by Dale Brown
“Our attacks were completely successful,” Kurakin reported. It was clear that he was enormously relieved. From the moment Gryzlov set Stacy Anne Barbeau’s political rally at Barksdale Air Force Base as Shakh i Mat’s first target, he had been focused on the dangers involved in carrying out a military operation that could easily kill or wound America’s national leader—even if only by accident.
“Spare me the standard briefing boilerplate, Vladimir.” Gryzlov nodded the other man toward a chair. “I want solid numbers.”
“Yes, sir.” Kurakin pulled out his own smartphone. He opened up several files. “From satellite photos, my analysts estimate that fourteen of our Kh-35 missiles hit their assigned targets.”
“And the other two?”
“One detonated prematurely seconds before impact,” Kurakin said. “The other appears to have crashed in the swamps east of the air base, probably due to an engine or avionics failure of some kind.”
“So the Americans will find it?”
“Eventually,” Kurakin agreed. He shrugged his shoulders. “But even then, the wreckage shouldn’t lead their investigators anywhere.”
Gryzlov nodded. Besides Russia, at least eight other countries around the world used the same subsonic cruise missiles. Many of them were building their own versions of the Kh-35 under license or reverse-engineering their own designs. No one would be shocked by the possibility that some of them had filtered out onto the international arms black market. As an added precaution, the missile components shipped covertly to Annenkov and his men had been thoroughly “sanitized”—stripped of any identifying serial numbers. That would certainly arouse suspicion, but it would also delay any investigation.
“Has your 737 returned to its base?” Gryzlov asked.
“It landed in Utah an hour ago,” Kurakin confirmed. “Annenkov made his scheduled stop at Dallas/Fort Worth and then continued on as planned without any delay.” He smiled thinly. “In the circumstances, the local airport officials were only too glad to expedite the departure of as many aircraft as possible.”
“I can imagine,” Gryzlov said dryly. News of the attack had caused the American FAA to temporarily ground or reroute all passenger and cargo flights scheduled to pass anywhere within a couple of hundred miles of Barksdale. Naturally, the effects had rippled across the entire United States, spreading havoc as connecting flights were canceled or delayed. With eastbound passenger jets and air freighters stacking up at their gates and on their runways, Dallas/Fort Worth’s managers had no interest in holding up planes headed in other directions.
He leaned forward. “What about your ground units? What’s their status?”
“The trucks carrying Baryshev’s KVMs and Aristov’s covering force have reached our safe house in Dallas,” Kurakin continued. “Again, without incident.”
Like the sites Aristov’s teams had set up in several other places across the U.S., the Dallas secure site was a warehouse nominally owned by FXR Trucking. Most were located on the outskirts of cities and large towns—in busy industrial parks where no one would be surprised by trucks and other vehicles coming and going at all hours of the day and night. As far as FXR’s American corporate executives were concerned, these warehouses now belonged to yet another fledgling subsidiary funded by the company’s new owners. Employees who once worked in those warehouses had either been transferred to other facilities or laid off with generous severance packages.
“Very good,” Gryzlov said. “Now, how much damage did your war machines inflict?”
Kurakin smiled more broadly. “More than my planners’ most optimistic hopes. For once, the American media is not exaggerating. Colonel Baryshev’s robots destroyed every single military aircraft on the ground at Barksdale.”
“All of them?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Kurakin said proudly. “Including Air Force One.”
Gryzlov felt a huge, answering smile of his own spread across his face. With one blow, he’d further ravaged the already weakened American strategic bomber force and wiped out an entire squadron of its most advanced stealth fighters. Best of all, there was no indication that Barbeau or her advisers had any idea that Russia was responsible for this attack.
To his surprise, the American president hadn’t even raised the alert status of her forces beyond DEFCON Three. In fact, there were no signs of any unusual activity by ground, air, or naval units deployed outside the continental United States. It was a very different story at military bases on U.S. soil. Satellite imagery and signals intercepts all showed that they were on high alert, with fighters and early-warning aircraft aloft on patrol. Their combat squadrons and other air units were being dispersed to alternate fields. Army units had been deployed to nearby military bases and high-value government buildings, and reserve and National Guard units had been activated.
