by Thomas Craig
It was closed. Thirty feet below the Hind's belly, with boarded windows. It had been deserted years before. Gas pumps, hoses bent hand-on-hip, a corrugated plastic roof that was dirt-covered, clumped with mosses, a wooden garage with drunkenly leaning doors, the single-story wooden house that was lightless, where—
— lights flicked grubbily on behind a thin curtain! His heart lurched with relief. Not lightless, not abandoned. Immediately, he dropped the Hind carefully toward the courtyard. The engine noise was fragile, uncertain, like the beat of an ancient, weakened heart. He felt the wheels touch, the helicopter bounce as if pleased; then he throttled back to ground-idle.
The low house — shack, no more — needed painting. It had looked so dilapidated he thought it must have been empty. Its door opened. A man in a thick coat and dark, baggy trousers stood in the light of Gant's main lamp, hand shielding his eyes. Gant adjusted the lamp so that it shone directly on the man — garage manager or whoever he was, it didn't matter; there was fuel beneath this weed-strewn, dusty concrete.
Stay smart, he told himself. Stay smart. Tension coursed through him, indistinguishable from relief.
Hie man walked into the light, waving at the beam as if fending off insects or repeated blows.
Gant moved the throttle levers to flight idle, and the rotors growled reluctantly into a dish. He eased the column forward and gently raised the lever until the helicopter shunted forward, waddling and uncertain in its progress. He watched the edge of the shining rotor dish as the Hind moved toward the corrugated roof.
He watched the pumps intently, watched the roof's hp, watched the rotor dish, whirling—
— satisfied he was as close as possible, he lowered the lever, eased back the column, applied the brakes. The helicopter sank, bounced, stopped. He altered the throttles — noise boomed around the cockpit from the roof and the pumps — and stop-cocked the engines and applied the rotor brake.
Check the tires, get the windshield… He grinned. The Hind was drawn up like a huge, grotesque car. Dust settled on the cockpit and shimmered downward around him. He could do nothing for the foment except stare at the gauges, then glance at the gas pumps, premium Grade, they announced in Cyrillic and some other script did not recognize. He could use gas instead of paraffin or aviation fuel without short-term damage to the engines. He had to.
The garage manager — in Soviet Central Asia he might even be the owner — ducked beneath the drooping, stationary rotor blades with inordinate care and suspicion. They rested more than ten feet above his head.
As he approached the cockpit, Gant swung his door open and called out, beginning to control the situation, damp down suspicion: "Gauges must be out — ran out of fuel. Sorry, comrade, to disturb your well-earned rest or whatever else you were doing back there." He was grinning broadly, but his features adopted command, the expectation of quick and questionless assistance. "Your stuff will have to do until I get home. Fill her up."
The engine noise had died out of his head now. Around him, the night seemed to spread outward like a black pool stained with moonlight. He sensed distances, and isolation beneath his relief. The man looking up into his features was an Uzbek with a narrow, dark, unshaven face. His eyes glinted reflections of the cockpit lights. Tiny rows of green, red, amber, blue from the still-alive panels made his pupils those of an automaton.
"Who pays me?" the man asked, seemingly unaware of the cold or the wind. His accent coated the Russian words thickly like a rough varnish. His thin, hook-nosed face stared impassively up at Gant, as if it were indeed a car that had drawn alongside the pumps. He was simply waiting to see money.
Gant glanced at his watch. Midnight plus five. Three hundred and forty miles to Baikonur. Two hours, maximum, with full tanks and a full auxiliary tank. He could still make it — just — if Kedrov was waiting for him; ingress and egress before daylight. Hopes, estimates, tension tumbled together in his mind and invaded his frame, even as he maintained his disarming, superior, expecting-to-be-accommodated smile toward the surly Uzbek. He gripped the door handle with his right hand, his thigh with his left, and calmed himself.
"You'll get paid — what's your worry, comrade?" He leaned over the Uzbek, his rank and uniform overalls evident. So, too, the holster on his hip containing the Makarov pistol. "I'll write you a recipe, OK? You'll manage to read it?" he added with a small sneer. The Uzbek was unimpressed, more reluctant than before. Evidently, he owned the garage. It would be his loss. Gant snapped: "The army pays, comrade."
