by Dale Brown
The other unusual thing about this flight was that this B-52 carried something it rarely ever took along on its missions: passengers. Trevor Griffin was one of them.
But not for long.
Hal Briggs, who occupied the bolt-in bunk on the left side of the aircraft, was already climbing down the ladder to the lower deck. Griffin followed, moving carefully, still getting accustomed to the strange suit he was wearing. The Air Battle Force guys unflatteringly called it BERP—Ballistic Electro-Reactive Process—but Trevor called it simply “un-fucking-believable.” It was a full-body coverall design, made of material that felt like stiff fabric, such as the kind that knife-proof bank deposit bags were made of. But once connected to a power unit worn like a thin backpack, the material electronically, instantly became as hard as an inch of titanium when struck. Griffin had watched a demonstration during his daylong training course and couldn’t believe what he saw: The wearer was protected from thirty-millimeter Gatling-gun fire, explosions, fire, and even a fall from a twenty-five-story parachute-training drop tower.
That wasn’t all. The boots had a jet-propulsion system built into them that compressed and stored a large air charge that allowed wearers to jump several dozen meters in height and distance—they no longer had to run or even drive into combat. The battle armor had two electrodes on the shoulders that could send a lightning bolt of electricity in any direction out to a range of about thirty feet, powerful enough to render a man unconscious. In addition, Briggs wore an exotic-looking exoskeleton device that enhanced their bodies’ strength by automatically stiffening sections of the BERP electronic body armor, then using microhydraulic actuators to amplify muscular strength. Griffin saw BERP-outfitted commandos tossing engine blocks around the training course like pebbles, hefting and firing thirty-millimeter cannons as if they were handguns, and demolishing small buildings like bulldozers.
His new helmet was something out of a science-fiction movie, too: It had sensors that gave him “eyes” in the back of his head, superhearing, night vision, and allowed him to talk to practically anyone on planet Earth with a radio. Even the color of the gear was high-tech: It was some sort of computerized multicolored pixelated design that allowed the wearer to blend into any background, from broad daylight in the desert to night against snow.
Trevor climbed down the ladder and met up with Briggs. On a signal from Hal, Griffin donned helmet and gloves and powered on his battle armor, as he was taught to do back at Battle Mountain days ago. Hal glanced at his old commanding officer with a hint of humor in his eyes occasionally as he checked Griffin’s battle-armor systems. “How do you feel, sir?” he asked.
“Like I gotta pee,” Griffin responded. “I’m finding it hard to consciously pee in this thing.” Like some sort of Frank Herbert sci-fi invention, the BERP gear collected urine and sweat from its wearer and circulated it through small tubules in the suit, which provided incredibly effective temperature control. The suit also had small filters built into the fluid-circulation system that removed bacteria and other contaminants from the collected fluid and allowed the wearer to drink the fluid from a tube—it tasted terrible, but it would save you in an emergency.
“That’s standard for everyone wearing battle armor for the first time,” Hal said. “But the more you pee in it, the better you’ll feel—and I guarantee if you’re thirsty enough, you’ll want it. Any questions for me, sir?”
“How many times have you used this aircraft before?”
“On an actual mission?” Briggs asked. Griffin nodded. “Never.”
“Never?” Trevor remarked. “How about test flights?”
“This particular aircraft? Never. How many total test flights…?”
“Don’t tell me, let me guess: never, right?”
“We have very good computers that model and simulate the flights for every possible loading and flight condition,” Hal said. “It’s been tested a hundred times—just not with any live human beings on board. I think we made one test flight with instrumented dummies a while back.”
“And?”
Hal smiled, shrugged, and said, “You know, sir, instrumented test dummies make terrible pilots.”
“Great.”
“And the best part, sir—you volunteered for this,” Hal said. “We’re happy to have you along.” He turned away and spoke, “Bobcat Control, Tin Man One. How do you copy?”
