by Thomas Craig
They'd designed it that way. His sense of his immediate surroundings had enlarged, he'd noticed the way the slope fell sheer away beyond the ravine and an outcrop of bare rock. He could glimpse the plain far below through the last of the poor trees. If he reached the outcrop by jumping across the ravine, he could not go down nor continue north because the ground rose steeply and there were no trees. Below him, only the ravine, where he would lie until they abseiled or climbed down to reach the cassettes in the kit bag slung across his body.
He pressed back against the rock. They wanted to drive him upward, on to bare rock, to flounder through the snow until they surrounded him.
He stared down again. The tiny frozen stream glinted like a snail track down there. The ravine was perhaps fifty feet deep — no, it fell away down a slope that twisted out of sight. In summer the stream would rush down it toward the foothills and the plain. Crazily, he wondered whether he could follow the course of the stream, out of sight of the hunt. Could he even get down there? If he fell, he would break bones. Be finished. He listened above and stared be low, estimating the width of the ravine, its roughnesses, the steepness of the frozen stream's descent. He shivered. It was dark in the ravine, as narrow as a straitjacket.
He heard more small noises above him. They were closing in on the ledge, knowing he was not to the south or the north, knowing he could go no other way. The gunships seemed to have been called off.
He lowered himself slowly, carefully, until he sat on the ledge, his feet dangling into the ravine. He breathed deeply twice, three times, then gingerly turned his body so that he was hanging, weight on his forearms and wrists, into the crack in the rock. He glanced to right and left. Empty. They hadn't linked up yet and weren't using the radios, to avoid giving their positions away. When they met, they'd cast about urgently to locate him.
He, too, was making noises now, the scrabbling of his boots for toeholds. His toes were numb with damp cold and moved inside the KGB uniform boots sullenly, reluctant to assist him. His eyes came level with the ledge, then he lowered himself farther into the ravine. Bile was sour at the back of his throat as fear surged. Fingerholds, boots scraping, his arms aching because he had to move so slowly in order not to give himself away with noise. Fingerholds, toeholds. He eased his body into a half-crouch, seeking new fingerholds. The rock was smooth, but cracked and pitted like scored metal. And icy cold. Down—
Caterpillar. Straightening, then arching, then straightening-Each tiny sound was a failure and an alarm. He descended the side of the ravine as it narrowed and darkened. Was it wide enough? His body seemed to ask the question with a flood of panicky heat.
Twenty feet down, thirty perhaps now. Caterpillar. His arms and legs were aching, his fingers stiff and clawlike. Icy cold. The rifle, slipping around on its strap from his back, rattled against the rock. He paused. Looked up.
They'd linked up from north and south. *He heard the crackling of a radio and the urgency of muffled words. They were very close, and alarmed that he had disappeared. Caterpillar. His back protested, his legs were quivering with weakness and effort, his arms were shrill with pain. Forty feet.
The ravine echoed his breathing, every tiny noise of his descent. It was a funnel for sound. They'd hear, any moment they'd hear.
His grip slackened, he scrabbled for it, felt his boots distantly attempt a foothold, then his body, suddenly seeming much heavier, slid the last feet. He buckled into a fetal position, onto the surface of the frozen stream, hands scraped raw, his cheek bruised and bleeding. Inertia moved him downward almost at once as he rolled onto his back. Like an amusement park slide, the stream moved him.
The face above him looked down, fifty feet away. Gant slid helplessly, as the shout of alarm reached him and a second face appeared. At once, the noise of a rifle and the cry of bullets from the surface of the rock. With a huge effort, he rolled into the shadow of a small outcrop. And sat hunched until someone ordered the firing to stop.
Silence again, then.
Ropes.
Unslung from packs, dropped like writhing snakes into the ravine, curled on the ice perhaps fifty yards away. The noise of boots on the ledge, then seeking for a foothold on the wall of the ravine. A lamp flickering over the coiled ropes, over the ice so that it glimmered, and over the outcrop beneath which he huddled. The bulk of the first man to descend. He could shoot the climber — and be shot himself. He immediately abandoned the idea. And stretched his limbs carefully, checking their mobility, their lack of pain. His hands were beginning to warm, held beneath his armpits. His feet were still cold and numb.
