by Thomas Craig
Priabin found himself staring across the room at Rodin, who was glaring in his direction; as if he were the jinx who had caused this ill-luck. But the time was unusable. He was Rodin's prisoner, he reminded himself, now aware of the lounging guard — a new one, the other having been relieved an hour before.
Rodin was huddled with his senior officers. Voices debated, urged, and rejected. Radio channels crackled, the voices of mission control and the shuttle waited. Priabin edged toward the windows. Looking down, he saw the huge map; colors flared, lights winked and moved. The combined forces of two military districts were being mobilized, marshaled into the shape of a trap. A team hand-picked by Rodin controlled, by proxy, hundreds of aircraft and helicopters, thousands of men. He turned away from the depressing vision it formed. He realized that all the delay to the firing of the laser weapon would do would be to prevent Rodin from destroying the Atlantis before Gant died. Nothing had changed.
And Rodin seemed to realize it, too. His face was still angry, and filled with cold authority. But his eyes and mouth were calm. His hands unclenched. A temporary setback; revert to original timetable. Gant, then the shuttle.
"Kutuzov, this is Rodin," Priabin heard him say. "I want a linkup with the — satellite during your present orbit of the earth, and an EVA to inspect and repair the system's failure. Acknowledge.
A man floating in space, repairing the malfunctioning motors. A matter of hours, no more. Rodin's features gleamed with satisfaction when the shuttle commander acknowledged. He put down the microphone and slapped his hands together loudly, like a noise to frighten children engaged in a party game in the dark.
"Gentlemen, we have work to do," he cried. "As tight a schedule ^ possible — and no more delays." He glanced again in Priabin's direction, then beckoned him. "Come, Colonel, you can give us your expert opinion on the preparations we're making for Major Gant "
18: Acts of Desperation
A Sukhoi fighter, too eager, flashed across the nose of the Antonov, the sun glistening on its silver fuselage. Then it was gone. Gant craned to follow its path, and saw it winking like a signal lamp as it banked then began to climb out of the sand brown of the country below into the pale morning sky.
And others…
Full daylight. Eight o'clock, and they had found him. The radio could not be retuned to their Tac channels, and the radar was too rudimentary to show more than a smudged impression of the hostile landscape ahead. After crossing the Caspian and the flat marshes and plain to the west of it, he had sneaked through the mountains like a thief, for hours it seemed. Sliding around and over and through, hugging the contours of the country as the night faded into gray, then blue. Temperature mounting, the past hours becoming no more than a mocking illusion of safety and cleverness, tension holding him like a straitjacket. Now morning and the aircraft.
He flung the lumbering, though small, Antonov severely to port, shocked at the leap of a mountain into the center of the cockpit windshield. He wrenched on the steering handles of the column, throwing the crop sprayer away from the mountain's snow-streaked flank. At once, he was straining to relocate the Sukhoi, the Fencer variable-geometry fighter. He had glimpsed the pilot's helmet and the aircraft's eagerness. He ignored the other occupant of the cockpit, the weapons officer. It was the pilot's skill that would kill him-
As the fighter flipped into a looping turn and came back toward him, he saw the flare of a missile igniting. He pulled up the Antonov's nose as if reining in a wild horse. Sky swung crazily across the windshield, the tail of the aircraft seemed as if tearing free of thick mud; then the thin, steamlike trail from the missile passed away beneath him. The peaks of the mountains around him gleamed with sunlight. The Sukhoi rushed below him and flicked belly outward around an outcrop of brown, snow-marked rock. And was a mile away before it began to turn.
The primitive radar, which only scanned forward, showed him no signs of other aircraft. But he knew that they were only minutes away at best. Aircraft and gunships. Slower and more maneuverable than the Sukhoi.
The border was less than fifty, less than forty miles away now. He had come nearly nine hundred miles in darkness and safety at zero feet and with mounting excitement. And now it was over. He dipped into the uneasy safety of the mountains once more.