The picture those facts painted was clear. The Americans did not know they had been attacked by a foreign power. They were taking purely defensive measures, not preparing to conduct a retaliatory strike against an identified aggressor. Which meant that Gryzlov’s plan, in all its cunning permutations, was unfolding just as he had intended.
“Do you have any idea of how many casualties you caused?” Gryzlov asked.
“No precise numbers,” Kurakin said. He shrugged. “I don’t think even the Americans have an exact count yet. But they were substantial. My best guess would be that we killed or badly wounded several hundred of the enemy, including many of their best pilots.”
“Molodets! Well done,” Gryzlov told Kurakin, openly delighted. For years, the Americans and their hirelings had battered Russia and its allies, often without paying any significant price. Exacting a measure of revenge for those years of pain and humiliation was incredibly satisfying. Knowing that this was only the beginning was even better. “I’d have you convey my personal congratulations directly to RKU’s troops and pilots, Vladimir.” He grinned. “Except, of course, that might imply I have some knowledge of your criminal and wholly unauthorized actions.”
“I can’t imagine what you’re referring to, Mr. President,” Kurakin agreed with an answering smile of his own. “After all, I was never here.”
Gryzlov nodded approvingly. “Of course not.” His eyes hardened. “So, when do you plan to strike your next target?”
“My forces can be ready to strike again within twenty-four hours,” Kurakin promised.
The Russian president held up a hand. “Not so fast,” he said with a sly smile. “Pospeshish’—lyudéy nasmeshish’,” he continued, quoting an old proverb. “‘If you hurry, you’ll just make others laugh.’ Give the Americans a little time to work themselves into a frenzy, eh? Let them sit and wonder and fret about what’s going on while they exhaust their pilots and policemen with fruitless searches and patrols. Then, once they begin to relax, that will be the time to hit them hard again.”
Twenty-One
THE GOVERNOR’S MANSION, AUSTIN, TEXAS
THAT SAME TIME
“While the White House will not confirm it, informed sources close to the president tell CNN that she is currently aboard one of the nation’s airborne command centers—and that she is directly coordinating the federal government’s response to this vicious terrorist attack against the United States. Her likely opponent in the fall, Governor Farrell, remains huddled in his mansion, meeting with political advisers—”
With a snort, John Dalton Farrell turned off the television in his book-lined office. He turned to the group of men and women gathered around the antique oak ranch table set in the middle of the modest-sized room. “Well, there you have it, folks.” He gave them a lopsided grin. “Apparently, we’re the ones cowering in a corner, while Stacy Anne Barbeau heroically leads the fight . . . from inside a heavily guarded airplane flying around at forty thousand feet.”
“Jesus,” one of them murmured. “Those bastards in the media aren’t even pretending to be unbiased anymore. That so-called news report might as well be a full-on Barbeau campaign commerci
al.”
Farrell shrugged. “No one ever said this would be easy, did they?” Seeing their glum faces, he deliberately struck a dramatic pose. “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!”
His senior campaign staffers groaned. Sure, their boss’s love for occasionally quoting old movies like Animal House was endearing. But they couldn’t help worrying that a hostile press would hear about him joking like this and use what he said, out of context, to paint him as an uneducated moron.
Farrell relented. “Okay, so the press hates my guts and worships the ground Stacy Anne treads on. Well, we knew that going in. Nothing’s changed, except that now we need to figure out exactly what I’m going to say about this terrorist attack on Barksdale Air Force Base and, it sure looks like, against the president herself.”
They nodded. The boilerplate condemnation the campaign had released earlier was good enough as far it went, but they needed something more concrete. Except for his criticisms of Barbeau’s weakness toward the Russians and the crony defense contracts she doled out to big contributors, most of the governor’s focus had been on domestic policy. Today’s horrific assault on a major American military installation was guaranteed to shift public attention to national security and defense policy—which was, traditionally, a boon for any Oval Office incumbent.
