"Sacha? I didn't."
"You said you did. Did you?"
Tears leaked from Rodin's eyes. He began nodding again like a round-based doll, tilting his whole upper body time after time.
"Yes," he breathed at last. Then: "Yes, yes, yes, yes."
"How? How did you do it?"
Would the paranoia hold? Persecution, the sense of isolation, the depth of misery, all conspirators surrounding Rodin, making him spill his little cargo of guilt.
"How?"
"Yes, how? Did you rig the car?"
"What do you mean?"
"You killed Sacha."
"I told them about him!" he cried out, then curled more tightly into the beanbag chair, into himself. He cringed away from further pain.
Priabin stood up, and Rodin shivered at his movement. The lieutenant was more deeply withdrawn than ever, almost lost to him. Priabin crossed the room, looking for the bathroom.
Bedroom, bathroom next door, he remembered. Bathroom— yes, light on; drawers, cupboards, vanity, marble-topped — my God. Aftershaves, colognes, shaving lotions, hair spray — yes, expensive makeup, French and American. Whose? Sacha's?
He opened the bathroom cabinet. Nothing he wanted there — not the mouthwashes and the creams. Drawer? No. Second drawer? Ah, yes.
Silver spoon, bottle. He gathered the items and returned to the living room. Rodin had not moved. Priabin placed powder in the bowl of the spoon on its thin silver chain, to be worn around the neck. If he gave Rodin another dose of cocaine now, the stimulant might make him high enough, temporarily, to talk about Lightning. He had to be snapped out of depression into a brief nova of clarity and reckless well-being. Rodin was huddled still into the beanbag, face almost hidden; completely unaware.
The telephone rang. White powder spilled from the spoon as Priabin's hand jumped with surprise. He stared at the receiver on a table near the windows. It continued to ring.
Warning?
He'd heard nothing outside. The telephone was reaching Rodins sunken consciousness. His face turned, wildly hopeful. He made as if to move.
Priabin picked up the receiver, but said nothing.
"Colonel?" Anatoly s voice.
"Yes, what is it?"
"Staff car's just drawn up outside the building, sir. Looks like the general… wait a minute" — he heard Mikhail's voice calling out indistinctly—"yes, sir, it's the general."
"Damnation!" he exploded. "Is he—?"
"Coming in, sir. On the steps now. Do you want—?"
"I'm coming out. Good work."
He thrust the receiver loudly back onto its rest. Half out of the beanbag, as if born from its depths, Rodin's face cracked into desperation as the call ended.
Priabin looked at him for a moment. Perhaps the concierge wouldn't inform the general, without being asked… he might just play it safe anyway. Even the KGB could give him a lot of trouble… no time to worry about it. Quickly, leave him.
He felt cheated and was enraged at the fact. He could have made him talk, he was certain of it, with another shot of cocaine to clear his head, loosen his tongue. He was so close—
His hand clenched into a fist.
Leave—
He hurried into the hall and to the door. Listened. Opened the door, heard footsteps below. Closed the door softly and ran up the short flight of stairs to the top floor.
Holding his breath, he watched General Lieutenant Pyotr Rodin use a key to open the door of his son's flat. From the bend in the staircase, he peered down at the top of the general's cap. The door shut behind him.
"Damn — oh, damnation," he breathed, grinding his teeth. He was possessed by the certainty that he would never have another opportunity to talk to Valery Rodin about Lightning,
Anders stood in the chill darkness. The wind from the mountains around Peshawar cut at the small exposed areas of his cheeks and forehead and nose. Gritty dust was whirled against his face. Lights were dotted and clumped on the hills around the airfield, and helicopters drifted unseen, their noises muted, across the plain. Light spilled from the open hold of the Galaxy as the first of the two MiLs was pushed down the ramp from the rear doors and onto the tarmac.
The tail boom of the Hind-D, Gant's MiL, dropped like a signaling arm, then the fat body of the helicopter rolled down the ramp. With furious, controlled haste, the Galaxy's load crew unshipped and rerigged the rotors, as Gant had done on the sandbar. He watched the crewmen descend, move away. Almost immediately, its rotors began to wind up, after the car backfire of the engine-start. The noise grumbled upward, toward the final whine. He held the transceiver absently to the side of his face, where his mouth wetted the fur trim on the hood of his parka. Each time the wind dropped or idled, he could vaguely feel the radiated heat from the Galaxy's huge engines. They had landed no more than seven minutes before from Karachi; it was almost seven-thirty, local time. Seven-thirty, too, in Baikonur, a thousand miles to the north of them. Gant had to be in — and out — while the darkness of this single night persisted. He had perhaps twelve hours — eleven…
Anders shivered, from the cold and from the accumulated tension of the flight from Karachi, from the tensions of the entire day. It was as if they had infected and reinfected one another in the Galaxy's hold with bad nerves, doubts, anticipatory fear, so that the dimensions of that huge space had diminished, pressing in on all of them. He could still see Gant pacing the hold like an animal in a cage while his Mil was checked and cleaned; Garcia sitting apart, being worn from within by his anxiety; the others quarreling over hands of poker.
He dismissed the images. It was out of his hands now. He, like an actor whose lines have all been spoken, had to retire from the stage. Whatever their condition, it was up to them. However hard that was to accept.
Gant shunted the Mil farther away from the ramp, juggling the stick and the pitch lever to keep the wheels on the tarmac. The second MiL, the 24A tanker helicopter, began to roll down the ramp into the windy night. Anders was a mere spectator. Swiftly, the 24A's rotors, too, were rerigged for takeoff. The two Isotov engines coughed into life, and the rotors began moving, shimmering in the thin moonlight. Hard stars glinted between banks of white cloud. Involuntarily, he glanced away from the two Soviet helicopters, toward the mountains, into Afghan airspace. He cocked his head, no longer able to hear anything except the noise of the MiLs; the decoy helicopters patrolling up and down the border did not seem convincing.
The MiLs bobbed, their wheels hardly in contact with the tarmac of the runway farthest from the tower and the airfield buildings. He depressed the button of the transceiver. His hps tasted the fur of the parka's hood as he spoke.
"Gant? Are you receiving me?"
"Yes," came the monosyllabic, detached reply; as if its owner had already departed.
"Good luck and Godspeed," was all Anders could find to say after a moment of hesitation. He shivered. His voice had seemed high and piping amid the turmoil of engine noise and the quiver of his nerves. This is what he had wanted, and now, somehow, he felt guilt approach like a sly messenger, with bad news. It — well, it seemed futile; the MiLs were toys, despite their noise.
"Sure," Gant replied. His tone might have been mocking, but Anders could not be sure. "And — yeah, you did OK, Anders. See you." It hadn't mocked, then.
Gant's Hind-D, its camouflage paint palely mottled in the moonlight, rose to the hover and then immediately passed over Anders' head. The downdraft clutched at him, tugged at his clothing, and dust whirled in his face. When he looked again, after furiously rubbing his eyes, he saw through a wet veil the shadows of the two MiLs moving away to the northwest. The Pakistani helicopters waited only a few miles away to shepherd them to the pass that was their chosen crossing point into Afghan airspace. After that, Gant and the others were entirely on their own. He could do nothing; nobody could.