by Dale Brown
Quickly, Patrick levered himself up out of the chair, ignoring the whine of protest from his exoskeleton’s servos. “Good hunting, Nadia,” he said quietly. “Fly safe . . . and bring my son home with you.”
“I will,” she promised. For a brief second, unshed tears glistened in her eyes. Then, choked up by emotion, she threw her arms around him and buried her face against his chest.
Caught by surprise, Patrick stood motionless while Nadia hugged him. It had been many years since he’d felt the warm embrace of another human being, especially a woman. Even he and Brad were still trapped at that awkward father-son handshake stage. And he knew that most other people, Nadia among them, were viscerally unsettled by the sight of his LEAF exoskeleton, clear helmet, and life-support pack. They made him seem alien, a man set apart from his own species.
Awkwardly, he patted her shoulder.
After a moment more, Nadia let go and stepped back. She nodded to him in silence, still unable to speak, and then turned on her heel and left.
Thirty-One
“Valley Flight Services” Aircraft Hangar, St. George Regional Airport, St. George, Utah
That Same Time
Hunter Noble limped down the cargo ramp of the twin-tailed C-23C Sherpa turboprop and out into the blistering summer temperatures of southwest Utah. Heat waves shimmered across the concrete. He squinted against the brightness, looking out across a landscape of reddish rock. Mountains loomed in the west and to the north, with low ridges and hills in the east. This airport was just a mile north of the Arizona border and on the northeastern edge of the Mojave Desert.
He glanced back over his shoulder at the two hard-faced men following close on his heels. Both wore sunglasses, dark suits, and ties. Slight bulges marked the holstered pistols concealed under their jackets. “You know, guys, this isn’t exactly what I had planned for my day off. I don’t like making threats, but if things don’t improve real soon, I may be forced to cut a couple of stars off your Yelp review.”
“The casinos in Battle Mountain aren’t going anywhere, Dr. Noble,” one of them, a big bruiser with a blond crew cut, said coolly. Everything about the guy said former Marine to Boomer, who’d privately dubbed him Goon Number 1. “You can throw away your paycheck another time. This is more important.”
“This being what exactly?” Boomer demanded.
The big man shrugged. “You’ll see.”
Boomer stopped at the foot of the ramp. He swung around and folded his arms. “Look, I’ve been toddling along like a good little soldier ever since you fellas came knocking on my town-house door a couple of hours ago. But now I think you owe me some straight answers.”
“And you’ll get them, Dr. Noble,” Goon Number 1 said with exaggerated patience. He nodded toward the large aircraft hangar they were parked next to. “In there.”
His partner, shorter and with close-cropped dark hair, said helpfully, “It’s air-conditioned.”
Boomer shot a finger at him. “Okay, you, I like. You’ve got solid motivational skills.” He sighed and started ambling toward a small door visible on the side of the huge building. “Fine . . . I give up. I might as well get this over with.”
As promised, the enormous hangar was air-conditioned. It was also occupied by a big, black, blended-wing aircraft with five large engines, four mounted beneath its highly swept delta wing and another atop the aft fuselage.
“What . . . the . . . hell?” Boomer said slowly, staring up in shock at what was unmistakably an S-29 Shadow spaceplane. He shook his head in sheer disbelief. “No fucking way.”
“I thought you’d appreciate my little surprise,” a smooth, resonant voice said from over his shoulder. Kevin Martindale came out of the shadows to stand next to Boomer.
“I knew we built most of the components for a third S-29 airframe and several extra LPDRS engines,” Boomer said carefully. He turned toward the other man. “But I also know that we never finished the damned thing. Not after the feds shut down our manned spaceplane program.”
“Sky Masters didn’t finish it,” Martindale agreed. He nodded toward the spaceplane. “I did.” He shrugged. “Or more precisely, I contracted with Helen Kaddiri for the discreet services of certain Sky Masters aircraft production specialists and the necessary equipment. They’ve been flying to St. George off and on from California for the past several years.”
Boomer stared at him. “You had our guys put the S-29 together here?” Martindale nodded, pleased that he had put one over on the cocky and sometimes arrogant astronaut-engineer. “In a hangar? Not in an aircraft factory?”