“You think they were really trying to kill her?” Sara Patel asked skeptically. The University of Chicago–educated daughter of Indian immigrants, she was Farrell’s top aide for trade policy.
“You saw the videos,” he said. “There were one heck of a lot of bullets and missiles flying around out there at Barksdale. If whoever hit us there wasn’t really trying to kill President Barbeau, they sure as shit made it look that way.”
Slowly, she nodded.
“Well, crap, Governor, if these terrorists were actually gunning for her, it’s too bad they missed,” Michael Dowell said with a cynical laugh. Dowell, short and wiry with the build and aggressive attitude of a welterweight boxer, was an acknowledged expert on banking regulation and small-business formation. “It would have saved us a few hundred million in projected campaign spending.”
He fell abruptly silent when Farrell turned an icy glare on him. “Stacy Anne Barbeau is still our president and this nation’s commander in chief, Mike,” the powerfully built Texan said coldly. “You may not like it. Hell, I don’t like it. Which is why I plan to beat her like a dirty rug come November. But in the meantime, everyone in this room will show the proper respect due her office. Is that understood?”
Dowell stared at the table for a moment and then quietly agreed. “Yes, Governor.”
“Good,” Farrell growled. He looked around the crowded room. “And we will make damn sure we don’t fall into the trap of siding, even rhetorically, with the assholes who’ve just killed and wounded so many of America’s brave soldiers and airmen. Is that clear enough for y’all?”
They nodded quickly, with murmured, embarrassed-sounding assents.
For a moment longer, Farrell stared them down. These were good people, he knew. Smart people. But like a lot of smart people, sometimes they lost sight of the forest for the trees. For all her many faults and manifest failings, Stacy Anne Barbeau was still a fellow American. Yes, he was in this campaign to win, but he wasn’t in it to lose his soul along the way.
Suddenly his smartphone started playing music, indicating that he was receiving an incoming call. He stared down at it in surprise. Not only had he set the phone to vibrate, but that snippet of Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid was not the ringtone he had set. To his wife’s occasional dismay, he was more of a country-and-western fan. Which meant someone had hacked the device. In and of itself, that wasn’t a crisis. Unlike a lot of people, Farrell used his smartphone sparingly, and never for anything seriously confidential. His aides sometimes joked that if their boss had his way, he’d still be transacting official business by telegram and mounted courier.
For a brief moment, he considered handing the problem off to his security people, but then his natural curiosity got the better of him. Whoever was responsible had gone to a lot of time and trouble to set this up. Why not find out who?
Farrell looked up at his advisers with an apologetic look. “If y’all don’t mind, I think I need to take this in private. Let’s take a short break and come back at this in ten minutes.”
Once they’d filed out clutching their array of briefing books and personal laptops, he swiped a callused finger across the smartphone’s screen to accept this mysterious call. But instead of connecting, his swipe activated software hidden deep inside its operating system. Rows of random-seeming numbers and symbols flowed across the screen and then vanished. LEVEL FIVE ENCRYPTION PROGRAM ACTIVE, LINK FULLY SECURE appeared in their place—followed immediately by the live video picture of a man with longish gray hair and a neatly trimmed gray beard. He looked back from the screen with a hint of amusement.
Farrell raised an eyebrow. “And here I’d thought your reputation for pulling technological rabbits out of the hat was somewhat exaggerated, Mr. President. I guess I was wrong about that.”
“I apologize for this unexpected intrusion, Governor,” Martindale said, though without sounding very sorry. “But since President Barbeau seems determined to make the same foolish mistakes over and over again, I need to brief you on what Piotr Wilk and I believe is actually happening.”
