by Dale Brown
A four-lane avenue cutting northeast right through the heart of Konotop caught his eye. Streetlights, telephone poles, and trees lined both sides of the road, but that street looked as though it might barely be wide enough. Maybe. If there weren’t any cars or trucks blocking the stretch he picked. Jesus, he thought, what a crazy stunt. He must be nuts. Then he smiled and shrugged. Since every other option was a literal dead end, what choice did he really have?
Still smiling, Brad tweaked the stick right, rolling the MQ-55 into a gentle turn. The television cameras mounted on the Coyote showed him a flickering picture of the terrain sliding past the small turbojet. There, he thought, spotting a set of train tracks running almost due east. That was his way into the city. He took the Coyote lower still and flew along the tracks at one hundred knots, not much above its rated stall speed.
Houses, streets, trees, and light poles flashed past his virtual cockpit, looming up with startling swiftness out of the darkness. He gritted his teeth, flying on pure nerve and instinct now. One tiny twitch at the wrong time and he’d smack the MQ-55 into the ground or a building, turning it into a mangled heap of debris. And all for nothing.
Ahead, the railroad tracks split, with some lines veering off to sidings, huge brick warehouses, and other large buildings set up for locomotive repair and maintenance. That had to be Konotop’s main rail yard. Which meant he was roughly twelve hundred feet from his turn point. Twelve hundred feet at one hundred knots per hour. He peered intently at the screen, counting down silently. Four. Three. Two. One.
Now.
He rolled the Coyote sharply left, powering up to keep the drone from falling right out of the sky. And then back sharply right. A wide avenue, blessedly empty of traffic at this time of night, appeared straight ahead of him.
Gently, gently, Brad thought. He tapped a key and heard the MQ-55’s landing gear whir down and lock. Down a bit. Down a bit more. The buildings, trees, and streetlights flashing past the screen grew much bigger in a hurry. His digital altitude readout wound down. Fifty feet. Thirty feet. Ten feet.
He chopped the throttles suddenly and the Coyote touched down, rolling fast right down a street in the heart of Konotop. He braked, bringing the small aircraft to a full stop within fifteen hundred feet. The avenue stretched on ahead for another mile or so.
Now to wait, Brad decided. But not for very long.
OVER UKRAINE
THAT SAME TIME
Thirty kilometers out from Konotop, the images captured by the Su-35’s OLS-35 electro-optical search-and-track system came up with appalling clarity on Major Vladimir Cherkashin’s large right-hand MFD. Stunned by what he was seeing, he keyed his radio mike. “Voronezh Control, this is Shotgun Lead. Konotop Airfield is burning. Repeat, the whole damned base is on fire! I see multiple wrecked aircraft and vehicles.”
“Are there any signs of hostile air or ground forces?” the controller asked.
“Negative!” Cherkashin snapped. “I have no unidentified radar or IR contacts yet.” He thumbed a switch on his joystick, activating his fighter’s automated defensive suite. “Shotgun Two. Go active on all countermeasures now!”
“Two,” his wingman reported.
“Arm weapons,” Cherkashin ordered, pushing another switch on the joystick.
“Two,” the other Su-35 pilot said. “Standing by.”
“We’re going to make a quick, hard pass over the field at two thousand meters,” Cherkashin said. “Whoever hit our guys can’t be far away. Keep your eyes open and be ready to nail them.”
“You don’t think Konotop was hit by a long-range missile or artillery barrage?” his wingman asked.
Cherkashin shook his head. “No, Oleg. Look at your screen. There are no craters. None. What kind of missile or artillery attack is that accurate? Konotop must have been attacked by an infantry or armor force using direct-fire heavy weapons. So we find those bastards and then we blow the shit out of them.”
“Copy that,” the other pilot, Captain Bessonov, said grimly.
The two Su-35s dove lower, racing west toward the ruined airfield at high speed.
KONOTOP
THAT SAME TIME
Patrick stood with the armored back of his CID squarely against the dirty brick wall of the apartment building. Row after row of rusting metal balconies draped with laundry rose above high his head. He aimed the electromagnetic rail gun skyward, waiting.
