Patrick McLanahan Collection #1

by Dale Brown

  “No one move!” the sergeant in charge of the military forces shouted in Russian. “Hands where I can see them!” The other soldiers carried rusty-looking AK-47s and sidearms in worn, rotting leather holsters. Azar had no doubt that Najar and Saidi could take them out within seconds…if they had weapons or were within reach of them. Najar, Saidi, Azar, and the vendor open their hands to their sides in plain sight.

  The man in the suit approached them, smiling—and then, to everyone’s surprise, bowed. “Salam aleikom, Miss Qagev,” he said in Farsi. “Welcome to Turkmenistan. I am Colonel Jamal Fattah, deputy chief of mission and chief political officer of the Iranian embassy in Ashkhabad.” He looked at Najar and Saidi. “You must be Miss Qagev’s bodyguards…Richard and Linda VanWie, or is it Major Najar and Lieutenant Saidi now?”

  “Salam aleikom, sir,” Azar replied, bowing slightly in return. Fattah was obviously pleased at that response, though he kept his eye carefully on Najar and Saidi. “What brings the Iranian deputy consul here?”

  “Why, a member of the Qagev royal family, here, in Turkmenistan—it’s practically a cause for yet another national week of celebration, just like the Turkmenis award themselves just about every other week of the year for some reason or another,” Fattah said.

  “How did you know we were here?”

  “I would be revealing important state secrets if I…”

  “The Russian embassy intercepted communications between Canada and the United States about the arrest and deportment of three persons who were under protective custody of the U.S. State Department, Shahdokht,” Saidi said. “They obviously passed the information to their friends the Iranians.”

  Fattah nodded and smiled. “Lieutenant Saidi is as smart as she is beautiful,” he said. “Rumor had it that you actually stole the plane sent to evacuate you to a safe place? Extraordinary. Anyway, the report said the trio was in quite a rush and headed to Istanbul via Frankfurt. A message was put out to all embassies to watch for you. After you left Istanbul, a very resourceful researcher at the Federal Security Service in Moscow guessed who you might be, based on recent events in Iran, and the word was put out to be on the lookout for you and your parents…”

  “What of my parents?” Azar interjected.

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that, Miss Qagev,” the Iranian said. “Once the word was out it was not difficult tracking down two adults and a female teenager traveling together through eastern and central Asia. We made positive identification shortly thereafter, pulled up your files, and then put all known pro-monarchy individuals and Iranian expatriates in Turkmenistan under surveillance, knowing you’d make contact with your underground network.”

  “We do not have any quarrel with the Turkmeni government,” Azar said, “and we have broken no laws here…”

  “I am sure you entered the country using false papers…”

  “We were legally admitted into this country and we have valid visas…”

  “That will be thoroughly investigated,” Fattah said. “While that investigation is underway, Iran will file extradition papers with the Turkmeni courts, and I have no doubt you will be turned over to us in a very short time.”

  “On what charges?”

  “Sedition, conspiracy, terrorism, murder—the list is very long and horrible,” Fattah said. “I am sure the Turkmeni government will be anxious to cooperate. These soldiers will take you into custody and take you to the Niyazov jail in Ashkhabad, where you’ll stay awaiting extradition to Iran. The wheels of justice move slowly in Turkmenistan, but you will eventually return home…as the guest of the ayatollah.” He lowered his voice, turning his back to the Turkmeni soldiers, and went on: “Now, you don’t want to die in a hail of gunfire outside a filthy camel corral in Ashkhabad at the hands of those mostly bored-looking, under-trained, and underpaid soldiers over there, so I’m asking you to come along quietly. I know your bodyguards are well trained and could probably twist those soldiers’ heads right off their shoulders, and mine as well, but I’d hate for anyone to die out here like common criminals, especially a royal princess. If you resist, I can’t be responsible for what happens next.” He motioned to his sedan. “Shall we, Miss Qagev?”

