… might have to use grenades on the two separate cockpits of the other gunship, the 24D. They had always known that. No way to reach gunner and pilot without opening both cockpit doors, both hatches. And the 24D was farther away than its companion, its crew already alerted to danger. The greater prize but the more risky capture. His eye strained at the eyepiece of the pocketscope. Sweat was chill on every part of his body.
Now—
One commando had his hand on the pilot's cockpit latch, a second had climbed to the gunners cockpit and was heaving at the hinged cover. Flash of gunfire, the noise coming slow seconds later, it seemed. Two rounds at point-blank range from an army-issue Beretta 9mm. Satisfied, the commando dropped back to the ground. The gunners body was all but below the level of his cockpit sill.
Image of the pilot turning in his seat, arm moving across his body, striking out with something. The commando at his door swung outward on it, suddenly endangered. A shot from inside the Mil, two more from outside it. The commando fell to the ground and lay still. The pilot should have been terrorized into surrender, not killed—
His body slumped heavily in the cockpit. Anders sensed rather than saw his hand leave the control column, sensed his weight transmitted down through the dead body to the rudder.
The Mil tilted, began to lean drunkenly over, its rotors seeming to stretch out toward the sand. Jaffe's hand gripped Anders' arm, and there was a sob of anticipation and shock in his throat. On the 24A, the rotors had stilled. It was safe. The nearer Mil continued to lean, its fuselage lurching, the tail boom swinging outward, the rotor disk tilting slowly, almost with delicacy toward the sand—
— where they would grind, bite, gouge before being ripped off, broken.
The pilot had his dead foot jammed heavily on the right rudder pedal. That was obvious. The tail rotor's thrust was increased, the tail had begun to swing. The Mil was leaning drunkenly; sand was billowing as the rotors' disk neared the ground. It was trying to climb even as it leaned, shunting about like a wounded bull on the distressed sand.
Jaffe was shouting in Hebrew above the bellow of the rotors and the confusion. Anders understood only the urgency. A shadow ducked into the whirling sand, touched the fuselage, began to climb. Anders watched him, almost paralyzed with the imminence of failure. A door swung open. The hollow seemed filled with flying sand. The door shut. Noise, noise—
The rotor disk shimmered, only feet from the sand, the fuselage leaned more drunkenly than ever, the tail boom seemed to thrash in the sand cloud like the tail of a pain-maddened creature.
"Christ!" Anders could not help bellowing at the Mil. Men were scattering from the 24A. Anders became mesmerized by the rotors of the 24D and by the apparent effort of the helicopter to lift off: a wounded bird trying to hop desperately into the air. Hop, hop, the rotors like broken wings, about-to-break wings…
… men running away — why? Then he saw. The lurching, hopping, leaning Mil was shunting closer and closer to its companion. Both the helicopters would be wrecked, the mission would be — would not be, ever.
"Christ!" he bellowed again. Four weeks before, a little more than that, they hadn't even known what the Russians were doing, hadn't any need for Mil helicopters and a reach-and-recover mission behind the Curtain — four weeks! The age of innocence. They'd been taken by complete surprise — the NSC, the CIA, DARPA, the DIA, the White House, all of them, totally, completely by surprise….. it was going to fail, going to fail, going to— Slowing? Slowing!
The tail no longer twitched, it was steadying. The shimmer of the rotors behind the veil of sand dulled, the noise lessened. The undercarriage righted, came level, thumped back onto the sand. The rotors continued to wind down. Anders realized that the commando had stop-cocked the Mil's engines, starving them of fuel as the quickest way to stop them. Had kicked the dead Russian's foot off the right rudder pedal and stamped hard himself off the left rudder to correct the drift of the tail boom before he released the rotor clutch.
The rotors slowed to a halt. Anders heard, in the deaf silence, faint, ragged cheering. It might have been Jaffe's voice, even his own. As the tension was released, he felt aged and dazed by it. Jaffe was on his feet, waving to his men, to the lieutenant at the foot of the dune. He was shouting for him to bring up the two helicopter pilots.
Anders stood up and rocked back and forth with exhaustion. It was as if he had run for miles without the least pause. Jaffe gripped his elbow. The colonel was grinning wildly. Below them, as the sand settled, he saw the commando open the door of the 24D and climb slowly, carefully out, as if bruised or wounded by his own heartbeat and adrenaline.
"I told you we'd do it — told you, man!" Jaffe shouted.
"A — close-run thing — too damn close!" Anders shouted back, beginning to grin. Then he coughed as the cold air filled his lungs. Sand drifted slowly down, making his eyes smart and wink.
"Don't bellyache! We did it, and you've got your helicopters— for whatever reason!"
Anders looked down into the clearing hollow. Bodies were being dragged, arrayed; dealt with casually or tenderly depending on their identity. The two MiLs faced each other like stags about to spar during the annual rut. Two intact Russian Mil helicopters. He sighed deeply, still feeling inordinately weak, almost helpless.
Winter Hawk had begun. They had the means to begin it.
ONE
ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER
You that never done nothin' But build to destroy You play with my world Like it's your little toy.
1: Distant Thunder
A moment of respite, within the storm of tension that he was experiencing, during which he remembered those faded, black-and-white snapshots his parents had always kept. It must be because of the camera near his hand and the sequence of photographs he was trying to obtain. They had kept their pictures in a used, threadbare brown envelope. They comprised a sequence, a story, even: of the building of the block of flats in which they had been allocated accommodation soon after their marriage. They must have gone every day, certainly a few times each week, and taken pictures of the slowly rising skeleton, of the piles of bricks, of the dumper trucks and concrete mixers — everything.
The moment of respite was already beginning to pass. His hand jumped on the clipboard, which rested on the rail of the walkway. His parents had, as he was doing, watched something grow, keeping a record of it. His record was not of a block of workers' flats, but of a weapon.
Below Filip Kedrov lay the laser battle station's components, close to final assembly. The main tube for the laser beam and the large mirror rested like a lance and shield, inert upon two vast benches in the assembly complex's main workshop. Robot arms and lifting gear hung motionless above them; still as items on a building site at the weekend. He knew he must pause for only a moment, there must be no suspicion, no sense of lingering; but he could almost savor the extremities of tension because this was the last time, the final day. His spying was almost over.