by Mark Henshaw
“Then we call the Germans and let them clean the place out,” Jon advised. “Maybe everything gets wrapped up nice and neat.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“When have I ever been an optimist?” he asked.
• • •
They needed almost another hour to walk down to the missile base. The complex was far smaller than the main base they’d just left, but still large enough to be daunting. They reached the tree line, and Kyra stopped short. “Jon,” she said, quiet. “Up there.”
He looked up. Two wooden poles six meters tall rose from the ground with a heavy metal cable strung between them over a concrete slab on the ground, then fastened to the earth on either side like the guidelines of a tent. A steel girder, rust apparent on its surface even from a distance, hung suspended from the wire over the slab, five meters square underneath. More dark wires on each side ran down to enormous metal cylinders topped with gold ports, and several other wires ran into a concrete bunker buried in a hillside beyond.
“Are those power lines?” Kyra asked.
Jon nodded. “Good bet. Look where they run.” He pointed and Kyra followed the invisible line drawn by his hand to the large silver cylinders topped with gold stubs. “Those look like industrial capacitors.”
“No corrosion on them. Those are new,” she said. “Big ones too. They look like the ones you’d see in a power substation.”
Jon twisted his head, listening. “No buzz,” he said.
“Line’s dead?”
“Probably, but I’m not going to test it,” he replied.
“If this is where Lavrov was set up, he could’ve just pulled some generator trucks up and jacked in right there.”
“I don’t think so,” Jon countered. “Those wires run over to those buildings. Makes more sense that they’d put up a generator inside. It would be quieter than running it out in the open.”
Kyra scanned the close horizon, looking for movement or other signs of life. She saw nothing. “I don’t see anyone.”
Jon nodded, and they walked toward the odd setup. “It’s a test rig of some kind, I think.”
“A test rig for what?” Kyra asked. “I don’t see any kind of blast or scorch marks on anything. And if they were testing bombs or guns, the locals would’ve heard it. We’re not that far from the village back by the rail station.”
Jon pondered the question for a moment. “We should check out the bunkers.”
Kyra took the lead, scanning their surroundings as she walked. She stopped as they approached the building that was the power line’s terminus. “Any idea what this one is?” she asked, nodding toward the building.
“Missile storage silo is my guess,” he muttered.
“Still don’t see anyone,” Kyra noted. “The place is locked up . . . but the lock looks new from here. Still shines, no rust.”
The bunker was a concrete slab dug into the earth behind, with a flat roof that angled down into sloping sides. Moss covered the top side and was growing down the front wall toward the doors. The concrete was discolored where some kind of dark gray paint had started chipping loose near the top. The two doors in front were metal, rusting into shades of red and green. Kyra’s observation had been correct. The locks on both were silver, free of corrosion.
“Think you can break in?”
“O ye of little faith,” Kyra chided the man. “Wherefore dost thou doubt?”
“As much as I appreciate your talents, you might want to compare your lockpicking skills to someone a little closer to earth.”
Kyra extracted her lockpick set from her pack and set to work. Jon kept up the vigil behind her, scanning the buildings and woods for movement. The woman took less than a minute to pop the lock. She pulled it off, set it on the ground, and opened the door.
“No miracles necessary,” she offered.
“Very nice,” Jon muttered. He stepped inside the bunker and switched on his Maglite.
• • •
The bunker’s interior was an open cavern, like a miniature aircraft hangar. The floor was concrete, swept clean of debris, with single row of large cement slabs rising up in a line at regular intervals, each with an identical concave arc cut into the center. “They laid the missiles out on those,” Kyra realized. She looked up and saw a pair of rails running along the roof near the corners. “Chain and pulley system,” she noted. “Would’ve made it easy to lift and lower them when moving them in and out.”
Jon walked toward the far end of the bunker until his flashlight illuminated the back wall. Enormous metal boxes sat on skids, cabled together, with a single power line coming out of the last box on the right and snaking along hooks mounted in the concrete wall toward the entrance. “There are your generators,” he said.
