by Thomas Craig
"Come on!" he yelled. His voice echoed betrayingly down the shaft.
Kedrov was not looking at him. His head was turned toward the silo. Then his face snapped back, mouth open, eyes wide.
"The doors are opening!"
"What?"
"The doors — they're opening. It must be coming up."
Priabin scrambled out of the shaft like a demented old man. He even crawled a few paces before getting to his feet, eyes staring wildly toward the silo. A hole in the ground now, no gleam of metal. He wanted to scream away the adrenaline coursing through his veins. He was too late, he could do nothing. Rodin had won. The thought obsessed him. There was no room for any speck of rationality in his head.
Rodin.
He was down there, hundreds of feet below him, just there. He banged the jack handle on the frozen ground, feeling the shock pass through his wrist and arm and reach his shoulder. Rodin was down there, laughing while he started the next fucking war.
"Look." Kedrov was shaking his arm, and pointing. Priabin whirled on him, the jack handle raised. "Look!"
It was coming out of the silo like some nightmarish plant, its growing cycle speeded up by a time-lapse camera. Dish aerial, transmitters, the platform on the metal stalk of an old missile hoist. Twenty feet into the air. It grew further and began to move. The dish aerial seemed to turn in their direction like a single, silver eye, then tilted toward the pale afternoon.
"Christ, oh, Christ," Priabin heard himself muttering.
Kedrov was separate from his desperation. Detached and blown like a brown leaf across the sixty yards to the silo.
"Wait — wait!" Priabin bellowed.
And was running, stumbling like an exhausted athlete. The jack handle like a heavy baton in his hand. Ahead of him, he could see the bottom of Kedrov's stolen overcoat flying in the wind, his arms waving as if he were swimming against the air's current. The plant had grown taller, thicker-stemmed. Its silver eye winked in the sun, watching the sky, swiveling. The spars and sticks of the other aerials and transmitters seemed to move, too.
He was out of breath, dragging in lungfals of air as if at some great altitude. His chest was tight and aching.
Kedrov was standing at the base of the platform, looking up. Smooth, sheer metal for thirty feet, impossible to climb. Hopeless. Metal gleamed and shone, mocking him. The platform hummed with electricity and purpose. The winking eye of the dish aerial halted in its movements. Stared directly at some invisible target.
"It's locked on!" Kedrov shouted in his ear. "Locked on!"
The cables, bunched into a rope, traveled back into the silo shaft, down hundreds of feet to Rodin's finger on the button. The signal was about to be transmitted.
He swung the jack handle at the cables, disturbing them and leaving no mark on the heavy nylon sheathing that protected the wiring. He felt his left hand forced open. He released his grip on whatever he was holding. Kedrov knelt by the bunched cables, straining with the heavy pliers. Groaning as he did so, veins standing out on his forehead, sweat sheening it. The wind sang through the transmitters and aerials in an unearthly, crowing noise.
Priabin knelt down, too, and took the cables in both hands. Heaved at them.
Kedrov wrenched rather than cut. His hands were white with effort. It was no use — if it was, Kedrov would electrocute himself as soon as the metal touched the wires inside.
Priabin heaved again at the reluctant cables. What did he think he was doing anyway? He gazed upward and then wildly around him.
Frenzied, he wrenched the Kalashnikov from his shoulders and pointed it at the cables, as if about to fire into them. His head whirled madly. The weapon was useless to him. He raised it as if to throw it aside. He'd never even learned to fire it accurately, years before during basic training. Cleaning, loading, aiming, even bayonet practice — the thing was useless, useless!
Then he remembered. Yes! He knelt down, his hands fumbling to detach the bayonet in its scabbard from above the magazine. "Get away!" he yelled at Kedrov, whose shadow interfered with the light. He struggled with the bayonet then threw the gun away from him and held up the tool he had constructed.
… with the bayonet and the insulated scabbard, an effective wire cutter is made…
The instructor. They'd laughed in the junior officers' mess afterward—who wants a wire cutter, we're not trying to escape, are we?
He attacked the sheathing of the cables, hacking, sawing, shearing at it. Strips of nylon, cord within, bare copper gleaming — one, two, three, four. He worked like a madman, mutilating the cables. His hands were torn and bloody from frayed wiring and the sharpness of the nylon.
