by Dale Brown
“Then we must strengthen our own defenses,” Nadia said fiercely. She felt her cheeks turn red immediately, embarrassed at having spoken so bluntly to her country’s elected leader.
The president only smiled. “Very true, Captain.” He sighed. “Unfortunately, there is very little that we can do in the short term. We are spending tens of billions of zlotys on new aircraft, antiair defenses, helicopters, tanks, submarines, and other weapons. But fully modernizing our forces will take many months if we are lucky, and, more probably, several years.”
“And you are afraid we will not be given the time we need,” Nadia finished for him.
Wilk nodded. “Not with the Russian bear, its claws unsheathed, already prowling so close to our borders.” He frowned again. “Somewhere, somehow, we must find an alternative!”
Nadia risked another glance at the president. He was staring off into the distance, deep in thought.
Suddenly Wilk stopped, spinning to face her so abruptly that the bodyguards coming up behind almost crashed into them. “We need what the Americans call a quick fix, Captain Rozek!” he said. “A means of acquiring more combat power immediately, within weeks—not months or years!”
“As a deterrent?” she asked.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But also as some means of ensuring Poland’s survival if deterrence fails.” He looked closely at her. “Did you ever read about the last weeks of the American occupation of Iraq? Back about seven years ago? Those stories about a major Turkish incursion against the Kurds in northern Iraq?”
Nadia searched her memory. She had been a cadet at the Air Force Academy in Deblin then. That was a long time ago, what seemed a lifetime of rigorous training, hard work, and painful experience. But one of her instructors had insisted that his students pay attention to events in the outside world—especially to events that could be signs of a revolution in military tactics and technology. “The Turks were forced to retreat,” she said slowly.
“Yes,” Wilk agreed. “But not by regular American or Iraqi military units. The American military had all but deserted northern Iraq in their drawdown. They hired civilian contractors for surveillance as the military forces withdrew.”
“That’s right,” she said, remembering more now. “Most of it was just rumors. Very little was ever officially admitted. But some observers claimed the Turks were defeated by a very unconventional force, one composed of special infantry with remarkably powerful weapons and a mix of advanced unmanned aircraft. It was also reported that this elite force was created by one of those private civilian security corporations.”
“Exactly,” the president said, smiling. “And do you remember the name used by this corporation?”
She bit her lip, concentrating, digging deep into her memories. “Dziecko. Child. No, that’s not quite right. Potomek! Scion! That’s it. Scion.”
“Correct,” Wilk said approvingly. He looked around carefully and then lowered his voice. “I will need your help in this matter, Captain. And your discretion.”
She stiffened to attention. “I am at your service, sir.”
“I would like to contact this American company, this Scion. But first I need more information about them. And about what they can do.”
“Sir?” Nadia asked.
“But I can’t do this myself,” Wilk said. “Not officially. Not without approval by the Council of Ministers.”
“You want me to research Scion,” Nadia realized.
“And to make contact with them,” Wilk said. “Discreet contact. Nothing about this initiative must leak out, especially not to the Russians. You understand?”
Captain Nadia Rozek nodded firmly, already contemplating the work she would need to do and the circuitous digital paths she would need to follow. “Yes, Mr. President. I understand. You can rely on me.”
FOUR
It is always our own self that we find at the end of the journey. The sooner we face that self, the better.
—ELLA MAILLART, SWISS TRAVEL WRITER
THE ROYAL MAYAN RESORT,
CANCÚN, MEXICO
A FEW DAYS LATER
“So, are you just a beach bum here on your family’s dime, or are you really a brilliant young Internet billionaire in disguise?” a husky voice asked, pitched just high enough to be heard over the sound of the surf curling up on the beach.
Brad McLanahan looked up from the e-book science-fiction thriller he’d been reading. He tipped his sunglasses up to get a better look at the young woman who’d stopped by his shaded beach chair. She was a good-looking redhead in a bikini that left little to the imagination, including the fact that she was in incredibly good shape. Silhouetted against the white sand beach and the emerald-green waters of the Caribbean, she stood looking down at him with a faint smile. His pulse quickened. Play it cool, he told himself. Well, a little cool anyway.
