Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 09

by Warrior Class (v1. 1)

  Annie looped the survival kit across her body under her right arm, pulled the watch cap down over her head and ears, then crawled out from under the pine tree, The pain in her back was still there, but thanks to the aspirin and her improved attitude, the pain was only talking, not screaming, to her now. Sure enough, the snow and wind had increased in intensity. Visibility was almost zero. Fortunately, the snow was less than a foot deep, which made moving relatively easy.

  “General, I’m heading east,” she spoke into the frigid air. “A Pave Hammer tilt-rotor hovering overhead would sure be welcome right about now.”

  “We’re right here with you, Annie,” came the reply. “The PJs are on the way.” Annie didn’t ask how far out they were or how long it would take for them to arrive—she didn’t need to ask any questions when she potentially wouldn’t like the answers.

  It was slow going. Using the compass from around her neck, Annie simply went from tree to tree, about ten yards at a time. She used the flashlight sparingly, shining the beam just two or three yards ahead at a time to avoid detection. She tried to count paces but gave up after tripping a few times on rocks, relying on the subcutaneous transceiver and Patrick McLanahan’s deep, solid, reassuring voice to guide her.

  She had gone perhaps fifty yards when she heard a noise. She turned and saw a pair of headlight beams slicing through the freezing rain. As the headlights got closer, she realized she was only about a dozen yards above a dirt road. The truck using the headlights shifted into a lower gear and slowed. "‘Oh, shit,” Annie said softly, “a truck just came out of nowhere. I think they saw me.”

  “Can you hide?” Patrick asked.

  “I’ll try,” Annie said. The truck was heading toward her, up a slight grade. Annie immediately ran forward in the opposite direction, not daring to use the flashlight. She extended her arms out in front of her, but still couldn't help colliding with trees, crashing into boulders, and tripping on rocks. The pain was back full force. But she ignored all of that and kept on running. She didn’t care what direction, only that it was away from the truck. “I... don’t hear the ... engine revving anymore,” Annie panted. “It must have stopped.”

  “Keep going as long as you can, then find cover,” Patrick said.

  “I’ll try,” Annie said, breathing hard. “I’ll...” She tripped once again and fell, sprawled out face-first in the snow. She was about to leap to her feet and keep running when she realized that she hadn’t just tripped on something—she had hooked her foot on something ... something like string ... like .... parachute risers.

  Annie wheeled around and dropped to the snow. She caught the risers again and pulled. More nylon cords came out of the snow. My God. they were parachute risers! “I found a parachute! I found a parachute!” she cried out.

  “Lower your voice, Annie. I can hear you fine,” McLanahan said. “Is it Dev?”

  “Stand by.” She frantically pulled on the risers she could find, the snow flying in all directions. No, wrong direction— she found the white parachute canopy. She whirled around and began pulling and digging in the other direction. Please, God, oh please, let it be him. Let him still be alive....

  She found the body under four inches of fresh snow, lying faceup. He still had his helmet on. his clear visor down and his oxygen mask connected. His parachute risers were wrapped around a nearby tree, meaning he had either landed in the tree and then fallen, or was dragged and crashed into it. Using the red-lensed flashlight, she whipped off the oxygen mask’s bayonet clips on the side of his helmet. A gentle cloud of steam escaped. “General, I found him!” Annie said. “I found him! I think he’s still alive!”

  “Thank God,” Patrick said. “Check him over as best you can before you move him.”

  “He looks like he’s okay, just unconscious,” Annie said as she began to examine him. He was securely bundled up in the cold-weather gear she’d seen him put on. She saw a big scrape against the left front side of his helmet and guessed he must have hit a tree face-first. “I don’t see any broken bones. He’s just unconscious,” Annie repeated.

  “If he’s still in his parachute, unfasten his risers and drag him as far as you can away from there,” Patrick said.

  Annie unclipped the parachute risers from Dev’s harness, then retrieved his survival pack, laid it on his chest, then grabbed his parachute harness near his shoulders and pulled. Although Deverill was tall, he wasn’t very big, but he wouldn’t budge. She pulled harder, throwing her weight into it. and finally broke him out of the crust of snow so he would move. But she could only move him a few inches at a time, and soon found that she couldn’t keep him from sliding down the embankment toward the road. This w'as not going to work. If she kept on moving him, he’d eventually slide all the way down, and then whoever was in the truck, or whoever might follow them toward the Vampire’s crash site, would ...