The Sukhoi turned lazily and looked for him again. A silver signal at the far end of a tunnellike valley, rushing closer Enlarging in his mirror. Hopeless—
Hie retinal image of the detonating missile was like a distant omen. The Fencer grew like a rushing silver fish in his mirror, attacking along the valley. It was time, the moment for Mayday — and even as he thought it, it was already too late. Cannon fire from the fighter flashed alongside and past the cockpit, shook and flung dust and snow from the nearest hill flank. Then the Antonov rocked in the shock wave of the Fencer's passage. Two tinted face masks were turned in his direction — it was as if he could see boyish grins behind them — and then the aircraft lifted sharply up and away to begin its turn. The Antonov, as if in surrender, entered a gap of clear air above mountain pasture the hill slopes falling sharply away on every side. Snow-covered grassland, dotted huts, a thin trail of smoke climbing into the morning air. The detail emphasized the lumbering, frail slowness of the crop sprayer. Gant swallowed and wiped the perspiration from the edge of the old leather flying helmet. The Fencer began falling like a meteorite toward him.
Weapon load — he'd glimpsed the underwing pylons on the starboard side, which included medium-range air-to-air missiles and the AA-8 snapshoot missiles designed especially for dogfights. And a multibarrel gun beneath the belly. As the Fencer had turned, he had seen the port wing and the bulk of two 57mm rocket launchers.
It swooped down behind him. The radar screen began filling with shapes. Six, seven—
Mayday.
The Fencer loomed—
Underwing flame. He had to climb, to broadcast his Mayday cry, his code ID, Winter—
The Antonov rocked, bucked, tried to free itself of his grip on the column. His wrists bulged with muscle and vein. Smoke, he smelled smoke — but the Antonov turned as he wished as the Fencer flashed over him with a cold shadow.
Gant knew the Fencers armaments, the speed, climb rate, turning circle, time-to-return to an attack — and the old Antonov was a weaponless biplane, a survivor from an age before modern dogfights.
The Sukhoi was now swinging down behind him in the mirror, where smoke was streaming from the aft section of his plane. He felt chilled as he identified the location of the fire, and the rudder and the column felt weak and distant under his hands and feet.
The fighter sped past and above and swung into a scissors maneuver. The pilot's reinforcements would be closing. Gant was supposed to follow — he was already heaving the column into a break that would confirm he was obeying the pattern of the maneuver—
Smoke. Controls OK, but limited life.
It was like a crazy, clever movie, past versus present or future. The Fencers patience was wearing thin as he curved back to complete the second figure of the scissors maneuver. He overshot because it was much slower than in training, but the boy in the Sukhoi had already begun to adjust.
As the smoke crept in, Gant knew his cockpit time was running out. The main cabin would be filled with smoke now, the airplane was becoming leaden and dull, and the mountainsides ahead of him offered a shelter he could not reach. Smoke trailed out from the tail-plane like a signal, answered by thin trails of smoke from hut chimneys on the ground. The thirty-seven miles to the border were impossible.
The Fencer came down like a saber.
There is a stalemate in the scissors…
… so said the manual. The boy in the Sukhoi understood the maneuver. His forward airspeed had been reduced, he was crawling through the air. The winner will be the fighter with the slowest}of' ward velocity…
The Antonov was the slower in any race, but it was unarmed-" — and hit.
He was in clean air.
Ground
. Still distant.
Instruments?
He would have to climb, and pulled back the column without expectation. The nose of the old biplane nuzzled into the sky. Only the Mayday signal was left to Gant, however much he resented the fact. The radio signal had to reach across the Turkish border like the scattering from a hand sowing grain. There was only that — and survival.
But not in the air. The fire, he knew, would be creeping along the fuselage from the tail section toward the main cabin. None of the controls seemed to have been damaged, the biplane could still be maneuvered, and the Sukhoi, even with its wings and air brakes hilly extended, was still not able to make the requisitely tough turns to break the stalemate of the scissors.
The Fencer was not an opponent, merely a factor. When the others arrived, they would build an aerial box from which he could not escape. It could be no more than a minute now before that process began… climb!
Mayday.
As the biplane's sluggish nose lifted, the Sukhoi flashed around and beneath, surprised by his disobedience. Then he climbed. The sun behind them reddened the star the fighter made as it rose. The boy pilot would come head-on now, firing everything, because on his screens the others were rushing in like sharks. He wanted the kill.