“Neither,” he said gravely. “I’m actually a lonely fugitive on the run from an international spy ring.”
“Not likely,” she said with a laugh. “If you’d said you were fleeing a paternity suit, I might have bought it.”
Brad grinned.
“Mind if I sit down?” the woman asked, nodding to the empty beach chair next to his.
“Not at all.” Brad laid his e-book reader aside and sat up a little straighter.
Maybe this day would be more interesting than the past several, he thought hopefully. Since arriving in Cancún, he’d done nothing but swim, sit on the beach, read, catch up on his sleep, and wait for the next signal from his father or Martindale. At first, after the rigors of his Sky Masters internship, he’d welcomed the chance to relax and rest. But now it was getting kind of boring. A little light vacation romance, or at least a fun, no-strings-attached roll in the sack, might be just the ticket to break the monotony.
“Samantha Kerr,” the woman said, holding out her hand. “My friends call me Sam.”
Brad shook it politely. “John Smith,” he said. “My friends call me John.”
She raised an eyebrow in disbelief. “John Smith? Really? That’s what you’re going with?”
“International fugitive. On the run. Remember?” he said, grinning wider now.
“Silly me,” the redhead said. “It slipped my mind.”
“Can I get you a drink, Sam?” Brad asked. “The guy at the beach bar makes a really good margarita.”
“Sorry, but no.” She shook her head. “It’s getting a bit hot out here for my taste, so I think I’ll head indoors.”
Brad hid his disappointment. Oh, well, he thought, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
“But I do have a comfortable air-conditioned suite,” she went on, with a heavy-lidded glance up and down his body. “And a fully stocked bar. Care to join me?”
“Oh. Er, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, yes.” Keep it together, Brad told himself, quickly helping her up from the beach chair. Her fingers felt cool and dry in his hand. “That sounds like a great idea, Sam.”
“I was hoping you’d say that, Mr. McLanahan,” the woman said even more quietly. She smiled sweetly. “It’ll make things so much easier.”
Brad froze. He narrowed his eyes, tightening his grip on her hand slightly. “Who the hell are you? And what do you really want?”
“Easy, tiger,” the woman said. “My name really is Samantha Kerr.” With a quick twist of her fingers, she broke his grip. “As to why I’m here, let’s just say that I’m Pharaoh’s daughter come to pull your reed basket out of the Nile.”
Oh, Christ, Brad thought, flushing slightly in embarrassment. EXODUS again. She must be a contact with word from his father or from Martindale. “You’re with Scion,” he guessed.
She nodded. “I work in the security and countersurveillance division.” Smiling again, she took his hand and brought it around her waist. “Which is exactly why we’re going to saunter off this beach to my room—acting for all the world like we’re heading in for an afternoon of really wild sex.”
“Which isn’t going to happen,” Brad said
sadly.
She laughed. “Maybe another time, McLanahan.” Then she turned serious and gently urged him into motion, bringing him along with her toward the steps leading up off the beach and deeper into the resort. “But, no. Not right now. I prefer my personal pickups to be a little less public. And definitely not made right in front of a bunch of strange guys peeping through zoom lenses and binoculars.”
Ah, Brad thought. He looked down at her. “I’m tagged.”
“Oh, yeah. That you are. It took us a couple of days to zero in on the surveillance team dogging you, which is why you’ve had such a lovely, restful vacation. But now it’s time to go.”
“Who are they?”
“Mexico’s CNI,” she told him. “Their National Intelligence Center is the equivalent of our FBI and CIA.”
That surprised him. “The Mexicans?”
“They’re acting for the FBI,” she said.
“Oh.”
“And the Russian SVR.”
Brad stopped dead. “You’re kidding me.”
“Nope.” She shook her head and started walking again. “Double-dipping is an old game in the intelligence trade, McLanahan—especially in a routine operation like this. It looks as though both Washington and Moscow only want to keep tabs on your whereabouts right now, with nothing darker in mind. So the locals are perfectly comfortable getting paid twice for the same work.”