  A flashlight beam swept across her. They were coming! They were a couple dozen yards away, but they were getting closer by the second. She heard voices, angry men’s voices. They were tracking her.

  There was nowhere else to go but down the embankment. Annie turned Dev’s body so his head was facing downhill. He moved much easier now, so she pulled faster. The flashlight beam swung in her direction again, much closer now. She crashed against a tree, swore gently, maneuvered Dev’s body around the tree, and continued to pull.

  Excited, frantic voices now. Annie guessed they had found the parachute. It was only a matter of time now. .. .

  Unexpectedly, Annie reached the bottom of the embankment, fell, and landed hard on the frozen dirt road. She twisted an ankle trying to land on her feet and couldn’t help but cry out in pain. The flashlights again swung right in her direction.

  They had them now....

  Borispol Air Base, Kiev, Bepublic of Ukraine

  That same time

  The landing was anything but pretty—in fact, it was more of a controlled crash than anything else. With most of his hydraulic system gone. Major John Weston had no control of most of the flight surface, engine nacelle control, or landing gear systems. He was able to use the emergency blow-down system and got one good main landing gear and the nose gear out of the spon- sons. But it didn’t matter—since he had no control of the engine rotating system, he couldn’t switch to helicopter mode. They were going to hit hard no matter how good the Trash Man was.

  Borispol Air Base was a large combined Ukrainian air force and army aviation base. Weston got a general layout of the base from his flight information publications. The northeast side of the base housed the army aviation eskadriyls, with Mil-8 and Mil-6 heavy transport helicopter squadrons and one Mil- 24 attack helicopter squadron; the south side had a mixture of fixed-wing air defense, attack, bomber, and transport planes. Weston used the large runway to get oriented, then slowly, carefully, diverted over to the taxi way opposite the blast deflectors beside the mass helicopter parking ramp. If he lost any pieces of his Pave Hammer aircraft, at least they probably wouldn't hit any Ukrainian aircraft, and he wouldn’t close the runway by crash-landing on the main runway.

  “Hang on!” Weston shouted behind him over the roar of the windblast and engine noises. “Prepare for a hard landing!”

  Normally he would've said, “Prepare for a copilot landing,” but he didn’t think the shades of his dead copilot would appreciate the humor As he touched down, traveling at least thirty knots beyond normal approach speed to maintain controllability, the first to arrive were the tips of his rotors, chewing huge double gouges into the taxiway. As soon as the rotors stopped, all lift ceased, and the MV-22 slammed into the pavement. The landing gear collapsed instantly, and the Pave Hammer aircraft began a long, ugly belly-slide, stopping four hundred feet later in the dirt between the taxiway and runway.

  Weston had all of the major systems shut off several seconds before they landed. Ignoring the emergency escape system in the cockpit, he leapt out of his seat, stepping carefully over the body of his copilot in the aisle, and went to assist
his surviving crew members in the evacuation. But Wohl, Briggs, Fratierie, and the surviving PJs had quickly evacuated Linda Mae Maslyukov out of the already-extended aft cargo ramp the moment the aircraft stopped, and had moved her several hundred feet upwind from the crash-landing site.

  The aircraft was not on fire, just smoke belching from each seized engine, so Weston accepted the grisly but important task of carrying his copilot’s body out of the aircraft. He half dragged, half carried him as far upw ind as he could, then laid him on the grass as carefully as possible. Exhausted, shaking from the buckets of adrenaline coursing through his bloodstream, very glad to be alive, Weston collapsed on the grass upwind of the aircraft. His job was over for now. All he needed was a beer and his wife and kids by his side.

  Ukrainian soldiers and airmen were running over to them, jabbering excitedly. Several of them spoke English, and they hurried to help the PJs attend to Siren. They started an intravenous drip to try to rehydrate and nourish her, and a Ukrainian medic began dressing her wounds. Ukrainian firefighters knocked down the smoldering engine fires quickly. Weston was introduced first to the security forces first sergeant, and then to a progressive string of higher-ranking officers, until the base commander himself finally appeared.