  Najar stepped forward, the menace clear in his eyes and body—so palpable was it that the Turkmeni soldiers sensed it immediately and stiffened. Azar scanned the growing crowd around them, but she didn’t see any sympathetic faces. They might scatter and confuse the crowd if her bodyguards could get their hands on those rifles, and they could probably lose themselves in the bazaar easily…

  …but then Azar noticed other men in the crowd…and they didn’t look like Turkmeni vendors or shoppers. They looked military but wore civilian clothes, they were less Central Asian–looking, their gazes were sure and steady, and their hands were free, hovering near open coats. They were Iranians, Azar thought, surely Pasdaran—she was positive of it. She turned to Saidi and motioned toward the men she spotted, and Saidi saw him right away too.

  “Major, no,” she said softly. “Pasdaran.”

  Najar’s eyes darted around the crowd and soon spotted the very same subjects. He looked accusingly at Fattah, then let his body relax and opened his palms. “I wonder what the Turkmeni government would think about Iran bringing in Revolutionary Guard assassins into their country,” Najar said.

  “They probably wouldn’t like it very much,” Fattah admitted, “but by the time they found out about him they’d be long gone, and you’d still be dead. Now come along quietly, please.”

  CHAPTER 6

  HIGH TECHNOLOGY AEROSPACE WEAPONS

  CENTER, ELLIOTT AFB, NEVADA

  A SHORT TIME LATER

  “Here’s the latest update, ladies and gentlemen,” Brigadier-General David Luger said in the Dreamland battle staff room. He was standing before Patrick McLanahan; Brigadier-General Rebecca Furness, commander of the Air Battle Force based at Battle Mountain Air Reserve Base, and Brigadier-General Hal Briggs, commander of the Air Battle Force’s ground forces; and Captain Hunter Noble and First Lieutenant Dorothea Benneton, representing the XR-A9 Black Stallion spaceplane crews.

  “Armstrong Space Station will take another day and a half to get settled into its new orbit to start detailed reconnaissance and surveillance of Iran,” Luger went on. “We’re getting a few oblique images but nothing tactically useful yet. We’ve increased NIRTSat overflights and we’ve narrowed the search for Iran’s mobile medium- and long-range missiles to a dozen different sites.”

  “One dozen? Doesn’t sound too narrow to me, Dave,” Hal commented.

  “Once the station gets in place, it’ll be able to discriminate between real missiles and decoys and even look inside bunkers and storage buildings,” Dave said. “We’ve got the best eyes out there on it now.”

  “Anything on Buzhazi’s whereabouts?” Patrick asked.

  “Negative,” Dave replied. “He’s hiding deep. No recent attacks except for very low-level insurgent activities. He might be gearing up for some big operation—the attacks lately have been small raids, collecting nothing more than uniforms and small-arms ammunition, but this could be a prelude to something much bigger.”

  “The White House won’t even consider our plan to attack the Iranian missile sites until we’ve narrowed the field down,” Patrick said, “so we’re on hold until then.” He turned to the Air Battle Force commander. “Rebecca, status of your forces?”

  “Same—three EB-52 Megafortresses, all manned; four EB-1C Vampires, two unmanned; and one AL-52 Dragon anti-missile aircraft,” Furness replied. One of the first female combat pilots in the U.S. Air Force, Furness was also the first woman in charge of a tactical bombing wing. Her Air Force Reserve B-1B Lancer bomber wing was selected by Patrick McLanahan to be converted to strategic flying battleships, capable of carrying an extensive array of weaponry. Most of her aircraft had been destroyed by the Russians at Yakutsk—her little force of bombers represented virtually all of America’s air-breathing long-range strike aircra
ft. “I think we have access to one or two B-2A bombers and six KC-10 tankers as well.”

  Rebecca’s EB-1C Vampire bombers, EB-52 Megafortress battleships, and AL-52 Dragon anti-missile aircraft were the most sophisticated attack planes in the world. The EB-1C Vampire was a modified version of the Air Force’s B-1B Lancer, with the addition of stealth technology, advanced computers, avionics, aircraft systems, and flight controls. But the real power of the Vampire bomber was its weapons. Every air-launched weapon in the American military arsenal could be utilized on the Vampire, and most weapons others in the American military had never heard of.