He had to move, now. Out of sight as the stream bent in its channel. The ice was like glass, without footing. He climbed to his feet, his back using the rock behind him to keep his body upright.
His feet careful of the ice, testing its smoothness, his eyes studying the downward course of the stream, the angle of descent.
The sense of his mistake, his fatal error, assailed him, while his body went on making its independent attempt to survive. He had walked into an even more certain trap than the one they had set. The climber was halfway down the ravine's side, abseiling like a careful spider, face turned repeatedly in his direction, rifle across his chest ready to respond to any action of his.
He looked up at the other faces, then at the protecting outcrop and at the lamp swinging back and forth along the dark channel. And then fired—
— and ran, stumbling and bent double, scraping his side along the rock, his feet constantly slipping, the gunfire hideously loud behind him and cutting across the cry of surprised pain from the fallen climber, who lay still, he saw as he half turned from a collision with the ravine wall. He reached the curve of the stream and tumbled onto the ice, skittering down its slope like a flung stone. Slowing gently.
He rose onto all fours, panting like a wearied dog. He had killed another of them. They'd want him. They could move quickly above him, once away from the ledge, along the outcrop. He estimated it was now seventy feet to the lip of the ravine. He was a more difficult target, they'd be reluctant to descend from any other place than the ledge, now out of his sight. For the moment, they'd hesitate.
He heard his name called, booming through some kind of loudspeaker. Above the noise of returned rotors. Magnified and wailing down the ravine like a wind.
Using the Kalashnikov as a crutch, he got to his feet. There would be two more on the ice by now, abseiling down from the ledge. He moved with infinite caution, one foot shuffled in front of the other, sliding step by step down the slope, using the ravine wall as a brake on his progress, dragging his shoulder against the rock. Looking back every second or third step, waiting for them to appear; counting his breaths, his heartbeats, passing seconds, distance— anything to prevent the paralysis induced by desperation from overtaking his legs and feet. He could hear radios, rotors, the clatter of equipment.
Single shots. Whining off the rock. Chips of it struck his face and hands. He returned their fire even though he could not see them. A lamp flicked its beam out toward him. He fired again. They returned fire more heavily. Still single shots. His name boomed through the loudspeaker, sapping his will
Darkness. The belly of a gunship hung over the ravine like the stomach of a huge, bloated spider. A face peering down from the main cabin. A scattering of seed, even as he fired upward and the face and hand were withdrawn. Seed falling stonily, rattling into the ravine. He stumbled as he ran, hearing single shots behind him, hearing the hideous, magnified rattling of the grenades. He fell, rolled and skidded, bullets passing over his head, slid on, head tucked into his arms, body fetal, feet in the air because he did not want any braking effect from his boots, rifle tucked into his belly, kit bag containing the cassettes following him down the headlong slope of frozen water. Explosions, cracks rushing after him jaggedly — he could see them as the flame of the grenades faded on his retinas. He was still being carried forward and downward by inertia and the slope, but the cracks raced more swiftly, seem
ing to overtake him, until they petered out.
Banging against an outcrop, aching in a new place, he looked up. The MiL's belly was fat and dark above him again, and the face was looking down cautiously. He raised the old AK-47 and fired a short burst. The face became surprised, then marked, then unassembled as the rounds destroyed it. The body fell away from the helicopter to hang grotesquely by its safety harness, just on the lip of the ravine.
Moments. He had bought a few precious moments.
He could not accept the information of his eyes. A blank, black wall of rock fifty or sixty feet from him. Even with the hollow circles of fuzzy light still in the center of his vision, he was certain, though he could not accept it. It had to be an illusion, not a dead end.
He forced himself to listen. The gunship had moved away with a roaring noise. His ears seemed deafened. The body was gone. The cracks in the ice had not reached within twenty yards of him. His two pursuers were being more cautious now.
The glimmer of the frozen stream simply became black rock. It turned to neither side. It just ended.