“One, this is Control, we read you five-by,” Brigadier General David Luger responded from his Battle Management Center, or BATMAN, at Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base. With him was Colonel Daren Mace, the operations officer for the 111th Wing; Colonel Nancy Cheshire, commander of the Fifty-second Bomb Squadron, the unit in charge of all the Megafortresses, who was “piloting” this unmanned Megafortress; Marine Corps Sergeant Major Chris Wohl, noncommissioned officer in charge of the Air Battle Force’s ground forces; and Colonel Kelvin Carter, the Fifty-second Bomb Squadron’s operations officer and the man in charge of the special mission that was about to begin in a few minutes. They were supported by intelligence, weapons, surveillance, and maintenance technicians seated with them in the Aircraft Control Group of the BATMAN.
“We’re ready to board Condor.”
“We’re ready here.”
“Let’s mount up.” Hal hit a switch and watched a cabin-pressurization gauge, which showed the cabin altitude slowly increase until it equaled thirty-two thousand feet, the same as the aircraft altitude. Their oxygen system was already built into their BERP suits, so they didn’t need oxygen masks. Griffin tried and failed to control his belches and other bodily outgassing as the lower outside pressure allowed trapped gases in his body to escape. When the pressure was equalized, Briggs undogged the aft bulkhead door and stepped aft. Griffin followed. A short walk later, they were in the QB-52’s bomb bay. Briggs flipped on the lights—and there it was.
They called it the MQ-35 “Condor,” but it had no official designation because it was as experimental as anything ever before fielded by any Air Force unit. The Condor was designed as a stealthy long-range special-operations forces insertion transport aircraft, using a long-range bomber to get it close to its target, then using its onboard propulsion system to fly the team out at the end of the mission. It resembled a giant stealthy air-launched cruise missile, with a smoothly blended triangular lifting-body fuselage, a long flat nose, and a gently sloping aft section culminating in a small-diameter engine-exhaust nozzle. Thirty-six feet long, nine feet high and wide, it took up almost the entire bomb bay, leaving a very narrow catwalk around it. Briggs opened the entry door on the side of the craft, and Griffin clambered inside and began strapping in. Hal performed a brief walk-around inspection using a flashlight, climbed into the front seat, closed and latched the entry door, and strapped himself in.
The interior was tight and cramped. The team members sat in heavy-gauge steel seats, not quite side by side and not in tandem, but slightly staggered so they had a bit more shoulder space. The only windows were the forward cockpit windows. There were two more seats behind Griffin, plus a small cargo area behind the rear seats for their weapons and gear. They all were quiet as they tightened shoulder and lap restraints and readied themselves for their mission. Hal flipped some switches and powered up the tiny ship’s internal power and instrumentation. “Control, Condor, power on, ready for systems check.”
“Systems check in progress, Condor,” Kelvin Carter responded from Battle Mountain. Hal Briggs could manually operate and control Condor, but, like the QB-52 Megafortresses, it was designed to be controlled, monitored, and flown via satellite from Battle Mountain. A few moments later: “Condor, systems check is complete, aircraft is ready for flight. I’ve been informed that we’re sending updated intel info to you now. We might have to make a change in the landing zone. Stand by.”
“Select the tactical area chart, sir,” Hal told Griffin.
Inside his helmet Griffin glanced at the electronic display, which was a very wide field-of-view visor, similar to the view fr
om a quality full-face motorcycle helmet. At the extreme upper left side of the display was a small yellow bar. When Griffin looked at it, a menu similar to a Windows or Macintosh computer popped up. He scanned down the menu until he came to the “Charts” selection, then glanced at the star icon to the left. Another menu popped up, displaying a set of charts. Griffin selected the proper one. The entire chart appeared to be floating in front of him. By glancing at navigation icons on his display, he was able to display changes to the chart from the last briefed information.
“Looks like Russian troops have moved even farther east than we anticipated, sir,” Hal said after studying the symbology on the new chart. “I’d say they’ve completely taken Tedzhen. A few patrols have moved almost all the way to the Sakar Reservoir. Colonel?”
“Our contact point is on the north side of the reservoir,” Griffin said. “Our landing zone is between them and the Russians’ new position. It’s close, but I don’t think it’s been compromised—yet.”
“Top? What do you think?”
“The data is over thirty minutes old, sir—they may have compromised your landing zone already,” Chris Wohl responded by the secure satellite link. “But there’s only one way to find out.”
“I agree,” Hal said. “Colonel? Your thoughts?”