  The EB-52 Megafortress was a highly modified version of the venerable B-52 Stratofortress bomber, so much so that it could hardly be called a B-52 any more at all. Instead of five or six crewmembers, it had just two pilots—all other functions and crew positions were automated. The skin and structure of the original B-52 had been changed, using composite fibersteel, radar-absorbing materials, and unconventional mission-adaptive flight controls, to turn it into a real stealth bomber. The avionics and systems on board had all been changed to make the aircraft more precise, more connected, lighter, faster, and more efficient. Only a handful of EB-52s and its other even more highly modified brothers and sisters still existed after the American Holocaust, but the remaining few planes were the cutting-edge of long-range air attack.

  “Updates on Iran’s defenses?”

  “The Revolutionary Guards and Iranian air defense forces are on full alert,” Rebecca replied, “and we’re seeing every kind of Russian, French, Chinese, and even some American air defense weapons from the seventies to the present operating out there. Tehran, the Turkish border, and the Persian Gulf, Gulf of Oman, and Arabian Sea coastlines are the heaviest defended, with multiple layers of very sophisticated surface-to-air missiles sites—many of them mobile and harder to pinpoint. They’ve obviously learned some lessons from their last encounter with you guys. Very few fighter patrols. We’re looking at possible missile launch sites but so far all of them have similar numbers of defensive batteries installed around them. So far we can’t tell which are decoys, so it’s hard to tell which are real.

  “We’ve had to modify our original plan to reflect the denser and more sophisticated order of battle,” she went on. “We’ll need to use a lot of resources to punch through both their outer as well as terminal defenses. Once our bombers get through the outer defenses they can roam over the countryside fairly freely until they get within fifty miles of the target area, and then they run the gauntlet again. Each plane may have just a couple big precision-guided munitions left to attack by the time they make it through.” She looked at Hal. “Our attacks need to be finely coordinated both for ingress and egress, and even if everything works perfectly our guys will be in for a very rough ride at best.”

  “But it’s still doable?”

  Rebecca hesitated just long enough for many of their throats to go dry, then replied, “Yes, we can do it. We’ll need as much intel as we can scrape together, better than average aircraft and weapon reliability, perfect timing, perfect aiming, and a lot of luck…but yes, sir, we can do it.”

  “Thanks, Rebecca.” Patrick knew that Rebecca Furness’s assessment was as brutally honest as possible—she wouldn’t hesitate to tell them if she didn’t think her bombers could make it. “Boomer?”

  “We’ve got two Black Stallion spaceplanes ready to go,” Hunter Noble replied. “Both can be configured for attack, satellite launch, or passengers. The third spaceplane hasn’t gone into orbit or carried any cargo but we can use it if necessary—we’ll be testing as we go. Nano?”

  “I wanted to bring up the new gear General Briggs mentioned we might be bringing along, Nano” Benneton said, smiling enticingly at Hal just as she had been since returning from Las Vegas. “I took a look at some of that new gear we acquired. The problem is not with weight, but volume. The unit itself folds up fairly small, but we need to remove two crew seats to accommodate it. That means we can carry one unit, two or three mission backpacks, two spare power cells, and three passengers in the module. It’s impressive technology, but my question for you is: is it worth losing two Tin Man commandos?”

  “Can we fit two units in the passenger module, Lieutenant?” Dave Luger asked.

  “Yes, sir, but with spare power cells only, not with any of those mission backpacks,” Nano replied. “Again, it’s volume, not weight. Obviously those units can carry a big load, and they were designed to be carried into battle aboard large cargo-sized aircraft or those cool Humvees we got, so there was never any attempt to miniaturize the mission backpacks. Once they’re redesigned, they’ll be much more useful.”

  “We’ll adjust the mix depending on the mission and the tactical situation,” Patrick said, “but for now I want to be able to bring one unit with as many mission backpacks as possible together with two Tin Men.”

  “Yes, sir. We can do that.”

  “Good,” Patrick said. “All right, folks: the plan still stands, and we’re just awaiting approval and a warning order. The primary objective is to locate, track, and destroy Iran’s tactical and strategic missiles, so whoever’s in charge out there won’t destroy half a city again like they did with Arān. It’ll take Ann and Raydon another day or so to reposition Silver Tower so we can do a detailed ISAR search on the spots we’ve identified so far with the NIRTSats. With thirty-six suspected storage, garrison, and launch sites, we’re going to need every person and every weapon system pulling together to make it work.”

