With this in mind, Colonel Gagarin suggested a broadcast be made on Red Radio retelling the beagle-flying-a-doghouse holiday balloon story that had been floating around, adding that the wayward inflatable had been tracked down, recovered, and destroyed. End of the ghost plane.
The Sostva commanders liked the plan.
They ordered Gagarin to put it into action.
* * *
But at the stroke of midnight, the ghost plane appeared again.
More than a thousand people saw the toy-like aircraft arrive over Rockefeller Plaza this time. Thanks to the Red Radio broadcast earlier, the ghost plane had been the talk of the MMZ all day, making many soldiers curious. But there were hundreds of civilians, too, who’d either listened to Red Radio or had gotten the word from others. They’d climbed up to the roofs of a number of skyscrapers just outside the MMZ with the hope that the little craft would return.
As before, the tiny plane circled the three main MMZ military buildings one at a time, three trips around each before starting back again. It was noisy but could move very fast. Despite its cartoonish landing gear, it was capable of amazing maneuvers, frequently coming within inches of smashing into a building’s sharp corner on wings-up turns. The trail of exhaust left in its wake created gigantic smoke rings around the skyscrapers, three on each so far. This was a big hit with those watching below.
About two minutes into the display, the plane’s engine let out a terrific screech. Suddenly, it went up on its tail, and stopped in midair outside the Navy Building’s penthouse window. At that moment, a MOP electrical crew working on the roof next door turned on one of their searchlights. It captured the colorful little plane in its beam for a few seconds, and illuminated a small crowd of people looking out at it from inside the navy penthouse.
Then, just as quickly, the plane’s nose came down, and with a great burst of flame and power, it vanished back into the night.
Chapter Seven
May 5
The next morning, the joint ops staff officers were astonished to see the Sostva commanders coming out of the elevators at 7:00 a.m., an hour early for their 0800 hours daily briefing.
No announcement, no prior warning, they were suddenly just there.
Colonel Gagarin was informed of the development. He hurried from his office to the lobby to discover the Sostva’s early appearance was not the only unpleasant surprise of the morning. Pushing his way through the military’s security detachments was an imposing man dressed in a black leather trench coat, huge fedora, and sunglasses. Tall, dark, handsome—and terrifying.
Commissar Zmeya …
He had a dozen of his special policemen with him. Piling out of the next elevator, Zmeya’s men towered over the other security entourages. Black combat uniforms, heavily armed, helmets with visors that hid their eyes, they instilled fear in everyone.
But for Zmeya himself to be here—in public, in the daytime, for a routine briefing—was very disconcerting. Something must be seriously wrong.
The principals marched into the conference room. Gagarin snapped his fingers, and a fourth chair was hastily put in place at the conference table. But Zmeya had no intention of staying long. He made it clear he had no interest in hearing pages of statistics.
He wanted to talk about only one thing: the ghost plane.
“This aircraft is real,” he said, pointing his finger back and forth at the Sostva commanders for emphasis. “It is not a balloon or an illusion. It is an actual airplane, and it poses a real threat to the Okupatsi. It was obviously circling your buildings to collect intelligence of some kind—and as such, you must shoot it down when it returns. And it will return. From this moment on, that will be your highest priority. Check with Moscow if you doubt my words.”
From behind his dark glasses, he scanned the faces of everyone in the room, as if taking a mental video of them.
“The NKVD will be watching, gentlemen,” he said darkly. “And waiting … for quick results.”
With that, Zmeya brusquely left the room, his security detail clicking sharp on his heels. The Sostva commanders scrambled to follow, creating a traffic jam at the conference room door.
Left behind, Gagarin and his joint ops officers were stunned. What the Sostva commanders had deemed nonexistent the day before was now the highest priority for the NKVD and the Okupatsi? Granted, the ghost plane was strange, but it was almost amusing. A drunken circus pilot flying in from somewhere.
As the two uneasy entourages headed for the elevators, Gagarin reached into the hall and managed to grab one of the security men who was last in line. He was an army sergeant attached to General Alexei’s protection staff.
“Comrade, explain all this,” Gagarin ordered him.
The bodyguard shook his head no, but Gagarin, an army colonel, insisted. “Kamchatka isn’t too pleasant this time of year,” he said.
The man relented. “You know about the commissar’s new kompanon?” he asked, in a lowered voice.
“You mean the most beautiful girl in the world?” Gagarin replied.
“That’s her,” the sergeant said. “She was with the commisar in the navy penthouse last night. There was a reading of famous military poetry for the higher-ups. She organized it, and Zmeya ordered everyone to go. In the middle of it, that flying toy started buzzing around the building. When it stopped by the penthouse’s main window, she saw it up close, and it was like she’d seen a ghost. She became dizzy, gasping for breath, and almost passed out. Needed some sniffing salts. The commissar became extremely angry as a result.”
The sergeant made a cutting action with his finger across his throat. “It’s been unpleasant ever since.”
But the joint ops officers were even more confused now.
“Why would that snake get upset over his girl’s being frightened by the thing?” Gagarin asked him. “I’m sure it scares some people, like clowns do, but the rest of us are laughing at it.”
