The signal from the threat radar, though, was weak and intermittent. The frequency suggested that he’d been briefly painted by the acquisition radar code-named Spoon Rest by NATO, which meant they were trying to target him with an SA-2 Guideline.
Guideline was the NATO reporting name for the Lavochkin OKB S-75 surface-to-air missile-ancient by the standards of modern military technology but still deadly. Gary Powers’ U-2 had been downed over Sverdlovsk in 1960 by a barrage of fourteen SA-2 missiles, a barrage that had also managed to take out a MiG-19 trying for an intercept.
Just because Delallo was being painted didn’t mean the Russian radar operator could see him. In fact, the operator probably didn’t. The whole point of stealth technology was to prevent the energy of the threat radar from returning to the emitting dish, rendering it blind. Still, the pucker factor for Major Dick Delallo was rising.
Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0058 hours
Akulinin and Lia walked up a low concrete ramp toward the entrance to the cruise ship wharf. The ship, the North Star Line’s St. Petersburg 2, was tied up on the pier just beyond the high chain-link security fence, her lights ablaze stem to stern, like beacons promising refuge and safety.
To get to that promise, they needed to go through the security checkpoint and customs. A pair of Russian MVD police eyed them suspiciously as they approached.
“Good evening!” Akulinin called in his most jovial dumb tourist’s voice. “Some fog out tonight, huh?”
One of the men pointed his weapon, an AKM, at Akulinin’s chest. “You stop, please,” the man said in thickly accented English. “Passports.”
Akulinin and Lia both handed their passports over.
The guard grunted as he looked at the stamps, then added, “Your other papers. ID. All.”
When these were produced, the guard went through them with microscopic attention while the other watched the two with a sullen expression.
“Your papers not in order,” the first said after an interminable examination.
“Why?” Akulinin said, putting on his best naïve-American expression of surprise and confusion. “What’s the matter?”
“Our papers were perfectly in order before,” Lia said. “What the hell is going on?”
“Papers not in order,” the Russian said, his broad Slavic features betraying no emotion. “You come with us.”
“We’re alerting Mercutio,” Rockman’s voice said in Akulinin’s ear… and presumably in Lia’s as well. “Stall them.”
Stall them, Akulinin thought. Right. Maybe I should do a little soft-shoe?…
“Mercutio”-Romeo’s best friend in Romeo and Juliet-was running Magpie’s support operation in St. Petersburg, the stage crew behind the scenes who let Lia and Akulinin play their roles. The support team was on board the cruise ship, which was serving as a kind of impromptu safe house for the op.
Of course, in the original Romeo and Juliet Mercutio had been killed in a duel.
Akulinin hoped to hell it wasn’t going to come to that.
Ghost Blue Twelve miles west of St. Petersburg 0058 hours
Major Dellalo pushed the throttle forward as he brought the stick back, sending the F-22 higher and yet higher into the thin, cold air. The SA-2 Guideline had a range of about thirty miles and a ceiling of sixty thousand feet. Thirty miles from the SA-2 site on the western end of Kotlin Island would reach to the far end of St. Petersburg to the east and halfway back to the Finnish border to the west.
His F-22 had two advantages if the Russians could actually see his plane and target it-speed and altitude. The top speed of the F-22 Raptor was classified, of course, but his baby could crowd Mach 2.5 and have knots to spare. Her service ceiling was sixty-five thousand feet.
It should be possible to get above a Guideline’s reach, and while he couldn’t outrun one-the SA-2 had a velocity of about Mach 3-the speed of his Raptor would make it nearly impossible to catch if the missile was launched from a stern position.
His major disadvantage at the moment was the fact that Kotlin Island, with its SAM base, lay only eight miles ahead, and perfectly blocked his route back to international airspace out over the Baltic Sea. If they wanted to, they would get at least one clear shot at him.
