by Thomas Craig
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 degre
e 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 the
y 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."
