The Moscow Offensive

by Dale Brown

  That was the advanced “civilian-grade” radar sited at McLanahan Industrial Airport. One of Jon Masters’s last designs, it was almost as capable as some of the U.S. military’s top-end radar systems . . . and at a fraction of the cost.

  “Nice to see that our friends are awake,” Brad muttered.

  “Can you blame them?” Nadia said. “By now, Dr. Noble and the others at Sky Masters must know the Russians have their own combat robots. They are wise to take precautions against unexpected and unwelcome visitors.”

  He shook his head. “No, I can’t blame them. But the fact they’ve got that big-ass radar powered up this late is going to make things a little trickier.”

  “Perhaps Martindale should have warned them we were coming.”

  “Too risky,” Brad countered. “It’s unlikely that the feds or the Russians have penetrated Sky Masters communications, but if either of them has . . .” He let the thought trail off.

  Nadia sighed. “It would be a very bad day for us.”

  “Yep. So the name of the game tonight is still How Not to Be Seen.” He thought for a moment. “Bring up NavPlan Two.”

  “Understood. Going to NavPlan Two.” Nadia pulled up her navigation display. Deftly, she entered commands instructing their computer to switch to one of the several alternate flight plans Brad had plotted before leaving Poland.

  Their cues on his HUD shifted immediately. Brad tugged the stick to the right, pulling the Ranger into a tight turn toward the north. This new course would take them around the outer edge of that Argus-Five radar’s detection envelope. Once they put the concealing mass of the Sheep Creek Range between them and the Sky Masters–operated airport, they could safely swing back south. Land-based radars could not see “through” higher ground.

  “New S-band Doppler radar detected at eleven o’clock,” the computer said suddenly. “Signal strength increasing.”

  That was the kicker, Brad knew. Evading the Sky Masters Argus-Five meant flying almost straight into the zone of another radar, this one sited high up in the Sheep Creek Range’s jumble of high plateaus, rounded rises, and boulder-strewn washes. The good news was that this new radar was one of the U.S. Weather Service’s NEXRAD stations. And that gave them a chance to spoof it without being noticed.

  “Activate SPEAR,” he told Nadia. “Target that S-band Doppler weather radar.”

  Her fingers danced across one of her MFDs, bringing their ALQ-293 Self-Protection Electronically Agile Reaction system online. SPEAR transmitted carefully tailored signals on the same frequencies used by radars hunting for their XCV-62. By altering the timing of pulses returned to a potentially hostile radar, it could trick that radar into thinking the Ranger was somewhere else in the sky . . . or even render it effectively invisible. “SPEAR is engaged,” she said. “Matching frequencies.”

  Crossing his fingers mentally, Brad held his course north. Since the primary mission of the WSR-88D radars in the NEXRAD network was weather tracking, they were highly automated. Plus, any meteorologist who was up so late keeping tabs on this particular radar should be paying more attention to cold fronts, thunderstorms, and the like than to a single tiny blip that quickly faded off his or her screen.

  “NEXRAD radar now at ten o’clock. Range thirty miles.”

  Nice theory, McLanahan, Brad thought, trying not to hold his breath. Now to see if it matched reality. They were almost broadside to that radar now, without any terrain between them high enough to provide cover. If they were going to get pinged, this was the time. Seconds passed, each seeming longer than the last while the Ranger streaked on, flying low over the arid Nevada desert.

  “No detection,” Nadia said finally with mingled relief and satisfaction. “SPEAR has control over that radar. It can’t see us!”

  “Copy that.” Brad tweaked his stick again, following the steering cues on his HUD as they slid left a few degrees and then kept moving. “Starting our final turn toward the LZ.”

  The XCV-62 banked slightly, starting a long, curving turn that would bring them back around to the southwest—coming in along the spine of the Sheep Creek Range. The aircraft’s nose pitched up, climbing to stay above the fast-approaching high ground. Brad started throttling back, slowly shedding airspeed.

  Beside him, Nadia had her eyes fixed on a computer-generated map. “We are three minutes out from the landing zone,” she told him.