Eventually he finished.
The interlocked bayonet-and-scabbard tool rattled and clunked as it slid down the silo shaft. Priabin lay on his back, chest heaving, staring at the sky. Kedrov was no more than a shadow in his peripheral vision. His body was a single, feverish ache. Nothing mattered now, nothing.
Rodin. Rodin…
He let the name fade in his mind, like a figure retreating down a long, empty corridor.
The sky was clean.
Except for Kedrov's shadow.
"I don't know if we were in time," Kedrov said, his voice hardly audible above the noise of the wind through the aerials. "They may have transmitted the firing command — we wouldn't know."
When the words had taken effect on Priabin's consciousness, he groaned, rolling on to his side as if to hide under nonexistent bedclothes.
Rodin, Rodin.
Train.
Almost at once, he could smell the smoke. The tunnel thrust the locomotive's bellow of steam and damp smoke along its length toward him. The rail beneath his left boot quivered, then thudded rhythmically. His heart thudded like the rail, but with relief; almost threatening to overwhelm him. He could only lean back against the wet brickwork and watch. The locomotive and its burden roared down the tunnel toward him.
His parka became sodden almost at once from the running water washing down the wall. The smoke made his eyes water, his throat constrict. And yet he knew he had to move, however terrifying this huge rush of metal. The train blocked the entrance to the tunnel, preventing any gunship from making its descent to cut off his escape.
There was a halo of light dimly marking the train's outline, a tiny gap of air between its bulk and the walls. Sparks, the billowing of wet smoke and steam, the glow of the boiler's fire. He turned his cheek to the rough brickwork, and wetness soaked into his taut skin. Already the realization seeped in — they would be working their way along the same wall, thinking they, too, could use the train's passage. He had to move now.
He began to slide-run along the curve of the wall. His shoulder scraped against the bricks and the jutting rock, his feet unbalanced and his whole body leaning like a drunk into the wall, away from the track. The train enlarged, yelling and threatening. Seeming too big for the tunnel. The dim halo of light had disappeared. He checked in midstride.
The breath he snatched at was foul with smoke, making him cough. His ears were filled with the din of the locomotive. Sparks jumped and spat like fireworks only a hundred yards away as the train rushed toward him.
Somehow, he made himself run on, toward the thing that filled the darkness with noise and fire. The beam of its lamp, polishing the track but eluding him. His shoulder pressed against the wall. The pressure and inertia of the train quivered in the brick, the gravel under his feet seemed like quicksand.
And then it was passing him, and moving with a totally unexpected slowness, laboring up the canyon's long incline. One man in the locomotive's cab was bent to the raging fire, the other stood as still as a statue commemorating a long-ago war. Then the first of the freight cars was level with him, and some animal or other lowed like a fog warning. Other beasts joined its cry. Cattle cars. Helpless animals, in transit to an abattoir.
His cheek was still warm from the blaze of the fire. He had to pause to beat at sparks that had flown onto his legs from the flanged
wheels of the cars. Then moved on in his unbalanced fashion, down the length of the long, slow train, which creaked and thudded and clanked; and lowed.
Smoke roiled about him so that he could hardly breathe. He was terrified by the sight of cattle snouts jutting through slats into the tunnels madness. He heard hooves banging against the floors and sides of cars as they lurched past.
The train was incredibly long. Its noise seemed as if it would never stop. He felt he would never rid himself of the lowing of the cattle. He had to be in the open before the end of the train entered the tunnel. The trucks moved by so slowly. He couldn't be running that slowly. Then he saw the light increasing.
The second locomotive, at the rear of the train, pushing it up the long incline toward Yerevan's slaughterhouses, was at the maw of the tunnel and was then swallowed. The driver's face, looking down at him, was white and shocked, and the glow of the fire was dimmed by the early-afternoon light. The track ahead of him was clear.
