Then another screech of tires. Two Brozi trucks had rushed up from the direction of Forty-Second Street, manned by a dozen fearsome Chekskis and one Militsiya officer.
This officer was hideous. A ragged uneven scar traveled from one ear to another, and he walked with an odd limp. His eyes were red and bloodshot. His nose was running.
“Sublieutenant Boris Borski,” he said, flashing his ID card at the other Militsiya. “Is there a disagreement here? Is it about launching a missile at that flying bug?”
No one said anything; they didn’t have to.
Borski walked up to the five-man missile crew still standing against the building wall. He addressed the first man in line, a young recruit.
“How many men does it take to safely launch one of these missiles?” he asked him.
“In an emergency situation, only four are needed, plus a firing officer, sir,” the young soldier recited crisply.
Borski calmly took out his pistol and shot the man in the temple. He crumpled to the sidewalk, blood gushing from his wound. Then Borski turned to the launcher’s commander and said, “This is now an emergency situation.”
The SAM officer gave up. One of his men was dead for no reason, and he was sure these psychopaths would just love to kill them all. He gave his bewildered crew their orders, and they immediately began preparing to launch one of their massive antiaircraft missiles at the miniature circus plane.
Their radar switched to active search, they quickly managed to get the plane’s tiny blip on their targeting screen.
Seconds after that, they launched their gigantic missile.
All those thousands of people who’d turned out to see the ghost plane watched the SA-4 rise up from the clutter of Midtown.
It looked like a gigantic Roman candle, powerful and earsplittingly loud. The immense roar of its engine reverberated up and down Manhattan and shattered even more windows. Its tail flame lit up the night for miles around.
Because, as a safety issue, SA-4s were designed not to detonate during the first few seconds of flight, the mystery plane simply banked to the right the instant the giant missile left its launcher and moved out of its way.
Streaking skyward now, with no discernible target in sight, the SA-4’s onboard computer essentially canceled its own launch. Its guidance system froze three seconds later, when the missile had reached a thousand feet in altitude. It rolled over hard, its engine still firing, but now unguided.
The thousands of spectators gasped and screamed, running in all directions.
With nowhere to go but down, the SA-4 slammed into Chelsea Piers a few seconds later, obliterating all of the rackets’ moneymaking drug labs.
It was a peculiar time for Colonel Ivan Samsonov to discover he was afraid of heights.
Flying had never bothered him; mountain climbing was the sport of his youth. Looking down from his forty-fourth-floor office was never an issue, either. Even his ascent to the top of the Eiffel Tower had been a great experience.
But outside, in the elements, at night, seventy stories up?
He was scared to death.
Yet, here he was, on the roof of 30 Rock, shaking uncontrollably, and not just from the cold. He was holding on tight to a cement post that helped secure the shallow brass railing that ran along the top of the building’s outer edge. He was sure if he let go, he’d be blown away.
He’d been up here since late afternoon, having used his Army-NKVD liaison credentials to get by all the security checkpoints cleanly. None of the female Cutie guards had frisked him, which was a good thing, because earlier in the day, he’d disassembled a rocket-propelled grenade launcher—the ubiquitous RPG—and sewed it and two projectiles inside the inner layer of his heavy uniform coat. The reassembled weapon lay just within his reach. He’d spent a lot of time up here praying that if the moment came, he would find the courage to pick it up and actually do something with it.
Acrophobia aside, he’d had one of the best views of what had just transpired over the MMZ. But after the SAM crashed, and while everybody was distracted by the disaster on the waterfront, only Samsonov seemed to notice that the ghost plane went back to orbiting the top of 30 Rock again.
It was the perfect scenario for him. When the plane first roared by him, it was barely twenty feet away.
He managed to load the RPG launcher with one hand while still holding on to the cement post with the other. He leaned out over the brass railing; the plaza below him looked as if it were a hundred miles away, straight down. Trying to keep his sense of balance, when the mystery plane went by him again, he somehow convinced his trembling fingers to pull the trigger.
