by Dale Brown
“You were right on time,” Hal said. “Three more seconds and the colonel would’ve been turned into Swiss cheese.”
“Roger that,” Carter said. “Glad we could help. We’re going to pay a visit on a couple other Russki aircraft heading your way. The closest ground troops are about eight miles southwest. We don’t have any air-to-ground weapons on board the Megafortress, but we can create some confusion for you. Watch the skies.”
“Thanks, Bobcat.” Briggs jet-jumped over to Griffin. “You okay, sir?”
“I’m here to tell you, Hal,” Griffin said weakly, “that it is possible to see your life flash in front of your eyes twice in one night. I sure as hell did.”
“You saved our bacon, Colonel,” Hal said, helping Griffin strip off the useless battle armor. “You’ve earned the right to join our exclusive club if you so choose.”
“I’ve got a desk back in San Antonio waiting for me, along with a wife and kids — I think that’s where I’ll stay for a while,” Griffin responded honestly. “That is, if we can get out of here without Condor.”
At that moment Hal turned. He’d received another warning tone in his helmet. “A vehicle heading toward us — I thought Carter said it was clear?” Hal raised his rail gun, preparing to engage.
Then he saw Jalaluddin Turabi frantically waving from his perch atop the Russian armored personnel carrier. He and Dendara had returned to the place where they’d been captured and absconded with the APC and weapons.
“It’s a piece of crap! Don’t these Russians believe in cleaning their vehicles?” Turabi asked. “But it should get us to Repetek, where my men will be waiting. Shall we go?”
Cia Air-Operations Base, Near Bukhara,
Republic of Uzbekistan
Later that day
Confirmed, sir,” the unit intelligence officer said, handing his commanding officer a report. “The damned Air Force again.”
“I thought so,” the commander said angrily. He read the report, shaking his head, then crumpled up the paper and banged a fist on his desk. “A commando operation supported by a damned B-52 bomber—and they don’t say one friggin’ word about it to us or to anyone at Langley. Where was Turabi taken?”
“Chärjew, then by air to the USS Lincoln in the Arabian Sea,” the intelligence officer replied. “Bob, we’ve got to pull all our assets in right now. The Russians are going to sweep east, take Mary, then sweep north and bomb the living daylights out of us at any time. We’ve got to exfil our guys and get out of here.”
“I know, damn it, I know. A year of work down the tubes — not just in Turkmenistan but all the way to Iran and all over Central Asia. The Air Force really screwed us last night.”
The commander looked up from his desk at the hanger where his office was located. He had a U.S. Air Force MH-53M Pave Low IV special-ops helicopter and crew standing by ready to go, along with its crew of six and a team of twelve commandos — and there was no doubt that he could get volunteers to fill up the chopper if he asked. He had a large contingent of operatives and valuable informants on the streets of Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan, and also down inside Iran, throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, and as far away as Krasnovodsk, the big Russian port on the Caspian Sea — all turning up information on enemy activity in Central Asia. He had guys deep inside Al Qaeda, the Russian military, Afghani drug cartels, and terrorist groups for thousands of miles around.
All compromised because of some half-assed Air Force operation near Mary.
It was too risky to stay in Uzbekistan now. The Russians were going to be like a large hive of angry bees — stirred up, swarming, and mad as hell, ready to lash out at anything that wasn’t 100 percent verified Russian. The whole Central Asia operation was in danger. A lot of Russians had been killed by the Americans as they fought their way out of Turkmenistan — no doubt the Russians wanted payback.
“We got no choice,” he said finally. “Send messages via secure microburst transmissions and radio interference, telling our guys to hightail it out into the back country and start monitoring the pickup points.” The CIA operatives used their own secret microburst transceivers — coded messages sent and received by devices that compressed messages into microsecond-long bursts, thereby reducing the chances of their being detected or used to backtrace their location. The CIA headquarters also sent messages by broadcasting interference signals overlaid on regular radio and TV broadcasts — sometimes as simple as bursts of static, other times images that could be seen only with special lenses or by slowing down videotapes of certain shows — to relay messages to their informants or agents in deep cover.
