"Well, my lady, have you any suggestions?" he asked good-humoredly. Katya wrinkled her nose as if she suspected patronage in his familiarity.
"I — well…"
"Come on," he chided, "just because I've been slow on the uptake and have only just realized you've got an idea. Out with it. Don't be coy."
"I'd like to look at the abandoned silo, and try to assess how much he'd prepared the hiding place."
"All right. Unless it's staked out or sealed off by GRU. Now— why?"
"If he'd had it in mind for weeks, then there might be another place somewhere else just like it. The GRU will be busy searching every other abandoned silo and underground complex."
"And get to him first? They've got the troops to do it."
Katya shook her head. "He's not stupid. He wouldn't use two hideouts that were exactly the same."
"So — where and what?"
"Hide — hideout," she replied mysteriously. Her pale cheeks were slightly flushed; self-congratulation and excitement. She was clever, intuitive, thorough. This was one of her little leaps in the dark. He smiled, encouraging her to explain.
"Well, it's flimsy, but—"
"Come on, Katya, forget the false modesty. You don't believe that for a moment."
"Bird-watching. Something he took up about a month or so ago, that's all. His latest hobby. Soon after he started using the transmitter to talk to the Americans, as far as we can tell."
"Yes? Go on." Priabin felt an unfocused excitement. It sounded like nonsense, but…
"He'd never shown an interest before that. There are maybe a dozen or more applications in his name for passes into prohibited areas."
"To assist his spying?"
She shook her head vigorously. "Not in the marshes, it wouldn't. Mostly that's where he wanted to go. The reason he gave was ornithology. Time and again — ornithology."
"Well? You searched his flat. Did you find his books, notes, and sketches?"
"Yes."
"Well?" He had caught her excitement like an infection. Rodin receded in his mind. His gesturing hands hurried her theory, her guesses.
She tugged her halo of tightly curled red hair back with her long fingers. "A couple of very ordinary books. I checked them out."
"He's a beginner, it's a new hobby."
"I realize that. The binoculars could have been a lot better. His notes are all right — but they don't improve. He's an enthusiast in everything he takes up — spends money on his hi-fi, on cinema history books. Here, he hasn't. But he went out a lot. I don't think he was learning anything."
"Sketches?"
"A few attempts."
"A cover, then?"
Katya shook her head. "Not quite — but not a real hobby. Not important enough to him to justify so many trips to the marshes."
"Then?"
"Then that's where I think he might be — sir," she added care-folly, looking away from his praising smile. He grabbed her by the upper arms and stood her up. He was laughing.
"Get on with it — and tell no one, understand?"
"You mean—?"
"I mean you could be right. Or you might be wrong. Find out."
"Yes. Now?"
He nodded. "Now. Take the dog with you, too — you know how he likes your company. Misha, come on, boy."
The dog, which had returned to the rug in front of the television, shook itself upright, its great tail banging from side to side. Katya grinned at it.
"Come on," she murmured coaxingly. "Thank you, sir."
"Find something, that's all I ask. And go carefully." His own impatient excitement possessed him once more. Tyuratam, the flat of a privileged young officer, a drugged man sprawled on silk sheets — he couldn't wait much longer. He'd talk to Rodin today, hit him hard, get at the truth.
Things were moving. The inertia of events swept him up. He ushered Katya from the office, his hand firmly on her shoulder. The dog waddled ahead of them down the corridor.
"Take a gun," he warned softly. "Just in case."
The sea shimmered in the afternoon sun. It was slightly cooler in the shade of the palms. Netting covered the two MiLs, reducing them to shapeless lumps without purpose or identity. They were parked, like automobiles, as close to the tree line as it was possible to land them. The tide had begun to retreat; its depth, as he knew because he had swum out there, would have been enough to submerge the helicopter on the sandbar. The flotsam of his impact had been drawn slowly, garlandlike, out to sea. The pelicans were diving for fish or floating like toys on the glaring water. The dead and maimed ones had been taken away by the retreating tide.
Gant wiped perspiration from his forehead. Mac lay near him, smoking, propped on one elbow like a vacationer reading a paperback. His posture suggested rest, but the nervous tension induced by waiting — four hours of it now — seemed electric in the heavy air. Kooper and Lane dozed or chatted desultorily, disguising the passage of time. Garcia was in the cockpit of Gant's MiL, taking his turn on radio watch; waiting for the signal that must arrive, and soon.
The Galaxy had made it to Karachi. To be precise, it had put down with the last dregs of its usable fuel at the military airfield west of the city, and only by declaring an in-flight emergency. Anders' voice, almost unrecognizable as it emerged from the decoding process of the quick reaction terminal attached to the satellite transceiver, had told them — wait, just wait.
Four hours of waiting. Reassurances had come through the communications system Gant would use over Afghanistan and inside Soviet airspace, but no decision; no permission. The mission was still like flotsam on this beach, its clock running away, racing ahead of them. He had to be in Peshawar by the evening, with a thousand miles of enemy airspace to cross to Baikonur. Six hours' flying, minimum. And he had to reach Baikonur that night.
Pakistani air force jets had made two passes overhead three hours earlier. Swept down at them, and passed seaward, into the haze, glinting like midday stars. Establishing the fact of a covert mission stranded inside their territorial border. Gant and Anders hoped the mounting nervousness would lead the government in Islamabad, however outraged, to agree to Anders' request in order to move on the unwelcome visitors, camped like gypsies on the beach.
No sign of people. The coastal strip was virtually uninhabited; barren, infertile, the palms simply a margin between sea and desert. A ship passing along the horizon and making a thin smudge of smoke hang there long after its silhouette had disappeared beyond the nearest headland. Otherwise, nothing. Gant looked at his watch once more; it was a nervous tic.
Three. It would take them almost two hours to reach Karachi, and the Galaxy would take another two hours to reach Peshawar. Seven at night before they crossed into Afghanistan… and they had to wait, just wait, while time ran out.
Despite his tinted pilot's glasses, he squinted at the sea and the heat haze. His eyes felt tired, strained, and his body somnolent; as if he were within the context of a restless night's sleep, half waking, always shifting position. The sense of unfairness remained with him; they had done enough to earn Islamabad's wink and nod, enough to get out of here.
"Major," Garcia called. "Anders."
Gant hurried to his feet, as if startled by danger. Mac looked up, Lane broke off the sentence he had begun. He strode toward the MiLs, lifting the netting and ducking beneath it. Garcia's face was strained with expectation. He handed the lightweight headset to Gant, who snatched it, tugging it on.
"Anders?"
"Gant." The strangeness of the remote, toneless voice was unsettling as it emerged from the decoding process. Similarly, Gant's voice would be somehow dehumanized aboard the Galaxy as Anders listened. "Gant — it's OK. Mission continues."