Winter Hawk (6 page)

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 un-distorted 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
^a
nd 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 ^iL-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 clich6d 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
^w
as, 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 . . .