by Thomas Craig
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
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br /> "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
&nbs
p; 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.
