Toad went trotting off, a silver figure laboring through the heat waves rising from the concrete.
Time passed. Jake Grafton stared at the sky.
There was a jet up there. He could see the contrail. There it was, a silver gleam coming out from behind that cloud.
The mirror was in his pocket. Inside the hot suit.
Well, there was no other way. He gingerly unzipped the suit enough to admit his hand, reached inside and snagged the mirror. Then he zipped the suit closed.
The mirror was rectangular, about two inches by four inches, with a hole in the middle. Jake looked above him for the jet, then raised the mirror and tried to get the refracted spot of sunlight to come into the crosshair. Then he realized that a cloud had drifted between him and the sun. He put the mirror down and studied the clouds.
A few minutes.
“Those people were murdered.”
Jack Yocke was beside him.
“Everyone southeast of Serdobsk was murdered,” Jake Grafton said. “Those folks in there just happened to be shot.”
“Why?”
Jake flipped a hand at the empty transporters.
“Somebody stole some missiles?”
“Looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“How are we going to get this helicopter started?”
“I don’t know that we can.”
Then the sun came out. And there was the jet, still high up there against the blue. Jake raised the mirror to his eye and moved it carefully to focus the light.
Yocke began to understand. “Is that Rita up there?”
“Maybe. I hope so.”
“Goddamn it, Grafton,” Yocke began. “Why didn’t—”
“We’ll get out of this or we won’t, Jack. That’s the whole story.” He was working the mirror. The sunspot was right on the crosshair. “Those people in there look like they are at peace.”
“That’s a peace I’m not ready for yet.”
“They probably weren’t ready either, but it came regardless. The one thing I can promise you — this is going to be one of the most peaceful spots on this planet for a couple hundred thousand years.” Jake removed the mirror from his eye and turned to face the reporter. “The peace that death brings is all any of us can count on.”
Yocke was watching the jet high in the sky above. “I think maybe she saw you,” he said.
One of the transporters rumbled into life. With diesel smoke pouring from the exhaust pipe, it slowly rolled toward the helicopter. “There’s a set of jumper cables in it,” Toad told Jake when he got down from the cab, “but no tools. The fucking Russians stole ’em or never put them in.”
“Try to hook the cables up and get that power cart started. Rita’s coming but we may still need this chopper.”
The jet was a three-holer, a Tupolev 154 with Aeroflot markings, a Russian ripoff of the Boeing 727 design. It wasn’t until it turned off the runway that Jake realized there was no hot gas coming from the center engine exhaust.
Rita taxied up and gestured to him from the cockpit.
“Everyone, we’re taking the jet,” Jake roared. “Help Captain Collins with his gear. Then get on the back of the transporter. Toad, when everyone’s on it, back that thing up to the door of the jet.”
Two U.S. marines opened the door for them and they scrambled aboard. Toad came in last. “Do we need to move the transporter?”
Rita was standing there. “No,” she told him. “I’ll back us out with thrust reversers. Close the door and let’s go.”
They took off the hot suits and threw them into the back of the passenger cabin. Jake made his way to the cockpit and dropped into the copilot’s seat. “You got an engine out?”
“Yessir. It was overheating. Maybe a bad thermocouple, but I don’t know. We got a heck of a takeoff roll without it, but I think we can make it.”
“How much runway we got?”
“About nine thousand feet. We’re light, nowhere near max gross weight. We’ll make it if the tires don’t blow. There’s no tread left and I could see cord in a couple places.”
Jake Grafton looked down the runway at the trees beyond. Relatively flat terrain, thank the Lord! “Well, I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
Toad stuck his head in. “Rita, you get more beautiful every time I see you.”
She flashed him a wide grin.
“Did you see the mirror okay?” Jake asked.
“Yessir. I had a little trouble finding this place. Most of the Russian nav aids don’t work. I circled for about a half hour and had about decided you were going out on the chopper.” She was all business, relating it crisply, a matter of fact just to be reported.
“There’s the gear handle and the flaps.” She touched each lever. “We’ll begin our takeoff roll with the flaps up so we’ll accelerate a little faster. I’ll call for takeoff flaps at about a hundred eighty kilometers per hour — the airspeed is calculated in clicks so don’t get excited. You put them down to the first detent, takeoff. When we’re airborne I’ll call for the gear, then the flaps.”
“Let’s do it.”
She taxied to the very end of the runway and held the brakes while she ran her two good engines up to full power. Then she released the brakes.
The jet accelerated slowly. Jake could hear the thumping as the wheels passed over the expansion joints.
Rita Moravia made no attempt to rotate, merely sat monitoring the engine instruments and the airspeed indicator between glances at the end of the runway, which they were stampeding toward at an ever increasing pace.
“Flaps,” she called.
Jake moved the handle to takeoff. The indicator moved. “They’re coming!”
The airspeed needle kept rising, but oh so slowly. The end of the runway came closer, closer.
Jake was reaching for the control wheel to rotate the plane when Rita eased it back and the nose came off, then the main wheels just as the end of the runway flashed by.
“Gear up,” she called, and Jake Grafton raised the handle.
When the gear was fully retracted the plane accelerated better. Still Rita kept the nose down and let the airspeed increase. “Flaps up,” she said at last, and Jake moved the handle.
When they were climbing through three thousand meters — the altimeter was calibrated in meters — Rita told Jake, “This is the biggest plane I’ve flown. Handles better than I thought it would.”
17
When the airliner was level at cruising altitude, Captain Collins checked everyone for radiation. Jake had to part with his shirt. Colonel Rheinhart lost his trousers. “As soon as we get to Moscow,” Collins told them, “I want each of you to take a long shower. Wash your hair thoroughly. The stuff you want to get rid of is radioactive dust and dirt. Stay in the shower as long as you can stand it and don’t come out until you’re as clean as a new penny.”
When Jake had settled into a seat, Yocke came over and sat beside him. “Where’d you guys get this airliner?”
“Aeroflot.”
“Who’d you have to kill?”
“Nobody. Toad told them we wanted to charter an airliner and waved American money. He got this one full of gas for seventeen hundred dollars cash and two bottles of mediocre whiskey that he stole out of Spaso House on the Fourth of July. The Aeroflot man insisted a Russian pilot come along, but he came down with something and got off when Rita gave him a hundred. She flew it out of Sheremetyevo.”
“What about air traffic control?”
“One of the enlisted marines speaks tolerable Russian. He’s up in the cockpit with Rita now.”
Yocke shook his head. “It’s amazing what real money will buy.”
“Ain’t it, now.”
“Think that’s what happened to those missiles?”