Winter Hawk mg-3

by Thomas Craig

  He rubbed his hand through his hair. Then drank cold coffee. The guard, on the other side of the foldaway table on which breakfast had been served — with a sense of mockery clearly emanating from Rodin, who must have organized the meal — belched softly, then picked his back teeth with a used matchstick. Priabin had eaten as if on holiday — or like the proverbial condemned man, he corrected himself.

  On the giant screen, the two cosmonauts danced with heavy, slow movements around the PAM, maneuvering it into position. Their dialogue and the replies and instructions of mission control were no more than a background noise, like Muzak.

  The hours of Gant's continuing escape had been like a mounting fever, maddening Rodin. His figure had vanished from the windows of the command section. Priabin, itching with a renewed assault of tension, watched the door below the line of windows. As if waiting for an actor to enter, stage right. Hearing a babble of sound that could not submerge itself into the dialogue with Kutuzov, he turned his head.

  At the map table, someone was looking up toward the door into the main room, other officers were bending closer to the table. The excitement was unignorable. They'd found him, he'd been sighted…

  Rodin strode across the room toward the table. Priabin stood up. The guard seemed indifferent to his movement. Rodin's voice was peremptory with inquiry, but bearing an undercurrent of congratulation in it, too. His staff officers crowded around, peering, gesticulating. There was no doubt about it. The dialogue with the shuttle and the images on the giant screen were peripheral, almost subliminal. The center of the room was the map table.

  Priabin felt physically sick with utter weariness. He tasted the fat in which his breakfast had been cooked; the coffee seemed lodged at the back of his throat. He tasted too many cigarettes. He understood why he had watched the passage of slow time only on the screen and not looked at any of the numerous clocks in mission control. Subconsciously, he had known the exact moment dawn had broken over the border and seeped through the Caucasus mountains. And every minute since then had wound him like a watch spring, tighter and tighter. His hand gripped the edge of the rickety table. He felt dizzy. Words leaked like the chants of a distant but approaching mob… hit… confirmed hit, on fire…"

  "Head-on… can't get away." Voices from headphones, tinny and stridently unreal, from remote microphones, repeated and emphasized by the group around the table. Hands tracing shapes and courses, heads bent to peer at the culmination."… is it, sir?"

  "… there."

  "… contact lost. Gunship has visual…"

  "What of—?"

  "Here, just here."

  "… destroyed…"

  Priabin was less than halfway across the room to the table. Peripherally, he saw the two cosmonauts like great white grubs on the screen. The battle station and its PAM seemed one single object now. And that was it, all of it. Then he heard:

  "Fireball — completely destroyed."

  Cheering, congratulation — nausea returning, on which he gagged. Looking up after a moment, he saw Rodin staring in his direction. The general's smile was one of cold, certain satisfaction. His right hand, slightly extended, was closed in a firm grip.

  "… chute opening — there's a parachute opening, comrade General."

  Rodin seemed to falter, as if ill or dizzy.

  Priabin felt his limbs unfreeze. He hurried to the table. A staff officer moved as if to interpose his body between the general and some attack. Rodin glared into Priabin's eyes like a hard, explosive light.

  "What—" Priabin began.

  "… devil's luck," he heard Rodin exclaim in a pinched, cheated voice before the old man turned to the map table. His knuckles whitened on the table edge.

  … gunship may get there," someone said breathlessly. The atmosphere around the table was choking and airless. "Two more aircraft closing quickly." The tone was that of someone repeating an unviable alternative to a set of facts. "Down — he's down."

  "Kill him," Rodin managed to say. "Kill him."

  "The gunship's going in — tricky, they've spotted him, the chute's dropping over him, marking the spot. Rocket and cannon, sir — they're using everything…"

  Rodin lurched rather than walked away from the table. His hand waved the others away from him. The subliminal noises of the dialogue with the shuttle impinged on Priabin's hearing. It was as if he had lowered the volume of voices around the map, not wishing to hear.

  "… can't see anything now…

  "He can't survive that, surely?"

