Priabin had drawn back, stunned by noise and the bullets. Gant yelled into his microphone.
"Get back inside. That's enough — enough!"
Priabin looked toward the cockpit with the sudden movement of a startled deer. His headphones and their lead had been forgotten; Gant's voice had boomed in his head. He raised his arms in acknowledgment and scuttled back beneath the MiL's shadow. Television screen. The helicopter bucked in the wind's violence and the videotape recorded the corrugations of the roof for six seconds until he juggled the image of the shuttle and the laser weapon back onto the screen. Soldiers, too, and gesticulating ants. He could not prevent the surge of success catching at his breathing again, making his whole frame weak.
A flea jumped; a giant flea — up over the lip of the roof and down the slope toward him; seconds to weigh, decide, obey the voice that was crying in Gant's headset — kill them, kill them.
It happened in the slowest of motion. He glanced at the scene through the skylight, the frozen arm of die crane, the dangling ant-eater of the battle station, the shuttle's gaping maw — and the movement of the gunship seemed just as frozen and recorded. Sense of the tilted MiL, the noise of the cabin door banging shut, the movements of his hands like those of an old man — then his Mil jumping away as if to continue some rapid abseil. The gunship bore down and over him, and he sensed the machine he flew falling backward, then dodging like a small, agile opponent as the cannon beneath the gunship's nose opened fire. Tracer rounds hurt Gant's eyes by their proximity.
"Gant!" Priabin yelled, then cut off his voice, realizing his helplessness.
The Mil-2 rose up the opposite corrugated cliff, as if backing away from the belly of the gunship. He hopped the helicopter over the peak of the roof, flinging it like a stone away from the assembly building and up into the darkness. The gunship turned like an angry adult toward a disobedient child, the cannon still firing in short, awful bursts of tracer.
He turned on the radar. There was no point, no purpose in concealment; he needed to see them, even as his peripheral vision glimpsed winking navigation lights less than a quarter of a mile off to starboard.
Never this close, never this close before. Obsolete fighter aircraft tactics and maneuvers gleamed like false lights in his mind. Useless to him.
'Transmission!" he yelled. "Do they acknowledge in Aral'sk?"
"Yes — yes!" Priabin shouted in his ears after a silence that was filled with the noise of the Mil and the woman's moaning. 'They want to know what it is." Priabin seemed almost amused, a feverish excitement making his voice high and boyish.-
'Tell them to retransmit." Gant yelled, his eyes flicking from the scene beyond the Plexiglas to the radar screen. Three of them now, including the gunship still firing its gleaming bursts of tracer, unstitching the darkness. Gant was caught in a wash of light for a moment as he drove downward and beneath a great sagging loop of cable. Unnerve, unnerve, he told himself, his hands twitchy with anticipation, his body bathed in sweat. 'Tell them to retransmit now." It was as if he projected his own immediate fear as far as the Aral'sk KGB office. "Now!"
In his mirrors, the heavy Hind-D, like the one he had flown into Baikonur, hopped over the power fines and came on. Gant estimated distances. The rocket pod beneath one of the Hind's stubby wings bloomed orange. Voices yelled and countered in his headset.
He was half a mile from the main assembly building, heading east. He banked savagely, the whole area of his mirrors seeming to be blinded by the orange glow from the Hind's port wing. Capable of penetrating eight inches of armor, thirty-two rockets to each pod, four pods on this gunship. One hundred and twenty-eight chances to kill. The first burst passed alongside his flank as the helicopter lay on its side in the air for an instant. Range, twelve hundred meters— he was almost out of range. The smaller Mil could, just, out-maneuver the Hinds at low speed. He flung the helicopter toward a long, low warehouse. Shut up, he yelled silently as the woman cried out in pain and terror in the cabin behind him. The Hind possessed Poor low-speed handling qualities. But there were four of them now, the second closest perhaps less than a mile away, the others converging as orders were screamed and reiterated over the radio, ^ant hurled and twisted the Mil through the low canyons of the warehouse complex.
M… lost them," he heard in his headset.
' What?" he shouted back. The engines of the helicopter whined and screamed as he turned violently. He felt the whole airframe judder. The MiL's shadow loomed like a hunchback on the wall of a building, light spilled from an open door. The mouth of a furnace glowed. Industrial support unit. He was still heading east, his undercarriage skimming the concrete, his twists and turns as tight and violent as he could make them. The woman must be in agony at the assault of G-forces.
"Lost them. Gone dead," Priabin shouted. The mirrors were clear for an instant, as if he were alone.
"Dead?"
"Just cut off — middle of conversation. About to transmit on to Baku, for the satellite."
"Forget them. They won't be able to help."
"— happened?" was all he heard in reply.
"They're dead — you said it yourself."
The single videotape was all the evidence that existed. A Hind turned into view at the far end of a long corridor formed by the walls of two buildings. Smoke, sparks flaring from beside the cockpit, another welding job or a small electrical furnace — sparks, flash from the eager Hind astern. Rockets.
He jumped the Mil-2 into the air like a startled cat. It jerked rather than flowed upward, and the rockets passed like a firework shower beneath the helicopter's belly. Explosion as they diverged, one striking the wall of the building, penetrating the corrugated iron, another exploding on impact. The remaining rockets raced on, their flame suddenly dying out.
He rolled the helicopter in a banked turn over the roof of the building and slipped into the darkness beyond it. He increased speed.
The four gunships were controlled, but they had lost formation, purpose had become almost hysterical. They would leave gaps, blind spots; Serov insisted on retaining command of the helicopters. It was a weakness, it had to be exploited. Serov was relying on radar, visual sightings, positional reports all reaching him in a constant stream, but there were whole seconds that passed between information, decision, response. Chinks, tiny gaps of time — he had to slip through one of them.
The Hind was back in his mirrors, lumbering until it reached open darkness and then bearing down with frightening speed. If he had only been armed, he could have taken it easily. Outmaneuvered it, gotten behind it or above or beneath and ripped it open with rocket and cannon fire.
The Hind seemed to have discovered patience. It was now merely stalking him. Gant increased his airspeed, and the pilot in the Hind matched it but made no move to overtake him. Gant rose to a couple of hundred feet, as if declaring a surrender. He was visible now. He saw the other gunships on his radar, all close, too close, and dropped the Mil savagely down in the steepest descent possible. Somehow, now that they had reassumed a pattern and a definite purpose, he had to rid himself of one of them. Create a gap of time and air through which to escape.
"… she's dead!" he heard Priabin cry out. It did not matter. Priabin's grief or lack of hope did not matter, just as the woman's death was irrelevant; no more than the distant announcement of an aircraft's departure. His sole interest lay in his own survival.
He could not shake off the Hind astern of him. A stream of positional fixes flowed from the copilot-gunner back to Serov, pinning him down, like a moth to a card. Darkness was unusable, hugging the ground was no longer an advantage. They had him, they were closing at almost maximum speed.