The RPG rocketed away in a burst of smoke and fire, but it immediately began to corkscrew and quickly disappeared below, a complete miss. Samsonov was sure no one had seen his errant shot, not even the ghost plane’s pilot.
He’d done all this for nothing?
A few seconds later, the small aircraft came back around to his side of the building again. But suddenly, it went into its hovering routine … right below him.
Samsonov couldn’t believe his luck. He grabbed the second grenade, loaded it into the launcher and fired again. This rocket went haywire, too. It twisted its way down two hundred feet and wound up hitting the northwest corner of the already shattered Navy Building. But at that same moment, the mystery plane nosed down and began zooming away from the MMZ—only to find, hanging in the air right in front of it, the cloud of the debris from the second RPG hit.
The pilot only had two ways to go: He could fly so low over the top of the Navy Building that he’d hit at least a few of the people gathered there either with his propeller or his big wheels, or he could fly through the debris.
The pilot picked the second option, blazing right into the haze of concrete and metal, which ripped the plane’s fuselage to shreds and made it stagger in flight.
Samsonov was astonished. It wasn’t a direct hit, but he was the first member of the Russian military to inflict damage on the ghost plane. And while the tiny aircraft was still airborne somehow, it was on fire and smoking heavily as it wobbled away from the MMZ. When Samsonov last saw it, the small plane was out over the Hudson River, its smoky trail heading toward New Jersey.
Suddenly, he didn’t need to hold on so tight to the cement post anymore. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the photo of Commissar Zmeya’s gorgeous girlfriend. The most beautiful woman in America. He’d looked at the photo many, many times by now—and he’d simply fallen in love with her.
He gently kissed the picture.
Maybe now she’d at least know who he was.
Chapter Nine
Captain “Bull” Dozer was once again huddled in the hut atop his wooden tower, his two troopers close by.
The balloon was up; the picture was shaky. The radio was silent and the coffee was cold. As Dozer had written earlier in the hut’s hourly log: “Nothing new.” He’d listened to dead air on his radio for hours, hoping, to no avail, to hear from his buddies just as he did every evening, a dismal mission for sure.
At least he and the 7CAV had been lucky to come across the small military base in the Pine Barrens where they could drill and stay battle-ready. Built sometime in the prewar days, the tiny base consisted of a single Quonset hut, a narrow runway meant for helicopters and small airplanes, and a vast refrigerated underground bunker. Although the base was surrounded by nearly impenetrable forest with little more than a dirt path leading in or out of it, its mysterious builders had also installed a large camouflage net that could move back and forth like the roof of a sports stadium. It hid the base from prying eyes in the sky, yet allowed aircraft to come and go.
Theories about the base’s origins abounded among the 7CAV troopers. Maybe the bunkers were secret storage sites for WMD. Nuclear warheads, biological weapons, poison gas. That would explain the camo net, but why would suc
h weapons need to be refrigerated? The most radical theory was that the US military had conducted secret interdimensional tests there before the war—experiments that needed low temperatures to work and had to be kept from the public eye.
Tired of the silence, Dozer thought about tuning in to the only channel he could hear on his old rig but decided against it. Red Radio was typically Russian, crude and bizarre. It would run the same propaganda pieces over and over, in Russian and English, trumpeting the disheartening news of how well the Okupatsi was going and that the city was back to its old postwar abnormal self.
This canned hoopla would be followed by a tape of a grim-voiced announcer listing the penalties for soldiers caught stealing gasoline, carrying illegal weapons, possessing pro-American literature, or venturing into the Pine Barrens. That always brought a smile to Dozer’s face. Even before the Big War, few people had known the Barrens existed, and those who had been aware of it had kept away. Now the Russians were doing the same—for one reason: They must have come across information that the Pine Barrens was haunted.
