“How are you going to get these engines started out there”—Jake nodded toward the southeast—“if they run long enough to get us there?”
“We loaded two power carts into the other chopper, sir. That cut the amount of extra fuel we could carry.”
“I don’t want to walk back.”
“I think we’ll be all right, sir.”
Well, Goober was his pilot. He could go over the figures with him or take his word for it. “Okay,” Jake told him and turned to his little group. “Let’s get out of these suits after Captain Collins checks each one. Be careful with them. These are the only hot suits we have.”
“How did you get permission to borrow these machines, Admiral?” Colonel Rheinhart asked as he worked his zipper down.
“It’s a standard midnight requisition, Colonel,” Toad put in, but his smile never arrived. Jake Grafton saw that and wondered if Rita did. She was helping Captain Collins check the suits. “Common procedure in the American Navy,” Toad assured him.
“Oh, you’re stealing them?”
“We showed the guards at the gate a personal note from Boris Yeltsin.” The colonel looked at him askance, so Toad added, “An interpreter at the embassy wrote the note. We gave it to the sergeant of the guard as a souvenir, along with two cartons of cigarettes and a bottle of bourbon.” Actually Spiro Dalworth had done the talking and Toad had watched. Dalworth was trying hard to please Tarkington, who had little to say to him. Just now Dalworth stood watching this exchange. He wasn’t trying on a hot suit since he was going to remain with the fuel chopper.
“What if the Russians shoot us down?” Jack Yocke whispered to Jake Grafton, who pretended not to hear him. The admiral walked over to Rita and had some final words with her.
“If I may, gentlemen,” Colonel Reynaud offered, “I believe it is time to ‘mount up’? As zhey say in ze western movies, we are burning ze daylight.”
Jake rode beside Goober Groelke in the copilot’s seat for the first leg. He was impressed by Groelke’s flying ability: he handled the large Russian helicopter like he had flown it for years. Jake examined the faces of the instruments that were telling him God-knows-what and watched the pilot at work for the first five minutes, then his mind wandered.
More puffy clouds this afternoon. And they had a late start.
They soon left the heavily industrialized suburbs of Moscow behind and followed a two-lane road for a while, then the road turned more to the east and the helicopters flew across wood lots and fields and here and there small villages. The land didn’t look prosperous, Jake decided. From a thousand feet the fields looked weedy and unattended, the occasional house just a shack, the villages collections of shacks. At random intervals the machines crossed above power lines and railroad tracks, incongruous fixtures that ran across the gently rolling countryside from one hazy infinity to the other.
The helicopter flew from sunlight into the random cloud shadow, back to sunlight again while Jake Grafton thought about radioactivity and nuclear warheads.
The noise was loud but not painfully so. Oh, to be able to fly on forever and never have to arrive. His eyelids grew heavy. To fly on and on and never have to arrive at the radioactive hell embedded in the haze and puffy clouds somewhere beyond the horizon, beyond the blighted promises and twisted dreams…
Fueling the helicopter that was to take them on to Serdobsk and Petrovsk was a nightmare. The hand pump leaked and took the best efforts of two men. Everyone took turns. Three or four minutes of intense effort reduced most of them to puffing. The marine captain was in the best shape, but after five minutes even he needed a break.
They were in a pasture several miles from the nearest village, but no one came to see who they were or why they had landed. Two scrawny steers watched from the safety of some trees at the far end of the field.
“How’s the machine flying?” Jake asked Goober.
“Left engine is running a little hot,” he was told, “but the oil levels seem okay. And the pressure in the primary hydraulic system fluctuates occasionally, but it’s nothing we can’t live with.”
“And the other machine?”
“A bunch of circuit breakers popped. The stab aug is out. Several hydraulic leaks.”
The refueling took over an hour while Tom Collins rigged his radioactivity detection equipment, which he described to Jake as advanced Geiger counters. The censors were on small winches so they could be lowered from the open rear door of the chopper to get readings at ground level. In the meantime Groelke and the other pilot climbed all over the two helicopters, checking everything.
When fueling was complete, everyone stepped behind the helicopter to relieve themselves, then took long drinks of water. The party that was flying on donned the hot suits.
“Toad,” Jake said, “you ride with Goober in the cockpit.” Toad would do the navigation. He had several charts which he got out and stacked in the order in which he would need them. Most of the officers had cameras. They checked them carefully before they donned their helmets and zipped the gloves into place.
They were going to breathe filtered air as long as the radiation levels were not too high. Collins would tell everyone when to switch on their oxygen systems.
Jack Yocke walked over to Jake and said, “If anything goes wrong, we’re dead men. You know that?”
Jake Grafton was tempted to make a flippant reply, but after a look at the reporter’s face, he refrained. “I know, Jack,” he said patiently, and pulled his helmet on.
He knew the dangers better than the reporter did. No one in the other machine had hot suits and the machines would be too far apart for radio reception. If this machine had a serious mechanical problem and was forced down, everyone aboard was doomed. Even in well-maintained helicopters with excellent equipment and thorough, careful planning, this mission was too dangerous for anyone but a desperate fool. Which was, he told himself scornfully, why the Russians weren’t here and he was.
He had given the other pilot explicit orders: if we don’t come back after six hours, you are to return to Moscow.
The hour-and-forty-five-minute flight from Moscow had put a sufficient charge on the helicopter’s batteries that Goober got a start without using the external power cart. They had wrestled one of the carts into the passenger bay and Spiro Dalworth was outside standing beside the other, just in case.
Jake strapped himself into the crewman’s seat by the rear door. He surveyed the compartment. Some of the other people had strapped in, some hadn’t. Yocke was playing with his buckle, toying with the adjustment catch. Perhaps each of them in his own way was pondering his karma.
Jake looked forward and saw Toad looking back at him. He gave Tarkington a thumbs up.
When the engine RPM had stabilized, Goober lifted the tail and the machine left the ground.
All that remained of the Serdobsk fast breeder reactor was rubble arranged around a shallow hole in the ground. From a hover two hundred feet above the plant it was obvious that no one had survived the blast. Jake Grafton lay on his belly with his helmeted head poking out the open helicopter door. Seventy-five feet below him the radioactivity sensor was inscribing little circles in the air. Beside him people were taking turns snapping cameras.
Jake felt a hand pulling him. It was Collins. They put their helmets together and Collins shouted, “We can’t stay here more than a couple minutes. It’s hotter than holy hell down there.”