He saw the bridge, and heard the throb of rotors, and the scream overhead of the first MiG or Sukhoi fighter. He felt shrunken, a tiny figure on a narrow thread of track that ran from tunnel to bridge. He stared wildly around and above him, looking for the gunship, waiting for its attack; hearing, despite the noise of its approach, the sound of trucks moving on the highway below him. He felt pinioned by noise. Then he saw the gunship beating down toward him, rotors tilted, snub nose head-on to him. He would never — even if he could move — make the bridge before it opened fire. The passage of the train still rumbled in the ground beneath his feet. He raised the Kalashnikov in a futile gesture as the helicopter enlarged, its black tinted glass and snub nose sweeping over his head, the downdraft plucking at him as if to cuff him aside.
There was black glass everywhere as it turned to face him, swinging violently into the hover, so that he could see the gun and the missile pod. It hung in the air, its skis only feet above the railway track — between him and the bridge. Olive-drab paint.
He knew quite certainly that he would die there, framed in the tunnel entrance. They could be no more than thirty yards or so away now. He was trapped between the spetsnaz troops behind him and the gunship, which stared at him with its huge, black glass eyes. He shivered. The rifle pointed foolishly, like a child's stick. He seemed to have stopped breathing. The only sound he could hear was the noise of the small, light gunship.
Familiar?
Military. Olive drab. Insect eyes.
Familiar?
The helicopter stared at him, no more than twenty yards away. The helicopter — the, the — Hughes Defender stared at him. and a* the same unnerving moment that he identified the aircraft he saw an arm waving him forward from the port insect eye — the eye was a door that had swung open. The helicopter was American!
Relief… disbelief. The conflicting feelings seemed to shake him like a storm. It had to be an illusion, it couldn't be a Hughes, a Hughes couldn't be here—
— even as he began running toward it, obeying the still waving arm.
The Defender lifted slightly, delicately adjusting itself in the air, then settled on to its skis. Then all he saw was the arm, waving once more. But he had glimpsed the white star on the helicopter's flank and the legend u.s. army. The pilot had shown them to him like a guarantee. Ten yards away, five. The gesticulating arm came closer, closer, closer…
He staggered against the fuselage. Bullets clanged against the metal. He looked down with what might have been surprise. His left thigh was burning with pain and stained with something dark and wet, which spread even as he watched it. His whole frame began to quiver. Fuzzily, he could see two soldiers at the tunnel entrance, one of them kneeling, taking better aim, the other standing as stiffly as a member of a firing squad.
He groaned with pain. Something pulled at his shoulder, then a hand grabbed his arm, wrenching him off his feet. The rotors idled noisily above his head, the two soldiers were still and patient and certain, his leg shrieked as he was dragged into the cockpit of the helicopter and it twisted under him. The whole of his thigh seemed black with blood as he looked drunkenly down, slumped in the copilot's seat. His face leaned against the pilot's uniform. The flying overalls bore the name Pruitt. Then he was pushed away from Pruitt, to loll in his seat as the rotors picked up speed and volume. Bullets careened off the metal of the fuselage.
"Fasten your seat belt, Major," Pruitt snapped, his hand pointing forcibly at Gant's lap. Instinctively, Gant moved to obey, and his leg cried out again. "You all right?"
The Hughes was twenty feet or so up in the air, hardly moving. Gant groaned, then shouted:
"For fuck's sake — go!"
He tightened the seat belt automatically, then fumbled with his belt. The small helicopter flicked into the air like a spun coin, dizzyingly, making his leg protest with a flash of red behind his clenched eyelids. He felt sick. He forced himself to open his eyes, as if in response to the noise of bullets against the Defenders fuselage. Pale flickers of flame down on the track. A bullet flew off the cockpits Plexiglas, scarring it. The Hughes yawed wildly before Pruitt corrected its course. Gant felt the aircraft drop like a loosened boulder, down the canyon wall.
With a feebly waving hand, he pointed urgently toward—
— the military highway and its tunnel. Brdad tunnel. Even as he saw the first of the Mil gunships, its stubby wings overloaded with rockets and missiles, dive in pursuit of them. There was a second one, farther off. Gant tightened his belt into a tourniquet around the top of his thigh, grinding his teeth against the increased pain. Each maneuver of the Hughes seemed to wrench at the damaged sinews and muscles and act like a pump on the blood he was trying to staunch.
