by Stephen Moss
Gulshan and Rizvan sensed this like a pall over their heads, and any resistance they might have mustered had ebbed out of them as they approached shore. They were on trial, they knew that, how they behaved now would determine whether they were left alive once they hit shore. Keen to demonstrate his subservience, Rizvan clambered out of the boat to help Gulshan and Nick pull it up onto the dank, claylike sand. Once it was inshore, the two Azerbaijani turned to each other, exchanging a meaningful glance, before looking at Nick.
Nick looked at Gulshan, shivering, breathing with high, bated breaths, his lungs never fully deflating, as his body rode a crest of adrenalin, his fear and utter confusion only moments away from overwhelming him. Then he looked at Rizvan. The man was prepared. He was facing death with what dignity he could muster, and Nick saw that this man, as it was, had found his best in this moment. It was enough for Nick.
With a wave of his gun, he indicated for them to get back in their boat. Gulshan looked from Nick to Rizvan, and back again, waiting for his brother-in-law to react, but Rizvan merely waited, trying to see if this was merely a ploy to get them to turn from the gun. If he was going to die he wanted to face it, to see it coming, to make his killer look him in the eye as he died, and leave a memory in him, a demon he would have to live with.
A second passed. Nick could see Rizvan was waiting for some sign of animosity from him, but he gave none, only stern resolve. The moment held, and then, like the slow roll of a cyclist cresting a hill and starting down the other side, the moment gave, and Rizvan turned toward his boat. Gulshan took the older man’s lead, and helped him shove the boat back into the small swell, the two men feeling their youth come back to them as they heaved with vigor and then leapt into the small craft. As Rizvan fiddled with the engine, Gulshan stared at the two Englishmen, trying to be surreptitious, and watched as they walked backward up the rocky shore, keeping their eyes on the boat as it wallowed in the mild surf, before the engine puttered to life and propelled them out and away.
It was three miles to the embassy, but Nick did not intend to walk. Once the boat was a fair distance off, he reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a small ziplock bag. He pulled out a cell phone and a battery, plugging the one into the other, and waited for a signal. It took an eternity, but eventually two bars appeared and he dialed, the phone performing as it was designed to do.
The phone company would register the call on its systems as a hacked number, and eventually would shut down the sullied number in a little under three weeks. But Nick only needed to make one call.
Fifteen minutes later a car slowed near a rank pile of fishing nets and lobster pots. Its trunk popped open, and two dirty, odorous, and exhausted men climbed in, squeezing in together for ten final minutes of indignity as they rode out of town, away from the embassy, and into the hands of one of Ayala’s colleagues.
They would be scrubbed, changed, and out of the country by midnight.
Chapter 33: Meeting of Equals
Neal: ‘good evening, minnie. good evening, everyone.’
Minnie and Amadeu had configured a small virtual meeting space for such meetings, not dissimilar to the one the defunct Mobiliei Council had met in during its brief but infamous existence on Earth.
Ayala: ‘good evening, neal, minnie. as we’re all here, why don’t i kick things off. i have called us together so that we could discuss initial intel coming out of russia. i have asked for a comms link with our teams on the ground, and we will be patching into them soon, but before we get to that, i have another report that has just come in from azerbaijan, routed to me from a mossad asset in place there.’
She stopped speaking and, with her ever-growing confidence in the strange communications process, packaged the report in question in her head, and shared it with the rest of the group. The report came to them at once, highlighted parts lifting from its contents, focusing their attention to the sections Ayala wanted to talk about.
Commander Huxley, Royal Navy, [Seq.] Mil. Intel., Ashgabat Field Office: ‘… was at about 3am, first night out of e&e [escape & evacuation], sleeping in car park … flown over by first type of small black search drone …’
‘… wide wingspan … three engines, two large, mounted aft; one small, nose-mounted … thruster.’
Lieutenant Malcolm Granger: ‘… another of them flew over two hours later, moving faster …’
Cmdr Huxley: ‘… no, different type; faster, shorter wingspan, same black fuselage, same blue-white jet-trail, but this one was a fighter, much faster.’
Lt. Granger: ‘… agree … maneuverability was phenomenal … acceleration far higher than any vtol aircraft …’
The group continued to review the meat of the message, even as some were already reaching conclusions and starting to react.
Ayala: ‘we are ready on connection with recon teams one and three in russia. but i wanted to get your perspective on this data first.’
Barrett: ‘i am most concerned about the first variant. ¿are they describing some kind of F-35 copy, or a harrier jumpjet?’
Jack: ‘neither of those can hover for prolonged periods of time. sounds like they aren’t just talking about a standard vtol [vertical takeoff and landing], general milton.’
Neal was quiet, but deep down he was profoundly disquieted by this news. Its implications were profound.
John: ‘my friends, i fear that mr. granger may have accidentally hit this nail on its head. i fear we are not talking about two different plane formats at all.’
The group was silent for the millisecond that it took for this concept to sink in.
Neal: ‘i want to talk to the recon teams.’
Ayala was already working to patch them in, but Barrett was a moment longer catching up with the rest of the group.
