Black Flagged Vektor

Chapter 51

Thomas Manning held his breath, waiting for visual confirmation that the bioweapons laboratory had been destroyed. The National Reconnaissance Office had positioned two satellites in geostationary orbit over the area to provide detailed pictures of Vektor. They stared at two muted gray images of the facility on the bank of massive flat-screen monitors. One remained motionless, providing an overview of the Vektor campus, centered on the Virology compound. The second view shifted and magnified at the request of the CIA operations center. Right now, it remained focused on Blackjack’s vehicle in the parking lot. The massacred security team nearby was plainly visible to everyone.

“What are they waiting for?” Jacob Remy asked.

The first screen flashed to white momentarily before the infrared image settled back to what they had been watching seconds ago. The new image showed eight white-hot plumes surrounding the Virology compound.

“That,” Manning said and turned in his chair to face everyone. “Mr. President, Russia’s bioweapons program is officially offline.”

“Fantastic work, everyone,” the president said. “I hope this closes the book on a nasty chapter in modern human history. Biological weapons have no place in the world, and neither do the people who work to create them.”

“This should close that book for a long time, Mr. President,” the CIA director said. “With Vektor gone, the Iranians will experience a significant setback in their plans to enhance Iran’s biological weapons capability. This was the right call given the attack we suffered last month.”

“What are we looking at in terms of a local or regional response?” Remy asked.

Manning pressed a button on the touchscreen computer monitor imbedded in the table, opening the communication channel with CIA operations. He placed his headset on and adjusted the microphone.

“Karl, great work. That comes right from the top. Pass that along to the team when you get a chance. Has NSA picked up any unusual chatter yet?”

“Nothing yet, but I’m worried about one of the reports passed by the team a few minutes ago. One of our operatives intercepted a call meant for the security guards at Building Six, alerting them to a possible terrorist threat. That’s why we had a flurry of security activity during their last few minutes at Vektor. The head of security, Alexei Ivkin, apparently received an unconfirmed intelligence report regarding the threat. This can’t be a coincidence. Someone figured out what we’re doing,” Berg said.

“But they were too late.”

“Too late to save Vektor, but this doesn’t bode well for Blackjack. Whoever called this in isn’t connected to the Russian Federal Security Service. Trust me on that. I’m guessing high-level SVR. If they know, you can rest guaranteed that Putin knows. This could get ugly. We need to get Black Magic to the holding area.”

“I’ll let General Gordon know,” Manning said and removed the headphones.

“Is everything all right, Thomas?” the president asked.

“Everything is fine, Mr. President. NSA has not picked up any unusual communications chatter, but it’s early. The team is en route to their first checkpoint, where they’ll hide the SUV used at Vektor and switch to two cars for the next leg of their journey. It looks like they’ve made a clean break from the facility,” he said, pointing up at the screen.

Both images had zoomed out far enough to encompass the entire Vektor campus and the immediate area surrounding it. Blackjack had just veered off the main road leading to Koltsovo, heading south through the trees, which partially hid the vehicle from the satellite’s cameras. In front of the Virology compound, two vehicles pulled up next to the dead security guards and their abandoned jeep. The road leading to the main gate remained empty.

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll make a clean break from Russia,” the president said.

“It’s always possible that they could make it to the border undetected,” Manning replied, “but I’m not counting on it. General Gordon, we need to move Black Magic to Holding Area Alpha. If they continue to move undetected, they could be at the border sooner than we expected.”

He watched General Gordon’s reaction closely. Earlier this morning, Jacob Remy had pulled Gordon out of the Situation Room for a private conversation with the president. Manning knew this because he had excused himself to use the restroom and watched the combatant commander of U.S. Special Operations Command disappear into the president’s private office on the other side of the watch floor. This meant one thing to Manning. The president and his chief of staff wanted to privately clarify the rules of engagement for Gordon’s helicopters…or modify them.

“I’ll notify SOCOM immediately,” the general said.

He sensed a slight hesitation in Gordon’s response, which might have gone unnoticed under different circumstances. Manning’s request flowed through an additional filter in Gordon’s mind, which had caused a nearly imperceptible delay. He anticipated a problem if the Russians mobilized significant assets to locate Farrington’s team.

Chapter 52

Richard Farrington scanned the road ahead for any signs of trouble. They would travel along this two-lane road through the Sovetskiy City District, at the far southern edge of Novosibirsk. The road connected with Highway M52, which was the most logical escape route out of Novosibirsk, leading south and feeding into several roads that pointed toward the nearby border with Kazakhstan. It would also be the first road that the Russians would scour to find them. Instead, they would cross the highway and continue west a few kilometers to the edge of the Novosibirsk Reservoir, where they would turn north and cross the Ob River at the dam responsible for the reservoir. Their second checkpoint lay several kilometers from the dam, along the northern shores of the reservoir. If they managed to cross the river undetected, they stood a solid chance of surviving the night.

The six operatives had separated into two nondescript, high-performance sedans at the first checkpoint. They traded their limited-range submachine guns for an assortment of compact, modern assault rifles equipped with the latest optics. Rucksacks filled with essential gear, along with weapons and ammunition, had been staged in each car. Each member of the team fulfilled a specific role and their gear had been distributed accordingly.

Farrington’s AK-107U was jammed against the door, resting under his right arm, where he could put it into action quickly if necessary. At this point, they were mainly concerned with a local police response, which he hoped they had successfully evaded by heading away from Koltsovo. Crossing the Sovetskiy City District would pose a risk, but most of the district consisted of businesses and housing complexes that supported the two universities situated within a few kilometers of each other. He didn’t expect any trouble they couldn’t handle.

A lone street lamp appeared in the distance, ahead of the lead car, as his sedan followed a tight curve and emerged from a stretch of treelined road. Grisha reported from the car thirty meters ahead.

“Approaching the first roundabout. Looks clear.”

“I see it. Take it slow,” Farrington said.

Once they cleared the rotary, they had six more kilometers until they reached another rotary on the outskirts of the city district. They would have to be careful after the second rotary. The roads twisted and turned throughout the city district, dead-ending in large apartment building complexes or university parking lots. Driving would be tedious and confusing, requiring several turns to navigate the poorly designed university area before finding the road that would take them across the highway.

His satellite phone activated, bathing the front seat in an orange glow. He retrieved the phone from the center console.

“Blackjack actual,” he answered.

“This is Berg. Sanderson wanted me to pass NSA intercepts directly. They caught a high-level transmission emanating from the Koltsovo area. Encryption conventions and codes phrases correlated to known Vympel protocols.”

“How long ago?” Farrington asked.

“One minute after Vektor burned. They must have a response team in the area. Watch your back,” Berg said.

It made sense. Vympel Spetsnaz units formed the backbone of the Federal Security Service’s counter-sabotage capability, tasked to protect key strategic installations across the Russian Federation. Major transportation centers, crucial industrial hubs and nuclear facilities fell under Vympel’s protective umbrella. Experts themselves in the art of sabotage and deep-penetration operations, Vympel operatives were among the most highly trained and lethal instruments in the Russian Federation’s current inventory.

“We’ll be looking over our backs all the way to the border. Any word on Black Magic?” Farrington said.

“They’ll arrive at Alpha within three hours and shut down until you’re closer to the border. Remember, Black Magic will RTB thirty minutes prior to sunrise. That gives you a little under five hours.”

“We won’t be posing for pictures along—”

Farrington stopped in midsentence. He’d detected something moving fast in his peripheral vision, headed toward the rotary from the right. A car on this road wasn’t cause for worry but something had triggered an internal alarm. He peered through the thick row of trees lining the road that dumped into the rotary from Koltsovo, wondering for a brief moment if he hadn’t imagined it. At the same time he detected the red glow of the brake lights in front of him, he saw it again, but this time closer to the intersection. His mind interpreted the danger within in instant. A large SUV, driving without headlights, was headed into the rotary at high speed.

Senior Warrant Officer Grigory Limonov gripped the ceiling handle above the front passenger window as his driver accelerated the UAZ Hunter into the rotary. His detachment of eight men had been woken by a direct alarm activated within Building Six at the Virology compound. All of their beepers sounded at once, triggering a prearranged response that brought all eight men together at the main intersection of Koltsovo within ten minutes. On the way to the rendezvous, he placed two phone calls.

The first call went to Vektor’s security director, Alexei Ivkin, who explained the situation. Deadly biological samples had been stolen from Building Six in a sophisticated operation, leaving several guards murdered and the basement of the building destroyed. Guards at Vektor reported seeing a single SUV speeding out of the gate.

He placed the next call to the Federal Security Service’s Center for Special Operations. The alarm set off in Vektor had already set things in motion at headquarters, and he was immediately transferred to a surprisingly senior government official. By the time he arrived at the intersection to join the detachment, Vympel Spetzgruppa “Victor Two Three” (V23) had its orders from Moscow: capture or kill the terrorists responsible for the attack. Retrieval of the stolen biological samples had not been mentioned, but was implied within the constructs of the primary order.

Since it was obvious that the terrorists’ vehicle had already passed through Koltsovo, he separated the detachment into two groups, sending one north along the road leading to the town of Baryshevo. If the terrorists planned to seek shelter in Russia’s third largest city, they would have to pass through Baryshevo. As soon as his operatives sped north, he alerted local authorities in the town, with the hope that they might be able to stop the terrorists. At the worst, they could buy his team some time. By his calculation, the terrorists had a twelve-minute head start.

He’d put his own car on the road leading south, in case the terrorists decided to connect with Highway M52 and flee in that direction. This was the less likely scenario in his mind, but he had to cover both directions without splitting the team too thin. When he first saw a set of headlights appear on the east-west road, heading to the rotary, he had a strong suspicion they had stumbled onto their suspects. As his SUV cleared the line of trees obscuring a clear view of the approaching vehicle, he had a sudden moment of doubt. Guards at Vektor had reported an SUV. This was a sedan.

He grabbed the wheel to yank them out of the way, but spotted a second, nearly identical car emerge from the same direction. Two cars speeding along a back road after 11:00 PM on a Sunday? He turned the wheel into the crash, adjusting the center point of their impact from the sedan’s engine block to the front passenger door. He needed to kill or incapacitate everyone in at least one of the cars to give his men a chance to succeed, even if it cost him his own life.

Farrington dropped the satellite phone and issued a quick warning to the lead car, which he could already tell would be pointless.

“Grisha. Contact right!”

The brake lights disappeared momentarily, giving him the false hope that they might accelerate past the speeding SUV. The rotary had slowed Grisha’s vehicle to one third of its original travel speed by that point, making it an easy target. In the orange glow of the single street lamp jutting from the center of the rotary, he helplessly watched the SUV “T-bone” the sedan with horrific results.

The two vehicles plowed into the grassy center of the traffic circle as one mass of warped steel and shattered glass. Misha braked hard and turned left, exposing the car’s right side to the wreck, in a semi-controlled slide that ended at the edge of the rotary. Anticipating Misha’s maneuver, Farrington had braced his assault rifle against the bottom of the open passenger window, trying to line up the weapon’s sights for a shot.

He didn’t bother trying to use the ACOG scope, instead opting for the iron sights mounted at a forty-five degree angle along the weapon’s rails. He canted the weapon slightly and fired in full automatic mode at the SUV. Gosha’s weapon started firing three-round bursts at nearly the same moment.

The AK-107’s Balanced Automatics Recoil System performed as advertised, allowing him to keep the weapon well controlled at its cyclic rate of 900 rounds per minute. Within two seconds, Farrington had pumped thirty rounds of 5.45mm ammunition into the SUV, shredding the metal frame and obliterating any remaining glass. He opened the car door and crouched low, sprinting beneath the barrel of Gosha’s rifle, which continued to fire controlled bursts of steel at potential targets within the traffic circle.

Farrington reached the rear of the sedan and reloaded his rifle, inserting a fresh thirty-round magazine as he took up a position on the unexposed side of the vehicle, behind the trunk. Misha had already settled into a crouch behind the engine, firing his AK-107 over the hood in quick bursts to cover Gosha’s retreat through the back seat of the car.

Once all three of them were behind the sedan, Farrington made a quick assessment of the situation and issued orders. With only one working vehicle in the intersection, he had to take action to preserve their only method of escape. As the hollow sound of punctured metal started to fill his ears, he realized that they needed to quit using the sedan as cover.

“Gosha, cover us while we approach Grisha’s car,” Farmington said, sliding down the length of the sedan. “You ready?” he said to Misha.

“Now or never,” the operative replied.

“Cover fire!” he said over his shoulder, putting the sniper into action.

Bullets snapped overhead and beside them during the twenty-meter sprint across the open grass. Fortunately, the SUV’s survivors were at a disadvantage huddled behind their vehicle. Once Farrington and Misha had covered half of the distance, the mangled sedan effectively blocked the attackers’ line of sight, and the volume of gunfire slackened. Farrington lifted his rifle and aimed through the canted sights, searching for movement beyond the sedan.

“Target. Front of your sedan,” he heard in his earpiece.

