Shadow Command pm-14

by Dale Brown

  “No, sir — the missile went faster than Mach four, which is the fastest speed our fighter’s radar can track a target. I would describe it as a very high-speed guided rocket.”

  “I assume, then, that you compared the time of launch and the time of impact and came up with a number?”

  “Yes, sir.” His eyes looked pained — no one could tell whether it was because the general was afraid of telling the president the bad news, or because he was being lectured to by this foreign-sounding young playboy.

  “But you don’t believe the number you computed,” Zevitin said for the air force chief of staff. “Obviously this weapon was something we did not expect. What was the speed, General?”

  “Average speed, Mach five point seven.”

  “Almost six times the speed of sound?” That news rocked every member of the security staff back in their chairs. “And that was the average speed, which means the top speed was Mach…ten? The Americans have an attack missile that can fly at Mach ten? Why didn’t we know of this?”

  “We know now, sir,” General Furzyenko said. “The Americans made the mistake of using their new toy with one of our fighters on his wingtip.”

  “Obviously they were not concerned enough about our fighter to cancel their patrol or their attack,” Zevitin offered.

  “It was what the Americans call an ‘operational test,’ sir,” air force chief of staff General Andrei Darzov said. A short, battle-worn air force bomber pilot, Darzov preferred his head shaved bald because he knew how it intimidated a lot of people, especially politicians and bureaucrats. He had visible burn scars on the left side of his neck and on his left hand, and the fourth and fifth fingers of his left hand were missing, all a result of injuries sustained in the bombing of Engels Air Base, Russia’s main bomber base, several years earlier, when he served as Forces of Long-Range Aviation division commander.

  Darzov had wanted nothing short of bloody payback for the utter devastation wreaked on his headquarters during the sneak attack on Engels, and swore revenge on the American air commander who had planned and executed it…Lieutenant General Patrick McLanahan.

  Under former military chief of staff turned president Anatoliy Gryzlov, who wanted revenge on the United States as badly as Darzov, he soon got his opportunity. Andrei Darzov was the architect of the plan just a year later to modify Russia’s long-range Tu-95 Bear, Tu-26 Backfire, and Tu-160 Blackjack bombers with aerial refueling probes to allow them the range to attack the United States. It was an audacious, ambitious plan that succeeded in destroying most of the United States’ long-range bombers and the control centers for over half of their land-based intercontinental ballistic nuclear-tipped missiles. The devastating assault killed over thirty thousand people and injured or sickened thousands more, and soon became known as the “American Holocaust.”

  But Darzov hadn’t heard the last of his archenemy, Patrick McLanahan. When McLanahan’s counterattack destroyed almost an equivalent number of Russia’s most powerful silo-based and mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles, someone had to take the blame — other than the then-president of Russia, General Gryzlov, who had been killed during an American air strike on his Ryazan underground command center — and Darzov was it. He was blamed for making the decision to stage all of the Ilyushin-78 and Tupolev-16 tanker aircraft at one isolated air base in Siberia, Yakutsk, and for not providing enough security there, which allowed McLanahan and his Air Battle Force to take over the base and use the enormous amount of fuel stored there to be used by McLanahan’s bombers to hunt down and destroy Russia’s land-based nuclear deterrent force.

  Darzov was demoted to one-star general and sent to Yakutsk to oversee the cleanup and eventual closing of that once-vital Siberian base — because in an attempt to destroy McLanahan’s bombers on the ground, Gryzlov had ordered Yakutsk attacked by low-yield nuclear weapons. While only four of the dozens of nuclear warheads penetrated McLanahan’s anti-missile shield around the base, and they were all high-altitude airbursts designed to minimize radioactive fallout, most of the base had been severely damaged, and the heart of it had been flattened and rendered uninhabitable. There was much speculation that the general staff hoped Darzov would become sick from the lingering radioactivity so they would be spared the chore of eliminating the popular, intelligent young general officer.

