Threat Level Alpha

by Leo J. Maloney

  Just then, Conley’s ear comm beeped. He ignored it and powered up the jet.

  “I’m getting it too,” Morgan said. “It’s a recorded message for us from Shepard. I’m on it.”

  * * * *

  Morgan hit his ear comm as the prototype Chinese jet roared to life. The plane vibrated with power. There really is nothing like a fighter, he thought.

  He heard Shepard’s voice through his ear comm. “Gentlemen, I wanted to give you as much information as possible about the weapons system in the prototype jet. This information is highly classified and the CIA was unwilling to share the data. However, O’Neal was able to access the CIA system and retrieve the following.”

  “The plane is equipped with an offensive electromagnetic pulse device, operated by the co-pilot. The specs we’ve seen suggest that the EMP can be directed to target hostiles with variations on range and spread of the EMP field. It’s an important piece of hardware. Needless to say, we’d love to get it in the lab.”

  “In the event that you would like to or might need to test the system, I’ve loaded the specs and some basic instructions that O’Neal and I pieced together. We made a lot of guesses but you should be able to get at least minimal functionality from the device.”

  Conley eased the fighter out of the hangar and brought it to the end of the runway. On the opposite end the fire was raging at what was left of the fuel depot and the wreckage of the troop transport—barely recognizable as a plane as flames still roared from its carcass.

  He could see soldiers and a few vehicles scurrying around in the distance. However, there were no alarms, thanks to his and Conley’s work at the power station.

  Suddenly, the co-pilot headset hanging in front of him came to life. A voice was screaming in Mandarin.

  “They’ve spotted us,” Conley said, then shouted back in the same language.

  “What did you tell them?”

  “That we have new orders from Beijing. Headquarters has determined that base command is too incompetent to keep possession of this plane,” Conley said, and Morgan could hear the humor in his voice.

  “It’s not a complete lie. So far I haven’t been impressed by their security,” Morgan said.

  The plane lurched forward, accelerating down the runway. There was silence from the headset as they barreled ahead.

  “We’ll be up in a second,” Conley said.

  As they accelerated, the wreckage that Morgan had left seemed to race toward them.

  The screaming in the headset got even louder. They were close enough to the fire and the soldiers around it that Morgan could make out their stunned expressions as the fighter shot toward them.

  He was impressed that two of the soldiers drew their weapons and actually aimed at the approaching jet. Morgan didn’t hear any impacts on the airframe, and then they were off the ground, racing right into the top of the flames from the transport.

  And then they were through. Morgan saw that the mountains were now right in front of them—and unnervingly close. A proximity alert blared through the cockpit as Conley threw the jet into a sharp turn to the left and raised its nose. The maneuver tossed Morgan to the right as the plane shot up…and stalled.

  Conley angled the nose down as they continued to turn. Now Morgan could feel their sudden descent stop. Then he felt a burst of power from the engine. Unfortunately, the plane was now pointed toward the ground, which was very close—and getting closer fast.

  Conley pulled hard on the joystick and they dipped but straightened a good thirty feet from the ground, then angled up again, gaining altitude.

  The alarms stopped.

  “She’s got some juice,” Conley said.

  Morgan grunted as he reached for his flight helmet. “Just get us out of here,” Morgan said as they raced toward the pass and open sky.

  Then he heard a ping, as something hit the plane. “That sounded like a bullet,” he said. Looking around, he saw at least two-dozen Chinese soldiers pointing their sidearms at them. If this went on long enough, they might actually hit something vital.

  Well, in less than a minute they would be far away from the base. And with no communications, the chances that one of the other bases could send pursuit aircraft before they reached the Indian Ocean was slim.

  And then the proximity alert started clanging again.

  “What the—?” Conley exclaimed.

  “What’s out there?” Morgan said. Then he saw them: dozens of black specs in a haphazard formation that blocked the entrance to the mountain pass.

  “Drones. They were in the hangar. Base personnel must have launched them,” Conley said, a note of respect in his voice.

  Morgan understood. They had caught the Chinese completely by surprise, and even the General’s extra troops weren’t much help. And yet they had they somehow improvised a counter attack.

  “Are they armed?” Morgan said.

  “I don’t think so,” Conley said. “If I had to guess, they’re for target practice.”

  “So let’s shoot them down,” Morgan said.

  “No ammo. I guess they didn’t get a chance to load her up,” Conley said.

  Or, the test flight didn’t involve the aircraft’s guns. “Can you fly through them?” Morgan said.

  “No, a collision with something that size could take us out.”

  Of course—collisions with geese had taken down jetliners, Morgan remembered. And then he was being jerked around the cockpit again as Conley put the fighter into a sharp turn.

  “I’ll bring it around. It will cost us time, but I can circle until we get enough altitude to fly over one of these mountains.”

  And then another alarm beeped.

  “Missile lock,” Conley said.

  “What?”

  “Probably shoulder-fired. Hang on.”

  Dammit. The Chinese were really in the fight now.

  As the alarm clanged, Conley pointed the fighter at the burning hulk of the troop transport.

  Conley was coming in low…very low. They were so close to the ground that the soldiers in front of them abandoned their firing positions and scattered.