  “No visual yet,” Brad said tightly. They were roughly fourteen nautical miles out from the straight stretch of little-used dirt road he’d picked out earlier from satellite imagery as a possible place to land. It was still hidden in among the rugged hills and gullies ahead of them. “DTF disengaged,” he said, toggling a control on his stick that turned off the Ranger’s terrain-following system. He pulled back slightly, gaining more altitude to take a look at their planned LZ. Their airspeed dropped to three hundred knots.

  Abruptly, a cursor blinked into existence on his HUD. “There it is.”

  “Ninety seconds out.” Nadia slaved one of her MFDs to their forward-looking passive sensors and zoomed in her view. “The LZ appears clear. I am not picking up any unidentified thermal contacts.”

  Brad nodded. Except for occasional hikers, no one spent much time this high up in the Sheep Creek Range. Through his HUD, he could see the dirt road rolling away into the distance. It was a thin, bright green line against the darker green of the surrounding plateau. Using another control on his stick, he selected a touch-down point. Instantly, the Ranger’s navigation system updated his steering cues. “We’re go for landing.”

  “Sixty seconds out.” Nadia tapped a key, alerting their passengers in the troop compartment that they were making their final approach.

  Brad entered a quick command on one of his own MFDs. “Configuring for a short-field rough landing.” Then he throttled back some more. The Iron Wolf aircraft slid lower.

  The muffled roar from the Ranger’s four turbofan engines diminished fast. As their airspeed dropped, hydraulics whined shrilly. Computer-directed control surfaces opened along the trailing edge of the wing, providing more lift. The XCV-62’s nose gear and twin wing-mounted bogies swung down and locked in position.

  The dirt road, with a glowing line drawn across it to mark Brad’s desired touch-down point, loomed ahead through the windscreen, growing larger quickly as they descended. They came in low over the road, thundering along just feet above the ground. His left hand hovered over the throttles.

  One hundred yards. Fifty yards. Twenty-five yards. The computer-drawn touch-down marker was suddenly a fiery green blaze across his whole HUD.

  “Landing . . . now,” he said decisively. With a smooth motion, he chopped the throttles back almost all the way.

  The Iron Wolf stealth transport dropped out of the sky. It touched down with a sharp jolt—shaking and rattling hard as it bounded down the rutted dirt road. Plumes of dust and sand kicked loose by its passage drifted away on a light breeze. Quickly, Brad reversed thrust, gradually bringing them to a full stop about a thousand feet from where the Ranger’s landing gear first kissed the earth.

  For a moment, he sat still, breathing hard. Then he grinned over at Nadia. “Well, check off one more successful landing in this crate. Or, depending on how you look at it, one more narrowly avoided crash.”

  She made a show of peering out both sides of the cockpit and then looked back at him with a crooked smile of her own. “Since the aircraft does seem to be in one piece, I suppose your more optimistic appraisal is warranted.” She turned more serious. “Now what?”

  “Now we drop the ramp and have Captain Schofield and his merry band of scouts guide us to a somewhat less conspicuous position a little off this road. Before the sun comes up, we need to be out of sight, especially from the air.”

  Thirty minutes later, the Ranger was parked near the opening of a draw lined with sagebrush just east of the dirt road they’d used as an improvised landing strip. Schofield and one of his men were draping Scion-designed camouflage netting
across the aircraft to shield it from visual, thermal, or radar detection. The rest were hard at work smoothing out the tracks left by the aircraft’s gear when it taxied into this hiding place.

  Inside the cockpit, Nadia opened a com window on her display and typed in a short message reporting their safe arrival. Their computer automatically encrypted, compressed, and transmitted her message via satellite.

  An icon flashed within seconds, signaling an acknowledgment and urgent message. “It’s from Martindale,” she said to Brad and Whack Macomber. Her brow furrowed as she read through the decoded message. “He urges us to exercise extreme caution. We are to avoid detection by U.S. authorities at all costs.” With an exasperated sigh, she glanced up at the two Americans. “Apparently your President Barbeau is more than half convinced that we are the ones responsible for destroying your country’s bomber base.”

