mouth clientele, Priabin reminded himself humorlessly. Cassettes, expensive stereo items from the West, even the more usual currency of denim. Orlov supplied to the young and to the scientific and technical communities; the army had its own semiofficial pipeline, which flowed with more regularity, bringing the prized and scarce consumer luxuries. For the army it was a perk, not a crime.

Anger swelled once again in Priabin's throat. He banged on the door with his gloved fist, quickly, repeatedly. He realized Zhikin was watching him disapprovingly, head to one side. He went on banging, yelled Orlov's name in the quiet morning of the narrow, old street. Zhikin put his finger to the bell at the side of the door. What if, what if—? Priabin's mind drummed, as if to accompany the beat of his fist.

"Orlov!" he yelled. "Orlov, open this bloody door!" Voice becoming higher.

A helicopter drummed and grumbled overhead. He looked up. A vapor trail crossed the sun. Across the street, he heard the driver's radio. What if Orlov had gone underground along with Kedrov, slipped away in the night? If the army found out about Kedrov — they must, now that the man had disappeared from his work — he'd be bloody ruined.

"Orlov. Orlov, you old bastard, open up!"

He had to get Kedrov back at once. Then he might win the game that had suddenly turned deadly.

Zhikin's hand was firm on his arm.

"OK, sir?" he asked, his face concerned and cautioning.

"What?"

"You need — to calm down. Orlov will be no help if you…"He did not need to finish the sentence. Priabin glared, then swallowed and nodded.

"OK, Viktor, OK. Usual style, old techniques — sure." Come on, come on—

He craned toward the door and heard the slow shuffle of something — slippered feet or an old dog's noises — coming through the shop. A bolt slid back. A sigh escaped Priabin's lips, a smoky signal of relief. Zhikin's face settled into satisfied lines.

Another bolt, then a security lock. A gnarled hand slid up the blind. Orlov's face appeared, blinking at them like a threatened mole, its tunnel blocked behind it. Orlov wore thick glasses, was thin and elderly, but cunning — already counting them, assessing their mood. His head was bald, liver-spotted like the back of the hand still holding the raised blind. A shrunken but loose stomach sagged like a phantom pregnancy under a stretched gray cardigan.

He opened the door slowly. Priabin wanted to drive through it, rush into the shop bellowing Kedrov's name. But he knew the spy would not be there.

"Yes?" Orlov asked, his voice cautiously deferential, testing their mood like an antenna. His tongue licked his gray lips and his eyes blinked again. "Yes, comrade Colonel? I'm not open—"

"You are to us," Zhikin replied wearily, holding up the red ID card in its plastic folder.

"Yes, of course," Orlov replied. "Please come in, comrades. How can I help you?" Priabin, enraged by the man's calculated replies, realized he had been forewarned. He had been practicing his part all night.

Careful, careful… Viktor's right — Priabin could almost smell Kedrov upstairs, above the shop. He must have come; was he still here? What message had he sent? Steady, steady… Orlov's setting the pace just now.

They entered the shop. Bare floorboards, dust; the smells of lubricating oil, heavier greases, welding gas, paint. A litter of parts, a couple of complete bicycles; a new, bright-green man's bike in the shop's bay window that bulged into the narrow street outside. It was ready to be exposed to envying eyes as soon as the blinds and the security meshes were removed when the shop opened. Orlov seemed unwilling to invite them farther into the shop's secret reaches.

Priabin's excitement was evident in his voice. "Where is he?" he blurted. Zhikin's face disapproved.

Orlov stood behind the counter of the shop, as if to serve them. On its surface, yesterday's paper was covered with oil and a bicycle chain. Then he was startled by the noise of locks being smashed at the rear of the building. His head turned wildly. Priabin nodded to Zhikin.

"Search everywhere," he whispered insistently.

Zhikin seemed to weigh his mood and find it acceptable, and nodded. "I don't think he's here," he commented, then passed behind the shop counter into the rear of the building. Orlov had begun to whine.

"I — what do you want? I let you in, there was no need to break the door….." His voice trailed off as Priabin approached the counter, more like an intruder than a customer. He touched the day-old local Tyuratam paper — its reports seeming to indicate a separation of existence between Baikonur and the old town — shunting its edges parallel with those of the counter. The bicycle chain slithered like an almost dormant snake. Priabin looked up from the newspaper into Orlov's gray features.

A little money on the side, that's all it was. He'd call it providing a service, probably. Always reasonably safe, since the KGB bought their new stereo headphones or styluses or pop tapes here, too. Got their Jap hi-fi repaired by Orlov. Priabin himself had done so on one occasion, after the officially approved electrical shop in the town had buggered his cassette player. Orlov was safe—

— until he wanted to start playing in the first division, with the big boys. Being the transmitter man for Kedrov.

Priabin soothed himself narcotically into the familiar role of interrogator. Softly, softly.

"Where's Kedrov?" he asked almost gently.

"Who?"

"One of your best customers by the number of times he's been here."

Orlov was distracted by feet thudding overhead, by the destructive noises coming from behind the shop. The ripping of wood, tumbling of contents, the smashing of china, the heavy whispering of moved rugs and carpets; the groans of furniture being manhandled across bare boards.

"I don't understand. You want to know about a customer?"

Priabin swallowed his disappointment. Kedrov was not there. He must have called Orlov to warn him he was going into hiding. Where the hell was he? Panic mounted; he eased it away with the small rituals of the interrogator's foreplay.

"No. I want to know about the transmitter."

"Transmitter?"

A turn of the head, a fearful gleam behind the glasses as the clatter of parts tipped out of some box was clearly audible. There'd be a lot of damage, and some looting, of course. Priabin had no feeling either way; par for the course. New, shiny amplifiers would disappear, and the latest tapes. It didn't matter so long as they found the transmitter. That could be used to open up Orlov like the key to a tin of sardines. The transmitter—

— or its components!

"Viktor! Viktor!" he yelled. Orlov had stayed because he thought he was safe. He'd hidden the bloody transmitter. Zhikin appeared in the doorway to the rear of the building, dust on his overcoat, his hands grimy. "Viktor, tell them to look for the bits and pieces, yes?"

Zhikin's face brightened. "Should I get a couple of technical boys out from the town office?"

"Yes, do that."

"Phone's in the back — I'll do it now." Zhikin disappeared, whistling. Orlov's eyes were narrow with calculation as Priabin grinned at him.

"After all, you could have spent all night taking it to pieces, now couldn't you?" Priabin said lightly. Yes, he could play this role— interrogator-as-seducer. Apart from anything else, it kept his anxiety at a controllable level. He purred: "Where is it now? Forming the innards of a couple of new hi-fi systems?" He grinned. "We'll find it, Orlov. You shouldn't have tried to play with the big boys — not the Yankees, anyway. Where's Kedrov?" he snapped suddenly, harshly.

"He's—"

Priabin nodded. "What did he tell you last night? That he was suspected, he was getting out? Something spooked him. Did he say what it was?"

"I don't know what you're talking about, comrade Colonel, sir." His eyes were still narrow with cunning. There was a kind of daring, too, that Priabin was forced to admire. The man wasn't really afraid, but then, he didn't know the stakes Priabin had put down on the table. "I don't understand what you want. You already know about this place. I mean—"

"We know. We know." Priabin sighed. His gloves tapped on the edge of the counter, flicking back and forth like windshield wipers. "But we just wondered whether you'd gotten into some other things, say like drugs?"

"Never!" A prim, virginal refutation—what do you think I am?

"I have never touched such things, believe me, comrade Colonel. Never!"

"I don't doubt it, now. That's why we were watching you in the first place, not for the hi-fi's. That's how we stumbled on the transmissions, and then onto Kedrov. You see, we've known for a long time. It's why we sent in a burglary squad last week, looking for the damn transmitter." Priabin's voice broke off, his gloves slapped almost playfully, but hard, at Orlov. There was the tiny clatter of eyeglasses falling behind the counter, and the rustle of the disturbed chain-snake on the oily newspaper.

As Orlov scrabbled for his glasses, Priabin said: "Where is it? How much information has gone to the Americans, Orlov? How much?" The anxiety mounted again, as if he had pressed his tongue against a rotten tooth. It was obvious; the laser weapon. Kedrov had worked on it, part of its huge technical services team. How much had been passed via Orlov's transmitter?

Orlov's face appeared above the counter, glasses replaced. His mole features sniffed the danger in the electric silence of the shop.

"Come on, Orlov. I have the power, all the power. It doesn't matter if you deny it, if we find nothing, like the burglary squad. You'll never crawl out of the hole I can put you in. You know that, don't you?"

Orlov shuddered, a small, thin, old man's shudder, like the breeze flapping a semitransparent shower curtain. Priabin could see through Orlov, as if he were vanishing before his eyes. He knew Orlov now regretted everything.

"And there's always a family, isn't there?" Priabin persisted. "Son, daughter, grandchildren probably, in your case — all flesh and blood, all with jobs, some of them in the Party, expecting to go places." Priabin was smiling an open, almost joyous smile. Orlov was shivering; vulnerable as much as chilly. "Cars drive too fast on slippery roads, pupils are downgraded and moved out of the Science School to one of the — oh, agricultural places." Orlov appeared aghast. "You know I can do anything to you, or to them, whoever they are. Orlov, tell me about Kedrov. Tell me everything. We might even decide to leave you alone — you never know."

"May—" After a long silence, his voice seemed rusty, or grappling with a foreign language. "May I sit down?"

"Where?"

"In — in the kitchen. It's warmer."

"Of course. You can make coffee. Then we'll talk."

Excitement rose in Priabin; anxiety thrust into it like a bout of indigestion. Orlov looked at him with a myopic squint. His nose twitched. The blind mole scenting the air. His cheeks seemed hollow with defeat. Then he said, in a quavering voice, "I don't understand anything you've said, comrade Colonel. Drugs, transmitters— anything."

Priabin sighed, pressing close behind the little old man as they went down the narrow, dusty passage toward the kitchen. His head was cocked to one side, as if listening for the noises of the old man's inward collapse. Impatience. He pressed the heel of routine down on it. No one knew, not yet, only his people. Kedrov was out there somewhere. Orlov would know, would be able to make an informed guess.

When they found the transmitter or its component parts — circuitry, dish aerial, control panel, anything — he would be able to break the old man like a dry stick.

The ice-cold concrete corridor whispered, even after he had stopped walking. His clicking footsteps simply wouldn't stop; they continued, echoing and fading gradually. Yes, silence at last. There was no one behind him except the phantom of his own footsteps, his own fear. He smelled grease, oil, dust. Concrete dust. He touched his hand along the rough wall, seeking the metal conduits that carried the land lines, the firing circuits, the ceiling lights. His ankle ached because he had twisted it — not climbing over the roof, merely slipping in the tunnels leading to this place. He'd stumbled over the rails that had once carried the missiles on their long trolleys along this underground section of the abandoned silo complex.

Kedrov calculated he was seven or eight miles from his flat. It was a frozen, sub-zero morning above ground. It was cold here, too. He was shivering despite his heavy clothing. His hand continued its scrabbling along the icy conduit. He moved his body after his hand, stepping carefully but with the panic that the deep silence had brought. He kept his shoulder, then shoulder and arm, then shoulder, arm, and hip in contact with the wall, shrinking to one side of the long tunnel, the air in front of him alive with the danger of becoming solid, a dead end, at any moment. He had discovered this hideout weeks before, memorized and mapped it. Now memory seemed to fail like a weakening bulb. He rubbed his arm and hip along the wall, step after step.

Switch?

He touched its outlines, the button, hesitated, then threw the heavy switch. It clicked. How could he have simply forgotten the carefully noted locations? Dusty white light seemed to shower like plaster from the roof. There were pools of light on the concrete all the way down to the steel doors that marked the entrance to the silo. Warning signs, the scribbled graffiti of security and danger, littered the walls. Conduits, rails, the scent of concrete dust and dampness. He shivered. It was icy cold down here.

The claustrophobia weakened, fear diminished. He was alone, saw he was alone, sensed he was safe. No one came here, not any longer.

He turned, counting the steel doors that led off the corridor. Four. He wanted the seventh door. He hurried, limping slightly but heedless of the now-innocent rails. Six, seven. The room behind it had not even been stripped when the old silo system had been abandoned for more sophisticated warrens elsewhere within Baikonur. The tunnel had not been used since the early sixties.

He touched the door. Icy. His fingers showed momentarily because, even chilled through, his body was warmer than the door. Then they vanished. He pushed the door open and switched on the long, narrow room's lights. Bulbs set in the ceiling were protected by wire mesh. He saw the familiar rows of bunks, set four high against the walls. Cupboards he had forced open on a previous visit were filled with unrusted cans of food. There was air and running water. But he'd brought supplies of his own, enough to last. The tiny bottled-gas stove and heater, he'd brought that, too. Vodka and beer — some things he'd stored on previous visits against the necessity, the fear, of having to use this place to hide out. Some last refuge — it possessed an old-fashioned appearance, even while it still had a sense of science fiction about it.

He unslung his small haversack and dropped it on the nearest bunk. The place struck him afresh, almost as if men still sat or lay on the bunks and there was a murmur of conversation in the room. The drift of cigarette smoke, the smell of coffee, as they waited to loose their missiles or waited having done so. He rubbed his arms, then rubbed his hands together to warm them. Cold — it was just the cold. He unbuttoned his overcoat and walked up and down the corridorlike room. There was no need, at the moment, to go into the cramped kitchen, check the water purifier or the stove. He had done all that on previous visits, there was no need.

A magazine lay beneath one bunk. He glimpsed old black-and-white photographs; he thought he recognized the face of Kennedy, once American President, peeping from the shadows. He was part of the geological record of the place.

He opened the haversack, then the greaseproof package he removed from it. Bit into the thick sandwich and its sausage filling. It seemed hard to digest, the bread unyielding at the back of his throat. The empty room seemed to murmur with voices again. In a moment, he must go and turn off the corridor lights, just in case. This was a horrid place.

Soon, soon they would know he had disappeared. By now, even. The KGB would question Orlov, the army would be told he had not reported for work, that his flat was empty. The hunt for him would begin. They'd panic — the army would want him, too, because of what he had overheard about Lightning. They'd think it was why he'd panicked — God, it was mad! Those telemetry officers could have killed him on the spot; by now they'd have found out who he was, reported the incident…

… changing the course of history, demonstrating who's really in charge to the Kremlin dodderers… they'd been half-pissed, loud, stupid — having a pee and not realizing he was in one of the cubicles. God, he'd have had to get away from them, even without the KGB following him!

He opened a bottle of beer. It was gassy, mostly foam, as he tilted the neck of the bottle to his lips. But it made the bread easier to swallow, softening it from the half-masticated stone it had become against the roof of his mouth.

Lightning. He giggled with returning confidence, with a growing sense of safety. Nothing to laugh about. He bit off another mouthful of sandwich, swigged more beer. Going down easier; he was beginning to enjoy the food.

He was safe, he told himself. The Americans would come. While the army looked for him and the KGB ran around in ever-decreasing circles, he was safe here. He sighed, a windy little noise in the long, narrow room. The Americans would be here in — oh, what, two days, three? He could hang on that long.

Couldn't he?

He shivered again. The bread stuck in his throat.

"Now, Orlov, where is he?"

Priabin's gloves tapped the kitchen table, slapping into patternless grains the little comet's tail of spilled sugar he had created near the opened packet. Some grains had adhered to the fingers of his gloves, some to the circuit boards and tape reels that lay on the table like accusations. The technical boys had found it after little more than an hour — it wasn't yet ten o'clock — despite the grumbling reluctance of their search, having been summoned directly from their beds into the winter morning of the old town. Orlov had, indeed, disassembled the transmitter into its component parts. The dish aerial they had found under a pile of old, rusting bicycle parts in the backyard of the shop, the high-speed tape reels in a box of tape-recorder spares; the frequency-agile encoder inside a degutted amplifier case; other pieces in speaker enclosures, inside the hollow frames of bicycles. There was enough on the table — never mind elsewhere in the shop — to represent, undeniably, a satellite-using, American-made transmitter and receiver of coded signals.

For the messages of spies; agents-in-place.

"Where is he?" Priabin repeated.

Orlov shook his head, his face hidden in his gnarled hands. He had crumbled rather than broken; each piece and component of the transmitter had been another wave battering at a worn cliff, eroding it Orlov had slid quietly and quickly into total defeat.

"I don't know. He didn't tell me. He called from a phone booth last night — that's all I know." He muttered into his dirty-nailed fingers. Priabin sipped his second cup of coffee and slid his legs out from the table, stretching.

"Don't know or won't say?" he inquired. Zhikin stood, arms folded, at the kitchen door. The others were taking a break at a small, grubby workers' cafe down the street from the shop; another poor, dirty fragment of this run-down district of Tyuratam. Priabin recited, perhaps for the dozenth time, the litany of threats. "Sons, daughters, grandchildren, aunts, nieces, nephews… schools, party, prison, unemployment, hospital — it could all happen." He sighed, as if the subject bored him. Zhikin nodded approvingly at his tone.

Orlov sobbed, almost retching in fear.

"I don't know!" he wailed. "He instructed me to send a final message, that's all I know. That's all."

Priabin snapped: "What did this message contain?"

"I — can't remember—"

"Remember!"

Orlov twitched in his chair. Its legs scraped on the kitchen tiles. His face was white. Priabin nodded at him to speak.

"He — he said he was being followed, that he would go into hiding, until — until they came for him—"

"Came for him?" Zhikin asked in frank disbelief.

Orlov continued to look at Priabin, afraid of the sudden excitement on the KGB colonels features.

'They intend to come for him?" Priabin asked.

"He thought so," Orlov replied.

"How do they intend to — rescue him?" he asked, half mocking.

Orlov shook his head. He shivered continuously now, despite the kitchens damp warmth. The fire in the grate had been banked up by Priabin. It smoked.

"He never said. He believed it, though." His tone implied that neither Orlov nor the colonel would have believed such a blatant lie.

"What else was in this message? You sent all the messages, I suppose?"

Again, Orlov shook his head. "Usually, Filip did so himself. To be secure, he said. Last night, he had to tell me the procedure before I could send the message. It took some time before I understood clearly what to do. He had to repeat the codes many times before I understood."

"The message?"

"He asked them to hurry — something, he said, called Lightning, of the utmost—"

"Lightning Priabin asked eagerly. "He said Lightning?"

"Yes."

"What did he mean?"

"He didn't say."

It was true, Priabin realized with intense, almost childlike disappointment. Kedrov knew. He knew about Lightning.

He had to clear his throat before he could speak. He said: "Then I have to have him. I believe you, Orlov. You must tell me where he is. You must tell me what the Americans know."

"I can't!" Orlov protested. "I would if I knew, I swear to you. He didn't tell me." He blamed Kedrov now — it was all Kedrov's fault, dropping him in the shit up to his eyebrows. Orlov would have told him anything he wished to know at that moment — but he knew so little.

"Do you know where he might be?"

Orlov shook his head, moaning softly to himself, his face once more hidden in his hands. Old, feeble, weak hands. Priabin despised himself for an instant.

"Did he have anything the Americans might still want?"

"I don't know. I did it just for the money," Orlov wailed; the final, complete answer.

"For your favorite charity, of course. Or the family," Zhikin sneered. Again, Orlov did not turn his head.

Priabin said, in a not unkind voice, "The Americans will not bother with him. But he may have travel documents, money, an escape route of his own?"

"I don't know, comrade Colonel, believe me, I don't know. I can only tell you that he seemed sure they could come."

Then he won't be making his own way out, Priabin thought. He's waiting around — to get himself caught, he concluded with a firm, decisive pleasure.

"Viktor," he said, looking up, "take some of the men. Get over to Kedrov's flat and search it. Yes, I know it's been searched. Do it again, and thoroughly."

"Sir." Zhikin nodded, approving Priabin's conduct of the interrogation, and the order he had issued. Priabin felt a momentary resentment of the older man, his subordinate officer. It passed almost at once.

Zhikin left the kitchen. Priabin heard him barking into his walkie-talkie as he clacked down the linoleumed passageway. He heard the shop door slam, its bell jangling wildly like a warning. He felt hot, despite having removed his overcoat. Excitements and tensions jumped in his body like sparks, little muscular tics and spasms through his frame. Fear was present, the sense of danger, of a perilous course ahead of him. He was a frail canoe rushed forward by white water toward rapids, toward a narrow gap between high cliffs. He could easily be wrecked, drowned by events. But if he played quickly, decisively, with nerve, then—

— get Kedrov under lock and key, get Lightning out of him, get, get — out of here, back to Moscow — the conquering hero.

"OK, Orlov, get your coat."

"What?"

"You're coming down to the office. You haven't even started yet."

He looked at his desk, still flecked with drying spots of paint of various colors: a vile green, white naturally, pink, gray — presumably undercoat — yellow. A dot puzzle, in color, which, if the dots were joined, would reveal the features of Filip Kedrov, spy. Priabin sighed. They'd found the rolls of film in the garage, waterproofed and hidden in cans of paint. Quite clever. A few scraps of paper, notes of instruction and record, the camera inside the plastic frog, but hardly anything else.

Orlov had confirmed that Kedrov had delivered nothing to the Americans except his radio messages. No courier had been in the area since the transmitter had been delivered, he was certain of that. So he had expected the Americans to come, he had a photographic record for them. But would they come? Priabin shook his head. It was impossible to believe. What kind of rescue operation could they mount? And Kedrov had pressed the panic button only hours before. No. Kedrov was stranded inside Baikonur. But—

— where?

Priabin looked at the first of the hastily developed films. The prints were still sticky, too glossy, But everything was there. He had been a good agent — a complete photographic record, punctilious and exhaustive, of the last weeks of the laser weapon project. From the weapons arrival at Baikonur from Semipalatinsk, almost. The American espionage effort had been motivated by increasing desperation. Everything had depended on Kedrov.

He put down the prints, rubbing his tacky thumbs against his fingers. He might have to destroy at least some of the films — by the time he came to use them, the army would wonder how long he'd known, why he'd not informed them or acted sooner. Peril. The word rather than the sensation appeared in his head. Yes, perilous. But he sensed now he could win. Progress convinced him — these films, for one thing. He was getting somewhere, and quickly.

If, if he could win now, Rodin and Rodin's father would be powerless against him. Moscow Center would have its prodigal son back with open arms and the fatted calf. He might even be able to press a narcotics charge against young Rodin.