“It was . . . difficult,” Martindale said with a slight frown. “Not to mention time-consuming and extremely expensive.”
“Yeah, I bet.” Boomer eyed him. “Mind telling me where you picked up the couple of hundred million dollars, minimum, building this bird must have cost?”
Martindale returned his gaze. “For the past four years, I’ve been funneling half the profits from Scion’s international security, intelligence, and military contracts into this project.”
Boomer raised an eyebrow. “Really? I kind of figured you needed all of that money to build a super-secret lair on a deserted volcanic island somewhere.”
“There are only so many laser-armed sharks one can buy,” Martindale said with a thin, dry smile. “After the first dozen or so, the excitement starts to fade.”
“I’ll take your word for that.” Boomer looked back up at the huge spaceplane. “What I don’t get is why you’ve gone to all this time and trouble, Mr. Martindale. We already have two S-29s ready to fly. Sure, a third one is nice to have . . . but it’s not exactly a game changer.”
The other man’s smile widened. “You might want to look more closely, Dr. Noble,” he said gently. “That isn’t just a standard-model S-29 Shadow. We built this one to your own design specifications for the S-29B.”
Boomer’s eyes widened in amazement. In the aftermath of the destruction of Armstrong Station by Russian missile and Elektron spaceplanes, he’d worked up plans for armed versions of Sky Masters’ spaceplanes—figuring the United States would need them in any future conflict in orbit. When President Barbeau abandoned all manned spaceflight, he’d reluctantly shoved the plans into a drawer, along with a lot of other innovative concepts that had never made it off the drawing board.
He’d designed the S-29B Shadow to mount a two-megawatt gas dynamic laser pod, along with a smaller targeting laser radar, in a retractable turret on top of its fuselage. The laser would be powerful enough to engage targets out to around three hundred miles—firing up to twenty times in five-second bursts before it needed to be refueled. Four microwave emitters in retractable pods—two near the wing tips, one atop the forward fuselage, and one on the underside of the aft fuselage—were intended to defend against incoming missiles, killer satellites, and enemy spacecraft. These defensive emitters operated automatically, either cued by the spaceplane’s own sensors or by data-linked information from other platforms.
Boomer ran his gaze over the parked spaceplane. Now that he knew what he was looking for, he could see the subtle differences between it and its unarmed counterparts. He turned back to Martindale with a frown. “Who else in Sky Masters knows about this?”
“Apart from Helen Kaddiri? And the technicians who helped build it?” Martindale said. “No one.”
“Not even General McLanahan?” Boomer asked in surprise.
The other man shrugged again. “Oh, I suspect Patrick may have guessed what I’ve been up to. But if so, he understood the importance of discretion. I’ve kept this project on a strict need-to-know basis.”
“So why are you telling me all this?” Boomer wondered.
“Because, Dr. Noble,” Martindale said, with another thin smile, “now you need to know.”
Boomer snorted. “Yeah, well, it sure as hell would have been nice to find out about all this before Brad McLanahan and I got our tails singed facing off against Mars One. Maybe if we’d flown this spacepla
ne instead, things would have turned out differently.”
Martindale shook his head. “The S-29B doesn’t have any separate payload capacity, Dr. Noble . . . as you should remember. Every spare ounce is needed for its offensive and defensive weapons and sensors. So you wouldn’t have been able to carry those reconnaissance nanosatellites of yours into orbit. Besides, it would have been viewed as somewhat impolitic to fly an armed spaceplane so close to what the Russians then asserted was merely a peaceful civilian space station.”
“Maybe so,” Boomer said with a sour tone. His mouth turned down. “Unfortunately, it’s already too late for this S-29B you’ve spent so much money on to make one damned bit of difference. Before the Russians launched Mars One, this bird would have ruled Earth orbit.” Angrily, he nodded toward the big spaceplane. “Sending that Shadow up to tangle with that plasma rail gun of Gryzlov’s would be like throwing a Sopwith Camel into battle against an F-22 Raptor. It would be suicide, not any kind of fair fight.”