Twenty yards to his left, Nadia Rozek’s Iron Wolf robot copied him, except that she held a mini-Stinger missile ready to fire. The mini-Stinger missiles employed by the CIDs were not designed to take down fast-moving, high-flying aircraft, but it was all she had, and she was hoping for one more bit of good luck tonight. “Standing by,” she said softly. “I will take the lead plane, CID One.”
“Understood,” Patrick said. “I have the wingman.” Based on its last sensor reading from the incoming Russian fighters, his computer was running a continuous prediction program—estimating where and when the enemy aircraft would come back into view. Following the visual cues it presented, he swung the rail gun just a couple of degrees to the right.
And suddenly a huge twin-tailed aircraft howled low overhead, racing toward the airfield. Off to the right, another Su-35 appeared, not far behind the lead plane.
“Tone!” Nadia shouted. She fired the Stinger. It flashed skyward in a bright plume of exhaust. Reacting with lightning speed, she loaded the second Stinger and fired again.
The two missiles streaked after the speeding Russian fighter. But its pilot was already reacting, strewing dozens of decoy flares across the sky as he banked hard, breaking away from the Stingers in a high-G turn. The first missile homed in on one of the flares and exploded too far behind the Su-35 to do any damage. The second Stinger flew straight through the expanding cloud of IR decoys but couldn’t reacquire the wildly maneuvering enemy plane. It raced on through the night sky and vanished.
Patrick shifted his rail gun slightly, barely leading the second Su-35. He fired. CCRRAACK! Plasma flared and then vanished. A miss. One round remaining. He leaned forward slightly, forcing himself to relax, following the cue set by his targeting computer. The distant image of the Russian aircraft pulsed green. Now! He squeezed the trigger again.
Hit with enormous force at supersonic speed, the Su-35 broke in half. Trailing debris, the two pieces tumbled out of the air and smashed into the ground at nearly a thousand miles an hour.
Patrick felt something akin to hunger, but he knew what it really meant: all rail-gun ammunition was expended.
One down, Patrick thought grimly. But that left one Russian fighter plane still in the fight—and neither CID had any weapons left that could touch it. Far off in the sky, he could see the Su-35 curving back toward their position, clearly intent on avenging its downed comrade. “Any ideas, Captain Rozek?” he asked.
“We might be able to hide for a time among the city buildings,” she said. “But my power levels are dropping fast.”
“Coyote One to CIDs,” Patrick heard Brad radio suddenly. “Don’t hide! There’s a big avenue a couple of blocks away. Head southeast on it at high speed. And make it obvious! Get that pilot to chase you.”
“And then what?” Nadia asked, puzzled.
“Leave that to me,” Brad told her quietly.
Major Vladimir Cherkashin rolled out of his tight turn and came wings level—slashing back toward Konotop at full military power. His defensive systems were fully automatic now, continuously launching flares and chaff to decoy any new enemy heat-seeking or radar-guided missiles. A pillar of fire off to his right marked the funeral pyre of Bessonov’s Su-35.
Cherkashin swore viciously. He and Oleg Bessonov had been friends and flying comrades since their days as cadets at the Air Academy. And now the other man had been swatted out of the sky without even seeing who had killed him.
Small flashes lit the jumble of buildings and streets ahead. Grenades exploding? Or mortar rounds? Were the Poles or Ukrainian terrorists who had attac
ked the airfield fighting their way into Konotop itself?
Cherkashin turned slightly to the left, closing in on those repeated flashes. He glanced down at images shown on his right-hand display. Whether they were out in the open or taking cover in buildings, his IRST system should be able to spot the missile teams who had ambushed him and killed Bessonov. He chopped his throttles, dumping airspeed to give himself more time to find and engage the enemy.
A glimmer of movement far down a wide street caught his eye. The Su-35’s cameras had picked up two flickering shapes moving southeast at more than eighty kilometers an hour, but his IRST system couldn’t lock on to them. They were just a jumble of seemingly unconnected hot spots racing down the middle of the avenue. He frowned. What the hell were those things?
He rolled right and then left to line up on the street. Still no lock.