He grinned; swallowed at once as the sense of danger formed a dry lump in his throat. He essayed a laugh. The dog looked up from its position near the radiator, then settled once more, its shaggy red coat looking almost more ruglike than the rug near which it lay. He regarded the dog fondly for a moment, then swung his booted legs onto his desk, unmindful of the still-tacky prints and the spots of drying paint. He lit a cigarette. He'd be back in Moscow, all right, just as soon as he dug up Kedrov. Moscow Center s gratitude for giving the army the shaft, in Baikonur, would be boundless. He could become the youngest general in the service! He'd get Kedrov straight onto a special flight, as soon as he caught him. Yes, he felt confidence now, a new undented confidence. He'd find the son of a bitch, and soon.

Priabin stared absently at the Party photographs on the opposite wall while he luxuriated in his thoughts and the cigarette. Grim, unsmiling faces they might be, but they no longer disapproved of or suspected him. They were faces he had somehow outwitted, like the cleverest but most disliked boy in his class.

So, he thought eventually, stubbing out the remainder of the cigarette, sitting upright at his desk now, why persist with Lightning? At least, why draw attention to it by sending Viktor after Rodin's latest boyfriend, a queer actor? Perhaps he had been foolish there — young Rodin would certainly get to hear about it, might blab to Daddy? Mm. Perhaps it was a mistake; precipitous.

The telephone rang. He snatched it up, as if it might be someone with the authority, the cunning, to scotch his dreams.

"Yes?"

"Viktor, sir."

"Oh, yes, Viktor. What is it? Look, I've changed my mind—

"I'm at the theater, sir." There was an excitement in Zhikin's normally bluff, unmoved voice. "He knows, all right. Says he doesn't know anything except the word, but there's more to it than that."

"LightningP"

"Yes, sir. Lightning. He nearly went berserk when I dropped the word out. He's had something whispered in his ear, all right, and by young Rodin."

"Bring him in, Viktor. Bring him in." Forget your change of mind, Dmitri, he told himself. What a stroke of luck. "He won't be hard to frighten — he's a civilian and a queer!"

"He phoned, sir — caught him ringing someone while he pretended he wanted the bog. I didn't realize they had a phone in there."

"Who did he call? Rodin?"

"He's not saying, but that's my bet."

"OK, charge him now — with sodomy. Get him down here right away. Once he's in here on a criminal charge, Rodin won't be able to get to him. We'll have everything he knows in a couple of shakes."

"Got you, sir — with you in, oh, half an hour. I'll come the roundabout route, just to make sure he's not spotted."

"Good man. When you bring him in, have a real go at him. Play the nice guy. I'll be with our friend Orlov after lunch. I'll join you in your office when I've finished with him."

Priabin put down the telephone. Stretched his legs and inspected his boots. Tiny spots of paint had adhered to their shiny surfaces. He stood up, stretching luxuriously. Danger tingled, but it was only one element in his excitement. The dog stirred at his approach. He soothed it back to sleep, looking fondly at its gray muzzle. Then he returned to his desk.

He began scribbling questions he would press on Orlov — and questions, too, for the little queer after Viktor had played the nice guy with him. He shook his head, smiling. His was the heavy's part. As easy as opening a can of — worms?

"I'm coming with you."

"All the way?" Gant replied, smiling sarcastically.

"Just as far as Peshawar."

"Just to make sure we don't turn around at the border?"

"I do what the man says, Gant, just like you." Anders sighed. "OK, let's move it."

Anders looked at his watch. Midnight. The repairs to the Mil-24A were completed, had been tested. Satisfactory. Forty-eight hours maximum, from now. The mission clock was running. Gant could have Kedrov out and safe by early Wednesday, Washington time. Time? It had to be enough.

He watched Gant pick up a parka and wrap it around himself then he followed him from the room. The TV set was showing cartoons. To Anders, there was little appreciable difference between the dashing cat and mouse and the program that had preceded their antics. Gant had similarly failed to remark the change. Just stared at the screen, hunched within himself, saying little. Anders had left him alone for long periods, hurrying between the hangar and the secure fine to the Oval Office. A heavy weight fell on the cat, which shattered slowly like an old vase. It seemed significant, especially as he followed Gant's retreating form along echoing corridors and out into the chill of the night.

Cold moonlight made the snow-covered hills ghostly around the air base. Light snow flew across the gap of darkness between them and the hangar. The massive bulk of the C-5 Galaxy transport was nose-out from the hangar, its engines still silent.

Anders felt the desert wind cut through his warm clothing. The cartoon image of the shattering cat remained in his mind. Winter Hawk was just as fragile. Even though inches taller than Gant, he seemed to be scuttling after the other man's stride.

They walked beneath the huge port wing and its two Pratt & Whitney turbofans. The wind hurled itself into the hangar and around the fuselage. The place was filled with people, and it dwarfed them, as did the aircraft. He nodded to the engineering officer who had reported completion to him. The gunship had already been stowed in the cargo hold of the Galaxy. He took the portable phone from his parka and began speaking into it even as he climbed the personnel steps aft of the wing, behind Gant.

The door slammed behind them. He spoke to the colonel who captained and flew the transport. "Yes, Colonel," he acknowledged. "You can engine-start. We're in your hands." He switched off the portable phone and thrust it into his clothing.

Almost at once, he heard the first rising whine of the four huge engines. The wind had disappeared. In its place, the noises of activity, the sounds of routine. Twelve-five. The note of the engines rose and strengthened.

The two helicopters sat on pallets near the tail, rotors folded like the wings of great insects. One mechanic was peeling away a stencil card from the flank of the gunship Gant would fly, the 24D, to reveal white numerals. Unit, base, designation, something of the kind. The U.S. Army drab in which the two ships had been painted during training had disappeared, to be replaced by the olive and yellow camouflage of Soviet Aviation Army units on duty in Afghanistan. Below the camouflage, the bellies of the gunships were painted a sharklike gray. Another stencil was peeled away after white paint had puffed from a spray gun. Cyrillic lettering. Warnings, red stars, instructions were all blossoming on the flanks of the two MiLs. Bolted and tied to their pallets, the two machines appeared strange, unknown. Becoming once more the two helicopters he had seen captured in the Lebanese desert.

The scene oppressed Anders with the sense of its fragility. The machines might be almost ready; it was the crews who were not. Gant himself, Mac, his gunner, and the second crew, headed by Garcia. None of them, not even Gant, was ready. There were too many factors in the matrix, like a complicated jigsaw puzzle knocked from a table, the pieces all separated and making no sense.

The cockpits of both MiLs were open. Heads and upper torsos bobbed, appearing and disappearing as the flight systems were checked. Anders had a fleeting impression that the machines were still under construction, unfinished. The on-board computers and moving-map displays were being updated. The main cabin doors, too, were open. Auxiliary tanks had been fitted to both helicopters to increase their range. Only by carrying twice his normal fuel and having the 24A similarly fueled could Gant make the thousand-mile journey from the Pakistan border to Baikonur and retain sufficient resources for the return flight. They would abandon the 24A once they had transferred its fuel to the other gunship, and make the return crowded into the 24D, together with Kedrov — the lost scientist, he added bitterly.

Weapons, too. Disguised or adapted U.S. weapons to complete the MiL's armories. On the short, stubby wings, four rocket pods and four missiles, four-barreled machine guns mounted in each nose. The weapons were real, but their purpose was disguise. It was a charade required for Afghan airspace, a charade played hour after hour — weapons, markings, call signs, IDs, Gant's ability to speak Russian — thin, so thin as to be almost transparent. Later, hour after hour in Soviet airspace… transparent.

Mac and the transport helicopter's crew moved toward Gant and himself. The Galaxy seemed to shrug at a weight of air pressing on it, against the wind, then began to roll out of the hangar. It was as if the cargo hold was suddenly bathed in a greater light, or some charge of static had built up. Everything seemed clearer, skeletal, stark. A long row of fold-down seats lined the bulkhead. Fasten your seatbelts, extinguish your cigarettes—time to go.

Work continued on the two helicopters.

Anders sat down and slipped the belt across his lap. He felt the huge Galaxy turn. Through the window at his side, he saw the maw of the hangar, like a whale's mouth lit from within, retreat into the darkness of the night. Sunday night.

He studied the crews like a diagnostician looking at X-ray plates. Mac was the best of them. Garcia, the second pilot, was good, but no better than good. His copilot was older, wiser, but no better than Garcia. Chameleon Squadron had lost a better pilot two months before, when their only surviving Mil crashed in East Germany. Before the Israelis had been blackmailed into stealing these.

Lane, the copilot, was OK. Kooper, Garcia's gunner, was better. Gant — was Gant; he'd chosen the 24D, Anders knew, because there was no copilot. Just a gunner. And Gant trusted Mac.

The Galaxy turned again. Anders glimpsed runway lights and felt the aircraft pause.

"At least those guys got off their butts!" Garcia exclaimed, sitting down with a nod to Anders, ostentatiously buckling his belt. "Jesus, are we lucky?"

Anders watched Gant's face twitch with mistrust. Anders sensed Gant's dislike of Garcia. The second pilot's tension seemed too febrile, wild; like the reaction of a man who had too heavily mixed his cocktails.

Anders studied the others, then the fold-down table near them, the plugged-in computer terminal, the screen, the rolls of charts and sheafs of photographic prints. Too much, there was still too much to do — thin, thin, transparent, his thoughts chorused.

The Galaxy surged forward. Anders felt tension grip and hold him. He saw Gant staring at him. The man's eyes were blank and yet fierce; alien, somehow.

Men were sitting down hurriedly now, at the sound of a horn through the hold. The MiLs were left alone, vulnerable. The load-master was talking to the flight deck over a telephone link. The show was about the hit the road. For a second, Anders thought of voicing the idea, but Gant's stare disconcerted him. He looked away, at the table. He could distinguish the highest-resolution images of the Baikonur area — one area in particular. A tiny island, kidney-shaped, surrounded by wet salt marshes. Reeds, swirls of shallow water, a white smear in one corner of one picture that might have been water fowl taking off. Could Gant find that at night, with minimal use of the gunship's lamp? That agreed rendezvous?

Be there, Anders thought involuntarily. You Russian son of a bitch, be there!

He felt his body molded to the fold-down seat as the Galaxy lifted away from the runway. Its undercarriage thudded up moments later. He looked at the MiLs.

Banks, glittering shoals, islets, one like an animal curled up, another kidney-shaped. Would they get as far as…? The thought faded.

Be there, he thought firmly. Be there.

The tracked army recovery vehicle was nose down in the river, like a fishing bird. Its powerful crane, mounted over the turret of the converted tank chassis, slowly drew the Zil sedan out of the mud and water. Great broken plates of ice, gray and wallowing like a ship's wreckage, lurched in the space of open water the accident and the recovery operation had created in the frozen river. The water was little more than a soupy dark swirl beneath a clouded sky. The afternoon was already beginning to darken. There was a tiny flurry of sleet in the chill wind, one of Baikonur's very irregular and unexpected snowfalls.

The car's windows and flanks streamed as it was swung over the SKP-5 vehicle toward the shallowly sloping bank, which was churned and printed with caterpillar tracks—

— and the narrower, half-obscured tire prints from the Zil, Priabin thought, shaken into wakefulness by the sight of the car and the knowledge of its passengers and their condition. The somber, chilly scene disturbed him.

When he'd finished with Orlov — the old man knew no more than he had already told, he was convinced of it — he'd stopped for tea in the canteen, then made his way up to Viktor's office. To find that Viktor and the actor had not returned. Three hours after his telephone call. Immediately, he had begun to worry. He sensed danger, even violence. The actor had called someone — Rodin, it had to be. What had happened to Viktor?

Eventually, as if only confirming something he already knew, a police patrol found signs of — an accident, a car had evidently gone into the river… on the route Viktor had said he would take. Yes, yes, I'll come at once. What? The army? To get the car out… very well, you've called in the army…

Holding the Zil aloft like some cup or trophy contested for and won, the SKP-5 ground and chugged its way back out of the water. The disturbed plates of gray ice slid and grumbled together, as if healing the breach in the river. The streaming car hung nose down; something tilted and restrained pressed against what remained of the shattered windshield. Army frogmen, who had attached the crane's cables and hooks to the car after it was located on the riverbed, half buried in the thick ooze, walked out of the freezing water. Other frogmen, in reserve, hurried toward them with tea or coffee and blankets and warm capes and parkas. Their interest in the Zil was minimal now that it was coming ashore.

Priabin blew sleet from his open mouth and pulled the hood of his parka closer around his head. Like a gesture of mourning. Viktor Zhikin's body threatened to loll out of the broken windshield and across the car's hood; it would then slide like an awry tailor's dummy, Ml into the riverbank mud.

He shuddered. The car was carefully set down at the top of the bank; almost a car again, intact for a moment in the poor light. He hurried up the slope, his rubber boots slipping on the churned mud, while police and army crowded gingerly around the wreck. The SKP-5 was uncoupled and chugged away, slithering lizardlike toward the tarmac of the road.

A car had crashed, skidding on the icy surface of the road that ran alongside the river. Two people had, unfortunately, drowned. That's all there was to it, Priabin thought. It was simply a coincidence that the car happened to be driven by his KGB second-in-command. Viktor.

He pushed the others aside, his emotions supported by his rank. People parted. He touched at, then lifted Viktor's head. Water seeped from Viktor's lips and nostrils. Bruising begun and halted by death. Gashes. He touched the face, feeling the embedded glass pricking and cutting his fingertips, his palm. His eyes watered with the cold wind and with the contact of the dead man's cold, wet skin. He snatched his hand away, sniffing. Moved around the car to the passenger door, tugged it open — no damage to the car, no evidence of a collision to drive it off the road, no violent skid marks on the tarmac behind it? — and a second body flopped dutifully and dramatically out of the door like dirty water escaping; to loll lifelessly as a doll, wet hair touching the churned mud at the roadside.

The little actor, Rodin's lover. As expected. Priabin felt an unreasoning hatred well up in him at the cause of Viktor's death. No skid marks? An accident?

Viktor might have died just because this little poof had panicked, tried to grab the wheel perhaps? Viktor might have died that way, but instinct, damn instinct, made him suspect other hands, an arrangement, a plan.

He was aware of the army uniforms that surrounded him, and aware that they outnumbered the KGB uniforms present. Why did he suspect that this was not an accident? Because it had killed Viktor? Was it simply grief getting in the way of reason, like a powerful bully? He stared at the actor's still head. You, he thought, you made a phone call from the theater, you spoke to someone — and then this happened. You'd have been shit-scared, because you were in real trouble and you knew what we wanted to ask you about—Lightning. The logic of the sequence was as tight and aching as a band of cold steel around his temples. He could not remove it. What had he heard? Loose talk because of the cocaine, mock toasts, murmured in-jokes? Enough to know what was meant, what was intended?

Viktor, Viktor, he thought. Why did you let him make that call? He must have called Rodin, yes. Priabin sighed. Coming out from his office, to this spot, driving through the failing afternoon light beneath the low, uncommon cloud cover, he had become convinced there had been no accident; he had been summoned to witness a design, a deliberate thing. Someone had wanted the actor shut up— and they'd shut Viktor up, too.

He felt his chest and throat fill with misery and useless rage. He glanced again at the actor's head near a frozen puddle. The voices of those around him had retreated to desultory murmurs, like those of people attending a funeral. The actor's bald spot was streaked with strands of water-darkened hair. Then he looked across the car at Viktor's graying temples above the scratched, glass-filled cheeks. It would have been so easy — an army patrol to stop the car, quick, decisive blows, a just-as-quick shove to the car, and down the river-bank and into the water… slipping out on the ice, breaking through it, vanishing up to the level of the roof. It must have been like that.

He wiped his eyes and nose. Lit a cigarette, hunching into the folds of his parka to do so. The first exhaled smoke was whisked away by the wind; as insubstantial as any protest, any action he might contemplate. Lightning had killed Viktor, he was certain of it. Rodin had threatened him after his slip of the tongue, and he had been frightened, too. Kedrov had used it as a lever, a bribe, to make the Americans sure to rescue him; the little queer actor had panicked as soon as Lightning was mentioned, panicked enough to make a desperate phone call.

Every mention of it was like spiffing gold; people rushed to retrieve it.

"What?" Priabin snapped, startled back into the cold wind and the enclosing, bare, low hills that hemmed the scene. He glared at Dudin, the senior KGB officer for the town of Tyuratam. The man's expression was still shocked, but in a less personal way than Priabin knew must be true of his own features.

"I said, sir" — Dudin was careful with the occasion and Priabin's rank; Captain Dudin—"can I get the bodies loaded aboard the wagon now? Or do you want Forensic to inspect the car with — while they're still in place?" Dudin shuffled his feet, blew on his gloved hands.

"Let — get Forensic to examine the car first," Priabin said carefully, aware of each syllable, weighing its unhurried, neutral tone. Why? Give nothing away, he answered himself. The numbers of army parkas and overcoats seemed to press toward him like a hostile crowd. Rifles — holsters — guns. Instinct outran logical deduction, but he moved with the certainty of a strong swimmer in calm, familiar waters. "Yes," he repeated, "Forensic first."

The approaching car was moving fast, and its engine noise distracted him. Made him flinch, seeing the crashed, soaking Zil in front of him, as if he heard the accident happening in his head. He turned. Coming from the direction of the main complex, not from Tyuratam. A German car, silver-gray. A small, quick sedan, a BMW. He knew it had to be Rodin's car, the general's wealthy, privileged son's shiny toy. Yes.

Rodin, capless, got out of the car and hurried toward the wreck. His fine, thin hair was immediately disarrayed about his head. He pushed blindly past Dudin, then his eyes met Priabin's with a wild look. He seemed unnerved by the stare of the KGB colonel. Carefully, as if pointing, Priabin lowered his gaze, drawing Rodin's anxious, frightened eyes after it.

To the bald spot, the lank strips of hair like drying leather thonging the stained, soaked yellow sweater. Rodin sobbed chokingly, just once. He did not look up, though he appeared to wish not to look at the dead actor. Did not wish to touch, kneel beside, stare into the dead eyes of—

— wanted not to be there, Priabin concluded. Yet aware of what he would find even before he saw it. He had not dared to hope for anything better than this. Priabin felt himself embarrassed, as if he had intruded upon a scene of private mourning. Eventually, Rodin looked up, still kneeling.

They understood each other entirely as their eyes met. Priabin's gaze waited for the young man like a statement of arrest. The KGB officer even nodded, half-consciously, confirming what he had learned, what had been confirmed for him. Rodin looked aside, his cheeks blanched, his eyes wet and shameful.

He called you, Priabin recited silently. He sensed Rodin gathering his story together like wisps of material to be woven. But you panicked, too, you told others. It was dangerous, but then you had no choice. You knew what you'd done, what you'd find here. He called you, and you set the dogs on him and Viktor, my friend.

Because of Lightning.

Slowly, now…

Rodin's face was bleak as he turned once more to Priabin, his hps primed with their cover story. Seeing the young man's obvious fear chilled Priabin. Ahead of him, something like — he glanced involuntarily at Zhikin's dead face — something like that, unless he was careful, so careful. They'd killed now, the barriers had come down, the cage had been left open.

And their panic was evident, too.

Care, care… Priabin stared over Rodin's blowing hair, even as the young man began his halting, unconvincing story. The low, surrounding hills were closer in the gathering twilight. Sleet blew spasmodically. He was cold. Tracks down to the river, a mud-stained car. He was alone, even though Dudin's bulky frame was close behind Rodin. He must keep his head down, he told himself; attract no suspicion.

Viktor-

Begin an act, then. Begin to dissemble even while you're listening to this nasty, murderous little creep. Act a part. Tell them nothing about Kedrov, just find him before they do. He knows about Lightning. When I know, Viktor, I'll have them.

He couldn't tell anyone, not yet, not until he had Kedrov. Then, oh, then, he could present Moscow Center with Zhikin's murderers — the fucking army! He'd screw them into the bloody floor before he'd finished with them, present them on a plate to the Politburo, to the Chairman.

I promise you, Viktor, I promise.

So play-act.

He sketched on his features a dim attentiveness that was without the least suspicion, as Rodin's story tumbled out. He shivered. Hodin, recovered for the moment, was explaining how he had heard, wondered if the accident had anything to do with… Sacha had been arrested, he'd been told…

Zhikin's body was being lifted gently upright in the driver's seat, being fed slowly back through the broken windshield by one of the Forensic officers. The man handled the body carefully, almost reverently. But the head flopped grotesquely on its broken neck, filling Priabin's throat with bile.

4: Dropping Zone

General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin of the Strategic Rocket Forces, deputy commandant of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, lay awake and stared at the ceiling of his bedroom. The shadows up there, in the corner, were warm and brown, not dark; they mirrored both his satisfaction and his concern. Lightning—and his son; the defense minister s pleasure and congratulations at progress, and his son's appearance at the scene of the accident that had killed that— actor.

The shadows darkened and lightened, as if catching his mood as it varied.

The television broadcast had been amusing — for the most part. The old buffoon Nikitin had appeared against a backdrop of the Kremlin and a frozen river Moskva, Calvin the American President against a snowbound Washington projected behind him. They had danced their mincing, polite dance, the deceived and the deceiver; a farce. Calvin, as predicted, had had to pledge himself to appear in Geneva more than a week earlier than he had expected — all that had been satisfactory, most pleasing. Rodin had been able to laugh at both statesmen equally. Nikitin, doing only what the army wished, though he did not know it, thought he was in the driver s seat. Calvin would not risk the opprobrium of world opinion by being seen to hesitate now. The final touch to the canvas of the launch of the shuttle on Thursday and its rendezvous with the American craft in orbit was pure comedy. Nikitin thought that a good idea, too, the idiot.

The broadcast had ended with a flurry of despicable images. Satellites being deployed, SS-20s and cruise missiles being withdrawn, silos being emptied of ICBMs, barbed wire being rolled up, tanks going into mothballs — the music of Beethoven accompanying the lurid betrayals. That last couple of minutes had distressed and angered him. Even Zaitsev's call from Moscow had not sufficed to restore his confidence and good humor. Zaitsev, the defense minister and leader of the pro-army faction on the Politburo, had dismissed Rodin's anger as futile. The withdrawals voorit be happening, will they? he had assured. Why be angry, then, with the fiction?

Nevertheless, it was easier for Zaitsev to be dismissive, at Stavka — general staff — headquarters or the ministry, than it was to feel lighthearted at such rubbish here in Baikonur. The images of, of — surrender had ruffled his good humor. After a few large whiskeys he had retreated to his bed. And slowly, his confident mood had returned.