Martindale nodded. “I agree. As matters stand, this spaceplane cannot engage in combat in orbit and hope to survive.”
“Then why haul me all the way down here for this little dog and pony show?” Boomer asked cautiously.
Martindale looked at him in surprise. “Isn’t that obvious? The S-29B may not be able to fly safely into orbit, but it can certainly fly elsewhere.” Carefully, he laid out what he had in mind.
When he finished, Boomer stared at him for a few moments. Finally, he shook his head. “And you didn’t see fit to mention any of this to Major Rozek?”
Now it was Martindale’s turn to stare. “Do you really think I should have revealed the existence of a top secret armed spaceplane to a covert ops team preparing to fly deep into heavily defended Russian airspace?”
“Yeah, I guess I see your point.” Boomer sighed. He nodded. “Okay, I’m in. But I’ll need some time to rustle up a crew. My specs called for a crew of four plus the pilots. It’ll take months to train them up.”
Martindale shook his head. “That won’t be necessary, Dr. Noble,” he said with absolute assurance. “I’ve already selected a crew for this spaceplane. In fact, they’ve been training for missions for the past two years.”
“Two years?” Boomer took a deep breath and then let it out in a rush. “You know, you really are one spooky son of a bitch, Mr. Martindale,” he said, half in disgust and half in sneaking admiration.
Martindale nodded serenely. “Yes,” he agreed. “I suppose I am.”
Attu Island, the Aleutians, in the Bering Sea
Several Hours Later
Attu, near the western end of the Aleutian island chain, lay only five hundred nautical miles from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula. During the Second World War, the forty-mile-long island’s rugged hills and mountains had been the scene of a horrific eighteen-day battle between occupying Japanese soldiers and the U.S. Army’s 7th Infantry Division. More than four thousand men had died in the struggle over an otherwise unimportant speck in the middle of the Bering Sea. Now, though, the island was ordinarily entirely uninhabited, home only to the graves of the dead and dozens of rare bird species.
That was about to change.
Six hours after taking off from Battle Mountain, the Sky Masters XCV-62 Ranger piloted by Peter Vasey flew toward Attu, cruising at four hundred and fifty knots barely two thousand feet above the sea. Intently, he peered through the cockpit canopy into a dense gray wall of swirling fog. The Aleutians were known for horrible weather—fierce storms and squalls in winter and thick fog in summer.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered. “My old grannie told me stories about the Great London Smog of 1952, where you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. But I never thought anyone would be daft enough to try flying through something almost as bad. Not even me.”
Sitting in the copilot’s seat, Major Nadia Rozek smiled wryly. “Your grandmother did not have the benefit of a DTF system, Constable.”
“There is that,” Vasey allowed. Between the detailed maps stored in their aircraft’s computers and periodic, short bursts from its radar altimeter, the Ranger’s digital terrain-following system was ordinarily used for prolonged, very low-altitude flight at high speeds. Together with its radar-absorbent stealth coating, DTF enabled the aircraft to avoid detection and dodge enemy SAMs. Today, the system’s computerized maps and radars had another use—allowing them to fly, with reasonable confidence, in conditions where visibility was practically nil.
Nadia peered down at her display. “Eight nautical miles to our final turn to the airfield.”
“Copy that.” Vasey eased back on the throttles. The muted roar from the Ranger’s four turbofan engines decreased. Their airspeed dropped fast.
They were heading for a runway on the southeastern side of the island, just inland from Massacre Bay. Closed more than a decade ago, Casco Cove Coast Guard Station’s airport was now officially reserved for emergency use only.
“Casco Station, this is Ranger Six-Two,” Nadia said. “Two minutes to final approach fix. Descending through fifteen hundred feet. Airspeed two-five-zero knots, full stop.”
“Ranger Six-Two, Casco Station, roger,” a crisp female voice replied. The airport was back in business, this time run by the men and women of a Scion advance team flown in the day before. “Winds variable between one-eight-zero and two-four-zero degrees, twenty knots gusting to twenty-seven, ceiling indefinite, fog, haze, runway visual range variable between six hundred and zero, altimeter two-niner-four-zero. Runway braking action fair.”