Villages, huts, settlements below — a long, wide valley, lush beneath snow. From the school atlas on the copilot's seat, this was the target for the signal. Smoke billowed, hardly dispersing in the airflow. The snapshoot missile had ignited without damaging. The plane was being eaten by the fire, but everything still worked.
Here he had to.
Sukhoi, finally swinging up and around to kill.
Altitude just, just enough.
Mayday. Heat in the cockpit, smoke everywhere, billowing and acrid.
"Mayday, Mayday — this is Winter Hawk. I repeat, this is Winter Hawk." Behind his tinted face mask, the young pilot of the Fencer should let his smile grow at the panic of the distress call and the unfamiliar code name. "This is Winter Hawk." In control rooms, cockpits, radio posts, they'd hear it and be satisfied. The American pilot hadn't made it, he'd lost. He was crying for help. He gave his position, over and over, he repeated the code name, the Mayday, then his position again. And because the hunt knew what he had, he ended: "Winter Hawk successful, repeat successful. Mission accomplished/' When he had repeated the final sentence of his message, he flicked off the radio and coughed in the acrid atmosphere. The radio had become irrelevant. The cockpit was hot, stifling. And now the burning…
Vietnam. Pulling at the hood of the ejector seat, the cockpit Plexiglas banging away from above him, the seat exploding out of the Phantom, rotating like a ball so that he saw sky, jungle, sky, the Phantom pursuing its course, streaming dark, oily smoke. Sky, jungle — the seat drifting away from him, then the neck wrench and physical blow of the chute opening above him… then the airplane exploding into bright fragments wrapped in billowing orange. Then dropping toward—
Here he had no ejector seat, only the parachutes stowed in the burning main cabin. He heard the Antonov's automatic fire alarm for the first time, as if it had only begun that moment. He switched to autopilot, and sensed the cockpit alienate him; finish with his services. He unbuckled his seat belt and stood up, dragging off the tight old leather flying helmet, throwing it aside. Bending low he gripped the hot door handle and opened the cabin door. Smoke was opaque, choking. He clutched his handkerchief over his nose and mouth. His last glimpse through the cockpit windshield had shown him new stars winking as they approached and the mountains beginning to loom ahead of the course he had set.
He fumbled in the cabin like a blinded animal. Caught up the kit bag that contained the cassettes of film and videotape. Rifle next, snatched from its mount on the fuselage. Orange fire glowing at the end of the cabin. Smoke everywhere. Now the burning of systems, ailerons, struts, linkages, control mechanisms. At any moment, the Antonov would be unable to respond to the autopilot and begin to fall out of the morning.
Glasses, rifle, spare ammunition clips, cassettes… chute, chute — his mind raced toward being out of control. Emergency pack, compass… the linkages were buckling, beginning to distort-He felt the Antonov lurch tiredly, then resume its illusion of calm passage.
He heaved the chute from its locker and awkwardly, hunched and coughing, wrestled his arms into the harness. Then touched the ripcord. He eased around the chemical tank and reached the door — flung it open. Smoke was torn and hurled around him. The wind cried. The fire leaped nearer. The biplane lurched again, then seemed to decline into a lazy, certain fall, banking over the valley toward the nearest hillside. Brown and snow-streaked. The slipstream tore at Gant's clothing, flapping the parka like stiff folds of tarpaulin. He gripped the edges of the door frame with white hands. Looked down, then quartered the sky as the Antonov's dying fall moved his vision like a lazy camera.
The Sukhoi Fencer was coming head-on now, and he could hear the boom of its engines echoing off the hills. The boy would hang a curtain of shells and rockets just ahead of the biplane, into which the old Antonov would lumber like a weary tiger into a pit. As he squinted into the slipstream, his eyes watering, Gant saw the Sukhoi growing in size, until the ripple of little ignitions beneath its wings indicated the hanging of the curtain. The Fencer was nose up, then it pulled steeply away and banked, slipping behind a creased mountain flank. Two new silver fuselages winked in the sun.