  “I’m hoping at least half of those are decoys that Silver Tower can identify—otherwise we’re going to need a lot more boots on the ground,” Dave said.

  “We need to start getting the boots over there now,” Patrick said. “As soon as we locate those missile sites we need to take them down.” He looked up and spoke, “Duty Officer, conference Colonel Raydon in for me.” The computerized “Duty Officer” made the connection just moments later. “How’s it going up there, Colonel?” Patrick McLanahan asked on the secure video communications datalink from his command center at Dreamland. “Ready to come home yet?”

  “Not on your life, sir,” Kai Raydon responded. “I feel like a kid again. I might just retire up here. Glad you called. I have something for you. Got a minute?”

  “Sure, Kai,” Patrick replied. “What do you have?”

  “As you know, sir, we’re repositioning the station to cover Iran better,” Raydon said. “It’ll take another day or two to complete the orbit change. But as we’re moving I decided to poke around eastern Iran and its neighbors with the sensors and electromagnetic sniffers Ann’s got up here to see if anyone else is getting as worried as the Iranians over this insurgency. I’ve been picking up an awful lot of uncoded chatter between Turkmeni border patrols and Iranian Revolutionary Guard units right around Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan. It doesn’t appear to be routine—something’s going down.”

  Patrick’s stomach tightened at the double mention of both the Iranians and Turkmenistan—his experiences with both had mostly been very unpleasant. Moreover, he considered the president of Turkmenistan, Jalaluddin Turabi, a friend, and if the Iranians were becoming active again in that country, his life was definitely in jeopardy. “Moving border security units in response to what happened in Qom?”

  “Maybe, but there’s something else,” Raydon said. “We ran a lot of the uncoded chatter through our translators, and we keep on picking up the word ‘princess.’ There’s only two of us up here, and Ann is pretty much working on setting up the station and placing us in our new orbit, so we don’t have time to check the intelligence dispatches on anything pertaining to ‘princess.’

  “At first I thought it was a glitch in the decoder, and then I thought it was a code-name for a weapon or vehicle, but I think they’re talking about a person. Can you look around and see what you can find?”

  “Sure. Did you send me the intercepts you’re referring to?”

  “Should be sitting in your in-box
already, sir.”

  “I’ll call you back as soon as I find anything.”

  “I’m standing by.” Patrick gave the information he had to his Plans and Intelligence office, who had access to all classified reports submitted to various agencies in the U.S. government, including the State Department and Pentagon.

  Less than an hour later, Dave Luger read over the report. “It’s not a code-name as far as we can tell, Muck,” he said. “We can’t detect any attempts to use code-words in any of the transmissions Raydon pulled down—the Iranians and Turkmenis are both chatting away in the clear. We think they’re talking about a real princess they may have captured. What do you suspect up there, Kai? What are you seeing out there in Ashkhabad?”

  “Nothing specific,” Raydon replied. “But we can track and triangulate the transmissions, coded and uncoded, and we traced activity to a big bazaar outside Ashkhabad.”

  “The Tolkuchka bazaar. I’ve been there,” Patrick said. “One of the biggest in Central Asia.”

  “We can’t pick out faces or anything like that, but we did get ultra-wideband synthetic aperture pictures of a confrontation between some Turkmeni military units and the source of some of the uncoded transmissions—namely, a car in which radio transmissions were being sent and received in Farsi.”

  “Not unusual. The border area is pretty heavily traveled, and the Iranians have a significant presence there.”

  Patrick was indeed very familiar with the country. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, some fleeing Taliban forces crossed the border into Turkmenistan. The insurgent force had grown as it moved westward into a fighting force big enough to threaten the pro-Russian Turkmeni government, and the Russians moved in to crush the rebellion. Patrick McLanahan’s fledgling Air Battle Force was ordered into Turkmenistan to covertly monitor the situation, and a low-scale but fierce shooting conflict erupted between American and Russian air and ground forces to prevent a slaughter in that oil-rich but underdeveloped country.