“Six-Two copies.” Nadia brought the XCV-62’s forward-looking passive thermal sensors online and activated its air-to-ground radar. In milliseconds, the aircraft’s computer analyzed the information it was receiving from both sources and overlaid the resulting image across Vasey’s HUD. “Lovely weather.”
“Fiat lux,” the Englishman said appreciatively. “Let there be light.” What had been a view of gray nothingness was now a green-tinted, three-dimensional picture of the rugged island ahead. The steering cues on his HUD slid right. He banked to follow them.
The mass of a steep, sixteen-hundred-foot volcanic mountain slid past off their left side. Snow still crowned its peak. Even in summer, temperatures on Attu never got much above fifty degrees Fahrenheit. The runway loomed ahead, stretching across spongy tundra otherwise marked by old bomb craters, unused roads, and abandoned buildings.
“Casco Station, Six-Two,” Nadia radioed. “Passing final approach fix. Descending through three hundred feet, airspeed two-zero-zero knots.”
“Six-Two, roger. Winds two-five-zero at twenty-two gusting to thirty, RVR eight hundred.”
Vasey entered a short command on one of his multifunction displays. “Configuring for landing.” Control surfaces on the stealth aircraft’s wing whirred open, providing more lift as their airspeed diminished. Their landing gear came down and locked in position.
They crossed over the threshold and slid lower. The Ranger was designed for short, rough-field landings, sometimes as short as a thousand feet. By comparison, landing on an asphalt runway that was over a mile long was child’s play . . . even in dense fog that cut visibility to just a few yards.
Smoothly, Vasey came in to land, making small adjustments with his throttles and flight controls. They touched down with scarcely a bump. He braked gently, timing it so that the Ranger came to a complete stop not far from a small apron built adjacent to the runway.
Four other planes were visible as blurred shapes in the fog. One was the C-130 Hercules four-engine turboprop that had ferried in the Scion ground crew. The other three were stealthy flying-wing aircraft, each about the size of a small business jet with twin wing-buried turbofan engines. No windows or cockpit canopies broke their smooth lines. Designed for remote-control and autonomous, computer-directed flight, they did not require human pilots or crews.
Two of them were MQ-55 Coyotes, intended as pure weapons carriers. Their internal bays could hold up to ten AIM-120 AMRAAM air
-to-air missiles. Built without radars of their own, they were low-cost platforms with one primary combat mission—dumping missiles out into the sky in a hurry for other friendly fighter pilots to control when engaged by superior numbers of enemy aircraft. The third stealth drone, built on the same airframe, was considerably more expensive and more capable. Designated as the EQ-55 Howler, it carried electronic jamming gear and was equipped with the same AN/APG-81 radar used by F-35 Lightning II stealth multi-role fighters.
Built by Sky Masters, the two Coyotes and the Howler had been in service with Poland’s Iron Wolf Squadron. At Nadia’s urgent request, they had been flown here, almost halfway around the world from their old operating base. The journey had taken close to forty hours. But because they were remotely piloted, the human controllers based in Poland had been able to swap in and out as needed during the marathon flight. All the Coyotes and the Howler had required were short periodic stops to refuel and undergo quick maintenance checks.
Nadia looked them over with a proprietary and predatory eye. Flown under her control using their built-in communications links, those three Iron Wolf aircraft would give her mission force substantial air-to-air combat power. Reassured, she sat back in her seat. Now it was just a matter of waiting for the rest of the naval and air units committed to her plan to reach their jump-off positions.
Thirty-Two
Battle Mountain, Nevada
That Same Time
Using his neural link, Patrick McLanahan opened a secure channel to Martindale. The head of Scion was flying back to Washington aboard one of his private executive jets. He answered immediately. Thanks to a solid satellite connection, his image was only slightly distorted. “Yes, General?”
“Remember that Russian heavy-lift rocket that exploded in flight?” Patrick asked.
Martindale nodded. “Quite clearly.” He frowned. “We’ve never been able to pin down what its payload could have been. Analysts for the Defense Intelligence have speculated it might have been another weapons module, or perhaps a refueling station and docking structure for Elektron spaceplanes.”