How had they spotted him? His radar screen showed a number of targets in the immediate vicinity, all at lower altitudes. Most of them were civilian aircraft, but a few had the characteristic signatures of Russian military aircraft. A JOINTSTAR E-3 Sentry AWACS over the North Sea was feeding him data on possible threats. There were two radar returns that worried him in particular… streaking in over Vikulova, from the south. The Sentry was identifying them as MiG-31s.
His threat receiver lit up again, and this time it stayed lit and he heard a high-pitched warble in his ears, which meant that the threat radar had switched to a high PRF tracking mode. So the Russians did see him, after all.
“Haunted House, Haunted House, Ghost Blue,” he called. “Oscar Sierra, repeat, Oscar Sierra. They have a lock.”
“Copy that, Ghost Blue.”
He suppressed a momentary flash of anger. It would be nice if “Haunted House,” the radio handle for the op controllers at Fort Meade, had something constructive to say.
The warning tone wailed away incessantly. A launch, a dim flash of light in the gloom immediately below…
By lowering a wing he could see the exhaust plume of the missile climbing through the fog, its exhaust illuminating the white haze below. A second missile rose close behind the first, followed by a third.
He was still climbing, passing through fifty-four thousand feet.
It was time to go balls to the wall. He slammed the Raptor’s throttles full forward, angling his thrust to increase his rate of climb.
Behind and below, the missiles began angling toward their high-flying target.
The question for tomorrow, Dick Delallo thought, was how did the Russians see this stealth aircraft? The pressing question of the moment, however, was how to avoid being shot down.
The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1658 hours EDT
Charlie Dean walked past an Army sentry at the door and stepped at last into the Art Room, his glance taking in the dozens of technicians and communications specialists huddled over consoles around the room, the numerous monitors, and the huge central display on the back wall. Currently the main display showed a satellite map of a large city, but he couldn’t tell, offhand, which city it was. A river snaked in from the right, then split to flow to either side of a large triangular island. Major highways were highlighted with yellow or white lines.
Two time readouts glowed in the upper right corner. It was 1658 hours Eastern Daylight Time; wherever Lia was at the moment, it was just before one in the morning.
Radio chatter sounded from speakers overhead.
“Haunted House, Haunted House, Ghost Blue. Oscar Sierra, repeat, Oscar Sierra. They have a lock.”
“Copy that, Ghost Blue.”
William Rubens looked up as Charlie Dean walked in. “They’re okay,” he told Dean without preamble. “ She’s okay.”
“Good to hear it,” Dean replied, keeping his voice neutral. Rubens knew that he and Lia were close, but neither of them wished to say so aloud.
Dean was afraid that someday someone higher up the bureaucratic chain of command would declare that his and Lia’s relationship was somehow unprofessional. In the modern, Orwellian world, the illogical, whimsical boundaries of political and sexual correctness could be redrawn overnight.
“Jeff said they were in a shoot-out?”
Rubens nodded. “Things went bad. We think our contact was a dangle.”
The word was tradecraft slang for someone deliberately exposed to a hostile intelligence service in order to lure that service’s agents into a trap or a compromising position.
“For?…”
“Not now, Dean,” Rubens said, his voice brusque. “We’ve still got a… situation.”
Dean almost
asked if the situation involved Lia but managed not to say anything. He knew Rubens well enough to know the Deputy Director would fill him in when-and if-he needed to know.
“Launch! Launch,” an anonymous voice said over the speaker. Dean could hear the stress behind the words. “I’ve got three missiles coming up, probably Guidelines. Maneuvering…”
Dean understood Rubens’ curtness better now. If an NSA asset-in this instance meaning an aircraft somewhere over the Gulf of Finland off of St. Petersburg-was being shot at, that was a serious situation indeed. The bad old days of the Cold War were long gone, but that didn’t mean there weren’t occasional problems with America’s new ally the Russian Federation. In the global arena, more often than not, Russia still reverted to her old role as America’s adversary. In fact, in some ways it was tougher now. In the Cold War, at least, you knew the Russians were the enemy. Nowadays, they were nominal allies in the War on Terror, as long as their cooperation didn’t interfere with their own agenda, such as dominance of the former Soviet republics, or the struggle for influence in the Middle East, or the developing international crisis in the Arctic…
Jeff Rockman was looking up at the big screen. Dean watched him a moment, then walked over to the coffee mess tucked away against one wall. He returned a moment later with two cups full. He set one on Rockman’s workstation desk.
