by Dale Brown
Annenkov made sure he wasn’t broadcasting over the radio and glanced at Uspensky. “Give me a position check.”
His copilot toggled one of the multifunction cockpit displays added when this old Boeing air freighter was secretly converted into a cruise-missile carrier. A map appeared, showing their current position and projected course. A red dot pulsed rhythmically about twenty nautical miles ahead. “We’re coming up on our preplanned launch coordinates, Colonel,” he confirmed. “Three minutes out.”
“Then let’s run through the attack checklist,” Annenkov said, summoning up his own digital copy with a quick tap. He read off the first item. “Confirm power to rotary launcher handling system.”
“The handling system is live,” Uspensky said, checking to make sure electrical power was flowing to the array of high-speed pulleys and hoists that would haul their rotary launchers along the rails built into the cargo deck floor.
“Bring the launchers online.”
The copilot tapped controls on his MFD. Four lights on a schematic of the cargo compartment turned green. “Our rotary launchers are online and linked to the attack computer.”
“Transfer our GPS coordinates to the computer and initialize the missile inertial guidance systems.”
Uspensky obeyed, efficiently keying in the commands that fed their precisely calculated current position to the inertial navigation systems that would control the Kh-35s in flight. More green lights blossomed on his displays. This was a work-around to help reduce the small position errors inevitably accumulated by inertial systems during flight. More modern Kh-35 missiles included GLONASS receivers, which enabled them to obtain highly accurate satellite navigation data from Russia’s equivalent of the U.S. global positioning system. But using those advanced missile variants would have made it easier to pin this attack on Moscow itself, rather than on someone else using Kh-35s covertly purchased on the international arms black market. “Guidance systems initialized.”
“Confirm preselected target sets are downloaded to the missiles,” Annenkov ordered.
“All target sets are downloaded.”
“Bring the missiles to full readiness.”
Uspensky tapped more virtual controls on his display. He watched closely as data scrolled across the screen in response. “Radar altimeters are good. Turbofans are good. Self-destruct systems are good.” He looked up. “All missiles are flight-ready, Colonel.”
“Checklist complete,” Annenkov said in satisfaction. “Time to launch position?”
“Thirty seconds.”
Annenkov tightened his shoulder straps and donned an oxygen mask. Beside him, Uspensky did the same. He reached up to the overhead instrument panel and set the 737’s pressurization control system to manual. He flipped two switches on the same panel. “Depressurizing the cargo deck.”
The engine bleed valves feeding pressurized air to the jet’s cargo deck closed tight. At the same time, outflow valves opened on the fuselage. Pressure on the cargo deck dropped fast, rapidly equalizing with that of the much thinner atmosphere at twenty-five thousand feet.
“Fifteen seconds,” Uspensky reported, watching their current position indicator close on the launch coordinates RKU’s planners had selected for this mission.
Carefully but quickly, Annenkov entered another command on his MFD, temporarily transferring control of the aircraft to their attack computer. He put his hands back on the yoke, but kept them relaxed.
“Five seconds.”
At a precisely computed moment, the 737’s enlarged forward cargo door unlatched and slid back along its fuselage. The twin-engine jet shuddered, rocked by increased turbulence.
“Commencing attack,” Uspensky said tersely.
Smoothly, their first rotary launcher whirred into position at the open cargo door and started spinning, ejecting sky-gray cruise missiles out into the slipstream. As soon as all four of its missiles were away, the now-empty launcher swung toward the rear of the aircraft—replaced almost immediately with the next in line.
One by one, the sixteen Kh-35s dropped toward the distant earth. Their turbofan motors would not ignite until they reached their operational attack altitude, just ten to fifteen meters above the ground. No one saw them falling away from the 737. Between their camouflage paint and relatively small size, the missiles were effectively invisible to other aircraft in the area—all of which were separated laterally by at least five nautical miles and vertically by two thousand feet. The Kh-35s were also too small to show up on the civilian air-traffic-control radars monitoring this sector.
“Launch complete,” Uspensky reported from his side of the cockpit. “No ordnance remaining.”