  Hal Briggs and Chris Wohl, looking like some sort of sci-fi Starship Troopers, walked up to them. Since they had just landed on a Commonwealth air base and might still be pursued by the Russian Air Force, both of them were on guard: Briggs had his helmet on, scanning the sky and the base for any sign of a threat; Wohl had his huge electromagnetic antitank rail gun out and ready. “Guys, this is the base commander, Brigadier- General Mykhaylo Sakhan, commander of the Second Aviation Division here at Borispol.” Briggs saluted; Wohl stood silently, his rail gun at port arms.

  “And who are you, sir?” Sakhan asked, after he returned his salute, staring in amazement at both their strange outfits and their weapons.

  “Our code name is Tin Man, sir,” Briggs replied in his electronically synthesized voice. “We are American military personnel. That’s all I am authorized to reveal to you.”

  “Neechoho, ” Sakhan said. “Wc were warned by your American state department that you would be arriving, although they said nothing about arriving spacemen.”

  “We need one of your helicopters to return to Russia, sir,” Briggs said simply.

  “What happened?” Weston asked.

  “Our guardian angel took a hit. Terminator is down. We’re going in after them.”

  “Damn. I wish I had my ride.” And he meant it—all thoughts of relaxing with his family and a cold one were gone. Dewey and Deverill had risked their lives to save his. “You guys get out of here. We’ll be okay.”

  “Unfortunately, I cannot help you,” Sakhan said. “I have not received authorization from my superiors to assist you in violating Russian territory. I understand lives are at stake, but your government has not made the reason for all this activity clear to us. Perhaps you can explain who you are and what you were doing in Russia, and I can pass this information along to my superiors.”

  “Unfortunately, that's not possible, sir,” Briggs said. “But I assure you, my government will take full responsibility for our actions and reimburse you in full.”

  “Would you sell me your strange outfit, or allow me to rent it for a while, or accept my assurance that whatever I might do with it would not be your responsibility?” Sakhan asked with a smile.

  “No, sir.”

  Sakhan raised his hands. “So there we have it. You can expect a representative from your embassy to arrive shortly, and we will secure the wreckage of your aircraft and assist your injured in any way we can.”

  “I’m sorry we couldn't get any authorized assistance, sir,” Briggs said.

  Sakhan narrowed his eyes. “This means what, soldier?”

  Briggs and Wohl walked down the taxiway and made their way over to the mass helicopter parking ramp. Sakhan and several of his officers and personnel followed. They walked down the middle of the ramp until they saw a Mil-8MTV twin- turboprop helicopter gunship readying for takeoff, with a machine gun mounted on the nose but its weapon outriggers empty. “We'll take this one,” he said.

  “Pereproshooyoo?" Sakhan exclaimed, the rising anger apparent in his voice. “You will ‘take' this helicopter? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, sir, that I will take this helicopter to Russia on a rescue mission, or my associate will destroy it.”

  “Destroy it? How dare you?”

  Briggs turned to Wohl. “Demonstrate,” he ordered.

  Wohl turned and, shooting from the hip, fired a depleted uranium projectile into another parked helicopter about a hundred yards away. The projectile created a bright one-inch contrail through the moist predawn sky that was very visible under the ballpark lights illuminating the ramp. Several large pieces of the helicopter’s engine compartment flew off, and the rotor mast listed sideways so far that one rotor blade tip sagged all the way to the ramp.

  “Gavnuk.! That little display of false bravado just cost your government five million dollars, and cost you a year in prison!” Sakhan shouted. He turned to two of his security men standing behind him and issued an order in Ukrainian.

  But when the guards leveled their assault rifles on Briggs and Wohl. Briggs immediately sent both of them to the tarmac with one quick electric blast each from his electrodes. Wohl covered Briggs with the big rail gun but did not aim it at anyone. The other officers around Sakhan were stunned, not daring to make a move. Briggs nodded toward another helicopter. “Now that one.”