Only the thought of his son, Valery, disturbed his calm now. He studied the darker shadows on the ceiling. An old cobweb hung there, drifting back and forth in the heat rising from the lamp. Rodin distracted himself from his son by allowing the images of the broadcast to return. And Nikitin's voice and other voices seeped into his mind, to be met with a frozen, confident contempt.

We cant afford your toys any longer! That had been one of Nikitin's outbursts at a Politburo meeting, so Zaitsev assured the general staff. We must have this treaty with the Americans before we are bankrupted by you and your games! The army must pay the grocery bill!

My God.

They had laughed, he and his cronies. It had taken almost a year to persuade the Politburo to keep Linchpin, the laser weapon project. And to keep it secret and outside the terms of the damn treaty. A small victory in the middle of the army's defeat by the politicians.

Rodin felt his temperature rising, but did not quell his emotions. They visited him now like the familiar twinges of old age; known and tolerable. And they strengthened his resolve. Lightning would change everything. By Friday, the world would be different. The Nikitin faction on the Politburo would be subservient once more. The treaty would be — worthless to the Americans.

Peasant women bewailing another bad harvest… corruption throughout the civil service… always the same wailing cries of the inefficient and incompetent—we cant afford you. We want to sell you out, sell our country out.

'Hie bedside telephone rang, startling him. His recriminations had been as leisurely as a reverie. He sat up in bed, the shadows in the comer of the ceiling now without meaning. The clock on the bedside table showed it to be almost midnight.

"Rodin. Yes?"

"Comrade General — Serov here. Have I disturbed you?"

Serov. GRU commandant.

"What is it, Serov?" Why did he always react to Serov's voice or presence with a certain hostility? He shook his head.

"Sir — General, it's a delicate matter…"

Serov was being uncharacteristically sensitive and hesitant.

"Is it Lightning?" Rodin asked, too quickly. He almost hoped that it was. Lightning was not a delicate matter, merely crucial. Something prickled in his chest like a warning of illness.

"No, comrade General, it's your son," Serov announced, his adopted tact no longer present. His habitual sneering calm had reasserted itself. Rodin felt his own hostility rising.

"Valery? Lieutenant Rodin?" he corrected himself. "What about him?" He wanted to ask, what is wrong, what has happened? And surprised himself with such a wish. Something chilly seemed to wrap itself around his heart like a cold scarf. "What about my son?" Control of his voice was an effort.

On the ceiling, the shadows were larger. The central heating seemed to have switched itself off

"I — General, I have considered this matter very carefully. I suggest that your son should be sent on leave, perhaps even to Moscow, for the present. Perhaps a two-week furlough?" Serov's manner seemed incapable of retaining deference for much longer. The bully in him was always close to the surface.

"You call me at midnight to tell me that?" Rodin blurted in reply. "To suggest he go on leave?" Genuine irritation had been recovered; he felt more in control of himself.

"I — apologize, comrade General. It's taken me a lot of time to come to this conclusion, but now that I have, I think my advice should be acted on as soon as possible."

"Why?" His voice was too quick, too high.

"Sir, I arranged that accident to — plug a leak. It did not have to involve your son." What was Serov hinting at? What had Valery done? He felt hot once more, his heart stone-heavy in his chest. He was angry with his son; Valery had again caused him trouble, embarrassment, that was more than obvious; but because it was Serov, there was that edge of fear, too. "Unfortunately, it required the immediate removal of the actor—"

"Well?" Rodin almost shouted, ashamed of his rising fear.

"Unfortunately, after coming to us and cooperating with us, your son has managed to interest the KGB commandant, Priabin, in the matter, and in himself. The accident has become a suspicious circumstance in Priabin's eyes, one in which your son is—"

"My son was not involved!" Rodin shouted. His free hand trembled, plucking at the comforter. His reactions confused him. They were muddied, stirred up like a pool by Serov's words. He tried to analyze his emotions, but was unpracticed.

He looked at the photograph on his bedside table, ornately framed in silver. A snowbound Moscow park, a handsome young woman in a tailored suit exposed by her open fur coat, fur boots on her feet, but a fashionable felt hat rather than one of fur on her dark hair. A pram, and a child in it. He had taken that snapshot himself. Had Valery been a disappointment to him since then? No, no, only when he had begun to grow, attended school, was too much and too long under his mothers influence…

He regained control, and snapped: "Get to the point, Serov. Are you suggesting my son has been insecure?"

"The word I would choose is — indiscreet, comrade General."

"Then?"

"Your son has interested the KGB. I would rather they did not talk to him."

"You attracted the KGB's attention by staging that accident."

"We had to kill the actor, a queer — your son's friend. He knew too much and he was being asked about Lightning by the KGB. Does that satisfy you?"

"Serov, you're impertinent — insubordinate." Rodin began to feel breathless. He pressed his free hand on his chest, hard. And calmed himself. Valery's actor friend — the words hurt like a physical pain. Valery blabbing to his circle about Lightning:, Serov prepared to kill to keep the matter secure… kill.

"General, I apologize. It was my professional anxiety." The voice did not soothe, but seemed confidently silky with threat. To Valery? The man would not dare.

"Yes, Serov, yes." His voice was high.

"The accident was designed to stop the leak. To warn others."

"Yes."

"Your son must go on leave." Rodin felt himself led along a dark path, his guide a creature determined to rob him. "If he is not here, then all the gaps will be stopped up. There will be no further leaks."

"But you say my son told — the actor?" He was floundering now, he realized. Serov had assumed control of the conversation. His own authority seemed to have vanished. "Everything?"

"Oh, nothing of the detail, General, we're sure of that. After all, he doesn't know very much, does he?"

"Of course not." He felt his son's safety, and his villainy, working deeper and deeper into him.

"General?"

"I–I will speak to my son in the morning," he managed to say.

"I recommend—"

"I will speak to him in the morning!" Rodin bellowed in an irate voice, thrusting the receiver back onto its rest.

Dmitri Priabin yawned and rubbed his cheeks, then replaced his hands on the steering wheel. He was tired from lack of sleep after the emotions he had endured. He could not fend off those glimpses of the past hours that flickered in his imagination. Zhikin's wife, in particular. He had watched her staring at him as her face crumbled into grief and she began crying in a way that seemed to make her ache. Ugly, mouth open, eyes blind, twisting her apron.

The children had been taken by a neighbor. He'd seen to that before breaking the news of Viktor's death. After a while, she seemed to have forgotten his very presence, as if tied to her chair in a stiff, unmoving posture; staring into a storm that made her eyes stream.

Eventually, he had left her, patting her hand, mumbling justice, revenge, which she heard as little of as she had his earlier sympathy. He'd told her nothing of his suspicions — knowledge, he corrected himself — but he'd wanted her to know something would happen, something would be done to balance things. Then his flat, and sleeplessness; crowding fears, dim futures. The dangerous path — he knew about Rodin and the little actor. Rodin knew he knew. An ugly, dark standoff.

But he had to go on with it.

He opened the car door. Morning leaking into the sky. The wind chilled through him at once. He crossed the yard at the rear of the KGB's Tyuratam building toward the central garage. Rodin's narrow, somehow naked features were vivid in his mind, tempting and threatening, as he bent his face away from the wind and hunched into his overcoat. Would he have told his father? What did the GRU know, how much had he told them about his conversation, his slip of the tongue, in Priabin's office?

Rodin knew. He cleared his throat with what might have been a growl. Concentrate on that, not your own skin, he told himself. Remember they killed Viktor — whatever else, they did that.

He banged open the judas door of the garage, startling one of the mechanics.

"Well?" he snapped. They'd been working on the Zil all night, presumably. His jaw worked, masticating emotion like hot food. Revenge? No, just making things come out right. "Well, Gorbalev?" he snapped, more impatiently, catching sight of one of the forensic officers leaning out of the driver's seat of the wrecked car as it rested on a hydraulic ramp in the center of the untidy, oil-stained floor of the garage. "Anything? How did they arrange it?"

Gorbalev seemed to study Priabin for a moment, then he climbed slowly out of the car, his long legs seeming to hamper his movements, as if the dimensions of the Zil were those of a child's kiddie car.

"Colonel," he greeted Priabin, who was still posed in the doorway, the cold flowing in behind him. "There's nothing on the car," he added. "Sorry."

"Nothing?" His voice turned at once from disappointment to temper. "What the hell—?"

"We've been thorough. Everyone has," Gorbalev replied evenly, adjusting his glasses, taller by several inches than Priabin. "There's nothing here. But, come upstairs — Zhikin's body." He appeared almost ashamed. Priabin looked at the car, glaring at its stained, dented hood and empty windshield. Through that—

He shuddered and followed Gorbalev out of the garage, along green-painted corridors, through frosted glass doors into the main building. To the first floor.

Viktor's body, lying on a table. He winced in anticipation, but there had not yet been a full postmortem. The scarred, hair-covered upper torso had not been cut, damaged by the pathologist. Zhikin's grimly blank face had been cleaned of glass. The smell of carbolic soap and disinfectant might have been emitted by the gray skin of the corpse.

"Here," Gorbalev said, pulling the covering green rubber sheet back from the lower part of the body.

Flat stomach, black hair massed around the limp penis, new and old marks on the thighs and shins. Blue stains, like old ink at the knee and ankle of the right leg. An arm was damaged, too, the bone breaking through the gray skin just where the faint line of an old suntan ringed the upper arm. Above the right knee, there was a red welt, indented with what might have been heavy finger marks. On impact, the steering wheel had impressed itself heavily into the flesh.

"What?" Priabin mumbled, suddenly disoriented, frightened by the body and its distance and lifelessness.

"Ignore the arm. Knee and shin and ankle. All those breaks and wrenches and twists could have been caused by the crash or…" Priabin looked at him but said nothing. Viktor Zhikin was too much like Anna like this, the scene too much like that scene, when he had been summoned to formally identify her body. Zhikin's body was too real, too heavy, like hers had been. Solidly dead. Gorbalev continued: "I think his leg was broken in these places and wrenched out of shape, just to keep the accelerator of the car jammed down hard. The thigh could have been wedged under the steering wheel, explaining the mark above the knee."

Priabin looked up from the bruises and from his memories. He was puzzled, but anger was beginning even before he understood the reason for it.

He looked wildly at Gorbalev, then blurted out: "Before or after he was dead?" It seemed essential that he know.

Gorbalev took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief; waited for the question to go away, or to make sense.

"I — before," he said eventually, unnerved by Priabin's damp-eyed, bright stare. Priabin sensed himself staring into the same storm that Zhikin's wife had endured. Revenge, now — oh, yes.

"It was done deliberately. They did it." He stared at Zhikins face, which was empty, blank, asked nothing of him; yet weighed on him with an intolerable but unavoidable burden. It was easier to feel enraged by the twisted limb than by that dead face.

Zhikin's face, his wife's face, Anna's face — all the same; distinct but communal. Fellow victims.

"OK. Keep quiet about this. Your report is to say nothing, except that you're satisfied it was an accident. Understand?"

Evidently, the forensic officer was mystified, but he nodded.

"I understand, Colonel."

Priabin's fist closed on Gorbalev's lapel. He jutted his face close to that of the other man. "No, you don't understand. Just do as I tell you. Your report describes those injuries as being entirely consistent with the accident. The car reveals nothing to account for the crash Zhikin" — he looked at the body, as if he were engaged in its betrayal; not for long, he fervently promised—"must have blacked out or swerved to avoid something or simply lost control. He made a fatal mistake. Understand? There are no suspicious circumstances— none!"

He glanced, once more, at Viktor Zhikin s body, saw the ink-stained knee and ankle, the twisted shape of the whole leg, and sensed the hands that had done it, breaking the bones with a rifle butt, or even a sledgehammer. Zhikin had still been alive when—

— hopefully unconscious when they began. With time and care, they could have wedged his foot and ankle without damage. They'd hurried it, taking the violent shortcut — and they'd probably wanted to. Twiglike snaps greeted with laughter, the handling of a living human form like a child's rubber doll, bending and breaking the pipe-cleaner skeleton within the flesh and muscle. Priabin felt sick. The damage was as much a warning as the drowning, as the actor's death.

Keep out. Restricted area, under military control. Keep out. Stay away if you know what's good for you.

Priabin prayed, once more, that Viktor had been unconscious when they began breaking him.

"He was still—?" he faltered, releasing Gorbalev's lapel. He smoothed the jacket's material absently. Gorbalev, polishing his glasses with haste and concentration, nodded.

"Alive? Yes. Water in his lungs. He wasn't dead when he entered the water. Probably unconscious, though. He was hit on the back of the—"

Priabin heard no more, slamming the door of the small, bare, harshly lit room behind him and cutting off the noise of Gorbalev's voice. His chest felt tight, his throat full. He shook with the irrepressible desire to kill someone.

Colonel Gennadi Serov of Soviet military intelligence, commandant of military security for the Baikonur area, watched the screen of his television set with a withering contempt. He had not turned up the volume. The puppets appeared more wooden, more meaningless without their words, without commentary. Bobbing, smirking heads posed in front of backdrops of Moscow and Washington. Both of them in darkness, the American capital slipping into night. the Moscow backdrop bright, jeweled with lamps. Two heads without authority. Calvin the American puppet and their own dolt, Nikitin. It was another of the endless repeats of the broadcast that Moscow television was transmitting to the entire Soviet Union, the whole of the Warsaw Pact, no doubt, just to make certain. There they were, the fools, grinning their little pact at one another; one of them relieved, the other defeated, he reminded himself. Which only made them all the more contemptible.

That fool Rodin, he thought.

Lightning.

Doubtless the father had talked to the son and then the son had whispered everything into the shell-like ear of the queer little actor. The whole matter angered Serov; it was almost an abstract emotion, tinged with his habitual disappointment regarding other people.

He stood with his back to the room, close to the television set. His hands were in the pockets of his uniform trousers, his jacket was unbuttoned; he wore a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, a Russian cigarette with a cardboard tube. The strong, acrid smoke surrounded him. He stood, hunch-shouldered, staring at the two voiceless faces on the screen, as if menacing them. Then, weary of them, he switched off the set. Thursday. It was to be Thursday. Calvin was so sensitive to world opinion at that moment he had been forced to agree to the signing. He was powerless against the wave of events. The launch would take place on Thursday, to coincide exactly with the signing of the miserable treaty. The real secret would come on Friday, with—

— Lightning.

And because of Rodins sodomite offspring, and this, this thing now sitting on the other side of Serov's desk, quaking in its highly polished boots because a pal had dropped him in the shit up to his neck. Because of people like that, Lightning had been threatened.

Serov glared at the army captain, who visibly blanched. Serov enjoyed the reaction; enjoyed, too, the captain's presence. His own efficiency, his personal stock, would emerge well from dealing with this — and from making Rodin toe the line over his son. Yes, if he could manage things with a certain deftness, then he would profit.

The captain's collar was crumpled and his tie was askew. With heavy, malicious humor, Serov thought it looked like the beginnings of an attempt to hang himself. The captain had opened a Pandora's box; Serov had to find the lid and replace it. He did not doubt that he could.

The captain had been the direct cause of the flight of the computer technician, Kedrov. The man had disappeared after overhearing this buffoon's loose talk — in a lavatory, for Christ's sake.

An evening of boozing, a big mouth, the simple inability to realize he and his pal were not alone. The man wasn't just disappointing, he was a disaster. Serov deliberately leaned one fist on his desk; the other rested on his hip. The pose suggested either might strike at any moment. The captain, gratifyingly, shook visibly.

Serov began. "You're a senior telemetry officer in the main mission control room, your security clearance is high — so high that you were placed in possession of certain most secret information in order that your computations would remain valid — you are experienced, you have been in your present post for five years — and you open your mouth in the lavatory, Captain?" The voice, the long sentence and its subordinate clauses had been orchestrated to reach a climax accompanied by the banging of his fist on the desk. The captain's tall, slim frame — apparently he was something of a wow with the women — obligingly twitched in response, jumping like Serov's paperweight carved in the form of a tortoise.

"I–I—" The captain tried to protest, his mouth and vocal chords captive in the surroundings of the office, imprisoned by his sense of Serov's boundless authority in police matters.

"Shut up!" Serov raged. "This miserable little computer operator, a civilian into the bargain, has disappeared. He is the man you saw in the club toilet?" He held up a clear, sharp color print of Kedrov's head and shoulders, thrusting it at the captain like a weapon. The captain rubbed his arms as if cold. His hands were near the shoulder flashes that denoted his membership of the Strategic Rocket Forces, the elite. Not for much longer, Serov promised. It would be the Far East, if he wasn't shot. Or perhaps military adviser somewhere in Africa, deep in the bush with the niggers, the fuzzy-wuzzies. "Is it him?" he bellowed. The captain twitched again. "Is it?"

"Yes, comrade Colonel, it is him," the captain blurted out.

It appeared, with this little turd's confession, that Kedrov had panicked, fearing he had heard too much for his own good — but he was running around somewhere with knowledge of Lightning.

"You will no doubt be dumbfounded to learn that this man is not at his work, not in his flat with influenza, with a woman or walking his dog — in fact, he is nowhere to be found!" Serov bellowed, amused by the evident terror his words inspired. Mentally, he was ruefully cynical, detached. Guilt was, of course, a hideous weapon. The captain was already, in his imagination, packing for the Siberian Military District and stitching lieutenant's shoulder boards on his uniform.

Yes, Serov thought, 111 see to everything on your behalf. Afghanistan for you, sonny. There you'll either be filling your trousers from sheer, unadulterated terror, or your stomach with booze or your head with hashish or your arm with heroin. One of them will see you off and save the price of a bullet in the nape of the neck.

"He's gone, flown, disappeared," he continued aloud. "And all because you frightened him off. He overheard you, saw the look on your face when you discovered him, and took off for the hills." He flicked his intercom switch as violently as if striking the captain, and barked into the machine. "I want some rubbish cleared out of my office — now!"

The captain's mouth opened silently. Two officers appeared at the door of the office, their smiles masked by urgency. Serov nodded, and the captain was unceremoniously snatched from his chair and bundled out of the office, the door slamming behind him and his escort. Serov gazed at the empty chair, askew but not overturned. The smell of the captain's fear was fading in the warm room. The radiator grumbled.

He suppressed a small sigh that threatened to become a yawn. He had been awake most of the night. Yet he could not regret the interruptions. He'd diminished Rodin and terrified the captain. Especially that. He could not but be pleased, as he always was, when they understood you held their very lives in your hand. He could never resist that.

Hands clasped together behind his back, he crossed to a huge map of Baikonur framed and mounted on one wall. By now, those two young men of his would be kicking the captain — literally kicking him black and blue — downstairs to the cells. It did not matter.

Now, where—?

He studied the map, his eyes ranging over it like the passage of a surveillance helicopter. Kedrov, running scared, had twenty-four hours' or more start on the search for him. But he was a civilian, he did not know the place as Serov did, as the GRU did. He must be found. He wouldn't talk unless he was caught, but the KGB — Priabin himself — was interested in him. Black-market goods. Serov tossed his head in contemptuous dismissal. Stupid, petty, but Priabin had been intrigued by the mention of Lightning—stupid little sodomite, Rodin's son. Priabin must not be allowed to learn any more, otherwise he might be just upright enough not to keep his own counsel but inform Moscow Center.

And all because of Lightning. Two people had already had to die. Not that he regretted the acts, only the loose ends they left. Then he had awakened yesterday to find Lightning lying around like a whore's telephone number. And that silly little bastard, Rodin, had been there, on the riverbank, staring all his knowledge into Priabin's face.

Would the death of Priabin's man, Zhikin, keep the KGB's heads down? he wondered, rubbing his chin, hearing the stubble rasp. It should do; Priabin wasn't a fool, and he'd never looked for trouble. He'd guess what was at stake — his own safety — and that should keep him in order.

Never mind Priabin at the moment. Kedrov was the first priority.

Serov's heavy, thick-fingered hand touched across the map's surface, sweeping in vague, narrowing circles at first, then rippling outward again into the villages, dormitory towns, forest, and countryside beyond the main cosmodrome. It was a difficult, perhaps impossible task in the time available. Leninsk-Kuznetskiy, the science city, Tyuratam, the old town — buildings, streets, acres of forest and marsh.

Where?

Where Kedrov was depended on how frightened he was of being found. Time to begin, then. Get the teams assembled. Start with the man's every known associate, every known contact.

Serov crossed with a swift, assured urgency toward the intercom, his forefinger extended to its switch even before he reached his desk.

The mission had been halted, as certainly as if the Galaxy had struck against some brick wall of air and broken up. Gant's imagination mocked him with images of the simulator tapes he had been watching, as if they represented a prize utterly out of his reach; mocked him, too, with memories of the Saudi Arabian desert over which they had flown, the endless sand stretching away like dusty concrete. Its emptiness, apart from the flares of gas burning off from rigs dotted in the landscape like isolated campfires, was a powerful analogy of his situation.

The Galaxy's tanks were awash with fuel. At Zaragoza Air Base in

Spain, they had taken aboard enough to make Peshawar in northern Pakistan without landing anywhere, with only one midair refueling, over the eastern Mediterranean. Now they could use only what little remained in the rapidly draining inboard tanks in the wings. The transport's captain was explaining, slowly and clearly as if lecturing trainee MAC pilots.

The Galaxy had looped well to the south of its most direct route, out across the Arabian Sea after crossing the interior of Saudi Arabia and the Omani coast, in order to avoid Iraqi and Iranian aircraft and the unlooked-for hazards of the Gulf conflict. Now it had already altered course to begin its long northward run to the coast of southern Pakistan, heading for Peshawar and the Afghan border. Langley had obtained permission for a landing only in Peshawar; the MiLs were to take off in darkness that evening, Tuesday evening. Gant looked at his adjusted watch. Local time, ten-fifteen in the morning. Tuesday morning—

— pointless anger against the sense of time passing; escaping. It had already run out, disappeared as fast as water might have in that expanse of gray sand that was Saudi Arabia. The green-blue of the Arabian Sea appeared illusory, misted and pearled as it was by the altitude.

Only too real. The Galaxy would have to ditch on that water, and soon. And yet it had enough fuel on board to take them another twelve hundred miles.

Complete failure itched in his muscles, knotted in his stomach. Because of a routine check. Just because of that — a handful of caption lights on the main instrument panel, and the flight crew had immediately seen the enormity and proximity of the problem they had uncovered. With every passing second, the four huge Pratt & Whitney turbofans were devouring what little fuel remained available to them.

