And Rodin seemed to realize it, too. His face was still angry, and filled with cold authority. But his eyes and mouth were calm. His hands unclenched. A temporary setback; revert to original timetable. Gant, then the shuttle.
"Kutuzov, this is Rodin," Priabin heard him say. "I want a linkup with the — satellite during your present orbit of the earth, and an EVA to inspect and repair the system's failure. Acknowledge.
A man floating in space, repairing the malfunctioning motors. A matter of hours, no more. Rodin's features gleamed with satisfaction when the shuttle commander acknowledged. He put down the microphone and slapped his hands together loudly, like a noise to frighten children engaged in a party game in the dark.
"Gentlemen, we have work to do," he cried. "As tight a schedule ^ possible — and no more delays." He glanced again in Priabin's direction, then beckoned him. "Come, Colonel, you can give us your expert opinion on the preparations we're making for Major Gant "
18: Acts of Desperation
A Sukhoi fighter, too eager, flashed across the nose of the Antonov, the sun glistening on its silver fuselage. Then it was gone. Gant craned to follow its path, and saw it winking like a signal lamp as it banked then began to climb out of the sand brown of the country below into the pale morning sky.
And others…
Full daylight. Eight o'clock, and they had found him. The radio could not be retuned to their Tac channels, and the radar was too rudimentary to show more than a smudged impression of the hostile landscape ahead. After crossing the Caspian and the flat marshes and plain to the west of it, he had sneaked through the mountains like a thief, for hours it seemed. Sliding around and over and through, hugging the contours of the country as the night faded into gray, then blue. Temperature mounting, the past hours becoming no more than a mocking illusion of safety and cleverness, tension holding him like a straitjacket. Now morning and the aircraft.
He flung the lumbering, though small, Antonov severely to port, shocked at the leap of a mountain into the center of the cockpit windshield. He wrenched on the steering handles of the column, throwing the crop sprayer away from the mountain's snow-streaked flank. At once, he was straining to relocate the Sukhoi, the Fencer variable-geometry fighter. He had glimpsed the pilot's helmet and the aircraft's eagerness. He ignored the other occupant of the cockpit, the weapons officer. It was the pilot's skill that would kill him-
As the fighter flipped into a looping turn and came back toward him, he saw the flare of a missile igniting. He pulled up the Antonov's nose as if reining in a wild horse. Sky swung crazily across the windshield, the tail of the aircraft seemed as if tearing free of thick mud; then the thin, steamlike trail from the missile passed away beneath him. The peaks of the mountains around him gleamed with sunlight. The Sukhoi rushed below him and flicked belly outward around an outcrop of brown, snow-marked rock. And was a mile away before it began to turn.
The primitive radar, which only scanned forward, showed him no signs of other aircraft. But he knew that they were only minutes away at best. Aircraft and gunships. Slower and more maneuverable than the Sukhoi.
The border was less than fifty, less than forty miles away now. He had come nearly nine hundred miles in darkness and safety at zero feet and with mounting excitement. And now it was over. He dipped into the uneasy safety of the mountains once more.
The Sukhoi turned lazily and looked for him again. A silver signal at the far end of a tunnellike valley, rushing closer Enlarging in his mirror. Hopeless—
Hie retinal image of the detonating missile was like a distant omen. The Fencer grew like a rushing silver fish in his mirror, attacking along the valley. It was time, the moment for Mayday — and even as he thought it, it was already too late. Cannon fire from the fighter flashed alongside and past the cockpit, shook and flung dust and snow from the nearest hill flank. Then the Antonov rocked in the shock wave of the Fencer's passage. Two tinted face masks were turned in his direction — it was as if he could see boyish grins behind them — and then the aircraft lifted sharply up and away to begin its turn. The Antonov, as if in surrender, entered a gap of clear air above mountain pasture the hill slopes falling sharply away on every side. Snow-covered grassland, dotted huts, a thin trail of smoke climbing into the morning air. The detail emphasized the lumbering, frail slowness of the crop sprayer. Gant swallowed and wiped the perspiration from the edge of the old leather flying helmet. The Fencer began falling like a meteorite toward him.
Weapon load — he'd glimpsed the underwing pylons on the starboard side, which included medium-range air-to-air missiles and the AA-8 snapshoot missiles designed especially for dogfights. And a multibarrel gun beneath the belly. As the Fencer had turned, he had seen the port wing and the bulk of two 57mm rocket launchers.
It swooped down behind him. The radar screen began filling with shapes. Six, seven—
Mayday.
The Fencer loomed—
Underwing flame. He had to climb, to broadcast his Mayday cry, his code ID, Winter—
The Antonov rocked, bucked, tried to free itself of his grip on the column. His wrists bulged with muscle and vein. Smoke, he smelled smoke — but the Antonov turned as he wished as the Fencer flashed over him with a cold shadow.
Gant knew the Fencers armaments, the speed, climb rate, turning circle, time-to-return to an attack — and the old Antonov was a weaponless biplane, a survivor from an age before modern dogfights.
The Sukhoi was now swinging down behind him in the mirror, where smoke was streaming from the aft section of his plane. He felt chilled as he identified the location of the fire, and the rudder and the column felt weak and distant under his hands and feet.
The fighter sped past and above and swung into a scissors maneuver. The pilot's reinforcements would be closing. Gant was supposed to follow — he was already heaving the column into a break that would confirm he was obeying the pattern of the maneuver—
Smoke. Controls OK, but limited life.
It was like a crazy, clever movie, past versus present or future. The Fencers patience was wearing thin as he curved back to complete the second figure of the scissors maneuver. He overshot because it was much slower than in training, but the boy in the Sukhoi had already begun to adjust.
As the smoke crept in, Gant knew his cockpit time was running out. The main cabin would be filled with smoke now, the airplane was becoming leaden and dull, and the mountainsides ahead of him offered a shelter he could not reach. Smoke trailed out from the tail-plane like a signal, answered by thin trails of smoke from hut chimneys on the ground. The thirty-seven miles to the border were impossible.
The Fencer came down like a saber.
There is a stalemate in the scissors…
… so said the manual. The boy in the Sukhoi understood the maneuver. His forward airspeed had been reduced, he was crawling through the air. The winner will be the fighter with the slowest}of' ward velocity…
The Antonov was the slower in any race, but it was unarmed-" — and hit.
He was in clean air.
Ground. Still distant.
Instruments?
He would have to climb, and pulled back the column without expectation. The nose of the old biplane nuzzled into the sky. Only the Mayday signal was left to Gant, however much he resented the fact. The radio signal had to reach across the Turkish border like the scattering from a hand sowing grain. There was only that — and survival.