56
“Ready to rock?” Holly asked the others as she tried to stretch the kinks out of her back. The only cab at the airport had been a thirty-year-old Zhiguli compact gypsy cab. The ride across Samara had been painfully cramped even with just the four of them.
Jon looked equally bent out of shape. Tim and Tom, the two 24th STS Air Combat Controllers who’d joined them in Ramstein, looked a little better off.
Holly had forgotten the smell of Russia. There was a dry-cold that pervaded every other scent. Cabbage and dry-cold. Aging, untuned exhaust from the Zhiguli, and dry-cold. The sagging industrial zone that surrounded the gleaming gray-and-glass facade of the Progress Space Rocket Centre’s entrance, squatting atop a flight of concrete steps like a sleeping bear ready to awaken and crush
