“Gotcha. I’ll keep my head low.”
Lex ducked back inside, then jerked at the sound of heavy boots trudging up the stairs.
He shifted silently across the landing and peered down to spy three troops mounting the stairs, two at a time. Where had they come from? Hell, did it matter?
There was no need to get into a protracted gunfight. He scooped up one of the heat seekers, reared back, and let it fly down into the stairwell. In the next heartbeat he bounded away and threw himself over Slava, bracing himself as the blast cracked and boomed, the landing quaking as a mushroom cloud of black smoke filled the well and had Lex shielding Slava’s mouth and nose. He rose to wedge open the door as Vlad’s voice crackled in his ear: “Boss, I’m in a cart. ETA just thirty seconds. Little help.”
“Roger that, you just hold a course straight through to the lifts. Do not veer off. Here we go!”
Lex slammed open the door, and while still on his knees he began hurling the tiny missiles right and left, the motors instantly igniting, miniature guidance systems homing in on the strongest heat sources, which in this case were the engines of the armored vehicles as they fired up and turned toward the exit.
While he didn’t expect to disable the vehicles with a single grenade (although that might be possible via a lucky shot that might cause internal systems to overload), the explosions would force any of the troops still dismounted in the motor pool to seek cover, as they had during the first round of explosions.
Once he set free the last grenade, Lex lobbed off the smoke canisters that in short order created a thick screen all the way out to the blast doors.
Through those diaphanous walls of smoke came Vlad, one hand on the cart’s wheel, the other gripping his pistol, his entrance heralded by a chorus of explosions that echoed so loudly that they drowned out the APCs’ rumbling engines. Vlad rolled up to the stairwell door and hopped out, holstering his pistol.
“How is he?” asked Vlad.
“Bad.”
“We got time to get a line in? Got some Ringer’s and morphine on board?”
“Do it.”
“Yes, sir.” Vlad’s tone had gone all business. He rifled through his med kit, got an IV in place on his first try, and hung the liter bag of lactated Ringer’s around Slava’s neck. Then he prepared the syringe of morphine and injected it into Slava’s line. He faced Lex and said, “Good to go.”
“I’m glad we saved your meds,” Lex told him. “It was a good call.”
Vlad pursed his lips and nodded. They stood and carried Slava to the back of the cart, where they propped him in a seat and Lex held him upright. He checked again for a pulse. Nothing. He began to lose his breath as he tried a second time. There it was, barely perceptible . . . but there. The son of a bitch was a fighter, all right.
“Long-range comm back up in a minute,” said Vlad, steering them into the smoke, leaning forward into the wheel as he drove blindly between the piles of rubble.
Suddenly, he blasted straight into a troop who was crossing their path. The guy rolled across the front of the cart and splayed across the floor. The impact sent them caroming off some rocks and back into the gap.
“I got it, I got it,” cried Vlad, cutting the wheel as Lex glanced over his shoulder and directed his own pistol toward the back of the cart, where a few more troops materialized from the smoke.
“Go right,” Lex shouted, then fired—just as a few of their rounds cut into the wall to their left.
“Deep Raider Actual, this is Guardian, over.”
Lex blinked hard and swore. Commanding officers always had perfect timing, didn’t they? “Guardian, this is Deep Raider Actual. We’ve completed our sweep. No package. Repeat. No package. I have a man down and need immediate evac, over.”
This was hardly the report Lex wanted to issue, and he wished he could take it back, but his was a life of intel and of cold hard facts.
“Roger that, Actual. QRF and second strike team are there now. I’ll coordinate, but you’ll still need to get to your rally point because we have inbound enemy aircraft and IFVs along the mountain.”
“We’ll get there. Sir, I don’t think the package was ever here.”
“We’ll follow up on the intel and see what happened. Make no mistake, heads will roll.”
“Roger that, sir. Seems like another group might’ve used us as a diversion to break out the Snow Maiden. We confirmed she was here.”