The sergeant lowered his voice even further. He had to hurry or he’d be missed.
“It wasn’t the plane that upset her,” he said to Gagarin in a near whisper. “It was the pilot. He stood that clown plane on its rear end long enough to look in at her. And she saw him somehow, and that’s when everything went to shit. That’s why Zmeya is so pissed. And that’s why he wants the clown shot down.”
The man started to leave a second time when Gagarin grabbed his sleeve for one more question.
“And how do you know all this, Comrade Sergeant?” he asked. “All these details and minutiae—it seems too much for an enlisted man to remember.”
The sergeant just shrugged.
“Because I was there, good colonel,” he replied. “I saw it all myself.”
Chapter Eight
Russkiy-NYC was put on high alert an hour later.
All leaves were canceled. All warships in the harbor went to battle stations. Security around key installations was doubled. Back on Phase One combat footing after just one day, the number of troops in the streets tripled.
And at the stroke of midnight, the weird little airplane appeared over the MMZ once again.
It was now the talk of the entire city. Thousands, soldiers and civilians, had taken to roofs all over Midtown, hoping to catch a glimpse of the mysterious little plane.
As before, it seemed to come out of nowhere. One moment, all was quiet, the next, the little plane was over Rockefeller Plaza again, making lots of noise and zooming around the top of the Army Building.
But this time, the two Yak-38 jet fighters were waiting for it.
Circling out over the Hudson River, the Yak pilots had only one order: to destroy the ghost plane. Figuring out who, or what, it was would come later.
Alerted that the aerial intruder had returned, the Yaks banked toward Midtown, weapons ready to fire. Each was carrying two powerful Aphid-6s, an air-to-air missil
e designed to shoot down other jet fighters. The strange little circus plane was so small that just one Aphid would blow it to pieces. Four missile hits would vaporize it.
But it wouldn’t be that simple. The Yak-38 was an unusual bird itself. A supersonic jet fighter that could take off and land vertically, it was built to protect ships at sea, not fight above an urban environment. If its speed fell below a hundred knots in level flight, it would stall and simply fall out of the sky. But because the ghost plane was so diminutive, the Yaks would have to fly uncomfortably close to stall velocity in order to shoot it down.
The jet fighters arrived above the MMZ doing three hundred knots and flying at fifty-five hundred feet. Their look-down radars picked up the ghost plane about a mile below, still circling the Army Building. The YAK pilots hatched a plan. They reduced their speed to one hundred and fifty knots and went down to five hundred feet. Then, just a half mile south of the MMZ, they came in behind the small plane and locked their radars onto it.
But just as they were about to launch their missiles, the weird little aircraft suddenly stopped in midair, its pilot pulling his nose straight up, taking himself out of the Aphids’ radar lock. The maneuver fouled the Yaks’ firing solution and automatically halted their launch.
The jet fighters roared by the little plane an instant later, their weapons’ computers blinking furiously after so abruptly losing their target. Forced to throttle up and make a wide, noisy turn out over the Hudson, it would take nearly a minute for the VTOL jets to get back into firing position. In that time, the ghost plane’s pilot calmly pushed his nose back down, and resumed orbiting the top of the Army Building.
The Yaks reappeared a minute later. As their first missed pass was due to high speed, they’d slowed to a seat-puckering one hundred and five knots for another try. Mimicking their initial maneuvering, they reacquired the tiny intruder on their radars and prepared to fire their missiles a second time.
But again, the little plane turned the tables on them. It suddenly tripled its speed, reaching nearly three hundred knots in just a few seconds, and disappeared around the corner of the Army Building. Once more, the Yaks’ weapons computers were thrown off, cancelling another missile launch.
Now both Yaks were forced to kick in their afterburners, lest they stall and crash. In doing so, they created a sonic boom so intense it shattered thousands of windows all over Midtown, causing tons of broken glass to rain down on the streets below.
After yet another wide bank out over the Hudson, the jet fighters returned over midtown for a third time and found the little plane acting strangely once again. Its pilot had put the tiny aircraft into another near hover, but this time, he was about fifty feet above the army’s penthouse roof.
Just hanging there.
The perfect target.
The Yak pilots immediately fired their Aphids. From only twelve hundred feet away, the quartet of missiles was suddenly heading right for the little plane, four enormous streaks of fire tearing through the night.
But then more magic. The tiny airplane vanished. One moment it was there, the next it wasn’t. The Aphid missiles streaked over the Army Building and hit the top floor of the old Honeywell Building three blocks away. Home to the largest counting room for the rackets, the equivalent of three million dollars in Moscow’s daily profits was blown sky high in a flash of fire and smoke.
The ghost plane’s disappearing act was accomplished by plunging straight down into the narrow space separating the Army and the Navy Buildings, allowing it to avoid the missiles with ease. Pulling up just fifty feet above a large captivated crowd watching on the corner of West Forty-Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue, the little plane climbed again and simply resumed circling the army skyscraper.
But the night was not over.