  “This just gets better and better,” Macomber growled. “How the fuck are we supposed to smack down a raid on Sky Masters without being spotted? I don’t care how nifty-keen these Mod IV CIDs are. All the fricking camo systems in the world won’t hide a rail-gun shot or autocannon fire.”

  “Oh, once that happens, we won’t have to hide any longer, Colonel,” Nadia said with forced good cheer. “It’s simple. When the Russians do attack, we kill them. Then we show their wrecked machines and mangled corpses to your government.” She shrugged. “That should be proof enough, even for a shortsighted cretin like your president. And then we can all go home without all this sneaking around.” That drew a reluctant, rare laugh from Macomber.

  Brad joined in, glad that Nadia could still shake Whack out of his occasional fits of gloom. Inwardly, though, he couldn’t shake a nagging worry of his own. What had appeared an obvious course of action back in Poland seemed a lot less obvious now that they were here on the ground deep inside the States.

  Sure, realistically, he and the others had no way to hunt down the covert forces Gennadiy Gryzlov was using to attack the U.S. There were too many possible hiding places and America was just too big a country. All of which made stationing their CIDs on overwatch near Battle Mountain the only rational play. Viewed logically, Sky Masters had to be a high-priority target for the Russians. Now that Moscow had its own combat robots, the high-tech weapons and other equipment developed by Sky Masters were sure to be the key to survival for Poland, its allies, and the United States itself.

  They were essentially employing the same tactics used by big-game hunters when setting out to bag a tiger in the trackless jungle. Instead of beating around futilely in the bush, the idea was to stake out a live goat as bait . . . and then lie in wait until the hungry big cat came prowling into your rifle sights. Well, Sky Masters was their bait.

  But what if the tiger had other prey in mind?

  That was the worry Brad couldn’t shake. What if he’d misread Gryzlov’s plans? Then what?

  Twenty-Two

  RKU SECURE SITE, DALLAS, TEXAS

  THAT SAME TIME

  Unhurriedly, Kirill Aristov sauntered along the withered grass strip lining the north side of Irving Avenue. His hands were buried in his pockets. He came to the corner of a small side street and paused, looking around in all directions as if making sure it was safe to cross. Under the crumpled brim of an oil-stained baseball cap, his eyes were watchful. A few cars and trucks drove past in both directions along the wide, six-lane avenue, but no one seemed to be paying any real attention to him.

  His lips thinned. After all, why should they? This late at night, the only people wandering out on the streets were either drunk or crazy or homeless, or most likely all three in combination.

  Satisfied that he was clear, Aristov strolled on up the narrower side street. Halfway down the block, he came to a padlocked chain-link gate. A rusting sign wired to the gate warned passersby that this was an FXR Trucking facility and that trespassers would be prosecuted. “Or right now, quite probably shot and killed,” he murmured to himself.

  He dug a key out of his jeans pocket, unlocked the gate, pulled it open just far enough to squeeze through, and then relocked the gate behind him. With only three tractor-trailers backed up against a single, slab-sided steel warehouse, the lot looked almost empty—especially when compared to those of the dozen other much-busier trucking companies and freight lines operating out of this run-down industrial neighborhood.

  Over time, Aristov supposed this lack of activity might strike FXR’s rivals as odd. Fortunately, he and his men, along with Baryshev’s war robots, would be gone long before anyone got too curious. After one last slow look around to make sure no one was watching, he crossed the parking lot to the warehouse, rapped twice on a door, and then went straight in.

  With a curt nod, Pavel Larionov slid his pistol back out of sight. The former Spetsnaz sergeant sat back down behind a solid metal desk that faced the door. A bank of TV monitors showed grainy images captured by low-light security cameras set up at various points outside the warehouse. “Any trouble?” he asked.

  “None,” Aristov said. He’d gone out earlier to walk around the neighboring area, looking for any signs that they were drawing unwelcome attention—either from the Dallas police or from America’s domestic spy agency, the FBI. He’d figured that it would be a lot harder to hide a law enforcement surveillance operation now that things were quieting down outside. And he’d been right. The panel vans and unmarked cars favored by the police and the FBI would have stood out like lions among alley cats on those nearly empty streets. They were still safely hidden here.