Fuck it, Cherkashin thought coldly. Throw enough 30mm shells into the middle of those weird thermal images and he’d hit something. He thumbed the guns switch on his stick and felt the Su-35 judder slightly as the GSh-301 cannon in its starboard wing root fired a short burst.
A fusillade of armor-piercing incendiary rounds lashed the street just behind the fast-moving targets—blowing huge smoking holes in the pavement and ripping parked cars to shreds. Damnation, the Russian pilot thought. He was undershooting—they were much faster than he thought. He lowered his aircraft’s nose slightly to gain a bit more speed. The glowing guns pipper on his heads-up display slewed toward the two weird, skittering vehicles.
Any second now.
“Warning! Air target at three o’clock low! Range close!” the Su-35’s automated system said urgently. “Collision aler—”
Horrified, Cherkashin flicked his eyes right. He just had time to see a strange, batwinged aircraft streaking off the ground—heading straight for his fighter at high speed. He yanked the stick hard left, desperately trying to evade.
And failed.
The MQ-55 Coyote hit the Su-35’s port wing squarely and tore it off in a hailstorm of shredded metal and carbon fiber. Razor-edged fragments slashed through both mangled aircraft. Trailing fire and smoke, the Russian fighter and the Iron Wolf drone fell out of the sky, slammed into a row of homes and shops, and blew up.
EXTRACTION POINT,
NORTHEAST OF KONOTOP
A SHORT TIME LATER
Two Iron Wolf aircraft—their Sparrowhawk tilt-rotor and their MH-47 Chinook helicopter—nearly filled the darkened forest clearing. Several recon troopers in camouflage were busy rolling up the electroluminescent panels they’d used to warn the flight crews away from tree stumps and boggy ground. The little Mercedes-Benz Wolf 4x4 was already safely stowed in the tilt-rotor. The two Cybernetic Infantry Devices, fully rearmed and recharged, stood motionless, ready to walk aboard the two aircraft.
Wearily, Nadia Rozek crawled out through the hatch in the back of CID Two and slowly swung herself down to the ground. She felt drained and shaky, almost as though she had aged twenty years in the past hour.
“Nice work, Captain,” a tall, broad-shouldered man in a black flight suit said. She recognized the American CID Operations commander, Major Wayne Macomber. “You guys did a real number on Konotop.” He grinned evilly. “A bunch of Russians just learned they picked the wrong people to screw around with.”
Nadia nodded somberly. “Perhaps. But most of them are now dead.”
“That’s the way it usually works,” Macomber agreed. He climbed up the CID’s leg and paused near the open hatch. “Better them than us is the way I always figure it.” He looked down at her. “Anyway, grab some food and shut-eye once you’re aboard the Chinook.” He slapped the armored side of the war machine. “It’s my turn next to take this goddamned bundle of gears and circuits out for a little spin.”
She nodded again. The squadron’s operational plan called for another rapid-fire attack on a second Russian forward operating airfield—this one five hundred kilometers to the northwest, in Belarus. By striking two widely separated targets in quick succession, they hoped to knock the Russians off balance, and to fool them into believing they were facing a much larger force.
Fighting off another wave of fatigue, Nadia turned toward the waiting helicopter. But then she swung back as a sudden thought struck her. “What about the pilot for CID One, Major?” she asked. “Where is his replacement?”
Whack was staring inside the CID at the gray, gelatinous membrane that made up the system that literally sucked up central-nervous-system signals from the body, processed them, and translated the signals into movement, and at the same time transmitted signals from the CID’s several hundred haptic and sensor systems directly into the body’s central nervous system. It always made him feel a little queasy lying on that oozy surface, like swimming in warm mud. He also had to remember to hold his breath for about thirty seconds until the hatch behind him closed, the CID locked on to his central nervous system, matched it to his preprogrammed patterns, activated, and then started its life-support systems. “What about him?” he asked distractedly.
“Who replaces him for this next mission?” Nadia wondered.
“No one,” the big American said quietly, lowering his voice. “That Iron Wolf machine is a one-man show.”
She frowned. “Surely, that is impossible. When will he eat? Or sleep?”
