by Thomas Craig
"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, t
oward 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.
