by Tom Clancy
“I’m told that our men will secure the refinery and avgas depot before sunrise. They’re already setting up the first roadblock. Have a look.”
The night-vision images piped in to Izotov’s screen came from the helmet cameras of Spetsnaz infantry and were grainy and shifting quickly, but it was clear they’d used one of the Ka-29s to block the road, along with a confiscated civilian SUV and a pickup truck. Shouts and gunfire echoed from somewhere behind the roadblock.
“There are only about fifteen hundred there, and they’re mostly aboriginal people, poorly armed as we noted. I expect no complications.”
“Don’t get too cocky, Major. You haven’t confronted the Americans yet, and I see here that only a small number of transports have landed. The others will soon be engaged by American fighters.”
“What do the Americans say? I am cautiously optimistic?” Noskov chuckled loudly. “I predict much blood will flow. I predict we will be drinking vodka in the bars of Edmonton and Calgary within a week and that the reserves will be ours!” His laugh now bordered on a cackle.
Izotov sighed. Major Noskov was an unconventional operations specialist at best, a cocky thug at worst.
Yes, he was a keen analyst of battles, able to spot and exploit an enemy’s weaknesses with speed and proficiency, but he always seemed slightly unhinged, a little mad, even. He rarely referred to superior officers by rank and seemed suspicious of them, especially Izotov.
That Noskov had joined the Russian Army at seventeen to avoid imprisonment for manslaughter was un-surprising. That he had led forces in the Second Chechen War from 1990 to 2005 and celebrated several key victories was admirable. That he’d had his left leg blown off by a rocket-propelled grenade, which had rendered him ineligible for active combat duty, was unfortunate.
However, his talent for planning and directing operations remotely was as unexpected as it was valuable, and Doletskaya had insisted that Noskov be sent to Canada to coordinate operations in the northern areas of Alberta, especially seizing the town of High Level.
But the man had a temper, and his dangerous instability caused him to be passed over for promotions. Although forty, he was still as brash as an eighteen-year-old at times, and Izotov found himself repeatedly cautioning the man, as he did now.
“Major, continue your good and cautious work for the Motherland.”
“Of course. What else would you have me do?”
“And know we will be carefully monitoring your progress.”
Noskov nodded, then, sans any good-bye, he whirled away from the camera and limped off on his artificial leg, shouting to the men unloading the BMP-3s that they weren’t fast enough and that he would shoot them if they didn’t hurry.
Well, so far, the operation was unfolding as planned, and based upon the enemy’s initial response, it seemed Colonel Pavel Doletskaya had somehow managed to keep silent.
Izotov could not understand that — unless, of course, the Americans had accidentally killed the colonel, for Izotov refused to believe that one man’s force of will could be that strong.
Or could it?
Soldiers at Fort Lewis were pumped with adrenaline, and Special Forces Team Sergeant Nathan Vatz was no exception. He was about to leave his barracks and head to Robert Gray Army Airfield, his load-out bag slung over his shoulders.
In the hall outside his room, he spotted Staff Sergeant Marc Rakken rushing toward him. “Yo, Nate, I just heard, man!”
“Yeah, I know, it’s crazy.”
“Why couldn’t they invade someplace warm?”
“The Russians can’t take the heat.”
Rakken nodded then raised his brows. “Maybe we’ll bump into some snow bunnies up there, eh?”
“So you’re going, too?”
“The brigade’s already got a quartering party heading up to start RSOI base ops.”
Establishing a reception, staging, onward movement and integration base, which included all the support facilities the brigade would need to operate, was the first step of moving 3,900 folks riding in more than 300 Stryker vehicles up to Canada. Once those facilities were established and artillery had arrived, the infantry would roll in and begin operations.
Rakken added, “I just heard they’ve called up the Fourth in Alaska, so those Strykers will be rolling down. I heard another rumor that a brigade from the Tenth Mountain Division is heading up in about sixty sorties of C-17s. They’ll establish the first blocking positions.”