WOLF SIX-TWO, OVER THE NAVAJO NATION RESERVATION, ARIZONA
THE NEXT NIGHT
Two hundred and seventy nautical miles and thirty-six minutes after crossing into U.S. airspace roughly halfway between El Paso and Nogales, the XCV-62 Ranger zoomed low over high alpine forests, sharp-edged canyons, and cliffs. Against a night sky speckled with thousands of stars and the softly glowing band of the Milky Way, the Iron Wolf stealth aircraft was nothing more than a dark shadow rippling across a pitch-black landscape empty of any man-made light.
Brad McLanahan pulled his stick gently to the left, banking to follow the glowing navigation cues on his HUD. A jagged pillar of rock slid past outside the right side of the cockpit and then vanished astern. Without his input, the XCV-62 pitched up slightly, streaked over a low rise, and then descended again before leveling off just two hundred feet above the ground. They were relying on the Ranger’s digital terrain-following system to keep them safe even at 450 knots. Using detailed digitized maps stored in the aircraft’s computers and repeated short bursts from its radar altimeter, the DTF system allowed feats of long-distance, low-altitude flying that would be almost impossible for any unaided human pilot.
“AN/APY-2 Pulse-Doppler radar still active. Bearing now four o’clock. Estimated range is one hundred and fifty miles,” their computer reported. “Detection probability at this altitude remains virtually nil.”
In the Ranger’s right-hand seat, Major Nadia Rozek leaned forward. She checked a menu on her threat-warning display, watching as the computer compared the signature of the radar emissions it was picking up against its database. “That is the same E-3 Sentry we saw earlier,” she told him.
Brad nodded tightly, keeping his eyes on his HUD. “Yeah, they must be circling over Kirtland AFB outside of Albuquerque. There’s a huge underground nuclear weapons storage complex on the base. Nobody there wants to get blindsided by another cruise-missile attack.”
Even before the XCV-62 crossed the U.S. border from Mexico, they’d started picking up the emissions of several E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft deployed to cover the Air Force bases in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Each of the modified Boeing 707s had a thirty-foot diameter rotating radar dome mounted atop its fuselage. Their radars could scan huge volumes of airspace—spotting nonstealth targets out as far as two-hundred-plus miles. And where those radar warning planes were, he knew pairs of F-16 and F-15 fighters were bound to be orbiting also—ready to intercept any unidentified aircraft the Sentries detected.
Slipping through this airborne web without setting off alarms meant flying an intricately plotted cou
rse at extremely low altitude, using the rugged terrain so prevalent in the American southwest to mask their passage wherever possible. So far they’d been fortunate. The Air Force had deployed its limited number of AWACS aircraft pretty much as Brad had predicted. There were gaps in effective radar coverage they could exploit.
Following the cues on his HUD, he banked left again, harder this time. With his left hand, he pushed the throttles forward a scooch, adding power to the engines to keep his airspeed up through this tighter turn. Then he leveled out again and reduced power, decreasing their thermal signature.
They were flying northwest now, headed directly into the badlands of Utah’s Grand Staircase–Escalante National Monument. Once the Ranger broke free of that labyrinth of canyons, cliffs, and soaring buttes and mesas, they should have a straight shot to Battle Mountain in northern Nevada.
Three hundred fifty nautical miles farther on, the Iron Wolf stealth transport swooped low over a jagged ridge and dropped back down into a wide, lifeless valley. Brad peered through his HUD. More high ground spread across the horizon. Seen through their forward-looking night-vision cameras, those steep, rocky slopes took on a green-hued glow. Nevada was the most mountainous state in the Union, with over a hundred and fifty named ranges, and thirty separate peaks that soared more than eleven thousand feet into the air.
He blinked away a droplet of sweat. His flight suit was soaked. Even with all of their advanced avionic and navigation systems, this prolonged nap-of-the-earth flight was imposing a serious strain on both his mind and his body.
“Not much longer now, Brad,” Nadia said quietly, offering him some encouragement.
He forced a tired grin.
“Caution, S-band multifunction phased array radar detected at ten o’clock. Range approximately forty miles,” the Ranger’s computer reported. “Evaluated as Sky Masters ARGUS-Five. Detection probability low, but rising.”
