"High-G maneuvers — like the early days in Afghanistan," he murmured. "The American made him follow a high-G turn the Mil-24 just can't make, the rotor struck the tail boom — seen it happen before in the mountains — he forgot it. He cut off his own arse, shredded the rotors, comrade General."
"Is, is—?"
"Burst into flames when it crashed, comrade General. The American fined them, sir!" It was an outraged wail.
Rodin tugged off his headset and threw it aside. He raged at Serov, as if in pain: "Kill the American! I don't care how, just do it now! Understand? Do it now!"
Flames spurted and died quickly fifty feet below and a hundred yards away. The gunship was incinerated, out of the game. His body was wracked with the pitch of tension the maneuvers had effected.
Now, carefully… Their low-light TVs and thermal imaging and infrared were all blind; flaring into indistinctness because of the fire on the crashed gunship. That had been a bonus. He could not have planned the lurch of the stricken Hind into a radio mast, then a radar dish, its tail broken but still flailing like that of a maddened insect, its rotors churning the icy ground — its fuel tanks erupting into a volcano.
Quick, then. He had drawn in the other three, they had converged like an audience acquired by a juggler, wondering what sleight of hand was in progress. He had twisted and turned and lifted and dropped the agile little Mil more and more puzzlingly, more and more hypnotically. And always over that bare, dark space of sloping ground where the Hind would think it safe to kill. Until it had begun to attempt to match his movements, to get behind or above or alongside for long enough to ensure a kill. Following him, turning tighter and tighter. He'd seen it happen on guerrilla film smuggled out of Afghanistan by the CIA. Finally, the pressure on the rotors from the created G-forces was sufficient to slap the rotor tip down onto the tail boom like a knife of dramatic sharpness slicing through flesh. A stagger in the air, a maddened, dervish whirling, then the crash and the explosion…
… seconds ago already. He edged the Mil-2 through and beyond a sprouting clump of subsidiary radar dishes. Firelight flickered and washed over them, threw his shadow.
Tracer roared and flashed past the cockpit, the fuselage of the Mil jumped and bucked, struck by cannon fire. He lowered the helicopter even closer to the slightly undulating ground, his airspeed minimal, his body twitching and shifting in his seat as if he were trying to maneuver only his physical form through the jungle of cables and pylons and dishes that confronted him. He attempted to steady the MiL, tense against a renewed burst of firing. Changed course once, again, again, as he waited for the damage to the Mil to become apparent, even deadly. Instinct compelled him to dodge ^d evade even as his mind explored his body, the cockpit, his sense of the main cabin. Something was wrong with the MiL; his shadow had been spotted, one of the gunships had loosed off cannon rounds more in desperation than certainty, but something was wrong with the Mil — the sensation of tight bonds becoming looser, the sense of a car's brakes becoming spongy, its steering soft, unresponsive. He could feel it in his hands, in — in his feet!
The rudders were slow in responding, the helicopter had acquired a determination, growing every second, to drift to port. He touched at the rudders with his feet. The Mil was drunk, hard to keep on its heading or to maneuver.
He emerged from the tracking network's forest almost at once. The passive radar warning had been improved on this helicopter; none of the gunships behind him had radar locked on. For the moment they'd lost him, just as he had hoped.
The Mil yawed, almost zigzagging as he struggled to bring it back onto its heading, southeast toward the road and the river that marked the boundary of Baikonur. Darkness, space, lack of habitation, he'd seen it on the moving map and decided to lose himself and the pursuit there, then—
But the lack of plan no longer mattered. He wrestled with the increasingly drunken helicopter, his injured hand on fire, the veins standing out on his wrists, his muscles in arms and now legs aching like overstretched—
No radar pickup anywhere. They were still blind. Tyuratam glowed away to starboard, but darkness pressed on him. Undulating ground, gritty sand flying in the downwash of the rotors. Stars overhead — he could see them now. He groaned aloud as it took whole seconds to swing the blunt nose of the helicopter back to face the heading he demanded of it. Southeast. He was flying much too slowly, much too drunkenly. If the remaining three gunships in the Baikonur zveno acted in concert, if Rodin directed them coldly rather than in rage, they'd find him before he got ten more miles.
Radio noise… silence, apart from the hiss of ether escaping like a gas. They'd switched to a secure frequency. He had lost them, just as they had lost him. The radio silence intensified in his head, as he struggled to maintain his heading against another lurch of the Mil to starboard. The lights of Tyuratam stayed directly ahead for whole seconds before they slid back to starboard.
"We can't get another ten miles in this machine," he finally announced. "It's shot, Priabin. Understand? It's over. Finished."
15: The Limits of the Cage
It seemed the icy wind blew the fleeting sunlight like frozen scraps across the tarmac of Geneva's Cointrin Airport toward the rostrum and the band and the guard of honor and the dignitaries and Air Force One. It glanced from the airport buildings in splinters of brightness that hurt Calvin's tired, stinging eyes. The cards on which his address was printed in large, black handwriting appeared about to be plucked away by the wind. His hands were already almost numb with cold.
The anthem completed, he heard the silence that seemed to stretch away on every side until the wind filled it. He glanced down once more at his speech, then his eyes roamed almost without focus or purpose across the scene; an undirected camera. Cameras—
He alerted himself, adjusting his features, to the battery of long-lensed cameras and the bobbing, shoulder-resting TV and film cameras. The scene closed in as the clouds once more masked the sun and the surrounding mountains seemed to retreat; even the snow on their flanks appeared gray.
He began speaking. Below and to one side, Remsburg, the secretary of state, Danielle, and Giordello, the chief negotiator, were arranged like figures in a tableau. In front of him, the guard of honor, the military band, the cameras; the rest of the world. He coaxed depth, vigor, honesty into his voice, adding the ingredients like a careful but dishonest chef, while fragments of his situation spun like slow coins in his memory and imagination. The slowing down of the U.S. laser program, Talon Gold, and the other projects, because of cost and by his orders… the frantic race they would now be in to recover the lost years… his country's inability to match the Soviets for at least five years, so DARPA claimed… the contumely that would haunt him to the end of his life and beyond once the existence of the Soviet weapon became known, as it must… the terrible, helpless clarity with which he saw the whole awful race to destruction beginning once more. During the last strains of the anthem, his heart had been beating sullenly under his hand as he saluted.
"… to the people of the whole world, I say this: We are here to make an end of the beginning. This is a time of hope — as an illustrious predecessor of mine once said, we have nothing to fear but fear itself. I ask all of you to remember that. Fear is an old coat we can, thankfully and by the blessing of God, throw away." The wind seemed to catch the emphasis in those words and fling it away, so that he hardly caught the sound of his own voice. Nervously, he glanced down at his wife, who smiled. Remsburg was watching him keenly, Giordello's dark features displayed only rigid formality as he stared ahead. Then Danielle, sensing that his thoughts were wavering, urged him on with the address with a quick, decisive nod of her head.