He shifted the weapon left and aimed at a point beyond the driver’s side door, across the hood. A bloodied face appeared in his sights, aiming over the roof of the car in the direction of Gosha. Farrington fired two quick bursts that knocked the man off his feet and flipped his submachine gun onto the hood. Edging forward along the car, he reached the driver’s window, noticing that Seva’s head was leaned up against the doorframe. The rest of his body was obscured by a deflated, blood-sprayed airbag, which rendered a quick damage assessment impossible. The blood splatter, along with the gash on the side of Seva’s head, wasn’t an encouraging sign for what he might find under the airbag. Three distinct semiautomatic rifle reports caused him to duck instinctively.

“Shooter down. Headshot. That’s three confirmed, including the driver and the one you smoked in front of the sedan. I didn’t see anyone else get out of the SUV,” Gosha said.

“Got it. We’re pressing forward to investigate,” Farrington said.

The traffic circle grew eerily quiet, despite the constant hum of the wrecked sedan’s sputtering engine. He signaled for Misha to go around the other side of the vehicle, so they could approach the SUV from two sides. He risked a glance behind him and saw Gosha scanning the wreckage through the scope on his assault rifle. He edged forward, crouching at eye level with the car’s crumpled hood, his rifle aimed at the SUV’s half-intact windshield.

He rounded the front of the car, spotting three men splayed on the grass. The closest man lay on his back, his eyes wide open in a blank, glassy stare straight up at the overcast sky. Blood trickled from his mouth down the side of his jawline. Farrington had fired at least ten 5.45mm projectiles into his body, overwhelming the man’s body armor and killing him instantly. The other two bodies lay behind the SUV. One of them had clearly suffered a headshot, probably from Gosha’s rifle. A massive exit wound marred the side of his head exposed to Farrington. The other lay motionless, face down in the grass a few feet from the partially opened front passenger door.

“Three down behind the SUV. One in the driver’s seat. We leave in thirty seconds,” he said, realizing this meant making a few tough decisions regarding the men in the wrecked sedan.

Farrington started to turn when he heard a static crackle, followed by a Russian voice. His attention was drawn to a handheld radio, which lay a few feet away from the facedown Russian. The man suddenly lunged along the ground, reaching for the black handset. Several steel-jacketed bullets from Farrington’s AK-107 punctured the soft armor portions of the downed operative’s ballistic vest, penetrating deep into his torso and preventing any further movement. Farrington sprang forward and smashed the radio under his boot. The Spetsnaz operative spit a mouthful of blood onto the grass and coughed before expiring.

He turned the man onto his back and examined his gear, concluding that he must be part of the Vympel detachment assigned to guard Vektor. Type IIIA ballistic vests, thigh holsters, throat microphones, hand grenades, dozens of spare magazines for his OTs-14 bullpup-configured submachine gun. All of it professionally rigged in a manner demonstrating years of operational experience. The fact that they had intentionally crashed into their lead vehicle sealed his assessment that they were Vympel. He just wondered if they had managed to get a warning out to the rest of the detachment or the local law enforcement network.

The sound of a muffled scream brought Farrington sprinting back to the passenger side of the sedan. He found Sasha stretched out on the ground, battered and bloodied, his left arm bent at the elbow in an unnatural angle. His right leg bled profusely through his dark brown cargo pants. He met Gosha’s eyes and raised an eyebrow.

“Not good. Compound fracture. Lower right leg. Arm is fucked. Misha’s getting one of the first aid kits. We’ll have to stabilize this shit before we move.”

Farrington looked into the driver’s seat, coming to terms with the possibility that he’d lost everyone in the car. As far as he was concerned, Sasha was done. They’d bring him as far as they could, but only a perfect exfiltration scenario from this point forward could assure his survival. Based on what they’d just experienced, the night was guaranteed to be anything but perfect. Sasha’s twisted limbs would prevent him from any serious attempt to flee over ground, and unless the Russians let them drive across the border, he was a dead man.

He opened the door, expecting to catch Seva with both hands. Instead, Seva’s limp body hung in the seat, suspended by the shoulder strap of his seatbelt. From this angle, the underside of the airbag looked clean, giving him hope that Seva had been spared. He reached across the airbag to disconnect Seva’s seatbelt, catching a brief, horrible glimpse of what used to be Grisha. The SUV had struck Grisha’s door with enough force to instantly drive the metal door three feet into the sedan, pulverizing the operative in a tangle of broken steel and limbs. There would be no need for a second look.

Lowering Seva carefully onto the grass, he noted a complete lack of external injuries beyond the shallow gash on the left side of his head. He felt for a pulse and checked respiration. Seva’s vitals were strong.

“Let’s get these two into the car. Ten seconds. I want all rucksacks and ammunition. We’ll have to change frequencies en route to the next checkpoint. We don’t have time to look for Grisha’s communications gear. Misha, torch the car when everything is clear,” he said.

“What about Grisha?”

“His body isn’t going anywhere, and we can’t leave him behind to be identified,” he said.

Chapter 53

Karl Berg stood up from his station and looked around the operations center.

“What just happened? I lost communications with Blackjack,” he said, trying to raise Farrington on the net again.

“Blackjack. Come in, Blackjack.”

He waited several seconds and tried again with no response.

“Fuck! Are the comms going through?” he yelled.

“Diagnostics look fine, Mr. Berg. It’s a simple satellite connection,” said one of the techs from the front of the room.

“There’s nothing simple about any of the connections in here,” Berg snapped.

He was worried. Farrington had cut out in midsentence, and he thought he had heard gunfire. An ambush wasn’t out of the question with the Vympel detachment activated.

“Is there any way we can find them with satellite?” he said, knowing that this wouldn’t be easy.

Satellite tracking didn’t work like the movies, where savvy ground-station operators could follow a car for hundreds of miles using a joystick to pan the camera. Current technology allowed for imagery and camera control, but on a more limited scale, subject to satellite positioning and object-tracking algorithms that take into account moving object estimation, target behavior modeling and target match processing. Much of the process was automated due to the complex mathematics involved, and restricted the satellite’s imaging capacity to a small fixed area around the target. They had decided from the outset not to restrict their satellite capability by tracking the team’s vehicles.

“I can coordinate a search along the road leading from their last checkpoint. It’ll take a few minutes,” said a dark-haired woman a few computer stations away.

“No. I don’t want to lose the bigger picture. We already have one satellite moving to a better position over the border-crossing area, and we need to keep an eye on the military base outside of Novosibirsk,” he said, sitting back down.

He tried the team again, but received no response, switching over to Sanderson’s communication net.

“Base, I lost communications with Blackjack during the middle of a satellite phone conversation. Can you make contact?” Berg said.

“This is base. Stand by.”

Ten seconds later, Sanderson came back on the line. “The call won’t go through. What happened?”

“I don’t know. Blackjack was in the middle of a sentence and that was it. I thought I heard gunfire. NSA confirmed Vympel signalled intelligence less than a minute after Vektor burned,” Berg said.

“The self-destruct system must have triggered their activation. I can’t imagine they could have caught up with our team,” Sanderson said.

“I don’t know. Maybe satellite communications are down. If we don’t hear from them within the next few minutes, I’ll redirect all satellite assets to find them. Until then, there’s not much we can do, aside from keeping our fingers crossed. It would be a real fucking shame to lose them at this point,” Berg said.

“You should have a little more faith in my people, Sanderson chided. “They haven’t let you down yet.”

“I just want to get them back. I owe them that much,” Berg said.

“We’ll get them back.”

A few seconds later, Farrington’s voice returned to Berg’s headset.

“Berg. Are you still there?”

“I’m still here. What happened?”

“Part of the suspected Vympel detachment rammed the lead car, killing Grisha and severely injuring Sasha. Seva is still unconscious, but his vitals are strong. We’re back on the road in one vehicle, headed to the reservoir,” Farrington said.

“I’m sorry about Grisha. Are you able to continue with the exfiltration plan?”

“Affirmative. We’re on our way to the second checkpoint.”

“That’s good to hear. We’re going to get you out of there. Contact base to report your status,” Berg said.

“Understood. Blackjack out.”

Berg turned to Audra Bauer, who shook her head slowly.

“Grisha’s dead, and Sasha is severely injured. Seva is unconscious, but appears to be fine,” he said.

“Shit,” she muttered. “We’ll have to pass this on to Manning.”

“Nothing for them to get worried about. The exfiltration plan remains the same.”

He knew that the mission couldn’t suffer any more unexpected setbacks without jeopardizing the helicopter exfiltration option. The president had been skittish about using helicopters from the very beginning. His most recent restrictions to Black Magic’s ROE underscored the delicate situation. It wouldn’t take much at this point for the president to send Black Magic back to Kyrgyzstan without Blackjack. He’d need to put his own secret play into action soon. It might be Farrington’s only hope.

Chapter 54

Farrington leaned inside the car and released the emergency brake, starting their car on a slow descent down the neglected public boat ramp to the dark waters of the reservoir. Gosha helped him expedite the process by joining him behind the vehicle’s open trunk and pushing. By the time the car reached the water, it had gained enough momentum to continue all the way into the gently lapping waves of the manmade lake. The car floated into the lake for several seconds, hissing as the cold water filled the remaining air pockets in the chassis. Once the black water started to pour into the open windows, the car gave up and plunged to the bottom, temporarily erasing any trace that they had come this way.

In his estimation, the concrete boat launch hadn’t been used in decades, and their car would probably remain hidden for weeks, depending on the level of the reservoir. Of course, he was probably wrong on that account. Nearly everything in this part of Russia either appeared to be in a state of decades-long disrepair or had been hastily cobbled back together without the benefit of an architect or skilled labor, including the community of lake homes they had passed in Leninskoye on their way to this isolated stretch of lakefront — thirty miraculously uneventful kilometers from Vektor.

So uneventful that Farrington could scarcely believe their good fortune after the disaster outside of Koltsovo. The Vympel team clearly hadn’t expected to find them so close to Vektor, instead stumbling upon them out of sheer random coincidence while travelling south. No detailed calls had been made to law enforcement units in the Sovetskiy City District, as evidenced by the complete lack of even the most rudimentary police presence. The streets had been deserted, as expected on a Sunday night in a university town, but to completely avoid running into one patrol car had been nothing short of a miracle, especially driving around in their shot-up sedan.

One close look at their car would have been enough to raise the suspicions of even the most apathetic police officer. One of the side mirrors had been sheared clean by a bullet. The windshield had been peppered by at least four hits. The side windows along the right side of the car were down in forty-degree weather, mainly because the multiple bullet strikes to that side of the car had shattered the windows inside the doors. They had tried to roll one of the windows up, but it had jammed after a few inches, yielding nothing but broken safety glass. Finally, their left front headlight had been destroyed, making them an easy target for a police officer looking to make a few dollars with a warning ticket. Then again, he mused, their car didn’t look half bad for the streets of Novosibirsk. Maybe two officers sitting in a well-hidden patrol car had watched them pass, each shrugging at the sight of another beat-up car on the road.

Farrington ran with Misha along an overgrown dirt path to a flat stretch of sandy beach fifty meters down the shoreline. Their mafiya contacts had picked this spot for its isolation along the northern shore, and its correspondingly rare shallow-entry sandy beach. Hard-to-find spots like this along the lake were usually accessed by boat, which gave them some hope that the car wouldn’t be found by someone trying to back their boat trailer into the water tomorrow morning. Early June was still a little cold for recreational boaters, but in Siberia, a fifty-degree day in June was treated with more enthusiasm than a seventy-degree day in July. Either way, they should be on a helicopter headed to Kyrgyzstan by the time anyone decided to take their boat out for the day.

Emerging from the tall grass at the edge of the beach, Farrington was greeted by the business end of Gosha’s OTs-3 SVU sniper rifle, extended over the bow of their boat. The 23-foot whaler sat slightly canted on the sand with its engines idling. Gosha stood up and took station behind the whaler’s center console, while Farrington and Misha waded up to their knees in the frigid water and lifted themselves over the side of the boat. Before he had a chance to think about taking a seat, the engine roared, pulling them off the sand and into the deeper water of the reservoir. Gosha lowered his night vision goggles and pointed them in the direction of the southwestern end of the reservoir. Moments later, their boat accelerated to thirty knots, or roughly thirty-five miles per hour, skimming the surface of the lake.

The boat travelled significantly slower than a car and would eat into the precious block of time left to reach the border, but it afforded them a few advantages they could not ignore. The reservoir and the wide river beyond it could not be easily blocked like a road. Russian authorities wouldn’t expect them to travel by fast boat, and by the time they started to consider the possibility, Farrington’s team would be back on dry land. While not the fastest way to reach the border, travelling southwest across the entire length of the reservoir was the most direct route to their next checkpoint.

One hundred kilometers from their starting point on this beach, the reservoir turned south, emptying into a wide river delta, before narrowing again and becoming the Ob River. They would swap the boat for two SUVS hidden on the delta’s western shore. From there, they faced a 160 kilometer journey across dirt roads and rolling hills to the border, passing north of Lake Kulunda, a massive salt lake surrounded by industrial facilities.