The port side had indicated an imbalance; the fuel was simply not feeding from the outer to the inner tanks en route to the engines. It might be caused by an electrical failure, a closed and jammed valve, a clogging of the suction/relief valves, a fault in the balance controls of the booster pumps. Manual, auto, off — the fuel would not flow, not even with the attempted use of gravity feed. The problem was esoteric; its consequences were all too real. The Galaxy was tiring like a weakened, exhausted bird; it would fall out of the sky just as certainly. The mission was dead.

… point of no return in three minutes," Gant heard the pilot in charge drawl in his slow, apparently unruffled Carolina tones. Lecturing to trainees. He felt his disorientation swept aside, as if he had snapped to sudden wakefulness. Point of no return? He had known that, of course, but the words themselves had a douching, cold-water effect. The green-blue beneath seemed nearer now, like a destination. "We can't make it back to Oman, or Saudi Arabia, and even Karachi is on the wrong side of marginal — where, sir?" Anders was being addressed as mission controller. "We don't have landing permission for Karachi, anyhow," the pilot added superfluously.

"You're — you are certain of all this?" Anders asked reluctantly, the headset clutched against his cheek like a bandage on a wound.

Gant stood opposite him, body slightly hunched into a tense silence, hands formed into loose fists, as if to ward off the situation. Between them, near the window, a scattering of half-unfolded maps lay on the floor and a moving-map display screen and its linked computer trailed a lead away somewhere across the huge hold to a power source. Various cassettelike cartridges waited to be inserted into the display. Maps of the countries surrounding them, all too distant.

"Sir, it's all been triple-checked. Acting on all our options together to conserve what fuel we have, we can't offer any guarantee to any destination, not even to Iran — and I guess you wouldn't want to take our cargo there?"

"Is there nothing—?"

"We're going to have to send out a Mayday and ditch in the sea. I'm sorry, Mr. Anders, but that's the bottom line. We're fresh out of options."

Gant watched Anders' face as the man avoided his gaze. His cheeks appeared bloodless. His eyes moved rapidly from side to side, as if he were dreaming. Among the maps, the console, the small port windows, he found no solution. Only the waiting, pearly sea below them, still as a pond. Gant took the headset from almost unresisting fingers, and snapped into it: "There's no way, skipper?"

"In-flight — is that you, Gant?"

"Yes."

"Then you already know the answer. We can't diagnose and repair a fault in the cross-feed system up here." The careful, almost sensitive politeness the pilot had shown toward Anders did not, evidently, apply to Gant, a subordinate officer. His tone was hard, certain, his own numb anger showing through it.

"OK, OK," Gant replied with controlled vitriol. Condemning the man for possessing no solutions.

"Look, Gant, we're all disappointed."

"Disappointed?" he replied scornfully. "We're not going to a fancy-dress party and you haven't torn a hole in your Robin Hood tights! Another tanker?"

"To fill up the tanks we can use? I've asked, dammit! Nothing could reach us before we fall in the water."

"Can you land anywhere?"

Anders was watching Gant with a kind of stunned admiration, a beaten fighter eyeing his opponent, wondering at the degree of energy, rage, and skill that had combined against him.

Gant's mind whirled out ahead of conscious thought, like a rope thrown across a chasm. The water already seemed much nearer. Around him, the hold seemed to enclose him firmly; a trap now, no longer the thin shell that kept them from the numbingly cold air outside. The sea, cleared of its pearly wash, glittered. There was no land in sight, not even the yellowy smudge of a beach, a small atoll, a sandbar. The cargo hold was the clinging interior of a Venus-flytrap.

He shook the image away. Anders' face was pale, his eyes staring through one of the windows, downward. Mac, Garcia, and the others formed a loose, silent group watching him and Anders. They'd heard, but now, after their initial babble of surprise and nerves, they were silent. Waiting.

His hands clenched more tightly. He waggled the headset's jack plug as if it might be a weapon. His body felt hot with frustration.

"There's nothing," Anders murmured. "It's fucked, Gant, completely fucked up." His fist banged the bulkhead, which boomed flatly. Then he was quiet once more.

Despite the illusion of the sea nearing, the Galaxy was climbing slowly, conserving its remaining fuel at the highest effective altitude. Pointlessly. It might as well already be falling. They would ditch in the sea, lose the MiLs, and Winter Hawk would be kaput, finished, canceled because some circuits, valves, pumps, even a single switch, had malfunctioned. One tiny fucking switch.

Gant turned to the window. Far to the north of the Galaxy lay a strip of smudgy yellow-brown. Land, but no landfall. The narrow, hardly inhabited coast of southern Pakistan. No runways, no airfields, no flatness of sufficient area; they'd already looked at the maps. Nothing. The coast taunted him with its inaccessibility. The sky was empty and clean, stretching upward and becoming purple and seemingly infinite — all that sky, with the Galaxy hanging on it as on a cliff edge of air, about to loosen its grip and fall. Two specks of dirt on the Plexiglas seemed to hang in the sky. He rubbed at them. For a moment, they had seemed like other, smaller aircraft, drifting away from the Galaxy—

"A beach!" he shouted. He was looking at the MiLs, all neatly palletized for easier loading and storage. Anders seemed startled, and the others turned toward him as if expecting an announcement, or a reprieve. "A beach!"

He stared down the length of the huge hold. The MiLs rested on large pallets, rotors folded and locked along each fuselage. The railway for the pallets ran the length of the Galaxy, to allow straight-through loading and unloading, to save time. On a third pallet, closest to the tail, there were drums containing their fuel load and reserve. All ready to be off-loaded under cover of evening darkness in Peshawar, a thousand miles away.

"A beach." He plugged in the headset at the nearest jack point. "Skipper — skipper, could you make Karachi empty — and I mean empty?"

"Empty?"

"Without your cargo, man!" Silence. "Well?"

He heard the pilot consult his flight engineer, but caught only the silence and not the sense of the mumbled reply. The pilot was angry when he spoke.

"We can't tell if the engines will flame out at the end of a landing roll, or maybe the fuel will run out three hundred feet in the air and half a mile from touchdown, or flameout might happen twenty miles out and five thousand feet in the air — how can I tell you, Major?"

Gant bared his teeth and snapped: "I take priority, skipper." His tone grated like sandpaper. 'The mission takes priority over everything else — the cargo. Interrogate the flight management system and find out if by trading off fifty thousand pounds of cargo against higher fuel consumption at a low altitude, you come out in credit." He added, with a glint of malice in his eyes: "What happens after that doesn't concern me. Do it, skipper."

He removed the headset. Anders was watching him, not with anticipation, but as if studying some different species.

"We can't land at Karachi, we don't have clearance. The air force and the government would both oppose any landing there. Anyway, we can't even make Karachi," Anders recited in a tired voice. He had remained unaffected, grasping only dim elements of Gant's objective, scattered pieces of a puzzle he could not interpret. "Langley would have to get Washington to talk to Islamabad."

"Then make it happen, Anders — now."

"What are you going to do?" His head was already shaking as he began to perceive the design.

Gant ignored him, staring at the litter of maps and at the console. Then he glared up at Anders.

"I'm going to find a beach on which these guys and their load-master can kick those pallets out the back door." His hand waved toward the MiLs and the fuel drums.

Ridicule and protest formed in Anders' eyes even before he opened his lips.

"I tolerated your bizarre private life — much as it shamed me— just so long as it never involved matters of security," General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin growled, angered even further by the feeble, damp-eyed protests of his only son. "Then yesterday, I discovered you had been — insecure." It seemed a species of aberration far greater in the general's eyes than sexual deviation. His voice, filled with threat, seemed to loom over the young man on the sofa.

"It wasn't anything — I swear to you it wasn't a serious mistake," Valery Rodin protested, his throat and chest filled with a tight anguish. Fear and the sense of the huge, heavily furnished room surrounded him. The general's apartment was on one of the upper floors of the Cosmonaut Hotel in Leninsk. Outside its windows, the morning sky was clean and remote. To Valery, it offered an illusion of freedom and escape.

"You swear to me, and yet, when your little friend rings, baying for help because the KGB have become interested in him precisely because you were loose-tongued in front of that Colonel Priabin, you immediately throw the whole sorry mess into Serov's lap. Serious? Not serious? It was profoundly serious, Valery."

The general walked to one of the wide windows and appeared to look out in deep concentration at the square far below his floor of the hotel. Then he turned to look at his son, and said: "How many of your precious little circle of perverts know as much as the actor apparently did?"

"No one else, I swear it."

"No one? Then how did the actor know? Did you whisper it during your sweaty bouts of sodomy?" the general raged. At one time, in the past, he had been unable to use language to confront his son's nature; now he found that words could be used as weapons, as a means of distancing the thing from himself — even from the son he had watched grow up. "Did you?"

Valery was appalled. His father knew and hated what he was; but though he had spoken like this before, there had never been such a degree of contempt, such vividness in the insults. He now realized just how much his father hated and despised him. "No, no, no," he sensed himself saying, while part of his awareness reflected on his surroundings. The thick carpet, Oriental rugs, paintings, heavy drapes, dark furniture; the apartment of a powerful man. Power that was now directed against him. He quailed. Without his father, he was nothing. A sitting target, without protection. If his father abandoned him now…

"No," he said carefully. "It was just something that — slipped out. Sacha — just panicked unnecessarily."

His father sighed, appearing to accept the careful lie. What did it matter now? Sacha was dead. Valery swallowed a hard lump of grief in his throat.

"You little fool." Rodin was wearing a silk robe. Normally at that time of the morning he would be at the complex, at his duties. He had waited two hours for this interview with his son.

The breakfast cart stood in the middle of the room, near an occasional table delicately inlaid with perhaps six different woods. Valery recognized it. It had once adorned his mother's small sitting room. The general had not even offered him as much as a cup of coffee. "He didn't need to kill him, that mad dog Serov!" he blurted, immediately regretting the outburst. It was just the way his father swaggered in the big room, and the memory of his mother that the table had evoked.

"What else was he to do, in the time available? You had interested the KGB in matters they should know nothing about. They were about to squeeze your friend like a lemon. An accident silenced him and warned them. Of course Serov had to use violence."

"You told them to kill Sacha," Valery said, his eyes suddenly damp and weak.

"No, no, all that was at Serov's discretion. But what he did, I would have done. He shut the actor up. Closed the door on your insecurity. Even then you could not stay away. The KGB colonel was there, and he saw your, your disgraceful behavior. Weeping openly at the roadside for an actor!"

Valery did not look up, merely shuffled his booted feet on the carpet. His movements raised little tufts of loosened pile around him. They had killed Sacha like a dog, a rabid dog.

He groaned aloud, then heard the general's breath explode like a condemnation.

"Pull yourself together!" he bellowed. "For my sake and for your own, try to behave like a man!"

Valery wailed what might have been a single word of protest, but if it was, even he failed to discern its meaning. His father's strong face hardened, his eyes gleamed above his prominent, sharp-cut cheekbones. The face was smooth from a recent shave, the skin still firm though veined and traced with age. Still the hero his mother had married, obeyed, worshiped, feared. The rising star of the Strategic Rocket Forces for more than twenty years, until he stood level with the very pinnacle. He was the hidden peak, the eminence grlse—

— and one of the principal authors of Lightning.

"I–I am sorry, Father," Valery began, calculating and cowed in the same moment. His father's moral and physical presence oppressed him, like the imminence of a storm. The pale clean sky outside seemed a great distance away. "I am sorry if—"

"No good apologizing," his father snapped. "Just try to stay away from actors and drugs for a while." His hands clenched and unclenched. He moved toward his son as if to strike him. Valery flinched, and the general's face betrayed an appalled and violent surprise. Then bitter distaste. Walking away, he continued: "Serov has suggested you be shipped out of here for a while — somewhere quiet, until this is all over. I — have not decided what should be done." He cleared his throat. His voice was more impersonal, businesslike. He turned to his son again, and made as if to reach out. But his hand did not move more than a few inches, as if some moral stroke rendered such gestures impossible. "But he will undoubtedly warn all your friends to keep away from you. Also, you will confine yourself to your apartment. Do you understand? You will remain entirely incommunicado for the rest of this week. After that, I will decide what is to become of you. I think, perhaps, it is time you attended the academy to — further your military career."

"No—"

"It will not be your decision, Valery, but mine." He paused.

Through his misery — and relief that his father intended nothing more for the moment — Valery heard his father s stertorous breathing and his own ragged inhalations.

"Do you understand?" his father repeated. "You see no one, you talk to no one. You stay indoors. You do not answer the telephone. Is that clear?"

"I — understand."

"Good. You've babbled quite enough already. A week of silence, and then enlistment at the academy, will help all of us." The Frunze Academy, the school for elite career officers. His father's influence could get him a place there — dammit. "Very well." The voice was unsoftened, and merely pretended to familiarity, to a common humanity between them. "Now, go. Go, Valery."

Valery made a grab at the generals hand, but his grip closed on air. The hand had been snatched away like that of some czar displeased with a menial ambassador.

"Go," the general breathed from near the windows.

Through the wetness of his tears, the sky appeared almost colorless to Valery Rodin; his father's figure a looming dark shadow against it.

A map was spread near his right boot, pictures unrolled on the screen of the moving-map display like a series of hurried-through slides. He might have been thumbing through some familiar reference book for information he knew it contained.

The three hundred and fifty miles of the coastline between the Iranian border and Karachi flashed by in sections. Narrow coastal strip before the coastal range. Blue of the sea. No islands, no coral atolls, no sandbanks of any size. Just the isolated coastal strip. A few small holiday resorts, a handful of villages. His eyes glanced from the magnified images to the map on the floor, as if seeking reassurance or in growing desperation.

There were people around Gant, silent and expectant, and that expectancy was fading, turning cold and sour. He was hardly conscious of them or their changing mood. Aware only of the headset he wore as he sat in front of the display, which was no larger than a Portable typewriter.

A box with keys below a small screen — a box without answers.

He could not be sure. He had to choose blind, sensing the precise length of a beach, assuming its width between surf and palm, assuming its emptiness — all before they overflew it to check it out

If he was wrong in any of those parameters, they would have no time or fuel to find a second dropping zone. And all he had in the way of backup was one of the flight crew acting as an observer, standing between pilot and copilot, binoculars ready for the earliest possible visual sighting of the dropping zone he proposed. By the time the beach took on dimension and form in the observers glasses, it would be too late to make any changes. It would be either go or no go.

Anders was in the secure communications room behind the flight deck, talking via satellite with Langley — with the White House by now for all Gant knew. Squeezing permission out of Karachi's military and Islamabad's government. Pressuring the director and the President to bribe the Pakistanis. Offer them anything — everyone always wants guns, missiles.

Gant muttered to himself, flicking back, flicking forward once more through the sequence of map sections. Holding, weighing, discarding, hurrying on. The stain of yellow-brown was clearer through the small window. It wore a line of green above it now and, more mistily, a jagged line of brown hills. Beach, trees, hills. The dropping zone had to be on the beach, but where, along this length of coast?

The three pallets would be loosed from the rear doors — fuel, Garcia's MiL, then his own helicopter. Parachutes opening and dragging, the impact of it like landing on the deck of a carrier — and he'd done that, scores of times, though Garcia hadn't and didn't like the idea. With great good luck, the pallets would remain intact and upright and they could release the MiLs, unlock the rotors and rig them, fuel up, and take off, to rejoin the Galaxy in Karachi, always praying the transport had made it.

If he could find the beach.

One road along the coast, no more than a wide dirt track. The villages and tiny resorts and occasional isolated bungalows were strung along it like weak and intermittent fairy lights. He heard the pilot's voice against his cheek.

"It's getting critical, mister." He no longer used either Gant's name or his rank. Gant was CIA, not air force; an obscure kind of enemy. He was intent upon wrestling the mission to a new shape, and the pilot was no longer in command of the tanker crew. Gant might just kill them with his scheme. "Our best estimate is — ETA over the coast in six minutes. That will leave you, at most, another four minutes of flying at zero feet before I have to ditch, or you re out the back door and I can still make Karachi. Got that?"

"I understand," Gant replied, waving one hand to silence the fierce whispering the pilots ultimatum had created. "Where do we cross the coast, on your present heading?"

"Somewhere — Charlie?" Gant heard the navigator muttering, then: "West of some God-forsaken place called — what? Ras Jaddi— village called Pasni on a low headland. Got it?"

Gant flicked through the sections of map on the cassette loaded into the display. "I got it." Ras Jaddi, a tiny headland, a speck of atoll? No, nothing except beach, the narrow strip before the trees. That yellow smudge he could see through the window. Ras Jaddi.

"Well, mister?"

Between Ras Jaddi and Ras Shahid, then. Within that fifty-mile stretch. He flicked at the buttons, watched the map unroll backward now, from east to west. Where was there a beach?

He had told Anders to pressure Langley s satellite photography experts into some immediate response. Supply background data, consult photographs, records, files — all the while knowing that there would be time only for a blind guess, the one quick overflight and look-down, then the decision of yes or no.

Beach—

— sand.

The sea was very shallow for a long way out, just there. The beach should consist of fine white sand up near the trees. An impact on wet sand would be risky; they had to make the DZ above the tide.

"Skipper — alter course to intersect the coast ten miles west of the headland. Somewhere between there and Ras Shahid is the DZ."

"You have to be more specific, Gant. I got no fuel to spare."

"OK, OK." He flicked once more through the sections of the map in a feverish hurry. He heard breathing around him, a ragged chorus, like the noise of boxing fans believing their man is going down for the final time. Section after section passed before him, each one covering no more than five miles of coast, detailed, enlarged—

— but only drawings, sketches.

There…

He made the calculations. The beach stretched for a mile and a half in almost a straight line. High tide reached no more than — it was wide enough. Trees, no villages or settlements, no bungalows. A sandbar almost encircled a small bay.

"OK," he announced. "Seventeen miles west of Ras Jaddi — hit that beach and hope to God."

There was silence for a moment, then the muttering of the Galaxy's navigator, finally: "OK, mister, it's your funeral."

"I know it."

"ETA is five minutes plus. We're at nine thousand feet, cruising at two-forty knots. Twenty miles to run. Beginning my descent. When we reach the DZ, you have time for one look-see." He paused, then added: "Then you say go or no go."

Gant envisaged the Galaxy's enormous shadow flickering across the fine white sand, and swallowed the saliva that had gathered at the back of his mouth. The huge wingspan, the weight of the aircraft, its lumbering inability to maneuver, everything. He saw it sagging toward the beach, laying its three pallets like eggs — a great prehistoric, reptilian bird. There would be time for the two passes, no more. The beach had to be wide enough, long enough, flat enough.

He stared at the picture on the screen until it began to grow vague and out of focus, then looked up. Mac nodded grimly. Garcia tried to grin, but his hps trembled. Garcia's crew had moved away. Gant had done what they all wanted, and what they had most not wanted. Garcia was not as good as he was, none of them had his experience; no one had his reputation. Now he was risking their lives, and they resented it.

"Mac," he said brusquely, "see the loadmaster. Make sure the guy is up to this, huh?"

Mac was experienced enough for his judgment to be trusted, even in this situation. He was the only one for whom Gant did not have to feel responsible. And Mac was in his MiL. Mac, perhaps, was lucky.

"Sure, Major." Even Mac was stiff and remote with anxiety, using Gant's rank as an indicator of doubt.

"The rest of you, you know the theory. Just let it happen to you." He shrugged. Always, he felt this difficulty, this distaste for risking other people's lives. He resented his responsibility for them. "Belt in tight and ride down. You do nothing. The captain and the loadmaster are the main men. The fuel goes out first, then you, Garcia. Then me on the second pass. I won't drop on your back/

"Sure," Garcia replied.

Gant resented the almost sneer, even as he understood it. Then he saw Anders moving swiftly down the hold toward him, his face no less drawn and pale than when he had departed for the communications room.

"OK," Gant concluded. "You got maybe five minutes. I suggest you get on board. Stow everything movable, make everything secure. OK? Anders?"

They drifted away from him, completing a departure they had begun the moment his decision was made. Anders glanced at them, looked at the map display — bending to reconcile it with the large-scale map of Pakistan on the floor of the hold — then said:

"Langley says to hold."

'Tell the skipper. He's talking about five minutes, no more. What kind of holding pattern is that?"

The Galaxy was descending now. Through the window, the strip of sand was still no wider, no more than a margin between blue and green and brown. The sea glittered far below, wide and empty.

"I know, Gant, but the government in Islamabad can't be talked to and persuaded all in a couple of minutes."

"Karachi?"

"Awaiting orders from Islamabad."

"We have to go, whatever. You know that, they know that. Up the ante — a bigger bribe, Anders. Get those guys in Islamabad to see it our way. Isn't it this neck of the woods where bribery's a way of life?"

"It all takes time, dammit."

"Time is the thing we haven't got."

"You know I can't authorize this, Gant," Anders said heavily. He leaned one crooked arm against the bulkhead, his weight against it. He appeared to be staring down at the sheen of the sea.

"You're just playing politics, man," Gant snapped, staring at the displayed section of map. That beach, there—

He was committed. They had to go.

"Whatever, it's been put on hold," Anders murmured.

"Hold? Anders, the computer scenario for the mission is out of date — tell them. Wake them up!"

"I did, but—"

"We're talking about minutes here! The shit's hit the fan, and all those guys are wondering is, who's broken wind."

"It's still on hold, Gant."

"It can't be."

He turned to look at the two Russian helicopters. Garcia was already aboard the 24A, checking that everything was stowed and secure. His copilot was alongside him, his gunner in front of them in the forward section of the helicopter cockpit. The MiL, on its pallet and with rotors folded in line along the top of the fuselage, looked helpless, unready. Behind it, the fuel drums were being checked on their pallet. The shadowy bulk of his own helicopter was closest to him. Around all three pallets, the Galaxy's crew moved urgendy. Mac stood with the loadmaster. Orders and checks crackled and flew from microphones.

He had already briefed the crew and their loadmaster. Getting Mac to check was only a way of keeping him occupied, and away from himself. The loadmaster was experienced and competent. He had dropped palletized loads at zero feet on previous occasions, but only from the hold of a much smaller Hercules transport. In the end, he would have to do little more than obey orders. The Galaxy's captain would call out the timings on each run, give the green light, and only then would the loadmaster's team, harnessed to the fuselage, release the pallets through the open rear doors.

"It can't be," Gant repeated softly.

"It has been."

"Jesus H. Christ! Do they realize? Do they understand? We lose these two choppers unless we can dump them on the beach. There is no other way — even they ought to be able to see that, six thousand miles from here."

"Gant?"

"Yes, skipper," he snapped into the headset.

"ETA, one minute. When we hit your beach, we have no more than four minutes in the DZ area. Two passes only, after the look-see. You got that?" There was an edge of nervousness in the aircraft pilot's voice now; something almost apologetic, too. "I don't have clearance, Gant," he added.