All kinds of paranormal activity had been reported inside the Barrens over the years. Headless sailors, crying ghosts, phantom horses, strange aerial lights, something called the New Jersey Devil, and on and on. Dozer had met Russians on the battlefield in Europe and had been fighting them in American ever since. He knew that superstition was deeply entwined in their DNA. That’s why the Pine Barrens was strictly off-limits to its soldiers. And that’s why Dozer had built his tower here.
Occasionally, other voices would break into the occupation forces’ broadcasts, reciting badly translated unscripted reports about peculiar things happening around the city. A few days before, Dozer had heard a military spokesman tell the troops: “Don’t drink too much on parade day,” “Avoid fondling women you don’t know,” and “Do not vomit in the street while on duty.” One had even said, “Stories about an aircraft spotted above the city at midnight doing wonderfully strange flying things are not true. It was a parade balloon depicting a dog.”
Whenever Dozer heard these odd reports, he thought, Boozed-up Russians. But drunk or not, it was obvious the invaders had not only taken over the city while barely firing a shot, but that they were planning to stay awhile.
Dozer unfolded his portable planning board to work on the second problem he was facing: trying to figure out what the 7CAV could do operations-wise against the Russians. He had mulled over a number of ways they could at least make the Russians’ occupation a little less painless. Maybe a series of quick raids around the edges of the city, attacking their fuel lines, convoys, and outlying patrols. Hit and run—all at night. The 7CAV was good at that type of thing. They were also adept at sabotage, and Dozer had considered attacking the Astoria power plant in Queens, now operating under Russian control, or maybe blowing up a section of one of the major bridges. But these would just be pinpricks against the huge Russian army.
While Dozer’s men were well trained and well armed, there were only a hundred of them. Just from rough calculations based on what they’d seen from the balloon cam, there were at least sixty thousand Russian troops in New York City at the time of the invasion, and by now, more like sixty-five thousand. Dozer liked to gamble, but not against those kinds of odds.
How the hell were they going to dislodge an army like that? And haunted forest or not, Dozer knew the Russians would eventually figure out where the 7CAV was operating from and seek to destroy them, probably with massive long-range artillery barrages of a type that could level the entire Pine Barrens in just a few hours. Was pissing off the invaders worth all that?
He’d asked himself these questions for nearly a month and hadn’t yet come up with an answer. But he knew he had to do something big, even if it was one last act of defiance in the name of his long-lost country.
If only he had a little help.
Dozer’s hut served another critical function apart from surveillance. It was the 7CAV’s air traffic control tower. From here, he and his men helped the unit’s cargo planes fly in and out of the hidden base.
The stout, boxy Sherpas could haul a substantial load. This was important, because due to its isolated location, the 7CAV’s supply had to come entirely by air. While Dozer was fairly certain that the Reds would not come out to the Pine Barrens unprovoked, the 7CAV still had to be careful operating aircraft so close to occupied New York City. Staying at treetop level, just below the Russian long-range radar net, was essential to the resupply effort. Plus, it all had to be done at night.
A few hours earlier, just after the sun had gone down and the balloon had gone up, the base’s camouflage net had been pulled back. The 7CAV’s four homely, unarmed Sherpas took off and flew up to Albany, in the Free State of New York, to pick up eight thousand gallons of gasoline in one hundred and sixty barrels. Now, half past midnight, the four planes were expected back at any moment, anxious as always to land and get under the net once more.
Around twenty five minutes past midnight, the tower’s spy camera picked up a brief but substantial infrared heat spike coming from New York City; on the video monitor, it looked like a quick, bright flash of light somewhere in Lower Manhattan near the water. This was not the first time the 7CAV had seen such a thing. The past few nights, the IR-equipped camera had detected dozens of spikes that Dozer’s techs had identified as fireworks, further proof that the Russians were enjoying their stay in the occupied city.
But while these heat spikes had become routine by now, Dozer told his two troopers to stick to the video monitor just in case anything else unusual happened. He would serve as the Sherpas’ air traffic controller tonight.
