Patrick McLanahan Collection #1

by Dale Brown

  “A camera—it’s a digital camera, designed to take digital pictures through the binoculars,” the officer said, examining the binoculars carefully. “And this port on the side…looks like it hooks into a transmitter, perhaps a satellite transmitter, da? Get someone out here with a metal detector—I bet we’ll locate the transmitter nearby.” He motioned to the captives. “You find out which is the leader yet?”

  “They don’t appear to understand Russian, sir,” the sergeant said. “But I think that one is the leader.” He pointed to a very tall Turkmeni soldier with an empty shoulder holster. “He was the only one with a sidearm. It was Russian, in very good condition, and it looks like he knew how to wear it.”

  The officer approached the man and shone his flashlight on him. Moments later, after grasping the man’s face, he broke out into a wide grin. “Well, well. Sergeant, don’t you see who we have here? This is General Jalaluddin Turabi himself, the new commander of the so-called Turkmen armed forces.” He bent down. “Am I not correct, General? And this is your aide, Abdul Dendara, no? Speak up so all your men can hear you.” The man remained silent, shaking his head that he did not understand. “Still playing dumb, General?” The officer withdrew a pistol, aimed it at the head of the younger man beside him, and fired. The headless body of the young recruit toppled over almost into Turabi’s lap. “How is your Russian now, General? Coming back to you?”

  “Yob tvoyu mat’ khuyesas!” Turabi swore in Russian.

  “There, you see, Sergeant? General Turabi knows Russian very well. We must take him with us back to the capital, and be very careful not to hurt him—at least for now. As for the other—execute him. We don’t have enough supplies to feed the entire damned Turkmen army.”

  “Bastards! You can’t just slaughter us like this! We are prisoners of war!” Turabi shouted. As Turabi was dragged away, the patrol sergeant barked an order. One of his troops clicked the safety off his weapon….

  But at that second they heard a loud banngg! The lights from the patrol vehicles that were illuminating the area snapped off, steam and diesel fuel gushing from a completely ruptured engine and fuel tank. The soldiers, Russians and Turkmen alike, dropped to the desert floor.

  The security officer saw several bright flashes nearby that he assumed were gunshots, all coming from near his men. “Sergeant!” he shouted. “Where are the attackers?” No response. “Sergeant! Answer me!”

  “I’m afraid he can’t answer you right now, sir,” came a strange, synthetic, computer-like voice. Suddenly the Russian felt himself hauled up by his jacket. He found himself dangling in the air—being held aloft by an alien-looking figure straight out of a science-fiction magazine.

  “Vyyabat!” he shouted. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Turn off his lights, and let’s get out of here, sir,” Hal Briggs said.

  “Americans? You are Americans?” the officer shouted. “What are you doing here? I will—” But Griffin silenced him with a quick bolt of energy from his shoulder electrodes, then dropped the unconscious officer to the sand.

  Trevor Griffin went over to Jalaluddin Turabi and helped him to his feet. “Are you all right?” he asked in Russian via the battle armor’s electronic interpreter.

  “You…you are the American robot warriors,” Turabi gasped. “Why have you come here?”

  “I’m from the Air Intelligence Agency, General Turabi,” Griffin said. Turabi still looked puzzled. “From Texas, General, remember? You’ve been sending us pictures of the Russians for weeks now. We’re here to get you and your man to safety. Let’s go. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  They returned to where the Condor aircraft was hidden, took the camouflage netting off, and pulled it out onto the highway. Turabi and his sergeant, Abdul Dendara, climbed in the back and strapped in, followed by Griffin and then Briggs. He had the power on immediately. “Bobcat Control, Condor, we’re up.”

  “Good to hear it, guys,” Dave Luger said.

  “We’re running a systems check now, Condor. Stand by for engine start.” A few moments later: “Systems check okay. Hydraulic fluid is a little low—we may have a leak somewhere. Engine-start sequence in progress.” On the back of the Condor, a small retractable air inlet deployed, and moments later they heard the high-pitched whine of a turbojet engine. “Engine start complete, running another systems check…Hydraulic pressure is low, almost to the red line. Let’s see if we can get airborne before we lose the whole system. Hal, use the tiller and keep her straight on the highway. Ready?”