Then he jumped down from the cockpit, landing close to the man, and was immediately taller than the Uzbek, who understood the change in their relationship. He flinched. Gant was still smiling, but his hand was lightly on the holster now. The flap was unopened as yet, just as his lips were unopened in the smile.
The night chilled through the thin flying overalls after the hothouse of the cockpit. His sweat dried like forming ice. The moon-sheened darkness oppressed, unrelieved except where headlights rose and fell over a dip of the road, perhaps a half mile away; a vehicle heading for the garage. He looked up, picking out the distant navigation lights of a slow-moving aircraft. A commercial flight out of Tashkent, he guessed. He shivered, desiring movement, assertion; the headlights flicking into view once more at the periphery of his sight. Bouncing nearer like a ball.
He bent over the Hinds flank as if it were that of a car and flicked open the fuel cap.
"There you are, comrade. Fill her up. Then fill the auxiliary tank in the main cabin." One hand still on the holster flap, the other on his hip in challenge. "Your hose won't reach from the pump," he observed with continuing casualness. "Find an extension hose and a funnel — get on with it, comrade."
The Uzbek seemed to subside slowly into his coat, shrinking. Then he shrugged and turned to the nearest pump, dragging the hose from its rest. He unlooped a length of hose from a hook on the side of the booth, and picked up a tin funnel from the shelf inside. The door banged in the wind. The Uzbek cursed softly as he thrust the nozzle of the hose into the extension, then dragged it toward the Hind. The headlights of the approaching vehicle bounced against the cockpit. The funnel clattered into the fuel tank; the man returned to the nozzle of the pump and squeezed its lever. Fuel flowed after the click. Gant felt as if he had drunk cold, fresh water. Oasis. The fuel's transfer was sweet. The headlights were flat beams now, colliding with the wood and metal of the garage. Ice sparkled on the corrugated roof above him and on the weedy pavement. Stiff grass rattled in the wind.
Gant remembered needlelike outcrops rising over the hills through which the Hind had flitted. Minarets and mosques sparkling with ice in the hard moonlight. Perhaps Bukhara, perhaps some other town. His flight over Soviet Central Asia had been like Ashing down some narrowing tunnel: hills, stretches of sand that seemed red even by moonlight, dry rivers, oases, encampments where camels lumped together like full sacks on the ground, as still the tents near them. Fires dying down, scuttling and alarmed figures moving. Herds of goats, trading caravans. Still irrigation water and reservoirs. It was as if the oncoming headlights illuminated the past hours. They were now clear, confined by the emerging dark shape around them that had become a truck. The Uzbek looked up from the nozzle of the pump without real interest. Gant's hands tensed, bunched into fists, and his face twisted to the beginnings of some cry of protest. Army?
Civilian.
He sighed audibly with relief. The hours of avoiding radar, other aircraft and helicopters, towns and villages had worn at him like waves at an old cliff. He stood more erect, as if to deny his weariness. The truck drew onto the pavement. The Uzbek made a noise in his throat that might have signaled recognition. The truck pulled to a halt. Gant heard the hand brake scratching on.
The young man who got down almost at once from the passenger side of the canvas-hooded truck was wearing an army uniform. Gant's heart banged in his chest. He was grinning as he stared, hands on his hips, at the Hind drawn up at the pumps.
Uniform? How—
?
The canvas covering the back of the truck rattled in the icy breeze. The driver, who wore a sleeveless sheepskin jacket and a cloth cap, got down from the cab. Only the passenger was in uniform.
And was approaching.
Russian, not Uzbek. White skin in the moonlight, white teeth, a white hand raised in greeting. A captain, but young. A yawn, one hand stretching away a cramp. The driver hung back, as if out of respect. The young man grinned again. Gant felt his attention mesmerized by the uniform, the shoulder flashes.
At seven yards, Gant saw that the captain was GRU, military intelligence—
— and went toward the younger man, disarming him with a smile, an extended hand.