Macomber sighed. “Captain, I wish I could give you a straight answer for that. Because I have the feeling our armored friend over there only plans to sleep when he’s dead.” With that, he sketched her a quick salute, steeled himself, and slid inside the CID. The hatch sealed behind him.
Still frowning, Nadia moved past the silent, motionless shape of CID One and climbed into the waiting helicopter. There was a mystery here that troubled her. Even with her limited experience inside these powerful and deadly Cybernetic Infantry Devices, she knew that no ordinary human could pilot one without the chance to rest and recover. Not and stay sane. So what did that say about the mysterious man hidden away inside that other Iron Wolf?
THE WHITE HOUSE,
WASHINGTON, D.C.
THAT SAME TIME
President Stacy Anne Barbeau worked very hard to keep her face an expressionless mask as Luke Cohen ushered General Timothy Spelling, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Thomas Torrey, the director of the CIA, and Admiral Kevin Caldwell, the director of the National Security Agency, into the Oval Office. Usually she kept a flock of tame reporters hanging around just outside, ready to file flattering little stories about her meetings with foreign dignitaries, film stars, and other celebrities, but the corridor was empty this afternoon. There was no way she wanted any pictures or news of this particular meeting appearing in the press.
Still stone-faced, she remained seated, not bothering to get up for the usual round of phony “we’re all friends and coworkers here” glad-handing. Cohen showed the three men to a row of straight-backed chairs set out in front of her desk. Once they were seated, he dropped casually onto a comfortable couch positioned off to the side.
“I hope I don’t need to tell you gentlemen how goddamned tired I am of being blindsided by the Russians,” Barbeau said scathingly, without any preamble. She nodded to the secure phone on her desk. “I just had another call from Foreign Minister Titeneva. She is demanding immediate information about these mystery aircraft we’re supposedly flying secretly across the Atlantic and Mediterranean. And frankly, I want some straight answers myself!”
Spelling cleared his throat. “Madam President, we’ve been investigating those Russian charges ever since Moscow first made them public.”
“Well?” Barbeau demanded.
“One of our F/A-18F crews flying off the Bush did intercept a group of six aircraft, identified as F-111s, refueling from a KC-10 Extender aerial tanker at the time in question,” Spelling said.
“An F-111?” Barbeau exclaimed. She knew her Cold War–era aircraft—she was an Air Force brat and loved every minute of her time on air bases all over the world. “That was an old S
trategic Air Command and Tactical Air Command bomber from the eighties. I thought they were all mothballed.”
“These were very much flyable, ma’am,” Spelling said. “They were flying without transponder codes and not on an international flight plan. The Hornet crew reported this contact to the carrier, but their report never went any further up the chain of command.”
Barbeau’s eyes flashed angrily. “Why the hell not, General? Are you telling me that officers of my Navy are conspiring to withhold information from their lawful superiors?”
“No, Madam President,” Spelling said. He looked acutely uncomfortable. “The pilots flying those unidentified F-111s gave the carrier’s air operations officer a special code phrase to check. When he ran that through Bush’s computer, it confirmed they were part of a DoD-authorized Top Secret, operations and support Special Access Program—one with instructions specifically requiring him to avoid logging or reporting the contact. That’s why it took a direct query from Admiral Fowler, the chief of naval operations, to confirm this incident.”
“You’re talking about this EIGHTBALL-whatever code the Russians picked up?” Luke Cohen asked, sitting up a little straighter on the couch.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs nodded. “That’s right, Mr. Cohen.”
“That code is dead after right now,” Barbeau snapped. “No one else gets to use it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And those F-111s were probably planes refurbished by Sky Masters and sent on their way to Poland, right?” Cohen asked.
No one in the Oval Office saw it, but Stacy Anne Barbeau’s face turned a sickening shade of pale when she heard the name “Sky Masters”—she had not had favorable encounters with that company or some of their people and products over the years.
Again, Spelling nodded, as Thomas Torrey, the CIA director, said, “That’s the most logical conclusion. Sky Masters claims they sold the planes to a number of different customers, but it’s fairly clear these other companies were acting as intermediaries for the Polish government. Or they might be shell corporations created by Warsaw itself. We’re still digging into that.”