At exactly 12:35 a.m., he grabbed his night-vision binoculars and leaned out the hut’s window, pushing both the 50-caliber and the plastic aside. After a brief scan of the dark skies, he spotted the first Sherpa about five miles out, approaching from the north. It was coming in low and slow over the pines, a tiny strobe light blinking on its nose. Dozer knew the other three cargo planes were right on its tail, flying with no lights at all. He clicked the hut’s prewar radiophone twice, sending a coded message back to the hidden base. The Sherpas were home; the camo net should be pulled back.
The four cargo planes roared past the spy tower a minute later, one by one, in a very close line. Their pilots were equipped with night-vision goggles as well. Each put the nose of his aircraft right on the center of the runway that had suddenly opened up a mile away. Bare and blinking LCD lights gave it a vague outline but not much more. Landing this way was not for the faint of heart, especially with a shitload of gasoline on board.
Still, all was proceeding smoothly—until Dozer happened to catch a glint of light coming from behind the last Sherpa.
“What the hell?” he exclaimed as the fourth cargo plane thundered past him.
Incredibly, a fifth aircraft was flying right on the Sherpa’s tail. Dozer could barely make it out in the dark, but he could tell the plane was much smaller than the cargo humpers and had a very unusual shape. It was also smoking heavily and trailing wisps of flame.
“Jesus Christ!” he bellowed into his radiophone, all thoughts of coded messages long gone. “There’s five of them heading your way!”
Telling his two troopers to stay put, Dozer was out of the hut in a second, furiously descending the ladder and falling the last ten feet to the ground. A low but unmistakable klaxon rose up among the pines, signaling the base’s security troops to immediately begin countermeasures against the intruder.
The 7CAV had actually drilled for something like this—except the opponent was always incoming helicopters. No one had ever imagined an enemy airplane getting under the dome.
Dozer dove into his jeep, shouting back up to the pair of troopers to keep their eyes open for any other aerial activity. Then he took off along the sand path that led back to the base.
Wheeling in and out of the short scrub and tumbling roots, he could st
ill see the intruder through breaks in the pines. It was flying so close to the last cargo plane’s tail, it was being battered mercilessly by the Sherpa’s prop wash.
Dozer was hardly an aviation expert, but it seemed impossible that the intruder’s heavily damaged airplane was even airborne.
He swore into the wind, “Who the hell flies like that?”
He skidded wildly onto the far end of the runway and floored the jeep’s accelerator. Now driving on asphalt and topping eighty miles an hour, he saw the last Sherpa bounce in for a landing, its crew realizing what was going on and quickly veering off the runway. The intruding aircraft pancaked in just a few seconds later. It bounced twice and then began a long, screeching skid down the landing strip, sending clouds of sparks into the night.
Dozer arrived just as the little plane came to a stop at the far end of the runway. Two jeeps of 7CAV soldiers were already waiting for it.
The troops quickly surrounded the damaged aircraft. A gust of wind blew the smoke away and the canopy on the little craft popped open. The pilot raised his hands high over his head. One 7CAV trooper used the muzzle of his M-16 to signal the man to stand up and take off his helmet. To everyone’s surprise, he was bald and pudgy, wearing an old, worn-out business suit, without a tat to be seen. He looked like an accountant from the prewar days, a bean counter with bad taste in threads—and certainly not some kind of fantastically gifted pilot.
“Jesus, don’t shoot!” he pleaded. “I’m not armed.”
“Who the hell are you?” the security team’s leader barked at him.
“I’m a numbers runner out of Montreal,” the man replied, nervously looking over his shoulder. “I’m a nobody. The lowest guy on the totem pole.”
In the parlance of America’s vast gambling underground, this man was a worm. Someone who picked up bets here and flew them there.
He was an outlaw, but not a very big one. And he appeared close to wetting his pants.
Battle for America Page 5