“This is your show, Hal,” Griffin said. “But going in at night, in this contraption—I’d say we go for it. No way in hell they’d ever expect us.”
“That’s the spirit, sir,” Hal said happily. “Control, recommendations?”
“This is Intel, Condor,” the intelligence officer responded. “We have a few other alternate infiltration spots, but it’ll extend your ground-travel time past your reserve power limit.” The BERP electronic battle armor ran off very high-tech fuel cells that supplied an enormous amount of power but for relatively short periods of time, depending on usage. In a simple “sneak and peek” operation, their power might last hours—but if they had to fight their way out of a battle, the power could last only minutes.
“The last two fuel cells are emergency-only, Control. We never plan to use them,” Briggs said. Each team member carried extra fuel cells—they were even more important than ammunition on this mission. “If we can’t do this mission without using the emergency fuel cells, we don’t go. We’ll do the approach to the planned landing zone, and if it’s hot, we’ll bug out.”
“Sounds good to me, Condor,” David Luger said. “We’re good to go.”
“Roger that,” Carter acknowledged. “Five minutes to release, Condor.”
It was the longest five-minute wait in Trevor Griffin’s life. All the techniques he had learned over the years to calm himself—controlled breathing, consciously unclenching muscles, Transcendental Meditation—refused to work this time. But soon he wished he’d had to wait a little while longer. It seemed only a few seconds when Carter gave a one-minute warning.
The bomb doors below them slid open. The rumbling sound reverberating in their helmets quadrupled in intensity, and the little craft shook violently in the disrupted airflow, as if it were a young stallion trying to break the wrangler’s grasp on the rope to free himself.
But the worst part was when they dropped free of the Megafortress’s bomb bay and fell out into space. Griffin felt as if his stomach had flown up into his throat. Blood rushed to his head, causing his vision to “red out,” and he thought for sure he was going to lose his lunch. The Condor’s sudden deceleration caused his body to mash up against his shoulder harness, which dug mercilessly into his body, so hard he could feel it pinch even through the thick BERP body armor. The Condor’s nose pitched over, and for a very long, uncomfortable moment, he thought he was heading straight down, ready to slam into the earth facefirst.
“Good separation, Condor,” Carter’s voice said. “How are you feeling, Colonel?” Undoubtedly the BERP rig had some sort of telemetry device that was sending body-function readouts back to Battle Mountain. “You can breathe anytime now, sir.” Griffin found he was holding his breath, and he let it out with a gush and found that the pressure on his chest had already greatly subsided.
“I’m okay,” Griffin said, willing his breathing to quickly return to normal.
“That first step is definitely an eye-opener,” Briggs exclaimed. Griffin silently cursed his desk-bound stomach and vowed to stay in better shape.
If he made it through this mission in one piece.
“MA flight controls responding normally,” Carter reported. “Coming up to best glide speed…now.” The Condor’s nose pitched up greatly, assuming a much more normal, albeit slightly unsettling, nose-down attitude. Underneath Condor’s skin were thousands of tiny computer-controlled hydraulic actuators that twisted and manipulated most of the outer fuselage—in effect, the entire body was a wing, with an almost infinitely controllable amount of lift or drag. The craft could glide as slowly as a feather one moment, sink as fast as a fifteen-thousand-pound rock the next moment, and then float like a cloud the next, all without deploying one aileron or flap. “Looking good, Condor. Sit back and relax, folks. We’re on glide path to target.”
Mary, Republic of Turkmenistan
That same time
Although it was at the crossroads of travel and commerce in Central
Asia, and had been for centuries, Mary was definitely a very lonely and desolate place now.
Mary once was the second-largest city in Turkmenistan and the nexus of the railways, highways, and petroleum pipelines that transported Turkmenistan’s immense oil and natural-gas wealth to other parts of Central Asia and as far east as the Indian subcontinent. It was also now the easternmost stronghold of the Army of the Russian Federation, which was trying to wrest control of Turkmenistan away from its interim Muslim government and replace it with a pro-Russian government again. Most of the Muslim population had fled north toward Chärjew, ready to cross the border into Uzbekistan if necessary; a few hardier souls had decided to make the perilous journey across the burning sands of the Kara-Kum Desert toward Kerki, ready to escape to Uzbekistan or Afghanistan if the Russians dared pursue them this far.
