The front wall of the conference room was a rear-projection display that showed a map of the southern half of Russia, with icons indicating the location of their air force bases, coded to indicate which type of aircraft were normally based there.
“Let’s have it,” Selig ordered.
“General, intelligence that’s been corroborated by DIA, CIA, and NSA indicates that the Russians have established a quarantine line along the Don and Volga rivers.” A red line appeared on the map, following the trace of the rivers between the Sea of Azov and the Caspian Sea. “They’ve backed it up with very aggressive enforcement by no fewer than six fighter squadrons that have orders to turn away any aircraft flying out of the Caucasus region or, if they refuse, shoot them down.” He hit a button on the podium, and a swarm of aircraft icons appeared along the quarantine line, extending along the adjoining border with Ukraine in the west, Kazakhstan to the east, and over the coasts of the Black and Caspian Seas. He hit the button again, and more aircraft icons appeared. “As you can see in this view, Belarus, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan have put up barrier patrols along their borders with Russia, and are refusing any aircraft passage across the border. The Finns have their F-18s up, and the Norwegians have F-16s on orbit opposite the Kola Peninsula.” By now, the colonel wore a distinctly unhappy expression. “In fact,” he went on as the borders between Russia and all of its neighbors, including China, turned red on the screen, “every neighboring country has closed their borders with Russia. They’re effectively isolated.”
Selig grimaced. “Just what we need, to make the Russians feel like they’re cut off. They’re paranoid as it is.”
Major General Sean Cranston, the USAFE Vice Commander, frowned. “What’s the status of their nuclear forces?”
“So far, sir, we haven’t seen any changes in readiness, and there haven’t been any incidents reported at any of their strategic sites.”
“Keep a close eye on that. The last thing we need is for any nukes to get loose in this mess.”
“Yes, sir.”
“What about the military aircraft in the south?” Selig asked, getting things focused back on the air situation. “They’ve got a lot of assets in the Caucasus Military District.”
“Yes, sir, they do. We haven’t received corroboration on this yet, but it looks like all their fighter and bomber aircraft in the Caucasus have been ordered to fly to six of the nearest airfields in the Volga-Ural Military District.” The airfields blinked on the map.
“Just their fighters and bombers?” Selig frowned. “What about the transports and helicopters?”
“They’re destroying them on the ground, sir.”
The response from both Selig and Cranston was simultaneous. “What?”
“That’s correct, sir. Imagery has confirmed that transport and rotary wing aircraft are being destroyed, and not just at the air bases or other military installations where intelligence has reported ongoing combat against…” The colonel ran out of words. They’d received an update from the Pentagon on what was happening in Los Angeles, and had been told that the same “biological agent” was at work in Russia, China, India, and elsewhere. But none of them could truly believe what they’d read in the report. “Regardless,” he went on, “it looks like they’re destroying everything beyond fighters and bomber aircraft.”
“The crews can’t be happy,” Selig said. “How are they supposed to get out?”
“They’re not, sir,” the colonel told him. “We’ve already received some reports of transports trying to leave that have been shot down, and FSB teams have been tasked with securing the airfields that haven’t already been compromised.”
“In God’s name, why?” Cranston was shocked. “Not only are they torching billions of rubles in assets, but they’re condemning invaluable aircrews! That’s insane!”
“We’re trying to get more details, sir, but right now our assessment is they don’t want to risk any possible contagion from those aircraft. For the aircraft that are being sent out, it looks like the crews are going to be quarantined and the aircraft sterilized. CIA reported that the FSB has sent special detachments to those six receiving airfields, along with Army decontamination units.”
“FSB?” Selig asked. “Not military police or GRU?” GRU, or Glavnoye Razvedyvatel’noye Upravleniye, the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, was the rough Russian equivalent of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, or DIA.
“No, sir, CIA was firm that they’re FSB, operating under direct orders from the prime minister. As for the aircraft, they’re being escorted by fighters outside the quarantine zone. Once they get to the receiving bases, from what we’ve seen so far they’re just packing the aircraft in as tight as they can.”
