Kedrov.
Her heart began to thump once more. He was holding a mug. Beyond his shoulder, a haversack. A transistor radio lay on the small, bare section of table she could see.
She had found him!
Self-satisfaction warmed her like scalding coffee. She seemed to touch his features with her intent, squinting look. Nose, mouth, profile, thinning hair. The features matched those of the photograph clearly in her mind.
She was very aware of her quick, light breathing and of the gun in her gloved hand.
And of Priabin.
She sighed, but the warmth of pleasure remained; pride was like a blanket into which she snuggled. She checked once more — radio, mug, Kedrov, radio, coffee mug, Kedrov—
— then straightened up, feeling light-headed with success. She tiptoed back toward the dog. Her body urged her to hurry the first yards of the mile or so back to the car and the radio mike.
Kedrov—
She ruffled the dog's fur and laughed softly, luxuriously, at her own success.
The bare, scoured landscape flowed slowly beneath the belly of the Hind. Gant was vividly aware of the fragility of the machine that enclosed him, that kept out the freezing night temperature and the cut and noise of the wind; aware of its power to kill him. Perhaps within minutes now. Just like his father's life-support machine: tubes, a tent, a mask covering the resented face. The doctor, his sister, her husband the trucker, all approaching the moment in different ways. He in his uniform, cap beneath his arm, body stiffly at attention. He'd decided for all of them and switched off the life support. The opaqueness of the tent pitched over his father's shrunken form had slowly cleared. A small, old body without the capacity to evoke feeling of any kind had gradually been revealed.
He squeezed the thought from his mind. Now, over this bleak, cold desert, this machine was keeping him alive — and it would switch itself off and kill him when the last drops of fuel drained from the reserve tank. Like the MiG-31 over the North Sea, the Hind would make an attempt on his life.
Icy perspiration. The dunes slid beneath the Hind's black shadow. Sand flew off their crests at the helicopter's passage. Distance to Baikonur, a little less than four hundred miles; location, Soviet Central Asia, following the course of the river Oxus toward the Aral Sea. Below him, the emptiness of the Kara Kum; the huge, decayed, toothless jaws of the valley carved by the Oxus opened on either side of him. Dunes and the diamond-sparkling sky stretched away in every direction. Far to the north, too far to concern him, thin cloud hung like the gray smoke from a cigarette.
However precisely and carefully he described the landscape to himself — with whatever assumed detachment — he knew he was unraveling like wool in a cat's claws. Panic had approached, and he was conscious of forcing a mental door shut against its increasing pressure. Soon — perhaps even before the fuel ran out — he would not be able to control it.
The Mil had drifted closer to the single main road running parallel with the river, between it and the railway line. Occasional headlights, and once the smoke and blaring light of a locomotive glanced across his vision. On the moving-map display, the desert appeared to stretch infinitely away beyond the river, road, and railway tracks. He had deluded himself, pretending that a solution lurked unformed at the back of his mind. He had run because there was nothing else he could do. He had, he admitted, run in the wrong direction. Mac's shape spread on the ground came back to him vividly, as did the sense of having abandoned the body.
Lumped, broken country stretched away to the north. To the south lay a plateau of ugly gray rock and sand. The Hind, with Gant imprisoned within it, hugged the ground on the last of its fuel. He had disappeared successfully into the landscape after crossing the border. His whereabouts were unknown. They would remain that way.
Fuel gauges on Empty. All of them. Wool in a cat's eager claws; unraveling…
The road was less than a mile away now. Unconsciously, he was drifting toward it, as if it were a solution. It wasn't. Straggling closer than the road was the gleam of the river.
Think, think.
His mind was empty, except for the seeping of panic, and the urge to survive, like the noise of a rat scrabbling at the cage; frantic and desperate. His arms quivered with the effort of holding the Hind's course and height. Its shadow drifted over the broad, straggling, gray river. Was there something at the edge of his mind? He couldn't think, he was too hot, his mind too jumpy and unfocused. He needed to be clearheaded. The Hind glided now, as if grace were to be its last skill. The water seemed shallow and muddy, more like a creek than the force that had formed the landscape around him. The dim glow from some encampment stained the night farther to the south, beyond the road and railway. His whole body leaped in anticipation, even as he dismissed it. They would have no fuel, and they would kill him for his clothes before they stripped the helicopter naked. Ignore it, ignore—
The campfire glowed like a promise. Deliberately, he slowed the helicopter to a crawling speed above its shadow. His arms ached with tension, and fear. His brow and the back of his overalls were Wet with perspiration. Not here, not in this lost place, he heard his thoughts repeating. Another mile, another ten, fifty… please.
He was at the hover, sand drifting off the side of a nearby dune, hanging like some vague curtain. The Hind was in a hollow, surrounded by low dunes. Not in this place — keep going, keep going, not in this God-forsaken place.
His resolve snapped in his head like an old dry stick. His body quivered. He could hear his teeth chattering. He could not clear his head.
The undercarriage bumped, then settled. He released the controls. Dust whirled around the cockpit. He switched off the engines, and the rotors whined down through the scale and slowed with a sense of finality. He cursed the weakness that had made him land even as he opened the pilot s door and jumped to the ground, coughing immediately because of the sand and dust.
He groaned aloud. As soon as he had walked away from the settling dust, he breathed deeply, again and again. He looked behind him. The Hind was already cold and lifeless, and the suggestion of its immobility was like a great, icy wave breaking against him. He was shivering, though he hardly noticed the small, biting wind. His hands clenched and unclenched in futility.
His father returned, then. Machines — his fathers only use to people, and only then when he was sober. The memory was a supreme mockery now. His father could repair any machine: irons, refrigerators, lawnmowers, sprinklers, cars — anything you wanted fixed *. until he had been beaten by a machine in the end, when Gant had switched off the life support. His father seemed to be watching him now — not gloating for once, just detached and judging.
Painfully, slowly, he climbed the shivering, rattling sand of the dune. Immediately, the glow of the campfire — no! The flash of a vehicle's headlights miles away along the road. No suffused glow of a town or village or barracks. He rubbed his hands through his hair, the presence of the silent helicopter pressing against the back of his head like a migraine.
Machine, machine… His father watched. Think, t-h-i-n-k… think…
He stared at the empty road. Heard the thin wind and shivered in it. Heard the oily sliding of the river and the silence of the helicopter. Empty country, empty road. He was breathing rapidly and deeply, despite the ache of the icy air in his lungs. The beginnings of a terminal attack. Empty road, empty… something, something, Christ! Empty road — its very emptiness was the clue, the answer, empty — stretching away like, like—