The 737’s forward cargo door slid shut and sealed. With Annenkov back at the controls, Regan Air Freight Flight 175 continued on its submitted flight plan toward Dallas/Fort Worth. To all outward appearances, it was again just one of the thousands of commercial jets operating in U.S. airspace.
INTERSTATE 20, NEAR HAUGHTON, LOUISIANA
SEVERAL MINUTES LATER
Louisiana state police sergeant Damon Benoit swung down out of his official Chevrolet Tahoe and started walking up the shoulder of Interstate 20 toward the blue Honda Odyssey minivan he’d just pulled over for speeding. The Honda had Texas plates.
Ah, how wonderful, he thought sarcastically. Yet another family from the Dallas or Fort Worth suburbs heading off on vacation and too rushed to obey the traffic laws of their neighboring state. He sighed, already imagining the harassed-looking driver’s embarrassed apologies and pleas for mercy.
Suddenly a finned gray cylinder blurred overhead with an earsplitting howl. It was flying so low that it barely cleared the tops of the trees lining both sides of the divided highway. Startled, Benoit dove for the ground, instinctively clawing for the Glock 22 pistol at his side. His campaign hat flew off, blew into the road, and disappeared under the wheels of an eastbound Toyota Camry.
More missiles slashed through the sky in rapid succession, all heading southwest. Along the highway, shocked drivers gawked up through their windshields at the shapes streaking through the air just above them . . . and then just as abruptly slammed on their brakes, frantically swerving to avoid colliding with other cars and trucks. Tires squealed and horns blared in all directions.
Swearing out loud, Benoit scrambled to his feet, turned, and sprinted back toward his patrol SUV and its radio.
Sixteen
BARKSDALE AIR FORCE BASE, LOUISIANA
THAT SAME TIME
“And so, my fellow Americans, this nation will stay the course of peace through strength and common sense! While I am president, we will never entangle ourselves in petty overseas squabbles that are none of our business. But at the same time, America will be powerful enough to deter any aggression against our vital national interests. That is why I am committed to rebuilding our neglected military, especially the Air Force I’ve loved and admired all my life. And as new and ever-more-advanced aircraft, like our spectacular F-35 Lightning II stealth fighters and the incredible B-21 Raider parked behind me, roll off our production lines in growing numbers, the whole world will see that I mean business!” President Stacy Anne Barbeau promised in a clear, determined voice. She paused, allowing the huge crowd of U.S. Air Force personnel ranked below her dais to clap for a few seconds.
Behind the broad smile she displayed for the TV cameras focused on her, she kept a firm hold on a growing feeling of irritation. Despite the guaranteed applause lines her White House speechwriters had sprinkled throughout this address, rousing genuine fervor from this bunch was proving almost impossible. She wasn’t drawing the wild whoops and cheers she’d expected. They were polite, but not enthusiastic. Her only consolation was that most of the media would focus its reporting on the good stuff. Today is all about the visuals, Stacy, she reminded herself—all about the images of shiny new warplanes, flags fluttering, gorgeously uniformed bands playing, with her front and center as the nation’s tough, plainspoken commander in chief.
Before the tepid applause could fade into embarrassing silence, Barbeau made a big show of shushing the crowd. “Thank you! Thank you so much,” she said with grace and tremendous warmth. Sincerity was one of the first things she’d learned to fake when she’d picked out politics as her path to the top. “And so together, we’re going to—”
And then a missile screamed in low across the runway, ripping past the crowded dais at more than five hundred knots. It slammed straight into the base of the ten-story-tall control tower and exploded. A burst of searing white light flared for a millisecond, followed by a roiling cloud of orange-and-red flame.
For what seemed an eternity but couldn’t really have been much more than a second, Barbeau stood frozen, rooted to her podium in utter disbelief. Then one of her Secret Service agents hurtled across the dais. He knocked her flat and covered her with his body. “Stay down! Stay down!” he screamed.
More missiles shrieked past, veering off to strike different targets. One after another, Barksdale’s communications center, hangars, machine shops, and fuel storage areas went up in towering columns of smoke, flame, and falling debris. The ground rocked. As the missiles detonated, the noise was so loud that each separate blast struck with the force of a physical blow. Across the wide concrete apron, airmen and reporters and White House staffers scattered frantically in all directions, seeking cover.