  “Nee! Zhoda! Zhoda! Very well, very well,” Sakhan said angrily, holding up his hands. “If you wish to kill or maim dozens of my men just so you may sacrifice your lives and the life of one of my helicopter crews over Russia, I cannot stop you. But I wish you to know that you are in violation of Ukrainian law and I will see to it that you are punished.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Briggs said. He and Wohl trotted over to the helicopter that had just started engines: meanwhile, Sakhan had issued orders over a portable radio to the crew. As the two Americans approached, several crew members departed the helicopter. When Briggs and Wohl climbed aboard, only the pilot and copilot remained.

  Briggs strapped into the flight engineer’s seat behind the copilot, then swiveled the seat so he sat between the two pilots. He saw their shocked reactions as they stared at the weirdly outfitted man. “Stand by for instructions,” he told the pilot. He nodded in return—obviously he understood English and could hear Briggs’s synthesized voice. Briggs activated his satellite transceiver: “Briggs to Luger secure.”

  “Go ahead, Hal.”

  “Me and the master sergeant just got a ride,” Briggs said. “We might need to smooth things over with the Ukrainian army, but we’ll deal with that problem later. I need a heading and as much intel as you can give me to the shootdown point.”

  “Roger. Be advised, Dewey and Deverill have been captured.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “Annie is still in contact with us,” Luger went on. “They were captured by locals and turned over to Border Police. They’re not on the move right now—we think they’re in a vehicle. but stationary right now. Deverill is unconscious. Stand by . .. your magnetic course is one-one-seven degrees, range two-two-three nautical miles. One thousand feet AGL should be a good emergency safe altitude for you.”

  “I’ve got a good visual on the terrain,” Briggs said. “We’re on our way. ETA, seventy minutes.” The Ukrainian pilots did lot have night-vision goggles, but Briggs could see everything with perfect clarity with his electronic visor sensors. “One-one-seven degree heading, boys,” Briggs shouted to the pilots. “And step on it.”

  “Step on it. Bistro. Ochen bistro. Haul ass, right, Mr. Robot?” the pilot echoed, laughing. Obviously, the pilots were much more excited about this mission than the base commander was. They lifted off the ground and headed off, staying just above the treetops.

  Codlea, Romania />
  That same time

  About a hundred miles north-northwest of the Romanian capital of Bucharest, nestled within the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps, Codlea was the site of a former Warsaw Pact bombing range and dispersal airfield, long ago sold to Pavel Kazakov—he never said why a Russian “businessman” needed an entire military base in the Carpathian Mountains, and the Romanian government, after seeing how much Kazakov was willing to pay for the abandoned ghost town of a base, didn’t ask.

  Romania was a rich source of weapons, fuel, maintenance personnel, intelligence officers, and fighters—all it took was money, and the supplies seemed unlimited. Romania, once only a junior member of the Warsaw Pact, had developed a substantial weapons-manufacturing industry during the Nicolae Ceausescu regime, manufacturing license-built and copies of Soviet and Chinese weapons of all kinds, from small-arms ammunition to jet fighters. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia and China flooding the markets with weapons, and hard economic times in most of Eastern Europe, those weapons factories turned to the underground weapons dealers to stay alive. Kazakov was a regular and welcome customer in Romania.

  From the outside, the big hangar looked as decrepit and as much in danger of collapse as all the buildings out there. But on closer inspection, one would first notice that the tall five meter-high barbed-wire fence surrounding the hangar was new. As one got closer, it’d be apparent that the peeling paint, loose siding, and rusty bolts on the outside of the hangar actually hid a soundproof steel lining, and that the old hangar door actually sat squarely on well-lubricated rollers. Although grass still popped up through cracks all over the runway and taxiways, some of the grass was clearly mashed down in places, denoting very recent activity by heavy vehicles.

  Inside the fifty year-old hangar was one of the world’s most modern aircraft—the Metyor-179 “Tyenee” stealth fighter-bomber. After its raid on Kukes, Pavel Kazakov had had Stoica and Yegorov fly the plane to this isolated, virtually unknown destination, where fuel, maintenance, and weapons were waiting. A crew’ of thirty technicians and workers were standing by, ready to check out the plane, download postmission data from its computers, and get it ready for its next mission.