  The alarm screamed louder, which Morgan knew meant the missile was gaining on them.

  And then, a few hundred yards away from the burning wreck, Conley turned them sharply again, pivoting around and back toward the pass. Morgan turned to watch the missile hit the wreck and explode.

  “We can’t stay in here, circling around. It will just be a matter of time until they hit us with one of those missiles.”

  “I know, but…”

  “I have an idea. Cut speed and head for the pass,” Morgan said.

  “But the drones,” Conley said.

  “Just do it. I’ll take care of them.”

  Checking his phone, Morgan called up the specs for the EMP weapon. They were translated into English and very detailed. If he had half a day, he might be able to make sense of them.

  But he had less than a minute.

  He saw the targeting screen and rapped it with a fist in frustration. The screen flashed and Morgan realized it was a touch screen. It showed the drones. Using his finger, Morgan drew a circle around them.

  A glowing line surrounded the drones on the screen.

  The proximity alert sounded, warning them of the impending collision.

  And then the missile lock alarm sounded.

  Dammit.

  How did you fire the damned thing? There were about a dozen different switches and dials…

  And a single red button.

  “Morgan?” Conley said.

  He pushed the button. Nothing happened inside the fighter and for a long second, nothing happened outside either.

  And then—all at once—fifty or so drones dropped out of the sky, maybe two seconds before the fighter reached their position.
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  The proximity alarm went silent and then there was a flash behind them as one of the drones got in the way of the heat-seeking missile that was chasing them.

  The cockpit alarms went silent…and then they were through the pass and in the open sky.

  Morgan didn’t look back. He was glad to leave the base behind them.

  “Any sign of pursuit?” Morgan asked.

  “No. And no chatter on the radio. I don’t think anyone else knows we are in the air. If we stay low, we’ll avoid their radar…Oh damn,” he said.

  “What now?”

  “We’ve got a problem with fuel. Line must have been hit…”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me…”

  He heard Conley chuckle. “Okay, that time I was kidding. Plenty of fuel and open skies until the Indian Ocean. Enjoy the view. I’ll put us down in about twenty-five minutes.”

  A few minutes later, his ear comm beeped and Shepard was on the line. “Congratulations, Morgan, Bloch says you are on schedule. I look forward to getting a look at that…new feature. In the meantime, I have something for you. It’s the Package. It’s ready.”

  Morgan let that sink in.

  “Who knows?”

  “Just me, O’Neal, and three from the team that worked on it,” Shepard said.

  “The specs we discussed?” Morgan said.

  “Yes, plus some improvements. Morgan, it’s…well. You need to see it for yourself,” Shepard said.

  “I’ll be there in twenty-two hours.”

  The landing was a little rough. Since there was no hiding an aircraft carrier, they had to land on an improvised sea platform assembled from barges.

  Conley maintained that the landing was a first of some kind but Morgan’s mind was already focused on the news that Shepard had given him.

  On the deck of the barge, Morgan told Conley that Shepard had called and his special project was finished.

  “Understood. I can get her on her way,” Conley said, gesturing to the plane. A team was already at work on the fighter, prepping it to be loaded onto a specially designed cargo container. “You head straight back.”

  Conley would ride with the plane as it was picked off the barge by a heavy lift helicopter, transferred to a civilian cargo plane, and then home. Thus, no leg of the trip could be tied to the U.S. government.

  And if Morgan knew Diana Bloch and Shep, it would also mean that Shepard, O’Neal, and their team would have some quality time with the plane before they made delivery to the U.S. military.

  “Thanks, I’ll see you when you get back,” Morgan said.

  “It may be a while,” Conley said. “I’ll be hitting the beach first before I get home, and you’ll be busy…”

  A smaller chopper took Morgan directly to Mumbai, where he grabbed a flight home. When Morgan settled into his seat, he checked his watch; he had about fifteen hours before he reached Logan International. That would be perfect. He had some work to do before he got home, and then he’d need some sleep. Whatever happened, he wanted to be rested when he got there.

  Chapter 4

  “Comrade, listen to this,” Vlad said. “There is a war in Chechnya. On the road to Grozny there is a family. The mother-in-law is in front, then a few wives, then the children. Trailing behind all of them is the male head of the family.

  “At the checkpoint, a Russian soldier asks him, ‘Why do you walk behind all of the women? Doesn’t your holy book tell you that the man goes first?’ To that, the Chechen replies, ‘My holy book says nothing about minefields. ’”

  “Very funny, Comrade,” Pavel said.

  “You know, Chechens are just Ukrainians who lived in Chernobyl,” Vlad said, putting the bottle of vodka on the table.

  Pavel smiled politely, but that wasn’t enough for Vlad.

  “You know, because of the radiation,” Vlad explained.

  “Yes, very good,” Pavel said.

  “A Chechen girl—” Vlad began.

  “Here, have some more vodka,” Pavel said, filling two shot glasses. Once the old soldier got started on Chechens, it would take some doing to get him talking about something else.

  Vlad was as old as Pavel’s own grandfather and had an endless store of anecdotes, many of them about the Chechens. Amazingly, most of the jokes went back decades, well into the Soviet era.