He crawled toward it, the hollow rings of light on his retinas vanishing. To confirm the dead end. There was no possibility of self-deception now. It was there, black and a hundred feet high, a solid wall of rock.
He groaned as he paddled down the slope on his stomach. Dead end.
His head turned to look up. The Mil had not returned, the pursuers were still out of sight. They had all the time they needed. The surface of the ice seemed to cloud like a mirror with his exertions, his hands were numb. In the strange quiet he could hear his own efforts — heart, lungs, boots scrabbling, hands sliding, weapon scratching at the frozen stream like an ineffectual icepick. All he became aware of was himself. His head was empty. There was no Vietnam, no father, no past, nothing…
The frozen stream disappeared, dropping like old lava into a hole it had carved in the rocks during slow millennia. Flung out from the lip of the hole, it was like a silver, jutting beard. Gant stared unrealizing over the lip of what might have been a dark cauldron where nothing boiled. Heart, lungs, the other noises stilled. The whack of rotors seeping back in. And before that noise loudened, he heard a radio's crackling and orders snapping muzzily down the funnel of the ravine. He was outside himself once more.
A dark hole in the floor of the ravine. The river dodging beneath some too-hard outcrop, the cliff face he had thought was a dead end. Dropping into — what?
Flash of a lamp like a splash of water somewhere on the ravine wall behind him. Radios, the urgency of the hunt overriding stealth. The rotors banging down like a yell into the cleft, echoing deeper into the ground through the hole into which he stared.
Gap.
Rough, contoured, ragged rock. Handholds, footholds. He glanced behind him as he turned around, then backed with the utmost, panicky care into the hole. Just as he had done into the ravine itself. Toes, hands, rifle rattling against the frozen water, the noise of dripping echoing in the blackness below him… around him as his head came below the lip of the hole and he moved sideways where his feet sensed, then discovered, a narrow ledge. He scrabbled his left hand in the kit bag, clutching the flashlight after touching the cassettes of videotape and film. He flicked on the flashlight and looked down into undefined, uncertain depth. Icicles— stalactites — but nothing growing up from the floor of what the light suggested was a cave, even a cavern. He could not see the floor, but wiped the flashlight's beam over the immediate rocks, and their contours were stark and easy to traverse. Having put the flashlight back into the bag, he slowly began to move to his right.
A sense of burial alive and of safety, conflicting and battling in his chest. He hung there for long moments, wrestling with and overcoming the claustrophobia. Eventually, he felt his heartbeat becoming calmer.
His hands became more confident. His feet shuffled and tested as he moved away from the hole in what was now the roof of the cavern; moved away, too, from the glimmering sheet of silver that trailed away into the blackness.
He caught the sounds of hammering, less real than the dripping of the water around and below him. Hammering—?
A lamp flashed down the frozen length of the stream, and some thing hissed as it fell in the darkness away to his left. The lamp had dazzled him. Then he heard the noises of a body lowering itself into the cavern. He had heard a piton being hammered in, a rope uncoiled and dropped.
His hands seemed frozen to the rock, his feet rooted. His own breathing became audible once more.
The guard, who had been sleeping on a chair opposite Kedrov's bed when Priabin had entered the room, stared at them, his eyes, above the torn sheet used to gag him, filled with sullen dislike. His hands were tied behind his back, then to his feet. Kedrov seemed unable to ignore the man, or to accept Priabin's desperation as genuine.
Twelve twenty-six. Priabin had been in that room for eight minutes. There was a corporal in the garage who might recover at any moment, a doctor might walk in, Kedrov's guard was tied up the dialogue continued in his head, snapping back and forth across the widening chasm of his nerves. But he couldn't force Kedrov to leave, the man had only to open his mouth to alarm the whole of GRU headquarters. He had walked into the tiger's cage to rescue— a piece of meat that did not have the consciousness to want to be saved.
Leave him, then.
"Look, come with me now, trust me," Priabin pleaded once more.