“And what are the Canadians doing about all this?” Vatz flashed a crooked grin.
Rakken pretended to think hard. “Trying to duck.”
“I thought so. Well, good hunting then, huh?”
Rakken slapped a palm on Vatz’s shoulder. “I just wanted to give you this before you go.”
“Oh, man, don’t do that.”
Vatz stared down at the closed knife in Rakken’s other hand; it was a balisong, or Filipino “butterfly knife,” with two handles that counter-rotated around the tang and concealed the blade within them when not in use.
Only this wasn’t an ordinary balisong. This was Rakken’s prized possession: a custom Venturi made of intricately patterned Damascus steel with black lip pearl inlays in the handles. It was as much a piece of art as it was a functional cutting tool, and it had been designed and crafted by famed knife maker Darrel Ralph.
“Nate, I’m giving this to you for two reasons: first, if one of us is going to make it, it’s going to be you. I believe that. And second, I’m just tired of carrying it.”
Vatz shook his head. He didn’t believe a word of it. And in a world full of high-tech toys, it was ironic that they should be standing there, discussing the exchange of a knife. Nevertheless, he took the balisong and slid it into one of his hip pockets. “You’re too much, Marc. I’ll borrow it. Give it to you when we get back, if we’re not all frostbitten by then.”
“All right, you got a deal. Good luck up there. And if you SF boys need any real men to come bail out your sorry asses, just give me or Appleman a call on the cell, ’kay?”
Vatz snorted, raised his fist to meet Rakken’s for a pound. Then he muttered a quick, “See ya,” and jogged off.
Captain Jake Boyd spotted the rescue chopper’s searchlight sweeping across the snow, so he sat up and began to wave them in. He wouldn’t miss the unforgiving cold or the sight of his beautiful fighter plane burning in the distance.
The blood had frozen on his lips and chin, and he could barely feel his cheeks. He slowly, carefully, got up as the chopper turned and pitched its nose for the landing.
Boyd’s heart sank.
The searchlight had blinded him, and he’d only seen a vague silhouette in the sky.
Now he saw it, a Ka-29, setting down with heavily armed infantrymen hopping down from the bay door.
Boyd had both pistols now, one in each hand; he charged back to the ejection seat and threw himself down behind it, then came back up and began firing at the oncoming troops.
He struck one soldier in the leg, caught another in the thigh, as they suddenly raked his position with so much fire that he could no long hear the whomping of rotors, only the echoing bang and subsequent ricocheting of rounds off metal.
He keyed the mike of his emergency radio. “This is Ghost Hawk on the ground! I’m being engaged by Russian infantry! What’s the ETA on that rescue bird?”
A sudden and nearby thump made him whirl.
Grenade. Right there.
He sprang up, knew that if he ran backward, they’d simply gun him down.
So he did what any other red-blooded American fighter pilot would do: he ran directly at the troops, screaming and firing.
The grenade exploded behind him, knocking him to his chest. That was when the first stabs of pain came, when he realized he’d been shot — and not just once.
He glanced up at the Russians, cursed as one came over, raised his pistol.
Stephanie’s voice was coming from the radio. He should have told her how he felt, should
have told her what she meant to him.
But at least now, at the end, he had that music, that sweet music of her crying out.
As Major Stephanie Halverson lifted off, her eyes burned with the knowledge that Jake was dead.
She’d been monitoring the radio, had listened to his last transmission. She wanted more than anything to streak back there and finish off the men who had killed him. But it was too late now.
The skies above the Northwest Territories were alive with incoming transports and fighters, and Halverson and the other three pilots training at Igloo Base had been tasked with getting up there and intercepting as many as possible, all while attempting to evade detection from those fighters.
There would be no dogfight — just a standoff surgical removal of those lumbering AN-130s.
But she could barely keep her thoughts focused on the task. She kept telling herself that she shouldn’t have been so distant from him, that she could sense how he’d felt about her, that she, too, had felt the same.