Gant looked at Anders, then said without hesitation: "You have it, skipper. I just gave it to you."

"Let me talk to Mr. Anders."

Anders was glaring at Gant. His body was slumped against the fuselage. The sea was much nearer beyond the curve of his arm. Hills were real, individual mounds and peaks and slopes. The line of palms and other trees, the strip of white sand snaking away westward, losing clarity and finally identity in the faint heat haze and the sheen of the sea. Gant swallowed.

"OK," he said, and handed the headset to Anders. "Tell him," he said softly. "Everything's ready." His fierce whisper contained no element of temptation, merely inevitability. "We have to go. You can clean up after the horses have left. Do it."

Anders took the headset as if it might explode in his large hand. His eyes were troubled and vague. For him, the beach ahead of them was not deserted but mined with diplomatic catastrophes. His career, too, was endangered by Gant s simple recklessness.

He glanced at the MiLs, at the voice-filled hold, the hurrying cargo crew, the sea, and the nearing strip of sand. Then seemed to look into the distances clouded with heat.

"Can you make Karachi, skipper — afterward?"

"If you're praying real hard, Mr. Anders, then maybe."

"And you, Gant, can you make Karachi?"

Gant nodded. The coast was less than five miles away. The transport was closing in on it, beginning to turn onto a new, westward heading. White sand.

Anders urged: "We can get down just by declaring an emergency. It's you they have to let land, after we've reneged on the original deal — you're not supposed to be seen."

"I know it. Look, we have camouflage nets, the works. We'll wait for you to contact us. Send for the rest of the family when you're settled in the new job, huh?"

Anders nodded. "You have clearance, skipper. My authority. Good luck."

"Thank you, Mr. Anders. ETA, thirty seconds. Gant?"

"Yes?"

"We'll set up the visual markers. You'll hear us, but don't give me trouble. It's out of your hands. OK?"

"OK." Gant sounded reluctant, but took off the headset.

During the first overflight of the beach, the flight crew would select visual markers, make their fixes, define exact distances. Making the strip of sand a grid, a pattern — a dropping zone.

He looked at Anders. '"Thanks."

"For what?"

"Seeing the inevitable."

"Shouldn't you—?"

"I want to see that beach."

They stared through adjacent windows. Perhaps six hundred feet up now, no more. The sea stretched away from them without wrinkling, without waves, like some vast lagoon. The edge of the tide flowed beneath the Galaxy's belly. Its huge shadow, coldly black on the white sand, wing tip over the water's edge. Gant glanced at the frozen frame of the map display, and began to recognize the shallow curve of the beach, the knoll of palms, the cradling arm of the sandbank. The transparent water seemed to run with silver veins, like mercury flowing over a blue-green glass slide. There were no rocks littering the beach, just the sand. He glanced across the hold. Trees flickered in the windows like an old, dark film, beyond the starboard wing.

Straight, flat, wide. The DZ.

"Good luck," Anders murmured.

"What? Oh, yes. Keep in touch."

"Wait for my—"

"Sure. It's in the bag. They won't want two Russian choppers sitting on one of their beaches for too long. See you, Anders."

He left the window. The Galaxy, having completed its check run, was beginning to climb and turn. The flight deck conversation, relayed to the hold, became more desultory. His stomach felt hollow. Nerves gripped him, shaking his body until he clenched down on them. A flight of seabirds, cormorants or pelicans, had risen agitatedly into the air from near the sandbank as the Galaxy flew over them. The captain's voice dismissed them as a possible hazard. Pelicans, he decided. Huge beaks and white bodies. Now settling like scraps of blown paper onto the cool, transparent water.

He winked at Mac, who was already strapped into his seat in the gunner s separate cockpit. Mac grinned.

He strapped himself into his seat, fitted his helmet, checked the cabin for anything not stowed or fixed. Fuel tanks empty. There was no way they could have risked a drop with fuel aboard. They'd fuel up from the drums, using the hand pump on the third pallet.

"Mac?"

"OK, sir." Mac seemed relieved, fitting once more into his role, their relationship.

"Then just hold on tight. Like the roller coaster, that's all it is."

The Galaxy was still turning in its great loop to approach the beach from its original heading. The loadmaster appeared below the pilot's cabin. Gant raised his thumb, the loadmaster responded, then turned to watch the drop-signal lamps. He pressed the right earpiece of his headset against his ear and raised his left arm as the red lamp glowed. When the green light replaced it, he would drop his arm and the crewman next to the ramp panel would press the toggle. The drogue chute would be ejected into the slipstream of the Galaxy. The main canopy would trail after it, and then jerk open folly, pulling the first pallet out in an instant, a mere twenty feet above the sand. fie could not tune the VHF set to the Galaxy flight deck's frequency. The intercom system operated by wire, like a telephone. He must sit in ignorance, in silence, until the loadmaster's arm indicated he was on his way. He would know nothing until the drogue chute opened, beginning to pull him through the doors. The feces of the Galaxy's cargo crew, harnessed and helmeted, would be the last thing he saw inside the transport, before they began rushing past him, as if seen from a speeding train. Red light, green light, moving arm, the jerk of the parachutes.

"Garcia?" he asked.

"Major?" Formality seemed to assist Garcia, just as it did with Mac. Or were they still distancing themselves from his decision? Garcia s voice issued from the walkie-talkie secured to the cockpit framework. They would use them for close-proximity communications over Afghanistan and inside Soviet airspace, thus reducing the chances of any radio transmissions being detected.

He flicked to Transmit.

"You OK?"

"Sure, Major." Garcia's voice was too quick, too hollow.

"Just cool it. Never been backward out of a Galaxy before?" The mild joke went unappreciated, and Gant merely shrugged. "Just hang in there, Garcia."

The Galaxy's course was straight and level once more. Its engines rushed distantly, like a wind. The cockpit seemed to close in around Gant. His hands touched the inert controls of the MiL. He glanced in his mirror—

— jaws opening.

The rear cargo doors of the Galaxy were slowly opening, seemingly in preparation to take some huge bite at the whiteness flowing beneath. Gant held his breath, looking down the flank of his own helicopter, past the 24A and the fuel drums. The doors widened their gape. White sand, the edge of the ripple-less tide, the darkness of trees.

Zero feet. Gant glanced at the loadmaster and the operator over whom he seemed to be leaning.

Three seconds, two—

Green light, glowing to one side of the hold, splashing on the flank of Garcias MiL. The sand rushed now, a white runway as the Galaxy gave the illusion of landing.

"Sweet Mother of Jesus," someone was muttering. Garcia?

Edge of the water. Sand. Green light.

Go—

In his mirror, Gant saw the pallet of secured fuel drums lurch toward the mouth of the cargo hold, its drogue chute out in the sunlight, the main canopy opening like a painted mouth.

5: Flotsam

Six bottles had contained beer, the larger bottle vodka. They were all empty now. Filip Kedrov studied them, shaking each of the bottles in turn as if tuning a set of musical bells. Then he replaced each with exaggerated care on the bunk opposite his; a rank of brightly painted toy soldiers. Dead soldiers, he reminded himself, and giggled.

Nothing else to do, he justified his tipsiness to himself. Bloody nothing else to do but sit and wait, just as he had been doing for the past twenty-four hours. Good thing he'd brought the bottles, an even better thing that he'd stored the vodka and some cans down here on an earlier visit. It had been intended as overstocking, but… the cans were all empty, too. In the bunker's kitchen, in the metal sink. There had been nothing else to do.

He flopped onto his bunk, slightly theatrically, hands clasped behind his head, which commenced whirling and spinning disconcertingly. Keep your eyes open. He raised his knees gently. The room began to spin.

He sat up quickly. His head lurched, and he wanted to hold it but was forced to grip the edge of the bunk with both hands if he was not to become one of those dolls with rounded bases that rocked back and forth for whole minutes after a single touch. His head bung over his knees; he groaned. The sound washed away down the long, empty corridor of the room.

He should have known, should have known he would get drunk out of sheer boredom. He released the bunk and held his head softly. After he had cradled it for a time, he looked up slowly. The row of bottles remained still. The opposite bunk did not lurch. He swallowed the sickly saliva in his mouth, and his stomach remained at some distance below his throat. He sighed cautiously.

All the drink had gone now, anyway. He focused slowly on the dial of his watch. Midmorning. Twenty-four hours had passed down there, two days since he had had Orlov send the last signal — well, almost two; a day and a half at least. They would be on their way now, coming for him. They had to come, didn't they? He felt certain they would, confident of the fact, and kicked his legs over the edge of the bunk like a child on a seawall. Soon he'd have to think about moving from here.

When?

Tomorrow would be early enough. It was difficult to decide, to imagine the distances, the time of their journey. But they wouldn't waste time, not with Thursday only two days away. And he had another hiding place, at the pickup point, the exact and agreed rendezvous. He would go there tomorrow. The helicopters would come in probably disguised as Russian machines — from where? Turkey, Afghanistan, more than a thousand miles away—

— Stop, stop it! He remembered why he had sought the drink's temporary oblivion. It was the fear of abandonment, the fear of huge distances, of a helicopter attempting that vast, hostile airspace. But he was indispensable, wasn't he? Indispensable.

Helicopters? One helicopter? Ridiculous!

Had they ever said helicopters? Had they? Well? Fool, fool, can't you remember? He pressed his hands against his temples, but he could not still the debate, could not squeeze certainty back into his head. Isolation, the sense of abandonment, welled up in him. Fool, fool — did they ever even mention helicopters? Isn't that what you supposed? Tears leaked from his squeezed-shut eyes. He slumped back against the cold wall, his hands loosely lifting and letting fall the material of the gray army blanket on which he sat. Then he let his head loll to one side, his cheek and ear and temple against the concrete, his posture magnifying his sobs. He could hear them, the great slobbering groans of a child sent to bed early. It had only been his dream, the helicopter; he had no authority for the idea whatsoever. It was Tuesday morning, and they would not come, not now. Cars, trucks, trains, would be too slow now… the moment was past when they would come.

He wailed loudly. He heard the noise magnified against the wall, almost through the concrete. They would not come. How could he ever have believed it?

He heard the noise he was making. Sobbing again now.

Heard—

The corridor on the other side of the wall was like a whispering gallery.

Heard—

— whispers, shuffles, clicks; movement and conversation of small animals — rats talking and scrabbling. He lifted his feet from the floor. He swallowed a sob. What did it matter now?

Whisper, shuffle, click…?

Heard—

— them.

Feverishly wiping his wet mouth with his hand, he pressed his ear more firmly against the wall. Shuffle, click, whisper, shuffle-click, whisper, slam, click-click-click, whisper, whistle—?

He was shivering with terror, unable to believe that the sounds were as distant as they appeared. He looked wildly around for a glass — remembering something from a detective story — and saw where a tumbler had rolled away from his drunken grasp under the bunk opposite; snatched it up, his hands shivering as they clasped it. He put it against the concrete, then rubbed his ear to comfort against it. His blood pounded, magnified, and his breath rushed. He had to hold the hand that held the glass, to still its tremor.

Click, click, click, whisper-whisper-whisper, shuffle, shuffle— little rat noises out there in the dark corridors — where? How far? Slightly louder now, coming closer…? He listened, until it became irrefutable that the noises were gradually becoming louder moving in his direction. A search — of every room!

His desperation doubled him up with stomach cramps. He wanted to retch. He dropped the glass on the bunk. His mouth hung open, but the nausea was like repeated soft blows to the back of his head, clubbing him gently down into the rough gray blanket.

He did not understand how he moved to the door, not even that he had done so. He pressed his ear against it, switched off the room lights, then moved the heavy, stiff handle and turned it. He opened the door with exaggerated caution even as the blows continued to bang in his neck and head. His breathing seemed wild, uncontrolled as he looked out. He heard the whisper moving down the corridor but discerned nothing in the gloom. Then heard and distinguished footsteps clicking, some distance away, funneled indirectly to him. They were still in another corridor, beyond the T-junction. But this corridor was a dead end. If he moved, it had to be back toward the noises he could hear, toward the crackling exchanges over walkie-talkies, thin tinny voices without recognizable words. The opening and slamming of steel doors. How far down the corridor beyond the T-junction were they?

His head had cleared. The blows of his pulse had receded. He ducked back into the room, and in the darkness that did not seem to delay him, he scrabbled up his haversack, checked that the precious transponder was inside, then scraped and bundled his possessions into it. Half-wrapped sandwiches smeared margarine on the heavy boots he would need in the marshes; he felt its stickiness…

He returned to the door.

He could not hide the fact of his presence. They might be at the end of the corridor already… no, no, the noises were still too quiet — but he had to head back toward the noises! The idea stunned him into immobility in the doorway. The row of lights along the corridor's roof could be switched on at any moment, exposing him. He shuddered, then moved stiffly, like a paraplegic at painful exercise. Walking as softly as he could, moving slowly, limbs unfreezing….

Yet, however cautiously he moved, it still seemed as if he were rushing toward the noises that slid and whispered along the concrete walls. Rushing into the narrow neck of a bottle — to become an exhibit, a preserved specimen. There were patches of silence in the search when he, too, stopped, then further crackles, whispers, slams. Occasionally, the calls seemed to be louder, on the edge of comprehension, and those were the most frightening. Closer, closer — he was converging on them. The noises of boot heels sounded like pebbles dropped down a deep well.

He touched off each door, each yard of wall, hardly breathing. He felt light-headed with panic, but there was a clarity to it. The panic hurried him on, but with caution, with alert senses; his ears began to measure the weight and distance of the noises made by the search. Even as his mind whirled with terrors.

Corner. The T-junction. Which way were the noises, which way the nearest runged ladder to the surface?

Footsteps, voices — left… ladder? Ladder? Come on, come on, which way, which…? Right, right! Thank God. Relief tumbled into his mind.

He felt the skin across his shoulder blades stretch and become sensitive as he turned down the right-hand tunnel. The furry touch of asbestos against his fingertips. His hand closed convulsively on the pipes, his right foot reached out and tapped against the railway in the middle of the tunnel and withdrew swiftly, as if its motions were signaling like a telegraph key along the rail. The skin on his back and buttocks was so thin. If they heard or sensed him now, they might just open fire.

He moved, counting each footstep. The tunnel, lower and narrower than the corridor from which he had come, magnified the noises behind him. He could almost hear each time the walkie-talkies were switched from Transmit to Receive. Slamming doors were loud. Bootsteps were distinct.

Hesitantly, he looked back. — gleam. A flash like a weak, distant glimpse of lightning or the twitching aside of a curtain. Flashlights. He felt his hand hurrying beside him along the top of the asbestos-lagged pipe. He began to hear his own footsteps as loudly as the first whispers of theirs. Tiptoe, but that was foolish because the drink returned to surge in his head before being kept at bay by fear and the instinct to escape.

A shout that might have been the raising of the alarm stunned him, thrust him in the back to make him go faster, rid him of all thought except the certainty of capture if he did not reach the ladder to the surface. There was no time for any other idea. His heart pattered in his chest like a small, terrified animal.

He looked back three more times. On the third occasion he saw a flashlight's beam wash the tunnel wail before turning off, down the main silo corridor from which he had come. Toward the room where he had hidden. Where the evidence of his recent occupation waited to be discovered. Lights flickered on, then the glow came seeping out of the long corridor, illuminating two soldiers, little more than silhouettes. His foot splashed in a puddle; something skittered away from him with a squeak; nausea filled his throat — don't be sick now, not here. He blundered on for a few steps, one hand over his mouth, until the nausea subsided. Ahead of him, a barely discernible light seemed to drip from the roof of the tunnel.

Perhaps no more — as much as — another hundred meters. He tried to remember, and did so quite easily, prompted by the new terrors of imminent discovery. Yes, no more than a hundred meters now to one of the air ducts from the surface, closed only in time of war.

He reached the ladder, touching it almost as he passed, then clung to it. He saw his own arms, could discern the color of his clothing, the whiteness of his hands. A weak circle of light illuminated him. He looked up. Was it pale blue? He could not tell.

It was the surface up there. He gripped the rungs of the ladder, released their iciness one by one, reaching his body into a stretch without moving his feet.

Whistles, then, from the corridor. Summonses over the walkie-talkies, crackling-squeaky orders. Excitement, discovery. At once, he moved his left foot, stepped, climbed. Rung over rung toward the broken, twisted-back netting at the top of the narrow chimney, sweating profusely with effort and relief. Up, up…

He climbed with increasing, flooding gratitude. The air in his nostrils was less musty, fresher, fresher all the time with each successive rung.

The Galaxy climbed and began to turn, as if fleeing the scene of an accident. For Gant, even the sound of Garcia's excited, relieved voice from the transceiver could not dispel the image of the huge fan of sand that had been thrown up by the impact of the fuel drums and the palletized MiL. Accident — collision.

"Madre de Dios, we made it!"

And behind Garcia's rushing, nervous relief were the noises of his crew, equally stunned. Gant had seen the main canopy of Garcia's pallet open, seen the helicopter snatched like a dandelion clock through the clamshell of the open doors; then the sand had obscured everything. The scene had lurched like the image from a joggled camera — sand, lush vegetation, the water, all rushing beneath him, then settling to a steadier image as the transport passed out over the edge of the tide. The white scraps of paper of the pelicans, distressed and alarmed, settled slowly once more on the water.

The Galaxy continued on its turn, lazily and as if time and fuel consumption were of no importance; Gant considered that the sense of detachment belonged only to himself.

No — already, the scene below was remote. At an altitude of two hundred feet, it was still impossible to make out details on the beach. The mirror into which he looked quivered because of the mild turbulence outside the Galaxy—

— sand beneath the open doors once more, not the glittering water. He felt his body tense, then consciously relaxed.

"The fuel drums are all over the fucking place!" he heard in the cockpit. Garcia over the transceiver. His body tensed once more. "No spillage. We'll try to move—"

"Gant?" he heard in his headset. "Yes, skipper?"

"We're going to have to let you down nearer the water, to keep you out of the way of those fuel drums."

"Your decision." He resented the admission. "Thanks. Good luck." v

The distances, timings, speed recited by the navigator and the copilot became a background, no more. Voices from the flight deck relayed to Garcia what Gant had been told. In his mirrors, he saw the huge shadow of the Galaxy's tail, dark and cool on the whiteness.

He braced his feet. His hands seemed superfluous in their lack of occupation. He might as well have folded them across his chest, like a child in class told to sit quiet, waiting for the school bell.

He smiled, in spite of his tension. The edge of the water seemed to glint in his mirrors, then the pilot adjusted the heading of the Galaxy. Height, speed, heading all seemed right to his sixth sense. The sand wasn't really firm enough for a palletized drop, but Garcia had made it — nothing to concern him, nothing.

The loadmaster raised his arm. His eyes were fixed on the red light ten paces from the MiL's nose. Gant breathed in deeply, snatching at the breath. Nerves jumped; he was helpless, it wasn't under his control.

The loadmaster's arm snapped down. Then his body seemed to lurch away, as if a blow had knocked the man aside. The beach tilted in Gant's mirrors, and the impressions he received were like reflections in a broken glass. A twitch ran through the huge fuselage, as if the aircraft had attempted some impossibly tight turn; a whale imitating the maneuvers of a shark. Anders' voice in the transceiver, wishing him good luck, broken by the pilot's expletive. The green light, the lurch, and the breaking open of the drogue chute—

— beach at the wrong angle, wrong angle! Sky in the corner of the tiny screen formed by one mirror, dark-green trees, the beach— dotted fuel drums, the half-buried pallet of the other MiL, a great stiff wave of sand thrown up on the beach — but all seen wrongly, as if he were drunk and falling—

— scraps of paper, red-white, white, red, red-white, white, scraps of paper all around him even as he was thrust against his harness, and the image of a slow-motion film of an accident test returned to his mind. He was the dummy flung slowly and grotesquely through the car windshield… the harness bit into his chest and shoulders, restraining him.

Scraps of paper, red-white, white, whirling and spinning. A pelican's body, headless, thudded against the cockpit, nauseating him; he understood what had happened. The course of the Galaxy had been closer to the water s edge, to the sandbank and the drifting, nervous birds. They had scattered into the air in front of the Galaxy as if thrown up by a giant hand, startling the pilot, making him twitch the stick and jerk the transport off course for an instant.

The main canopy opened its colorful mouth behind him, obscuring everything else. The Mil was tilting nose up, falling. The bird's decapitated body had disappeared from the Plexiglas, leaving a red smear that shadowed the glint of the sun. Other scraps of white flew or twisted above and beyond the MiL.

Split seconds… the sun blinded… Mac was muttering, but he hadn't reached his third expletive when the pallet struck the sand. The impact rendered him breathless. For an instant, he was the life-size dummy in an accident test. He fought for breath. Feeling returned in the gouging of the harness. His eyes opened. He could see nothing. A huge mask of flying sand had been thrown up all around the MiL. Water glinted and sparkled within it, raining down on the Plexiglas like a storm on corrugated tin. Darkness.

"Jesus, Jesus, Jesus….." Mac recited his litany.

The straps of the harness bit. Gant realized his body was at the wrong angle. He was sitting tilted forward and to one side in his seat. Hanging there. Splintering noises. Great, aching, tearing noises, and now a steadier though intermittent groaning; the occasional snap.

The sun came back.

"Gant, are you all right? Gant?" It was the pilot.

"Alive," he murmured, unconcerned. The inquiry was irrelevant. "Mac?" he asked.

"Christ! OK, skipper." Mac's voice was small and shaky, as if lost inside his stunned frame.

"Major? Major?" Garcia over the transceiver.

"OK, Garcia, OK."

The great pall of sand and spray fell lazily, half translucent, half opaque, into the sea, all around him; even the pelicans were beginning to fall easily out of the pale sky, to settle gingerly on the water, farther off from the — the sandbank, jutting out from the beach, half enclosing the little bay of cool water.

The sand slid down the Plexiglas like a drawn-back curtain. It stuck to the pelican blood, was plastered in streaks by the water that had been thrown up with the sand. Light flashed through the streaked cockpit from the Galaxy's wing as the aircraft curved gently away in a climbing turn.

The pallet had landed at an angle. Gant realized he was staring into the water — transparent, mercury-veined water, smooth once more after the pall of sand's disturbance.

With a shuddering lurch, the Mil shook off the remaining sand like a dog discarding water from its coat. The horizon was more tilted, the water discernibly nearer. A cold chill gripped his heart. When he looked up, the Galaxy had altered course, heading away behind him, toward its landfall at Karachi. Its diminishing seemed like an act of desertion. The voice of the pilot and the anxious murmurs of Anders filled his headset.