Viktor’s Solntsevskaya scouts had mapped the entire route with GPS, claiming that it could be done in less than two hours. Farrington had his doubts about their estimate, given that they had conducted the dry runs during full daylight, when the SUVS could be pushed to 50 miles per hour on dirt roads. His team would make the same trip employing night vision, more than likely restricted to 35 miles per hour. It could take them nearly three hours to arrive within striking distance of the Russian/Kazakhstan border. At their current speed, they would arrive at the next checkpoint at 1:35 AM, giving them little leeway for the three-hour land portion of the exfiltration plan.

Sunrise was at 5:25 AM, but he had to subtract thirty minutes from that time, since the helicopter pilots had been ordered to turn back at civil twilight. D.C. wanted their precious birds clear of any inhabited areas by sunrise, which left him with a drop-dead arrival time of 4:55 AM. Three hours and twenty minutes to travel 160 kilometers, leaving him less than twenty minutes to deal with the unexpected.

He took the seat next to Gosha, which provided him some shelter from the thirty-knot artificial wind and gave their situation some thought. They’d have to make up some time on the open water. He glanced back at Sasha, who lay across the back of the passenger compartment on the deck, supported and surrounded by cushions taken from the seats and various life jackets found stowed throughout the boat. Seva sat behind him on the rear cockpit bench along the stern of the boat. Seva had regained consciousness after they crossed the Ob River dam, complaining of blurred vision and a throbbing headache. Since a strong possibility existed that he had suffered a concussion, he would rest and tend to Sasha’s comfort during the crossing. Only three out of six operatives remained fully combat-ready with nearly five hours left to go. The odds were not stacked in their favor.

He leaned over and yelled into Gosha’s right ear. “Open this thing up to just under full throttle. We need to make up some time.”

Gosha nodded and pushed the dual throttle forward as far as it would go, notching it back just slightly to avoid a full redline situation. Viktor’s men had assured him that the boat was in top condition, but running an engine at its full RPMs for an extended period of time was tempting fate, and he couldn’t imagine any of them had much karma left to spare at this point. The boat accelerated across the water, reaching 43 knots. He examined the dimmed chart plotter on the navigation screen and noted their new estimated time of arrival at checkpoint three. 1:10 AM. Twenty additional minutes to deal with the unexpected. Staring out into the impenetrable darkness, he couldn’t escape the sinking feeling that they would need more time.

Chapter 55

The president paced in front of his desk in his study, considering what Jacob Remy had just suggested: sending the helicopters back to Kyrgyzstan and letting Sanderson’s team fend for themselves inside of Kazakhstan. Remy’s logic was cold, but had been built on the realities of the situation. He needed to war-game this more, to make sure Remy wasn’t exerting undue influence. Remy had made it clear from the very beginning that he didn’t want to use U.S. military assets for any phase of the operation, but Sanderson wouldn’t budge without the guarantee of a military-supported extraction. Since everybody wanted to see the Russian bioweapons program destroyed, the limited use of military assets was approved. Now they were all having second thoughts.

“What are we looking at if we send the birds back to Kyrgyzstan?” he said.

“We avoid a potential disaster. This whole helicopter thing was just appeasement from the beginning. We can’t allow the birds to cross the border to pick up the team, so Sanderson’s people were always working under the assumption that the team would have to figure out a way to get into Kazakhstan. Shit. If they can get into Kazakhstan, we can send some fucking cars to pick them up at the nearest gas station. Anything but risking one of those helicopters.”

“Mr. President, Mr. Remy,” Lieutenant General Gordon said. “Two things to consider here. First, we gave Sanderson our word that his team would be picked up at the border and flown to safe—”

“Not if half of the Russian Army is on their heels,” Remy cut in.

“I don’t remember any conditions to their extraction, other than it taking place on Kazakhstan soil,” Gordon countered.

“This just got far more complicated than just a simple handshake,” said James Quinn, the National Security Advisor. “Light elements of the 21^st Guards Motor Rifle Division in Altay have been activated, along with the 122nd Reconnaissance Battalion in Novosibirsk. We’re talking a lot of Russian soldiers combing the area with crappy command and control. If Sanderson’s team gets caught up in a fight, the Russians might not stop at the border. We can’t put those helicopters in that kind of a situation.”

“I understand the complexity of these missions better than anyone in this room,” Gordon said. “Trust me, I’m not blind to the possible consequences here.”

“Then you can see why we can’t afford to lose one of those helos. Especially to the Russians,” Remy said.

“Maybe you shouldn’t have insisted that we use them, if you weren’t prepared to lose them,” Gordon said, directing his comment at the National Security Advisor.

“The task force has to fly within detection range of Semipalatinsk Airport to reach any of the possible extraction points. We can’t do that with conventional helicopters. You said it yourself,” Quinn reminded him.

“Well, we can’t undo this now without betraying the men and women who stuck their asses out to do us a favor,” Gordon said.

“These aren’t U.S. troops,” Remy said. “We’re talking mercenaries at best.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, Jacob,” the president interjected. He was painfully aware of the delicate line they all walked trying to classify Sanderson’s people, and he didn’t want to have this discussion with General Gordon.

“It doesn’t matter who they are. What we need to decide is whether we’re going to leave them hanging out to dry or use these helicopters for their intended purpose. We have to test them at some point. This is as good an opportunity as any,” Gordon said.

“We stick to the plan for now, but if this gets any hotter than it already is, I’ll strongly consider sending them back,” the president said.

He could tell that Jacob Remy wanted to continue the debate, but had decided to shelve it for now. When everyone had left the study, Remy closed the door and stared at him with the same look he’d given him for nearly ten years throughout his meteoric rise to the presidency.

“It’ll get hotter, and you know it. There’s no way they can avoid these units long enough to slip over the border. This is going to end badly for everyone,” Remy said.

“So we send the birds back and it only ends badly for Sanderson’s people?”

Remy shrugged his shoulders, not wanting to utter the words. The president hated this about his chief of staff. He’d put the knife in your hand and walk you right up to his intended victim, shrugging his shoulders with that “you know what to do” look plastered on his face, but he’d never be the one to do the stabbing.

“We’ll see this through to the end. If they have the entire Russian army at their heels, I’ll get our helicopters out of there,” the president said.

“I hope that won’t be too late,” Remy remarked dryly.

Chapter 56

The sleek white boat slowed to a crawl along the tree-covered shoreline to give Farrington the best chance of spotting their checkpoint without making another pass. The two SUVs had been hidden near the checkpoint early this morning by Viktor’s crew. In addition to providing Farrington with a GPS waypoint marking the location along the riverbank, the bratva soldiers had hung several infrared chemlights from the trees at the proposed landing site. The chemlights would fade significantly, but should provide more than enough illumination through night vision to enable a quick discovery.

“Got it. Come right slowly,” he said, feeling the boat sway. “Dead ahead,” he added, when the dangling green lights seen through his goggles reached the bow.

“I see them,” Gosha confirmed, steadying the boat on course.

Farrington made his way forward to join Misha on the bow to guard the approach. They scanned the dense, murky vegetation for signs of an ambush, sweeping their assault rifles in long arcs as the boat approached a worn path through the foliage. When he felt the hull scrape along the rocky bottom, he slung his rifle over his back and climbed over the side, landing on spongy ground less than a foot from the water. Misha passed him the bowline, which he hastily tied to a thick tree trunk planted several feet into the brush.

“I’m going to scout ahead and locate the vehicles. I want everything and everyone offloaded in two minutes,” he said, hearing the team’s immediate acknowledgements over his earpiece.

He shouldered his rifle and peered over the holographic sights. The path leading away from the riverbank was dim, even with the help of night vision goggles. He’d walk several meters and stop, listening for anything that didn’t belong along an isolated stretch of the Ob River at one in the morning on a Sunday, besides his own team. After repeating this process three more times, he arrived at the edge of a small clearing in the trees and searched for more faded IR chemlights. Swiftly locating the dying green lights, Farrington moved toward them, keeping his weapon trained toward the jeep trail that emptied into the clearing from the west.

He reached the SUVs, which had been hidden from view by several thick, richly foliated tree branches, and conducted a quick visual inspection of the tires. He opened the driver’s seat door of the nearest vehicle and found the keys under the driver’s seat. Everything appeared as advertised.

“Team. I found the vehicles, and I’m heading back in your direction. I want to be on the road in less than five minutes. We have a lot of ground to cover.”

“Roger. We’re already moving up the path,” Misha said.

“How much gear is left at the boat?”

“Your pack and the spare with extra ammunition and explosives.”

“Got it. I’ll call this in and get a SITREP from base,” Farrington said and took off for the path.

He removed the satellite phone from one of his tactical vest pouches and called base to get an updated report regarding enemy movements in his immediate area and along his exfiltration route. He temporarily switched off his intrasquad radio so his conversation wouldn’t block his own team’s communications. Sanderson answered immediately.

“This is base.”

“Base this is Blackjack. We’ve reached checkpoint three. The vehicles are here as advertised. We’re a few minutes from stepping off. Any change to the disposition of hostile forces?”

“Unfortunately, the situation has worsened. Elements of the 122^nd Reconnaissance Battalion have arrived along highway 380 from Novosibirsk, on your side of the river. They’re spreading out along the road, leaving vehicle checkpoints all the way down to Barnual. The 21^st Guards Motor Rifle Division hasn’t fielded any units, but we’ve seen indications that they’ll put light armored vehicle platoons at border checkpoints. With access to the main roads, they’ll have these in position within an hour or two.”

“I’m more concerned with the reconnaissance units. Is this armored reconnaissance?” Farrington said, moving out of the way for his team to pass along the path.

“Negative. No signs of BTRs or anything like that. Mostly Tigers or lighter,” Sanderson said.

“The Tigers might as well be armor given what we’re carrying for weapons. We’ll have to avoid them just the same. Any good news?”

“No helicopter activity so far,” Sanderson said.

“That’s really good news.”

“So far. Intelligence analysts are pretty sure that most helicopter assets have been shifted west and north in response to Monchegorsk. With things simmered down up there, they’ve conceded that it might be possible for some of these units to have returned. Novosibirsk airport was home to a squadron of Mi-8 Hips, so you might have to contend with airlifted troops near the border,” Sanderson said.

“Wonderful. I don’t suppose anyone at the Pentagon knows where the Mi-28 Havocs are based? I seem to remember one of those in this neck of the woods a few months ago.”

“I can’t get a straight answer about that. I don’t think they have any idea where it came from,” Sanderson said.

“There’s nothing we could do about it anyway, so there’s no point in worrying about it.”

“Exactly. I’m going to send you all known positions of hostile units, based on communications and satellite imagery. The CIA is analyzing the areas relevant to your projected path. Make sure to keep your RPDA (Ruggedized Personal Data Assistant) handy. We’ll continuously update this information on the RPDA’s digital map. From what I can tell right now, you’re going to have a problem about two kilometers down Highway 380. Two Tigers are sitting next to the road you plan to take west. I’d avoid that route,” Sanderson said.

Farrington thought about the location of the Tigers with respect to their exfiltration plan. The improvised dirt road represented one of the few westerly passages they could use to travel over thirty miles per hour until they reached some of the small townships halfway to the border. Their other options lay south of the Tiger checkpoint or several kilometers to the north. Driving north would add too much time overall, forcing them to work their way west along less desirable roads. They could always head straight across Highway 380 from their current position and try to find a jeep trail that connected with the original road, but satellite imagery had steered them away from this option early in the planning process, and he’d be hard-pressed to force it on himself now. There was always another option.

“We’ll have to take out the checkpoint. I need to be on that road if we’re to have any chance of making it across the border before the helicopters turn back,” Farrington said.

“You can use the jeep trails along the riverbank area. They connect to other clearings in the trees and sort of leapfrog to a hidden area directly east of their position. You’ll have to cross over four hundred meters of open space between the Tigers and the trees, but that shouldn’t be a problem. They won’t be expecting you to come from the river,” Sanderson said.

“Sounds like you had this worked out ahead of time,” Farrington said.

“I knew you wouldn’t give up on that road,” Sanderson said.

“Am I getting predictable?”

“Just the opposite. You’re starting to get interesting. How is Sasha doing?”

“As long as we don’t have to travel by foot, he’ll be fine. We’ve started to administer morphine to dull the pain. I wanted to hold off so he could work a gun, but there’s no way he’d be able to withstand the SUV ride,” Farrington said.

“All right. Does it make sense to pack the team into one vehicle?”

“It makes a lot of sense tactically, especially with Sasha, but practically, I need to run two vehicles. It’s darker than shit out here, and we’ll be moving fast. Anything more serious than a blown tire would put us out of business with one vehicle,” Farrington said.

“See what I mean? I predicted you’d go with one vehicle.”

“Keep a close eye on those Tigers. We’ll be headed out in two minutes.”