  "Let the gunship take care of it. How many more in the immediate area — what? Let them wait until the snow's cleared—"

  Someone had taken command for the moment. Priabin heard no more, squeezing the voices from his head like water from a sponge. Rodin was beside him, his eyes filled with apprehensions and blame.

  "You," he said.

  Rodin seemed to have aged. When a lieutenant appeared beside him and saluted, it was some moments before his presence seemed to register.

  "What—"

  "Sir, Stavka, sir." He held out a message form, hastily scribbled upon. "Coded signal. They're awaiting—" Rodin waved the man away, snatching at the flimsy sheet and tearing it. The lieutenant subsided to attention some yards away. The noise at the map table had subsided, too, into a concentrated murmur. Time had dragged free of the images on the screen and raced now. Moments only before Gant was obliterated like the old aircraft in which he had escaped.

  Not quite escaped.

  Rodin waved the message form beneath Priabin s nose.

  "Decision postponed," he said. "Decision postponed." That's

  Stavka's position." He turned, glanced at the table, then faced Priabin once more. "One man, and they're afraid of him. I shall acknowledge." He smiled, very faintly and with evident cunning. "I shall inform Stavka that no proof exists, that the American has no proof."

  "You can't—"

  "I will. At once."

  Priabin's frame quivered. He felt a chill of fear. It was as he had suspected. Rodin was beyond logic. As if in explanation, Rodin added:

  "My wife died an hour ago. She never recovered consciousness."

  It was like a bulletin rather than an expression of loss. The indifferent voice of printed lines in a column of newspaper deaths. All restraint had gone. His face displayed no signs of grief, and little shock. The man had been hollowed out like a rotten tooth. There was nothing left inside him. Only the uniform and what he believed was his duty were left.

  Mad. Dangerously, frighteningly mad. To himself, Rodin was sane and certain.

  Priabin whirled around to the table behind them.

  "The gunships spotted him," someone called out. "Where's the closest backup aircraft?"

  "It's twenty miles to the border — fifteen at least."

  "Not in a million years — no chance."

  Priabin turned away. Rodin was smiling, almost sympathetically. Yes, his emptiness was justified. They'd kill Gant, recover the cassettes, and no one would ever know. No one. Gant was a dead man.

  "OK, Dick — what can we do?"

  Shock, hope, deep anxiety all fought against the clinging of the Valium he had taken in order to assure himself of sleep. He struggled to a more erect position against the padded headboard of the bed. Gunther was still leaning over him like a doctor.

  "What can we do?" he repeated, looking at his hands. They quivered to the register of a distant earthquake. The signal from Gant had shocked with its sudden glimpse of the impossible, and he felt he had not caught his breath since then.

  Gunther's briefing continued to assail him, like the effect of successive waves against an old, crumbling seawall. He wanted to give in to hope, and was terrified of its illusory beauty. Gant, alive—

  "We can't go in, Mr. President," Gunther offered, as if replying to some wild suggestion already voiced. "That's not possible. Their activity in the air, and now on the ground, is — well, sir, it's frantic."

  "Then they'll—?"

  D
anielle had slipped out of bed as soon as Gunther's knock had awakened her. Calvin smelled coffee, heard the plopping of the percolator. She moved against subdued lighting like an illusion. He rubbed the puttylike contours of his face with both hands.

  "Sir, I don't know. We don't know whether he has Cactus Plant with him, we only know that he transmitted the Mayday signal, he used his code ID, and he said mission accomplished. Their response confirms he has something, some proof, but we can't even begin to guess what it is. His aircraft was shot down, whatever it was, but he has to be alive."

  "You're certain?"

  "They're not looking for a body, not with those forces. Sure, they're putting out a smokescreen — searching for a crashed transport airplane is the story — but they're using spetsnaz codes and channels and paratroops — just to look for bodies?" Gunther raised his hands. "There are Desantnye Vojska units [parachute troops] in the area — they've just been parachuted in and there are more on the way. Sir, he's alive and in big trouble. He must have the proof we need!"

