The breath he snatched at was foul with smoke, making him cough. His ears were filled with the din of the locomotive. Sparks jumped and spat like fireworks only a hundred yards away as the train rushed toward him.
Somehow, he made himself run on, toward the thing that filled the darkness with noise and fire. The beam of its lamp, polishing the track but eluding him. His shoulder pressed against the wall. The pressure and inertia of the train quivered in the brick, the gravel under his feet seemed like quicksand.
And then it was passing him, and moving with a totally unexpected slowness, laboring up the canyon's long incline. One man in the locomotive's cab was bent to the raging fire, the other stood as still as a statue commemorating a long-ago war. Then the first of the freight cars was level with him, and some animal or other lowed like a fog warning. Other beasts joined its cry. Cattle cars. Helpless animals, in transit to an abattoir.
His cheek was still warm from the blaze of the fire. He had to pause to beat at sparks that had flown onto his legs from the flanged wheels of the cars. Then moved on in his unbalanced fashion, down the length of the long, slow train, which creaked and thudded and clanked; and lowed.
Smoke roiled about him so that he could hardly breathe. He was terrified by the sight of cattle snouts jutting through slats into the tunnels madness. He heard hooves banging against the floors and sides of cars as they lurched past.
The train was incredibly long. Its noise seemed as if it would never stop. He felt he would never rid himself of the lowing of the cattle. He had to be in the open before the end of the train entered the tunnel. The trucks moved by so slowly. He couldn't be running that slowly. Then he saw the light increasing.
The second locomotive, at the rear of the train, pushing it up the long incline toward Yerevan's slaughterhouses, was at the maw of the tunnel and was then swallowed. The driver's face, looking down at him, was white and shocked, and the glow of the fire was dimmed by the early-afternoon light. The track ahead of him was clear.
He saw the bridge, and heard the throb of rotors, and the scream overhead of the first MiG or Sukhoi fighter. He felt shrunken, a tiny figure on a narrow thread of track that ran from tunnel to bridge. He stared wildly around and above him, looking for the gunship, waiting for its attack; hearing, despite the noise of its approach, the sound of trucks moving on the highway below him. He felt pinioned by noise. Then he saw the gunship beating down toward him, rotors tilted, snub nose head-on to him. He would never — even if he could move — make the bridge before it opened fire. The passage of the train still rumbled in the ground beneath his feet. He raised the Kalashnikov in a futile gesture as the helicopter enlarged, its black tinted glass and snub nose sweeping over his head, the downdraft plucking at him as if to cuff him aside.
There was black glass everywhere as it turned to face him, swinging violently into the hover, so that he could see the gun and the missile pod. It hung in the air, its skis only feet above the railway track — between him and the bridge. Olive-drab paint.
He knew quite certainly that he would die there, framed in the tunnel entrance. They could be no more than thirty yards or so away now. He was trapped between the spetsnaz troops behind him and the gunship, which stared at him with its huge, black glass eyes. He shivered. The rifle pointed foolishly, like a child's stick. He seemed to have stopped breathing. The only sound he could hear was the noise of the small, light gunship.
Familiar?
Military. Olive drab. Insect eyes.
Familiar?
The helicopter stared at him, no more than twenty yards away. The helicopter — the, the — Hughes Defender stared at him. and a* the same unnerving moment that he identified the aircraft he saw an arm waving him forward from the port insect eye — the eye was a door that had swung open. The helicopter was American!
Relief… disbelief. The conflicting feelings seemed to shake him like a storm. It had to be an illusion, it couldn't be a Hughes, a Hughes couldn't be here—
— even as he began running toward it, obeying the still waving arm.
The Defender lifted slightly, delicately adjusting itself in the air, then settled on to its skis. Then all he saw was the arm, waving once more. But he had glimpsed the white star on the helicopter's flank and the legend u.s. army. The pilot had shown them to him like a guarantee. Ten yards away, five. The gesticulating arm came closer, closer, closer…
He staggered against the fuselage. Bullets clanged against the metal. He looked down with what might have been surprise. His left thigh was burning with pain and stained with something dark and wet, which spread even as he watched it. His whole frame began to quiver. Fuzzily, he could see two soldiers at the tunnel entrance, one of them kneeling, taking better aim, the other standing as stiffly as a member of a firing squad.
He groaned with pain. Something pulled at his shoulder, then a hand grabbed his arm, wrenching him off his feet. The rotors idled noisily above his head, the two soldiers were still and patient and certain, his leg shrieked as he was dragged into the cockpit of the helicopter and it twisted under him. The whole of his thigh seemed black with blood as he looked drunkenly down, slumped in the copilot's seat. His face leaned against the pilot's uniform. The flying overalls bore the name Pruitt. Then he was pushed away from Pruitt, to loll in his seat as the rotors picked up speed and volume. Bullets careened off the metal of the fuselage.
"Fasten your seat belt, Major," Pruitt snapped, his hand pointing forcibly at Gant's lap. Instinctively, Gant moved to obey, and his leg cried out again. "You all right?"
The Hughes was twenty feet or so up in the air, hardly moving. Gant groaned, then shouted:
"For fuck's sake — go!"
He tightened the seat belt automatically, then fumbled with his belt. The small helicopter flicked into the air like a spun coin, dizzyingly, making his leg protest with a flash of red behind his clenched eyelids. He felt sick. He forced himself to open his eyes, as if in response to the noise of bullets against the Defenders fuselage. Pale flickers of flame down on the track. A bullet flew off the cockpits Plexiglas, scarring it. The Hughes yawed wildly before Pruitt corrected its course. Gant felt the aircraft drop like a loosened boulder, down the canyon wall.
With a feebly waving hand, he pointed urgently toward—
— the military highway and its tunnel. Brdad tunnel. Even as he saw the first of the Mil gunships, its stubby wings overloaded with rockets and missiles, dive in pursuit of them. There was a second one, farther off. Gant tightened his belt into a tourniquet around the top of his thigh, grinding his teeth against the increased pain. Each maneuver of the Hughes seemed to wrench at the damaged sinews and muscles and act like a pump on the blood he was trying to staunch.
Pruitt drove the Defender downward. Rotor span twenty-seven feet — only twenty-seven, Gant told himself, the words taking the pattern of his grinding teeth and accompanying their noise inside his head. He slumped back in the copilot's seat. Pruitt abruptly leveled the helicopter before the mouth of the road tunnel, so that Gant yelled aloud. Then the tunnel swallowed the tiny aircraft.
"Shit!" he heard Pruitt distantly exclaim, his head filled with pain as if it were noise, the lights set in the tunnel's roof seeming to hurt his eyes, as if they, too, were connected with his wound. He had clamped his hand over his thigh. His finger and thumb had felt the entry and exit wounds of the bullet's passage. He was bleeding more slowly.