Charlie handed the receiver back to Honda. While the radio operator packed up the TAC-Sat, Squires took a moment to look across the terrain. It didn't require the eerie green light of the night vision goggles to look dead and desolate beneath the canopy of unnaturally bright stars. The track came toward them in a gentle curve from the plains to the east, passed through a natural path between the cliffs, and continued on across flat scrubland dotted with trees and patches of snow. To the south were mountains. The region was as quiet as anywhere he had ever been. The only sounds were the whistle of the wind in his helmet and the scuffling of the Strikers' boots against the dirt and loose rocks of the cliff.

Honda moved forward when he was finished. And with a final glance toward the eastern horizon from which their quarry would soon be coming, Squires moved to where the Strikers were just finishing with their preparations to descend from the ledge.

CHAPTER FIFTY

Tuesday, 9:32 P.M., Khabarovsk

Nikita had an uncanny sense about aircraft. Growing up at the Cosmodrome, he always heard the approach of helicopters before anyone else did. He could recognize jets by the sounds their engines made. His mother said that all those years his father had spent in cockpits had affected his genes, "filled them with aviation fuel," was how she'd put it. Nikita didn't believe that. He simply loved flying. But to have become a flier, to have been compared to the national hero Sergei Orlov, would have been impossible for him. And so he kept his love to himself, like a dream whose magic couldn't be communicated to another.

The train slowed as it came to a patch of track with thickly piled snow. Though the wind roared around the canvas flap over the open window, Nikita heard the distinctive drone of the MiG engines. Two of them, coming from the east toward a transport that was flying overhead. These weren't the first aircraft he'd heard, but there was something different about them.

He poked his head out the window and turned his left ear up. Though the failing snow made it impossible for him to see anything, the sound traveled clearly through it. He listened carefully. The MiGs weren't accompanying the 76T, they had caught up to it. And as he listened, he heard the 76T, and then the jets, head in the opposite direction, back toward the east.

That wasn't right. This might be the 76T his father had warned him about.

Nikita drew his head inside, oblivious to the snow caked on his hair and cheeks. "Get Colonel Rossky on the radio," he barked to Corporal Fodor, who was sitting at the table warming his hands above the lantern.

"At once," the Corporal replied as he hurried to the console.