With their weapons out and aimed in all directions, Secret Service agents formed a human phalanx around Barbeau as she lay prone, still winded and gasping for air. Special Agent in Charge Rafael Díaz leaned over and yelled loud enough for her to hear over the high-pitched howl of incoming missiles and deafening, bone-rattling explosions. “We’re getting you out of here, Madam President! Right now!” Without waiting for a reply, Díaz whirled around to his nearby agents. “Get the Beast moving! Let’s go! Let’s go!”
Painfully, Barbeau turned her head, blearily peering through the crouched huddle of agents who were shielding her from flying fragments and falling debris. Just a few yards away, her big black fifteen-thousand-pound limousine, nicknamed the “Beast,” started rolling forward from its assigned station. Agents leaped off the dais and yanked the car’s rear door open using coded taps on hidden sensor panels. With their sole priority being to remove the president from immediate danger as quickly as possible, two agents unceremoniously grabbed her by the arms and hustled her bodily toward the moving car. Without pausing, they pushed her through the open door and onto the limo’s plush rear seat. One agent leaped in behind her as the other agent slammed the solid, eight-inch-thick door shut.
Then, with all four tires squealing across the pavement, the Beast took off. Its powerful V-8 turbo engine labored under tons of armor plating, bulletproof glass, communications gear, and defensive systems. As it accelerated, the limousine barreled straight through a mob of panic-stricken journalists and camera crews scrambling to get out of its way. Muffled thumps and screams showed that not all of them succeeded.
The Secret Service agent who’d piled in before the door was shut squirmed around on the seat and stared back through the rear window. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed. “What the hell are those things?”
“Specter Lead to all Specter units,” Colonel Ruslan Baryshev radioed from inside the cockpit of his KVM. “Attack. Repeat, attack.”
Gleeful acknowledgments poured through his headset. But he was already in motion—sending his war robot lunging out of the forest lining the east side of Barksdale’s long runway. His battle computer silhouetted the two dozen American F-35 stealth fighters lined up wingtip to wingtip on the apron, identifying them as priority targets. They were more than a thousand meters away.
Closing the distance at more than seventy kilometers an hour, Baryshev raised his 30mm autocannon and opened fire on the run. Multiple armor-piercing, high-explosive rounds hammered the distant fighters. Hit repeatedly, the F-35s disappeared behind a rippling curtain of smoke and fire. Jagged fragments of wings, canopies, and fuselages cartwheeled away out of the smoke. American airmen caught in the path of his bullets vaporized, blown apart into bits of flesh and shattered bone.
The other KVMs were shooting, too—pounding the XB-1F Excaliburs and the just-landed B-21 Raider prototype with their own autocannons and the Israeli-made Spike antitank missiles. Plane after plane down the flight line exploded. “This is a turkey shoot!” Imrekov yelled exultantly over their secure link. “We’ve caught the Americans with their pants down! They can’t touch us!”
With a harsh laugh, Baryshev shifted his aim, zeroing in on one of the mammoth B-52H bombers parked next to the fighters. Bigger than the single-engine, multirole F-35s, the Stratofortress absorbed several direct hits before slewing sideways, wrecked and cloaked in dancing orange flames and oily black smoke.
Panting, Barbeau hauled herself upright in the limo’s rear seat as it raced away at sixty miles an hour. She turned to look back at the nightmarish scene behind them. Her bruised ribs sent pain sleeting through her brain like white-hot, stiletto-sharp needles. For a moment, she thought she would vomit.
Then her vision cleared.
There, out of the thick billowing clouds of smoke, several tall spindly metal shapes appeared, moving with eerie precision and terrifying grace. The weapons they carried spat fire and death—slaughtering everyone in their path and destroying stationary aircraft with contemptuous ease.
Barbeau’s eyes widened in horror. She knew only too well what those creatures were.
An antitank missile launched by one of the robots streaked across the path of the speeding limousine. Trailing smoke and fire, it slammed into the fuselage of Air Force One and exploded.
“Pop smoke! Pop smoke!” the Secret Service agent next to her screamed into the intercom.