  But not only did Darzov not die, he didn’t stay long in virtual exile in Siberia. Health-wise, Darzov and his loyal senior staff members survived by using the radioactivity decontamination equipment left behind by the Americans when they evacuated their personnel from Yakutsk. Career- and prestige-wise, he survived by not giving in to despair when it seemed like the entire world was against him.

  With the financial and moral support of a young investment banker named Leonid Zevitin, Darzov rebuilt the base and soon made it operational again instead of preparing it for demolition and abandonment. The move revitalized Russia’s Siberian oil and gas industry, which relied on the base for much-needed support and supply, and the government raked in enormous amounts of revenue from Siberian oil, most sold to Japan and China through new pipelines. The young base commander garnered the attention and gratitude of Russia’s wealthiest and most successful investment banker, Leonid Zevitin. Thanks to Zevitin’s sponsorship, Darzov was brought back to Moscow, promoted to four-star general, and eventually picked as chief of staff of the air forces by newly elected president Zevitin.

  “The Americans have tipped their hand and revealed a new hypersonic air-to-ground weapon,” Furzyenko said. “It shows how overconfident they are, and that will be their weakness. Not only that, but they wasted a multimillion-dollar missile destroying a truck and homemade rocket worth a few dollars.”

  “Seems to me they have every right to be overconfident, General — they can quickly and accurately destroy any target from two hundred miles away as easy as a child plinking a can with a.22 rifle from twenty meters away,” Zevitin said. Many of the generals knitted their eyebrows, as much in confusion at some of Zevitin’s Western terms as in struggling to understand his heavily accented Russian. “Plus, they did it right before our eyes, knowing we’d be watching and measuring the weapon’s performance. It was a demonstration for our benefit, as well as a very effective terror weapon against the Islamists.” Zevitin turned to Darzov. “What happened to the fighter that was shadowing the B-1 bomber, Andrei?”

  “The pilot landed safely but with most of his plane’s electronic equipment completely disabled,” the air force chief of staff responded.

  “How? Their terahertz weapon again?”

  “Possibly, but the American so-called T-Ray weapon is a subatomic wide-area weapon that destroys electronic circuits at ranges exceeding six hundred kilometers,” Darzov replied. “No other stations reported any disruption. The pilot reported that as soon as he launched his missiles his fighter…simply shut itself down.”

  “You mean, the missile shut itself down.”

  “No, sir. The entire airplane shut itself down, as if the pilot had turned everything off all at once.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “The terahertz weapon may have been able to do it,” Darzov said. “We will not know until we look at the fighter computer’s error logs. But my guess would be that McLanahan has deployed his ‘netrusion’ system on the Dreamland bombers, and possibly all of his aircraft and spacecraft.”

  “‘Netrusion’? What’s that?”

  “The ability to ‘hack’ into an opponent’s computer systems through any sensor or antenna that receives digital signals,” Darzov explained. “We do not completely understand the process, but the bombers can transmit a signal that is picked up and processed like any other digital instruction or message. The enemy signal can be false radar targets, confusing coded messages, flight control inputs, or even electronic commands to aircraft systems…”

  “Such as a shutdown order,” Zevitin said. He shook his head. “He conceivably could have commanded the MiG to fly straight down or around
in circles — luckily he only ordered it to shut down. Must be nice to be so rich that you can build such wonderful toys to load up on your planes.” He nodded. “Looks like your old friend is still in the game, eh, General?”

  “Yes, sir,” Darzov said. “Patrick McLanahan.” He smiled. “I will welcome a chance to take him on again and repay him for imprisoning my men and women, taking my base, and stealing my fuel. However, from what I understand, he may not be around much longer. The new administration does not like him at all.”

  “If McLanahan had any political savvy, he’d have resigned the moment the new president took the oath of office,” Zevitin said. “Obviously that has not happened. Either McLanahan is more dedicated — or dumber — than we thought, or Gardner isn’t going to fire him, which means he might not be the buffoon we think he is.” He looked at the generals around him. “Forget about McLanahan and his high-tech toys that never get built — he’s the best they’ve got, but he’s only one man, and he’s squirreled away in that awful desert base in Nevada instead of in the White House now, which means no one has the opportunity to listen to him anymore.” To Truznyev, chief of the Federal Security Bureau, successor organization to the KGB, he asked, “What about your ‘adviser’ in Iran? Did you get him out?”

