“And, by the way, I hate to burst your bubble, but that kiss she gave you on the airplane? It was to get a sample of your DNA—just to make sure it was really you, not some fake. And her name really is classified. You know how things are these days.”
“I guess I’m learning,” Hunter half muttered.
“We had to feed you information without your knowing it,” she went on, “because what we are working on is even bigger than the Russians invading New York City. And I mean real, live, take-over-the world stuff. Enslave the planet or we’ll destroy it. That’s the level of crisis.”
“But who could do something on that scale?” he asked.
She opened the red-striped pouch, pulled out a single photograph, and showed it to him.
It was a middle-aged man with a thin face, sharp features, a mustache and goatee, and a scar on his left cheek.
“Viktor Robotov,” he said, not surprised. “The devil himself.”
“That’s going easy on him,” Dominique confirmed. “Well, he’s come upon a nuclear submarine that was built at the same secret base and at the same time as the Isakov. This sub is also highly automated and can launch nuclear missiles, but not just ordinary ones. It can fire a secret SBM called solntse raketa, loose Russian for ‘sun bomb.’ You’ve actually seen them. The warheads come in bright yellow boxes.”
Hunter nodded. “Hard to forget that color.”
“Sun bomb is a good name for it,” she continued. “They detonate very high in the atmosphere with a flash so bright, it will permanently blind anyone within a two-hundred-mile radius. That could mean millions of people at once. It’s a terrorist weapon. A weapon of control.”
Hunter shook his head in disbelief. “Where the hell did that kind of weapon come from?”
“A place called the Kapustin Yar,” she replied. “It’s like a combination of Area 51 and Cape Canaveral in the Urals. The home of Russia’s top mad scientists. They built the sun bombs there years ago, but even they realized how nasty the weapons were, so they just hid them away. Viktor found out about them and secretly arranged to have them included in the shipment of WMD heading for New York City.
“We’re sure that his strategy is to hit a few random cities with the sun bombs, just to show the rest of the world what he can do. Any country the Russian military has conquered in the past two years would be on his target list, as well as a few that remain independent of Russia. After a few cities experience that kind of horror, who would want to go up against him?”
“And how does Zmeya tie into all this?” Hunter asked.
“You didn’t see the family resemblance, I guess,” she replied. “But those rumors are true. Zmeya was Viktor’s son—so was the commander of the Isakov, Yuri.
“Brother Yuri was transporting the box of sun bombs, or the Magilla, as everyone called it. Again, it was hidden among the tons of other WMD aboard the carrier, and even the NKVD higher-ups in Moscow didn’t know about it. The plan was to unload all that other stuff in New York and then secretly deliver the Magilla to dear old dad’s submarine at a spot in the ocean somewhere off New York City.
“But when the commissar heard something was going wrong on the Isakov, he flew out there, not to save his brother, but to get the Magilla, just so Dad wouldn’t go nuts on him. It was important for him to succeed in the eyes of his father, especially because his little brother had failed. I mean, number one son was virtually running the NKVD, and little brother was captain of the world’s most powerful warship. Basically, the family had the Russian military doing their dirty work for them, conquering countries they planned to terrorize in the near future.
“But believe me, these people are right out of a bad Shakespeare play. Neither son dared disappoint his father, yet now they’re both dead, one killed by the other.”
She showed him a photograph of a desk calendar processed in reverse negative so the impressions of what had been written on it were easy to read.
In the box for May 11, four days after the MMZ firebombing, six rows of numbers had been neatly written in. The first row was seven-seven seven-seven. The last was four-zero seven-four. These had been circled.
“All we really wanted was that first row of numbers,” Dominique told him. “I spent hours looking for them, so did Gagarin, the Halo copter crew, everyone. Trashman literally went through 30 Rock’s rubbish looking for them. So did the Worm; he was working inside the rackets for the Reds as a real numbers dealer, but he was also on a mission for us.
“Anyway, Viktor actually called Zmeya that night, and in that conversation, he revealed the location of his sub’s home base with these numbers.”
Hunter was impressed. “How did you ever figure it out from just a bunch of numbers?”
“It’s the old Ottoman Naval Purple Code,” she explained. “Simple really, if you have the right numbers. Seven-seven seven-seven are the longitude and latitude coordinates for the secret shipyard where the sub and the Isakov were built. The rest of the numbers make up a nonverbal communications schedule. ‘I’m going to start at seven-seven seven-seven. Leave your radio on, and when you hear three clicks, you know I’m at the next lat and long number, maybe off Norway somewhere. When you hear three clicks at the third number, you know I’m off Iceland, and so on.
“The numbers seven-seven seven-seven are for the Kara Sea off Siberia near the Arctic Circle. Four-zero seven-four is New York City. Viktor was telling his son that his sub was leaving the Kara Sea and would contact him at points along the way until they got to New York to make the Magilla switch. Zmeya wrote the numbers down because he wrote everything down, and when I took the desk calendar, we finally got the break we needed. We finally knew where Viktor’s secret base was.