Barrett: ‘i’m sorry, but how could they be the same plane, i am hearing two different wing forms …’
The general stopped himself. His recollections of the liquiform trailing edges and adaptable wing forms of the StratoJet came to him, built around rigid nanotube spars that could hinge in and out to provide the superstructure of the wings. The morphing wings of the StratoJet had seemed so esoteric, so futuristic, Barrett had not even allowed himself to think that anyone else on Earth could have them. The implications stunned him into silence.
He joined the rest of the virtual conference’s participants in quiet introspection while they waited for Ayala to speak again. The pause seemed long, almost tortuous, though less than a second passed in real-time. Minnie had the recon teams patching in, ready to speak at their command. Even as the group continued to review the full report coming from Nick and Malcolm, Ayala spoke to Minnie.
Ayala at Minnie: ‘¿minnie, which of the teams is on open connection?’
Minnie at Ayala: ‘recon team leaders one and three are online now. recon two is in position, pings show connection imminent.’
With that, Ayala could feel the pending connections with Recon One and Three, like a beseeching child awaiting permission to speak. Knowing the leader of Recon One especially well, she opened connection with him first, pinging Recon Three to wait a moment.
Ayala: ‘captain miller, this is ayala.’
She began, somewhat redundantly, the virtual voice that you used in such conversations carrying with it a data packet that confirmed, at the primal level, the identity and location of the sender.
Ayala: ‘you are on with t.a.s.c. leadership, please report on progress.’
Captain Miller: ‘sir, this is team lead miller, recon one. as our reports show to date, we have completed stages one through four of our recon pattern. as shown in relayed image capture, we can confirm previous force estimates at rostov.’
The captain was about to go on about their recon mission around the large town of Rostov-on-Don, but Neal did not have the patience to listen to a full re
port. He had reviewed the images and data sent back by the teams. He had seen the new imagery coming back from the Pod satellites they had begun seeding into Low-Earth Orbit from the Climbers as they rose, their decaying orbits designed to harvest and return ever better resolution imagery in a broad spectrum, before the disposable units disintegrated in the atmosphere.
Even as he interrupted the captain, Neal was calling up current flyover imagery.
TASC CO Dr. Danielson: ‘captain, we have seen the reports. your thoroughness and efficiency is very much appreciated. but today, if you can, i would like to focus on some specific questions we have.’
Captain Miller: ‘of course, sir.’
Neal: ‘captain, we have received unsubstantiated reports of currently unidentified aircraft as a component of the russian forces. specifically, these craft may have features not unlike our own stratojet fleet. request you confirm any such sightings.’
Images of the StratoJet, clear in Neal’s mind as he recalled them in cyberspace, relayed themselves via Minnie to the whole group, and were echoed into Captain Miller’s virtual sight as he crouched in deep tree cover, his team encircling his position, providing strict border cover while he communed via the tweeter with TASC leadership.
The captain was not hasty in his response. He had not seen them. But one of his team had.
Captain Miller: ‘sir, I have not had a direct confirmation of any such craft. but one of my spezialists has seen something that may be of interest. patching him in now.’
The Spezialist in question could not see the whole meeting room, he spoke only via his captain, and would hear only what was released to him by the Team Lead.
Spezialist Mik Guttman: ‘sir.’
Captain Miller: ‘spezialist guttman, please recount the drone sighting you had this morning.’
The room was curious. Drone?
Spezialist Mik Guttman: ‘yes, sir. it was at approximately 0400 hours. i was running point for our final reloc of the night to vantage point one-bravo-november, and i called in a team halt. i had seen a jet-trail ahead, and we went to ground while it passed. i would initially have described the contact as not dissimilar to a global hawk drone, only with dual jet propulsion. but then it accelerated away, and it was significantly faster than any global hawk model i am aware of.’
Neal: ‘spezialist, when you say accelerated hard, please describe the jet-trail. ¿was it an afterburner?’
Captain Miller heard the question, and relayed it onward to the waiting Spezialist Guttman. The reply came hesitantly.
Spezialist Mik Guttman: ‘afterburner, well, i wouldn’t describe it as that, sir, no. afterburners go from orange to blue, this went from blue to … white.’
Quavoce: ‘he is describing fusion jet units.’
Barrett: ‘¿but how can they make fusion generators without a resonance chamber?’
John Hunt: ‘they can’t, not on the small scale we are discussing here. certainly we were unable to produce efficient fusion reactors back on mobilius smaller than a small tank until we developed resonance chamber technology. the desire to reduce their size was a major impetus behind the development of resonance theory.’
The room paused a moment longer, maybe waiting for Neal to ask another question. Finally he spoke up.
Neal: ‘ayala, please relay spezialist guttman’s description to the other recon teams, along with imagery of the stratojet. it sounds like we are dealing with a smaller craft than our own, but maybe they have others as well. please ask them to come back with any additional relevant data on these immediately.’
Ayala: ‘already done. i am receiving confirmations now. no such additional sightings.’
Neal: ‘understood. in any case, with your approval, i would like to move this to priority one on the recon mission profiles.’
Ayala: ‘absolutely. i will update and relay to the teams.’