“We’ve been monitoring your drone feeds and sent back the ID. We’ve got everyone looking for her now. Anyway, get out of there, Captain. You’ve done what you could.”
“On our way, sir. Deep Raider Actual, out.”
After a second of just shaking his head in frustration, Lex switched to the team channel and told Borya to be ready for them. The exit was coming up fast.
His gaze lowered to the cart’s floor, and he shuddered over the swelling puddle of blood. The bandages could no longer hold back the torrent. Dreading it, Lex reached up and checked Slava’s neck for a pulse.
The man was growing cold.
THIRTY-FOUR
Spetsnaz Headquarters
Fort Levski
Bulgaria
Major Stephanie Halverson was exactly where she belonged: behind the stick of an F-35B Joint Strike Fighter and studying an incoming force of MiG-29 fighters lighting up her display.
She wasn’t concerned about the MiGs. She and the rest of the twenty-four strike fighters from Carrier Air Wing Eight (CVW-8) attached to the USS George H. W. Bush would dispatch them quickly and efficiently before they were ever picked up by enemy radar. The Joint Strike Fighters were far more stealthy than the federation’s old fleet. Moreover, the MiGs would still need to be cued in via an airborne radar plane or ground station, and even then, they’d still have trouble picking up the F-35s. Halverson’s colleagues were already targeting the radar planes, and the nearest ground stations had already been obliterated.
However—and this was a big however—the MiGs weren’t the only aircraft in this arena. The Federation had scrambled at least twenty Sukhoi PAK FA T-50 stealth fighters from Sevastopol International Airport (now primarily used as a military fighter base). With their pairs of thirty-millimeter cannons; state-of-the-art avionics packages including X-band AESA (active electronically scanned array) and L-band radars for picking up stealth-specific aircraft; and Kayak, Kilter, and Archer missiles, the T-50s were Russia’s most formidable, maneuverable, and hard-to-detect fighters. They had gone head-to-head against the F-35s several times, mostly during standoff missions with air-to-air missiles exchanged at extreme distances.
This battle was different. All the dust in the zone would diffuse their radar signals through absorption, reflection, and scattering, creating much smaller echoes and making it much harder to acquire targets. That handicap might cause pilots to get in close for those rare but certainly not unprecedented dogfights, along with descending much lower than usual to visually acquire their ground targets before unloading their ordnance.
Halverson’s own ground targets were strung out below. She confirmed that some of Fort Levski’s Cockroaches and BTRs had been spared from the kinetic strike since they’d been parked inside the mountain, and those vehicles were now taking up positions along the mountain road and targeting JSF air elements, most notably the slower-moving Seahawks, the enemy guns flashing like a short-circuiting string of casino lights.
The irony was that neither she nor any other pilot from CVW-8 had permission for a missile strike against those guns, since a Marine Raider team was still in the process of exfiltrating from the base.
Halverson, of course, wasn’t one to blindly follow orders, and she dove toward the mountain, evading the AA fire outlined in her helmet-mounted display system to get a good look at each of those Cockroaches, six in all now, positions marked along the snaking road.
As she pulled up and a
way, she concluded that their ground team would have a hell of a time getting past those vehicles and those crews, along with the dismounts that had flooded out of the mountain. In fact, you didn’t want to be near an AA gun while it was lobbing shells. Between the ear-shattering racket, the danger of a misfire, and the threat of incoming missile fire from your own forces, getting close to one of those IFVs was putting one boot in the grave.
She called back to the tactical air commander with an urgent message for General Mitchell.
After a ten-second pause, she was put through: “Guardian, this is Siren. I’m ready to provide Close Air Support for our Raider team. Request permission for a direct link with that team leader on the ground, over.”
“Roger that, Siren. I know what you have in mind. Standby for Deep Raider Actual.”
“Standing by.”
