by Dale Brown
“Command not understood,” the computer said.
Oops. Brad colored briefly, embarrassed. The SuperVark’s voice-command system was a high-tech marvel, but it had limitations where English-language idioms were concerned. “Disregard.”
“Disregard last command. Fifty miles to primary mission target.”
Brad glanced ahead out the XF-111’s canopy. A pale yellow and white glow on the far horizon marked the city lights of Moscow. Almost there, he thought. Once he got within forty miles of Dolgoprudny, he’d pop up again to launch the JASSMs and break away at high speed.
“EXODUS threat detected at four o’clock,” the voice-command system said sharply. “Range is one hundred and sixty feet.”
What the hell? Brad swung his head sharply, straining to look out the right rear quadrant of the XF-111’s canopy. There was nothing there, just the black of a clear Russian night sky speckled with cold bright stars. Reacting instinctively, he turned hard into the threat. But what was this EXODUS thing? Some new surface-to-air missile? A new-type Russian fighter? And how had whatever it was gotten so close that it was practically scratching the paint on his SuperVark?
“Query EXODUS,” he demanded. He kept the fighter-bomber in a tight turn while frantically scanning for some visual on this unidentified threat that would explain things.
“EXODUS confirmed,” the computer said. “Still at four o’clock. Range one hundred and sixty feet.”
Brad frowned. Somehow, this unknown object was holding a static position relative to his aircraft, even while he maneuvered wildly. How was that possible?
Suddenly all the cockpit displays went out, leaving him sitting in absolute darkness. The noise and rumble of the XF-111’s twin turbofan engines died. The night sky outside the cockpit went black. With a whine of hydraulics, the floor tilted back to level. After a split second, red emergency lighting flickered on, outlining a door at the rear of the compartment.
“Simulator power loss,” the computer reported. “Mission incomplete.”
Not cool, Brad said to himself through gritted teeth. Doing all the grunt work and manual labor expected of summer interns at Sky Masters and keeping up with required classes in aerospace engineering, business management, and air combat tactics left him scrambling just to eat, stay in shape, and occasionally sleep. And now, just when he’d committed a whole hour of his incredibly limited free time to this XF-111 mission simulation, the darned thing had gone dead less than halfway through. It was like getting all the interruptus without any of the coitus.
Sky Masters Aerospace operated some of the most advanced full flight simulators in the world, enabling the Nevada-based private company to train pilots to fly almost any kind of aircraft. Its programs and instructors could teach you to handle everything from lowly little turboprops to fifth-generation fighters like the F-22 Raptor. Sky Masters even trained astronauts to fly the incredible S-series advanced spaceplanes, which delivered passengers and cargo to Earth orbit from ordinary commercial runways. For Brad, the chance to grab occasional sim time was one of this unpaid internship’s biggest perks.
Still pissed, he unstrapped himself from his seat and stood up, stretching out the kinks in his shoulders and legs. His build was one of the few disadvantages he’d inherited as a McLanahan. Most of the time there was nothing wrong at all with being tall and powerfully built, but it kind of sucked when you had to squeeze yourself into a crowded cockpit for hours on end. Getting the chance to lob some ordnance into a computer-generated building full of virtual bad guys would have made up for the physical discomfort.
It was only when he stepped out onto the narrow platform attached to the huge, full-motion simulator that the penny dropped. There, off at his four o’clock and about a hundred sixty feet away, was the exit door for the huge converted hangar Sky Masters used to house its simulators. It was at the same range and bearing as that weird threat warning he’d been given just before the simulator’s power failed.
EXODUS wasn’t NATO shorthand for a new Russian SAM or fighter plane, he suddenly remembered. It was one of a series of code words created by his father, retired Air Force Lieutenant General Patrick McLanahan, and by former U.S. President Kevin Martindale, now the owner of Scion, a private military and intelligence company. They had wanted a means to communicate quickly, securely, and secretly with Brad in an emergency. EXODUS was essentially shorthand for “make an excuse and get out of Dodge fast.”
Which meant there was trouble brewing somewhere.