Kyra’s light caught a dark shape by a pair of worktables and benches that ran along the wall opposite the power line. A backpack sat on the floor, the flap on the front hanging loose. She knelt down by it, lifted the flap, and pointed her light inside. “Camera . . . water bottle . . . notebook,” she said, moving the contents around. Other odds and ends were gathered in the bottom.
“Longstreet’s, I’ll wager,” Jon suggested.
“That British hiker?” Kyra realized. “Yeah, I wouldn’t bet against that.”
“Anything on the camera?”
Kyra picked up the device, a low-end Canon digital SLR. She searched for the power button, pressed it. “Not working. Battery might be dead. We could take it back to the embassy and get a new one . . . unless you want to preserve the crime scene.”
Jon looked around with his flashlight. “Something tells me that it won’t be here that long. If the Russians are done with these generators and the capacitors outside, I can’t imagine they’ll leave them here. And if they’re not done with them, they’ll be back.”
“I don’t think we want to be here for that.” Kyra swept her light over the worktables and benches. They were free of dust and tools, with only bits of wire and electronic parts sitting on top. She picked up a calculator, a cheap Hewlett-Packard. She fiddled with it, but it refused to go on. What appeared to be a digital voltmeter fared no better, as did a radio that sat on the floor under the table. “Busted junk,” she said.
Jon frowned. “All of them?”
“Yeah.” Kyra took the battery covers off. “Batteries all look fine. No corrosion.”
Jon pulled the batteries out of the devices and began dropping them one by one a short distance from each other, just a few inches off the table. Each made a solid thumping sound, and several remained upright.
“What are you doing?” Kyra asked.
“When a battery is used, the alkaline inside undergoes a chemical reaction that produces a gas that gets trapped inside the casing. The more it’s used, the more gas it builds up. Drop a charged battery onto a hard surface and it won’t bounce. Drop a dead battery, and the gas trapped in it will make it jump. It’ll usually fall over. Sounds muffled when it hits too,” Jon explained. He held up one of the batteries. “These still have a good charge.”
“So why do we care?” Kyra asked.
“The calculator, voltmeter, the radio . . . they all have good power supplies, but none of them work. And I’ll bet you that the camera’s battery is fine too.” Jon looked away from the battery in his hands to his partner, her face only half lit by her flashlight. “It’s just a theory, but think about it. Assume Lavrov is doing something up here, something he shows off to the Syrians. We know it’s something that he could transport without drawing a lot of attention. It doesn’t make a lot of noise, if any, but draws a fair amount of power.” He held the battery up again. “And it kills electronics.”
Kyra processed the evidence in her mind. “EMP?”
Jon nodded. “Basic physics . . . run enough electricity through metal coil connected to a capacitor and you’ll create a pulse that will generate an electrical current inside any computer circuit in range. If there’s enough power behind the pulse, it fries everything
. Scientists say that one nuclear-generated EMP at four hundred kilometers over Kansas would make the entire continent go preindustrial in a few seconds. The Syrians don’t have a missile that could do that, but a Scud could reach Israel in a few minutes. Every time the Syrians face off against the Israelis, they get thrashed because the Israelis have better weapons. We sell Tel Aviv all kinds of high-tech gear that the Syrians can’t match, even buying from the Russians. But mount some really powerful electromagnetic pulse bombs on Scud missiles and set them off over the Golan Heights or Tel Aviv, and just maybe the Israeli military gets paralyzed. Same thing could happen to us.”
Kyra looked around. “The lights weren’t out in the village when we came through. If they were testing one of those, it must’ve been a small model.”
“Lavrov wouldn’t have needed to test a big one. EMP bombs aren’t complicated to build. The only real variables involved are the altitude when detonation occurs and how much power is behind the pulse. Maybe Lavrov’s people figured out how to build a more powerful version in a smaller package.”
“What’s the altitude ceiling for a Scud?” Kyra asked.