Mary was Podpolkovnik Artyom Vorobev’s first field command. He was in charge of the 117th Rifles, a motorized rifle regiment with about three thousand troops carried aboard a conglomeration of vehicles, everything from cargo trucks to BTR-60 armored personnel carriers and BRDM scouts. Vorobev, however, was lucky enough to have a battalion of T-72 light tanks augmenting his force, which he deployed right up front on the Ashkhabad-Mary highway. He also had almost a full air-defense battalion, including four ZSU-23 mobile antiaircraft artillery vehicles and three 9K35 Strela-10 mobile surface-to-air missile units, along with a command-post vehicle, radar vehicle, and reloads.
He used to have an S-300 brigade up front, but of course the damned Americans and their unmanned stealth bombers had taken care of that unit. The furor regarding his decision to deploy the S-300 air-defense brigade so far ahead of his regiment had thankfully quieted down in the wake of the United Nations’ decision to exclude all foreign military combat aircraft from Turkmenistan. He was still in command, and he was determined not to screw up again.
The Strela-10 heat-seeking antiaircraft missile system was much more capable than the ancient ZSU-23 against high-performance aircraft, such as the American bomber that was shot down a few weeks earlier. But as commander of the point scout unit, Vorobev’s objective wasn’t to take on a massed air or ground assault but simply to make contact with any enemy forces out there, report their strength and position, disengage, and maintain contact until heavier reinforcements arrived. The main force was many kilometers away, but it was two full reinforced brigades spread out along the fifty kilometers between Mary and Tedzen, supported by several aviation, air-defense, engineer, and special-operations companies.
Vorobev’s command vehicle was located near the rear of his regiment, about ten kilometers southwest of the main airport at Mary and four kilometers behind the lead scout formation to the east. He
was proud of this force, and he told his battalion and company commanders that every day. Vorobev had been deployed all over the Russian Federation in various units throughout his eighteen-year-long army career, but mostly as a staff officer, never as a field commander. He had worked hard and used his contacts to go to the best schools and training centers so he could fill out his résumé with plenty of academic experience, but despite top marks and glowing endorsements from many high-ranking generals and even a few vice marshals in Moscow, he had always lacked the one thing he needed to compete for flag rank: actual experience commanding a combat unit in the field.
When he got his orders to go to Turkmenistan, he thought his career was over—an assignment to Central Asia was worse than one to Siberia. But it turned out that one of his many patrons did him a favor: He would be taking command of a full regiment, which looked good on any subcolonel’s record, but his first command was in a relatively quiet and safe location—Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan. Nothing ever happened there.
That is, until about two months after he took command of his unit. Then, as his grandfather always used to say, “On idyot pyerdyachim parom,” or “He was going to the top propelled by fart steam.” The Taliban had invaded Turkmenistan, one of the other Russian army regiments in his division assigned to defend the city of Mary had been crushed, and now he was suddenly thrust to the forefront with strict orders from Moscow not to underestimate the Taliban-led forces and let the same happen to him. Vorobev’s regiment was now expected to blunt any advances by any hostile forces, whether they be Turkmenis, Taliban—or American B-1 bombers. Mary was the “line of death” here in the wastelands of Turkmenistan. If he held fast, Vorobev would get his long-awaited promotion, perhaps back to a staff job as polkovnik or maybe even a general major. If he failed, the best he could hope for was an honorable retirement with his podpolkovnik stars still on his shoulders.
If he survived.
It was nearing 9:00 P.M., which was patrol shift-change time for most of the regiment. Because so many of his men would be out and about at this hour, Vorobev made it a habit to stop by at least one security-sector company to watch the changeover before heading to his tent to start reviewing reports, making notes, and issuing orders to his battalion commanders. His driver was waiting for him as he put on his helmet and pulled the chin strap tight. One of his young lieutenants, a mortar-company commander named Novikov, and a battalion commander named Kuzmin were accompanying him on this evening inspection. These ninety-minute-long tours gave his junior officers a chance to have a look at the rest of the regiment, ask questions, and get some face time with the boss.