Gant poised himself. The Antonov's fall was almost graceful, delicate. He glanced at the tail plane, then at the fire behind him. He thrust out from the cabin door into the slipstream, feeling it leap on him, buffet and move his body even as he fell away from the Antonov. Altitude, five hundred and fifty feet, no more. It was low to jump — just all right? The mountains loomed — all round him, it seemed — and the biplane curved eerily toward it. He swiveled his gaze but could not see the Fencer.
Impact. Not with the mountainside but with the curtain of shells and rockets. The Antonov disintegrated. Skeletal remains were illuminated like black matchsticks within the ball of orange fire, which became smoke. Debris drifted down—
— like himself.
Ripcord.
Jerk as if someone were wrestling with him and trying to break his back. He looked up. The chute opened slowly, like a demonstration.
Where was the Fencer? how near the closest of the others? how long to fall…?
The snow filled the valley, now wide enough to be a plain. The ^ind drifted him toward the huge mountain. His hands tugged, altering his course minutely. Perhaps two hundred feet up now, no more. Where was the Fencer? How close was the nearest gunship?
The Fencer pilot had not seen him jump. Perhaps the others were too far off to reach him. One hundred fifty feet. He felt himself hanging in the wind like a target in a fairground booth.
The lower slopes of the mountain gave him his best chance. The pall of smoke from the biplane hung above him, as the debris raced him toward the snow. He was too close to the mountainside to reach the flat terrain covered with soft snow. The wind drifted him, and he fought against it, tacking like a sailor with a hundred tiny adjustments to avoid being thrown against the rock face. He was unaware of his own breathing, his mind was at a great distance. Hands only, his weight, the force of the wind, the brown, snow-streaked rocks, the trees below.
And the sky, the silver fuselages taking on distinct shape and proximity. And the first gunship no bigger than a beetle as yet. Mayday. There had been no other way. He could not have survived in the sky.
He jerked on the chute's cords, feeling his body swing away from hard rock, then he seemed to plummet into a narrow crevasse. Feet struck, cold and shock registering together. He rolled, covered at once in snow, his nostrils and mouth filled with it, choking him. It buried him, cutting out all light and air. He could just make out the noise of firing and registered the thud of cannon fire or rocket attack through the rock beneath and around him. Darkness. Suffocation.
Time passed somnolently on the gian
t screen portraying the repairs to the laser weapon's payload assist module. The sensation of such lumbering slowness scratched at Priabin's nerves. It was as if time itself imprisoned him, not the bored and chewing guard who lounged opposite him. He wanted to scream away the tension thai gripped his chest and made it difficult to breathe. Ten o'clock in the morning. Already half an hour of daylight on the Turkish border. The idea brought a fresh choking sensation. There was nothing he could do, however much he wanted to.
The repair work had been in progress for more than three hours. On the screen, the bloated form of one of the cosmonauts hung m the blackness alongside the laser weapon. The faulty payload assist module had been detached and returned to the Raketoplan's cargo bay in order to affect the necessary repairs. Now, as he watched, a second cosmonaut — only the shuttle's pilot had remained aboard Kutuzov—hovered into view, propelling slowly ahead of him module's bulk. It was one third of the battle station's size and circular, except where its single rocket motor narrowed into a funnel.
The cosmonauts, even wearing their backpacks, seemed dwarfed by the two machines they now had to reunite. It was perhaps a matter of less than two hours, then a further two hours, and—
Rodin — where was Rodin? He looked up toward the windows of the command room. Figures behind glass. Yes, there he was, arms moving in emphasis, the mad conductor of this mad orchestral score. Unable to settle or remain still. Moving between Lightning and Gant. Shaped by the progress of the repairs, which had gone well, and the hunt for the invisible Gant.
On the screen, the payload assist module was nudged toward the laser weapon, approaching it with the caution of a servant bearing bad news. The two cosmonauts, using their backpacks and yet still moving with almost stonelike slowness, closed on one another, handling the inertia of the PAM, slowing it, directing its bulk beneath the waiting battle station. Time was elephantine, yet it hurried, making him want to shriek. This was all the time there was. Four hours — and when they had passed, the world would have changed.