He looked up at the night. The moon had gone. Five in the morning, local time. His westward flight extended the night, as if he carried darkness with him like a cloak, which would disappear a hundred miles short, almost an hour before he reached the Turkish border. As soon as they saw him — and he knew they would — he would scream Mayday on the broadest wave band; scream the whole story.
Gant shook his head.
He had begun to believe in his survival. He did not want to envisage daylight. He rubbed his eyes. Navigating by compass and the stars — and the school atlas — tired him, the noise of the Antonov was a constant assault, but those things did not matter. They were elements of surviving, and familiar. He could cope. Distance from Baikonur was like a constant, measured flow of adrenaline.
In every direction, emptiness undulatingly stretched away from him. The uninhabited northern part of the Kara Kum Desert. Somewhere, a rock split, the noise like gunfire, startling him. The shock had no reverberation. He was calm. The whole ballgame now, that was what he wanted. The videotape cassette delivered; the means of winning. It meant he had to survive, cross the frontier. It was him now, against everyone and everything, and the idea did not unnerve him. Not yet.
The wing tanks should be almost full by now.
"One half-orbit distance achieved, Kutuzov "
"Roger, control. Forty-five minutes since satellite release. Countdown to PAM ignition at — fifteen seconds and mark. Over."
"Roger, Kutuzov. Fifteen seconds and counting."
Rodin was smiling. It was as if there were two smiles on his lips at the same moment. The small one at the fiction of referring to the laser weapon as a satellite — in the event of transmission interception and decoding — and the larger satisfaction of the countdown, like that of a cat with cream on its whiskers. Ten seconds were all that remained until the payload assist modules small solid-propellant motors automatically fired to lift the laser battle station toward its thousand-mile-high orbit over the Pole.
Kutuzov was in a two-hundred-mile-high orbit, circling the earth every ninety minutes. Its cargo doors had opened an hour and a half before, the shuttle had maneuvered into position, the laser weapon on its motors had been set spinning in the hold, then unlocked to drift away from the shuttle. Now, half an orbit later, its motors were about to fire. Five seconds.
Priabin stood at the back of the narrow command room like a newspaper reporter allowed to observe events without playing any part in them.
Everything had gone smoothly, there had been no hitches. Rodin was winning his race with Gant and with his own country. To watch him was like being told that one's calm, elderly neighbor was a dangerous madman, then becoming alert for signs of disorder, irrationality, even violence. But there was nothing. The general was blithe, tense at moments, jocular, expansive, silent in turn. There were no signs of madness, simply the sense that this room and the vast control room below its windows were his entire world. Institution. They were all mad here. And unstoppable. He knew that with only too great a certainty. He was there because it amused Rodin to have him witness his own helplessness. Watching history unfold, mm, Priabin? he had snapped at him at one moment, when the cargo doors of the shuttle opened and the camera displayed the action on a dozen screens at once. A rare privilege, he had added, for a mere policeman. Laughter in the crowded, orderly room.
They had no thought of consequences, only of authority. The demonstration of their power. Outside this institution of theirs, with its intoxicating illusion of omnipotence, there existed only the Politburo. No other world, no populations, no enemy country, no other superpower. They were engaged in a struggle with their political masters — soon their servants? Priabin nodded in gloomy confirmation. If they didn't cause a war, they'd win what they wanted. The institution would control everything.
The madhouse. The efficient, normal-seeming, clubby madhouse.
Ignition of the PAM's motors. Priabin winced and waited for the voice of the shuttle's commander to confirm motor ignition. He could clearly envisage the laser weapon flashing up into the darker darkness, away from the earth. Rodin was as remote as Kutuzov and the now moving Lightning weapon.
T plus ten seconds.
"Baikonur, this is Kutuzov."
"Go ahead, Kutuzov
The voices were uttering feed lines to arouse the pleasure of this room's inhabitants. He glanced at a screen beside him.
Before the shuttle commander could reply, he heard someone say in a surprised, even pained voice: "Comrade General, we're not getting a confirm signal from the PAM."
Then the Kutuzov voice: "Baikonur, PAM ignition nonfunctional. Repeat, we do not have PAM burn."
Rodin's cry broke in the room, startling men who, a moment earlier, had been somnolent with anticipated pleasure.
"What has happened? Answer me. What's wrong, Kutuzov— what has gone wrong?" It shook Priabin to attention. On the screen beside him, the fiber-optic map showed the twin wiggles, red and white, of the two shuttles' orbits, separated by half the world. On a second screen, the open cargo doors of the Kutuzov and the empty cargo bay.
No ignition, then—
No ignition!
"Baikonur, this is Kutuzov. We're showing a nonignition on the PAM's motors."
"Backup!" Rodin cried.
"Backup systems show nonignition, sir."
"Manual emergency trigger!"
"No response from the PAM motors, sir."
There was a tight, stifling silence in the room, the only chatter from machines, the humming and clicking of electrics.
"Sir, telemetry reports tracking the — satellite." The officer remembered the fiction. "It hasn't left orbit, sir. It's not moving."
Priabin glanced toward a clock on the wall. Six forty-five. Recognition of time made him think of Gant. Two and a half hours or more since he had taken off, incinerating Serov and a gunship crew to enable him to do so. Perhaps he was halfway, or less, to Turkey. Time, time… delay.
"Not moving?" It was a challenge rather than a question.
"Telemetry confirms the weapon is stationary in its original orbit."
"Where it cannot be targeted and fired!" Rodin stormed.
Time…
Had the solid-fuel motors on the weapon fired, there would have been a maximum of two hours before the battle station reached its final altitude and been ready to fire at the American shuttle. Time-" how much time now? A systems failure in the ignition of the PAM had elongated time like elastic, stretching it in—
Gant's favor?
No, Gant would be stopped at the border. Daylight would be the brick wall with which he would collide and die.
Priabin found himself staring across the room at Rodin, who was glaring in his direction; as if he were the jinx who had caused this ill-luck. But the time was unusable. He was Rodin's prisoner, he reminded himself, now aware of the lounging guard — a new one, the other having been relieved an hour before.
Rodin was huddled with his senior officers. Voices debated, urged, and rejected. Radio channels crackled, the voices of mission control and the shuttle waited. Priabin edged toward the windows. Looking down, he saw the huge map; colors flared, lights winked and moved. The combined forces of two military districts were being mobilized, marshaled into the shape of a trap. A team hand-picked by Rodin controlled, by proxy, hundreds of aircraft and helicopters, thousands of men. He turned away from the depressing vision it formed. He realized that all the delay to the firing of the laser weapon would do would be to prevent Rodin from destroying the Atlantis before Gant died. Nothing had changed.