  Nikolai Dobrynin met him just inside the main warehouse area. “We’ve received a new warning order from Moscow. General Kurakin wants us to hit our next scheduled target in forty-eight hours.”

  Aristov looked past him to where several men stood grouped around a folding card table. The KVM pilots were studying maps while their leader, Colonel Baryshev, ran through yet another proposed attack plan. “Do they know about this additional delay?”

  Dobrynin nodded.

  Aristov frowned. Baryshev and his pilots should be grabbing some sack time right now. What were they doing awake this late—especially after learning they wouldn’t be going into action for two more nights? If any of them had slept for more than a couple of hours after reaching this secure site, he’d missed it. Quietly, he said as much to Dobrynin.

  “I’ve asked about that. Baryshev and his men claim they don’t need much sleep,” the other man said carefully. “Apparently, they’re taking it in turns to spend some time plugged into those war robots of theirs.”

  “For what purpose?”

  Dobrynin lowered his voice. “Those machines include advanced medical diagnostics and health maintenance systems. While they’re hooked up, these guys filter out the fatigue toxins from their bloodstreams. Plus, they can juice up on different hormones and neurotransmitters.”

  “So Baryshev and the rest of his KVM pilots are screwing around with their brain and body chemistry in order to go without sleep?” Aristov frowned. “Does that sound like a good idea to you?”

  The other man shrugged. “In combat, maybe. But outside of an emergency situation? Hell no.” He looked at his team leader with a worried expression. “Should we report this to Moscow?”

  “Without more evidence this behavior is causing a problem?” Aristov said slowly. Reluctantly, he shook his head. “No. The colonel and his men have been trained on these war robots. We haven’t. They must know what they’re doing.”

  “I hope so.” Dobrynin sounded unconvinced.

  Aristov clapped him gently on the shoulder. “That makes two of us, Nikolai.” His eyes hardened. “Which is why we’re going to keep a very close eye on them from now on. Just to make sure.”

  BATTLE MOUNTAIN, NEVADA

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER

  Rubbing at bleary eyes that felt like they’d been sandpapered, Hunter “Boomer” Noble slid behind the wheel of his Lincoln luxury sedan, hit its push-button ignition, and then bit down on a ferocious yawn. Do not start
that or you’ll never stop, he thought tiredly. Instead, he ordered, “Open the pod-bay doors, Hal.”

  The integrated voice-command system he’d set up to control the lights, air-conditioning, and other electronics in the house he was renting instantly obeyed. With a low rumble, the garage door rolled up—revealing a row of large, two-story homes across the street. With the sun still below the eastern horizon, lights showed behind only a few windows.

  Carefully, Boomer backed out of the garage, down his driveway, and out onto the empty street. No other cars were in sight. Naturally. His neighbors were mostly up-and-coming executives working for some of the other tech companies lured to Battle Mountain by Sky Masters’ presence and subcontracts. But not even the eagerest beaver among them made a habit of heading to the office at this ungodly hour. That was a “pleasure” reserved for top-level Sky Masters executives and engineers since the bolt-from-the-blue sneak attack on Barksdale Air Force Base.

  He put the Lincoln in gear and drove off. Behind him, his garage door rolled back down and locked automatically.

  Boomer rolled through the nearest stop sign and took a left onto a bigger street that would take him to Interstate 80. Suddenly his headlights picked out a man wearing jeans, hiking boots, and a hooded maroon MIT sweatshirt standing right in the middle of the road—apparently trying to thumb a ride.

  “Oh, man, you have got to be kidding me,” he snarled under his breath. Now they were getting guys to bum rides in his suburban neighborhood, and practically in the middle of the night? This was the kind of crap that people moved out of places like Las Vegas or San Francisco to escape. What was next? Upscale panhandlers trying to rustle spare change for a round of golf at the local public course?

  Still grousing out loud to himself, Boomer started to pull around the would-be hitchhiker. Then he saw the crude, hand-lettered sign the other man held up. It read, will work for food for my wolf.