“Jesus.” Brad glanced at the beautiful woman nestled in his arm. “No offense, Ms. Kerr, but you work in a very weird world.”
“That I do,” she agreed.
Back in her suite, Samantha Kerr quickly bolted the door and made sure all the blinds were closed. Satisfied they could not be seen, she reached into her purse and handed him a sheaf of documents. “Welcome to your new and very temporary life, Mr. Jackson.”
Quickly, Brad leafed through the papers. Right on top was a Canadian passport made out in the name of Paul Jackson. He flipped it open and stopped. The face staring back at him from the passport photo was his . . . only it wasn’t, somehow. Instead of his own natural blond hair, the photo showed him with dark brown hair. And the face in the picture was, well, fatter. He looked up at Sam and showed her the photo with a raised eyebrow.
“Ah, the wonders of Photoshop,” she told him cheerfully. “And a little hair dye and a couple of cheek pads will put you in the right shape to clear international customs and board your flight.”
“My flight?”
“Air France direct to Paris,” Sam said. “Lucky you.” She glanced at her watch. “You leave in about four hours.”
“And what happens after I get to Paris?” Brad asked.
“That’s above my pay grade, Mr. McLanahan,” she said. “But I’m sure you’ll be met and briefed more extensively on arrival.”
“Hold on,” Brad said, raising a hand in protest. “You say I’m under surveillance, right?”
“Yes.”
“So when I just up and disappear, both the FBI and the Russians are going to go nuts trying to find me,” he pointed out.
Samantha only grinned. “Who says you’re going to disappear?”
“Huh?”
She turned toward the bedroom door and raised her voice slightly. “Time to make your appearance, Brad.”
Moving quietly, a man moseyed out into the suite’s living room. He leaned back against the nearest wall with his hands in his pockets. He didn’t say anything. But there was just the faintest hint of a shit-eating grin on his face.
Brad suddenly realized they were just about the same height and had the same build.
“See?” Samantha said impishly. “You’re not going anywhere, Mr. McLanahan . . . rather, Mr. Smith. You’re going to be having the time of your life here in Cancún. With me.” She shrugged her tanned shoulders and sighed dramatically. “It is a rough job, but I guess someone has to do it.”
MCLANAHAN INDUSTRIAL AIRPORT,
BATTLE MOUNTAIN, NEVADA
THAT SAME TIME
Hunter “Boomer” Noble stood off to the side of the long runway, scanning the sky through a pair of binoculars. He squinted, fiddling with the focus as he zoomed in on a small flying-wing aircraft turning toward the field at low altitude. Heat rolling off the tarmac shimmered in the air. Summers in the high desert of north-central Nevada were always hot and bone-dry.
A voice sounded in his earbud. “McLanahan Tower, Masters Five-Five, level at one thousand, airspeed one-eight-zero knots. Five miles southeast of runway three-zero, full stop.”
Boomer hid a grin. Tom Rogers always sounded so serious on the radio, just as if he were really up there in the aircraft instead of sitting in an air-conditioned office in front of a remote piloting console.
“Masters Five-Five, McLanahan Tower, winds calm, cleared to land straight-in runway three-zero,” the controller responded.
Boomer stood watching while the remotely piloted plane slid lower, touched down gently with a small puff of gray smoke from its landing gear, and taxied past him. Its wing-buried turbofan engines were already spooling down. Seen up close, the aircraft was tiny, about the size of a small business jet. No windows or cockpit canopy broke its smooth lines.
“I assume this little bird is what you wanted to show me, Dr. Noble?” a smooth, resonant voice said suddenly from over his shoulder.
Startled, Boomer swung around. He found himself staring into the amused eyes of a much shorter man with long gray hair and a neatly trimmed gray beard. Two bigger men, wearing sunglasses, suits, and ties, were posted about twenty feet away. Slight bulges marked the holstered weapons concealed under their jackets. Kevin Martindale, former president of the United States and the current president and CEO of Scion, never went anywhere without armed bodyguards.