Farrington lifted his assault rucksack onto one shoulder and Grisha’s pack onto the other, finding his balance before heading off for the vehicles. His own pack was heavy enough, filled with water, batteries, ammunition, rope, medical supplies, and a variety of grenades, but Grisha’s pack pulled him down even further. They had emptied Grisha’s rucksack on the boat and refilled it with ammunition magazines, Semtex and two Claymore mines, all of which combined to weigh far more than his own pack. He heaved the weight along the path and caught up with the team at the SUVs. Sasha was already situated in one of the vehicles, propped against the left passenger door by rucksacks.

“Change of plans, gentlemen,” he announced to the dark cluster of operatives.

“Base found something in our way down the road. We’ll have to do a little housecleaning before we can proceed west.”

Chapter 57

Gosha sighted in on the rightmost GAZ-Tiger vehicle and adjusted the picture for maximum contrast. At 397 meters, the ATN Thor 6X thermal scope on his sniper rifle gave a crisp, high-resolution black-and-white digital image of the Tiger. He shifted his view to the second Tiger on the left and conducted the same drill, scanning the thermal image for personnel in the open. The gunners for each vehicle sat half-exposed in the roof hatch, scanning the highway to the north and south. From his few minutes of observation, he noted that they paid no attention to the dirt road leading to the river, which was fortunate. Farrington and the remaining two operatives had covered the open ground at a fast jog, counting on the slightly raised road to shield them from view by the gunners.

A ghostly white image appeared from the back of the vehicle on the right and walked toward the west, along the road Farrington insisted they would need to get out of Russia. The man stopped for a moment, facing away, and Gosha could tell that he was urinating. He was unarmed, which gave the sniper an idea.

“I have one target taking a piss to the west of the vehicles. No rifle. One target visible on top of each vehicle. This might be as good as it gets. We have a ten-second window of opportunity.”

“Let’s take it. Same plan as discussed,” Farrington said.

“Roger. Stand by,” Gosha said.

From his position in one of the trees, Gosha centered the reticle on the white image of the soldier standing behind the Pecheneg light machine. The machine gun represented the biggest threat to the three operatives lying on the other side of the road. If the gunner was quick to react, the Pecheneg’s high rate of fire could put them out of business quickly. Seva would focus his suppressed rifle fire on the second vehicle’s gunner, who sat behind an AGS-30 grenade launcher.

He relaxed his hand and started to apply pressure to the trigger. The 7.62X54mm steel jacketed projectile left the barrel while the crosshairs drifted over the target’s upper chest.

“Shot,” he said and shifted to his second target.

He didn’t relish the thought of shooting a man while he was taking a piss, but the man was dead either way, so what did it matter?

Farrington pushed himself up and sprinted for the Tiger. The bullet would take less than a half second to travel the distance, probably striking before he could fully raise himself off the gravel. He heard Seva’s suppressed AK-107 snap two short bursts, followed by the report of Gosha’s rifle. Through his night vision, he saw the gunner tumble out of the first vehicle. As he barreled across the two-lane road, he felt a projectile snap over his head.

“Target on ground is down. Sorry about the haircut,” Gosha said.

Farrington continued sprinting toward the vehicle several meters away, glancing briefly to his left to verify that the gunner of the second vehicle was no longer a threat. The soldier moments ago leaning against the grenade launcher had disappeared, so he didn’t break stride. He reached the Tiger just as a commotion broke out inside the vehicle.

Not wasting a second, he jumped onto the rear tire and grabbed the steel bar at the edge of the jeep’s roof, heaving himself onto the roof. He landed on his stomach and quickly rolled to his side to access one of the grenades on his vest. He tore the safety pin out of a fragmentation grenade and released the handle, throwing the grenade through the open hatch. A discordance of screams and panic erupted inside the vehicle.

Farrington stood and fired his AK-107 through the hatch, adding to the mayhem. After firing the extended burst, he jumped off the Tiger and rolled on the ground to face the jeep, emptying the rest of the magazine at anyone attempting to escape through the passenger doors. The grenade detonated inside the Tiger with a muffled thump that exploded the windows and knocked open the rear hatch. Nobody appeared to have escaped. The second Tiger suffered a similar fate less than a second later.

He quickly lifted himself off the ground and checked the other side of the smoking jeep. A mangled corpse hung upside down from an open door, its lifeless hands barely raking the hard-packed dirt below the vehicle. He didn’t expect to find any survivors. The effects of a fragmentation grenade in such a small space could be devastating.

“Tiger one is clear,” he announced.

“Tiger two clear,” Misha said.

“Copy. Let’s load up the bodies and get these vehicles out of sight. Gosha, keep an eye out for unexpected company on the road.”

“Already scanning. Looks clear.”

Farrington yanked the blood-slick body up by its vest and pushed it through the front seats into the back of the Tiger. The inside of the vehicle looked ghastly through his NVGs, still sizzling and smoking from the intense damage done by the grenade. He counted three bodies, including the driver, all blasted beyond recognition, much of them adorning the seats and equipment. He flipped the starter switch and the diesel engine roared to life, which was a small miracle after the grenade blast. He stopped for a moment and examined the back of the Tiger again, pausing to look up through the hatch at the overcast night. Instead of driving off with the other Tiger, he climbed over the dead driver and stood up through the hatch, examining the Pecheneg machine gun. He pulled the charging handle back and aimed down the road, firing off a burst.

“You got something?” Gosha asked.

“Negative. Just thinking,” Farrington replied, looking at the second Tiger crossing the highway.

“I’m thinking the same thing,” Misha said.

“That we just traded in our unarmored SUVs for heavily armored jeeps?” Farrington said.

“Exactly,” Misha said.

“Sounds like a plan. Let’s transfer all of the gear and get out of here.”

Six minutes later, they were packed into one of the Tigers, headed west along the improvised road at nearly 65 miles per hour. They’d lost nearly fifteen minutes dealing with the checkpoint, but they could make up all of that time in their new transportation. If anything, they might even gain time. Similar to the “Humvee,” the Tiger was a high-mobility, multipurpose military vehicle, equipped with a powerful diesel, turbocharged, air-cooled engine. Independent torsion suspension, telescopic shock absorbers and regulated-pressure tires gave it a top speed of 55 miles per hour over rough terrain and up to 90 miles per hour on the road.

The Tiger’s unyielding endurance for poor road conditions left Farrington confident that they could condense the team into one vehicle. He’d chosen the jeep with the grenade launcher because the weapon presented a capability they didn’t have organic to any of their weapons — long range high-explosive munitions. The Pecheneg machine gun would have been nice, but the ability to fire 30mm grenades at a rate of two per second would come in handy if they ran into any more armored vehicles. He could almost guarantee that these wouldn’t be the last Tigers they ran into out here. He just hoped they didn’t bump into any light armored vehicles from the 21^st Guards Motor Rifle Division. The 30mm grenades would be useless against those, along with everything else they carried.

Chapter 58

Karl Berg removed his headset and turned to Audra Bauer, who was examining satellite footage on her two screens.

“They’re clear of the checkpoint, moving west in one of the Tigers,” Berg said.

“Smart move taking the Tiger,” she commented.

“They’re going to need all the help they can get. The Tiger might give them the edge they need to pull this off. They won’t have to stick to roads or trails when they get near the border, which is a major improvement to their plan. They should be able to slip through the 21^st Motor Rifle Division units along the border,” Berg said.

“Speaking of the 21^st, satellite imagery and electronic intercepts confirm that a brigade from the 142^nd Motor Rifle Regiment has started to deploy from their base in Biysk. Estimated time of arrival along the border zones for the bulk of the brigade is two hours. Early elements will arrive within the hour,” Bauer said.

“Shit. We’re looking at BTRs, BRDMs, Urals and Tigers. Anything with wheels. They can’t move the tracked infantry fighting vehicles into that area fast enough. How many are missing from the base in Biysk so far?”

“They’re still counting. At least thirty BTR-80s and seventy Tigers, along with a dozen utility trucks. All headed west.”

“Add that to the 122^nd Recon Battalion’s sixty plus Tigers to the east and we can conclude that somebody’s pissed back in Moscow,” Berg said. “Audra, can you direct one of the satellites to babysit the checkpoint Blackjack just eliminated? Eventually, someone is going to wonder why the checkpoint isn’t responding and take a look. I want to give Blackjack a heads-up when that happens,” he said, standing up.

“Sure. You headed somewhere?” she said.

“I need to make a call,” he said.

“Your guy in Russia?” she said.

“Could be a woman. I was a hot ticket back in the day,” he said, winking.

She shook her head and started typing instructions to the NRO satellite handlers, leaving Berg to his phone call. He was glad she quickly assumed he was calling Kaparov. It made sense given the fact that Vektor had been attacked. At some point during the night, if it hadn’t happened already, Kaparov would be awakened with the news that a facility containing samples of biological material suitable for weaponization had been breached. Of course, there would be no mention of the bioweapons laboratory. Kaparov would be asked to analyze the threat posed by the possible theft of viral samples like smallpox and avian flu. He’d wait for Kaparov to call with the “shocking” news.

No. Berg had a different call to make. One he couldn’t make in the CIA operations center. If anyone discovered what he had arranged behind all of their backs, he ran the risk of losing the asset before it could be employed. It was better that they discovered his plan when the consequences of shutting it down outweighed letting it proceed.

He exited the “Fishbowl” section of the operations center and walked toward the exit, eager to retrieve his cell phone.

“I need to make a call outside of the operations center,” Berg said, addressing the two security guards manning the entrance station.

Less than a minute later, he stood in the hallway outside of the operations center. He walked through the deserted hallway and speed-dialed the number he needed. He waited for the call to connect, which took several seconds, since the signal had to travel halfway around the world and negotiate encryption protocols at its destination.

“Weatherman standing by for you to authenticate.”

Berg pressed the ten-digit combination of numbers assigned for the operation.

“Good evening, Mr. Berg. Black Rain is spooled up and ready for launch.”

“Good timing, Weatherman. Launch Black Rain immediately and proceed to holding area over Lake Kulunda.”

“Roger. We’ll have her airborne in a few minutes. Time to station estimated at 0425 local.”

“Copy 0425. I’ll open a channel in the operations center for terminal control at approximately 0400 local. Have a safe flight,” Berg said.

“We always do. I’ll expect to hear from you at 0400 local. Weatherman out.”

Berg put the phone back in his jacket pocket and leaned against the wall, breathing heavily. He was extremely nervous about the next three and a half hours. If he got lucky, Farrington’s team would slip through the Russians’ net and drive right across the border to be picked up by Black Magic. Black Rain would never be used, and it would be high fives all the way to the White House. Berg was no stranger to luck, but his breaks didn’t come so neatly wrapped. Three and a half hours and this would be over, one way or the other, and nobody could accuse him of shortchanging Sanderson’s people. He could live with the consequences of putting Black Rain into play to give Farrington’s team a fighting chance.

Chapter 59

Lieutenant Colonel Maxim Odenko ran his finger along an unfolded road map of the Altai Krai region, squinting to make out the details. Battle lights bathed everything within his command vehicle in a dull red glow that preserved the occupants’ night vision, but cast a monochromatic film over his map. He could barely make out the terrain features, not that it really mattered. He didn’t have the resources to start scouring small valleys or posting units on hilltops. He barely had enough vehicles to cover the roads adequately.

He had the three hundred kilometer stretch of Highway 380 between Novosibirsk and Barnual locked down to the best of his battalion’s ability. Sixty-three vehicles were spread along the highway at ten to twenty-kilometer intervals, covering all of the major western roads or trails they could identify using local maps and satellite imagery. A smaller number of vehicles had been dispatched along Highway M52, but the local law enforcement response from towns along the highway had been swift to respond, blocking the north-south route at Cherepanovo and Tal’menka within thirty minutes of the terrorist action against the state institute in Koltsovo. Unless the police were full of shit, there was no way the terrorists could have travelled Highway M52 quickly enough to make it through those cities before the roadblocks were established.

His bet was on Highway 380, not that he thought it mattered at this point. Unless the perpetrators had taken an hour-long nap on the side of the road, they had already cleared these roads and headed west. He’d requested permission to start moving his units along the roads they were guarding, but the request had been quickly denied pending updated intelligence. Orders from the 41^st Army commander had been explicit, and in true bureaucratic fashion, it was too soon to consider a shift in tactics, regardless of the obvious.

His battalion would seal the highway from Novosibirsk to Barnual and let the 21^st Motor Rifle Division and Border Guard Service barracks in Karasuk handle the border…despite the fact that the terrorist attack had taken place nearly two and a half hours earlier and the perpetrators had not been seen since the ambush outside of Koltsovo. His patience was starting to wear thin with headquarters, especially at two thirty in the morning. Sitting on this road was a waste of time, and everyone in his command knew it. Now it was apparently taking its toll on his men.

“How long since checkpoint twelve reported?” Odenko said.

A bleary-eyed lieutenant holding a radio handset answered from across the small table. “They missed the one-thirty checkin, so it’s been over an hour at this point.”

“That’s too long, damn it! I’ll hang the sergeant in charge of that group and relieve his platoon commander if we find out they fell asleep. Send that useless fuck over to check on his men. I shouldn’t have to tell him to do this! Or you!” Odenko said.