He pressed the button to move to the next graphic, which showed a satellite image of one of the air bases. “This is Sennoy Air Base, taken forty-five minutes ago. As you can see, it’s not a large facility, and only has a single runway. It typically hosts a small number of transport aircraft and helicopters. But here,” he pointed with a laser pointer at the eastern end of the apron, where fourteen aircraft were haphazardly clustered, “you can see a squadron of Su-27 Flankers that just arrived, along with what we believe are decontamination vehicles.” Eight military-style trucks with large liquid storage tanks were parked in a ring around the aircraft.
Selig shook his head. “They pushed those planes off into the grass?”
“Yes, sir. And here,” he moved the pointer to a spot about a hundred meters north of the main apron, “you can see portable shelters. We believe this is where they’re processing the flight crews, presumably to make sure they’re not, um, infected.”
Cranston pursed his lips. “I also see, what, a company of infantry combat vehicles around the shelters?”
“Correct, sir. And there are two tank platoons over here.” The pointer moved another hundred meters beyond the temporary shelters to where six brooding shapes sat, their barrels pointing in the direction of the shelters. “The other five quarantine airfields have similar heavy security for the new arrivals.”
“Okay,” Selig said, trying to force himself to fast forward into the surreal nightmare that reality had suddenly become, “what else.”
“In the European theater, the ground forces are on alert, but the only movements have been internal, mainly deploying units along the quarantine line.”
The colonel pressed another button, and a larger scale map appeared, showing all of western Russia and Europe as far as Germany.
Selig scowled at the clusters of red icons in the Black Sea, in the Gulf of Finland off Saint Petersburg, and in the Barents Sea outside of Severomorsk, where the Northern Fleet had its headquarters. “It looks like everything they have that can float has put to sea.”
“In a nutshell, general, that’s exactly what’s happened, but we believe for different reasons. We have information indicating that the Northern Fleet units put to sea as part of the general Russian military alert. But in the Black Sea, we believe the ships that have deployed, mostly out of Sevastopol and Odessa, are Russian ships forced to leave by the Ukrainians.” After the breakup of the Soviet Union, Ukraine wound up with the main Soviet Black Sea Fleet ports. After a great deal of political wrangling between the two new nations, Russia and Ukraine agreed to partition the fleet, with Russia leasing port facilities for their vessels from the Ukrainians. But Ukraine had never been terribly happy with the situation.
“Oh, shit,” Cranston said. “The Ukrainians got their wish: an excuse to kick the Russian Fleet out of the Crimea.”
“Yes, sir,” the colonel agreed. “Of course, that leaves the Russians with a problem. While the Russian ships so far have been steaming toward their own coast, the Russians don’t have port facilities available for all those ships in their own territory. At some point soon, we’re probably looking at a large-scale deployment of surface and submarine combatants into the Mediterranean. And that’s assuming
that the Russians and Ukrainians don’t start a shooting war over this.”
Cranston shook his head. “Vice Admiral Lafferty in Sixth Fleet must be going ballistic.”
“To say the least. Whatever this contagion is could blow up into World War Three.” Selig turned to his senior staff officers, all of whom were sitting around the table. “Make sure we’re tied in tight with Lafferty’s people. If things get out of hand, I want contingency plans in place so we can cover Sixth Fleet. The same goes for our NATO partners up north in case the Northern Fleet goes looking for trouble.” He considered his next words for a moment. “We haven’t received orders yet to do so, but I want the command pushed up to maximum combat readiness. Quietly.” He looked at his operations officer. “I want as much AWACS coverage as we can get, looking as deep as possible into Russian airspace without getting under their skin. Get a basic weapons load on our fighters and strike aircraft, but otherwise keep things low key. Keep the training tempo as it is; if we increase our training activity now, it’s going to worry them, and if we do a stand down, it’ll be worse. So far this is an internal problem for them. If it becomes something more, I want to be ready, but I don’t want our contingency preparations to inadvertently push them over the edge.” To the personnel officer, he said, “I’m not going to recall folks from leave yet, but as of now I’m curtailing everything but emergency leave. Our folks are going to have their hands full.”