  “Let’s do it.”

  But it wasn’t going to happen. As soon as the Condor started moving forward, the nose slipped sideways, and they could feel a severe shuddering under their feet. “Control, I can’t steer it,” Hal said, “and I feel a really bad vibration in the nose.”

  “Hydraulic pressure is down to zero,” Kelvin Carter reported. “The nosewheel will just free-caster without hydraulic power. Hal, you’ll have to lock the nosewheel in place with the locking switch on the tiller. You won’t have any steering, so you’ll have to manually line the Condor up on the highway. Use differential braking until you get enough airspeed to steer it aerodynamically. Careful on the brakes—you’ll flip yourself over if you have takeoff power in and you hit the brakes too hard.”

  “I’ll get out and line it up,” Griffin said, and before Hal could protest, he had undogged his hatch and was scrambling out. It was no problem for him to lift up the nose of the aircraft and reposition it on the highway centerline.

  But just as he did, a warning beeped in his helmet. “I’m picking up an aircraft coming our way.” He raised his rail gun and followed the prompts in his helmet until he could see the threat symbol in his electronic visor. “Got him! Got him!” he said excitedly. “Low, six miles, speed one-ten. Probably a damned helicopter gunship or attack plane.”

  “Easy, sir. Wait for him to come into range,” Hal said. With the powered exoskeleton, Griffin tracked the incoming aircraft easily. “Should be any second now. Don’t lead him—the projectile will move a hell of a lot faster than—”

  Suddenly Griffin heard in his helmet, “Warning, laser detected. Warning, laser detected.”

  “Laser!” he shouted. “He’s laying a laser designator on us!” He didn’t wait any longer—he fired the rail gun at the incoming aircraft, even without a lock-on, hoping that the shot would make the pilot veer away or the gunner to break his lock-on or concentration.

  It did neither. As Griffin watched, his electronic visor showed another target—this one moving much faster than the helicopter.

  He didn’t hesitate. He jumped atop the Condor aircraft and watched as the laser-guided missile streaked in. Like a hockey goalie, he crouched down, keeping the missile centered in his sights while balancing. He raised the rail gun and tried to line up on the incoming missile.

  But before he could get a shot off, it hit. The missile deflected off the barrel of the rail gun, off Griffin’s right arm, veered away from Condor, hit the ground, and exploded. The rail gun shattered in his hands, and he was blown backward off of the Condor and several yards through the air onto the hard-baked desert floor.

  He was still alive. He heard warning buzzers, his electronic visor was cracked, and his body felt as if he were being turned on a rotisserie over a blazing bonfire—but he was still alive.

  “Colonel Griffin!” he heard Hal Briggs shout. Briggs was kneeling beside him, putting out an electrical fire from his backpack and belt and removing his helmet. “Holy shit…”

  “Where…where’s that gunship, Hal…?” Griffin breathed. “Get him, damn it!”

  Hal turned and raised his rail gun—but before he could line up on the aircraft, another explosion erupted a short distance away. The Russian gunship had shot a second laser-guided missile into the Condor, blowing it to pieces. “Oh, my God!” Griffin shouted. “Turabi and his sergeant…”

  “They’re clear,” Hal said. “They’re trying to find a place to hide.” Just as he was abo
ut to fire on the aircraft, he received warning in his helmet. “Oh, shit, another aircraft inbound.”

  He turned to take a shot at the second aircraft, then slung his rail gun over his shoulder, picked up Griffin, and leaped away—just as another laser-guided missile exploded in the exact spot where they’d been a fraction of a second earlier. Hal landed from his jump and had barely enough time to cover Griffin with his body when the second aircraft, a Russian Mi-24 Hind-D attack helicopter, peppered him with thirty-millimeter cannon fire. The shock of the heavy-caliber shells hitting Briggs was so fierce that, even protected by Briggs’s armored body, Griffin felt his breath being knocked out of his lungs by the impact. As soon as the cannon fire stopped, Briggs scooped up Griffin and made another thruster jump in a different direction, away from Turabi and Dendara.