  “What was left of him, yes, sir,” the FSB chief replied.

  “Good. The last thing we need is some enterprising American or Persian investigator finding Russian clothing or weapons mixed in with a lot of Iranian body parts.”

  “He was replaced with another agent,” Truznyev said. He turned angrily to Alexandra Hedrov, the foreign minister. “Giving those Hezbollah bastards weapons like the 9K89 is a waste of time and money, and hurt us in the long run. We should stop supplying them with such advanced missiles and let them go back to firing homemade Katyushas and mortars at the Persian collaborators.”

  “You agreed to General Furzyenko’s recommendation to send the ‘Hornet’ missile to Iran, Director,” Zevitin pointed out.

  “I agreed that the Hornet missile should be used to attack Persian army and air force bases with high-explosive and mine-laying warheads, sir,” Truznyev said, “not to just fire them indiscriminately into the city. The launch point was at the very edge of the rocket’s maximum range to hit the Doshan Tappeh air base, which was the target they told us they were going to strike. The Hezbollah crew also reportedly dragged their feet launching the missile — they even let children come around and watch the launch. This has been reported many times.”

  “We will obviously have to instruct the insurgents to adjust tactics now that we know about this new American weapon,” General Darzov said.

  “Will you also instruct them not to put their own homemade poison brews in the warhead?” Truznyev asked.

  “What are you talking about, Director?”

  “The Hezbollah insurgents loaded the Hornet missile’s warhead up with some sort of chemical weapon concoction, similar to mustard gas but much more effective,” the FSB chief said perturbedly. “The gas killed a dozen people on the street and injured several dozen others.”

  “They cooked up their own mustard gas?”

  “I do not know where the hell they got it, sir — Iran has a lot of chemical munitions, so maybe they stole it or had it secretly stored away,” Truznyev said. “The stuff went off when the American missile hit. But the point is, they violated our directives and attacked an unauthorized target with an unauthorized warhead. There are only a few truck-launched missiles that have the fusing necessary to carry out a chemical weapon attack — it will not be hard for the Americans to discover we supplied the Iranians with the Hornet missiles.”

  “Get Mohtaz on the phone, now,” Zevitin ordered. Chief of staff Orlev was on the phone in an instant.

  “Now that the Pasdaran has brought in foreign fighters from all over the world to join this damned jihad against Buzhazi’s coup,” Truznyev said, “I do not think the clerics have very tight control over their forces.” The Ayatollah Hassan Mohtaz, the former Iranian national defense adviser — and the most senior member of the former Iranian government to survive Buzhazi’s bloody purge of Islamists — had been proclaimed president-in-exile, and he called upon all the Muslims of the world to come to Iran and fight against the new military-monarchist government. The anti-Persia insurgency grew quickly, spurred on by tens of thousands of Shi’a Muslim fighters from all over the world who answered the fatwa against Buzhazi. Many of the insurgents had been trained by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Pasdaran, so their fighting effectiveness was even greater. Within days after Mohtaz’s call to arms went out, most of the cities of the new Persia were embroiled in bitter fighting.

  But part of the chaos in Persia was due to the fact that the coup leader, General Hesarak al-Kan Buzhazi, inexplicably refused to form a new government. Buzhazi, the past chief of staff and former commander of the paramilitary Internal Defense Forces that battled the Revolutionary Guards Corps, had led a stunningly successful coup, killing most of Iran’s theocratic rulers and sending the rest fleeing to neighboring Turkmenistan. It had been assumed that Buzhazi, together with former chief of staff Hoseyn Yassini, the officers of the regular armed forces, and supporters of one of Iran’s past royal families, the Qagevs, would take control of the capital city of Tehran and form a government. A name had even been chosen — the Democratic Republic of Persia, indicating a clear direction the people wanted to take — and the country was now referred to by its historic name, “Persia,” instead of the name “Iran,” which was the name decreed to be used by Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1935. Only supporters of the theocracy still used the name “Iran.”