She raced into the heavens, going supersonic, moving into her standoff position to begin launching missiles at the cargo planes, now at 28,450 feet and descending rapidly.
A check of the 130s’ range revealed they were about fifteen kilometers away, within the Sidewinder’s killing zone. Her electronic countermeasures — including the jamming of enemy radar systems — were fully engaged.
And her first two missiles were locked on.
Her wingman, Captain Lisa Johansson, call sign Sapphire, announced that she, too, was locked up and ready to fire. The other two JSF fighters were already engaging the enemy.
Halverson opened her mouth to give the order—
Just as the alarms went off in her cockpit.
Incoming enemy missiles launched from Sukhoi SU- 35 long-range interceptors. She already had the angle of arrival.
The computer identified the missiles as Vympel R-84s, the latest incarnation of Russia’s short-range, air-to-air missile, considered by most combat pilots to be one of the world’s most formidable weapons.
“Sapphire, abort missile launch! We got incoming. Check countermeasures. IR flares and chaff! Evade!”
SEVENTEEN
In February 2006, the Marine Corps Special Operation Command (MARSOC) was activated, which in effect made Force Recon Marines an official part of the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) team along with the other special operations units — SEALS, Rangers, Army Special Forces, and Special Tactics teams. MARSOC was fully constituted in 2010 and became part of the Joint Strike Force at that time as well.
Consequently, when the Russians began their move into Canada, MARSOC was among the first to get the call.
And that particular call had funneled down through command to one Staff Sergeant Raymond McAllen, who was now sprinting back to his two-story barracks to get packed up and get the hell out of Southern California, bound for the Northwest Territories, more than two thousand miles away.
Elements of the 13th Marine Corps Expeditionary Unit (MEU) were being deployed from Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton up to Alberta. They were pumped full of lightning and ready to crack and boom onto the scene. The only thing missing from all the excitement was Jonesy.
And his absence was sorely felt by the five remaining members of the Force Recon team: McAllen, Palladino, Szymanski, Friskis, and Gutierrez.
Five minutes prior, McAllen and the rest of the Outlaws had been listening to their company commander, Colonel Stack, going over the warning order; the CO singled out McAllen’s team to spearhead the company’s reconnaissance operations.
Marine Corps brass, along with the JSF, believed that the Russians would move a large ground force, maybe even a couple of brigades, into several areas of Alberta. They would take the town of High Level and use it as a staging area, and would also move down Highway 63 in the eastern part of Alberta toward Fort McMurray and the Athabasca Oil Sands north of “Fort Mac.”
Much to McAllen’s chagrin, his new assistant team leader, Sergeant Scott Rule, had to open his dumb-ass mouth and ask what was meant by “oil sands.” The CO loved to hear himself talk and loved to impress everyone with his attention to details, whether they put you to sleep or not. That he didn’t have a PowerPoint presentation was the only saving grace.
So they got the one-minute lecture about oil sands, a mixture of crude bitumen (a semisolid form of crude oil), silica sand, clay minerals, and water. The CO even knew that the bitumen was used by the aboriginals back in the day to waterproof their canoes.
Point was, the oil sands could be turned into real, usable oil, and the Russians wanted control of all the reserves.
But they wouldn’t get them — not if United States Marines stood in their path.
Once McAllen and his boys arrived in Alberta, they would chopper way up Highway 63, establish a reconnaissance post, deploy two robo-soldiers that would be controlled by human operators, and confirm where lead elements of the enemy force were heading.
They were a small piece of a much larger defensive dubbed Operation Slay the Dragon by the JSF, an operation that included all branches of the U.S. and European Federation armed forces, with the Euros focusing on the major city of Edmonton.
Now, back in his barracks, a shirtless Sergeant Rule approached McAllen, cocked a brow, all pierced nipples and twenty tattoos. “Hey, Ray, you got a minute?”