  But the explosion, the gunship attack, and that last leap substantially depleted his power—warning tones were popping up the moment he landed from his jump. Griffin obviously saw them, too, because he held out his spare power pack. “Turn around—I’ll swap power packs.”

  “Not this one, you won’t,” Hal said, examining the pack—it had shattered along with the rest of Trevor’s backpack. He quickly ejected his nearly spent power pack and replaced it with his emergency one, then made another leap when he noticed the first gunship lining up for a cannon or missile attack.

  But it was soon obvious that the Russian helicopter pilots had set up their attack-orbit plan well. Hal couldn’t jump in any direction without a gunship able to bear down on him quickly with only minor corrections. As soon as he landed from his last jump, cannon shells were raining down on him, while the other gunship was circling to begin his attack.

  Hal found that he was a few yards away from a shallow wash, and while he waited for his thrusters to recharge, he carried Griffin to it. “You gotta stay here, sir,” Hal said. “If we’re going to stop these bastards, I need to get some room to fight. Burrow down as deep as you can and hide under the sand—your suit will help screen your heat signature from their IR sensors.”

  “Hal…” But he was gone seconds later.

  As soon as Briggs landed, he hefted his rail gun, took aim on the closest gunship, and fired. Nothing happened—he saw the bluish yellow streak of vapor hit the helicopter, but it kept on barreling toward him. Hal leveled the gun again and prepared to fire another round.

  But he realized moments later that the big helicopter was no longer flying toward him but crashing toward him. The main rotor had sheared off milliseconds after the large titanium projectile shattered one engine and the transmission, and seconds after being hit the gunship was nothing more than a man-made meteorite. The crew compartment and cockpit were filled with burning fuel and transmission fluid, and almost instantly ordnance started to cook off out on the pylons and stub wings from the intense fuselage fire. Hal jet-jumped away from the impact point seconds before the copter crashed into the desert right in front of him.

  “Got the bastard, sir,” Hal radioed, before realizing that Griffin’s equipment was destroyed and he couldn’t hear. He activated his sensors to locate Griffin.

  And realized with horror that the second Russian gunship had zeroed in on Trevor Griffin and was about to attack! He raised his rail gun just as the gunner started walking thirty-millimeter rounds onto Griffin’s hiding spot.

  But at that very moment, two missiles streaked out of the night sky and rammed into the Hind’s engine exhausts. The gunship immediately exploded, and the flaming fireball buried itself in the desert a few hundred yards away from the Air Force colonel.

  Just as he was wondering who’d shot those missiles, Hal heard, “Sorry we’re so late, Tin Man.” It was Kelvin Carter. “Got here as quick as I could.” Soon the unmistakable roar of their QB-52 Megafortress could be heard, less than five hundred feet overhead.

  “You were right on time,” Hal said. “Three more seconds and the colonel would’ve been turned into Swiss cheese.”

  “Roger that,” Carter said. “Glad we could help. We’re going to pay a visit on a couple other Russki aircraft heading your way. The closest ground troops are about eight miles southwest. We don’t have any air-to-ground weapons on board the Megafortress, but we can create some confusion for you. Watch the skies.”

  “Thanks, Bobcat.” Briggs jet-jumped over to Griffin. “You okay, sir?”

  “I’m here to tell you, Hal,” Griffin said weakly, “that it is possible to see your life flash in front of your eyes twice in one night. I sure as hell did.”

  “You saved our bacon, Colonel,” Hal said, helping Griffin strip off the useless battle armor. “You’ve earned the right to join our exclusive club if you so choose.”

  “I’ve got a desk back in San Antonio waiting for me, along with a wife and kids—I think that’s where I’ll stay for a while,” Griffin responded honestly. “That is, if we can get out of here without Condor.”

  At that moment Hal turned. He’d received another warning tone in his helmet. “A vehicle heading toward us—I thought Carter said it was clear?” Hal raised his rail gun, preparing to engage.

  Then he saw Jalaluddin Turabi frantically waving from his perch atop the Russian armored personnel carrier. He and Dendara had returned to the place where they’d been captured and absconded with the APC and weapons.