“Zulu Three this is Alpha Zulu, over,” the lieutenant said over the command net.

“This is Zulu Three, over.”

“Send one of your vehicles to investigate Zulu Two Five’s position and report their status immediately, over.”

“This is Zulu Two actual. We’re trying to raise radio contact with Zulu Two Five, but suspect communications gear issues or possible atmospheric interference, over.”

Odenko swiped the handset from the young lieutenant and responded. “This is Alpha Zulu actual. You need to quit suspecting every reason under the sun for their failure to follow orders and get someone over there to confirm what happened. I want a report within ten minutes, out.”

He heard the communications net key a few times, as the lieutenant on the other end of the line debated whether to respond. He’d closed the loop on any response by ending his transmission with “out,” which he hoped ended the conversation.

“If he says one word, I’ll call an airstrike down on his position,” Odenko said.

“Do we have air assets on station, sir?” the lieutenant asked.

His battalion master sergeant snickered from the front passenger seat as Odenko stared at the lieutenant in disbelief. “Did any air assets check in with you tonight?”

“Negative. There are no air assets. I answered my own question,” the officer said, clearly intimidated by his plum assignment to the battalion command vehicle.

“Next time answer it before you ask it!” Odenko said, noting that the master sergeant had not stopped his muffled laugh.

“Don’t laugh, Master Sergeant. It only makes me more irritable,” Odenko said.

Given the level of dysfunction he had witnessed so far, he’d have to schedule more night training for the battalion. The battalion barely received enough fuel to conduct basic daytime maneuvers, but he didn’t care if they just sat in a field and counted the stars. Mobilizing the battalion out of a deep sleep had been a painful experience he did not care to repeat. He could foresee many emergency recall drills in the upcoming months. Twelve minutes later, the radio came to life.

“Alpha Zulu, this is Zulu Two actual. Zulu Two Four reports that Two Five is not at the checkpoint, over.”

“What do you mean they are not at the checkpoint?” Odenko said, well past using proper radio protocol.

“They’re missing, sir.”

“Well, you need to find them!”

“This is Zulu Two. I’ll shift vehicles and start a search of the area, over.”

“I’m coming myself. We’re less than fifteen kilometers away. Out,” Odenko said.

This was a regular clusterfuck. He didn’t know who had screwed up at this point. Was Zulu Two Four looking in the wrong place? Or was Zulu Two Five sitting in the wrong spot, oblivious to their error…and apparently the radio? He’d soon find out.

“Kamarov, let the other vehicle know that we’re headed to Two Five’s checkpoint location,” Odenko said.

Eight minutes later, Odenko spotted a lone vehicle on the road through his night vision goggles, crushing any hopes of finding Zulu Two Five along the road. According to his handheld GPS, they were less than a kilometer from the assigned checkpoint location, so the lone vehicle had to be Zulu Two Four. Now he started to worry. He couldn’t think of any reason why they would be off the highway. He lowered himself into the hatch, out of the 65 mile per hour wind buffeting him.

“Can you confirm that’s Two Four up ahead?”

“Wait one, sir!” the lieutenant replied.

Odenko climbed back up and gripped the Pecheneg machine gun for stability against the gale-force wind created by the Tiger’s speed along the highway. A few seconds after that, Odenko saw the vehicle’s headlights flash twice.

“It’s Two Four, sir. They just flashed their lights!” the lieutenant said through the hatch.

“Got it!” he replied.

Not good. Two of his Tigers, carrying eight of his men, had vanished into thin air, either leaving their checkpoint without authorization or never arriving. He started to climb down into the vehicle to talk with the Tiger on the road, when his night vision goggles flashed bright white, effectively blinding him. He immediately raised the goggles attached to his helmet and tried to pierce the darkness with his degraded sight. The deep sound of an explosion reached him seconds later, just as his vision had cleared enough for him to determine that a fireball had erupted behind a line of trees to the east of the highway. He pulled back on the Pecheneg’s charging handle and swiveled the mount in the direction of the dissipating flame. He felt someone climbing through the hatch and looked back to see Private Second Class Marakev squeezing through.

“I got this, sir!” the private said.

Odenko grabbed his shoulder. “Scan three hundred and sixty degrees. We have no idea what we’re dealing with!” He struggled to yell over the wind.

Private Marakev lowered his night vision and squeezed by to take charge of the machine gun, relieving Odenko of his duty to protect the command vehicle from immediate threat. Odenko dropped into the rear compartment of the Tiger and took the handset from his lieutenant.

“Two Four, this is Alpha Zulu actual. What is your status? Over.”

“This is Two Four. I sent two men on foot to investigate Tiger tracks heading toward the river. They had just reported finding one of the Tigers when the explosion occurred. I’ve lost contact!” the sergeant said frantically.

“Sergeant, take a deep breath, and get a hold of yourself. My unit will investigate the explosion and bring back your men. Stay alert and watch the road. This could be a diversion of some sort. Out.”

“Master Sergeant, get us over to the explosion. Lieutenant, I need you topside with your rifle.”

He popped back through the hatch just as their Tiger started to slow to make the turn at the checkpoint. Through the pitch-dark night, he could make out the shapes of both soldiers on top of Two Four’s Tiger. His driver gingerly dropped them onto the shoulder and pointed the Tiger in the direction of the treeline. Odenko lowered his night vision goggles and immediately saw the bright green glow of a burning vehicle through the trees. The Tiger moved forward slowly.

“Watch your targets. We have two friendlies in the immediate vicinity of the explosion,” Odenko said.

“Yes, sir,” the private replied, scanning the darkness with the machine gun.

Odenko lowered himself into the vehicle just as the lieutenant arrived at the hatch, tightly gripping an AK-74.

“You cover any direction Marakev isn’t watching,” he said, adjusting the young officer’s night vision goggles and patting him on the shoulder.

He had no idea what they were headed into behind the rapidly approaching tree line, but as a reconnaissance battalion, scouting the unknown was their primary mission, and he was excited to finally do what he had trained a lifetime to do. He just hadn’t expected his vehicle to lead the way on the battalion’s first combat reconnaissance mission since he’d taken command two years earlier. If he’d known this ahead of time, he would have put a few more experienced soldiers on the guns of his Tiger.

Chapter 60

Farrington stared intensely through the night vision goggles at the featureless green road ahead of them. The chilly night air blasted his face through the missing windshield, pelting his cheeks and neck with stinging pebbles. A small price to pay for a better off road vehicle and armor that could stop most small arms fire. He strained to see as far ahead as possible and make what little sense he could of the deeply rutted dirt road.

Travelling at thirty-five miles per hour along this confusing jumble of jeep trails for the past twenty minutes had put them into the trees twice, costing them precious time. He desperately wanted to avoid any more involuntary off-road trips, but he had no intention of slowing down any further. He needed to close the distance to the border while they were alone on the roads. Once they started to attract company, travel would become perilous and require more caution, which was why they had detoured slightly from his original plan twenty minutes earlier and found themselves on these miserable trails.

They had just completed a shortcut through a small hamlet of dirt roads and corrugated tin huts called Verkh Payva, in an attempt to link up with a road that could support another high-speed run. They hadn’t seen a single light in the village as they sped through at seventy miles per hour. Every small settlement they’d encountered west of Highway 380 had been the same — eerily quiet and dark, just the way he liked it.

His original plan had been to travel north of the town and continue on what had turned out to be a reliable jeep trail, but he had become hopelessly addicted to travelling at seventy miles per hour. They’d already made up the time lost at the checkpoint and gained a few minutes on their exfiltration deadline. The road they sought through the thick trees and washed-out trails ran for fifty miles to the town of Znamenka, on the northern tip of Lake Kulunda. If he could hit sixty miles per hour on the road ahead, he could gain more time. Based on Sanderson’s last report, elements of the 21^st Motor Rifle Division had started to set up roadblock positions in the towns closest to the border. Znamenka was thirty miles from the border, so he didn’t anticipate anything more than local law enforcement.

The Tiger’s chassis crunched and shook as they hit a sizable washout along the road, seriously testing the vehicle’s supposedly undefeatable suspension system. He wasn’t sure how many times they could plow over a downed tree or crash through a washout at forty-five miles per hour before they threw an axle or bent a pin, disabling the vehicle permanently.

“You can slow down if you see stuff like that,” Farrington said, “no point in walking the rest of the way.”

“I was hoping you’d say that. I’m not sure how much more this thing can take,” Misha said from behind the wheel.

Farrington’s satellite phone rang, and he plugged it into his communications rig.

“What are we looking at?” Farrington answered.

“I noticed you took a little detour,” Sanderson said.

“I’m going to make up some time on the road between Verkh Sayva and Znamenka,” Farrington said.

“Just be careful. The 121^st Recon battalion started moving west a few minutes ago, which means they found the ambushed Tiger. You bought some extra time with the booby traps, but they know you’re headed west. High-profile roads might not be the best idea. The 21^st Motor Rifle Division will respond accordingly and likely expand east from the border area. We can’t track all of these units.”

“I understand. Has the 21^st shown any movement?”

“Negative, but it won’t be long, and you have a Border Guard barracks in the area. They know the area better than you do. If there’s a quick way to get to that road you’re taking, they’ll show the 21^st the way. We’ll keep a close eye on Znamenka.”

“That’s all we can do. Two hours and this is over,” Farrington said.

“And there’s no wiggle room. Berg is worried that the White House might yank the helos early if things get too hot. We still have a few cards to play, but I don’t have a trump card this time,” Sanderson said.

“Understood. Is Black Rain still online?”

“Affirmative. ETA 0425 over Lake Kulunda. We’ll track your progress and adjust accordingly. It looks like you’ll be past the lake by 0425, so we might head it straight to your position. That should shave a few minutes off the ETA.”

“I think that’s the best plan. I’d send it to Slavgorod,” Farrington said.

“You’re not punching through Slavgorod.”

“I’m not planning on that, but I estimate that we’ll be somewhere northwest of Slavgorod at that point. At least I hope so. If not, we’re fucked.”

Slavgorod was fifteen miles from the border, but not directly connected to Kazakhstan by a major road. Hundreds of jeep trails and unmarked dirt roads snaked west into the fields and rolling hills, crisscrossing and emptying directly into Kazakhstan. They anticipated a sizable military presence in Slavgorod, so the plan was to run well north of the city through the myriad trails winding through trees, streams and mild gradients. Once they reached a point less than a mile from the border, they would turn due west and take the Tiger on a true off-road journey, relying on Berg and Sanderson to avoid any final patrols. If they hadn’t swung past Slavgorod by 4:25, they were unlikely to reach the border in time for pickup, especially travelling north of the city.

“All right. I’ll reroute Black Rain to Slavgorod. How is Sasha holding up?” Sanderson said.

“He’s holding up better in the Tiger. We have him lying down, strapped to one of the troop benches. His vitals are stable, but we have him fully drugged up on morphine. The road would have killed him,” Farrington said.

“And Seva?”

“Severe concussion from what we can tell. His vision seems fine, and he’s one hundred percent mission-capable, but he’s started to vomit frequently. I’ll be glad to get these two on a bird heading home.”

“I want all of you on a bird heading home. Be careful on that road,” Sanderson said, ending the call.

“I think this is our road,” Misha said, slowing the Tiger down to a crawl.

Farrington grabbed the RPDA and activated the screen, scrolling to a tighter view of the digital map. Examining the map for several seconds, he agreed. “I concur. Viktor’s people ran this road at sixty miles per hour during the day, so what do you say we try fifty?”

“That’s all?” Misha said.

“Feel free to push it if you can keep us on the road,” Farrington said, feeling the Tiger accelerate onto the wide dirt road.

“You up for sixty, Seva?” Misha asked.

“I might get some splash back from my own puke at sixty. Ten would be nice,” Seva said, eliciting a laugh from the team.

“Might get some splash back? I’m already getting a taste up here. Maybe you could aim lower?” Gosha said from the gun turret.

“I’ll send the next batch right up your way. Sixty it is,” Seva said.

“Fucking great,” Gosha said.

Once the Tiger stabilized on the road, Misha rocketed them forward at a speed that brought a smile to Farrington. He leaned over to examine the speedometer. Sixty-three miles per hour. At this speed, they’d cruise through Znamenka before any of the 21^st’s vehicles could mobilize.

Chapter 61

Farrington didn’t have time to further articulate his decision to run the blockade. Their Tiger was rapidly approaching the maximum effective range of the weapons likely to be mounted on the vehicles at Znamenka, and he didn’t have much time to coordinate a strategy before 30mm grenades started raining down on them.

“We’re running it. I’ll call you once were through, out,” he said, jamming the satellite radio into the center console.

“Gosha! Anything yet?” he said.

“Nothing. I don’t see shit!”