  “But I do not think we should stop arming the insurgents,” General Darzov said. “Every successful attack against the Persians will weaken them. We need patience.”

  “And every time the jihadis launch another missile into the city and kill innocent women and children, the insurgency suffers the same fate — it gets weakened, as does Russia, General,” foreign minister Alexandra Hedrov said. Tall, dark-haired, and as alluring as any woman in the senior echelons of Russian government could be, Alexandra Hedrov was the highest-ranking woman to ever serve in the Kremlin. Like Zevitin, she came from an international finance background, but as a lifelong resident of Moscow and a married mother of two, she didn’t have the jet-setting reputation of her superior. Serious and sharp and without extensive political connections, Hedrov was widely considered the brains behind the presidency. “We look even worse if we are seen supporting baby-killers.”

  She turned to Zevitin. “Mohtaz has got to find a way to tone down the jihadis, Mr. President, without relieving the pressure on Buzhazi and Qagev to give up and evacuate the country. We cannot be seen supporting mass murder and instability — that makes us look unstable ourselves. If Mohtaz continues on this path, the only recourse we have is to support Buzhazi.”

  “Buzhazi?” Zevitin asked, confused. “Why support Buzhazi? He turned to the Americans for help.”

  “That was our fault — he acted out of desperation, and we were not there for him when he needed us, so he turned to McLanahan,” Hedrov explained. “But Washington inexplicably has not thrown its support behind Buzhazi, and this creates an opportunity for Russia. We secretly support Mohtaz because Russia benefits from the instability in the region with higher oil prices and greatly increased arms sales. But if we end up backing a loser, we should reverse course and support whom I believe will be the eventual winner: Buzhazi.”

  “I disagree, Minister,” Darzov said. “Buzhazi is not strong enough to destroy Mohtaz.”

  “Then I suggest you get out of your airplanes and laboratories and take a look at the world as it really is, General,” Hedrov said. “Here is the real question, Mr. President: Whom do you want to win, Buzhazi or Mohtaz? That is who we should be supporting. We support Mohtaz because the chaos in the Middle East keeps America from meddling in our affairs in our own spheres of influence. But is a theocratic Iran a better choice for Ru
ssia? We know Buzhazi. You and I have both met with him; we supported him for many years, before, during, and after his removal as chief of staff. We still supply each other with intelligence information, although he is keeping information about the American presence in Iran closely guarded and more expensive to obtain. Maybe it is time to increase the level of contact with him.”

  The phone vibrated beside Orlev, and he picked it up and moments later put it on hold. “Mohtaz on the line, sir.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Iranian embassy in Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan,” Orlev replied, anticipating the question.

  “Good.” When the Ayatollah Mohtaz and his advisers fled Iran, he unexpectedly holed up in the Russian embassy in Ashkhabad, demanding protection from Buzhazi’s forces and the so-called monarchist death squads. That created a lot of curiosity and questions from most of the rest of the world. It was well known that Moscow was an ally of Iran, but would they go so far as to protect the old regime? What if elections were held and the theocrats were voted out? Would the clerics and Islamists become an albatross around Russia’s neck?

  As a concession to the rest of the world, Zevitin had Mohtaz leave the embassy, but quietly guaranteed his safety with Russian FSB units stationed in and around the Iranian compound. At first he thought the Islamist wouldn’t leave the embassy — or, worse, threaten to expose Russia’s involvement in Iran if he was forced out — but thankfully things didn’t reach that stage. He knew Mohtaz could always produce that card in the future, and he needed to decide what to do if he tried to play it.

  Zevitin picked up his phone. “President Mohtaz, this is Leonid Zevitin.”

  “Please stand by for His Excellency, sir,” a heavily Persian-accented voice said in Russian. Zevitin rolled his eyes impatiently. It was always a game with weak men like Mohtaz, he thought — it was always so damned important to try to gain the smallest advantage by making the other party wait, even over something as simple as a phone call.