The Kremlin Strike

by Dale Brown

  With a nod, Wernicke flipped the file closed. “Show her in, please.” He glanced at his watch. “And then you may as well go home. It’s very late already, and I expect it will take some hours for Fräulein Roth and me to finish going through the financial reports she’s brought from Berlin.”

  “Very well, Herr Wernicke,” she said tightly. From the rigid set of her shoulders, it was clear that she suspected paperwork was the last thing on her employer’s mind. Turning on her heel, she pulled his office door open wider. “Herr Wernicke will see you now . . . Fräulein,” she snapped.

  Wernicke hid a smile when his guest came in. Though the young woman was dressed demurely in dark gray wool slacks, a white-collared cotton shirt, and a dark blue double-button blazer, there was no denying that she was remarkably attractive. No doubt many men would have been tempted into sin and vice by her beauty just as his secretary prudishly imagined he was.

  He waited impassively until the door closed behind her and then got up from behind his desk. For a big man, he moved with surprising ease. “Welcome back to Moscow, Sam.”

  Amusement sparkled in Samantha Kerr’s bright blue eyes. “I don’t think the dragon guarding your gate likes me much, Marcus. Should I bring her chocolates next time?”

  “It couldn’t hurt,” Marcus Cartwright said, with a thin smile of his own. “How was Berlin?”

  “Damp, dreary, and cool when I passed through.” Sam shrugged. “Which was still better than my time in D.C. By the way, Mr. Martindale said to give you his regards.”

  “I’m touched,” Cartwright said dryly. “I had no idea our mutual employer was such a people person.”

  Ultimately, Tekhwerk was owned by Kevin Martindale and his private military corporation, Scion—though that fact was hidden from the Kremlin by a byzantine chain of holding companies and investment firms. Revenues earned by the company’s day-to-day business deals paid for intelligence-gathering and covert-action operations inside Russia itself. Better yet, the need for frequent travel between its scattered offices and associated enterprises provided convenient cover for Scion operatives disguised as Tekhwerk executives and employees . . .

  . . . such as Scion field agents Samantha Kerr and Marcus Cartwright.

  At Cartwright’s invitation, Sam dropped gratefully onto a leather couch with a spectacular view of the Moscow skyline. She’d been on the move for what seemed like days—ever since Martindale briefed her on this new assignment. Almost from the moment the Energia heavy-lift rocket launched, Cartwright and his small team of operatives had been working around the clock to collect intelligence on Moscow’s new space program. Sam’s orders were to assist them, by any means necessary.

  Cartwright took a seat across from her. “Quite frankly, I’m very glad you’re here. We desperately need a fresh pair of eyes.” Now that he was off his feet, the big man looked almost as tired as Sam felt. “So far, the best thing I can say about this operation is that none of my people are dead or in an FSB interrogation cell. Not yet, anyway.”

  “That sounds ominous,” Sam said lightly.

  “Hyperbole and I are not old friends,” Cartwright said grimly. “We’ve hit roadblocks at every turn. Both the Plesetsk and Vostochny launch sites are completely locked down, totally off-limits to anyone without special high-level security clearances. The same goes for Star City, where rumor says there’s a very hush-hush cosmonaut training program going on.”

  Sam leaned forward with a frown. “Locked down in what way, exactly? Roving police patrols and checkpoints?”

  Wearily, Cartwright shook his head. “More like minefields, barbed wire and bunkers, searchlights, mechanized infantry units, T-72 and T-90 tanks, helicopter gunships, and antiaircraft batteries. There’s no way I can sneak a black-bag clandestine team past that kind of security. Nothing bigger than a butterfly has the slightest chance of getting within ten kilometers of any of those places without being detected, intercepted, and killed.” He looked her right in the eye. “I’ve seen nuclear-weapons storage depots and ICBM bases with weaker perimeter defenses.”

  “So forced entry isn’t an option either,” she realized.

  “Not unless Mr. Martindale can whistle up a team of those Iron Wolf combat robots for us,” Cartwright agreed dourly.

  Sam sighed. “That might be considered just a tad unsubtle.”

