The booster fires, and Taras feels the Bars leave the rails in his back teeth before his eyes catch up.
For half a second the field is lit white to the treeline, every frozen furrow standing up in relief, the Hilux bucking on its springs. Then the booster tumbles off into the dark and the turbojet takes over, a thin climbing whine like a dentist’s drill heard through an apartment wall. Taras keeps his eyes on the tablet. The green chevron banks north, steadies, and settles on a heading for Ryazan and the refinery beyond it that has been on the list since September.
Bohdan is already up on the truck bed. He slaps the empty rail twice with a flat gloved palm, the way he slaps every airframe before it goes, like a groom sending a horse out of a stall. Taras has never asked what it’s for. He assumes it’s for nothing.
“Good girl,” Bohdan tells the rail. “Go cost them money.”
Taras pockets the tablet and stamps his boots. The cold has found the seams of his gloves. Out here the snow has a crust that squeaks, and the only light is Kharkiv’s glow smeared across the underside of the clouds to the south.
His phone sits in his chest pocket, against his ribs. Two winters ago it buzzed there all night, Shahed, Shahed, ballistic, Shahed, until he learned to sleep through it. That was the arithmetic of the war as Taras understood it. Russia sent hundreds in a night, the city absorbed them, and he and Bohdan drove out to a field and sent back one. Every launch felt like answering a barrage by throwing a rock.
“Listen,” Bohdan says.
Taras hears it before he understands it. A ragged buzzing rises from the south, a two-stroke engine straining like a moped on a steep hill, then another behind it, and another, until the sound stops being engines and becomes something closer to weather. The piston drones come over low, Liutyis and FP-1s, their wings just visible where the city’s glow lights the cloud from beneath. They pass in a loose river, flat and patient, chewing north at the speed of a car on a highway.
Then the jets. Palianytsias, Peklos, more Bars from teams Taras can’t see, each one a quick tearing whoosh that starts behind his left shoulder and is over the treeline before he can turn his head. They lay over the pistons the way a snare plays over a bass drum.
“How many teams are out?” Taras asks.
Bohdan pulls his scarf down off his mouth. “Everyone with a truck.”
Something heavier comes from the southwest. Taras feels it in his sternum first, a deep and level roar, an airliner’s voice coming from something flying far too low to be an airliner. Snow sifts off the hedgerow beside the Hilux. The Flamingo crosses above them like a freight train on an elevated track, a long dark body with a dull orange glow at its tail, and the whole field seems to lean after it.
Bohdan tips his head toward the west. Far off, a pair of jet engines wind up and then fall away as the aircraft turns for home.
“Sukhoi,” he says. “He’s already let go.”
Taras listens for the missile. He hears the pistons, the jets, his own breath in the scarf. The Storm Shadow is somewhere ahead of all of them, skimming the snow at rooftop height, and it is the quietest thing in the sky.
He tries to count. He reaches sixty in the pistons alone, loses the thread when a cluster of jets rips through, starts over, and quits somewhere past a hundred. The river keeps coming. In his chest pocket the phone lies still against his ribs.
“Time for second load,” Bohdan says, and drops off the bed into the snow.
Taras climbs up to stow the tablet case. Before he jumps down he puts his palm flat on the cold rail and slaps it twice.
The heater rattles and blows air that smells of burnt dust. Bohdan drives the farm track with the lights off, steering by the pale stripe of the ruts, then turns onto the highway toward the city. Taras sits with his hands under his thighs, waiting for feeling to come back.
The first truck comes at them out of the dark, running blacked out the same as they are: a Hilux with launch rails under a tarp, snow packed in its wheel wells. Behind it a flatbed hauls a long shape strapped down under canvas. Then a battered L200 with two Bars lashed nose to tail, and a white Sprinter van with the tail fin of a Liutyi poking out through its half-open rear doors.
The van’s driver lifts two fingers off the wheel as they pass. Bohdan lifts two back.
Taras turns in his seat and watches their shapes shrink against the snow, rolling toward the field he just left.