His hands balled into fists. What the hell was going on now? he wondered.
For years, he had been caught up in events well beyond the pay grade of any trained military officer, let alone an ordinary college student barely into his twenties. In 2015, together with his father and other Sky Masters pilots under government contract, he’d flown an unauthorized retaliatory strike against the People’s Republic of China after Chinese bombers attacked the U.S. Air Force base on Guam. Almost everyone thought his father had been killed during that mission. The fact that Patrick McLanahan, though terribly wounded, had survived was known only by a tiny handful of people.
Then, last year, funded by a grant from Sky Masters, Brad and a team of fellow students from Cal Poly had worked hard to build and deploy an experimental orbital solar power plant called Starfire. It used a microwave laser to beam all the power they collected back to Earth. Despite their peaceful intentions, the Russians and Chinese claimed they were building space weapons and launched an attack on Starfire and Armstrong Station. With salvos of S-500 air-to-space missiles streaking toward them, Brad’s team had been forced to convert their laser into a real fighting weapon. And it had worked—helping defend Armstrong Space Station successfully right up to the moment when a Russian EMP blast knocked out their electronics.
That would have been way more than enough danger and excitement for anyone. Unfortunately, Brad had also found himself hunted by Russian assassins, narrowly escaping being murdered more times than he liked to think about. It seemed that Russia’s president, Gennadiy Gryzlov, had embarked on a personal vendetta against anyone bearing the McLanahan name. It was a vendetta that went back more than a decade, all the way back to the day when Gryzlov’s own father had been killed by American bombs—bombs dropped in a raid commanded by Patrick McLanahan.
Things had been quieter in the months since the tangled wreckage of Armstrong Station fell burning through the atmosphere. The press, quickly bored by old news, had stopped hounding him for interviews. The survivors of his Starfire team had drifted apart—drawn back to their own academic challenges and lives. Even Jodie Cavendish, the Australian exchange student with whom he’d fallen in love, or maybe just lust, and shared the secret that his father was alive, had gone back to Brisbane. Then, after the school year ended, the higher-ups at Sky Masters, impressed by his work and leadership skills, had offered him this summer internship. And even the Russians seemed to have stopped trying to kill him. Brad had been hoping that destroying the Starfire Project had satiated that nut case Gryzlov’s rage.
His father and Martindale weren’t so sure. Both men suspected Brad was still under close surveillance—certainly by the U.S. government and probably by Russia’s SVR, its Foreign Intelligence Service, and the PRC’s Ministry of State Security. If so, none of his phone calls or e-mails were secure. That was why they’d ginned up a number of code words and phrases for different situations and made him memorize them.
So now his father and Martindale were privately signaling him to bail out of his Sky Masters internship and head for the hills. Fair enough, Brad thought. The trick was going to be how to do that without tipping off the FBI and various Russian and Chinese intelligence agents that something weird was up. If he just waltzed into the personnel office and said he was quitting, he might as well send up a flare. Nobody who knew anything about him would believe he’d walk away from this gig with Sky Masters without a darned good reason.
Still thinking about that, he slid the last few feet down
the ladder from the XF-111 simulator and dropped lightly onto the hangar floor. The massive Hexapod system’s huge hydraulic jacks towered above his head.
“Well, shit, look who’s been hogging the sim again, guys,” a voice jeered from behind him. “It’s Boy Bomber Jock McLanahan and his trusty sidekick, Ego Fricking Mania.”
Brad spun around.
Deke Carson and two other Sky Masters test pilots were about twenty feet away, loitering near the control consoles that ran the simulators. Carson, the biggest of the trio, leaned back against one of the consoles with his arms folded and an unpleasant sneer plastered across his face. His two friends, slightly smaller and lighter but wearing obnoxious smirks of their own, hovered at his elbows.
Brad’s eyes narrowed. Mostly he got along pretty well with the fliers who worked for Sky Masters and with the other professional pilots who flocked here for advanced training. Carson and his cronies were the exception. They’d been riding him all summer.