The captain took his hand, shook it. Despite the icy wind, the GRU mans hand was still warm from the heated cab. His features registered a slight shock at the coldness of Gant's grip. There was a sharp smell of vegetables — cabbages? — in the air; presumably the truck's cargo.
Why was a GRU captain stepping out of that vehicle?
Cabbages, onions, the earthiness of potatoes. Gant's sense of smell was heightened by nerves. The name of the firm on the truck was in Uzbek, not Cyrillic. He wrenched his mind away from the irrelevant. The captain's scrutiny was inexperienced, but nevertheless there. No hint of suspicion, but questions were forming in his eyes — a military helicopter, there?
Gant's own rank matched that of the captain, but the younger man would assume the precedence of GRU over Aviation Army rank. Gant's attention concentrated, narrowing every perspective, on the shoulder flashes, the arm badges — the tiny, untwinkling jewels of the man's significance.
"You're a long way from home, comrade," he announced heartily.
"— words out of my mouth," the captain replied. Laughed. Finally released Gant's grip. "A bloody helicopter at a filling station? You must be the squadron joker!"
"Ran out of fuel," Gant complained.
"Long way from home. Not as far as you, man. I'm just hitching a ride to Bukhara, then on to Samarkand." His accent was Moscow, perhaps Ukrainian — Kiev? European Russia. The master race. Gant's own accent — his mother's accent — was distinctive. "You're Georgian, by your accent?" the young captain added.
"Yes," Gant replied. "From Surami — you know it, the thermal resort." His shoulders shrugged.
"Away from the Black Sea?" Gant merely nodded. "Don't know it," the captain continued. "One-horse town, is it?"
"Just about." His voice was easier, lighter. He spun the web of conversation, rank, and comradeship. Then the captain asked:
"Afghanistan, if I'm not mistaken?" His eyes were sharper as he studied Gant. They were alert, as if studying some mental list of explanations. The night and the distances leaped at Gant, reminding him that the Hind was misplaced by hundreds of miles, was suspicious here.
He was suddenly aware of his own cover story. Where was he going? From where? Alma-Ata, army headquarters, was eight hunted miles to the east. His cover was now outdated, an obvious fake.
Beneath their conversation, their camaraderie and humor, the fear continued to flow like a river. Gant shivered. The wind seemed to be strengthening. Yet the two Uzbeks seemed oblivious to it; they were smoking near the pumps. Gant heard his teeth chattering and the captain grin.
"Adamov," the captain announced.
What is my name? His identity lay in his breast pocket, with his papers.
What is my name?
He had forgotten his cover name.
The captain s eyes glazed with suspicion.
9: Heart of the Matter
"Let's find ourselves some coffee. This Uzbek moron can fill the helicopter on his own. My driver can keep him company."
Gant realized that the captain's words, as he gestured toward the low wooden bungalow, were meant to extend the moment of suspicion. Just how long would this pilot take to introduce himself, explain himself? The moment was a rubber band being stretched to breaking.
"What in hell are you doing getting down from a cabbage truck, comrade?" Gant exclaimed, forcing laughter. "A captain in the GRU — not quite the right sort of transport, huh?" His hands came out, palms up. Friend, harmless, they suggested, while his voice asked who are you, man?
The captain was disconcerted, but it might have been no more than his resentment of the familiarity of Gant's tone. It was the captain who should patronize, if either of them did.
"Just finished a job up-country," he replied, his hand still patting at Gant's shoulder and turning him toward the wooden building, where a grubby light filtered through thin, unlined curtains. The wind moaned, rattling the corrugated plastic above his head, making drooping rotor blades of the Hind quiver. There was a sense of Mutual cursing in the conversation between the truck driver and the parage owner; racial suspicion and hatred. "Some of these fucking Muslims are giving trouble — don't want to fight their Islamic brothers in Afghanistan. You know what they're like. Pigs." He spat obviously and loudly, turning toward the two Uzbeks as he did so. The wind carried the gobbet of spitde and splashed it against the side of the gas pump, near the bending garage owner's head, which did not ^rn or look up. The truck driver's eyes flickered, but the expression died as easily as a match flame in the wind. "Pigs," the GRU captain repeated, evidently convinced of the manifest truth of his generalization. "We shot a few — a number of the conspirators and mutineers were tried and executed according to military law," he corrected himself solemnly. His eyes were smiling and flinty with satisfaction. Then he belched, and Gant smelled the drink on his breath for the first time. "All done by the book, according to the book, for the book." Captain Adamov grinned. "Bang!" He strutted a few steps, hand curled at the end of his outstretched arm. His trigger finger squeezed perhaps half a dozen times as he paused behind remembered necks, watched remembered corpses.