Over time all the field operatives and informants who wished to leave would get the message, and they would execute their escape plan. The actual procedure differed widely for individual agents, but the objective was for each agent to report to one of several exfiltration points near where he or she lived or worked and wait for a sign or message that the agent was going to get picked up. It could take days, sometimes weeks — patience and trust were the key words here. Sometimes agents would be on the run, hiding out in the wilderness. If they were lucky, they could maintain their covers while checking the spots daily for a sign that their rescuers were nearby.
“Roger that,” the intel officer said. “Everyone’s been in fairly close contact. We should have no trouble rounding them all up.”
“That’s because the Air Force stirred up the Russians before, too,” the commander said bitterly. “I am going to make sure that Langley chews some butt at the Pentagon this time. Someone’s got to lose his stars over this. They just can’t—”
The unit commander was nearly knocked off his chair by the first massive explosion, but by the time he leaped to his feet and began running for the exit, the second bomb crashed through the ceiling of the hangar and exploded. He never heard or felt anything after that….
* * *
The CIA air base in Uzbekistan was certainly no secret to anyone — especially not the Russians. Since Russia was a full partner in the defense of Uzbekistan, and Russia was mostly responsible for Uzbekistan’s border security and defense, the Russians had plenty of information on anyone moving across the frontier — including the CIA agents and their most trusted informants.
But instead of simply raiding the CIA field headquarters, Russia had other plans for them.
A lone Tupolev-22M Backfire bomber swept in over the desert plains of eastern Uzbekistan. It had been cleared into Kazakhstan by Russian air-traffic controllers based at Alma-Ata and monitored by other Russian air-traffic controllers in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, who watched the speedy bomber as it descended rapidly from high altitude down to just a few hundred meters from the surface. There were actually three Backfires that had launched from their secret Siberian base, but after their last aerial refueling, the crews chose the best-operating aircraft to complete the mission.
Skirting the Bishkek radars, the Backfire bomber proceeded at low altitude across the vast southern Kazakh plains, staying below the coverage of air-defense radars in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Minutes later the bomber started a slight wings-level climb. At an altitude of one thousand meters, it began its attack.
The Tu-22M carried three large air-launched missiles called the Kh-31, one in the bomb bay and one on external hardpoints on the non-moving portion of each wing. Each six-hundred-kilogram missile had a ninety-kilogram high-explosive fragmentary warhead designed to blast apart lightweight structures like radar arrays and antennas with ease. After release, the missile shot ahead of the bomber using its small first-stage solid-rocket motor, then climbed rapidly through fifteen thousand meters’ altitude using its big second-stage motor. When the second-stage motor burned out, the motor casing became a ramjet combustion chamber, which automatically fired and quickly accelerated the missile through Mach 3. The Kh-31 initially used its inertial navigation system to steer toward its target, but it received position and velocity updates through its GLONASS satellite-navigation system,
which greatly improved its accuracy to near-precision quality. It needed less than four minutes to fly the two hundred kilometers to its target. Once within thirty seconds of its target, it switched to a passive radar detector and homed directly in on a specific radar frequency.
One Kh-31 missile lost contact with its carrier aircraft and hit harmlessly somewhere in the central Uzbek deserts — but the other missiles continued their flight with devastating accuracy, destroying the air-defense radar sites at Tashkent and at Samarkand, a large city in southeastern Uzbekistan. With the Uzbek radars shut down, the Tu-22M proceeded south into Uzbekistan and set up an orbit, blanketing the area with electronic jamming signals and also monitoring the activities about to begin.