“Hey, Charlie. Thanks.”
“Who’s shooting at whom?” Dean asked, looking up at the display. It was, at the moment, singularly unhelpful, showing a swath of satellite-revealed sea and land from Estonia to Finland. A white icon labeled “Akulinin and DeFrancesca” was blinking on the waterfront in St. Petersburg. Another, marked “Ghost Blue,” was drifting slowly north a few miles off the coast of Kotlin Island.
Rockman glanced at him, then back at the board. “The Russkies just popped three SAMs at our comm relay aircraft. It’s getting a little tight over there.”
“Sounds it.” He could see three icons marking the SAMs, now, painted in by the computers running the display. They were swiftly closing the range between Kotlin and Ghost Blue. Other icons showed in the area as well, some orange, meaning unknowns, others red, meaning confirmed potential hostiles.
“‘Russia shoots down American aircraft inside Russian territory,’” he said, mimicking a newscaster’s voice. “‘Details at eleven.’ The old man’s a bit worried about the publicity, you know?”
Dean did know. The National Security Agency and Desk Three were successful only insofar as they could elude the spotlight of public awareness. The encounter over the Baltic could well mean big trouble for the Agency.
Especially if the opposition managed to shoot the plane down.
As for the pilot hanging it all out for God and country at the top of the world… well, Charlie Dean thought, these Art Room chess players were pretty focused on the big picture. If the pilot got bagged, they would cry tomorrow. Or perhaps next week.
Ghost Blue Two miles northeast of Ostrov Kotlin 0059 hours
Major Delallo waited until the missiles were trailing him. He was passing fifty-eight thousand feet, now, but the trio of Guidelines was closing faster than he could climb. It was going to be damned close.
Past fifty-nine thousand feet. The missiles were five miles below him, still coming strong at three times the speed of sound.
Delallo had a tactical choice. He could keep climbing, hoping to get above the SAMs’ operational ceiling, and hope to hell the Russians hadn’t packed a surprise into those three birds, like some extra altitude. Or he could turn into the missiles and try to force an overshoot. The good news was that his F-22 was much more maneuverable than the missiles.
A major factor was those two MiG-31s back there. They were climbing, too, and coming fast. The MiG-31 Foxhound was the best interceptor in the Russian arsenal, and it could both outclimb and outrun the F-22. It would not be a good idea to let them get too close.
Delallo gauged the right moment, then popped chaff, hauling around on the stick and vectoring his engines sharply in a grueling, high-G Herbst maneuver.
The Herbst maneuver-also known as the J-turn-was only possible for high-performance aircraft like the Raptor. You needed post-stall technology, meaning vectored thrust engines and advanced computer-operated flight controls to manage a high enough angle of attack to pull it off. As he brought his nose around and down, his velocity fell off dramatically. The missiles were closing quickly-he could see their exhaust plumes out of the corners of his eyes as he concentrated on flying his plane.
An alarm sounded as he went into a stall; only his vectored thrust engines, delicately handled in sharp, precise movements, kept him properly oriented. In seconds he had the aircraft on a new flight path, down and into the missiles, which were about sixty degrees off his nose. He was forcing them into a maximum rate turn, a maneuver he knew he could win. Accelerating now at full throttle and assisted by the relentless pull of gravity, he was past the first Guideline before it could even begin to alter course… then past the second, then the third. All three had failed to hack the turn.
Now he eased off the throttles and made a gentle turn back toward his original heading, still descending and accelerating past Mach 2.
Grunting hard against the savage, crushing pressure of the G-load, Dick Delallo automatically swept his eyes over the threat indicator panel. It was blank.
So he was surprised when a missile he had neither seen nor known was tracking him exploded twenty feet below his right wing. Surprised? It was the shock of his life. After the flash and thump that rocked the plane, the surprise was that he was still alive.