Boomer finally noticed the big black limousine parked next to the airport tower and shook his head ruefully at the newcomers. How the hell does Martindale do it? Boomer wondered. How does he manage to pop up unannounced whenever and wherever he likes? Sky Masters didn’t run ordinary flight operations with total military-grade security, but there were still fences, sensors, and guarded gates. Somebody should have spotted Scion’s CEO on his way in and notified him.
He felt his pulse settle and forced a smile of his own. Spooky son of a bitch or not, Martindale was one of Sky Masters best customers, and he was closely tied in with the company’s head honchos.
“That’s right, sir,” he said. He nodded toward the unmanned aircraft as it swung slowly off the runway and rolled to a stop on a nearby ramp. “Meet the MQ-55 Coyote.”
“Give me the basic rundown, Dr. Noble,” Martindale said. He looked the small aircraft over with a critical eye. “From the shape and engine placement, I assume it’s designed for stealth?”
“Reasonably so,” Boomer told him. “Besides using a flying-wing configuration and wing-buried turbofans, we’ve also covered it with a special radar-absorbent coating created by an Israeli company, Nanoflight. This coating sucks up most of the electromagnetic energy from a radar wave and shunts it off as heat. Some energy gets back to the emitter, of course, but only in a really reduced and scattered form.”
“Interesting,” Martindale said.
“Oh, yeah,” Boomer agreed. “The stuff’s not cheap, but it’s a lot less expensive than most of the other stealth materials on the market.”
“So how stealthy is this Coyote of yours?” Martindale asked. “Could it penetrate heavily defended airspace without being detected?”
“On its own? Nope.” Boomer shook his head. “But the MQ-55 isn’t designed for that mission. It’s designed to operate in a combat environment full of violently maneuvering aircraft all emitting like hell with every radar and ECM system they’ve got. In the middle of a fight like that, the Coyote doesn’t have to slide through the air like it’s not really there. It just has to be less visible and quieter than everything else.”
“Which makes it what exactly?” Martindale wondered.
“The MQ-55 is a missile truck, sir,” Boomer said
. “A low-cost platform built with mostly off-the-shelf components and designed for one primary task—dumping a lot of long-range missiles out into the sky in a hurry for our fighter jocks to control. We started working on the concept right after that Chinese sneak attack on Andersen Air Force Base on Guam a couple of years ago.”
“I remember,” Martindale said softly. “We were bushwhacked in the air, blinded when they knocked down our AWACS plane, and then our base took heavy damage and terrible casualties from Chinese supersonic cruise missiles. If Patrick McLanahan and a few of our other XB-1F Excalibur bombers hadn’t gotten off the ground first and been able to hit back, we might have lost everything in the Pacific.”
Boomer nodded. “We analyzed every piece of data we could get from that first fight, the one between the two F-22A Raptors that were on patrol west of Guam and the Chinese strike force. Unfortunately, the picture we put together matched up right down the line with the results of a computer war simulation Rand Corporation ran way back in 2008. Plane for plane and pilot for pilot, our Raptors were superior to those Chinese J-20 fighters they tangled with, but the Raptors ran out of missiles before the Chinese ran out of jets . . . and that was it. Game over.”
Boomer headed toward the parking ramp. Martindale came with him. “We figured there was no way the Air Force or the Navy could afford to build enough F-22s or F-35s to match the Chinese or the Russians in numbers,” Boomer said. He pointed to the Coyote. “So this was the answer we came up with. The MQ-55 is relatively cheap, reasonably fast, has decent range, and it can carry enough long-range, air-to-air missiles to even up a fight against superior numbers of enemy aircraft.”
“Go on,” Martindale said, clearly intrigued.
“The airframe is new, but we modeled it closely after our other successful flying-wing designs,” Boomer said. “That cut our development and flight-testing costs dramatically. Since it’s remotely piloted, we don’t need a lot of complicated avionics—just enough so that a ground- or air-based pilot can fly it safely and perform a few basic maneuvers. The engines are off-the-shelf Honeywell TFE731s, the same kind flown on most business jets.”
