Winter Hawk mg-3

by Thomas Craig

  "Kedrov, you're done!" Priabin shouted, almost laughing, pleasure welling up in him.

  Kedrov was stunned, then further startled to see Katya's small frame emerge from behind Priabin's coat, her.gun, too, trained on him. His mouth plopped open and shut, open and shut, like that of a goldfish. Priabin clasped Katya's shoulder, and said:

  "You can arrest him, Katya — you found him."

  She moved carefully toward the bunk. Kedrov's shadow, their own shadows, danced and mingled and loomed at one another all around the room. A beer can rolled to Priabin's feet. He kicked it with the kind of pleasure he might have felt kicking back a boy's football in a park. Katya motioned to Kedrov to extend his hands. She handcuffed him. The man's mouth continued to open and close He could find nothing to say. Katya stood back, her narrow face flushed with excitement, her gun steady.

  Priabin moved to the table. Tapped the transistor radio with the barrel of his pistol.

  "Works without its batteries, I see," he murmured knowingly. Further shock was impossible on the stretched, blanched mask of Kedrov's face. He spoke, however.

  "How—?" Like an actor forgetting his lines, he dried after the single word.

  "We know someone's coming," Priabin said, offering no explanation of his knowledge, not even referring to the borescope. "We'll all just sit and wait for him, shall we?" His voice was still musical with success. Katya, too, was smiling.

  "When's he due to arrive? Soon, I should think, the way you keep looking at the door. Soon? Good — excellent."

  Priabin looked at his watch. Three twenty-eight. He'd give it until four. Then the worries returned. Rodin — I should have told Mikhail to watch Rodin, stay with him.

  Would he somehow be made to pay for this success? He felt himself almost superstitious, needing signs and portents. The ticket to Moscow on the morning flight was waiting at the Aeroflot desk. He'd simply checked the Aeroflot computer from the KGB offices; the airline, thank God, was still KGB rather than army, even out here. Mikhail had the tape of his conversation with Rodin. Yes, that was safe. The little incantations of his successes that night calmed his breathing, cooled his body. He looked at Kedrovs face, crumbling like waxy, old cheese; the portrait was almost complete. Kedrov's rescuers next, then Rodin… the thought of Rodin was like the hollow tooth to which the tongue inevitably returns. He winced. But if he had not left the boy, he would have just continued to refuse, even threatened Priabin with his father, denied everything. He had had to be left alone with his growing fears. Through them, Priabin might come to help.

  His anxiety would not go away. To allay it, he snapped at Kedrov: "What do you know about Lightning, my friend?"

  As if he had been practicing his response to just that question, Kedrov flung back at him: "Nothing. Nothing at all. What are you talking about?"

  "You know something, Kedrov — you know," Priabin murmured. "It's in your eyes." Priabin felt calm once more, albeit temporarily, he suspected. The cabin seemed less shadowy and cramped. Katya and Kedrov and he formed a still, restful painting as they waited.

  Until four o'clock.

  Then Rodin would have to become his absolute priority.

  His speed was no more than ninety miles per hour. The Hind wove its way along the channels and roads and railway tracks of a derelict silo complex. Canallike gouges in the flat land. The complex had been abandoned in the early seventies, when all passages and missile railways had been tunneled underground. Satellite photography had shown this place unchanged for more than fifteen years. Dust flew up behind the helicopter. Kedrov's transponder was less than five minutes away now.

  He jerked the Hind aside violently, avoiding a fallen power cable that had suddenly draped itself in front of the cockpit as if hanging from the dark sky. The helicopter rolled, then he righted it.

  He studied the map display. He was working to the largest scale now, and the details were more sketchy, adapted from countless satellite pictures. The thin, dark trail of a shallow stream, barely running on the surface at all, lay ahead of the white dot that represented the helicopter. He lifted out of a gully. In his mirrors, skeletal gantries and towers leaned or remained upright without purpose. Beyond them, the bathing place was lost to sight. On the map, fireflies moved now that he was in open sky. Russian crackled and flew in his headset.