Pruitt drove the Defender downward. Rotor span twenty-seven feet — only twenty-seven, Gant told himself, the words taking the pattern of his grinding teeth and accompanying their noise inside his head. He slumped back in the copilot's seat. Pruitt abruptly leveled the helicopter before the mouth of the road tunnel, so that Gant yelled aloud. Then the tunnel swallowed the tiny aircraft.
"Shit!" he heard Pruitt distantly exclaim, his head filled with pain as if it were noise, the lights set in the tunnel's roof seeming to hurt his eyes, as if they, too, were connected with his wound. He had clamped his hand over his thigh. His finger and thumb had felt the entry and exit wounds of the bullet's passage. He was bleeding more slowly.
The tunnel was wide enough to take a Mil-24, not just the smaller Hughes, but they'd have to be more careful. The second gunship could hop to the other end of the tunnel, but the Hughes was armed with missiles and a Chain gun, and they'd have to be careful, too.
He was hardly conscious, because now the tunnel lights seemed hypnotic, extending into a blur. The pain in his thigh steadily mounted through his whole frame and seemed to throb in rhythm with the passage of the lights. Pruitt's wild elation was no more than a distant sighing.
The tunnel ended like a bright mouth opening.
The Plain of Ararat. Daylight and gunships. They were as unreal, as unimportant to Gant as smears on the Plexiglas. He vaguely glimpsed a border crossing, poles and booths and vehicles straggling across the highway. Then it was gone He could not be certain he had seen it, was increasingly unaware of the dimensions of the cockpit around him, the presence of the pilot. Then Pruitt jerked the helicopter up and away.
Something exploded astern of them against the canyon wall. Gant did not turn his head to look back. He felt an increase in the Defender's speed, and sensed the ground farther away below. The plain spread out ahead of them, as gray-white and unfeatured as an unrolled bale of cloth. His head felt heavy, and yet without substance.
Turkey. He knew that.
More gunships.
Hughes helicopters, and a Bell Hueycobra. Their shapes familiar, comforting. Jets higher and farther away. Turkey. The border was already invisible behind the last slopes of the foothills as the Defender skimmed the snowbound plain. The whiteness, he could see now, was smeared by the passage of a steam
train and trellised by cleared roads and highways. The twin peaks of Mt. Ararat gleamed in the distance.
A second Hughes Defender slid up close to port. Its pilot raised a thumb. An unarmed Turkish air force Jetranger rose like a cork to the surface of water and took up station behind them. It was a target for any missile that might be launched across the border. The Hueycobra bobbed to starboard as they closed ranks around Pruitt, around Gant. He was protected, safe. His leg burned with a fresh agony. There was something he had to do besides sleep, besides surrender to the pain — something…
His hands groped toward the instrument panel. Pruitt, understanding his feeble efforts, thrust the copilot's headset into his hands and opened the Tac channel. As if lifting a great weight, Gant slowly slid the headset on. Voices blurted in his ears, showering the ether with congratulation.
"Come on, Major!" he heard Pruitt urge, but the pilot's voice was very faint.
The pain threatened afresh. He began talking quickly, afraid it might finally overwhelm him. They had to be told; they had to know. The cockpit was as vague and unfeatured as the pale sky and the carpet of snow. The instruments were blurred, his sense of Pruitt beside him diminished.
"… Winter Hawk" he felt himself repeating, over and over. His own exclamations of pain were more real. He heard himself grinding his teeth as a noise inside his head, as if bones were being moved in his skull."… I have the proof, yes… definite proof….." It did not matter who was listening, how far up that staircase in his mind he had climbed in less than a minute. Some general, a CIA deputy director — who cared? He remembered something else, then, with a huge, sickening effort, and said: "They have the weapon, it's — already in orbit… intend to use it, against the shuttle—Atlantis…."It was so difficult to remember the shuttle's name. A cleared road lay below him, Pruitt was following its gray line through the snow. Someone asked him a question — one of the voices that babbled at him and kept him from sleep, allowing the pain to enlarge. He merely repeated: "… the target is the shuttle, yes — I saw the launch, the weapon is in orbit at this — moment…." Then, finally: "Man, I don't give shit what you do, just do it!"