Sanderson reported the sudden appearance of three vehicles on the edge of Znamenka. Two Tigers with multiple weapons mounts and one Ural 4320, heavy off-road trucks capable of transporting an infantry platoon. All of this was supposedly in the open, but nobody in his Tiger had been able to spot the blockade force through their night vision goggles. Still more than two kilometers away, the unmagnified NVGs couldn’t provide a crisp enough image to pick them out of the background. He also wondered if the rolling hills didn’t play a major role. If the vehicles were situated in a small depression outside of town, they might not see them until the last second. He wanted to believe that the Russians would have the same problem, but he knew better.

“Seva, take over for Gosha on the gun. Gosha, try to pick them up on your thermal scope,” Farrington said.

“Got it,” Gosha replied.

The maximum effective range for an AGS-30 automatic grenade launcher was 1700 meters, but he didn’t expect the Russians to engage his Tiger that far out. The 30mm grenades fired by the system travelled at 183 meters per second and would take an eternity to arc down onto target at that range, rendering impossible the task of adjusting fire on a fast-moving target. The automatic grenade launcher was designed to engage static or slow-moving targets with overwhelming firepower, so he anticipated a strategy better suited to the weapon starting at 1000 meters.

Tactically, the best way to stop an approaching vehicle with an area weapon like the AGS-30 was to create a wall of fragmentation and high-explosive detonations at a fixed point in front of the vehicle and let it sail through. He planned to exploit this tactic to get their lone vehicle past the initial grenade threat unscathed. After that, it would come down to speed and firepower, as it always did in open combat.

“Slow it down to fifty miles per hour, Misha,” Farrington said.

The Tiger immediately decelerated, launching him forward against his seat belt.

“Shouldn’t we be speeding up?” Misha said.

“Not yet. I just had an idea. Be ready to floor it.”

Gosha sat on the back lip of the hatch and peered through the thermal scope at the bouncing purple image. He was thankful they had slowed down because the jolting and bumping at seventy miles per hour would have made this task impossible. He had changed the digital scope’s settings from black-and-white to color, in order give him the best chance of picking up warm engine blocks, hot exhaust pipes and personnel in the open. Thermal returns would appear in the orange to yellow range, with yellow signifying the hottest sources. He expected to see the Ural’s exhaust pipe first, since it was located high above the cabin, followed by the gunners manning the weapons on the Tigers. His scope showed nothing but a sea of purple.

“Negative on the thermal scope. They must be masked by a hill,” Gosha said.

Seva sat on the right side of the open hatch, trying to remain clear of Gosha’s view. He swayed on the edge, which made Gosha nervous. Seva had vomited at least five times in the past hour, yielding little more than the water he was trying desperately to force down to stay hydrated. He lowered the scope for a moment to grab Seva’s vest and pull him closer.

“I’m good, man. I’m good,” Seva insisted.

He was far from good. The operative was fading fast, suffering from a severe concussion and possibly a cerebral blood clot. He needed to be strapped into the bench across from Sasha, receiving intravenous saline, but they had neither the saline nor the luxury of retiring his gun until they reached the extraction point.

“Hang in there, brother. Less than an hour to go,” Gosha said, slapping him on the shoulder.

He lifted the rifle back into position and scanned the deep purple image, sweeping left to right along the perceived level of the horizon. The Tiger hit something in the road, slamming the scope into his eye socket and dazing him momentarily. The road smoothed out again, and he got the sensation that they were climbing a gentle hill. He put the scope to his face, afraid of taking another mind-numbing punch to the head and prayed the hill’s elevation would give him the view he needed. Nothing appeared for several seconds as he anticipated the Tiger’s next jolt. Suddenly, he saw the entire formation. Three unmistakable vehicle heat signatures and a dozen smaller yellow specks surrounding them.

“Contact confirmed. Three vehicles. One Tiger on each side of the road. Utility truck behind the Tiger on the right. Marking targets,” he said, moving forward in the hatch to a position next to the grenade launcher.

He activated the AN/PQS-23 Micro-Laser Rangefinder (MLRF) and triggered the narrow beam, centering the thermal scope’s crosshairs on the rightmost Tiger. The laser was invisible to his thermal scope, but would appear as a crisp, bright line to his team’s night vision goggles, leading directly to the hostile vehicles. Unfortunately, the Russians would see the same laser and know that their blockade had been spotted.

“Got them. Three vehicles,” Farrington said.

“Same here. Give me the first target,” Seva said, suddenly flush with energy.

“Range to right Tiger?” Farrington said.

“Hold on,” he said, fumbling with the MLRF’s rubberized buttons.

The green LED readout on the back of the MLRF gave him a distance of 1700 meters, but he wasn’t sure the laser had been centered on the Tiger, since he couldn’t see the laser in his scope.

“Confirm that my laser is on target. On three, two, mark,” he said.

“On target!” Farrington and Seva yelled simultaneously.

“Sixteen hundred meters!” Gosha said.

“Mark the right Tiger for Seva and watch your rangefinder. Our first salvo goes out at 1000 meters. I need to know the instant they start shooting,” Farrington said.

“Copy that,” Gosha said. “You ready, my friend?” he said, nudging Seva.

“As long as you don’t nudge me while I’m firing,” he replied, sounding much like the smart-ass Seva he knew.

Lieutenant Mikhail Greshev lowered his rifle in utter disbelief. Standing on the hood of his Tiger, he had been watching the vehicle’s approach through the night vision scope on his rifle for over a minute. The vehicle had disappeared behind a hill for several seconds, and when it reappeared, a bright green laser connected his vehicle with the oncoming Tiger.

“They’re marking us, sir!” said the sergeant manning the automatic grenade launcher.

“I can see that,” he grunted, jumping down onto the hard ground.

“Do they have air support?” his platoon sergeant said from the window of the Tiger.

“Nothing was reported. They’re probably ranging us,” Greshev said. “Radio!” he said, fuming that his radioman had suddenly gone missing.

A soldier trotted up to him from the darkness and pushed a radio handset into his shoulder.

“Intrasquad net,” Greshev said, swiping the handset.

“Yes, sir.”

“Master Sergeant, make sure he’s sighted in on the 700 meter mark. Fire on my command only,” he said, sending the same command over the radio to the other Tiger. “Battalion command net,” he ordered.

“Right away, sir,” his radioman said.

He was in the middle of reporting contact with the suspected terrorist cell when one of the soldiers across the street started screaming, “They’re shooting at us!” He raised his rifle and stared through the scope, watching in horror as the grenade launcher on the approaching Tiger flashed bright green several times.

“Incoming!” the gunner screamed behind him, scattering everyone standing near the Tiger.

He did the math in his head, like he had been trained to do. The incoming fire would be inaccurate and likely ineffective at first, but the hostile force could rain grenades down on him for another fifteen seconds before his first grenades arched skyward. The terrorists had started firing well outside of the 700 meter marker. Even an ineffective barrage could cause mayhem throughout the platoon, disrupting his carefully laid plan. All of this information collided inside a brain well aware that an unknown number of 30mm high-explosive projectiles were a few seconds away from possibly landing on top of him. Suddenly confronted with conflicting information, under threat of annihilation, he did what any newly minted officer might do in a similar situation. He panicked and tried to make a last-second adjustment to a plan that would have served him well.

“Gunners, add 200 meters and fire! Add 200 meters! Fire!”

He searched for his radioman, but couldn’t make anything out in the darkness. He had been using the night vision scope on his rifle so frequently throughout the night that he had practically forgotten about the night vision goggles attached to his helmet. He took off running for the road, screaming his orders to the second Tiger and colliding with one of his own soldiers. Knocked off his feet, he regained his footing just as both of his own Tigers started lobbing grenades down the road.

He crouched in place on the side of the road and waited for the hostile rounds to land in his position, showering the black sky with glistening body parts and glowing metal fragments. Instead, the first salvo of projectiles from the inbound Tiger struck 100 meters short of their position. By the time the deep, rhythmic thumping of multiple high-explosive impacts reached him, he realized what he had done. He had effectively killed his platoon.

“Enemy rounds out! 900 meters to target,” Gosha screamed, keeping the laser centered on the rightmost Tiger.

“Reloading!” Seva yelled.

The AGS-30 was fed by a detachable drum that held twenty-nine grenades. With a rate of fire exceeding 400 rounds per minute, the weapon was good for four to five sustained bursts before reloading. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a spare operative to help with the procedure.

He felt the Tiger lurch forward on the road as Seva disappeared, straining at its top speed of 90 miles per hour along the improvised road. His rifle bounced everywhere as the speeding Tiger jarred him against the hatch, rendering his efforts useless.

“Help Seva reload! I need that gun back up in twenty seconds!” Farrington said.

Gosha slung his rifle and swiveled the launcher ninety degrees to the right to facilitate reloading. Twenty seconds was a tall order for a crew that had just practiced loading and reloading this system for the first time an hour and a half ago on an even road. He detached the empty drum and tossed it over the back of the Tiger, catching multiple flashes in his peripheral vision. He turned his head over his shoulder, watching in awe for a brief second as several dozen bursts of white light, surrounded by brilliant orange sparks, decorated the road behind them.

“Multiple impacts. 100 meters behind us,” Gosha said, grabbing the ammunition drum handed to him from inside the Tiger.

Now he understood what Farrington had done. He had lured them into overshooting somehow and very likely emptying their ammunition drums. At 90 miles per hour, their Tiger would reach the convoy in less than thirty seconds, which might not give the Russians enough time to put their grenade launchers back into action. His team’s biggest concern from this point forward would be vehicle-mounted machine guns and small arms fire, which was no small threat to their lightly armored vehicle. Fortunately, they would have twenty-nine rounds of 30mm ammunition to even the odds. He attached the drum and secured it tightly, stepping to the right to put his laser back into action. Seva finished the job, pulling back on the charging handle and searching for the rightmost Tiger through the 2.7X sight attached to the AGS-30.

Green tracers raced past them, snapping closely overhead and bouncing off the ground in front of them.

“300 meters!”

He winced as a tracer bounced off the grenade launcher mount, sizzling the air between their heads. Unfazed by the close call, Seva put the AGS-30 back into action, concentrating the 30mm maelstrom on the two heavily armed vehicles. Through the thermal scope, Gosha saw several yellow blossoms envelop the rightmost Tiger, which was immediately followed by a similar digital light show on the left side of the road. His entire scope image suddenly turned bright white, causing him to lower the rifle. A massive fireball rose in front of them, indicating that one of the Russian vehicles had been destroyed by a secondary explosion. The AGS-30 coughed several more rounds and fell silent amidst the chaos of inbound tracers, supersonic cracks and the sound of bullets striking metal.

“Switching to rifle!” Seva yelled, indicating that the launcher’s drum was empty.

Gosha ejected the spent magazine in his rifle and reloaded another from one of the pouches on his vest, firing at the bright flashes seen through his fuzzy thermal sight, keeping only his shoulders and head exposed through the hatch. Seva took the same position on the right side of the Tiger, and they both fired furiously at the quickly approaching cluster of soldiers on the ground.

Lieutenant Greshev hugged the ground, flattened by the explosion of the Tiger and simply afraid to stand up. From his position on the side of the road, he could see the darkened hull of a Tiger speeding directly for him. In less than a minute, his platoon had been destroyed because of his error, and now he lay behind the bullet-riddled body of the soldier he had knocked down running blindly through the dark. A series of small explosions ripped through a small knot of brave soldiers trying desperately to put one of the platoon’s light machine guns back into action. He could see all of this now through the night vision goggles that he had forgotten about earlier. He could also see that nothing moved in his command vehicle, which had been obliterated seconds earlier by the same weapon that just killed the few surviving members of his platoon. He couldn’t imagine any of the soldiers near the light machine gun surviving the simultaneous detonation of several high-explosive grenades in their midst.

As the Tiger raced toward him, he made a split-second decision to atone for his failure and bring honor back to the platoon. He tensed his body and made sure that the safety on his AK-74 was not engaged. When the Tiger reached a point less than thirty meters away, he jumped to his feet and fired his rifle from the hip in the general direction of the speeding vehicle beside him. His lifeless body hit the ground without knowing what he had accomplished.

Using his rifle’s angled tritium sights, Gosha fired a hasty burst at a soldier superimposed against the flames of the burning vehicle. Before he could assess the effects of the burst, a hammer-like impact dropped him through the hatch into the rear compartment. Seva’s body followed him through the hatch, landing directly on top of him and dislocating his right shoulder, which had been pinned underneath him by the fall. The pain in his shoulder flared so intensely that he momentarily lost track of the fact that something had knocked him off his feet. He lay there for a second, unable to process what had happened, until the Tiger jolted, tearing at his dislocated shoulder.

“Motherfucker!” he said, pushing Seva with his left arm.

He could tell that Seva was dead. The operative’s body moved with little effort, displaying none of the stiffness or resistance indicative of someone still in control of his or her body. The clanging of metal projectiles against the Tiger’s hull suddenly shifted to the rear of the vehicle, settling on the back hatch and dissipating with the few seconds it took Gosha to regain his bearings.

“We’re through,” Farrington announced.

“Seva’s hit. I think I’m hit too,” he managed to say, cringing from the pain caused by the Tiger’s coarse ride.