  "And they're terrified he's going to get it out — to us," Calvin murmured. Then he looked up into Gunther's shadowed face. "But how in hell can we?" He raised his hands in a gesture of defeat and surrender, but slapped them impatiently back on the bedclothes. "Hell, what can we do?"

  "John," he heard Danielle say, her voice strangely pained. He looked up. Her dark hair clouded around her small face. "He's alive. It doesn't matter….." Her voice trailed away into the empty shadows of the room. He nodded, as if she had been his spokesperson and voiced exactly what he had intended to say.

  Gunther stepped back as Calvin swung his legs out of bed, stood up, and put on his robe. One of his jokes. Donald Duck across the shoulders of the toweling material. And a NASA shuttle badge sewn on the breast pocket. But as if he had donned a uniform, his movements became at once crisper, more alert. He rubbed his hair to tidiness.

  "You'll come down?" Gunther began.

  "Yes. At once." He thrust his feet into his slippers, and held Danielle's wrists briefly as she handed him coffee. The presidential seal minutely painted on the white china. He nodded reassuringly at his wife. Her face seemed a mirror of his own. Hope fading, the anxiety mounting. "Yes, I'll come down to the code room. What monitoring do they have down there?"

  "Full links with the Pentagon, the NSA, Langley."

  "Good. What have we—?"

  "There's a KH-11 satellite over the Caucasus. Full daylight and little cloud cover. Good transmission situation. Washington can see quite a lot of the activity. Gunships, fighters, troop transports. And now troops on the ground in numbers."

  "Terrain?"

  "Mountainous, all the way to the border. Difficult for him."

  "And for them."

  "How far inside is he?"

  "Between ten and fifteen miles, their best estimate."

  "That little?"

  "That little. Maybe that's as bad as a hundred, even a thousand. They have crack troops swarming all over the place."

  "Dick, don't say that. The man got out of Baikonur in an airplane — now how the hell did he do that? He could—"

  But Gunther was shaking his head. "They can't afford to let him."

  "He has to stay alive. He has to make it — for Christ's sake, we can't lift a finger to help the guy!"

  "Not unless you want to start the next war."

  Calvin nodded absently. "I realize that, Dick," he murmured. "At least" — he looked up, grinning suddenly before his face reassumed its solemn expression—"part of me does. OK, we can't go after Gant. But we can have people on the border, right on the border, and we can be watching from the air. What do we have up?"

  "AWACS is watching the whole thing."

  "Good. Then I have to talk to the Turkish president right away."

  "We anticipated that, Mr. President."

  "Right, then let's be clear what we're talking about here. We have to enlist the aid of one of our NATO allies… wait. Would they cross into…?"

  Gunther looked gloomy. "They want him awful bad," was all he said.

  Calvin rubbed his hair.

  "Then I have to prepare one of our allies for a possible Soviet troop incursion into their territory — if Gant makes it that far. God knows what I tell the Turkish president." He was pacing the room urgently, as if attempting to walk off the last lingerings of the Valium; or of fear. "Ten miles — maybe as little as that?" Gunther nodded. Calvin turned slowly, looking at the room as if it were some kind of command center reflecting the powers of his office. And shook his head. "All we can do is make sure we're there to meet him, if he gets out. And he has the proof we need." The tone was singular, not plural. He felt a thrill of enraged frustration that deepened almost at once into fear. He was racked by hope and terror. The proof I need, the proof, he heard again and again in his head. The proof I need.

  "Mr. President?" Gunther began.

  "Yes, yes, I'm coming. Give me just a moment to dress."

  Tree line.

  The tree line was what had saved him, he admitted once more. Temporarily saved him; just as it temporarily concealed him.

  His back was against a rock, he was sitting hunched on pine needles. The snow was patchy beneath the trees, much of the forest floor tinder-dry. He held the small glasses he had taken from the Antonov to his eyes, and watched them moving below, around, opposite. All of them…

  … all of them spetsnaz, experts.