Carson was the worst. Like many Air Force pilots, he’d been “involuntarily separated” from the service in the last round of budget cuts. Sky Masters was retraining him to fly big commercial jetliners, but he was still pissed off about losing his military career. And even the sight of Brad McLanahan was like waving a matador’s red cape in front of a bull. Knowing that a kid, and a civilian kid at that, had more flight time, even time in space, and real-world combat experience than he did struck the former Air Force captain as proof that politics and family clout counted for more than talent and training.
“Did you cut the power to my sim, Deke?” Brad snapped, moving toward the other men.
Carson raised an eyebrow. “Your sim, McLanahan?” He snorted. “Last time I looked, you were just a jumped-up broom jockey with a big mouth. Or did somebody in corporate promote you to CEO because you did such a good job cleaning toilets?”
His two friends snickered.
Encouraged, Carson unfolded his arms and stepped right up to Brad, crowding inside his comfort zone. “Look, Bradley McDumbshit. These guys and me . . .” He nodded at his cronies, “We’re paying the freight here, to the tune of ten thousand bucks apiece per goddamned month. And we’re getting sick of seeing you waltz around like you’re God’s Own Aviator. Hell, you’re not even a nugget. You’re just a little piece of crap with delusions of grandeur.”
“I’ve paid my dues,” Brad said tightly. “I’ve flown enough to—”
“Bull,” Carson interrupted. “The only reason anyone’s ever let you sit in a cockpit is because your dad, the late and totally unlamented General McLanahan, knew how to kiss political ass in Washington, D.C., and corporate ass here at Sky Masters.”
For a moment, Brad saw red. Then he breathed out slowly, forcing himself to regain self-control. He had nothing to gain from getting into a fight with a dick like Carson. Three years ago, losing his temper with an instructor had gotten him bounced out of the U.S. Air Force Academy in the middle of cadet basic training. Though he’d never said so, Brad knew that was the one time he’d genuinely disappointed his father.
“Nothing to say, McLanahan?” Carson asked loudly. His sneer grew deeper. “I guess that’s because you know it’s the truth.” He glanced at his friends, saw them grinning in encouragement, and swung back to Brad. “Hell, the only other thing you’ve got in common with your dad is the nasty habit of getting other people killed for your own goddamned glory! How many people were left sucking vacuum when you ditched from Armstrong Space Station and hightailed it for home? Four? Five? More?”
On the other hand, Brad thought coldly, he did need a good reason for leaving Sky Masters before his internship was up. Maybe this was his chance to create one. He looked hard at Carson. “I strongly suggest you shut up, Deke,” he said.
“Or what?” Carson asked, still sneering.
“Or I will kick your sorry Hangar Queen ass,” Brad told him. “And right in front of your little friends, too.”
For a second, he thought the other man would play it smart and back down. That would be . . . disappointing. But then he saw Carson’s nostrils flare and knew he’d jabbed the right nerve with that Hangar Queen crack. Maybe it wasn’t fair to rub Deke’s face in the fact that his beloved Air Force had treated him like a broken-down bird useful only for spare parts, but this wasn’t exactly a time to be fair.
Carson shoved his shoulder hard. “Screw you,” he snarled.
One, Brad thought. He just smiled.
Furious now, Carson started to shove him again.
Now.
Brad slid to the left, deflecting the other man’s arm up and away with a right fan block.
Off balance, Carson stumbled forward.
Moving swiftly and fluidly, Brad swung in behind him, sliding his left hand under and around the other man’s jaw to bring Carson’s throat into the crook of his elbow. At the same time, he brought his right hand over to grip the back of the former Air Force pilot’s head and pushed forward, exponentially increasing the force on his carotid arteries.
Within seconds, deprived of any blood flow to his brain, Carson sagged, unconscious. Brad dropped him to the hangar floor. The self-defense training he had received from Chris Wohl and his countersurveillance operatives of Scion, even though long discontinued, still stuck with him.
“Who’s next?” he asked, stepping over the other man’s limp body. He grinned. “I’ll be nice. You can both come at me at the same time.”