  His conflicting emotions had receded, lost in routines, in flying the helicopter. There was an abiding sense of moving closer to the center of a web, of deliberately putting his foot on a branch-covered pit. Otherwise, the fear had diminished, the sense of panic that had made him turn west and begin to run was under control. He was wound tight as a spring, but there was an unreality about the danger and an excitement that welled in him. He believed he could get to Kedrov, believed he could get him out — despite the odds against him. He had recovered his ego. There was a cold, machinelike exhilaration about his attempt that swept even self-preservation aside, for the moment. But the whole thing was narrowing like a blind alley. It was going to be close, very close.

  He noticed sedge waving and bowing like corn beneath the Hind's belly as he was approaching the salt marshes. The troop transport, a heavy Mil-8 Hip, had collected the GRU search party and was moving on a course almost parallel to his own. If he glanced to port, he could just make out the distant white legs of twin searchlights walking across the landscape, shining down from the Mil-8's belly. Collision course between himself and as many as two dozen armed GRU soldiers. He dropped over a low bank into the winding course of the stream, which led into the heart of the salt marshes. Ice gleamed like fragments of a broken mirror.

  He lost sight of the two walking legs of light and of the forest of abandoned gantries behind him. Airspeed, eighty-five. Time — he glanced at the clock on the main panel — three forty-two. He looked up as the Hind's shadow skimmed a stretch of frozen water. No navigation lights, only the cold stars. He was sweating freely now. Distance to target, four miles. A clump of dwarf bushes leaned from the bank of the stream. Icy sedge stood out from both banks like the spikes of an insect-devouring plant, ready to close over the helicopter.

  Call signs, reports, instructions rang in his ears. Though he knew they were not aware of his presence, not yet.

  KGB helicopter, routine flight, would be his story. By the time they checked him out — despite the absence of a flight number on their radars, which would make them curious — he would have completed ingress, be on his way out again… be there Kedrov, be there, you bastard.

  The padding of his helmet above his eyebrows was damp, and rubbed as he moved his head from side to side. He was too hot in the leather jacket.

  As the marshes spread out more flatly, he glanced to port. Yes, the lights walked on in the distance. The Mil-8 was now slightly ahead of him, or so it seemed. Stunted trees in a clump. The Hind rose—

  — flicked aside. Violently, as the rotors of another helicopter caught the moonlight, and cockpit lights enlarged in his vision. He swung to one side of the Mil-2 and slightly higher. Altitude, six hundred feet, rising like a bobbing cork onto every radar screen monitoring the area.

  Russian bursting from the headset, a stream of oaths and curses and a challenge that was without suspicion; just simple fear and relief flooding the ether.

  "Calm down, comrade," he heard himself saying through clenched teeth. The other Mil was turning in his mirrors, to face after him. Reeds and frozen water flowed beneath the Hind. "No damage done," he continued to soothe. "KGB flight Alpha-Three, what more do you want? Fucking around the sky like a swarm of flicking locusts." He listened then.

  "… purpose of flight?"

  "None of your fucking business. We have choppers, too, comrade." He flew on, watching the Mil recede in his mirrors, watching its blind face turn slowly away as if to resume its inspection of a plotted route. He heard its pilot or copilot reporting the near-collision, reporting his cover story. He was logged in. Now the questions would begin. He dropped down to fifty feet, disappearing from radar.


  Islets, stretches of reed-filled ice, stunted trees. The marshes. Navigation lights to port and starboard, but patrolling, not converging. The Mil-8 s searchlights a dull glow away to port, but closer now. Collision course. He felt weak but forced himself to study the map display, to draw his gaze away from the clock on the panel, to ignore the fireflies superimposed on the sketchy landscape.

  Something flicked at the edge of eyesight as disturbed water birds rose in the night. The white dot on the map converged on the islet curled like a sleeping cat and the other that was kidney-shaped — the agreed rendezvous!

  He adjusted the contrast to improve the low-light TV picture on the main screen. Gray shapes glowed unreally. He bobbed over a rise — airspeed seventy — drew the Hind s shadow like a black cape across a stretch of ice, glanced to starboard… yes?

