Everything has been triple-checked, he caught himself silently reciting like a litany. All the IDs, the call signs, the unit, the cover story, everything, everything, over and over…
He felt himself to be an adult attempting, through fear or a crushing sense of inadequacy, to recapture the unquestioning innocence of a child. The litany did not work, it was merely the prayer of an unbeliever.
The noise of the two helicopters, now Hind-D and Hind-A, gunship and troop transport purporting to belong to the Soviet Frontal Aviation Army and attached to a unit serving in Afghanistan, diminished toward the border. He shivered again and stared at the empty Galaxy. The night surrounded the hard light from the hold and the shadow of the fuselage. The transport aircraft was a remote island in the inhospitable sea of the airfield. The two vanished MiLs were no more than bottles on water; a cry for help. Unreal, fragile.
Now he knew it wouldn't work. Too much could go wrong. It was all too risky.
TWO
MASTERS OF WAR
In a world of steel-eyed death And men fighting to be warm…
7: Bid the Players Make Haste
Gant ran through the moving-map display, projected on the main tactical screen, surveying their entire crossing of Afghanistan, a thin, silver snail trail across the fleeting sequence of maps. Peshawar to Kabul, but keeping well to the east of the capital and its radars and air force units, and flying through the foothills of the Hindu Kush, which formed a bony radar and infrared shield. Laghman Province, then Nuristan and Takhar and Kunduz provinces, before reaching the thick purple line that represented the Soviet border.
Their course stayed as much in the mountains as possible, as far east of the main areas of military activity as satellite surveillance and CIA secret reports from the mujahideen fighters could place them. Gant canceled the run-through. The main tactical screen went blank. He was flying visually. No infrared or radar emissions to be picked up. He updated the map display once more, reinstating the current section, matching it to the landscape around him, which undulated now like some great living thing. It was not a mountain range with valleys and hollows and peaks and knifelike passes, but a great coiling snake, and as dangerous.
The flanks of the mountains gleamed with snow in the bright moon. Garcia's MiL, in his mirrors, was silvered by the light and appeared mottled like a cow because of its camouflage. Mac's helmet, in the gunner's cockpit below him, was like a silver dome. Lights from Mac's screens and displays winked and shone beyond the gunner's shoulders.
Gant glanced at the fuel gauges. They would not have to set down to refuel until they were far inside Soviet territory, maybe not for two or three hundred miles. The return flight had a critically small margin of fuel. Once they abandoned the second MiL, they would have just enough, just enough, to fly the same route home — while they waited, alerted and watching for them, all along the thousand miles of desert and mountain.
He dismissed the thought. It interfered with this phase of the mission, to remain undetected in Afghan airspace.
They were seventy miles northeast of Kabul, skirting the mountains that contained the fertile Panjshir Valley. Ahead of them, another hundred and fifty miles to the Soviet border. An hours flying at their present speed and without deviating from their plotted course, which was already in the onboard computer.
Aircraft activity was heavy, but it was related to a known new push against rebel tribesmen. No one was looking for them, not yet. But it meant that a lot of aircraft and helicopters were in the air— his cover, but also his peril. One visual sighting, or straying onto any one of thirty or forty radar screens, and he would be called to identify himself. He wanted to use his radar instead of relying on eyesight, but it would be like making ripples on a pond, attracting hunting fish. The last time he had briefly employed the radar — counting the seconds it was operating with a mounting breathlessness — he had spotted a high-flying reconnaissance aircraft, slow-moving enough to be an Ilyushin 11–18, moving westward well to the north of them. The flick, too, of a low, fast fighter moving away. They remained undetected. He had switched off the radar gratefully, sweating with relief.
Now his own radar, and those of Soviet aircraft, were virtually useless in the mountains. The ELINT systems on the lumbering reconnaissance aircraft were incapable of picking them out from the ground scatter of hills, valleys, snow, rock, rushing water. You're safe, he told himself once more, but the thought struck hollow.
He banked the Mil around the sheer face of a cliff, tilting the rotors away from it. Garcia duplicated his maneuver, then he, too, leveled his helicopter. Far below, water gleamed in a thin crack. Snow mottled a high peak and lay more thickly in a mountain pass. A black-and-white landscape. At any moment, an aircraft or helicopter could appear, startling him, calling on him for his IDs. That danger remained and did not seem to lessen. Minute by minute, it stretched undiminishing into the hours ahead.
He dodged and slunk through the high mountains, the noise of his rotors booming back from rock faces, hollowing down long, narrow valleys.
There were over two hundred assault helicopters stationed in Afghanistan, by Langley's expert reckoning. Two extra could easily be overlooked, especially if their pilots wanted it that way.
On the moving-map display, he could pick out the main Soviet air base at Parwan, the most northerly on their route before they crossed the border. Radar would tell him what kind and degree of activity there was around it, but he resisted the clamoring temptation. He flew into an opening where the mountains seemed to part to west and north, and exposed him like curtains being drawn back on a huge, open stage of dark air. He sensed, as well as saw, the moonlight flowing over the MiL, saw its shadow flit and tremble across the valley below. The empty, open sky stretched away on every side—
— hide-and-seek. His eyes quartered the night. Hide-and-seek. He increased his airspeed to one seventy, and waited, relieved when the noise of the rotors hammered back at him from rock faces as the mountains closed in once more. Cover; the safety of rock.
A stream of Russian, blurting in his headset, alarmed him like the sudden cry of discovery. The radio had been tuned to the principal Soviet TAC (secure tactical communications) channel as soon as they crossed the Pakistan border. It had been mostly silent until now. The codes Frontal Aviation Army units in Afghanistan used had been broken by Langley; the radio set itself had been reconstructed by DARPA specialists. The voices had been little more than distant, vague whispers.
Until now.
Something was close, perhaps too close.
He turned up the set's volume as the signal frequency locked. It was a… helicopter pilot, talking to the AWACS Ilyushin. A quick-fire, sudden, excited burst. What was it? What—? Unidentified radar trace, which had disappeared from the Ilyushin's long-range radar screens… your sector, he heard, chilled.
He had been picked up by the patrolling early-warning aircraft, either he or Garcia; it didn't matter which. He listened, knowing that the alerted helicopter would now climb, try to look down, find him again. The interference of the mountains would be like a washing shoal of fish crossing the enemy radar screens. It would obscure any clear blip he might make. At least, he had to hope that would be the case.