Check the tires, get the windshield… He grinned. The Hind was drawn up like a huge, grotesque car. Dust settled on the cockpit and shimmered downward around him. He could do nothing for the foment except stare at the gauges, then glance at the gas pumps, premium Grade, they announced in Cyrillic and some other script did not recognize. He could use gas instead of paraffin or aviation fuel without short-term damage to the engines. He had to.
The garage manager — in Soviet Central Asia he might even be the owner — ducked beneath the drooping, stationary rotor blades with inordinate care and suspicion. They rested more than ten feet above his head.
As he approached the cockpit, Gant swung his door open and called out, beginning to control the situation, damp down suspicion: "Gauges must be out — ran out of fuel. Sorry, comrade, to disturb your well-earned rest or whatever else you were doing back there." He was grinning broadly, but his features adopted command, the expectation of quick and questionless assistance. "Your stuff will have to do until I get home. Fill her up."
The engine noise had died out of his head now. Around him, the night seemed to spread outward like a black pool stained with moonlight. He sensed distances, and isolation beneath his relief. The man looking up into his features was an Uzbek with a narrow, dark, unshaven face. His eyes glinted reflections of the cockpit lights. Tiny rows of green, red, amber, blue from the still-alive panels made his pupils those of an automaton.
"Who pays me?" the man asked, seemingly unaware of the cold or the wind. His accent coated the Russian words thickly like a rough varnish. His thin, hook-nosed face stared impassively up at Gant, as if it were indeed a car that had drawn alongside the pumps. He was simply waiting to see money.
Gant glanced at his watch. Midnight plus five. Three hundred and forty miles to Baikonur. Two hours, maximum, with full tanks and a full auxiliary tank. He could still make it — just — if Kedrov was waiting for him; ingress and egress before daylight. Hopes, estimates, tension tumbled together in his mind and invaded his frame, even as he maintained his disarming, superior, expecting-to-be-accommodated smile toward the surly Uzbek. He gripped the door handle with his right hand, his thigh with his left, and calmed himself.
"You'll get paid — what's your worry, comrade?" He leaned over the Uzbek, his rank and uniform overalls evident. So, too, the holster on his hip containing the Makarov pistol. "I'll write you a recipe, OK? You'll manage to read it?" he added with a small sneer. The Uzbek was unimpressed, more reluctant than before. Evidently, he owned the garage. It would be his loss. Gant snapped: "The army pays, comrade."
Then he jumped down from the cockpit, landing close to the man, and was immediately taller than the Uzbek, who understood the change in their relationship. He flinched. Gant was still smiling, but his hand was lightly on the holster now. The flap was unopened as yet, just as his lips were unopened in the smile.
The night chilled through the thin flying overalls after the hothouse of the cockpit. His sweat dried like forming ice. The moon-sheened darkness oppressed, unrelieved except where headlights rose and fell over a dip of the road, perhaps a half mile away; a vehicle heading for the garage. He looked up, picking out the distant navigation lights of a slow-moving aircraft. A commercial flight out of Tashkent, he guessed. He shivered, desiring movement, assertion; the headlights flicking into view once more at the periphery of his sight. Bouncing nearer like a ball.
He bent over the Hinds flank as if it were that of a car and flicked open the fuel cap.
"There you are, comrade. Fill her up. Then fill the auxiliary tank in the main cabin." One hand still on the holster flap, the other on his hip in challenge. "Your hose won't reach from the pump," he observed with continuing casualness. "Find an extension hose and a funnel — get on with it, comrade."
The Uzbek seemed to subside slowly into his coat, shrinking. Then he shrugged and turned to the nearest pump, dragging the hose from its rest. He unlooped a length of hose from a hook on the side of the booth, and picked up a tin funnel from the shelf inside. The door banged in the wind. The Uzbek cursed softly as he thrust the nozzle of the hose into the extension, then dragged it toward the Hind. The headlights of the approaching vehicle bounced against the cockpit. The funnel clattered into the fuel tank; the man returned to the nozzle of the pump and squeezed its lever. Fuel flowed after the click. Gant felt as if he had drunk cold, fresh water. Oasis. The fuel's transfer was sweet. The headlights were flat beams now, colliding with the wood and metal of the garage. Ice sparkled on the corrugated roof above him and on the weedy pavement. Stiff grass rattled in the wind.
Gant remembered needlelike outcrops rising over the hills through which the Hind had flitted. Minarets and mosques sparkling with ice in the hard moonlight. Perhaps Bukhara, perhaps some other town. His flight over Soviet Central Asia had been like Ashing down some narrowing tunneclass="underline" hills, stretches of sand that seemed red even by moonlight, dry rivers, oases, encampments where camels lumped together like full sacks on the ground, as still the tents near them. Fires dying down, scuttling and alarmed figures moving. Herds of goats, trading caravans. Still irrigation water and reservoirs. It was as if the oncoming headlights illuminated the past hours. They were now clear, confined by the emerging dark shape around them that had become a truck. The Uzbek looked up from the nozzle of the pump without real interest. Gant's hands tensed, bunched into fists, and his face twisted to the beginnings of some cry of protest. Army?
Civilian.
He sighed audibly with relief. The hours of avoiding radar, other aircraft and helicopters, towns and villages had worn at him like waves at an old cliff. He stood more erect, as if to deny his weariness. The truck drew onto the pavement. The Uzbek made a noise in his throat that might have signaled recognition. The truck pulled to a halt. Gant heard the hand brake scratching on.
The young man who got down almost at once from the passenger side of the canvas-hooded truck was wearing an army uniform. Gant's heart banged in his chest. He was grinning as he stared, hands on his hips, at the Hind drawn up at the pumps.
Uniform? How—?
The canvas covering the back of the truck rattled in the icy breeze. The driver, who wore a sleeveless sheepskin jacket and a cloth cap, got down from the cab. Only the passenger was in uniform.
And was approaching.
Russian, not Uzbek. White skin in the moonlight, white teeth, a white hand raised in greeting. A captain, but young. A yawn, one hand stretching away a cramp. The driver hung back, as if out of respect. The young man grinned again. Gant felt his attention mesmerized by the uniform, the shoulder flashes.
At seven yards, Gant saw that the captain was GRU, military intelligence—
— and went toward the younger man, disarming him with a smile, an extended hand.
The captain took his hand, shook it. Despite the icy wind, the GRU mans hand was still warm from the heated cab. His features registered a slight shock at the coldness of Gant's grip. There was a sharp smell of vegetables — cabbages? — in the air; presumably the truck's cargo.
Why was a GRU captain stepping out of that vehicle?
Cabbages, onions, the earthiness of potatoes. Gant's sense of smell was heightened by nerves. The name of the firm on the truck was in Uzbek, not Cyrillic. He wrenched his mind away from the irrelevant. The captain's scrutiny was inexperienced, but nevertheless there. No hint of suspicion, but questions were forming in his eyes — a military helicopter, there?
Gant's own rank matched that of the captain, but the younger man would assume the precedence of GRU over Aviation Army rank. Gant's attention concentrated, narrowing every perspective, on the shoulder flashes, the arm badges — the tiny, untwinkling jewels of the man's significance.