“If this is about what we discussed earlier—”
“Look, man, you set me straight. I’m so squared away that if you brush against me, my corners will cut you.”
“Nice.”
“But I’ll never be Jonesy. Nobody will. Just want you to know that I’m giving you a hundred and ten percent. Always.”
“We’ll see how long it takes for you to create your own shadow. And I hope it’s a pretty long one. The other thing is, I got about eight, nine years on you. In my book, that makes me old school.” McAllen reached out and flicked one of Rule’s nipple rings. “Maybe the Corps’s gotten a little soft on this crap since you hide them under your shirt, but I haven’t.”
“I’ll remove them, Sergeant — if they bother you that much.”
“I just want to be sure we’re on the same page.”
“We are. Good. Now don’t forget to pack an extra sock.”
“Huh?”
“Our suits have all those fancy micro-climate conditioning subsystems, but if the suit fails, you and your family jewels will be glad you got that sock. Trust me.”
Rule grinned. “I hear that, Sergeant.”
McAllen turned and looked the man straight in the eye, then proffered his hand. “The last time I met the Russians, they couldn’t help but fall to their knees and bleed.”
“I hope I have the same effect on them.”
They shook firmly, then Rule rushed off to pack.
McAllen returned to inventorying his gear. He fetched a picture of himself and Jonesy from his footlocker and slipped it into his ruck. They’d been pretty drunk that night, and Jonesy had been the one to get McAllen home. He was like that. Dependable beyond belief. And McAllen had to get it into his head that though no one could replace Jonesy, he had to give Sergeant Rule, nipple rings and all, a chance.
At least the spirit of Jonesy would be heading up into the Great White North, along with the spirit of the Corps.
Whenever they went into battle, every man who had ever been a Marine went with them.
With white-hot chaff flashing beside her wings, Major Stephanie Halverson took her F-35B fighter into another dive, rolling as she did so, then banked sharply to the right, cutting a deep chamfer in the air.
Her pressure suit compensated for what would’ve been excruciating g-forces, keeping the blood from pooling in her legs, yet still she felt the usual and sometimes even welcome discomfort.
One missile took the bait and exploded somewhere above her; she didn’t waste time to check its exact location because the other one was still locked on.
Utilizing all of the jet’s sensors and t
he helmet-mounted display, Halverson was able to look down through her knees, through the actual structure of the aircraft, and spot the missile coming up from below.
She punched the chaff again.
Then killed the engine and let the fighter drop away like an unlucky mallard during hunting season.
The only problem was, the missile had been designed to “see” whole images rather than just single points of infrared radiation like the heat from her engine.
So that Vympel R-84 with its “potato masher” fins had a decision to make: detonate its thirty kilograms of high explosive in the chaff or continue on to Halverson.
With her breath held, she watched as the missile penetrated the chaff cloud—
And kept on coming.
She cursed, fired up the engine, then started straight for the cargo planes still glowing in her multifunction display.
Okay, steady. Okay.
She pressed a finger against the touch screen, viewing a much clearer, close-up image of the nearest aircraft. She tapped another button, and target designation and weapons status imagery appeared in her HMD. She closed in, the target now being automatically tracked, the crosshairs in her visor locking on the AN-130.
If I get taken out of the fight, I’m bringing a couple of you with me.
She tightened her fist, pressed the button.
Missile away. She pressed again. Missile #2 streaked off a second behind the first.
The radar alarm was still going off.
And there it was, a glowing dot. You didn’t need a key to the display’s symbols to know what that one meant: death.
“Sapphire, this is Siren, can’t shake my last missile, over.”
“Yes, you can, Siren! Chaff again! Come on!”
Aw, what the hell. She popped more chaff then broke into a diving roll that would have left most nuggets barfing in their helmets.
And what kind of miracle was that? The damned missile took the bait and exploded in a beautiful conflagration, the dark clouds traced by flickering light.