"OK, OK," he snapped. "Get out of my head!" His voice was urgent, tinged with panic. The broken pallet beneath the helicopter groaned, then slithered. The cockpit lurched.

"Skipper—"

"Mac, stay cool. Stay still," he warned. "Don't move."

"Your angle of impact," the pilot was repeating, his words irrelevant. The cockpit seemed as close and final around him as — as the oxygen tent that had shrouded his father's last days. He shuddered, shaking off the image.

"Skipper — and you, Anders — there's nothing you can do, nothing. Get the hell out of here."

"Gant—"

"Don't bother me now."

He flicked off the VHF set, then reached up and drew off his helmet. The cries of pelicans like the magnified tearing of paper or cardboard. The almost still lapping of the tired, cool water. The creaking of the pallet's remnants as they moved uncertainly — downward.

Garcia's voice in the cockpit. Figures along the beach, running as if labored and laden through the sand. The glinting, retreating dot of the Galaxy. Spars and slivers and torn spears of wood littering the sandbar.

"Just stay cool," Gant murmured, releasing his harness gently from his bruised body. Slowly, he levered himself up from his seat and reached for the pilot's door. Gripped its handle, turned it.

The Mil lurched, sliding another foot and more toward the water—

— which, he saw clearly, was not as shallow as it seemed, but was deep enough to submerge the helicopter as far as the main cabin.

He looked up. The locked rotors lay along the fuselage. The Mil could not fly; it was drowning.

There was nothing he could do. As he swung the door gently open over the water, the Mil slid again, with an accompanying groan from the broken pallet. The sea idled, deceptively innocent, less than a foot below the sill of the cockpit. When it moved again, water would begin to slop in. He looked down over the gunners cabin. Mac's face stared up at him, bemused and afraid. The water lapped against the Plexiglas, level with Mac's arm.

Gant's body felt frozen, immobile, as he waited for the next, inexorable movement of the Mil into the sea.

"He was there and yet you managed to miss him? He eluded your search?" General Lieutenant Rodin asked. Serov's admission had distracted him from the ponderous, dinosaur movement of the vast platform on which lay the booster that would carry the laser battle station into orbit aboard the Raketoplan shuttle craft.

Serov studied his superior's features before he replied. They were pale and drawn into intent, grim planes by his mood. Rodin was taller than the GRU colonel, and seemed especially aware of the feet at that moment, even though both of them were dwarfed by the booster. The diesel locomotives protested outside the vast hangar as they strained to move the booster's platform from the assembly building along the first yards of the miles of double railway track to the launch pad. The noises of the platform's first movements were hideous, making Serov's teeth ache.

"Yes, he had indeed been there," he confirmed in a neutral voice. "My people may — or may not — have alarmed him. Anyway, there was no trace of him in the warren of tunnels and rooms. We were thorough."

"And what are you doing now?" Rodin asked in an imperious tone. It was as if he drew something of an added authority from the scene around him; as if he had chosen a setting that displayed him to advantage. Serov had not dared keep the information regarding Kedrov a secret from Rodin. His temerity in suggesting the son be sent away from Baikonur would have earned a greater rebuke if

Rodin had found out about Kedrov's disappearance from anyone but himself. He had, of course, minimized the extent of the carelessness the telemetry officer had displayed.

Serov was aware of the scents and noises of the place, aware of the technicians swarming over the platform and the booster, whose great bunch of rocket engines had passed out of the hangar into the pale winter sunlight. The chill of the day stood next to him in the assembly hangar like a heavy body leaning against his frame. His breath clouded around his head.

"Extending the search. Surveillance on all known associates. Well get him, comrade General," he added reassuringly, with studied deference. Rodin seemed to smile in a thin-lipped, momentary way, as if sensing the change that had occurred in their relative positions since their telephone conversation. "I think Kedrov will head for open country now. He knows we'll be looking for him."

"And you're certain he knows little or nothing about Lightning?"

"Less than the actor, I imagine," Serov replied quietly.

Rodin turned away abruptly. Serov enjoyed the general's brief discomfiture.

A flock of technicians and members of the scientific staff walked funereally in the wake of the platform. Rodin was watching them as if — as if he owned them, Serov thought. At the far end of the hangar, where the light appeared dusty and inadequate, the shuttle craft lay on a similar, much smaller platform. Teams of people swarmed over it, bees around honey, obscuring any sight from where Serov stood of the almost assembled laser weapon. He had a minimal interest in it as a machine; its power interested him a great deal more. Mere technology wearied him. It was, ultimately, a civilian world.

Chessboard patterning decorated the stages of the booster. Gleaming metal, curving, strong lines, a sense of massiveness; power, too. Serov, with Rodin's back to him, shook his head with cynical ruefulness. A gigantic badge of authority and power.

"I — have confined my son to his apartment for — the remainder of this week," Rodin announced without turning around.

"Very well, General. As long as—"

"He will speak to no one, he will not leave the place. Is that clear? Meanwhile, warn his friends to stay away from him."

"Yes, comrade General," Serov murmured. It had to be accepted. Rodin was using the advantage of Kedrov's disappearance to ensure that his decision was accepted.

As if pressing home his reasserted authority, Rodin asked: "What of the KGB's interest in this Kedrov?"

"Pure accident — drugs, we believe."

"Perhaps. But what consequences might follow?"

A group of senior officers was moving toward them. The third stage, the smallest, of the booster passed their position like a slow, submarine creature, out into the sunlight. There was sufficient clear sky for the American spy satellites to observe the moving of the booster. But then, a Soviet shuttle flight had already been announced to the world by Nikitin as a gesture. A rendezvous with the American shuttle in a mission of peace to symbolize the implementation of the treaty. Rodin merely flicked one hand toward the approaching group, and they halted, still some distance away.

"No consequences, comrade General. Unless they find him first — which they will not."

"Make sure of that, Serov. You know, I cannot help the suspicion that your—accident was precipitate."

"I beg to disagree, comrade General. It was entirely necessary."

"Make sure nothing else goes wrong. Understand?"

"Nothing else will go wrong."

"At this moment, Stavka's backing is absolute. Also, that of our friends in the Politburo." Rodin essayed a smile, then seemed to reject the expression as something foreign and worthless. "But if Moscow were to be, by any means, made suspicious, even alerted— then Stavka would not go ahead with Lightning. There would not be a majority of the high command in favor of pursuing Lightning once the elements of secrecy and surprise are lost to us. That was made clear at the outset — it was made clear to you, among others." Every utterance, Serov decided, was something ex cathedra—Holy Writ, almost. He suppressed a tiny smile. Megalomania, raging megalomania.

"I realize that, comrade General. The high command will not openly defy the Kremlin — at least not yet. Not without Lightning having been put into effect."

"Therefore, find this little man who has disappeared and kill him before the KGB or anyone else stumbles across him."

"Yes, comrade General."

"We must present those old women on the Politburo with a fait accompli, with a result, Serov. When they see what Lightning achieves, the research and development budget for the battle station program will be unlimited." Rodin's eyes stared, as if he were looking into a vague distance beyond Serov. He appeared to wish to recite old resolutions, cherished dreams as a way of escaping from any thought of failure — or his son. This was, Serov realized, a catechism.

"I understand, comrade General," he murmured, contempt smoothed from his voice. "We must succeed." He paused, then added: "We'll find this Kedrov and dispose of him."

Rodin nodded vigorously. "Yes, yes, of course. He has no means of escape or safety." Then his eyes seemed to narrow to a closer attention. "The army is gambling everything, Serov, in order to regain its rightful power — twenty years of power that has been thrown away or snatched from us by Nikitin and his cronies. So I do not want to step into a dog turd on my own doorstep, not now. Find this spy and get rid of him."

Sunlight spilled whitely into the hangar, seeming to bring a more intense cold to the place, now that the booster's platform had gone. In the distance, the locomotives could still be heard, murmuring in protest at the weight and the effort.

Rodin nodded once, then turned his back and strode arrogantly toward the waiting group of officers.

"If your son hadn't been terrified of you from birth." Serov murmured, then closed his mouth on the remainder of the sentiment. He would do his job, he decided, dropping his salute. He walked out into the sunlight, squinting.

He'd have Kedrov safely dead, long before Thursday. No doubt of that.

The main canopy floated on the surface of the translucent water, becoming sodden. Along the length of the sandbar, back toward the beach, the wreckage of the pallet lay like flotsam. A gouge in the sand, like the careering track of a huge, runaway vehicle, had been scraped out by the impact. Gant's awareness was calm, alert. Garcia and his crew had begun running leadenly out along the bar toward the stranded MiL, which was—

— poised. Still. He was balanced gently, hands and feet taking his weight, half out of the cockpit door as if about to alight from a bus. The pelicans' cries had stilled, the sea was calm; the Galaxy's engines had retreated beyond audibility. A strangely surreal silence bad pervaded the beach. It was almost dreamlike, except for the spars of wood, the darkly gouged sand, and the floating specks of Pelican corpses.

The intake plugs had held fast. Water had not entered the air intakes and thus the engines. All other openings remained sealed. Except for Macs cabin and his own. He breathed shallowly, his mind racing, as he watched Mac climb from the hinged canopy of his cockpit. The Mil was being rocked gently. Mac was turning his head constantly, like a doll, from the sand to Gant's face. He was treading gingerly as if through a minefield, but he was climbing out against the list of the helicopter. He should not cause it to slide farther toward the water. Unlike Gant, who could only exit from the starboard side of the 24D, into the sea—

— with the Mil moving after him?

He concentrated on Mac. One foot and leg over the sill, the slow, balletlike turn, the right leg, the pause, then the drop. Macs hands released the sill of the cockpit, and the Mil quivered. But did not move.

Mac looked up at him, grinning through the stained Plexiglas as Gant looked down.

"Easy, skipper."

"OK, OK, Mac," he snapped impatiently. He raised his voice, still poised in the doorway of his cabin. "Garcia — where's my rigging kit?" he yelled.

"All over the fucking beach, Major."

"Then for Christ's sake get it here."

"What are you going to—?"

Gant felt as if the force of his anger and urgency would topple the Mil into the sea.

"I'm going to rerig the rotors — this baby has to be flown off the sandbar." He looked down. He had no knowledge of tides. He stared into the slight haze and glitter, toward the beach. White sand, all white sand. The tide was not retreating, if there was much of a tide — he didn't know.

He glanced at the radio, then dismissed the idea of talking to the Galaxy. He studied the rotors folded along the MiL's fuselage. Five rotors, but only four of them needed repositioning. It was the only way, and if he didn't get it done, the mission had floundered finally and completely.

"Rigging kit!" he yelled. "Fuel up your MiL! In that order, Garcia."

"Couldn't we use his Mil to tow us off?" Mac began.

"Don't finesse, Mac. For Christ's sake, Garcia, get your ass moving."

"What do you want me to do, skipper?" Mac asked, wading into the water and edging around the pallet until he was looking up at Gant.

"I'll need you when I start rerigging. OK?"

"Sure. Have we gotten enough—?"

"Clearance? Don't ask! I think so. Another couple of feet nearer the water and we've had it." He was distracted. Silver fish nipped and glanced near Mac's submerged legs. "Wade out there, Mac— how deep does it get?" If it was shallow enough…? He watched Mac's waist disappear, then the stain of the water creep to the shoulders of his flight overalls. Shit.

"OK, Mac."

"Too deep, uh?"

"Too deep. We have to fly her off — she won't float high enough to keep the rotor tips out of the water. The droop on the blades will dip them below the surface."

The parameters of the situation continued to narrow as they divested themselves of every shred of optimism. There was only one solution, but it appeared impossible. He had to rig the rotors. He needed Kooper or Lane and Mac around this MiL, and he needed, needed—

— fuel, the rigging kit, a rope. Rope first.

"Mac, get some rope off — get all the rope off the pallet. Don't release the chopper yet, she might slide right off We need to lasso each rotor to swing it into position."

"Sure, skipper." Mac appeared galvanized by the instruction, as if movement and purpose were reasserted and offered a satisfactory solution to their situation. Gant glanced across to the beach. Lane was in the water, pushing something ahead of him. The rigging kit, had to be. Garcia and Kooper were wearily rolling one of the huge fuel drums toward their helicopter, which seemed to sit besieged on the beach, surrounded by the fortifications its impact had dug for it.

"Come on, Lane," he yelled. Lane nodded. He was skirting the sandbar, where the water was shallow, pushing the rigging kit ahead of him on a section of pallet, its buoyant honeycomb layer intact.

Mac unthreaded a length of rope, measuring it as he did so. He was as intent as a child engaged in some secret game.

Gant's mind spun out ahead of the moment like a spiders thread. The images did not seem to reach as far as safety. Rerigging, refueling, rotors having to be clear of the water, the necessity, he now saw, to use the other Mil to ferry the fuel out, the necessity to have that Mil tow out the fuel, across the water, without approaching too close to upset his helicopter with its downdraft. The tide, too…

He looked down. No edge of stained sand. The tide was coming in; how fast? Would the sandbar be covered? He knew it would be — the gouge showed dark, heavy sand, not the fine whiteness of the beach near the trees. They would not even have to wait until the pallet's wreckage slid into the water; the sea was coming in to meet the MiL. Already, it was perhaps an inch, two inches farther up the flank of the helicopter, lapping gently, deceptively against the Plexiglas of the gunner's cabin. The rotary cannon's barrel was already dipped like a straw into the water. The tip of the airspeed sensor boom toyed at the surface. The Mil was leaning to starboard and tilted nose down, too. Its weight should have been pressing the wreckage of the pallet down into the compacted sand of the bar— should have been. But it had moved twice, three times, although only by inches. Either it would move as they began to rerig, or — or the tide…

"Lane! I want you in here. You do the cowhand's job, Mac."

"Sure."

"Get the rigging kit onto the sand. I need you—"

"I release the rotor brake every time you want the rotor head moved, huh, Major?"

"Got it right off the bat. Change places with me. Come on."

Lane dragged the section of pallet and the elements of the rigging kit up the slope of the sandbar, Mac wading into the shallow water to help him, the coiled rope over his shoulder. When they had finished, Mac waved.

"Ready when you are, skipper."

"OK. Lane, let's change places." He reached back into the cockpit and tugged the transceiver from its mounting, then clipped it to his pocket. "Garcia — situation report now."

"Major — we're making it," he heard Garcia breathlessly reply, his words accompanied by a soughing like that of the wind. "We got the wobble pump operational, we're fueling up now. Then we'll re-rig our rotors. Any more orders?"

"You're going to have to tow out one of the fuel cells to me. Just be ready. Out."

Lane was standing beneath the cockpit. Gant balanced in the doorway, assessed the stability of the tilted helicopter, then jumped into the shallow water. Looked up at once — the Mil had not moved. He exhaled with noisy relief.

"OK, Lane, just take your time, huh?"

Lane reached upward, grabbing the frame of the open door with one hand, the sill with the other. Like a hunchback, he placed his feet in the niches in the fuselage, hesitated, then scrambled softly into the cockpit, straightening gingerly only after a long hesitation. Something groaned beneath the MiL, but it had not moved. It was simply the tide that shocked — another inch, maybe two.

Swiftly, Gant rounded the drunkenly hanging nose and walked up the slope of the sandbar. The water had been warm; he had hardly noticed. The morning was still. The temperature wasn't much over sixty, but it was humid and breezeless. Tension made him sweat.

He squinted into the light, looking up at the locked rotors. Four of the blades clustered over the tail boom required moving. And first he must rerig the blade that would hang closest to the water — a measurement of the incoming tide. If it dipped below the surface, then when he started the engines it would break, stranding the Mil for good. So—

"You lasso each of the rotors, Mac, and haul them around to the rigged position. I'll lock and secure."

"Sure, skipper." Mac had taken the coiled rope from his shoulder. He grinned and wiped sweat from his forehead.

Gant touched gently at the flank of the MiL. Placed his hands firmly on the stubby port wing, above the rocket pod, which stared threateningly into his stomach. He heaved his body onto the wing. The helicopter quivered, rocked gently, settled back. There was a groan of splintered wood, but no sideways or forward movement. Mac's breath exhaled noisily. Gant stood on the wing, then began climbing slowly, using the handholds set in the fuselage. Tension shook his frame; sweat blinded him — just that small effort, and he felt weak, as if the air was that of some Turkish bath. He pressed his body against the fuselage, edging upward. Lane's features appeared pale and nervous through the cloudy Plexiglas to his left, beyond the plugged air intakes.

He scrambled into a crouched position atop the helicopter, near the opening of the oil-cooler intake. He nodded to Mac.

"OK — throw up the tools."

The wrench glinted in the sun. He caught it easily. Then he grabbed the second tool out of the air, clanging it down against the drum of the exhaust port, which boomed hollowly. He nodded again, paused to look across the water. In a mirror image of what he was about to attempt, he could make out Garcia atop the 24A, unlocking his second rotor. Kooper had dragged the first one into position; it was already rerigged for takeoff. It was a race, and he suddenly appeared to be falling behind; Garcia did not have the urgency of the creeping tide to prompt him.

From his vantage, the sandbar already appeared narrower, a sliver of gouged whiteness reaching out from the shore. No longer like a crooked arm, only as thick as a beckoning finger. The chin radar had disappeared beneath the water; the FLIR, too, was gone. The tip of the sensor boom had dipped below the surface, the rotary cannon was half drowned. Urgency panicked him, made him feel old and insecure as he straightened up, balancing his weight evenly, one foot to either side of the exhaust. Then he sat down gently.

Minutes, minutes…

He unlocked the first rotor.

"OK!" It was necessary and unnecessary to shout, but he did so, releasing the tension that threatened to cramp his arms, his grip on the tool. Mac's lasso floated upward; Gant grabbed it and crawled along the tail boom, a four-footed animal disoriented on a high wire, looping it over the tip of the first rotor. "OK!" He felt the sweat sheening his body inside the flight overalls, and wiped at his forehead and eyes. Raised his body to watch.

Mac walked into the water, tugging the rotor slowly away from its folded position, the rope taut, dropping beads of bright water. The rotor tip moved downward in an arc. Gant could not breathe.

He scuttled back along the tail boom, seating himself once more on the warm metal of the exhaust. He began rotating the nut, one eye watching the moving rotor tip as it dipped toward the water. Fish flicked like silver metal fragments. The wrench rotated the large nut, drawing back the triple lugs, which allowed their mating lugs to engage in their housings and become locked when the special retracting tool was withdrawn. The rotor stopped moving. Gant almost fearfully studied its tip. Less than a foot from the water. Once any part of it was submerged, the game was lost.

"One!" he yelled. "OK, Lane — release the rotor brake!"

He moved away from the rotor head. As the brake was released in the cockpit, the rotor head moved, bringing it to a more convenient position. Mac flung the lasso but failed to loop it on the tip of the next rotor. Gant s temperature soared; he clamped his lips shut, watched Mac throw again, catch the tip, tighten the noose. He waved him to begin pulling the rotor into position, retracting the lugs, loosening the nut with the wrench.

A frantic stealth; a tense, almost slow-motion sequence of actions. Lasso, wrench, retracting tool, wrench, the insertion of a wired pin. Hydraulic pressure would complete the locking of each rotor at the moment of engine-start… lasso, wrench, retracting tool, wrench, wired pin, rotor brake… His back and arms ached, his body was bathed in sweat. The water edged slowly — no, they were laboring slowly, with effort, the sea just slid and rose — toward the rotor tip. Starboard undercarriage beneath the water, the sea lapping high up on the gunners cockpit, Garcias Mil in the hazy distance already fully rigged.

"Lash the fuel cell as securely as you can," he was instructing Garcia, even as he tightened the fourth nut, at the point of removing the retracting tool. "Make the towrope as long as you can — I don't want this baby disturbed by your downwash. Get that fuel and the wobble pump out here as quick as you can." "OK, Major — with you as soon as we can." Gant did not look up at the beach again. He stared instead at the tip of the rotor that leaned out over the water. Inches now. They wouldn't have time. Inches…

He heard the 24A's engines start, the rotors wind up. A shattering noise that seemed like laughter mocking the immobility of his own helicopter. He tightened the last nut and removed the retracting tool. He reached for the last wired pin and fitted it. The retracting tool slithered from his damp grasp, clanging down the bulkhead, splashing into the water—

— a moment of relief that he had finished with it, that he need not waste time retrieving it, then he realized that Lane, his own task completed and startled by the noise behind him, had lurched across the cockpit to look out, leaning his weight too quickly, too heavily against the frame of the door—

— Mac's mouth opening in surprise, even warning, Gant clinging to the rotor head, still straddling the exhaust as if riding a wild horse, Lane realizing what he had done—

— all in the moment that the Mil seemed to shrug, and tilt and drop its nose and port side. The tip of the rotor disappeared beneath the surface, refraction making it appear like an arm put out of joint. A foot or more of it below the water!

Water lapped against the gunners cockpit, almost over it; the sea idled over the lip of the pilot's doorsill.

"Jesus!" Gant wailed. The pallet's wreckage groaned. The movement continued. Two feet, three, almost four feet of rotor disappeared beneath the surface. The next rotor was no more than a foot from the water. He could not take off now. Dare not attempt engine-start and let the rotors, one after the other and with quicker and quicker beat, plow through four or five feet of water. Breaking each of them, one by one, flinging the body of the Mil about in an approximation of an animal's dying frenzy—

— couldn't, couldn't.

As if an intrigued spectator, the 24A glided gently slowly toward them, towing the fuel cell behind it.

The problem had changed. Gant couldn't use the fuel now, there was no point, but there was no other way to lift the Mil to safety. Pelicans scattered around the approaching helicopter like gulls around a plow as if mocking the stately progress of the 24A, which finally stood off in the hover about fifty yards away. The sandbar was now like the thinnest of bony fingers. It was diminishing more rapidly because of its flattened top.

Mac's face, empty with realization, Lane's features stunned with self-blame, the face of the 24A staring blindly at him. Faces.

The towrope slackened, the fuel cell bobbed on the glittering water. Pelicans wheeled and cried in protest, began to settle… slack towrope… Garcia would drag the fuel cell closer — why bother? Slack towrope.

Towrope.

Fuel first, or towrope — towrope…

"Garcia — drag that fuel cell and the pump onto the sandbar, then cast off. I want the rope—"

"I can't—"

"You got to, Garcia. Towrope on the tail bumper, you got to pull this baby out of the water. Then we fuel up, and I may have time to lift her off under her own power — now do it!"