“Now, once he realizes what’s happened here, I doubt he’ll be sailing this way anytime soon. But because we know the location of the secret shipyard—and that it probably doubles as his base of operations—we’re going to launch a strike on the place. Once we take it out, he’ll be a man without a home base. The Russians certainly won’t want him back, not after the debacle engineered by his two kids. And he won’t have this load of sun bombs. But … we know he has at least a half dozen experimental warheads with almost the same capacity, so the threat has not diminished. That’s why we have to track him down asap.”
“But how did Fitz find out about the sun bombs in the first place?” Hunter asked. “Their existence must have been highly top secret.”
She laughed. “Well, you know Fitz,” she said. “He has people inside the Kremlin. No one sympathetic to our cause, they’re all just paid informants. But they’re deeply imbedded and high on the food chain. They tipped off Fitz about the missing sun bombs and almost simultaneously told him about Viktor’s submarine. That’s when Fitz knew he had to do something, but something very secret.
“Truthfully, things were happening so fast, we didn’t know if we were going to make it. We had to find out Viktor’s plans and come up with a way to stop him, all while a war was going on in New York City.”
“But once you had my DNA,” Hunter said, “why didn’t you let me in on it then? I could have helped.”
She laughed again. “Do you have any idea what your DNA looks like?” she replied. “All this jumping around that you do has altered it, to say the least. We talked about it, but in the end, we decided what we were doing was just too important to take the chance—and we knew you’d understand.”
They were quiet for a while, just looking out on the ocean and feeling its cooling breeze. Hunter was trying to process it all.
“You’ve still got a tough job ahead of you,” he finally said. “Finding Viktor’s sub and stopping him? He could be anywhere. How are you going to do it?”
“By fighting fire with fire,” she said, adding, “Let me show you.”
They walked to the cliff and she asked him, “What do you see?”
“The ocea
n,” he replied. “The cliff. The beach. The sand …”
“Look closer, at the bottom of the cliff,” she said.
Hunter did as she requested. It took a while, but he eventually realized a lot of the shrubbery and beach flora was actually artificial and stuck into a huge net, at least as big as the one that covered the Pine Barrens base.
Underneath all that camo was a submarine. A very large, very powerful-looking one tied up in a deep trench next to the cliff.
“Jesus, is that a Trident sub?” Hunter gasped.
“The USS Ohio,” she replied. “One of the first Tridents to go to sea, and also one of the first to be adapted for both an attack role and special ops.”
Hunter just shook his head again. The engineering to dock the sub here and keep it hidden was enormous. “And let me guess, it now belongs to Fitz.”
“He bought it because he knows it’s probably the only way we can catch Viktor, sub versus sub,” she replied. “But once we realized what you guys were doing in New York, he also knew we had to use it to help you out, but only from a distance.”
“You mean the second battle cruiser?” he asked her. “And two of the destroyers? That was you?”
She nodded. “I was told the sub’s crew—all Irish mercs by the way—had perfected their underwater attack skills by that time. They were out there watching for Viktor and following what you guys were doing as well. When you needed an assist, they’re the ones who came through.”
“And this ship the Bruynyzi? The one with all the firefighting equipment on board? How did you ever know that was something that would work so well into our plans? I mean of all the ships to hit …”
She smiled again. “Well, Fitz told me he can’t take credit for that. Frankly, that was target practice after our sub crew spotted the original Russian fleet heading somewhere—and that somewhere turned out to be New York City, something that was confirmed by Fitz’s Kremlin moles. As for hitting just the right ship? That was divine intervention. Or something.”
Then she turned his attention to the southern end of the bluffs, the hayfield he used to work when they lived here.
“Once again, take a closer look,” she said.
It took another few moments, but at last, Hunter realized he was looking at two helicopters parked under a hay-covered camo net. Again, more excellent camouflage.
One helicopter was the mammoth Mi-26 Russian Halo. The other was a CH-21 “Flying Banana” used by US troops early in the Vietnam War. This was the copter that had landed on top of Tower Two and spirited Dominique and the Magilla away.
“If you take an even closer look,” she said. “You will see we have security in place around here as well.”
Again Hunter squinted as he looked into the nearby woods and gradually saw there were at least a dozen armed men in green camouflage jungle uniforms watching over them from about a hundred feet away.
“They’re all part of Fitz’s new gang,” she explained. “More Irish mercs. He got the old uniforms for a bargain—that’s why everyone’s dressed that way. The copter, too. So he has a little air force of his own, too.”
“Figures Fitz would bring Vietnam unis back into style,” Hunter said. “And save a buck doing it.”
“Well, after buying an enormous Trident sub,” Dominique said, “he had to be somewhat frugal.”
Hunter looked around the property, realizing now that it was a very elaborately hidden military base.
“Well, I hope he’s paying rent for all this,” he said, only half kidding. At that moment, someone walked up behind them. It was Sergei Gagarin, the man with the eye patch.
“They’re expecting the callback from Canada,” he told Dominique, his accent now thoroughly Irish. “Mike needs you to be there.”
Dominique walked over and hugged the man.
“Thanks, darling,” she said. Gagarin kissed her cheek and then walked back up to the farmhouse.
