Winter Hawk

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"Two minutes, and they're nervous already."

"How many Russians?"

Anders had seen one fair-skinned face behind the tinted cockpit glass of the nearest helicopter. He continued holding the pocket-scope nightsight to one eye, studying the two Mil-24s in the hollow beyond him. The temperature had dropped below freezing as soon as the sun set, and there was a sliver of new moon amid the hard, bright stars. A thin, cold wind pattered fine sand against the shoulders of his sheepskin jacket and insinuated the stuff between collar and hairline. Below the crest of the dune, the thick barrellike lens of the night observer lay between Colonel Itzhak Jaffe and himself.

Anders could hear the murmur of an occasional voice in the silence, but often the noises might have been the wind calling and chasing around the hollow; and besides, the murmurs were much less clamorous than the remembered voices in his head and the urgency they demanded. His skin prickled on the back of his hands with nerves rather than the stinging of the blown sand. Jaffe pressed an earphone to the side of his head. The hollow had been sown with tiny microphones before the MiLs arrived. He could, with difficulty, overhear parts of the conversation between the occupants of the two helicopters — mostly the Farsi from the terrorists in one of the main cabins rather than the Russian from the pilots.

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