"You'll have to help."
"I can't go down there."
"I don't care if you didn't like it last time. You're coming with me."
Priabin knelt down and pressed his cheek to the icy metal of the closed doors. He heard, faint but distinct, the humming of machinery or electronics. Ana a rumbling noise, as it a train were passing through the earth a long way down. It was down there! He got to his feet.
"Good, down the air shaft, then. Come on."
They ran to the air shaft's rusty grating. The jack handle from the toolbox levered the mesh away from the mouth of the narrow shaft. A flight of rungs set in the concrete disappeared into the darkness — no, there was a faint glow of light from the bottom. He turned and began to climb backward into the shaft, his feet feeling for the nearest rungs. He gestured at Kedrov to hand him the toolbox.
"Come on!" he yelled. His voice echoed betrayingly down the shaft.
Kedrov was not looking at him. His head was turned toward the silo. Then his face snapped back, mouth open, eyes wide.
"The doors are opening!"
"What?"
"The doors — they're opening. It must be coming up."
Priabin scrambled out of the shaft like a demented old man. He even crawled a few paces before getting to his feet, eyes staring wildly toward the silo. A hole in the ground now, no gleam of metal. He wanted to scream away the adrenaline coursing through his veins. He was too late, he could do nothing. Rodin had won. The thought obsessed him. There was no room for any speck of rationality in his head.
Rodin.
He was down there, hundreds of feet below him, just there. He banged the jack handle on the frozen ground, feeling the shock pass through his wrist and arm and reach his shoulder. Rodin was down there, laughing while he started the next fucking war.
"Look." Kedrov was shaking his arm, and pointing. Priabin whirled on him, the jack handle raised. "Look!"
It was coming out of the silo like some nightmarish plant, its growing cycle speeded up by a time-lapse camera. Dish aerial, transmitters, the platform on the metal stalk of an old missile hoist. Twenty feet into the air. It grew further and began to move. The dish aerial seemed to turn in their direction like a single, silver eye, then tilted toward the pale afternoon.
"Christ, oh, Christ," Priabin heard himself muttering.
Kedrov was separate from his desperation. Detached and blown like a brown leaf across the sixty yards to the silo.
"Wait — wait!" Priabin bellowed.
And was running, stumbling like an exhausted athlete. The jack handle like a heavy baton in his hand. Ahead of him, he could see the bottom of Kedrov's stolen overcoat flying in the wind, his arms waving as if he were swimming against the air's current. The plant had grown taller, thicker-stemmed. Its silver eye winked in the sun, watching the sky, swiveling. The spars and sticks of the other aerials and transmitters seemed to move, too.
He was out of breath, dragging in lungfals of air as if at some great altitude. His chest was tight and aching.
Kedrov was standing at the base of the platform, looking up. Smooth, sheer metal for thirty feet, impossible to climb. Hopeless. Metal gleamed and shone, mocking him. The platform hummed with electricity and purpose. The winking eye of the dish aerial halted in its movements. Stared directly at some invisible target.
"It's locked on!" Kedrov shouted in his ear. "Locked on!"
The cables, bunched into a rope, traveled back into the silo shaft, down hundreds of feet to Rodin's finger on the button. The signal was about to be transmitted.
He swung the jack handle at the cables, disturbing them and leaving no mark on the heavy nylon sheathing that protected the wiring. He felt his left hand forced open. He released his grip on whatever he was holding. Kedrov knelt by the bunched cables, straining with the heavy pliers. Groaning as he did so, veins standing out on his forehead, sweat sheening it. The wind sang through the transmitters and aerials in an unearthly, crowing noise.
Priabin knelt down, too, and took the cables in both hands. Heaved at them.
Kedrov wrenched rather than cut. His hands were white with effort. It was no use — if it was, Kedrov would electrocute himself as soon as the metal touched the wires inside.
Priabin heaved again at the reluctant cables. What did he think he was doing anyway? He gazed upward and then wildly around him.
Frenzied, he wrenched the Kalashnikov from his shoulders and pointed it at the cables, as if about to fire into them. His head whirled madly. The weapon was useless to him. He raised it as if to throw it aside. He'd never even learned to fire it accurately, years before during basic training. Cleaning, loading, aiming, even bayonet practice — the thing was useless, useless!
Then he remembered. Yes! He knelt down, his hands fumbling to detach the bayonet in its scabbard from above the magazine. "Get away!" he yelled at Kedrov, whose shadow interfered with the light. He struggled with the bayonet then threw the gun away from him and held up the tool he had constructed.
… with the bayonet and the insulated scabbard, an effective wire cutter is made…
The instructor. They'd laughed in the junior officers' mess afterward—who wants a wire cutter, we're not trying to escape, are we?
He attacked the sheathing of the cables, hacking, sawing, shearing at it. Strips of nylon, cord within, bare copper gleaming — one, two, three, four. He worked like a madman, mutilating the cables. His hands were torn and bloody from frayed wiring and the sharpness of the nylon.
Eventually he finished.
The interlocked bayonet-and-scabbard tool rattled and clunked as it slid down the silo shaft. Priabin lay on his back, chest heaving, staring at the sky. Kedrov was no more than a shadow in his peripheral vision. His body was a single, feverish ache. Nothing mattered now, nothing.
Rodin. Rodin…
He let the name fade in his mind, like a figure retreating down a long, empty corridor.
The sky was clean.
Except for Kedrov's shadow.
"I don't know if we were in time," Kedrov said, his voice hardly audible above the noise of the wind through the aerials. "They may have transmitted the firing command — we wouldn't know."
When the words had taken effect on Priabin's consciousness, he groaned, rolling on to his side as if to hide under nonexistent bedclothes.
Rodin, Rodin.
Train.
Almost at once, he could smell the smoke. The tunnel thrust the locomotive's bellow of steam and damp smoke along its length toward him. The rail beneath his left boot quivered, then thudded rhythmically. His heart thudded like the rail, but with relief; almost threatening to overwhelm him. He could only lean back against the wet brickwork and watch. The locomotive and its burden roared down the tunnel toward him.
His parka became sodden almost at once from the running water washing down the wall. The smoke made his eyes water, his throat constrict. And yet he knew he had to move, however terrifying this huge rush of metal. The train blocked the entrance to the tunnel, preventing any gunship from making its descent to cut off his escape.
There was a halo of light dimly marking the train's outline, a tiny gap of air between its bulk and the walls. Sparks, the billowing of wet smoke and steam, the glow of the boiler's fire. He turned his cheek to the rough brickwork, and wetness soaked into his taut skin. Already the realization seeped in — they would be working their way along the same wall, thinking they, too, could use the train's passage. He had to move now.
He began to slide-run along the curve of the wall. His shoulder scraped against the bricks and the jutting rock, his feet unbalanced and his whole body leaning like a drunk into the wall, away from the track. The train enlarged, yelling and threatening. Seeming too big for the tunnel. The dim halo of light had disappeared. He checked in midstride.