  And yet for all of his bluster, Pavel had more than once seen Vlad playing soccer with groups of local Chechen children when he was off duty.

  But his jokes…

  In those anecdotes the Chechens were idiots or schemers or cowards. They would be offensive to Chechens, of course, but he had heard far worse in the barracks back in Moscow.

  That Chechen looks unusually peaceful, said one soldier.

  That’s because he’s dead, said another.

  That was probably the kindest joke he had heard soldiers his own age tell about Chechens. Something had happened after the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the Chechen separatists. The jokes had gone from merely offensive to vicious.

  Pavel had lost a couple of friends to Chechen terrorists and he knew a soldier who had lost some family to an attack in Moscow, but the jokes still made him uncomfortable. They just didn’t seem funny to him, and even less so now that he and Vlad were stationed on the border of the Chechnya region in the shadow of the Caucasus Mountains.

  So far from Moscow and home, near so many Chechen people who eyed their Russian army uniforms with clear hatred, Vlad’s jokes didn’t seem funny at all.

  “First we eat, then durak,” Vlad said, putting two bowls of his lamb and potato stew on the table.

  Six months ago, Pavel had been impressed the first time he had tasted Vlad’s stew. That whole first week, Pavel had enjoyed the food that tasted of home—unlike the odd dishes that the locals ate.

  The second week Pavel had been less impressed. By the end of the first month, he had gently suggested that they could try some of the local dishes but Vlad had refused.

  Now Pavel was resigned to his comrade’s nightly stew. If Vlad cooked it without complaint, Pavel would eat it without complaint.

  The base was quiet. Of course, it was quiet every night. The only noises were the sounds of the woods and the gentle hum of the generator. On the plus side, their living space was better than the barracks in Moscow. He and Vlad each had their own room, and there were empty rooms to spare.

  The “base” had once housed a dozen soldiers who had watched over the warehouse in the small compound. Now it housed only Pavel and Vlad, and the warehouse stored old computers and electronics that were good for nothing but museum pieces. And then there were the spare parts for tanks that had gone out of service when Vlad was young.

  And yet the two men guarded a place that should have been closed down twenty years ago.

  Of course, Pavel had once spent a year manning a checkpoint on a road outside of St. Petersburg. It was a checkpoint that could be avoided easily by simply driving a short distance around it.

  And yet Pavel had dutifully checked the papers of every car that came through—for the few drivers who thought it was too much trouble to drive around the checkpoint in bad weather.

  That was the Soviet way, his commander had explained. And for many it was still the Russian way. ‘You think things will change overnight?’ the officer often said. ‘What do you think this is, America?’

  Now, sitting with Vlad in the armpit of nowhere, Pavel thought he had found the spot furthest from America in the world.

  And yet there was plenty of vodka. And Vlad was usually an agreeable companion—devilishly good at durak. As the older man dealt the cards, Pavel studied his movements. Maybe in six more months of this duty, Pavel would uncover Vlad’s secret.

  “Simple durak to start,” Vlad said.

  Pavel knew the routine by heart. Always simple durak to start. Then as
the hour got later and the vodka flowed it would be full durak, then crazy durak, and then (if the vodka held out), Albanian durak.

  There were worse duties, Pavel thought as he studied his cards. Soon, Vlad would begin with his stories. After six months, Pavel still had not heard them all.

  And then the lights went out.

  Vlad cursed. It was his turn to tend to the generator. He grabbed a flashlight and headed outside. He hesitated at the door, studied Pavel, and warned, “Don’t peek at the cards.” Then he was out the door.

  A few minutes later, the lights came back on. Then, at about the time he expected Vlad to shuffle back inside, he heard a distant pop sound.

  That was odd. He’d catalogued each of the night sounds in this godforsaken place, and that was new.

  He heard shouting. It was Vlad. Then there was another pop and another, followed by what Pavel recognized as automatic weapon fire.

  Even as Pavel’s brain was struggling to process this information, he was moving. He lurched across the kitchen to the radio station. They kept the radio on, but the temporary power outage meant it would take another minute to warm up.

  There was more shouting. More single shots. From Vlad’s pistol, Pavel realized, a cold pit forming in his stomach.

  The light came on and Pavel spoke into the microphone. He gave his identification number and then said, “We are under attack. Automatic weapons fire…”

  And then the lights went out again.

  More shouting, another single shot. And then multiple blasts of automatic weapons. He recognized the sound: AK-47s.

  Then silence.

  Vlad, Pavel thought sadly.

  Then he heard strange voices shouting in Chechen. Fools, he thought, they must think we have real weapons here. They must think there is something to guard.

  Well, even if they prevailed, the joke would be on the Chechens. There was nothing in the warehouse but old junk.

  And yet maybe they would not prevail. Perhaps they didn’t know that Pavel was there. He drew his sidearm and got up from the radio console.

  Yes, perhaps he could deal them a surprise or two. Just as they had surprised poor Vlad.

  He switched off the safety on his pistol and calculated his chances of reaching his room, where he kept his extra ammunition. He’d have to wait. He couldn’t risk it while he still heard the Chechens moving around the compound.