The second part of the operation had actually taken place nearly a half hour earlier. Orbiting over southern Siberia at fifteen thousand meters, a Tupolev-95MS “Bear” bomber, a long-range turboprop aircraft first designed in the 1940s, had released two eleven-meter-long missiles from wing pylons about twenty seconds apart. Code-named the Kh-90 “Karonka,” or “Crown,” it was one of the world’s most advanced land-attack missiles. The missiles’ first stage was a solid rocket motor, which accelerated the missile to almost Mach 2. As in the Kh-31s launched by the Backfire bomber, when the first-stage motor burned out, the rocket chamber became a ramjet engine. Air was compressed and accelerated inside the ramjet, and liquid rocket fuel was injected and burned. As the missile gained speed, air and fuel were squeezed and accelerated even more, until the missile soon was cruising at over eight times the speed of sound.
The missiles streaked across Siberia and Kazakhstan, climbing to twenty-five thousand meters’ altitude, then started a steep dive toward their target. Steered by signals from the Russian GLONASS, their accuracy was superb. At an altitude of ten thousand meters, each missile ejected two independently targeted 150-kilogram high-explosive warheads.
The CIA operations base next to the abandoned airfield outside Bukhara, Uzbekistan, consisted of only four buildings inside a ten-acre fenced compound — two aircraft hangars, each of which doubled as a storage facility, ammo dump, and training center; a natural-gas-fired power generator and well pumphouse; and a headquarters building, which doubled as a barracks. The warheads hit each structure dead on. The explosions were so powerful that the fuel and munitions inside the hangars did not even have a chance to explode.
They simply disappeared in a cloud of superheated gas.
2
Barksdale Air Force Base, Bossier City, Louisiana
Days later
What in hell do you mean, you don’t know where it came from?” Lieutenant General Terrill Samson, commander of Eighth Air Force, thundered. Terrill Samson was a truly imposing man, even when seated, and a few of the staff members arrayed around him in the headquarters battle-staff area jumped when he shouted, even though they were accustomed to his loud, frequent outbursts. “A Russian bomber completely wipes out a CIA field-operations base in Uzbekistan, and you’re telling me we still don’t know where it came from or what weapon it used, General McLanahan? It didn’t just pop up out of nowhere!”
“Sir, we’re working on it,” Patrick McLanahan said. He was speaking via secure videoconference from the Command and Operations Center of the Air Intelligence Agency at its headquarters in San Antonio, Texas. “The Nine-sixty-sixth should have that information shortly. We have almost constant surveillance on every Russian bomber base west of the Urals. So far every one of those bases’ normal inventory has been accounted for—”
“What about Engels’s bombers, General?” Major General Gary Houser asked.
“Sir, we still have no firm estimates on how many planes survived, how many damaged planes were reconstituted, or where any survivors were relocated,” Patrick responded. Engels Air Base in southwestern Russia was the largest bomber base in Russia and the headquarters of Aviatsiya Voyska Strategischeskovo Naznacheniya (A-VSN), or Strategic Aviation Force, Russia’s intercontinental-bomber command, composed of subsonic Tupolev-95 Bear bombers, supersonic Tupolev-160 “Blackjack” bombers, Ilyushin-78 “Midas” aerial-refueling tankers, and Tupolev-16 “Badger” tankers and electronic-warfare aircraft. “Our poststrike intelligence after the raid reported twelve possible Backfire survivors, plus another ten with only minor damage. The base itself is still not operational, but it may be usable, so it’s likely that any surviving bombers could have made it out.”
“Engels’s bombers, eh?” Samson muttered, shaking his head. “I should have known.” It was well known throughout the command — and most of the world — that Patrick McLanahan’s former unit, the Air Battle Force, had conducted a surprise bombing raid on Engels Air Base. During the conflict with Turkmenistan, Russia was about to initiate a massive bomber raid from Engels against government and Taliban troops threatening Russian bases and interests in that oil-rich country. Using his fleet of unmanned long-range bombers launched from Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, Patrick had destroyed several Russian bombers on the ground at Engels, damaged several more, and severely damaged the base itself.
Although Patrick’s raid had halted the conflict in Turkmenistan and allowed United Nations peacekeepers to enter that country safely and establish a cease-fire, most of the U.S. government, the Pentagon, and the world had blamed Patrick McLanahan for the rising tensions between Russia and the United States. No one expected him still to be wearing an American military uniform, let alone a general’s star.
