"Damn you, just do as you're told. You don't know shit about the ten seconds that follow what you're asked to do. You don't know anything. We need all the ammunition we can lay our hands on." Stop it. Wasted energy, he told himself. "You're the backup," he continued in a calmer, more official tone. "Just get the shots, OK?"
"OK." Silence, then the sliding back of the cabin's main window on the port side, directly behind him. The main observation window. Priabin must be leaning out, watching the assembly complex slide closer like a great fungus of light. Then he heard Priabin say: "Gant?" His voice seemed to hold a threat, but was without excitement.
"What?"
"I've just remembered how much I want to kill you."
Gant's wrists jumped with reaction, his body shivered.
"I don't need it, Priabin. Not here and now. Just do the job."
Then he attended to the call signs trickling through the ether. Headings, ground speeds, reports, requests. Headings… They were moving back, closing on mission control, he presumed, from where the hunt was being coordinated. A point only two miles or so behind him. He was the fly in the center of the web. The closest helicopter, by his guess, was little more than five minutes from him, coming in from the northwest.
Haifa mile. Less than a minute. He could see the main assembly building quite distinctly, ahead of him. Scattered trucks, the locomotives that would tow the shuttle out to the pad, soldiers gathered like ants around their parked vehicles. It all seemed enlarged, as if viewed through a telescope of exposed nerves. One quarter of a mile. He flicked off the lamp in the Mil s belly because now it drew attention, conspicuous in so much light. He banked the small helicopter lazily and hung tilted sideways in the hard-lit evening, approaching the vast building that rose like a line of cliffs. He ascended gradually, innocently, into the air until he could see beyond its vast corrugated roof to where Baikonur vanished into the dark.
He glanced at soldiers staring up at him disinterestedly; a glimpse of the yellow locomotives, the grouped trucks, a sense of the renewed wind as it banged at the fuselage. Then as he leveled, he could see only the huge, sloping roof beneath and around him. Target. He drifted the Mil slowly, very slowly, along the gully that ran between the two sloping cliff faces of corrugated sheets. Looking for the skylight he needed.
The channel between the two slopes of corrugated iron seemed endless, so slowly was the Mil moving forward. Noise beat back like blinding sunlight from the roof, deafening him, making it almost impossible to hear Priabin's shouts in the headset. His eyes scanned the length of the roof on either side, studied the mirrors, looked ahead, again and again. As if he expected the helicopters to jump into sight like giant fleas.
Tension beat like quick, successive waves of a storm; his ears throbbed. Too slow, too slow—
Yet he spoke calmly to Priabin, enunciating clearly; the volume a yell, the tone one of encouragement. "You can see it?" Twelve, he counted. Twelve of the skylights on either side already passed. How many? "Where will it be? Remember it."
Priabin was counting, too, as he leaned out of the cabin window. But he had to lean back inside each time he spoke and shout above the rotor noise, holding his microphone against his lips.
"Shuttle — moved to middle — building… laser weapon — cargo hold. Middle, middle of the building — eighteen, eighteen windows. "
Gant strained to hear, and to believe. It had to be like an X ray, and as accurate. He had to be above the right skylight, he had to be able to see the shuttle and its cargo hold on the tiny TV screen in front of him. To point the camera lenses downward, hold steady, let the videotape soak up the images below like litmus paper — all the while juggling the Mil in the wind that howled down the channel between the two slopes of iron.
"OK, OK," he replied. "One eight, eighteen."
Fourteen, fifteen — close now. The clock ticked in his head as precisely as ever. The closest gunship was less than three minutes away.
He couldn't use the IR sensors on board. Too much icy metal directly around and beneath, too vast a space within. It had to be guesswork, relying on what Priabin had already described of his last visit to the assembly building — rubbernecking like a tourist — and his estimation of the present position of the shuttle and its by-now adjacent or even loaded cargo. He had to be able to see. seventeen, the helicopter seemed to hang like a model in a wind tunnel; undulating, disturbed, but not flying. Seventeen… eighteen — eighteen.
He held the Mil-2 at an angle that was difficult to maintain, its whole fuselage tilted away from the roof's slope. The skylight was blacked out, as he had expected.
"Eighteen!" he yelled.
"Eighteen!" Priabin cried back at him, his voice almost lost in the noise and the wind.
"Are you ready?" Gant estimated the skylight was directly beneath one of the wheels of the tricycle undercarriage. Priabin had to check.
"Yes!"
" Camera?"
"Check!"
* Go!"
He strained his hearing but caught no sense of Priabin's boots clatter onto the corrugated iron when he dropped. Then he saw a bent, hunched, almost reclining figure just ahead of the MiL's nose; waving. Overcoat flying, boots losing purchase, camera straining at its straps, face white with fear and tension. He was frantically directing the nose of the helicopter away. Gant shunted delicately in the wind, with a vast expense of energy and adrenaline. He waited, arms and shoulders crying out, until Priabin stopped waving; raised his thumbs. He was so close Gant would have seen the gesture clearly without the aid of the lamps splash of light, which he'd switched on once more. Now—
He dropped the MiL's starboard wheel. He heard the noise, felt the damage, the restraint of the skylight's remains as he tugged the undercarriage clear and righted the helicopter; returning it to its abseiling posture against the slope of the roof..
TV screen. Priabin was waving wildly like an excited child. TV screen. He studied the viewfinder's image. The crater of twisted metal, broken wood, splinters of glass, shards of wooden blackout.
Focus.
There—
— what he had come for. There.
He caught his breath. On the tiny television screen the view-finder's black-and-white image wobbled, blurred, and then re-focused. The maw of the shuttle's cargo bay gaped, the long-nosed metal anteater of the laser weapon hung over it, suspended from a crane. Caught in the act.
Gant could see Priabin at the farther edge of the skylight he had broken with the undercarriage, his hands waving and pointing, the video camera clutched against his chest — then operating. The light from the MiL's lamp splashed into the skylight. Wait, wait—
He switched on the videotape, holding the image firmly, with vast effort, his muscles aching with the strain of holding the Mil against the buffeting wind. The tape began running; evidence, proof — he'd done it, he had it all.
Then the alarm, even as he cautioned himself once more. Wait—
— the first shooting, from inside the assembly building. Andike figures staring, running, posed to attack or panic. Glass still showering down, shards of wood and buckled metal rattling and bouncing on the flanks of the shuttle, smaller than its target, Atlantis. Gant's thoughts raced, uncontrolled. Hie alarm would be reaching the closing gunships: shock, response, orders, further concerted response. pull speed, heading certain — kill, kill, kill… now the closest Mil Was half a minute away from the corrugated roof. The knifelike channel was like a cul-de-sac, trapping him. The videotape slid softly, J^th aching slowness, gathering the images that were required. Bullets struck the belly of the MiL, whining away, their high noise audible in the roar of the rotors. In their panic they risked the Mil "eing damaged and crashing through the roof, onto the shuttle.