Early in the invasion, MOP units had resurrected three dozen of the city’s old municipal tow trucks. By taking off their towing equipment and installing 12.7 millimeter heavy machine guns, they’d converted them into bronegruzivikis, or gun trucks, a name quickly shortened to Brozis. They were then given to the NKVD’s Chekskis.
The Brozis were waiting in force tonight, per the order of Commissar Zmeya. They were armed with special ammunition called ITZP, or instantaneous incendiary rounds, tracers that lit up bright green on leaving the barrel and stayed lit until they hit a target. Powerful and accurate, they would make short work of the ghost plane.
Once the now-unarmed Yaks were forced to leave the area, the Brozis roared into position all around the MMZ. A dozen powerful searchlights down on the plaza were switched on. They quickly caught the ghost plane in their beams.
Suddenly, the sky above Midtown Manhattan was awash in the violent glow of ITZP fire, thirty-six distinct streams of emerald light rising into the night, heading right for the little aircraft. No way could it survive such an intense fusillade.
Yet, the pilot didn’t try a desperate maneuver like banking left or right, or diving away. Instead, he expertly weaved his way through the garish barrages. Twisting, climbing, turning, adding power, then reducing it, he avoided all of it. Then, incredibly, the plane resumed making circuits around the top of the Army Building as if nothing had happened.
The Brozi gunners started firing again, this time leading the tiny plane with the help of their night-vision goggles. Another massive wave of tracers filled the sky, heading toward the top of the Army Building. But this time, at the very last moment, the little plane went into its hover mode again and simply let the flood of green streaks go by. It seemed easier that way.
This barrage didn’t disappear into the night like the first one. Instead, thousands of the green tracer rounds smashed into the top of the Army Building, blowing half the roof off, while the rest slammed into the top ten floors of the Navy Building’s facing side. Hundreds on the plaza below fled as the twin hits pelted the MMZ with a second storm of broken glass.
The gun trucks were immediately ordered to cease firing.
Meanwhile, the little plane had switched to circling the Navy Building, and after two quick orbits, it jumped over to the MOP Building.
But then … something strange happened.
Breaking from its bizarre pattern of flying madly around the tops of the three side-by-side military HQ buildings, the funny little plane started climbing.
And climbing.
And climbing.
And to the astonishment of the thousands below, for the first time, the ghost plane began circling the top floor of 30 Rock, the headquarters of the NKVD secret police.
Earlier in the day, a newly arrived battalion of SA-4 SAM mobile launchers had been dispersed throughout the city.
Their crews had been briefed on what would be expected of them as part of the Okupatsi force. But they were also given an unofficial briefing about the ghost plane and what had been happening around New York in the days before their arrival. Their battalion commander strongly emphasized to his crews that they would have nothing to do with the ongoing ghost plane mystery. SA-4s were designed to shoot down bomber formations from hundreds of miles away. They were here to protect Russkiy-NYC against a massive airborne attack, not some flying circus toy with giant wheels.
The SA-4 launch crews were all veterans of the recent African campaign and wouldn’t have to be told twice. They knew firing one of the massive SA-4s at such a tiny target, at such close range, inside such a congested area, would be insanity.
The load of fuel carried by just one of their missiles held enough explosive power to devastate four city blocks.
The SA-4 SAM launcher parked near the corner of West Forty-Eighth Street and Fifth Avenue was one of the closest to Rockefeller Center.
Located just a hundred feet outside the MMZ’s barbed-wire barrier, its six-man crew had a clear view of all the buildings within the Russian enclave.
Their launcher looked like a tank, a big bulky armored vehicle on two tracks with a
large antenna spinning on the top and two gigantic missiles on launch railings hanging off either side. Its commander sat in a small open turret near the front; the rest of the crew tended the missiles from the control hatch in the back.
The crewmembers watched in amazement as the bizarre ghost plane drama unfolded in the night skies above the old Rockefeller Center. Their attention was drawn back down to earth when a large Cadillac roared up to their position and four men in trench coats and fedoras jumped out.
No introductions were needed. The missile crew knew the men were NKVD Militsiya. Not to be trifled with under any circumstances.
The enlisted men were made to stand against a wall nearby while one policeman climbed atop the launcher and accosted the SAM commander. He pointed at the little plane whipping around the top of 30 Rock and barked, “Fire at that mosquito immediately. Sight it, lock it, and destroy it. Now.”
The SAM commander just shook his head.
“I am under orders not to shoot these missiles unless the city is in danger of a massive bombing attack.”
“This order comes directly from the commissar’s office,” the NKVD man growled. “Now, fire on it.”
The SAM officer tried to reason with the man. “This missile is an SA-4,” he said. “It’s designed to hit targets twenty miles high and two hundred miles out. Firing it from here, in this crowd of buildings and at such a small close-proximity target, will be inviting disaster.”
But the NKVD man angrily waved his protests away. “You are under orders—”
“And what if we hit the building itself?” the missile commander shot back at him, growing alarmed now.
“Then you’ll face a firing squad in the morning,” the NKVD man spit at him in reply. “You’re the experts. Do your job.”
But the missile commander did not move. He did not say a thing. He stayed defiant.
Battle for America Page 4