  Almost against his will, the big man smiled. “I suppose so.”

  “You said entry to Plesetsk, Vostochny, and Star City required special security clearances,” she said slowly.

  “Correct.”

  “Can we forge the necessary IDs?” Sam asked. It was a tactic the two of them had relied on in the past, all the way up to masquerading as officers on Russia’s general staff. Scion’s false document section had a justly earned reputation for working miracles.

  “No,” Cartwright said bluntly.

  Now there was a surprise, Sam thought. She stared at him. “Why not?”

  “Because we don’t even know what the damned things look like,” the big man told her. “Security clearances for what we think is called ‘the Mars Project’ are issued only to those on a special list tightly controlled by Gryzlov himself.”

  She frowned. “Tricky.”

  “That’s not all,” he said gloomily. “From what little we’ve been able to confirm, there’s yet another layer of security—beyond those special ID cards. Even with the right documents, no one gets past the perimeter of any of those sites without positive biometric confirmation of their identity.”

  “Do tell,” Sam murmured. “Well, that certainly suggests the Russians have something worth hiding. Something very big and very nasty.”

  Cartwright nodded. “No question there.”

  She leaned back against the couch, pondering the problem further. As a first step, they needed to focus their efforts. The Vostochny and Plesetsk launch sites were remote and difficult to reach from Moscow. They were also tight-knit technical communities devoted to a common purpose, firing off rockets into space. Strangers would stand out, no matter how good their forged documents. More importantly, U.S. reconnaissance satellites could easily monitor any new Russian spacecraft rolling out for launch. That was the sort of data-driven espionage America’s official intelligence agencies had mastered long ago, from the earliest days of the Cold War.

  The trouble was that this was primarily a human intelligence problem, Sam decided. Learning that Moscow had developed more powerful rockets meant little unless they could also figure out how the Russians planned to use them. All of which led her back to Star City and its rumored top secret cosmonaut training program. Finding out what these brand-new cosmonauts were being trained to do would answer a lot of questions. So figuring out how to penetrate the security around Star City was where the Scion team should devote its time, energy, and resources.

  Cartwright nodded when she explained her reasoning. Then his broad face darkened. “But there’s the rub, Sam,” he pointed out with regret. “The equation’s damnably simple: no special ID card and biometric confirmation, no access. So we’re right back where we started: stuck outside the Star City security perimeter without a way in.”

  “So we take this one careful step at a time,” Sam said dispassionately, concealing her own doubts. Seeing a veteran operative like Marcus Cartwright so spooked by Gryzlov’s new security measures was not a confidence builder. “And the first step is taking a closer look at one of those new Mars Project identity cards.”

  The big man frowned. “Easier said than done, I’m afraid. As far as we can determine from distant surveillance, nobody with Mars-level clearance goes anywhere without an armed escort. Pulling a snatch job to grab one of those IDs would be messy as hell—”

  “And end up triggering Russian security service red alerts from here to Vladivostok,” she finished in disgust.

  Cartwright nodded gloomily.

  Now what, genius? Sam asked herself silently. Scion didn’t recruit field agents who froze at the first hurdle. Obstacles, Mar
tindale often said coldly during debriefings, were there to be overcome—not used as an excuse for failure. Sure, it was the kind of rear-echelon motivational bullshit that tempted a lot of people to strangle him . . . but that didn’t make it any less true.

  Thinking hard, she stared out toward the twinkling lights that marked Moscow’s crowded city center, distantly noting her own reflected image superimposed on the darkened glass. During the last half hour the summer sun had slipped below the horizon. Somehow, she knew, they needed to lay their hands on a Mars Project ID. Which was manifestly impossible. So how was she supposed to untangle this particular Gordian knot?

  Something about the way her own face stared back at her from the window tugged at her mind. And then, quite suddenly, Sam saw a path forward, or at least its first tentative, faltering steps. She looked back at Cartwright. “Okay, we don’t try to steal a Mars Project ID card itself,” she said cheerfully. “We just steal its soul.”

  Seeing the puzzled look on her colleague’s broad face, she laughed. “Remember what some cultures think will happen to them if someone takes their picture with a camera? We don’t need a physical copy of the identity card. We just need a good, solid image. At least as a start.”