Heads nodded and a murmur of “Yes, sir” went around the room.
Selig nodded for the colonel to continue.
“Sir, the last thing I have on the European theater is about a group of eight MiG-29 Fulcrums out of Lipetsk in the Moscow Military District.” The map changed again, zooming in on western Russia, with Moscow in the middle of the view. Lipetsk Air Base, more than two hundred kilometers south of Moscow, was highlighted. “One of the analysts in the 707th ISR Group somehow pulled this out of the clutter of all the other military aircraft movements that are taking place.” The 707th ISR, or Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance Group, was headquartered at the National Security Agency at Fort George G. Meade in Maryland. One of the group’s many jobs was to serve as the lead for the Global Air Analysis SIGINT mission, providing analysis and reporting on high-interest aerial activity. What was happening in Russia now definitely fell into that category.
The display showed a series of undulating tracks that began just south of Lipetsk. The aircraft the tracks represented were making long east-west sweeps, with the westerly legs taking them right up to the border with Ukraine, then Belarus, and then east as far as the Volga River, with the aircraft gradually moving north.
“What’s really interesting is this.” The colonel pointed to two aircraft icons that were different from those representing the fighters. “It looks like they’ve dedicated two Il-78M tankers out of Dyagilevo to keep these Fulcrums in the air. Just as a side note, those are the only tankers not supporting the barrier operation in the south.”
Selig, along with everyone else in the room, stared at the image, perplexed. The fighters doing sweeps like that was odd enough. That the Russians had dedicated two of their precious tankers to them was the real kicker. “What the devil are they up to?”
The colonel glanced at the map behind him, then turned back to Selig. “We think they’re looking for something.”
* * *
“Do you think they’re looking for us?” Jack stared out the windscreen, helping Khatuna and Mikhailov watch for other planes. They’d seen quite a few, far above their own tree-skimming altitude.
“Probably, but stop worrying,” Mikhailov advised. “The first we will know if they have found us is a warning over the radio, if they choose to give one. Otherwise, it will be cannon shells or a missile. Then, pfft!” He looked outside at the endless white expanse, his expression turning serious. “The FSB will likely determine that it was we who stole the petrol in Zadonsk, and from that they will know the type of aircraft we are flying, and some fool at the petrol station probably took down the plane’s number. But they cannot know our destination, at least not for certain.”
“Sure they can. Where are we going to go with this thing loaded with fuel drums? Siberia?”
“Maybe we should. They would never think to look for us there.”
“Do you have wife?” Khatuna suddenly asked, looking at Mikhailov.
“No, I do not.”
“If you did, she would hit you.”
“I think that means she is interested in the job,” Mikhailov said to Jack, with a wink to Khatuna.
Exasperated, she rolled her eyes and focused her attention on keeping the badly overloaded biplane in the air.
Mikhailov looked again at the map, on which he’d penciled in their course. From Zadonsk, he’d had Khatuna fly northwest for an hour, which took them nearly two hundred kilometers to Oryol. The next leg, the one they were on now, took them north-northwest for more than seven hundred kilometers, and was probably the most dangerous part of their long journey. Moscow, two hundred kilometers off their starboard wing now, was ringed with Air Force bases, with more spread throughout the rest of the military district around them. “I think we will be able to avoid most of the fighter bases,” Mikhailov said as his finger traced their course. He had marked the bases he knew about, and had Khatuna take the plane lower, sometimes down to less than thirty meters, when they came within fifty kilometers of any of them. It was terribly dangerous, because the plane, which normally was almost impossible to send into a stall, was so heavy that it seemed to want to fall from the sky with only the slightest provocation.
But they had no choice.