Whummp. Whummp. Whummp.
Three multispectrum infrared smoke grenades triggered by the driver exploded around the Beast. In a fraction of a second, billowing white clouds blotted out Barbeau’s view of the two-legged war machines that were systematically destroying Barksdale Air Force Base. Terrified almost out of her wits and desperately trying to tell herself that what she’d seen with her own eyes could not possibly be real, she sat frozen, staring back into the swirling veil of protective smoke as her limousine sped away toward safety.
Through his neural link, Imrekov “felt” several rifle-caliber rounds smack into his KVM’s rear composite armor. They ricocheted off. No damage, his computer reported. Hostiles at six o’clock.
Irked, he whirled through a half circle. There, half hidden by the blazing wreckage of the American president’s 747 jetliner, his sensors showed several airmen lying prone on the pavement. They were shooting at him with M4 carbines and pistols. That is brave, but very, very foolish, he thought. And it will be fatal.
Grinning cruelly, Imrekov raised his 30mm autocannon. It fired once and then fell silent. Cannon ammunition expended, the KVM told him. He’d used up all of his rounds destroying the enemy fighters and bombers they’d caught on the ground. “Der’mo,” he growled. “Shit.”
So be it. He would handle this the old-fashioned way.
Imrekov sprinted toward the enemy soldiers who were shooting at him. More 5.56mm rounds spanged off his robot’s armor. He ignored the hits and ran on, closing fast.
At the last moment, the tiny group of Americans scrambled to their feet and tried to fall back. But it was too late. His KVM burst into their midst and blurred into lethal motion—lashing out with its robotic hands and feet. Airmen went flying in every direction, felled by powerful blows that crushed rib cages and shattered skulls.
Exhilarated by the ease with which he’d slaughtered his enemies, Imrekov crouched down among their mangled corpses, employing his passive and active sensors to scan for more targets to kill. To his intense annoyance, he could not find any.
The American air base was a sea of devastation. Buildings hit by Kh-35 warheads were smoldering heaps of broken concrete and twisted steel. Curtains of fire rippled high above dest
royed fuel storage tanks. Wrecked aircraft and torn corpses littered the field.
Baryshev’s exultant voice broke into his thoughts. “Specter Lead to all Specter units. Mission complete. Disengage and withdraw to the rally point.”
Brought back to the present, Imrekov replied, “Two copies, Lead. Disengaging.” He brought the KVM back to its feet and moved off across the runway, joining the other RKU war machines as they broke off and headed for the woods.
Captain Paul Fraser skidded around the corner of a burning, bomb-ravaged building. Scorching waves of heat washed over him. Gasping, the Air Force captain raced on and broke out into the open. There, across the pad, he saw his HH-60G Pave Hawk search-and-rescue helicopter. His copilot, Seth Hahn, already had the bird spooling up. His crew had been on standby in case anything went wrong during the president’s visit.
Responding to a massive surprise missile and ground attack hadn’t been very high up on their briefed list of possible missions. But as far as Fraser could see, his Pave Hawk was the only flyable aircraft left at Barksdale. Which made it imperative that they get in the air and at least try to track the bastards who’d nailed the base.
He pulled himself up into the cockpit and dropped into his seat. Hahn tossed him his headset and he plugged in. “All set?”
“We’re set!” his copilot assured him. “The engines and flight controls look solid.”
“Gunners ready,” the two crewmen in back reported. They were already manning the HH-60G’s two 7.62mm miniguns.
Rapidly, Fraser ran through an extremely abbreviated takeoff checklist. The moment he finished, he throttled up to full power and took them into the air—climbing as fast as possible. They needed to break clear of the smoke and turbulence created by fires burning everywhere across the base.
A minute later, the Pave Hawk clattered over Barksdale’s runway, heading east at sixty knots. Sitting in the left-hand seat, Hahn peered down at the display he’d set to show images captured by their nose-mounted forward-looking infrared camera. “Contact with multiple thermal sources! Some sort of legged machines. Big suckers. Maybe twice human-sized. Maybe more. They’re moving east through the woods and bayous about five klicks ahead.”