  Ten

  Sky Masters Aerospace, Inc., Battle Mountain, Nevada

  The Next Day

  Brad McLanahan rapped on the open door of Hunter Noble’s office and then poked his head around the doorjamb. “You called, O mighty wizard of aerospace engineering?”

  With a tired nod, Boomer waved him inside. He was on the phone, listening to someone talking fast while he scrawled notes on a crumpled piece of scrap paper. “Yeah, I got it,” he said briskly. Sighing, he hung up and rubbed hard at his eyes. “Man, I feel like a dog that actually caught the car it was chasing.”

  “Busy?” Brad asked in sympathy.

  “With a capital B,” Boomer said. “We’re landing new contracts with the Pentagon, Poland, and other U.S. allies so fast that it seems like the ink isn’t even dry on the paperwork before the next one hits my damned desk.”

  Brad nodded. Barbeau’s administration, always eager to funnel federal defense dollars to favored campaign contributors and equally determined to punish companies it distrusted, had virtually blacklisted Sky Masters for four long years. Now free to compete fairly, without a hostile White House tipping the scales against it, Sky Masters was on a roll—beating out defense industry competitors with new aircraft, weapons, and sensor designs that were astonishingly innovative, cost-effective, and close to operational readiness.

  “Anyway, I’d better stop bitching about all our good luck,” Boomer said, ostentatiously crossing his fingers. “Dame Fortune is a fickle lady, after all. No sense in making her mad. The table will go cold soon enough.”

  Brad nodded seriously, hiding a smile. In his off-hours, the other man was an avid and successful amateur gambler, with a reputation for winning more than he lost at the big-name casinos in Reno, Lake Tahoe, and Las Vegas. But even the professionals knew there were moments when you caught a winning streak . . . and times when no amount of skill, intuition, and mathematical genius could affect the outcome. “I sort of figured you called me over here to work through that little flight-planning problem my dad and Martindale dumped in our laps.”

  “You figured right.” Boomer shook his head. “But increasing the orbital maneuvering capability of our S-19s and S-29s at four hundred miles above the surface? ‘Little’ isn’t exactly the word I’d choose to describe that kind of challenge.”

  “How about . . . difficult?” Brad suggested.

  Boomer snorted. “More like totally freaking impossible.” He leaned over and tapped a few keys on his computer. On the far wall of his office, the large LED screen he used for conferences with his widely scattered engineering teams lit up. “Unfortunately, figuring out how to match the orbital reach of that new Russian heavy-lift launcher is only part of the problem we face if Moscow starts screwing around in space again. Check this out, young Jedi.”

  Obediently, Brad swiveled in his chair to study the digital map of the earth the big screen now showed. A series of bright yellow lines across the face of the planet in a sine wave pattern showed the ground track of an orbit inclined at 51.6 degrees. They rose as high as southern Canada and Russia and as low as the southernmost tip of South America.

  Boomer pressed another key. Red circles lit up across the territory of both the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, intersecting the projected orbital tracks at several points. Brad narrowed his eyes. “Those are the estimated engagement zones for deployed Russian and Chinese antisatellite weapons, right?”

  “You got it in one, Brad,” Boomer said with approval. “Of course, that’s pretty much what I’d expect from General McLanahan’s fair-haired boy.” He nodded at the circles. “Thanks to our friends in Scion, you’re looking at the best available intelligence on where Moscow and Beijing have stationed their S-500 surface-to-air missile regiments. Martindale’s spooks didn’t tell me where this information came from. And since I’m allergic to federal maximum-security prisons, I sure as hell didn’t ask.”

  Brad nodded. Over the years, Kevin Martindale’s private military company had regularly obtained highly classified data from U.S. intelligence databases without being detected. Even with an ally in the White House these days, he had a sneaking hunch that Scion analysts still didn’t waste much time making formal requests to their counterparts in the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the CIA, or others. He looked at the map again. “What about Russia’s MiG-31Ds? Do we have any intel on their current status?”