  The morning was icy cold and clean. Sound was restricted to the occasional crackle of a distant radio or transceiver carried on the sharp air, and the throb of troop helicopters and gunships winding through the mountains or floating above the wide plain of Ararat. Beyond the troops and the machines hanging in the air and the occasional fattening stripe of a vapor trail, he could see Turkey in the distance, where the landscape seemed cardboard and flat through the glasses. The twin peaks that dominated the plain to the west were those of Mt. Ararat, in Armenia — Turkish Armenia. Gant knew that from the pages of the school atlas. And knew little more than that.

  Far below, the main road paralleled the border. To the northeast, a haze of industry hung where the city of Yerevan must be. Snow, brown flanks, foothills, the wide plain, and the river Araks, followed in swift, blurred succession as he swung the glasses down. He was in the niche of border between three countries.

  Spetsnaz…

  He involuntarily looked at his watch. The sleeve of the parka crackled with dried, half-frozen snow melt as he tugged it back from his wrist. Nine-fifteen. Just over an hour since he had bailed out. And they had attempted to obliterate him with rocket fire from the first of the gunships to reach him. Had he been able to control the chute as well as he would have chosen — he would have struck the snow of the plain dead. In pieces; burning rags of clothing and flesh hanging loosely from the cords of the chute. He shivered, and was chilled through.

  The shallow crevasse had saved his life. Trees had beckoned below, and he'd struggled feverishly down the precipitous slope, coughing and spitting out melted snow, banging against rocks, tripping often. Then he'd reached the first stunted trees, rolling over and over beneath them until a slim bole winded him and fetched him up half lying, half sitting, breath heaving. It had taken them three quarters of an hour to land the spetsnaz troops or parachute them in. In that time, he had worked his way farther down the mountain, beneath the thickening, stronger trees. To wait, and recover. Now he must move again.

  He raised the glasses. A slow vapor trail streaked the sky to the west, across the border in Turkey. As if it were some kind of signal that they had received his Mayday call.

  A gunship slid up the side of the mountain, dragging its shadow like a cloak across the snow. Irrelevant. They couldn't find him, not beneath the tree cover. The spetsnaz could—

  — and would.

  They worked, like most special forces, in four-man units. Or, as now, in multiples of four. And in touch with each other. They could napalm the mountainside from gunships or MiGs, but he
knew they wouldn't. They had to be sure, positively sure, he had died. They wanted the cassettes that were the evidence, and they wanted the body. Perhaps most of all that. They wanted the body, to be certain.

  It was time to move. To survive. The nearest troops that he could see were perhaps four or five hundred yards away, below and to his left, trudging up a snow-hidden track, backs bent, guns clearly visible. A four-man unit.

  Far below and across the plain, a train appeared as if sliding wormlike out of the undulating earth, smoke billowing up into the air. Railway, road, river; border. Open country. Gant rose onto one knee.

  They were toiling alertly up the slope where the trees opened out to reveal a winding track. Rifles slung across their chests — new AK-74s, not like the old Kalashnikov he held in his hands — packs, camouflage overalls; other weapons — a Dragunov snipers rifle carried by the sergeant, and slung at one trooper's side, an RPG-7 rocket launcher. If they found only the remaining bits of him, it would be enough.

  Four hundred yards.

  Everything had become simple, even stark. They wanted him dead, and the proof recovered. He was the only fly in their ointment. He wanted to survive. Even the proof and their concern over it were unimportant. There was only their need to kill him and his desire for survival. Which made the sighting through the foresight's cylinder and the open, U-shaped notch of the rearsight easy, almost like squinting into a small telescope. And made the metal of the unfolded stock as comfortable as that of a favorite hunting rifle. Single shot.

  Once, twice, three times.

  Surprise, although half expected, although their nerves were alert. Heads up for an instant before the inertia of training and experience threw their bodies aside from the track toward rocks or tree boles. Enough surprise for one of the camouflaged bodies to fall awkwardly and roll over, and for a second to have to lunge limpingly toward cover. The fourth, fifth, and sixth rounds missed. He quite clearly saw snow plucked up by each of the bullets.

  Then he moved, farther back into the trees and to his right, body bent and weaving below and around stinging branches. Ten seconds, eleven, twelve—