  Then rose onto radar screens once more, but he had to be sure — a hundred, two hundred feet, then the shape of the islet revealed itself. Catlike — kidney-dish islet lying across a stretch of frozen water from it, the skeletal shadow of a rotting jetty.

  He dropped the Hind, as if determined to break through the gleaming ice. Navigation lights around him were lost in the background of stars. The wind seemed no longer to hurl itself against the helicopter. The agreed rendezvous. He was there; target. The white dot that represented the Hind was as still as the Bethlehem star.

  He flicked away, keeping low, making the reeds bend into the wind with his passage. Stunted trees in the foreground, jutting out of the land's slight undulations. He slowed his speed, judging distances, watching the screens, the radar altimeter, port and starboard of him, the ground… where were the lights from the Mil-8? He could not see them. He put the helicopter into the hover. Dropped the undercarriage onto a slight incline, bounced the Hind, rolled it forward, wheels hardly in contact with the frozen ground, until the dwarf firs seemed to surround it. Switched off the engines.

  Silence.

  The wind, then—

  — and nothing else. Reeds grew as high as the miniature trees, as if springing up that moment around the helicopter. He felt like a gazelle in veldt grass; there were lions out there he could not see. Still, cooling, the Hind could be overlooked from above. The world consisted of only two dimensions. The reeds were almost as tall as the fuselage. Good enough.

  He opened the cockpit door. He did not concern himself with Adamov, who was securely tied and gagged. He drew a sketch map from his flight overalls, checked the compass display on his watch, oriented himself. Islets to the southeast of him. He could see the clump of trees standing up like frightened hair from the knoll's scalp. Half a mile.

  Searchlights—

  — leaping onto the ice in front of him, cutting off his glimpse of both knoll and trees. As the belly of the Mil-8 lumbered into view, he pressed against the fuselage of the Hind.

  Two hundred yards away, the transport helicopter moved across his sight, walking on its searchlight legs, something like an umbilical cord dragging from its belly and tossed by the wind — a ladder, a rope ladder. He heard a dog bark, more than one dog, and glanced Wildly around him, the noise of the rotors beating in his head. The noise had come from within the MiL. The dogs were still aboard, but the cabin door was wide now; light spilled from it outlining a human form. Dogs, men, guns.

  The transport moved away, oblivious of him. He saw a bulky shadow starting to descend the rope ladder a quarter of a mile away. They were beginning to drop men and dogs in their prescribed places. They were looking for Kedrov — go.

  He could not move, not for a long moment, not until the Mil-8 had moved farther off and its noises were less insistent. Then compass, sketch, night glasses, visual sighting of the knoll and islet where the jetty was, then—

  He clambered down the slight incline, onto the first stretch of ice, sedge and reeds scraping like steel against his legs. His hand on the pistol—

  — Kalashnikov. He turned, scrambled back up the slope, breathing already harsh, and opened the cabin door. Adamov's white face resented him. He climbed in, took down one of the rifles from its clips, checked its magazine, its weight in his hands, looking only once at Adamov, forcing himself to wink, tossing his head to emphasize a gesture he did not feel. He shut the cabin door behind him. Jogged more easily, familiarly, down the incline onto the ice. Continued to jog, leaning into the wind, head down, rifle clutched across his chest. Half a mile. Three-fifty.

  Be there

  Gennadi Serovs imagination prickled with points of information just as the night sky, seen through the window of the speeding car, seemed alive with the cold, separate lights of stars. There was a comfort in the analogy, just as there was exhilaration about the details of the report rendered by the team leader and the doctor. They were now seated in silence in the rear of the car, Serov preferring to ride next to his driver. He felt light-headed — yes, that was apt— with the risk he had taken and was still running. It had been a dangerous, even a challenging, move to have young Rodin killed, but therein lay its greatest satisfaction. When the body was discovered, the general would be deeply wounded. And if he became suspicious, asked for causes, occasions, reasons, Serov would plant evidence of KGB surveillance in the empty flat across the street from Rodin's apartment. After all, they had been there.

  Routine reports, issuing from the radio, washed over him like the sensation of a warm bath. The helicopter search, the cars, and the troops on foot had not yet located Kedrov. They would do so; and if they did not, General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin would have enough to distract him when the body of his son was discovered.