* * *
The booming from the anti-aircraft guns outside the main entrance unnerved Lex. He ordered Vlad to head for the service road just inside the blast doors. They pulled to a stop and sought cover behind a haphazardly parked collection of more carts. Lex hopped out, ripped off his gas mask, and looked at Vlad. “Slava’s dead.”
Vlad tugged off his mask, cursed, then turned and hurled it toward the wall. He crossed back to Slava and put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “God damn it.”
“Deep Raider Actual, this is Siren, over.”
“Siren, standby.” Lex frantically slipped off his pack and dug out his situational awareness visor, this one a backup that resembled a pair of wide skier’s sunglasses. He booted up the SAV via a button by his ear. A databar opened and floated at arm’s length to show the cockpit view of the incoming caller, along with full ID: F-35B Joint Strike Fighter pilot Major Stephanie Halverson, call sign “Siren.”
“Okay, Major, I’m here.”
“I’m looking at your blue force beacon and see you’re just inside the main exit. You got six Cockroaches on the road to get past.”
“Only six? Got more coming out now.”
“Roger that. I’m seeing you got one observer up top. He needs to find cover.”
“I’m on it.”
“Good. I’m taking out the farthest guns from the entrance with missiles. The ones closest to you get the cannon. After my second pass on them, be ready to haul ass, over?”
“Shit, lady, you don’t have to ask me twice. Waiting on you. Go for it!”
“Okay, I’m coming around. One last question. Do you have the package?”
“Negative. No package.”
Halverson’s tone shifted dramatically. “Uh, can you say again?”
“No package.”
“Oh, all right. Stand by.”
Lex switched to the team channel. “Borya, this is Actual, you read me?”
“I’m here, boss.”
“Get down here, right now! Air strike coming in.”
“Can’t do it, I’m cut off. Lots of dismounts on the road right now, right under the lines. I’ll be too slow if I go with the camouflage.”
Lex nodded, already visualizing Borya’s secondary escape plan. “I hear that, Sergeant. You fall back to the air shafts. We’ll link up with you after the strike. Stay down!”
“No worries about that, boss. How’s Slava?”
Lex hesitated. “He’s gone. Now get out of there.”
* * *
In the airspace above Bulgaria, President Kapalkin had been watching the attack on Fort Levski from his private jet, the distorted and static-filled security camera images sent to him via Moscow from the minister of defense, while his own pilots, along with his T-50 fighter escort, reported the devastation in the distance. Kapalkin’s outrage over what was happening had already resulted in two destroyed tablet computers and a broken bottle of Leon Verres vodka, the bottle itself covered in fur and diamonds and one of the priciest in the world.
While his pilot had just made a hasty course correction, guiding them far away from the danger zone and taking them back toward Moscow, Kapalkin called the American president and demanded answers.
“President Kapalkin, I was expecting your call.”
“I’m sure you were.”
“I’ll get right to the point, then.”
Becerra tried to sell Kapalkin a story about the Spetsnaz abducting one of their engineers and that the Russian Federation had instigated the entire attack.
“A pathetic excuse for your allies? Is that what this is?” Kapalkin asked him.
If that weren’t enough, Kapalkin’s people on the ground had informed him that Lieutenant Colonel Osin was dead and that the Snow Maiden was missing. It appeared someone had helped her escape.
“We don’t have your engineer,” Kapalkin repeated. “We didn’t abduct her. And if I may say so, I believe we’re both being played for fools.”
“Who’s playing us?”
“Who isn’t? The Euros? The Forgotten Army?”
Becerra’s expression grew harder, his gaze penetrating. “You left out the Ganjin. What do you know about them?”
Kapalkin snorted. “What do you know?”
“You came to us when the terrorists had nukes in Canada. We helped you save both of our economies. Now it’s time for you to help me. I’m asking you one more time: What do you know about the Ganjin?”
“I’ll admit we’ve heard the name. Only the name. To me they’re a myth. Where is their headquarters? Where is their army? Who are their generals? What do you know?”