“For a Scud D? A hundred fifty kilometers, more or less . . . but they don’t need it to go a hundred fifty kilometers up. If there’s enough power behind the pulse, a kilometer or two above the battlefield will do just fine to kill every unhardened piece of gear dead . . . or do the same thing over a major city and kill all of the critical infrastructures in a direct line of sight of the device.”
“Strelnikov’s grandfather was Jewish,” Kyra realized. “It was in the file. Maybe he had a soft spot for Israel. He found out Lavrov was sharing EMP tech with the Syrians and came to us.” Kyra pulled out the smartphone and began to photograph everything in sight. Then she picked up the calculator. “Think the Germans would object if I took this?”
“Knock yourself out,” Jon said. “Time to be going, I think.”
• • •
They stepped into the daylight. The sun had reached the tops of the Brandenburg woods and the dark would be settling within the hour.
Jon picked up the padlock from the cement ramp where Kyra had laid it and turned his back to the base. He hooked the shackle over the entry doorway latch—
“Jon!” Kyra yelled.
Jon looked up.
Five men were talking toward them. They were dressed in plainclothes, short haircuts, with pistols drawn. They saw the Americans and shifted from a slow walk to a dead run, guns raised. The man on the far left fired and Jon heard the round strike concrete.
Jon dropped the lock, and the analysts ran for the woods, just to the south. More rounds hit the bunker, closer than the first. The men behind them yelled. Russian, he realized. He couldn’t understand their commands, but the cadence and guttural sounds of the language were unmistakable.
He heard their pistols fire over the sounds of his own boots tearing through the grass and leaves. The rounds cracked the air open as they passed by the running analysts faster than sound. Kyra sprinted ahead of him, her breath already getting heavy. She looked back, saw she was outpacing her lumbering partner, and slowed up to let him close the distance.
They reached the woods and crashed into the undergrowth at full speed. The brush and weeds slowed them, and the trees forced them to run in anything but a straight line. Three hundred feet into the forest, Kyra ran up to one of the larger trees and stopped for a second, looking back. Jon caught up with her and looked back. He couldn’t see their pursuers, but their voices carried well enough as they cursed and yelled at the scrub pines and low bushes tearing at their legs and arms.
“Still coming,” Kyra said, her breathing rapid. She pulled her backpack off and tore open a Velcro pocket on the outside. “Which way?”
Jon looked up, and picked out the sun’s direction through the green canopy. “We’re running south. That means the road is that way.” He pointed left. “The truck is a mile down, there.” It would be at least a fifteen-minute run through these woods.
“A mile,” Kyra muttered. She pulled out a Glock 21, the clip already locked in. She racked the slide to chamber the first round. “Maybe we can slow them down.”
A Russian shouted in the distance, not quite so far away now, and the analysts started to run again. “We’re on friendly soil,” Jon yelled. “You’re not supposed to be carrying!”
Kyra leaned around the oak and sent three rounds back at the men behind. “Are you complaining?”
“Nope,” Jon told her. “Just don’t tell the Germans.”
“You keep telling me that.”
• • •
The woods were pulling on them, trying to slow them down. Surely it was doing the same for the men behind, but every shout seemed closer than the one before. Bullets whined through the trees around them. He could hear them tearing into the trees, dull thuds and hard cracks, but he could not see where they were hitting. Kyra broke stride, turning and firing as often as she dared, but there were far more rounds coming in their direction than she was sending back.
Jon looked left and saw the concrete wall that bordered the open road. They could jump it, get into the open, and put some distance between them and the Russian hunters before the men realized they had left the woods—
He saw movement beyond the wall. The Russians had seen the road and come to Jon’s own conclusion. Two of their pursuers had moved out to the road on the other side of the wall, flanking them. If they were Lavrov’s men, then they were Spetsnaz, he thought, and they had a clear path to run all the way to the truck. They would certainly reach it before he or Kyra would.