  “Ask and you shall receive,” Boomer said graciously. More red circles appeared across southern Russia. These were centered on a network of air bases ranging eastward from Vornezh in the west to Yelizovo Airport on Siberia’s Kamchatka Peninsula in the east. The MiG-31D was a high-altitude, Mach 3–capable fighter. Used in an antisatellite role, MiG-31s could fire Wasp missiles, an air-launched variant of Russia’s Iskander theater ballistic weapons. “See the problem?”

  “Yeah, I do. All too damned clearly,” Brad said slowly, staring at the map. Thanks to their S-500 SAMs and MiG-31-launched Wasp missiles, Moscow and Beijing were poised to interdict a huge portion of low Earth orbit, all the way up to two hundred and sixty miles. Any spacecraft or satellite flying through those missile engagement zones was in danger of being shot down—including the S-19 and S-29 spaceplanes their Sky Masters team was working so hard to restore to flight status.

  Sure, Sky Masters could launch into equatorial and low-inclination orbits instead, avoiding the risk of interception. But accepting those restrictions would mean conceding a huge swath of the most militarily, scientifically, and economically useful space above the earth to Gennadiy Gryzlov or to China’s almost equally dictatorial leader, President Zhou. That would be one hell of a big and bitter pill to swallow, he thought grimly. And if Moscow’s heavy-lift rocket program was part of a space-based military move against America or its allies, as his father and Martindale suspected, that gauntlet of ground-based missiles and MiG-31s would stop any possible Sky Masters counterattack cold.

  Brad looked back at Boomer. “There has to be a way a spaceplane can dodge those potential kill zones,” he said stubbornly.

  “Oh, there is,” the other man agreed. “Say we light the candle and head for space out over the Pacific, right? Out where no missile can touch us?” Brad nodded. “Okay, so once the spaceplane is safely in orbit around the equator, we execute another series of burns using the LPDRS engines in rocket mode,” Boomer went on. “Essentially, we combine a plane change maneuver to shift our orbital inclination with a couple of fast-transfer burns to increase altitude.” He shrugged. “And hocus-pocus, abracadabra, all of a sudden we’re coasting along in orbit over Russia well beyond the reach of Comrade Gryzlov’s menacing missiles—”

  “With nearly empty fuel tanks,” Brad realized abruptly.

  “Pretty much,” Boom
er said. “The delta-v requirement for that kind of stunt is huge. Yeah, we can do it, but only by spending most of the fuel needed for other significant on-orbit maneuvers or to make a powered reentry.”

  Brad winced. Carrying out the maneuvers Boomer described would foreclose a lot of options. Reaching its final orbit with dry main-engine fuel tanks would leave a spaceplane entirely dependent on its much smaller, much less powerful hydrazine thrusters. It would also mean reentering the earth’s atmosphere like the old space shuttle—using atmospheric drag to slow down until the spaceplane could glide safely to a landing. And that kind of high-drag reentry always inflicted damage to thermal protection tiles on the fuselage and wings, adding to mission costs and turnaround time.

  “Well, that sucks,” he grumbled.

  “Tell me about it,” Boomer said, sounding discouraged. “But however much I hate running up against problems I can’t solve, I just don’t see a workable way forward here. In the short run, we can’t squeeze any more efficiency out of the S-19 and S-29 engines and thrusters.”

  Brad frowned, thinking out loud. “Maybe we could add auxiliary fuel tanks—”

  Boomer shrugged. “We could, but only at the cost of passengers or cargo or crew. Or defensive and offensive weapons, if the Russians are planning new military operations in orbit against us. Mass is mass.”

  Brad pointed at the shelves lining the wall behind Boomer’s desk. They were crowded with detailed scale models of every aircraft and spacecraft the other man had ever flown or worked on. “There’s the XS-39 you’re designing,” he pointed out. “It’ll have spare payload capacity according to the specs I’ve seen.”

  With a weary smile, Boomer shook his head. “The XS-39 is a beaut,” he agreed. “The trouble is, right now it’s just a collection of design drawings and models. We’re at least a couple of years away from getting a prototype into space, even with a crash R&D, flight-test, and manufacturing effort.”