“Slow us down to sixty,” Farrington said.

Farrington raised his night vision goggles and climbed between the seats. A bright light filled the compartment, focused on Seva, who lay on his back. The light shifted to Gosha’s face, causing him to raise his left hand.

“He’s gone. Where are you hit?”

“Right leg, maybe. My shoulder’s on fire too,” Gosha said.

Farrington helped him up onto the bench opposite of Sasha, being as careful with him as possible in the back of a dark, cramped compartment moving at sixty miles per hour down a glorified jeep trail. The experience nearly caused Gosha to momentarily black out, mainly fueled by the pain in his right shoulder. He stared at Sasha’s glazed-over eyes as Farrington examined him with the flashlight, wondering if he had survived the firefight.

“I think I dislocated my shoulder,” Gosha said.

“Let me see.”

Farrington raised his limp arm at the elbow, rotating it across Gosha’s stomach and probing along the dislocated shoulder. The pain caused by the movement of this arm caused him to grimace, but paled in comparison to what Farrington had planned for him. Without warning, he firmly swung Gosha’s forearm one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction, causing him to scream. The pain subsided within moments, restoring full mobility to his arm.

“All fixed. You have a laceration across your right thigh from a bullet that ripped through your holster. Nothing too nasty,” Farrington said, aiming the light at a red slash visible below a rip in his bloodstained khaki cargo pants.

“Patch that up with a compress, and reload the grenade launcher. I need to contact Sanderson and figure out what we’re looking at to the west.”

“Got it. How long until Black Rain is on station?” Gosha said.

“Fifteen to twenty minutes. We’ll hit Slavgorod right as they arrive.”

“We’re going around Slavgorod, right?”

“Going off-road this far from the border will give the Russians time to redeploy the bulk of the 21^st in our path. We can’t get into a running gun battle with BTRs on twisting jeep trails with no cover. They’ll tear us to shreds from a distance. Black Rain will get us through Slavgorod. Then we go off-road,” Farrington said.

“We can’t survive another encounter like that.”

“I know. Patch yourself up, and get ready. We’ll be there in less than fifteen minutes, unless our air is late.”

“All right. Let’s do this,” Gosha said, not sure what to make of Farrington’s lightning advance along the most predictable route to Slavgorod.

Chapter 62

Karl Berg watched the satellite feed closely, speaking in hushed tones to Sanderson through his headset. He didn’t want Audra to figure everything out until it was effectively too late to stop what he had planned. He glanced over the top of his computer station and caught the watch floor supervisor’s attention. Almost time. Audra leaned over and pointed at a cluster of vehicles on one of his screens. Her index finger rested on the thermal image of four BTR-80 armored personnel carriers hidden behind a thick barrier of trees north of Slavgorod. She slid her finger east along the main approach road to the city and stopped on a pair of Tigers less than a half-kilometer away.

“They need to take evasive action immediately. That’s a reconnaissance element looking to hand off targets to the BTRs. The rest of Farrington’s nine lives will be used up pretty quickly if the BTRs catch him in the open,” she said.

She was dead right, as usual. The single 14.5mm gun in each BTRs turret had an effective range of three kilometers and could fire a variety of armor-piercing or high-explosive projectiles, all of which could penetrate the thin armor on Farrington’s vehicle with little effort. There was no way Farrington could approach Slavgorod with the BTRs guarding the road.

“I’ll notify Sanderson immediately,” he said, feeling guilty about the subterfuge circling the air between them.

“Base, this is control,” Berg said. “I am passing positive control of Black Rain to your station. Satellite imagery confirms the presence of four BTR-80s and two Tigers on the approach road. I recommend using ordnance sparingly. Additional units have entered the city from the south and may present a challenge.”

“Which unit is Black Rain?” Audra said.

“Hold on,” Berg said.

He didn’t meet her gaze, knowing he couldn’t lie directly to her face. He concentrated on the screen and activated the communications link to Weatherman, a CIA drone operator working out of the mobile control station at Manas Air Base. Berg had managed to surreptitiously deliver one of the CIA’s MQ-9 Reaper drones to Manas, hidden amidst the logistics equipment necessary to support the temporary presence of three top-secret helicopters. The secrecy surrounding the helicopters kept prying eyes off the delivery manifests, drawing little attention to the arrival of one additional C-17 Globemaster III heavy transport aircraft from Jalalabad Air Base.

“Weatherman, this is Berg. Standing by to transfer tactical control of Black Rain.”

“This is Weatherman. Wait one.”

“Karl, who are you talking to?” Audra insisted.

“This is Weatherman. I have positively authenticated the request for tactical control of Black Rain. ETA 0418 local.”

“Good luck and happy hunting,” Berg said, ready to come clean with Audra.

He turned his head toward the watch supervisor and nodded, watching her immediately transmit an order over her headset to one of the technicians in the operations center.

“Karl, I need you to explain what is going on here,” Audra said.

“I’ve arranged an insurance policy for Sanderson’s crew,” he said.

“Please tell me you didn’t put one of our drones over Russia.”

“You know I have a bad track record with drones,” he said, hoping she might find the humor in his comment.

“I don’t find that amusing, Karl. Not in the least. Your track record involves losing drones. We can’t lose one of those on Russian soil, for many reasons,” Audra said.

“I’m not going to lose this one.”

She glanced around and moved her seat closer. “It’s already lost,” she said, looking at him for agreement.

She tilted her head and managed to look even more incredulous, which Berg didn’t think was possible at this point.

“You sent a Reaper?” she demanded.

“The Predators don’t have the range to make the round trip,” Berg said.

“That didn’t stop you last time.”

“See? I’m becoming more responsible.”

“What was all the head nodding with Ms. Halverson about?” she said, gesturing toward the watch floor supervisor.

“I’m cutting the satellite feed to the Situation Room for a minute or two,” he said.

She shook her head and leaned back in the chair. “I don’t know what to say, Karl. You’ve gone too far on this one. I think this might have to be our last operation together,” Audra said.

“You mean you’re not going to fire me?” Berg said.

“How could I fire you? I can’t sit here and pretend that this isn’t partially my fault. I’ve encouraged you for far too long. I’ve swept enough of your operations under the rug for one career. I need a break from that kind of stress. Our friendship needs a break from it,” she said.

“I’m sorry to have kept you in the dark on this, but I wanted to give you and Manning some plausible deniability here. I need him to look the president and the director in the eye at the White House and convincingly tell them that he has no idea what just happened. I need to keep them all confused long enough to get Farrington to the border.”

“You better pray that Black Rain doesn’t get shot down over Russia,” she said.

He was moments from making an ill-timed joke about purposely crashing the drone, but Audra beat him to it.

“And I don’t care how bad it gets out there, you will not turn one of our Reapers into a kamikaze like you did before. Are we crystal clear on that?”

“I’ve already built that restriction into the parameters. Sanderson can only pick and prioritize targets. Once the eight Hellfires are expended, the drone is back under our control,” he said, wondering if he needed to further clarify this with Weatherman.

Chapter 63

Thomas Manning stood along the back wall of the small conference room and watched the satellite feed with curious interest. Reports from Karl Berg over the communications feed evaporated when Sanderson’s team sped past the first possible detour point, six kilometers from the city. He’d spent the next few minutes urgently trying to reach Berg, as the Tiger continued to barrel down the road, skipping several more opportunities to deviate from a suicidal engagement with Russian armored vehicles, and sending the president and his staff into a general uproar.

When Berg didn’t answer his repeated requests, dozens of scenarios swirled through his head, none of which held promise. Did they lose communications with Farrington’s team? Did someone sabotage the CIA operations center? Was Farrington ignoring orders, thinking he could take on armored vehicles?

The Tiger continued to close on the city, bringing everyone to the edge of their seats. Farrington’s vehicle suddenly stopped three and a half kilometers from the Russian BTR ambush site, eliciting a collective sigh of relief from the room. When the Tiger once again accelerated at reckless speed toward the city, the president stood up from his seat and turned to CIA Director Copley.

“They’re never going to make it through! What are they doing?”

“I don’t know, Mr. President. I can’t get through to my operations center,” Manning interrupted.

“The BTRs are on the move, heading east to intercept on the road. They’ll be within gun range in less than thirty seconds,” Lieutenant General Gordon said.

Manning confirmed the armored vehicles’ movement on the screen. All four BTRs had moved in a column onto the east-west road running from Znamenka to Slavgorod. In a few seconds, the vehicles would spread out into a “line abreast” formation, exposing Farrington’s Tiger to four 14.5mm guns. If the Tiger didn’t alter course within the next few seconds, they would all bear witness to a massacre. He wondered if this was Farrington’s plan, if Sanderson and Berg had uncovered information over the past few silent minutes that had sealed the team’s fate, and Farrington intended to go down fighting.

“Isn’t there any way to communicate with the team? I thought we were talking to them just a few minutes ago?” the president said.

“I’ve lost communications with the group controlling Blackjack,” Manning said.

“Well, somebody better warn them that they’re about to be taken out! I think we should send the helicopters back to Manas immediately. Something isn’t right here,” the president said.

“Mr. President, the helicopters haven’t been detected. There’s no reason to send them back prematurely,” General Gordon said.

“It’s not a premature decision, General,” the president said. “Those men are as good as dead.”

“We can send them back in a few minutes, Mr. President. What’s the range of those guns again? 3000 meters?” Jacob Remy asked.

Remy’s cold statement wasn’t lost on Manning, or anybody in the room. Lieutenant General Gordon penetrated him with a look of disgust and hatred that might have caused Remy to lose voluntary control of his bladder…if the president’s chief of staff had bothered to take his eyes off the wall monitor. Instead, his gaze remained glued to the massive screen, eagerly waiting to watch the thermal image of Farrington’s Tiger blossom into a bright white circle. Before anyone could answer Remy’s question, the two screens displaying the operation’s satellite feeds went blank, catapulting the room into chaos.

“Operations, this is Thomas Manning. We just lost our satellite feed in the Situation Room. What’s going on over there?” he demanded.

“We’re not sure. Some kind of technical difficulties with the satellite link. Should be back up in a minute or two. Everything is under control,” a familiar voice replied.

He almost screamed into the headset that nothing appeared under control, but something gave him pause. The voice belonged to Karl Berg, and he’d answered immediately. Manning thought about the events leading up to this moment and the incredible risk they had all undertaken to coordinate the team’s extraction. The possibility of encountering light armored vehicles in their path hadn’t been a surprise. In fact, Pentagon and CIA analysts had accurately predicted the response and deployment of the Russian assets on nearly every level. The strong likelihood of a sizable roadblock north of Slavgorod had been part of the early briefings. Now it made sense to him. He stopped with that thought and whispered into the headset.

“Berg, you devious son-of-a-bitch.”

“Did you get through to your operations center?” the president demanded.

“I did, Mr. President. They experienced a problem with the satellite link. Should be back on-line in a minute. They don’t know what happened.”

Without hesitating, the National Security Advisor suggested the possibility that the Russians had disabled U.S. satellites with a directed EMP blast. His declaration plunged the already agitated room into further chaos and temporarily yanked him out of the spotlight. Manning looked up at the director, struggling not to grin. The director wore an emotionless face, but he could see it in the director’s eyes. Like Manning, the director was engaged in an all-out battle to internalize his suspicions that the timing of the satellite link failure was far from random.

Chapter 64

The wind punched through the missing windshield, mercilessly ripping through the Tiger’s cabin as Misha increased their speed to eighty-five miles per hour. The frost-heave-damaged asphalt road connecting Znamenka to Slavgorod had left his spine rattled and his stomach in knots. Despite the shattering discomfort, successfully navigating the entire road at highway speed had far exceeded his expectations for the Russian equivalent to backwater USA. Based on what he had witnessed during their trek westward to the border, backwater was a generous description of the isolated network of villages and trails defining their southwestern Siberian experience. He couldn’t imagine a commerce-related reason for the government to pave the road between these two towns, but was grateful that some nameless Communist Party bureaucrat had at one time persisted in his or her pursuit of the precious bitumen surface his vehicle travelled.

He stared at the monochromatic green image of two Tiger vehicles less than a kilometer ahead, partially obscured by a thin stand of tall trees extending north. The line of trees, planted long ago by Slavgorod city planners to cut the frozen winds sweeping across the Siberian steppes, rapidly grew in his viewfinder. At this speed, it took less than thirty seconds to travel a kilometer. Sanderson was cutting it a little close.

“Stand by to engage targets!” Farrington said.

“We can’t keep slugging it out like this,” Gosha replied.

“Have some faith, boys,” Sanderson said over the communications net.

For the final phase of their exfiltration, Farrington had patched the satellite phone directly into his comms rig, adding Sanderson to the intrasquad feed. With elements of the 21^st Motor Rifle Division pouring into the city from the south, the ride through Slavgorod would require quick communications and multi-sensory input from all members of his team.

Of course, if Black Rain didn’t immediately produce some bad weather for the approaching Tigers, they might not reach Slavgorod. He scanned the northwest horizon, looking for any sign that they would not have to engage in another close-range gun battle. He couldn’t imagine the Russian gunners making the same mistake twice. A single flash erupted on the horizon, followed by multiple flashes.