Five soldiers and five guns at least . . . two analysts and one gun, Jon thought. The odds weren’t hard to calculate. Even if he and Kyra turned west and moved deeper into the woods, the men would almost certainly run them to ground. There wasn’t enough distance between them and their pursuers, and the men behind were in better shape than he was. Kyra was young and fast, but Jon was past his prime.
He saw Kyra go down hard in the dirt ahead of him, stumbling over some growth in the brush. Jon thought for a moment that one of the Russians had finally drawn close enough to be accurate with his sidearm, but the girl scrambled to her feet and pushed off, trying to recover the speed she had lost. He was hardly fast enough to catch up before she was back at her full speed—
—no, not her full speed, he realized. Kyra was running slow so she wouldn’t lose him.
Run faster, old man, he told himself. His body refused to obey. He didn’t have more speed in him to give.
He looked at the young woman, the world moving in slow motion around him.
The enemy was too close, there were too many obstacles between them and the truck. Even without him plodding behind, every tree, every root, every dip in the ground would slow Kyra down. She couldn’t run at full speed over this damp ground. At every step, the earth was pulling at her feet, forcing her to use her strength to pull her feet back up. The road was in better shape, but it was no escape route. If she jumped the wall, the men on the open road would be in her path and they would have a clear field of fire. If she stayed in the trees, the enemy behind her would get into pistol range long before she reached the truck. She would be forced to stop running and find cover, and then the men on the other side of the wall would climb back over into the woods, get in behind her, and that would be that.
For three years, he’d tried to give her, this broken girl, what little he had to offer. He’d been the best friend he knew how to be, which wasn’t much, but she’d taken it and returned more than he’d ever given her.
Kyra needed more time, more space, and she didn’t have it. Maybe he could give her that.
He dug deep and decided he might have enough energy for one more sprint.
• • •
Kyra turned and fired again. Jon ran up to her and put his hand on the Glock. “Give me the gun,” he ordered. His words were labored, his lungs wheezing hard.
“What?”
Jo
n didn’t ask twice. He reached out and put his hand on the weapon. Kyra, confused, released it to him. “Keep running!” Jon yelled. Then he pulled away, running left for the concrete wall.
The Spetsnaz soldiers on the road were twenty yards ahead of them when Jon reached the concrete wall. He ran at the barrier at full speed, sprinted up, and pulled himself over. He hit the dirt on his feet, the mud absorbing some of the impact and the sound. He pushed off and ran after the Russians. The soldiers ahead hadn’t heard the sound of his boots in the wet dirt, their ears filled with the sound of their own gasping breath.
Jon raised the Glock, lined up the sights as best he could with one hand on a dead run.
He’d shot men before, once in Iraq. The dreams had haunted him for years, driven him into depression, and left him unsure whether he could ever kill another person again, even in his own defense. He knew the answer to that question now and he was at peace with the answer. The Russians would probably kill him and the act wouldn’t have a chance to torture him after.
Jon pulled the trigger.
The pistol kicked hard in his hand, the barrel jerking up. The shot was high, his aim thrown off by his own motion. He’d never shot anyone moving on the run before, but he was close enough. One of the soldiers went down as the .45 round punched into his shoulder, his body twisting and his legs collapsing under him.
The sound of the shot reached his companion’s ears just as the man started to tumble to the ground. The second Russian spun around, trying to line up his weapon, but the advantage of surprise had allowed Jon to pull the Glock back down and line up his own. His second shot fired a fraction of a second sooner than his target’s and the round struck the Russian’s chest on the right side, knocking off the soldier’s aim and spinning him as his Makarov pistol fired.
The Russian’s bullet tore into Jon’s right thigh, ripping his pants and spraying blood from the gory hole in his skin, and sent him into the dirt. His vision went blurry from the pain, fire burning in a straight line through his leg. Still, he tried to focus, scrambling to raise his gun and cover the two fallen Russians with the Glock in case one of them wanted to be persistent, but neither man was moving.