Hunter was thrown for another loop, but only for a few seconds. There was something about the two of them standing together. They both looked regal. And they were obviously a couple. Did this mean he’d been right all along? He was in a different universe where he and Dominique were just … friends?
But she was shaking her head. She knew what he was thinking.
“No, Hawk, ” she said. “I thought you were dead. Everyone did. Then I heard the rumors of the shuttle crashing out near Football City, and I began to wonder. But when I saw that little plane and the way it was flying, I was sure it was you. But I also knew what was at stake. And I knew I had to carry on with what I was doing. To tell you the truth, I just shut it all out and forced myself not to think about it until things were resolved.”
She reached out and touched his face.
“It was ten long years,” she said, her eyes welling up again. “And when Fitz brought Sergei in to help, well, we just clicked, and …”
She choked up for a moment and then said, “It’s the same universe, Hawk. … It’s just that people change. You certainly have. And so have I.”
Chapter Fifty-One
Otis Air Force Base, Cape Cod
May 24
The four Su-34 JLRs were lined up on the runway, engines turning furiously. Behind them, four more Su-34s—these were the buddy tankers. All the jet fighters were painted in naval gray and bearing American flag emblems on their sides and wings. Hunter was in the fourth Su-34 at the end of the first line.
The new American Naval Air Force had joined the plan to strike Viktor’s secret shipyard—and the fact that the aerial portion of the mission would originate from Otis was drenched in irony. This was where Hunter and other American pilots had run ZAP—the Zone Air Patrol—soon after the Big War. In many ways, Otis was where it had all started. Hunter had a lot of history with this place. They all did.
The four fighters and their tankers were about to take off for one final training mission before the actual strike against the arctic shipyard was launched. Other elements of the newly combined air and sea assault were moving into place. Operation Skyfire was just seventy-two hours away.
Bull Dozer had been brought into the Fitz Group. At first, he’d been as incredulous as Hunter had been when he’d learned what Fitz’s people had been doing in New York during the Okupatsi. But when he recalled Fitz’s telling him earlier that he was on to something very hot, the pieces had fallen into place, and the old marine had become a quick convert. When he offered the Su-34s to be part of the strike package, Fitz quickly accepted.
Dozer had come up to Otis to help with the last-minute details of the mission. Fitz’s people knew exactly where the secret shipyard was—the southern tip of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Kara Sea, just off the coast of western Siberia—and the new expanded plan was simple. Hit the place with a massive air strike and then, with USS Fitz submerged nearby, sink anything that tried to escape. With the flight being four thousand miles one way, the mission would put the ultra-long range Su-34 JLR to the test. But that’s exactly what the airplane had been built for.
Meanwhile, most of Fitz’s intelligence operatives were undercover again, traveling to other locations around the world in hopes of determining Viktor’s whereabouts in case they didn’t catch him during the shipyard strike. Dominique was among those forward deployed.
Dozer appeared on the tarmac just as Hunter was doing his last preflight checks. He’d helped the Wingman strap in, handing him yet another borrowed crash helmet.
Cigar going as always, the marine told his friend, “I see they gave you the extra-large fuel tanks. I’m guessing they’ll get you to Canada no problem once the training mission is over.”
“I know what they’re for, Bull,” Hunter said, trying to ignore him.
Hunter had a classified radiophone number in his pocket, right next to Saul Wackerman’s flag. He’d used it once, leaving a short message. But that’s where it
ended with him right now, he had more immediate things to think about. “Lots of stuff has changed in the past few weeks,” Dozer went on. “Just look at yourself. In a new airplane. In a new American air force. These things usually come in threes, you know.”
“I thought your lucky number was five?” Hunter joked.
Dozer laughed and patted him on the shoulder. “Touché, brother.”
Then he was gone. Hunter punched his mission codes into the flight computer and then watched the control panel light up green. All the instrument translations had been done already, but he knew pretty much how everything worked anyway. It came naturally.
The special Su-34 JLR felt good underneath him. He fiercely disliked the Russians, but he loved this airplane. He’d been doing little else but flying it for the past few days. The Fitz Group was very excited to have him on board.
They started taxiing. JT in the lead, then Ben, Crunch, and himself. Their buddy tankers would take off right after them. Every plane in the training package had a two-man crew except for Hunter’s. He just wanted to ride this one alone.
Besides, once it was over, his return destination would be different from theirs.
They got the final go-code for takeoff. Ironically, it came from Gagarin, who also passed on a coded message telling them Fitz’s Boomer sub was closing in on the target and would be in position in less than forty-eight hours. So, a two-prong attack was assured.
Then Dominique’s new gentleman friend wished them good luck and signed off. From that moment on, they were in radio silence.
Hunter took off in sequence and climbed to twenty-five thousand feet, where the entire package formed up. Then he turned with the others and headed due north.
It was a two-hour mission. They rehearsed both low- and high-altitude over-water strike approaches and then dropped practice bombs on an isolated island off the coast of uppermost northern Maine. Called Steels Harbor, it was almost an exact duplicate of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in the Kara Sea.
Battle for America Page 30