4
Operation Magpie Waterfront, St. Petersburg 0059 hours
A BRIGHT, SILENT, SMALL FLASH briefly flared in the western sky, somewhere above the fog, but no one on the ground saw it.
The guard was deep into his perusal of Akulinin’s papers. Akulinin had the feeling that these guys weren’t exactly the MVD’s finest. More like armed postal clerks, trying to decide if he needed more stamps.
“You need pay special tax,” the guard said, waving Akulinin’s Russian visa.
As if that were news! “Okay, okay,” Akulinin said. “Skol’ka? How much?”
The two guards exchanged a glance; Akulinin could see the avaricious smiles shielded behind their eyes. “Eight hundred rubles,” the first said.
Akulinin nodded. “I can take care of that.” He reached for his billfold.
“No,” one of the guards said, gesturing with his AKM. “You come with us. Pay at-what is word? At office.”
“Listen, Ivan,” Akulinin said, throwing some swagger into his voice and manner. “Our papers are fine. You’re just trying to shake us down for a little vzyatka, am I right?” He deliberately mispronounced the word, which was Russian for “bribe.”
The guards’ faces hardened. “You come.” There was no mistaking the threat behind the words. “Now!”
The Art Room NSA Headquarters Fort Meade, Maryland 1659 hours EDT
“I’m hit!” Ghost Blue’s voice called. “I’m hit!”
Dean stared at the flashing icon marking a point just north of Kotlin Island in the Gulf of Finland, the coffee in his mug forgotten. He could hear the ragged edge of stress in the pilot’s voice.
The controllers in the Art Room, all of them, remained silent. Dean could almost feel the oppressive sense of helplessness as the drama played itself out on the other side of the world.
“Damn it,” Sarah Cassidy said from a nearby console. “I told them they should use F-47s!”
Dean said nothing. Like every other branch of the American intelligence community, the National Security Agency had for years been working toward what Dean considered to be an impossible goal-the ability to conduct operations with a complete lack of risk for human operators. Spy satellites, remote sensors, unmanned aerial and submarine drones-billions of dollars had been spent over the past few decades to reduce the possibility of human casualties to zero.
The same ment
ality had haunted the Pentagon for decades now as well. Was it possible to fight a war relying solely on robotic weaponry, smart bombs, and invisible aircraft, to win a war without the images of body bags on the nightly news to remind the people at home that victory always came at a price?
Within the intelligence community, the list of serious intelligence failures over the past few years only emphasized the fact that all the spysats in orbit couldn’t provide the same depth and detail of data as a single well-placed human agent, HUMINT as opposed to SIGINT.
That, in fact, had been a large part of the philosophy behind the creation of Desk Three. The NSA was the principal agency responsible for America’s SIGINT capabilities, but there were times when you needed people on the ground, down and dirty.
Or, in this case, in an F-22 Raptor above the icy waters of the Gulf of Finland.
“Okay… okay, I’ve got it…,” the voice said over the speaker. Dean could hear the whoop and buzz of alarms in the background. “Starboard engine’s out, but I’ve still got control. Heading for Waypoint Tango Bravo.”
“Ghost Blue, Haunted House,” Rockman said, touching a microphone transmit switch. “Be advised that there are two, repeat, two targets closing on you. Probable Foxhounds. Over.”
“Yeah, I got ’em on the gadget. I’ll be over international waters before they catch me.”
“Copy that. Good luck, Ghost Blue.”
The answer was unintelligible.
“Sir!” Cassidy called out. “We’ve lost Magpie’s signal!”
Ghost Blue had been relaying radio communications from the Magpie team but must have now moved out of range.
“That’s okay,” Rubens replied from another console down the line. “We’re getting their signal through Mercutio and the safe house.”
“Who’s Mercutio?” Dean asked, joining Rubens.
Rubens looked up at Dean, then back to the big display. “One of our agents,” Rubens said with cryptic understatement. “He’s in charge of the backup team for Magpie.”
Arctic Gold Page 5