Kedrov looked dazed by the remark, as if by tragic domestic news. Priabin guessed there was less than two hours before final target acquisition by the laser battle station on the helpless American shuttle — and this, this dummy won't move, won't wake up! "Trust me," he repeated, but his harsh tone alarmed Kedrov, who flinched into the corner of the room. He was standing like some mental defective, cowering even though he was standing upright, hands flat against the walls.
"No." Kedrov sighed plaintively. He was in some sort of suspension here, a place out of time. He felt safe. Even the armed guard had become familiar. Priabin had roughly rearranged his tiny world and frightened him with its new, uglier image.
"For Jesus Christ's sake, man, I'm here to save your life," Priabin hissed, his voice dropping violently in volume after the first two words as he remembered the corridor outside, the danger of the building around this room. His hands went forward in a plea. "Look, you have to come, you have to help me — you have to save your own life, don't you?" He shifted on the chair, his impatience heating his body, his back aware of the door behind him against which the chair and his weight were placed.
Kedrov seemed puzzled, as at some advanced mathematical concept. How much damage had Serov's drugs done to him? Would he be of any help anyway? Jesus — twelve twenty-seven.
The guard's removed uniform, even his boots, lay on the bed like a spread corpse. It would be easy for them to get out if only Kedrov would put on the uniform — put it on, you stupid bugger, for God's sake!
He couldn't explain his plan to Kedrov, not in front of the guard, who would eventually be found… knock him out, place the unconscious form under the bedclothes, it might be hours before… but Kedrov remained intractable.
He stood up, wary of leaving the door, jammed the chair beneath the door handle. Kedrov stood in his corner, for all the world as if he had wet his trousers, his face helpless, bruised by the mystery and danger brought into the room by Priabin. Priabin moved toward him, hands held out in front of him, palms outward.
"Listen," he said confidingly. "Listen. Serov's dead, you know that, but that isn't the end of it, Filip — yes, I was after you, too, I admit that — but you know about Lightning." Kedrov shook his head violently. "Yes, you do — I have to do something about that, and you have to help me. You have to help me, Filip. Only you can."
He was standing only a yard from the man now. Thin, pale hair awry, his face wizened and aged by the past few days, body pressed into the corner of the room. Priabin took him by the shoulders. Kedrov flinched.
He leaned his head tow
ard Kedrov and whispered. "There has to be a transmitter, doesn't there?" he asked, sensing a great reluctance in himself. Kedrov seemed puzzled only by the fact that he was whispering. He could not risk the guard hearing, but he had to know. "A secret transmitter to put Lightning into operation. The general can't just press a button in front of everyone in mission control, now can he?" All the while, he was gently shaking Kedrov's shoulders, as if waking — Anna, he thought for a moment, then concentrated on the familiar, gentle tone of voice he felt required to use. "Some of them know, but not all. It's a secret, after all, so he can't press the button in full view of everyone, can he? People like you who aren't army — see what I mean?" Did it sound feasible now, put into words? Or did it sound ludicrous? Perhaps they all did know. No, his guard didn't seem to, the technicians with whom he had played bridge had always referred to Linchpin, and to the objective as being the placing of the weapon in orbit — oh, yes, they were going to test the weapon, sometime, on a dead satellite, maybe; they hadn't known anything more than that. It would be senior telemetry people, senior staff officers, the crew of the shuttle, Serov, and his second-in-command.
"See what I mean?" he persisted. Twelve twenty-nine. Shake his shoulders, gently, come on, Sleeping Beauty, wake up. Priabin felt sweat gather around his throat, beneath his arms. "They would have to have a secret transmitter, even a small control room, in order to align the weapon, acquire the target, and fire the laser beam — don't you see, Filip?" Come on, come on, you fucking cretin, understand — say yes, oh, Christ, please say yes. "See?" he managed to murmur sweetly, stepping back.
Kedrov nodded. His face had been screwed up in concentration. Suddenly, his brow unfurrowed, he looked younger. And he nodded eagerly like an idiot understanding a simple instruction. Thank God! Then he seemed to see Priabin's uniform and become frightened again. Priabin forced himself to smile, and leaned forward, taking his shoulders again, feeling their flinch, then relaxation.