Garcia immediately headed his Mil toward the sandbar, to a point thirty yards or so away from the 24D. The fuel cell bobbed behind it; the pump, on a section of pallet unbolted from the main frame, was bringing up the rear of the tiny, futile-looking convoy. Garcia passed over the bar, throwing up a cloud of fine sand, then the towrope tautened as the pallet section drove into the bar, wedged, stuck fast.

"Mac, Lane — get the hell over there and untie that rope!" Into the transceiver, he snapped: "Kooper, I want you down here now. Garcia, stand by when you've delivered him."

Gant rose, straightened, then jumped down on the port side. The water was closing over the sandbar ever more quickly, or so it seemed. Garcia's Mil had touched its wheels onto the bar, and Kooper had opened his Plexiglas hatch from the gunner's seat. He climbed out, balanced on the boarding steps, closed his hatch, and dropped into the swirl of sand raised by the rotors. Garcia lifted and dodged the Mil away from the sandbar, adopting the hover perhaps twenty yards out over the water. Gant ran, floundering in the churned sand, toward the knot of men around the fuel cell and the wobble pump. His hands waved Garcia in closer. Mac was holding the end of the towrope aloft like a prize at some championship.

Garcia's Mil danced slowly, graciously in toward them. Mac began pulling the rope toward Gant, Kooper and Lane picking it up, too, like children rushing to join a tug-of-war challenge. Garcia kept pace with them, standing far enough off not to raise sand. The water, instead, was wrinkled and distressed by his downdraft. It looked darker, colder beneath the MiL's shadow. Gant, too, grabbed the rope, and the four of them heaved and rushed it toward the uptilted drunken tail boom of the 24D.

"Make it secure," he ordered.

He returned to the nose section of the helicopter. The water was shallow enough. He stepped into it, feeling with his feet for a foothold, for the resistance of compacted sand, as he leaned against the Plexiglas and pushed. His feet slipped, then gripped. He was up to his thighs in water. He moved around the nose, then checked the sand along the forward fuselage, below the pilot's cockpit. Enough for a foothold, maybe.

"OK — Kooper, Lane, get her unlashed from the pallet. She has to roll off when Garcia takes up the strain. Come on."

Water was lapping gently against the fuselage. He slammed the pilot's door, preventing it from slopping into the cabin. Sensor boom almost submerged, cannon refracted and bent beneath the surface. Forward undercarriage drowned, starboard undercarriage the same.

Kooper, Lane, and he unlashed the Mil from the wreckage of the pallet. His knuckles sprouted blood as he grazed them. Kooper swore. The heat seemed intolerable, as if the air had begun to scorch and burn. His lungs felt dry and raw. Every time he glanced up, the sandbar seemed narrower. The pelicans, settled now despite the hovering MiL, seemed to have gathered to watch; superiorly afloat, able to fly simply by rising from the sea.

He straightened his aching back.

"OK, OK — let's get to it. Garcia — ready?"

"Ready, Major."

"Begin to take up the slack — gently."

Gant raised his hand, and Garcia's Mil began to move slowly away, along the diminishing spine of the sandbar. Mac stood by the towrope where it was attached to the tail bumper. The rope jerked out, rose from the sand.

"Get ready," Gant warned Kooper and Lane, waist-deep in the water, shoulders leaning against the Plexiglas of the gunner's cabin and the metal of the fuselage.

The towrope snapped taut, scattering wet sand. The knots creaked tight. The rope strained. Hold, hold—

The sandstorm whirled beneath the 24A, almost obscuring it. It began flinging hard, stinging particles against Gant's face and hands. He squinted into the murk. The rope seemed thinly stretched, like a thread rather than a rope,

"Mac!" he yelled. "Come and give a hand."

He splashed into the water, taking up a position near the forward undercarriage. Straining against the bulk and mass of the fuselage. Mac joined them on the port side, his feet just out of the water.

"Heave — for Christ's sake, heave!"

Downdraft from the straining Mil seeped over them like a slow cloud of heavy gas. He closed his eyes against the stinging sand. He heard the others coughing, groaning with effort. The 24D resisted, solidly unmoving.

Come on, come on, come on, come on!

He heard Garcia increase the power to his engines. The Mil roared. He seemed in darkness when he slitted open his eyes. His feet began to lose what grip they had been able to find, he began to slip backward.

"Come on — heave!" he screamed.

He fell forward, plunging his face into the churned, sand-filled water. Beneath the water, he could hear the throb of the Mil and some thin noise like a distorted cheer.

He lifted his face out of the water. Twenty yards away, as the sandstorm subsided, its wheels axle-deep in the sand at the end of three long, deep furrows, his helicopter sat with a kind of elegance: upright, rotors drooping gently.

Water sparkled as it dripped from the rotor that had been half submerged. Lane was on his knees in the water, Kooper was doubled over. Mac had struggled up the slope and was staring at the Mil as it rested near the fuel cell and the pump, as if quizzical about their situation.

"OK, let's fuel her up and get off. We haven't got time to spare."

Lane groaned, got to his feet. Kooper straightened reluctantly. Mac was already moving toward the MiL. Garcia's helicopter hovered over the water, towrope trailing in the sea. By the time Gant reached him, Mac had cut through the rope. Garcia wobbled in the air, as if bowing, then headed back toward the sandbar. Gant waved him away. Garcia gave a thumbs-up.

"OK — be back with you, Major, just as soon as I can."

The 24A drifted toward the beach.

Urgency was difficult, as if further effort was grossly unfair and to be resented. They should be safe, after what they had done. Instead, Gant felt his muscles crack and protest as they hauled the fuel cell alongside the helicopter, then dragged the pump beside the fuselage. He knocked open the fuel cap positioned just forward of the stubby port wing. Mac attached the hose, Kooper locked it to the fuel cell. Then he and Lane grabbed the handles of the wobble pump, and began pushing and pulling back and forth, pushing and pulling.

"We'll spell you," Gant said. Water sucked around his boots. The sand was dark and wet beneath the wheels of the MiL. He looked at Mac, then added: "I want enough to get me to the beach, is all."

Sweat spread where the water was drying on their overalls. Once more, the air seemed to scorch in Gant's lungs as he relieved Kooper at the pump. A cone of heat and humidity surrounded him. Mac's face, opposite his, was reddened, running with perspiration. Kooper relieved Gant. Water splashed audibly, ankle-deep. Lane took Mac's place.

When Garcia arrived, panting for breath after trudging along the narrow spine of the bar, Gant climbed into the cockpit of the MiL. Fuel gauges… not quite yet…

"Garcia," he called, leaning out of the cockpit. "Unplug the intakes." Garcia splashed through the knee-deep water and climbed onto the fuselage. Gant looked at the rotors drooping to port and starboard. Their tips reached down almost to the level of the stubby wings. The sea had begun to envelop the undercarriage once more. Perhaps two or three feet from the rotors — fuel gauges…?

He began prestart. Auxiliary power unit on.

Fuel gauges?

"OK, guys — disconnect."

"Jesus," someone groaned. Gant heard the hose being disconnected, the fuel cap closed.

He reached up, after glancing down at the water rising toward the weapons pylons beneath the wings. He pressed the two start buttons adjacent to the throttle levers. He advanced the levers to a ground-idle setting. His arm quivered with weariness and a new sense of urgency. If the water beat him now…

The two Isotov engines growled to life. He checked the main panel, monitoring the small percentage of instruments and functions he required to fly the two hundred yards to the safety of the white sand. The whine of the turbines reached a higher note. Water splashed against the weapons load beneath the wings.

He watched Garcia, Mac, and the others retreat in his mirrors, wading back through the water. The sandbar had disappeared. They were thigh-deep in water, walking along its hidden spine. He reached up to the throttles and advanced them to their flight-idle setting. The turbines screamed, the rotors quivered, held by the rotor brake. He stared at the rotor tips to port, then starboard. Six inches, perhaps five—

— released the rotor brake. They began moving, turning as if in amber or thick jelly. Slowly, slowly. Distressing the water over which they passed. He held his breath. Quicker, quicker.

The rotor disk shimmered, the tips lifting well above the water. The Mil seemed to shuffle, as if impatient but still restrained by the water. His eyes were blinking away perspiration as his left hand raised the pitch lever, increasing the engine power. His right hand eased the column toward him, lifting the helicopters nose.

The Mil lifted clear of the water and sand as if climbing out of molasses. The water rippled outward from the downdraft, puckered by streams falling from the undercarriage and fuselage. He lifted the Mil over the staring, waving group wading toward the beach, heading for the trees.

He began to breathe more easily. He lowered the pitch lever and gently applied pressure on the rudder pedals. He dropped the helicopter high up on the beach, the fine white sand beyond the tide line whirling up around the cockpit. Then the thought struck him — the Galaxy… did it make Karachi?

6: In Foreign Places

Dmitri Priabin watched the dogs tail wagging lazily just below the television set. He was leaning one elbow on his desk, holding the telephone receiver to his ear. Nodding occasionally, as he listened to the surveillance report on Valery Rodin from one of Du-dins teams attached to the Tyuratam office. They were established in an empty flat opposite the refurbished mansion where Rodin owned — owned, not rented — a small, expensive apartment.

On the television screen, half a world away and hours earlier, Soviet ice skaters danced a jigging, doll-like finish to their routine and bowed, then slid toward the camera that would study their faces while they waited for their marks. Another of the endless repeats Soviet television relied upon to fill its program schedule. The movement of the dogs tail seemed to dismiss their performance. He watched the skaters' shiny, heavily breathing feces, grinning, and recognized a common identity with them. They were spiritual cousins. Their marks stuttered along the top of the screen. Disappointing. Behind the East Germans. He sensed their anxiety, but without his customary cynicism. They might well be anxious for their new flat with all the modern conveniences — would the second-ranked Soviet pair overtake them, and thereby take over the flat? He smiled. It was what they were all after, just as he was — a flat on the Kutuzovsky Prospekt. The place had never seemed as inviting to the skaters or to himself as at that moment.

He recognized that his mood had lightened.

"He's been what?" he asked sharply, startled out of his half-attentive mood. A photograph of Rodin lay clipped to the first page of the file opened on his desk. The narrow, sensitive face looked up at him scornfully. The eyes were sharply focused; not as they must be now.

The marks for artistic impression were better. The skaters waved with renewed energy. They might yet get to keep their flat on Kutuzovsky Prospekt.

He listened carefully. "You're certain?" he asked.

"Yes, sir. Silver spoon, sniffing it right up his little red nose, sir," the KGB man assured him. "He's practically in a dead faint right now, stretched out on the bed. Silk sheets, sir," he added leeringly.

"After drinking, too?"

"Yes, sir. Brandy and coke."

Priabin laughed. "Tell me about the telephone calls."

"Must have made twenty, sir. Do you want the exact log?"

"Not now. Just your impressions."

Other skaters smoothed onto the ice, bowed, and curtsied. Canadians, threatening the Russian medal places.

"Most of them were members of his little gang, sir. The booze, barbiturate, and buggery boys." Again, Priabin chuckled. "Tried his father a couple of times, but the general's down at the assembly building — they're rolling out the booster this morning."

"I know." He'd watched, from his window. "Go on."

"All his friends hung up. Couldn't wait for him to get off the line. They must have decided he's caught AIDS, mm, sir?"

"Get on with it."

"We've got everything on tape. The bug's working beautifully at the moment. He's been crying and shouting all over the place, pleading and begging. I almost feel sorry for the poor little twink?" He offered the remark tentatively, as if testing the water of his colonel's bigotries.

"Daddy's put him out of circulation, then?"

"He did order some groceries, sir, and a lot of booze. That was before he started calling his friends."

"He's been told to stay in. And not to talk to anyone, no doubt. Now, watch him carefully — I mean carefully. I want him soft, pliable, but not useless. When you think he's ready for a visit, call me and I'll come over straightaway. When he's lonely enough to talk to me."

With their telephoto lenses and high-powered glasses, they were just a few floors above and almost directly opposite. They couldn't miss the signs. Rodin had no need to draw his curtains for hours yet, and before nightfall he should be ready.

"Sir, we won't miss him picking his nose or scratching his bum, if that's what you want."

"Anyone else watching him—?" He broke off as the door opened. Katya Grechkova entered, a sheaf of papers and files held against her breasts. He waved to a seat opposite him. She turned her attention to the skaters, but only momentarily. The second-ranked Soviet pair were on the ice now, gliding into a lift and throw. The girl, in emerald green and white, flew through the air and landed safely. "That you can see, that is?" he finished.

"Don't think so, sir."

"Make as sure as you can. I don't want to be seen going in there, when the time comes. Stay out of sight. I don't want GRU interested — we are not interested in Rodin ourselves. Got it?"

"Invisible men, sir, me and Mikhail." Priabin heard a distant chuckle. Mikhail was at the camera's viewfinder or the surveillance glasses on their tripod

"Keep it that way," Priabin replied dryly, putting down the receiver. He tapped at his teeth with his thumbnail. A moment of irritation on Katya Grechkova's pale, freckled features, as Priabin looked up at her. "What's all that?" he asked.

"Kedrov, sir."

He waved his hand almost dismissively. Grechkova was punctilious in her respect for his rank. It had taken months to persuade her that it was largely unnecessary, entirely unsought. He watched the dog get up, stretch, idle its way as if propelled by the wagging of its tail over to her, who fondled its shaggy hair, stroked and patted it. The dog licked her hand.

Then she looked up, as if caught in some dereliction of duty. Priabin saw the vulnerability that normally remained private. She had an estranged husband in the army — this military district, but at army headquarters in Alma-Ata. Had the husband ever seen that small, vulnerable look? She was in the process of obtaining a divorce. Priabin was certain, and relieved, that she carried no torch for her commanding officer. Though he liked her.

"Anything new?" His tone was detached, but not without interest, though he had come more and more to persuade himself that the solution to his problem lay with Valery Rodin. Who knew everything about Lightning, without doubt — and who helped kill Viktor. If he found Kedrov, the agent-in-place, of course it would do a great deal of good.

"It's not confirmed, sir. Sorry — it seems the GRU may have discovered his hiding place a few hours ago. No, he wasn't there," she hastened to reassure.

Suddenly, Kedrov was the infinitely desirable, captive. The GRU mustn't get hold of him before he did.

"Thank God," he breathed. "Where?"

"An abandoned silo complex. He was camped out there, as far as I can discover. But he must have heard them and got away. It's here, sir. Only gossip, but it sounds likely to be true."

"What else have we got?"

"Not much."

She tossed her head after frowning over a summary sheet on her lap. She stood up and passed him the documents, tapping at the top sheet, running her unpainted nail down the list it contained. She placed the file on Kedrov over the picture of Rodin.

The second Soviet couple had finished their routine. Good marks for technical merit.

"Hm….." Priabin studied the digest of reports on Kedrov— friends, acquaintances, hangouts, social habits, sexual involvements. There really was very little that was new. It was the file of an agent who had disappeared; a spy there seemed little more to learn about. "Not much, is there?" he commented finally, lifting the file nearer to him so that the picture of Valery Rodin was once more revealed.

"Sorry," Katya replied, as if being personally blamed.

Rodin's features stared up at Priabin. Just a matter of time now, he thought, and felt the impatience vie with the sense of danger. Was he being reckless? Did the danger attract as much as the hope of a solution? I'll get the bastards, Viktor, any way I can, he swore silently, reaffirming a purpose, clouding his self-doubt.

"Can't be helped," he murmured. He flicked over the pages of the file. Drinker, occasional lecher, cinema buff, hi-fi enthusiast, bird-watcher — his hobbies seemed to offer little or no illumination. "No, there's nothing here." He sighed.

Concentrate, he instructed himself sternly. You have to find him before the GRU — time's running out, if they're chasing close behind. If they find him first, whatever he knows or doesn't know, you'll be right in the shit! They'll find out you knew all about his activities and never let on.

"Is anything wrong?" Katya asked.

He looked up abstractedly. "What?"

"Is anything wrong?" she repeated. She pursed her lips as she saw his face become secretive, closed. "You look worried."

"I just wish we could find him, Katya. We have to, before those goons in GRU do the job for us. If they even suspect that we were on to him and let him get away — you can imagine the consequences in this place."

"Why are they looking for him?"

"Presumably, just because he's missing from his work. Let's hope it's nothing more." He shook his head.*"They can't know anything, not yet." He stood up and thrust his hands into his pockets. Then he crossed to the window. The booster was almost out of sight now. A snaillike hump in the distance, without real shape or identity, way beyond the assembly building that still contained the shuttle and the laser weapon. Sunlight gleamed on metal; everywhere. "He could be anywhere out there," he murmured. "But where?"

"Don't they always run to somewhere they know?" Katya prompted.

"Mm?"

"To feel safe?"

"Oh, yes, that's the theory anyway." His attention had moved from the main assembly complex and the railway leading toward the distant scrawl of gantries that marked the launch site, toward the chimney smoke that was shaded like charcoal scribble along the horizon above the serrated silhouette of Tyuratam. Rodin was there, he thought; he has the key. I know where to find him. "Yes, they do," he repeated. But not Rodin — he doesn't feel safe in his flat, just abandoned.

Impatience seized him once again, and he turned abruptly to Katya. She was looking at him, awaiting orders. He wanted to ignore her and leave at once, but her gaze seemed to prevent him. He must attend to the matter of Kedrov. He sighed and threw up his hands.

"Well, my lady, have you any suggestions?" he asked good-humoredly. Katya wrinkled her nose as if she suspected patronage in his familiarity.

"I — well…"

"Come on," he chided, "just because I've been slow on the uptake and have only just realized you've got an idea. Out with it. Don't be coy."

"I'd like to look at the abandoned silo, and try to assess how much he'd prepared the hiding place."

"All right. Unless it's staked out or sealed off by GRU. Now— why?"

"If he'd had it in mind for weeks, then there might be another place somewhere else just like it. The GRU will be busy searching every other abandoned silo and underground complex."

"And get to him first? They've got the troops to do it."

Katya shook her head. "He's not stupid. He wouldn't use two hideouts that were exactly the same."

"So — where and what?"

"Hide — hideout," she replied mysteriously. Her pale cheeks were slightly flushed; self-congratulation and excitement. She was clever, intuitive, thorough. This was one of her little leaps in the dark. He smiled, encouraging her to explain.

"Well, it's flimsy, but—"

"Come on, Katya, forget the false modesty. You don't believe that for a moment."

"Bird-watching. Something he took up about a month or so ago, that's all. His latest hobby. Soon after he started using the transmitter to talk to the Americans, as far as we can tell."

"Yes? Go on." Priabin felt an unfocused excitement. It sounded like nonsense, but…

"He'd never shown an interest before that. There are maybe a dozen or more applications in his name for passes into prohibited areas."

"To assist his spying?"

She shook her head vigorously. "Not in the marshes, it wouldn't. Mostly that's where he wanted to go. The reason he gave was ornithology. Time and again — ornithology."

"Well? You searched his flat. Did you find his books, notes, and sketches?"

"Yes."

"Well?" He had caught her excitement like an infection. Rodin receded in his mind. His gesturing hands hurried her theory, her guesses.

She tugged her halo of tightly curled red hair back with her long fingers. "A couple of very ordinary books. I checked them out."

"He's a beginner, it's a new hobby."

"I realize that. The binoculars could have been a lot better. His notes are all right — but they don't improve. He's an enthusiast in everything he takes up — spends money on his hi-fi, on cinema history books. Here, he hasn't. But he went out a lot. I don't think he was learning anything."

"Sketches?"

"A few attempts."

"A cover, then?"

Katya shook her head. "Not quite — but not a real hobby. Not important enough to him to justify so many trips to the marshes."

"Then?"

"Then that's where I think he might be — sir," she added care-folly, looking away from his praising smile. He grabbed her by the upper arms and stood her up. He was laughing.

"Get on with it — and tell no one, understand?"

"You mean—?"

"I mean you could be right. Or you might be wrong. Find out."

"Yes. Now?"

He nodded. "Now. Take the dog with you, too — you know how he likes your company. Misha, come on, boy."

The dog, which had returned to the rug in front of the television, shook itself upright, its great tail banging from side to side. Katya grinned at it.

"Come on," she murmured coaxingly. "Thank you, sir."

"Find something, that's all I ask. And go carefully." His own impatient excitement possessed him once more. Tyuratam, the flat of a privileged young officer, a drugged man sprawled on silk sheets — he couldn't wait much longer. He'd talk to Rodin today, hit him hard, get at the truth.

Things were moving. The inertia of events swept him up. He ushered Katya from the office, his hand firmly on her shoulder. The dog waddled ahead of them down the corridor.

"Take a gun," he warned softly. "Just in case."

The sea shimmered in the afternoon sun. It was slightly cooler in the shade of the palms. Netting covered the two MiLs, reducing them to shapeless lumps without purpose or identity. They were parked, like automobiles, as close to the tree line as it was possible to land them. The tide had begun to retreat; its depth, as he knew because he had swum out there, would have been enough to submerge the helicopter on the sandbar. The flotsam of his impact had been drawn slowly, garlandlike, out to sea. The pelicans were diving for fish or floating like toys on the glaring water. The dead and maimed ones had been taken away by the retreating tide.

Gant wiped perspiration from his forehead. Mac lay near him, smoking, propped on one elbow like a vacationer reading a paperback. His posture suggested rest, but the nervous tension induced by waiting — four hours of it now — seemed electric in the heavy air. Kooper and Lane dozed or chatted desultorily, disguising the passage of time. Garcia was in the cockpit of Gant's MiL, taking his turn on radio watch; waiting for the signal that must arrive, and soon.

The Galaxy had made it to Karachi. To be precise, it had put down with the last dregs of its usable fuel at the military airfield west of the city, and only by declaring an in-flight emergency. Anders' voice, almost unrecognizable as it emerged from the decoding process of the quick reaction terminal attached to the satellite transceiver, had told them — wait, just wait.

Four hours of waiting. Reassurances had come through the communications system Gant would use over Afghanistan and inside Soviet airspace, but no decision; no permission. The mission was still like flotsam on this beach, its clock running away, racing ahead of them. He had to be in Peshawar by the evening, with a thousand miles of enemy airspace to cross to Baikonur. Six hours' flying, minimum. And he had to reach Baikonur that night.

Pakistani air force jets had made two passes overhead three hours earlier. Swept down at them, and passed seaward, into the haze, glinting like midday stars. Establishing the fact of a covert mission stranded inside their territorial border. Gant and Anders hoped the mounting nervousness would lead the government in Islamabad, however outraged, to agree to Anders' request in order to move on the unwelcome visitors, camped like gypsies on the beach.