  “It’s a piece of crap! Don’t these Russians believe in cleaning their vehicles?” Turabi asked. “But it should get us to Repetek, where my men will be waiting. Shall we go?”

  Cia Air-Operations Base, Near Bukhara,

  Republic of uzbekistan

  Later that day

  Confirmed, sir,” the unit intelligence officer said, handing his commanding officer a report. “The damned Air Force again.”

  “I thought so,” the commander said angrily. He read the report, shaking his head, then crumpled up the paper and banged a fist on his desk. “A commando operation supported by a damned B-52 bomber—and they don’t say one friggin’ word about it to us or to anyone at Langley. Where was Turabi taken?”

  “Chärjew, then by air to the USS Lincoln in the Arabian Sea,” the intelligence officer replied. “Bob, we’ve got to pull all our assets in right now. The Russians are going to sweep east, take Mary, then sweep north and bomb the living daylights out of us at any time. We’ve got to exfil our guys and get out of here.”

  “I know, damn it, I know. A year of work down the tubes—not just in Turkmenistan but all the way to Iran and all over Central Asia. The Air Force really screwed us last night.”

  The commander looked up from his desk at the hanger where his office was located. He had a U.S. Air Force MH-53M Pave Low IV special-ops helicopter and crew standing by ready to go, along with its crew of six and a team of twelve commandos—and there was no doubt that he could get volunteers to fill up the chopper if he asked. He had a large contingent of operatives and valuable informants on the streets of Ashkhabad, the capital of Turkmenistan, and also down inside Iran, throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, and as far away as Krasnovodsk, the big Russian port on the Caspian Sea—all turning up information on enemy activity in Central Asia. He had guys deep inside Al Qaeda, the Russian military, Afghani drug cartels, and terrorist groups for thousands of miles around.

  All compromised because of some half-assed Air Force operation near Mary.

  It was too risky to stay in Uzbekistan now. The Russians were going to be like a large hive of angry bees—stirred up, swarming, and mad as hell, ready to lash out at anything that wasn’t 100 percent verified Russian. The whole Central Asia operation was in danger. A lot of Russians had been killed by the Americans as they fought their way out of Turkmenistan—no doubt the Russians wanted payback.

  “We got no choice,” he said finally. “Send messages via secure microburst transmissions and radio interference, telling our guys to hightail it out into the back country and start monitoring the pickup points.” The CIA operatives used their own secret microburst transceivers—coded messages sent and received b
y devices that compressed messages into microsecond-long bursts, thereby reducing the chances of their being detected or used to backtrace their location. The CIA headquarters also sent messages by broadcasting interference signals overlaid on regular radio and TV broadcasts—sometimes as simple as bursts of static, other times images that could be seen only with special lenses or by slowing down videotapes of certain shows—to relay messages to their informants or agents in deep cover.

  Over time all the field operatives and informants who wished to leave would get the message, and they would execute their escape plan. The actual procedure differed widely for individual agents, but the objective was for each agent to report to one of several exfiltration points near where he or she lived or worked and wait for a sign or message that the agent was going to get picked up. It could take days, sometimes weeks—patience and trust were the key words here. Sometimes agents would be on the run, hiding out in the wilderness. If they were lucky, they could maintain their covers while checking the spots daily for a sign that their rescuers were nearby.

  “Roger that,” the intel officer said. “Everyone’s been in fairly close contact. We should have no trouble rounding them all up.”

  “That’s because the Air Force stirred up the Russians before, too,” the commander said bitterly. “I am going to make sure that Langley chews some butt at the Pentagon this time. Someone’s got to lose his stars over this. They just can’t—”

  The unit commander was nearly knocked off his chair by the first massive explosion, but by the time he leaped to his feet and began running for the exit, the second bomb crashed through the ceiling of the hangar and exploded. He never heard or felt anything after that….

  The CIA air base in Uzbekistan was certainly no secret to anyone—especially not the Russians. Since Russia was a full partner in the defense of Uzbekistan, and Russia was mostly responsible for Uzbekistan’s border security and defense, the Russians had plenty of information on anyone moving across the frontier—including the CIA agents and their most trusted informants.