Gant, controlling the shiver that the mime had induced, watched Adamov as he returned to his side, nudging him. 'The rest of them have been shipped off now," he remarked. "A few more GRU and GLAVPUR people among their officers, of course."
"Where—" Gant cleared his throat, glancing at the dial of the gas pump still spinning as his tanks filled. After the underbelly tanks, the auxiliary tank in the cabin. It would be minutes yet. "Where was this, comrade?" The driver and the garage owner were gabbing rapidly in Uzbek, their words still carrying the strong accent of hatred.
Pig, pig, Russian pig…
The words became a remembered litany in his head. He had heard them often, through the thin, cracked-plaster wall as he lay next to his sisters cot. Only understanding years later what it must have been that his mother was refusing his drunken, demanding father. He shook his head. Adamov seemed confused.
"Where was this little problem?" Gant asked.
"Oh, barracks outside Khiva. Low-grade conscripts. They had some of their officers tied up — full of hashish and threats, the whole lot of them." He grinned. "Making demands — you know them. Cut the balls off one poor sod and shoved them down his throat." He sighed theatrically. "Not a lot of resistance, once we'd explained the position to them and the hashish wore off"
"How come you're here now? Must have been a big operation?' Gant shrugged as convincingly as the cold would allow.
"What do you mean?" Adamov protested, as if he suspected the presence of another policeman.
Gant understood. Adamov had been due some leave, had perhaps wangled or forged the papers granting him a few days off in
Samarkand before he reported back to headquarters. His presence there was a weakness, but the man was still dangerous.
Degree of cover, training prompted him. Imagine you're standing there naked, reddening with embarrassment until you can put on some clothes. What can you add to your cover? Remember background, experience, training, anecdote, expertise, rank. Convince them you are who you say you are.
Afghanistan — you're just back from there, Gant instructed himself, and find that Adamov is fighting the good fight right here— Uzbek pigs.
"OK, co
ffee it is," Gant said. "Borzov, by the way," he added, remembering his cover name easily now. Adamov nodded, relaxed by the identity he felt was emerging.
"Good, good." Adamovs hand came back to Gant's shoulder. They moved together toward the low house, bending slightly into the increasing wind. Which nagged at Gant's awareness. His mind estimated the wind speed, considered takeoff, flying.
Twelve-twenty, he saw, glancing surreptitiously at his watch. Time wasting. Cover story.
"Cleared your desk early, mm?" he asked with assumed heartiness.
Adamov glanced at him with renewed suspicion, then relaxed.
"Just so, man. Cleared my desk early." He pointed an index finger, then curled it shut in a squeezing gesture. Hero of the slaughter. He laughed. "I like it. Cleared my desk early." His laughter was snatched away by the wind after it had buffeted Gant.
Adamov had enjoyed the killing — perhaps he had even been given his early leave for services rendered? Gant shivered. Adamov said abruptly: "I recognize the unit badges on the MiL, the IDs. Alma-Atas your home base, then?" He hardly paused before he added: "Then you must know old Georgi Karpov? He must have keen posted to Kabul the same time as you were — same flight, or squadron, or whatever you call it in the FAAs. How is he, old Georgi, mm?"
Adamov had paused on the step up to the wooden porch of the bungalow. Dust flew around them. The captain's eyes were bright, as bright as the full moon. Only one thought took precedence in Want's mind.
Who was Georgi Karpov?
* * *
The laser battle station, ostensibly the first component of Linchpin, in reality the very heart of Lightning, had been transferred to the main assembly building still in its component parts. The main mirror, the laser tube, the power source — each provided General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin with a hard, diamondlike satisfaction. Each component was as evocative as memories of the ranks he had held, the promotions he had received during his years of service.