No sign of people. The coastal strip was virtually uninhabited; barren, infertile, the palms simply a margin between sea and desert. A ship passing along the horizon and making a thin smudge of smoke hang there long after its silhouette had disappeared beyond the nearest headland. Otherwise, nothing. Gant looked at his watch once more; it was a nervous tic.

Three. It would take them almost two hours to reach Karachi, and the Galaxy would take another two hours to reach Peshawar. Seven at night before they crossed into Afghanistan… and they had to wait, just wait, while time ran out.

Despite his tinted pilot's glasses, he squinted at the sea and the heat haze. His eyes felt tired, strained, and his body somnolent; as if he were within the context of a restless night's sleep, half waking, always shifting position. The sense of unfairness remained with him; they had done enough to earn Islamabad's wink and nod, enough to get out of here.

"Major," Garcia called. "Anders."

Gant hurried to his feet, as if startled by danger. Mac looked up, Lane broke off the sentence he had begun. He strode toward the MiLs, lifting the netting and ducking beneath it. Garcia's face was strained with expectation. He handed the lightweight headset to Gant, who snatched it, tugging it on.

"Anders?"

"Gant." The strangeness of the remote, toneless voice was unsettling as it emerged from the decoding process. Similarly, Gant's voice would be somehow dehumanized aboard the Galaxy as Anders listened. "Gant — it's OK. Mission continues."

"Thank God," Gant murmured. Garcia crossed himself with a fervent detachment. "Can we leave now?"

"Immediately. To rendezvous at" — he gave the map reference, then repeated it—"with Pakistani helicopter units offshore. They'll bring you in — in disguise, sort of. Wolves in sheep's clothing. Fly an offshore routing to avoid visual sighting before the rendezvous point — you got that?"

"I copy." Garcia was holding the relevant map, folded in deep creases, in front of Gant. He saw the rendezvous point clearly. Ten miles offshore. They'd go in like a flock of low-flying birds, two MiLs submerging their identities within the flight of Pakistani air force helicopters. Anders had done well.

"OK. Good luck."

"How high was the price?"

"You wouldn't believe it, Gant. The President is not pleased. Your debt is climbing."

"The hell with that. I'll report when we're airborne. See you, Anders." He threw the headset into Garcia's arms. Grinned. Felt his body shaking with relief. "OK, Garcia, let's get moving. Close formation, you fly to port of me and a little behind. Constant visual surveillance, and fifty feet off the water. OK?"

"OK, Major."

He had already turned away from Garcia, lifted the netting, and was shouting at Mac, Kooper, and Lane, all on their feet, like customers waiting for some store to open.

"Let's move it. We're back on the ice!"

Priabin had never before experienced, in quite such a satisfying manner, the charm of unsuspected surveillance. Powerful glasses on a tripod, their twin black snouts hardly jutting through the slight gap in the net curtains; the camera's long, long lens beside them. The pleasant ache in his back after stooping for a long time to the viewfinders, the numbness in his buttocks after perching on a hard chair for some time. The aches of a gardener satisfied with his day's work, or a man who has harvested successfully. The beer and sandwiches in the darkened room and the surprising camaraderie among unseen watchers.

It was just after dark now. He straightened up once more, sighing, his hands cradling his back. The glasses were now night-vision binoculars that rendered the world in shades of gray, adding to that inevitable sense of the unreality; the person under surveillance being an object, not a human being.

There was special film in the camera. Each of the surveillance instruments had its own pleasure to give. The tape recorder linked to the phone tap, voice-activated. Rigged to record even their own telephone reports. The laser eavesdropper, which collected the vibrations of a windowpane as it quivered in sympathy with a human voice, had developed a fault and stood, as if it had transgressed, in one corner of the bare, carpetless room. Priabin shifted his weight from foot to foot. It was easy to let time slow down. He possessed Rodin like this.

Power, that's what it was, in the end. He'd spent what? More than three hours just watching, doing nothing. He made himself move. The other two men in the room, Mikhail and Anatoly, stirred like large, impatient cats. The room smelled of waiting, dust, pungent garlic sausage, and beer. And heady, cheap tobacco.

"OK, he's as ready as he'll ever be. I'm going over," he announced.

"You'll want to be wired, then, sir," Mikhail observed, moving to one of the suitcases lying on the other side of the room. His companion, Anatoly, dragged a chair to the tripod and at once sat down, adjusting the focus of the night glasses, humming tunelessly.

"No. Not this time."

"Sir?"

Anatoly had stopped humming.

"Just take it from me — it could prove safer. He won't tell, I won't, and you won't — whatever I learn. But I don't want any record around of my conversation with the lieutenant the military might get their hands on."

"OK, sir, if that's how you want to play."

"Mikhail, believe me. Something big is going on. I can feel it in my water. He knows about it, the fairy prince over the way. He'll tell me, if I can persuade him. Now, where does that leave us?"

"We've got the message, sir. What we don't hear, we can't let slip," Anatoly murmured without turning around. "We'll play dumb."

"Good. Right, I'll be on my way."

"Shouldn't one of us—?"

"You think he's dangerous?"

"Little princess could be desperate, sir. Could come to the same in the end."

"He's up to his eyeballs in coke. I think I can handle him." He clicked his tongue against his teeth. "All right," he added, "if you see me struggling on the bed with him, don't assume I've fallen for his boyish charm — get over there on the double."

Mikhail laughed, an explosive noise in the darkness.

"OK, sir."

Priabin sensed their alertness, all the tiredness of routine and familiarity erased. He picked up his overcoat and pulled it around his shoulders. Straightened his jacket and tie. First impressions—

His boots sounded heavy on the floorboards. He closed the door behind him, walked down the short hallway, and opened the flat's front door. The corridor was empty. As he waited for the elevator, he felt the place's chill, received its smells of cooking and electricity, heard its murmurs. A number of television and radio sets, laughter. It was a squat, modern block of flats spilling from the science city's boundary and encroaching on the most northerly street of the old town; it loomed over the grander, older house — some czarist businessman's idea of a town mansion — where the apartments were allocated to military, top scientific personnel, mistresses. The flats were bought and sold, exchanged for large favors, promotions, used as bribes.

The concierge watched him leave the foyer. He pushed through the revolving doors into the icy chill of the evening. The temperature had plummeted. He stood for a moment looking up at Rodin's windows, two of them lit. He saw again the young man lying on his silk sheets, as if he still watched him through the binoculars; or hurrying to the lavatory to be sick, drinking but unable to eat. Afraid. Posed with his sunken head in his hands on the edge of the bed, staring at the carpet and desperate for the telephone to ring. He was ready to talk.

Priabin sighed with satisfaction as he poised himself on the edge of the pavement. Then he crossed the quiet, narrow street, hunching his overcoat up around his neck. The wind seemed to pass through his clothing with casual, biting ease.

There was carpet in the wide hall. The concierge, summoned by means of the speaker to one side of the door, ushered him in with slight but evident deference. Complicity smoothed his features. He would say nothing, unless directly questioned by someone more imposing than a KGB colonel. Priabin nodded meaningfully at him and took the stairs two at a time. The concierge had no interest in whom he might be visiting.

Outside the door of Rodin's apartment, he was aware of the degree of quiet luxury around him, foreign even to a colonel in his service. Foreign to him, anyway.

The carpet was thick beneath his soles, betraying where he had walked. Wool, pure wool. The door was perhaps the original one, whatever alterations had been made to the house. Paneled wood dark with stain and age. He did not remove his cap as he pressed the doorbell. First impressions—

He felt subdued by his surroundings, and needed to offer Rodin an image of immaculate authority. He must look as if he meant business, would be satisfied with nothing less than the truth, the whole truth, nothing but…

He pressed the bell again, held it, heard its shrill summons from beyond the door. Hoped Rodin had not passed out. He'd been sitting on the edge of his bed when Priabin left the other flat, holding his head gently like some delicate, ripened fruit. He had been awake, but in what fashion? Had Priabin left it too late? He became aware of the emptiness of the corridor and the staircase behind him. He was an intruder here, making a secret visit. He thought of Viktor Zhikin, and felt the heat of his body mount to his face; his cheeks burned. Rodin had to be awake—

He kicked the lower panel of the door, savagely. A weak, almost pleading grumble reached him from behind the door. It opened.

He saw a pale-blue carpet, flowers in a tall vase that had begun to droop and fade. Priabin straightened. Immaculate authority. He stared into Rodin's sunken eyes and saw them flinch with recognition and anxiety.

"Good evening, Lieutenant," he said with overflowing confidence. "I think it's time we had a long chat, don't you?"

He studied Rodin's features. Saw deterioration and experienced satisfaction. He had chosen the right moment. There was tiredness and empty loneliness; dark blue rings under the pale eyes.

"May I come in?" His hand pushed authoritatively at the door.

"I–I—what do you want?" The eyes finally narrowed against a realization of danger. "Who — what do you want?" His drugged awareness picked up disconnected phrases.

"To talk to you, Valery." His hand pushed the door further open. Large rooms beyond Rodin's narrow shoulder, pale, rich carpeting, ornaments and prints. Just as he had seen through the binoculars. It seemed to Priabin, not without irony, like a glimpse into the West from the far end of a long tunnel.

"Why?" Stubborn anger now, gathering slowly like a storm. "Get out."

"No."

He turned Rodin's body with the hand that still held his gloves, propelling him into the apartment's long hallway. Rodin accepted the inertia of his entry and moved ahead, his feet shuffling, his body leaning slightly against the strong hand's certainty, as if grateful.

Prints of hunting scenes and the French Impressionists, red walls set against an almost white carpet. An extravagance of rugs. Priabin could imagine loud rock music and laughter from past parties. He shunted Rodin into the main living room. All the time he had been whispering to him as to a child being shepherded into the dentist's office. Rodin seemed to accept the spurious comfort and the imposed situation.

As Priabin had moved through the hallway and past the rooms, he realized that the image through the binoculars had not conveyed the wealth here, the possessions, the splashes of carpet, rug, picture, vase, ornament, hi-fi, record collection. It wasn't the taste, simply the income — the influence, he corrected himself — that could obtain all these things for a mere lieutenant. Cushions, jade, heavy drapes, his thoughts catalogued.

He pushed Rodin gently into a deep beanbag of a chair. The young man, no more than twenty-two or — three, adopted a yogalike posture, arranging his robe to tidiness. His eyes were blue and blank. He seemed to be staring at his visitor's boots intently. As Priabin lifted his head, he saw the extravagant molding and the plaster frieze of shepherds around the main light fixture. The room suggested the existence of an elite beyond that of his own service. There, the wooden dacha amid the trees was the best that might be hoped for. Obscurely, the room angered him. He was not the simple son of a peasant; his father had been a schoolmaster and Party member, with a medal from the Great Patriotic War — he'd seen the red banners rise above the shattered, grandiose buildings of Berlin. Seen the Fascists finished off.

And now this. A lieutenant in the People's army with all this.

He moved closer to Valery Rodin. And sat on the floor, cross-legged in front of him.

"Tell me," he said softly, his hand touching the sleeve of Rodin s robe. 'Tell me about it." His overcoat, after he had removed it from his shoulders, lay at his side like a large, untidy dog. He placed his cap and gloves on top of it, making himself look younger, less official. Sympathy, not envy, he cautioned. Pat his arm, but gently.

Rodin's features seemed engaged in an effort to regain an attentive pattern around his nose and mouth. The cocaine, as a stimulant to the nervous system and taken, no doubt, to help him climb out of the pit of loneliness his father had condemned him to, had lost its effect. It had been defeated, to some extent, by the brandy. He was now quiescent, but deeply introverted and depressed. Priabin felt himself little different from a bomb-disposal officer approaching a suspicious device.

Rodin's pupils were like shriveled raisins in his chalky face. Acute paranoia, Priabin recalled from somewhere. Large doses of cocaine and acute paranoia. The bomb might explode; worse, it might be a complete dud and not go off at all. He continued to pat the young man's arm. Rodin did not respond to the contact. Eventually, Priabin said:

"Tell me, Valery, who's locked you up in this expensive cell?" He shook Rodin's arm gently, but the lieutenant dragged it away from his touch. He scowled because his features could not find a sneer of contempt quickly, then the look soured into a drooping snarl.

"Get out," he whispered, blinking his eyes to make them focus.

Priabin shook his head. "I know you want company, Valery," he asserted. "You're all alone here. They've seen to that, haven't they?"

Perhaps ten seconds later, Rodin nodded. Once the action had commenced, he continued to nod, like a doll. His breathing was loud and ragged; his hps quivered, and his eyes appeared damp.

"Your father?"

"Of course my bloody father!" Rodin hugged his arms around himself, turning into the beanbag, drawing his feet up. His whole body shivered. He began to sob. His voice had seemed to tire after the scream. "Always my bloody father. He made me go into the fucking army when all I wanted to be was a painter." Priabin glanced swiftly around the room. The walls displayed nothing that might have been painted by Rodin. "No good at it, anyway," Rodin pursued, "but he couldn't wait to tell me that." He looked at Priabin, who arranged his features to express sympathy. Rodin's voice was a transmission from a distant radio station; fading, indistinct. "In the bloody army for you, my lad," Rodin mocked, his face twisted, his hand flapping in a caricature of a salute near his temple. "In the army, make a man of you." He turned once more to his listener. It seemed that he did not recognize his visitor; did not care who it was. "Never admitted it, never, never, never. All the army gives you is privileges and a chance to bugger the conscripts!"

He laughed raggedly, staring at Priabin. His attention subsided almost immediately, the world around him rushing into a vague distance. His eyes were inwardly focused, and the retreat seemed more profound. Priabin was greedy to interrupt, to begin to interrogate, yet restrained his mounting impatience. But it was a race against time.

"Worse for him, really, now I'm in the army and under his nose. He had to — to keep sweeping up after me, cleaning up the turds I leave on — his doorstep… art, culture, acting don't interest him. Queers are forbidden, don't talk about them. My mother knew, she understood. Couldn't bear it, but understood. He can't though, never has."

Priabin absorbed the room once more. The father paid. Every day, General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin paid. Drugs, affairs, indiscipline; the general had committed a grave error in having his son posted to Baikonur. Custody must have turned into a nightmare.

Away, he suddenly thought. The next logical step, especially now, would be to send his son away somewhere; to avoid any and all consequences of the interest he had aroused — that Sacha's murder had aroused. That was why the boy was in quarantine. He might have no other chance of talking to him; it had to be now. He had to press.

"Why did they kill Sacha?" he asked bluntly, but not without a sympathetic tone.

Rodin's face paled further around his open mouth.

"What?" He was attempting to concentrate, to realize that it was cold water that had been thrown over him, to wake him.

"Why did they kill Sacha, Valery?"

"I killed Sacha. / did it."

"Why, then, Valery? Had you quarreled? Out of love?"

"What?"

"Why did you kill him?"

"Sacha? I didn't."

"You said you did. Did you?"

Tears leaked from Rodin's eyes. He began nodding again like a round-based doll, tilting his whole upper body time after time.

"Yes," he breathed at last. Then: "Yes, yes, yes, yes."

"How? How did you do it?"

Would the paranoia hold? Persecution, the sense of isolation, the depth of misery, all conspirators surrounding Rodin, making him spill his little cargo of guilt.

"How?"

"Yes, how? Did you rig the car?"

"What do you mean?"

"You killed Sacha."

"I told them about him!" he cried out, then curled more tightly into the beanbag chair, into himself. He cringed away from further pain.

Priabin stood up, and Rodin shivered at his movement. The lieutenant was more deeply withdrawn than ever, almost lost to him. Priabin crossed the room, looking for the bathroom.

Bedroom, bathroom next door, he remembered. Bathroom— yes, light on; drawers, cupboards, vanity, marble-topped — my God. Aftershaves, colognes, shaving lotions, hair spray — yes, expensive makeup, French and American. Whose? Sacha's?

He opened the bathroom cabinet. Nothing he wanted there — not the mouthwashes and the creams. Drawer? No. Second drawer? Ah, yes.

Silver spoon, bottle. He gathered the items and returned to the living room. Rodin had not moved. Priabin placed powder in the bowl of the spoon on its thin silver chain, to be worn around the neck. If he gave Rodin another dose of cocaine now, the stimulant might make him high enough, temporarily, to talk about Lightning. He had to be snapped out of depression into a brief nova of clarity and reckless well-being. Rodin was huddled still into the beanbag, face almost hidden; completely unaware.

The telephone rang. White powder spilled from the spoon as Priabin's hand jumped with surprise. He stared at the receiver on a table near the windows. It continued to ring.

Warning?

He'd heard nothing outside. The telephone was reaching Rodins sunken consciousness. His face turned, wildly hopeful. He made as if to move.

Priabin picked up the receiver, but said nothing.

"Colonel?" Anatoly s voice.

"Yes, what is it?"

"Staff car's just drawn up outside the building, sir. Looks like the general… wait a minute" — he heard Mikhail's voice calling out indistinctly—"yes, sir, it's the general."

"Damnation!" he exploded. "Is he—?"

"Coming in, sir. On the steps now. Do you want—?"

"I'm coming out. Good work."

He thrust the receiver loudly back onto its rest. Half out of the beanbag, as if born from its depths, Rodin's face cracked into desperation as the call ended.

Priabin looked at him for a moment. Perhaps the concierge wouldn't inform the general, without being asked… he might just play it safe anyway. Even the KGB could give him a lot of trouble… no time to worry about it. Quickly, leave him.

He felt cheated and was enraged at the fact. He could have made him talk, he was certain of it, with another shot of cocaine to clear his head, loosen his tongue. He was so close—

His hand clenched into a fist.

Leave—

He hurried into the hall and to the door. Listened. Opened the door, heard footsteps below. Closed the door softly and ran up the short flight of stairs to the top floor.

Holding his breath, he watched General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin use a key to open the door of his son's flat. From the bend in the staircase, he peered down at the top of the general's cap. The door shut behind him.

"Damn — oh, damnation," he breathed, grinding his teeth. He was possessed by the certainty that he would never have another opportunity to talk to Valery Rodin about Lightning,

Anders stood in the chill darkness. The wind from the mountains around Peshawar cut at the small exposed areas of his cheeks and forehead and nose. Gritty dust was whirled against his face. Lights were dotted and clumped on the hills around the airfield, and helicopters drifted unseen, their noises muted, across the plain. Light spilled from the open hold of the Galaxy as the first of the two MiLs was pushed down the ramp from the rear doors and onto the tarmac.

The tail boom of the Hind-D, Gant's MiL, dropped like a signaling arm, then the fat body of the helicopter rolled down the ramp. With furious, controlled haste, the Galaxy's load crew unshipped and rerigged the rotors, as Gant had done on the sandbar. He watched the crewmen descend, move away. Almost immediately, its rotors began to wind up, after the car backfire of the engine-start. The noise grumbled upward, toward the final whine. He held the transceiver absently to the side of his face, where his mouth wetted the fur trim on the hood of his parka. Each time the wind dropped or idled, he could vaguely feel the radiated heat from the Galaxy's huge engines. They had landed no more than seven minutes before from Karachi; it was almost seven-thirty, local time. Seven-thirty, too, in Baikonur, a thousand miles to the north of them. Gant had to be in — and out — while the darkness of this single night persisted. He had perhaps twelve hours — eleven…

Anders shivered, from the cold and from the accumulated tension of the flight from Karachi, from the tensions of the entire day. It was as if they had infected and reinfected one another in the Galaxy's hold with bad nerves, doubts, anticipatory fear, so that the dimensions of that huge space had diminished, pressing in on all of them. He could still see Gant pacing the hold like an animal in a cage while his Mil was checked and cleaned; Garcia sitting apart, being worn from within by his anxiety; the others quarreling over hands of poker.

He dismissed the images. It was out of his hands now. He, like an actor whose lines have all been spoken, had to retire from the stage. Whatever their condition, it was up to them. However hard that was to accept.

Gant shunted the Mil farther away from the ramp, juggling the stick and the pitch lever to keep the wheels on the tarmac. The second MiL, the 24A tanker helicopter, began to roll down the ramp into the windy night. Anders was a mere spectator. Swiftly, the 24A's rotors, too, were rerigged for takeoff. The two Isotov engines coughed into life, and the rotors began moving, shimmering in the thin moonlight. Hard stars glinted between banks of white cloud. Involuntarily, he glanced away from the two Soviet helicopters, toward the mountains, into Afghan airspace. He cocked his head, no longer able to hear anything except the noise of the MiLs; the decoy helicopters patrolling up and down the border did not seem convincing.

The MiLs bobbed, their wheels hardly in contact with the tarmac of the runway farthest from the tower and the airfield buildings. He depressed the button of the transceiver. His hps tasted the fur of the parka's hood as he spoke.

"Gant? Are you receiving me?"

"Yes," came the monosyllabic, detached reply; as if its owner had already departed.

"Good luck and Godspeed," was all Anders could find to say after a moment of hesitation. He shivered. His voice had seemed high and piping amid the turmoil of engine noise and the quiver of his nerves. This is what he had wanted, and now, somehow, he felt guilt approach like a sly messenger, with bad news. It — well, it seemed futile; the MiLs were toys, despite their noise.

"Sure," Gant replied. His tone might have been mocking, but Anders could not be sure. "And — yeah, you did OK, Anders. See you." It hadn't mocked, then.

Gant's Hind-D, its camouflage paint palely mottled in the moonlight, rose to the hover and then immediately passed over Anders' head. The downdraft clutched at him, tugged at his clothing, and dust whirled in his face. When he looked again, after furiously rubbing his eyes, he saw through a wet veil the shadows of the two MiLs moving away to the northwest. The Pakistani helicopters waited only a few miles away to shepherd them to the pass that was their chosen crossing point into Afghan airspace. After that, Gant and the others were entirely on their own. He could do nothing; nobody could.

Everything has been triple-checked, he caught himself silently reciting like a litany. All the IDs, the call signs, the unit, the cover story, everything, everything, over and over…

He felt himself to be an adult attempting, through fear or a crushing sense of inadequacy, to recapture the unquestioning innocence of a child. The litany did not work, it was merely the prayer of an unbeliever.

The noise of the two helicopters, now Hind-D and Hind-A, gunship and troop transport purporting to belong to the Soviet Frontal Aviation Army and attached to a unit serving in Afghanistan, diminished toward the border. He shivered again and stared at the empty Galaxy. The night surrounded the hard light from the hold and the shadow of the fuselage. The transport aircraft was a remote island in the inhospitable sea of the airfield. The two vanished MiLs were no more than bottles on water; a cry for help. Unreal, fragile.

Now he knew it wouldn't work. Too much could go wrong. It was all too risky.