But Carson’s two cronies were already backing away. One of them had his cell phone out. “Sky Masters Security?” he stammered. “We’ve got a big problem in the Simulator Building. We need help, right now!”
The other looked at Brad with an odd mix of fear and curiosity in his eyes. “You know you’re totally fucked, McLanahan, don’t you?”
Brad shrugged. “Well, yeah, I guess I probably am.”
OSCE ARMS CONTROL STATION,
NEAR STAROVOITOVE,
URKAINIAN-POLISH BORDER
THAT SAME TIME
Lieutenant General Mikhail Voronov, commander of Russia’s 20th Guards Army, leaned forward in the Kazan Ansat-U helicopter’s left-hand seat, studying the ground flashing below at 250 kilometers per hour. This part of western Ukraine was covered in tiny lakes, narrow rivers, and marshland. Patches of pine and oak forest alternated with small fields sown in rye, potatoes, and oats. There were relatively few roads, most of them running east toward Kiev and west toward the Polish frontier.
A poor countryside, Voronov thought. But a useful place to keep a choke hold on the Ukrainians.
“We are five minutes out, sir,” the pilot told him. “Captains Covaci and Yurevich report they are ready for your inspection.”
“Very good,” Voronov said.
Stefan Covaci, a Romanian military police officer, and Vitalyi Yurevich, a member of Belarus’s border guards, jointly commanded one of the OSCE arms control posts sited at every border crossing into Ukraine. Since Romania was friendly to Ukraine and Belarus favored Russia, the dual command arrangement kept each national contingent reasonably honest and efficient.
In theory, under the cease-fire agreement between Ukraine’s government and the separatists allied with Moscow, these stations were supposed to stem the flow of weapons and military technology that might trigger a new conflict. In practice, their work helped keep the Ukrainians militarily weak and under Moscow’s thumb. Weapons sought by Kiev were deemed contraband, while Russian arms shipments to Donetsk, Luhansk, and other rebel-held cities easily evaded the OSCE’s inspectors.
The Russian general smiled, remembering the carefully crafted English-language quip his president had used at a recent meeting: “So the West thinks OSCE stands for the ‘Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe,’ eh?” Russian Federation President Gennadiy Gryzlov had said with a wolfish grin. “How very high-minded of them. Fortunately for us, we know that it really stands for the ‘Organization to Secure Our Conquests and Empire.’ ”
It was the kind of darkly ironic gi
be Voronov greatly enjoyed.
Since the tank, motor-rifle, and artillery brigades of his 20th Guards Army were based closest to Ukraine’s eastern border, Voronov acted as Moscow’s de facto satrap for the rebel-controlled regions. He made sure that the Kremlin’s carefully expressed “wishes” were obeyed to the letter. If necessary, separatists who balked were discreetly eliminated by special hit teams under his orders—as were other Ukrainians still living in those areas who were too stupid to understand who now ruled them.
As the senior Russian commander in this region, he also made a habit of periodically inspecting the OSCE’s arms control posts. These inspection tours added up to long, dreary hours spent flying from place to place, refueling when necessary, but his visits kept the monitors on their toes. And that was useful. Arms and ammunition they confiscated were arms and ammunition his own troops would not have to face when the day finally came to finish the job and reconquer all of Ukraine.
For now, President Gryzlov seemed content with the status quo, but the general suspected that would soon change. The NATO powers, led by the United States, were increasingly weak. Just last year the Americans had effectively stood aside while Russia first destroyed an S-19 spaceplane with their vice president aboard, and then blew their prized Armstrong orbital military station into a million pieces. And if anything, their new president, a woman of all things, seemed even less likely to get in Moscow’s way.
Voronov’s sly grin slipped.
Poland was the one real remaining obstacle. It, too, had a new president, Piotr Wilk. But this Pole, a former air force commander, seemed made of sterner stuff than the American, Stacy Anne Barbeau. His sympathies plainly lay with Ukraine’s democratic regime. And he was already proposing a program of significantly increased defense spending to boost Poland’s military capabilities. If left too long to his own devices, Wilk seemed likely to make trouble for Moscow.