Least of all Lieutenant General Terrill Samson, Patrick’s new boss.
“We’ve tried to account for the survivors, through surveillance as well as through diplomatic channels, but have not been successful,” Patrick went on. “We should have an answer shortly as to where they came from. The Russians are bound by the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty to state exactly how many long-range bombers they have and their precise location; under the Open Skies Treaty, we have a right to verify that information ourselves. Russia can’t legally withhold that information. We will—”
“General McLanahan, thanks to your unsanctioned, wasteful, and wholly unnecessary attack on Engels, we will be lucky to get any cooperation from Russia on any aspect of the CFE or SALT agreements,” Samson interrupted. “You will make it your top priority to find out exactly where those bombers came from and what Russia’s current long-and medium-range strike capability is. I want that info on my desk in twenty-four — no, I want it in eight hours, in time for the next scheduled battle-staff meeting. Is that understood?”
“Perfectly, sir.” Patrick knew that was all his staff had been working on ever since U.S. Strategic Command alerted them of the attack — they would have the info ready by then.
“What do you know about the attack?” Samson asked heatedly.
“Reports from Uzbek air-traffic-control authorities in Tashkent have confirmed that the aircraft that crossed over from Russia was a Tupolev-22M bomber, call sign Mirny-203,” Patrick said. “Air-traffic controllers from Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan, reported the bomber to Tashkent but did not provide any flight-plan information. The aircraft was spotted about one hundred and seventy-five miles north of the Uzbek border by radar operators at Tashkent before the radars were knocked off the air and communications were disrupted.
“The Russians have one missile with that kind of range: the AS-17, code name ‘Krypton,’ ” Patrick went on. “The AS-17 is an antiradar weapon designed to exceed the range and performance numbers of the Patriot antiaircraft missile. However, the AS-17 was not originally designed to be fired from the Tupolev-22M. One AS-17 apparently malfunctioned and crashed in the desert in Kazakhstan.”
“CIA will undoubtedly send out teams to recover data on that lost missile,” Houser said. “I’ll have the info as soon as they get it.”
“Sir, we’ve heard from CIA, and because of the strike against their base, they’re not prepared to mount a covert mission into Kazakhstan to retrieve the missile,” Patrick said. “Colonel Griffin has put t
ogether a mission plan for your approval. He can deploy with a team, or we can brief a team based in—”
“So Griffin wants to lead another covert-ops team into Central Asia, eh?” Houser asked derisively. “He obviously thinks he’s the newest action hero now.”
“Sir, no other agencies have offered to get that data for us,” Patrick said, daring to show his exasperation at Houser’s remark, “and if I may remind you, we have very few military or intelligence assets in place in that region since the United Nations Security Council ordered us to leave so they could install peacekeeping forces. If we want a chance to get that data, Colonel Griffin needs an execution order immediately. We can have him and his team deploy immediately to—”
“I think Colonel Griffin has stirred up enough shit in Central Asia for the time being,” Houser interjected. “Although we certainly applaud him for successfully retrieving General Turabi of Turkmenistan, who has proved to be an extremely valuable source of information on the Russians’ advance into Mary, it is clear now that the Russians felt threatened and retaliated against what they thought was a CIA operation. In addition, I personally feel that I was led astray by General Luger at Battle Mountain. Colonel Griffin took an awful risk by going on this mission, an especially unnecessary risk considering all the forces Battle Mountain had available.”
“Sir, Colonel Griffin’s plan utilizes forces based in—”
“General Houser said he’d discuss this with you later, General McLanahan,” Samson cut in irritably. “Can we get on with the briefing, please?”
“Yes, sir,” Patrick said. “The antiradar missiles flew for approximately one hundred and thirty miles. Speed of each missile was in excess of Mach three. They were on a ballistic flight path at first, but during descent the radar operators said the missiles made minute course changes that placed them precisely on target, indicating that perhaps the missiles were operator-or GPS-guided, not just inertially guided. This matches the AS-17’s flight profile. They scored direct hits on the Uzbek radar sites.