  Apparently, Valery Rodin had subsided quite easily, even strangely. Given up, as if his heart or will had surrendered. The tranquilizers had been administered via the tube. It had all been over in a few minutes; they had left Rodin so deeply unconscious he would never recover.

  The car coursed through the traffic-less streets of Leninsk-Kuznetskiy, the science city of Baikonur, heading southeast from Tyuratam toward GRU headquarters, a complex of white buildings close to the Cosmonaut Hotel. Out of Baikonur itself, there was something commercial about it, business rather than army or science. Serov enjoyed the separation of the GRU from army headquarters — detachment implied independence. To the north of them, the complex was bathed in light from a hundred sources, the sky softened by its glow. To the south, over the darkened city, the stars burned. The car was passing an ornamental fountain at the entrance to a leisure park. The wind had shaped the spray into a peacock's tail before the temperature had frozen it, despite the antifreeze they mixed with the water.

  Radio reports, radio noise. He sighed. Kedrov was unimportant, only the general's anxiety made him otherwise. A dozen helicopters, a hundred men or more, all looking for this one pathetic little shit. Even out as far as the marshes. Perchik might have a good idea there, might not…

  He closed his eyes. Details of the reports sparkled like jewels in the darkness behind his lids.

  Snapped open. He sat upright. His driver was looking at him expecting to receive a change of orders.

  "What?" he asked.

  His driver handed him the radio mike. Serov depressed the Transmit button and demanded: "Repeat that last information, Unit?" He turned to his driver, clicking his fingers impatiently.

  Unit Air-7," he added when given the designation. The driver steered the car to the curb, and they slowed to a halt. The hand brake rasped on. "Unit Air-7, what was your report?" Serov barked.

  This is Serov, understand? Your report."

  His fingers drummed on the dashboard. Through the window, listing a little with his sudden tension, he could see a war memorial doming at the end of the wide thoroughfare. They were no more than two minutes from the office. Yet the driver had been correct to stop until this matter was dealt with — had he misheard?

  … helicopter we can't account for, just sitting under some trees. Engines stopped, no sign of the pilot," the report continued. When the pilot of Air-7 had finished, Serov was silent for a few moments.
Why had it awakened him? It was strange, but not sinister or threatening. In the silence, the pilot added: "A gunship, sir. And it's not a member of our zveno. Stranger."

  "What markings is it carrying?" he asked. "Can you see?" He forgot to add "Over," but the pilot of Air-7 seemed to divine that he had finished; or was, perhaps, simply frightened into efficiency. An unidentified gunship? From outside Baikonur? picked up the engine heat on IR," the pilot explained, his voice distant and unreal, but somehow enlarging the significance of the abandoned Mil-24."… see it now on low-light TV… army, sir, not ours or KGB. Joyrider, comrade Colonel?"

  "Don't be stupid." It was possible, however, in a place like Baikonur — studentlike stunts and stupid acts of indiscipline; boredom. Most of the GRU's work had to do with things like that. But in a gunship? Nevertheless, he added: "If you can't see his white arse going up and down in the reeds, then it may not be a joyride. Get down there and check it out — now, sonny."

  He threw the radio mike toward his driver and rubbed his chin. Intuition was pressing at the back of his thoughts, attempting to bully its way in. Why? How much significance should he attach to this?

  "Very well, Vassily, drive on." He banged the dashboard as if to startle a horse into motion. The driver started the engine, put the car into gear, and pulled away. The war memorial, sword uplifted in threat rather than reconciliation or sorrow, loomed closer. It was a huge shadow against the lights of the square behind it. Should he order the Mil surrounded, as intuition seemed to demand? No, wait.

  The car rounded the dark memorial, crossed the square. The empty ether hissed from the radio. What was it? Why did he still feel it important?

  "Sir — Colonel, sir." A different voice, perhaps the copilot.

  "What?" This time he remembered. "Over."

  "Sir, an officer — one our ours, GRU, tied up in the cabin. Sir, he's claiming he was kidnapped."