Neal: ‘thank you.’ He paused, and then went on, ‘we should probably also update their tactical parameters to include the assumption that the russian forces may now include troops equipped with some measure of our own battleskin’s capabilities. they should proceed with appropriate caution, accordingly.’
Ayala: ‘yes, it is discomforting, but must be assumed. i will work to update them on capacities as appropriate. ¿quavoce, maybe you could help me with some modeling there?’
Jack: ‘wait, please, wait. ¿are we saying that agents mikhail and or pei have helped the russians make a resonance chamber, and they are producing some version of the stratojet right now?’
Ayala: ‘i don’t see how we can not conclude that. and it makes sense, why wouldn’t they give russia the ability to defend itself if they intend to use them to destabilize our efforts.’
Jack: ‘but they would be giving russia, and thus humanity, access to the technology we are going to need to fight the coming armada. ¿why would they want to do that?’
Quavoce: ‘the units they are describing sound like much smaller fighters than the larger stratojets we have been producing. i can imagine a scenario where i would have done the same, in their place, given that they must have correctly assumed humanity already has access to such technology from john. they have probably limited themselves to only sharing ground and atmospheric units, nothing that would be of use in the coming war.’
Neal: ‘of course they have shared this. we should have assumed this from the start. we should never have waited this long to become involved.’
Barrett: ‘¿neal, what were we supposed to do? ¿just unilaterally invade? we could not have taken direct action without the permission of our allies, not without risking the support we so badly need from them. and they would never let us meddle in what is already a veritable powder keg.’
Neal waited a moment, then let them know what he thought about waiting for permission.
Neal: ‘we have wasted far too long tiptoeing around the inadequate and ineffective governments of our allies. we have wasted too long begging for approval and support. this is not a negotiation. our needs are not up for debate. our mission trumps all this petty bickering, and i am tired of asking for the permission of people who are more worried about the survival of their political careers than they are about the survival of the planet.’
Barrett went to interject, to staunch the flow of vitriol spewing from Neal’s mind, but even as he went to speak, Quavoce and John shared sub-link flashes of approval of this turn of events.
They had tried to stay out of the political machinations of the group, knowing it was not their place to meddle in the governing of alien worlds, any more than it had been to come to Earth in the first place. But Neal was not asking for his Mobiliei friends’ approval, nor did he give Barrett the chance to air his concerns.
Neal: ‘madeline, barrett, please work with birgit to force-analyze dispositions in eastern bloc nations. we are going to need tactical contingency plans should things come to a head there. ayala, please unleash the recon teams, they are to proceed with caution, but they are also to proceed with haste. i want mission patterns to include incoming forces behind major russian force buildups. get those teams deeper. i want to know what the russians have, i want to know how much of it they have, and i want to know it now.’
The room was silent once more. Eventually Barrett spoke up, knowing as soon as he did so that he should have waited.
Barrett: ‘¿should we pass on this new information to our nato colleagues?’
If they had have been in a room together, they would have visibly flinched at Neal’s expression. Instead, a palpable silence invaded the conversation. Taming his annoyance, Neal eventually responded.
Neal: ‘yes, barrett, i imagine we should. we can tell them about the report from Turkmenistan, and hint that we have received others as well, but no mention of the recon teams, for obvious reasons. if we get more concrete proof we can pass that along. ¿ayala, can you take care of that?’
Ayala: ‘i can and i will, neal. but, to your point earlier, this raises a broader issue. our e
uropean allies are already very nervous, especially the germans, about activity in the former eastern bloc. this may drive them to want to bring home more forces from rolas, or worse, demand our own intervention.’
Neal was beyond anger now, a cool fury settling in his stomach that he could funnel his frustration into, to be dealt with or tapped into later, when he was alone. He responded calmly now.
Neal: ‘we all know the former is something we must resist with utmost force, given the already reduced us presence here. the latter is simply unacceptable under any circumstances. to leave rolas exposed, especially given this latest information, cannot be allowed.’
Ayala pushed the issue, as she knew she must. She doubted anyone else would, given Neal’s mood.
Ayala: ‘i agree wholeheartedly. but our allies may not. i am afraid that if we share too much at this stage, without an appropriate plan to counter, we may be inviting disaster.’
Barrett: ‘ayala, we simply must inform the europeans of this. we cannot leave important intel that could lead to significant casualties to stay in a file.’
Ayala: ‘i understand that, general, but neither should we incite fear and concern where no action is possible. look, if we are honest, the europeans are not going to intervene with force even if the russians invade ukraine, there will simply not be enough political support. that is also true of belarus and, to a lesser extent, the baltic states in the north. ¿honestly, barrett, am i wrong?’
She was not, and when no one responded, she was about to go on when Barrett begrudgingly followed her line of thinking.
Barrett: ‘no, ayala, you aren’t. the question is will they stop there. we have to hope that the russians, even in their current state of abandon, will hesitate before crossing the borders of any central european countries. because if they do, the europeans are going to be forced to respond, and when that happens, we are going to have to intervene on their behalf, all the more so if we have withheld important intel about the enemy’s capabilities.’