Mikhailov craned his neck to the left, looking out Khatuna’s side. Vyazma Air Base was close, only twenty kilometers away. If he remembered correctly, only rotary wing aircraft were stationed there. Of course, helicopters could carry weapons, and a Mi-24 attack helicopter could easily catch the laboring An-2.
“So if we make it past Moscow, then what?”
Looking back at the map, Mikhailov pointed. “Once we reach Lake Ilmen, here,” his finger rested on a large lake almost two hundred kilometers south of Saint Petersburg, “we turn north to fly over Lake Ladoga, which will still probably be mostly frozen over, and keep going until we reach Norway.”
“Nice. All we need now is in-flight service.”
Khatuna huffed. One of the things they hadn’t found in the plane had been food, nor was there anything to drink other than a half-empty (“Or half-full,” as Mikhailov happily pointed out) bottle of vodka behind the copilot’s seat. If they were lucky and made it to Norway, they’d be in the air at least ten hours. It was going to be a hungry and thirsty flight. Jack mentally kicked himself for not thinking of raiding the truck stop for whatever munchies they might have had.
“Look at it this way,” Mikhailov said, glancing down at his lap and the fading stain there from when he’d wet himself, “without food and water, we will not have to worry so much about the lack of a toilet.”
Khatuna fixed him with a hard gaze that she couldn’t hold. Her scowl dissolved into a grin.
Mikhailov told Jack, making sure Khatuna could hear, “I think she likes me.” He chuckled at her scandalized expression.
Then he began to cough up blood. Lots of it.
“What has happened?” Khatuna stared at Mikhailov, and Jack could tell what she was thinking.
“No, he’s not infected! He has a shattered rib that punctured his lung, and it’s finally collapsed.” From the amount of blood Mikhailov was coughing up, he clearly had other internal injuries. That didn’t surprise Jack at all, considering the shape Mikhailov had been in before the harvester had tried to kill him in the hospital in Stavropol, and everything that had happened since. “Damn it!”
“What can we do?”
The large veins in Mikhailov’s neck were standing out, and his skin was starting to turn blue as he desperately gasped for air.
Jack had seen this once before, in Afghanistan after
one of his soldiers had taken a bullet to the chest. He’d been there when the medic had treated the young man by sticking a needle into his chest to relieve the built-up pressure in the chest cavity, allowing the lung to reinflate. Jack couldn’t remember the details, but he remembered that much.
“Is there a first aid kit in here?”
“Da, there is one here, next to me.” Keeping one hand on the control yoke, she leaned over and pulled out the kit, handing it to Jack.
He pulled it open and cursed. There were bandaids, gauze, tape, and a few other odds and ends that were of absolutely no use to him. “Shit! I need a needle, a big needle. Or maybe a pen.” He checked his own pockets, but came up empty. He hadn’t had any need for pens, or time to grab any, before they’d jumped into Ulan-Erg.
“Here!” Khatuna snatched up a cheap ballpoint pen in a pocket beside her. It was the same kind as the one Mikhailov had used to draw their course on the map, but that one had gone clattering to the floor when he began to thrash around.
Jack grabbed it and shoved it in a pocket for the moment. “Hang on, buddy,” he said to Mikhailov. “Sorry, but I’m going to have to pull you out of here.”
Unbuckling Mikhailov’s harness, Jack awkwardly hauled him out of the copilot’s seat. Mikhailov’s eyes bulged and he gasped in agony, more blood streaming from the corner of his mouth.
As gently as he could, Jack laid him on top of the nearest barrels in the cargo hold. He ripped open Mikhailov’s tunic, then slit his shirt open with his knife to expose the Russian’s battered chest. The lower left side was badly bruised, and Jack assumed that’s where the lung had been punctured.
Jack couldn’t remember exactly where the medic had inserted the needle back in Afghanistan, but seemed to recall it was in the upper part of the chest. Taking the pen, he placed the tip between two of Mikhailov’s upper ribs on the left side. “Sorry, Sergei, but this is going to hurt like hell.”
The Last Days: Six Post-Apocalyptic Thrillers Page 36