"I turned onto it about half an hour before the bridge," The sun had heaved itself above the horizon and was filtering through the blue summer haze that hung over Charleston. The helicopter climbed to nine hundred feet and flew southwestward until the highway unreeled beyond the cockpit windows. The pilot pointed downward and Suvorov nodded.

They followed the outbound traffic as the South Carolina coastal plain spread beneath them. Here and there a few cultivated fields lay enclosed on all sides by forests of long-leafed pines. They passed over a farmer standing in a tobacco field who waved his hat at them.

"See anything familiar?" the pilot asked.

Suvorov shook his head helplessly. "The road I turned off of might be anywhere."

"What direction were you facing when you met the highway?"

"I made a left turn so I must have been heading south."

"This area is called Wadmalaw Island. I'll start a circular search pattern. Let me know if you spot something."

An hour slipped by, and then two. The scene below transformed into a maze of creeks and small rivers snaking through bottomland and swamps. One road looked the same as another from the air.

Thin ribbons of reddish-brown dirt or potholed asphalt slicing through dense overgrowth like lines on the palm of a hand. Suvorov became more confused as time wore on, and the pilot lost his patience.

"We'll have to knock off the search," he said, "or I won't have enough fuel to make Savannah."

"Savannah is in the state of Georgia," Suvorov said, as though reciting in a school class.

The pilot smiled. "Yeah, you got it."

"Our departure point for the Soviet Union?"

"Only a fuel stop." Then the pilot clammed up.

Suvorov saw it was impossible to draw any information out of the man, so he turned his attention back to the ground.

Suddenly he pointed excitedly over the instrument panel.

"There!" he shouted above the engine's roar. "The small intersection to the left."

"Recognize it?"

"I think so. Drop lower. I want to read the sign on that shabby building sitting on the corner."

The pilot obliged and lowered the helicopter until it hovered thirty feet over the bisecting roadways. "Is that what you want?"  he asked. " 'Glover Culpepper-gas and groceries' We're close," said Suvorov. "Fly up the road that leads toward that river to the north."

"The Intracoastal Waterway."

"A canal?"

"A shallow canal that provines an almost continuous inshore water passage from the North Atlantic States to Florida and the Gulf of Mexico. Used mostly by small pleasure boats and tugs."

The helicopter beat over the tops of trees, whipping leaves and bending branches with the wash from its rotor blades. Suddenly, at the edge of a wine marshy creek, the road ended. Suvorov stared through the windshield.

"The laboratory, it must be around here."

"I don't see anything," the pilot said, banking the craft and studying the ground.