“We’re not sure, but the Forgotten Army works for them—as does your rogue colonel, the Snow Maiden. That’s right, we know she was there and escaped.”
“Do you know where she is now?”
“I’m willing to work with you to find her and asking you to help us find our missing engineer. This Ganjin group might be the key to everything.”
Kapalkin settled back deeper into his seat. “That’s an interesting proposal, Mr. President. But speaking bluntly, this attack in Bulgaria is a strange way to ask for help. A simple request to our ambassador in Washington would have sufficed.”
Becerra shook his head. “We’re not sure that your ambassador still reports to you, and we believed that our engineer was being held at Fort Levski. Sir, we can drag out this verbal sparring for years but, eventually, both of us will have to answer to the world and our own people for our actions. We worked together in Canada. Why can’t we do it again?”
“I’m forced to question your veracity, Mr. President, in the face of the satellite images I’ve seen showing you training ground drones in military maneuvers in your Mojave Desert.”
“I’ll be frank. Those aren’t military maneuvers. Since the war between us broke out, we’ve been watching you pour your petrodollars back into your economy, but now my geologists tell me you’re fast approaching peak oil. The rest of your reserve is now much more difficult to extract, requiring extensive processing. As your output diminishes, you’ll be forced to cut back on exports just to satisfy your own needs. When you do that, you’ll upset some of your allies. You’ve got yourself a Siberian tiger by the balls and you can’t let go. Energywise it’ll eventually cost you a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of oil from the ground. That’s a game changer, Mr. President. You know it, and we know it.”
“So what are you doing out there in your desert?”
“I’m told that even though the Middle East is too radioactive and untenable for humans to work on the desert surface, the oil beneath the surface is not contaminated. When you see my drones in a huddle, they’re training to build pumping stations, and when you see them in a long line, they’re learning how to lay pipeline—all the way out to the coast.”
“So you plan to go back in there.”
“We don’t have to do it alone. We could turn this into a joint effort, let it become a symbol of renewed trust, and finally, let it help put an end to this conflict. T
his doesn’t have to be complicated. We can make it so simple.”
Kapalkin furrowed his brows. “I don’t trust you, Mr. President, but I’m willing to hear more. When I land in Moscow, I’ll form a negotiating committee. They’ll meet secretly with your people in Geneva, seven days from now. We’ll be in contact to firm up the time and place. Good-bye, Mr. President.”
“My people will be there, sir.”
Kapalkin immediately made another call to General Izotov, who had successfully passed his polygraph exam and whose loyalty was, according to Kapalkin’s experts, unquestionable. Kapalkin gave the general a summary of his call with Becerra, after which Izotov asked, “So how would you like to punish them?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“May I suggest cutting off their oil?”
“How much?”
“All of it.”
“Are you serious? Do you understand the implications that will have on our own economy? It’ll create a surplus and lower the price for our other customers, which in turn will lower our profits, decrease revenues, and strangle our defense budget during a time of war.”
“It’s only a temporary measure,” explained Izotov. “To let them know we’re serious, and believe me when I say there is nothing more serious than their thirst for oil.”
Kapalkin balled his hands into fists. “All right, but only I give the order, and I won’t be doing so for at least seven days.”
“Why the delay?”
“That’ll become clear to you, General. Good-bye.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Spetsnaz Headquarters
Fort Levski
Bulgaria
Lex and Vlad had crouched behind the cart, with Slava’s body still slumped in the seat above them.
Two more Cockroaches roared by, along with three more BTRs. The combination of all those screeching engines and the booming outside left their ears ringing.
Vlad was rubbing his eyes, trying to hide his grief from Lex. Ironically, Slava and Vlad had not been that close. They were professionals to be sure, but they never spent any time together outside the Corps. When the team went to a bar, Slava took off by himself. Maybe Vlad was feeling guilty over never getting to know the guy or that Slava was always chiding him about his constant doom-and-gloom reports.