“Missiles away,” Sanderson said over the net.

“Gosha, distance to targets?” Farrington said.

“Less than five hundred meters!”

He did a quick mental calculation involving estimated missile time of flight and flipped up his night vision goggles.

“Get inside the Tiger!” he said.

Less than a second after he heard Gosha drop into the cabin, a brilliant flash illuminated the landscape ahead of them, immediately followed by a shockwave that rattled their 12,000 pound armored vehicle like a toy. Misha kept the Tiger steady on the road as they sped toward the inferno.

A few seconds later, the heat radiated by the burning wreckage on the side of the road became too intense, forcing him to shield his face with his hands. Through his fingers, he caught a brief, ninety mile per hour glimpse of the carnage wreaked by the Hellfire’s 100-pound high-explosive warhead.

One of the vehicles lay upside down but mostly intact against the burning trees, smoke and flame pouring from its windows. The other Tiger hadn’t moved from its original position, but there was little left to indicate what it had been before the Hellfire missile had plunged through the thin armor. Through the flames dancing in the grass, all he could discern was a twisted, smoking chassis. The drone operator had assigned one missile to the pair of Tigers, correctly assuming that the force of the warhead would effectively destroy both of the tightly parked vehicles.

Two fireballs ascended skyward on the horizon, in the vicinity of Slavgorod’s city limits, drawing his attention away from the grisly destruction. Additional flashes closely followed, momentarily exposing several small buildings previously shrouded in darkness.

“Black Rain reports good hits on all targets. Four BTRs and two Tigers destroyed on the road. Three Hellfire missiles remaining. Black Rain will remain on station until all ordnance expended,” Sanderson said.

“Copy. Just make sure Black Rain keeps us positively identified throughout the city. We’re driving a Tiger and I just saw what a Hellfire missile can do to a Tiger,” Farrington said.

“Roger. Recommend that you activate your IR strobe once inside the city. That’ll keep Black Rain off your ass. Use the lowest intensity setting. Remember, the Russians can see that strobe with their night vision. Black Rain is repositioning to cover you from the top down.”

“We’re less than a minute from entering the town. Any chance of a straight shot across?”

“Not likely. I’m looking at eight Tigers and five BTRs less than two kilometers from the northern access road. Even if you did slip by, they’d be all over your ass on the way to the border. You could have avoided all of this drama by staying on the trails,” Sanderson said.

“And we’d be forty kilometers from the border instead of fifteen, with little chance of reaching our pickup. We weren’t making enough progress,” Farrington said.

A few seconds of icy silence hung over the net before Sanderson spoke.

“Let’s get you through the city undetected. You’ll have to slow down as soon as you reach the first houses on the left. You’ll need to take a left on a dirt road just past the seventh house. This road will curve to the right and put you at a dirt intersection with homes on all four sides. Take another left at the intersection. We’ll assess enemy vehicle movement from there,” Sanderson said.

“Solid copy. We’re passing the destroyed BTRs right now,” Farrington said, tracking the wrecked convoy through his windows.

The first armored vehicle remained upright on eight surprisingly intact wheels, burning brightly through the blown side and top hatches. A massive hole above the troop compartment poured thick smoke and sparks into the darkened sky. The second and third BTR on the road had fared no better, belching flame through every opening into the Siberian air, evidence of torn metal and burning material scattered on the road between them. The last BTR had been knocked onto its side by the force of the explosion that inflicted a three-foot wide hole in its left side and blew the turret at least fifty into the field. Misha swerved to avoid the smoking chunk of metal as they passed down the left side of the road, giving Farrington a view of the twisted gun barrel sticking up from the grass. Looking back as the Tiger rejoined the road, he could see an area the size of two football fields softly illuminated by dozens of small fires and burning fragments thrown from the obliterated vehicles. The glow receded as their Tiger reached the first house and Misha started counting the houses out loud. Misha found the dirt road and slowed to make the turn.

“Gosha, activate the strobe,” Farrington said.

“Strobe activated,” Gosha replied.

A few seconds later, Sanderson’s voice echoed through his headset.

“Russian vehicles are starting to deploy east through the town in response to the explosions. If they keep going east, you’ll run into them trying to break through to the west. We’re going to hit the first one to reach the northern road with a Hellfire and try to draw them away. I’ve just been told that Black Rain has identified your strobe and marked your vehicle as friendly. You’re looking good. Keep heading south on that road.”

It now seemed that the only people who didn’t know where the vehicle was headed, were the people actually in the vehicle. Farrington stared at the green image ahead, trying to make sense of the dirt road that barely stood out from the rest of the landscape. Several scattered houses forming the rough outline of a road guided them, but for all he could tell, they could have been driving through a row of backyards.

“Coming up on a right curve. Make sure you take a left at the first intersection after the curve. Once you take that left, keep going and don’t turn west until I tell you to. You’ll be off-road at that point, but there’s a massive windbreak on the eastern edge of town that will keep you hidden. Keep pushing south,” Sanderson said.

“Got it. Misha, can you see a curve?” Farrington said.

“I can’t see shit.”

“Coming up in thirty meters. On my laser. You might want to slow down,” Gosha said.

Both of them saw a bright green line mark the start of the curve, which gave them a better frame of reference, but did little to help either of them identify the turn. Misha slowed at the point and started to gently turn.

“Sharper turn! You’re gonna roll us into that ditch,” Gosha said.

Farrington felt the vehicle lurch to the right, as Misha turned the wheel suddenly.

“Nobody said a fucking thing about a ditch!” Misha replied.

“This looks good,” Farrington said, pretty sure they were straightened out on the road.

A few seconds later, they reached the intersection and turned left, continuing south into the fields behind a large barn and several unlit homes. He saw the thick row of trees Sanderson had mentioned past the houses, and directed Misha to work his way along the field until they found an opening in the tightly sown windbreak.

“Missile away,” Sanderson said.

Farrington leaned forward and craned his neck to the right, trying to catch a glimpse of the inbound Hellfire. A bright flash reflected off the treetops and the top of the barn, blinding his night vision goggles, followed by a massive crunching sound.

“Scratch one BTR. Find a path through the trees and stand by to make a high-speed run due west,” Sanderson said.

“Follow my mark, Misha,” Gosha said.

Misha accelerated toward the tree line, chasing Gosha’s laser. He stopped the Tiger less than twenty meters from the opening.

“Russian units are speeding to the site of the destroyed BTR. We’re going to fire one more at a building north of the city. As soon as you hear the explosion, take off looking for an east-west road. All of them cut directly across the town. Deactivate your strobe,” Sanderson said.

“Strobe deactivated,” Gosha said.

“We’re at a break in the trees,” Farrington said.

“Stand by…missile away,” Sanderson said.

Eight seconds later, Farrington saw a bright green flash to the north. He slapped Misha’s shoulder, and the Tiger rocketed forward before the sound of the explosion reached them. Misha turned the jeep left on the gravel road just beyond the trees, searching for a westerly route. Farrington spotted what appeared to be a wide turnoff coming up on the right.

“Try that,” he said, pointing uselessly at the turnoff.

“Where?” Misha said, slowing.

“Right there. Looks like a car parked at the corner, or some kind of—”

“Got it,” he said, swinging the car onto the road and speeding up.

“You’re clear to punch through town. The closest units to the south are three kilometers away, just entering Slavgorod,” Sanderson said.

A few minutes later, Misha brought the Tiger to a halt in unfamiliar territory on the far western outskirts of town. They needed to connect with one of the major jeep trails headed southwest, which would feed into a network of smaller westerly trails that emptied directly into the border less than twelve kilometers away.

“Anyone following us?” Farrington said.

“Not that I can tell,” Gosha said.

“You look clear from where I’m standing,” Sanderson said, eliciting a few tired laughs.

“Anything ahead of us?” Farrington said.

“Nothing heavy. We’ve spotted a few Tigers running up and down the border, but we’ll help you get past those. I’m going to notify control, so they can release Black Magic from the holding area,” Sanderson said.

“Copy. We’re moving out.”

Farrington looked at his watch and smiled. 4:27. They had nearly thirty minutes to travel twelve kilometers over flat terrain, with nobody in immediate pursuit. Maybe this hadn’t been the suicide mission he expected after all. Then again, it was too early to start thinking like that. A lot could go wrong in twelve kilometers.

“Head out on the trail to the left at fifty miles per hour. If it stays southwest, increase your speed. Stay frosty, gentlemen. We ain’t out of the woods yet.”

Chapter 65

Dean Canales stared at the shifting infrared image of the Tiger on his screen and manipulated the joystick at his station to decrease the magnification and display a more panoramic view. Based on the Reaper’s sensor input, Blackjack was less than three kilometers from the Kazakhstan border, with a clear path ahead of them. The nearest enemy vehicle, a heavily armed Tiger, sat four kilometers southwest of them at the end of the jeep trail in front of the border. Blackjack had jumped the trail a few kilometers back, heading due west at a conservative off-road speed that would put them on Kazakhstan soil in six minutes if they didn’t blow a tire. Even if they blew a tire at this point, they could limp across the border in time to meet their pickup.

“Let’s do one more sweep for hostiles. Climb to three thousand feet and start a three sixty centered on Blackjack’s current position,” Canales said.

“Roger. Climbing,” the other CIA employee said.

“All right. Let’s see who’s out there,” he said, adjusting his joystick to sweep the area north of Blackjack.

Commands transmitted from the mobile ground control station took 1.2 seconds to reach Black Rain through a satellite link, which made operating the drone an interesting exercise in forward thinking. Nothing happened immediately, and high-stress situations required an odd form of time-delayed patience. Former pilots had a difficult time adjusting to a video-game-style flight mode that didn’t immediately respond to their “stick” movements, and were rarely transitioned to UAV programs. The CIA preferred to steal previously trained drone pilots from the Air Force, or in the case of Dean Canales, train them from scratch.

The Raytheon AN/DAS-1 Multi-Spectral Targeting System (MTS-B) mounted under the Reaper’s nose responded to his commands, sweeping north and panning out to an even wider view than previously established. Canales focused on the MTS-B’s infrared sensor’s input, which gave him the best chance of detecting any threats within the sensor’s view. The Siberian landscape had retained little of the previous day’s heat, providing a near perfect backdrop for the passive infrared sensor. The heat signature of a human or recently run vehicle starkly contrasted with the cold ground, making his job relatively simple. The system’s software did the rest, automatically locking onto these signatures for further investigation by human operators. Canales would make a quick assessment, based on system recommendations and his own experience, whether the Reaper needed to do a closer sweep over a detected signature.

With his eyes fixed to the screen, he reached for an insulated coffee mug on the floor with his unoccupied hand. He found one of the mugs and lifted it, quickly determining that it was too light to be his backup supply of caffeine. He moved his hand around under the thick leather swivel seat in frustration, finally deciding to take his eyes off the screen for a brief second. He turned the seat to the right and leaned his head over the side, immediately finding the tall black mug and lifting it from the floor. Now he was back in business.

He had crashed hard ten minutes ago, coming down off the incredible adrenaline rush initiated by the brief one-sided battle over Slavgorod. He’d fired more than his fair share of Hellfire missiles against Al Qaeda operatives or other “extremists,” and was no stranger to questionable drone missions, but what they did over Slavgorod was something different altogether. Whatever Blackjack carried in that Tiger had to be absolutely critical to national security because he had just committed an act of war against the Russian Federation to defend it.

He couldn’t imagine the agency debrief for this operation and all of the paperwork he’d have to sign swearing this to secrecy. The only immediate upside he could foresee would be an instantaneous transfer out of this shithole back to the United States. He expected to be on the first flight out of Manas after landing the Reaper, which suited him fine. Manas Airbase was a miserable assignment that he’d reluctantly agreed to take for the hardship pay.

When he returned his gaze to the multi-sensor input console, his eyes caught something exiting the bottom of the screen at high speed. He didn’t see enough of the image to determine what had crossed the screen, but based on the sensor’s orientation, it was travelling north to south. He nestled the coffee mug between his legs and checked the system for a software tag. Finding it at the top of the queue, he hooked the tag and clicked on the icon to slave the MTS-B turret on the Reaper to the heat signature. One point two seconds later, he experienced an adrenaline spike that felt like more of a heart attack. Two Mi-8 Hip helicopters had passed under his Reaper, headed toward Blackjack.

Chapter 66

The Tiger dropped into a shallow ditch, jamming Farrington against the four-point harness that had kept his body inside the vehicle over the past several minutes. The vehicle suddenly angled skyward and cleared the ditch in a violent lurching motion.

“You gotta watch that shit! We can’t get stuck!” Farrington said, fully aware that he was letting the conditions get the better of him.

“You didn’t see the fucking ditch either! I’ve been driving this motherfucker in the dark for four hours. I could use a little help watching the road!” Misha said.

“Check out the eastern horizon,” Gosha said, temporarily diffusing the tension.

Farrington raised his night vision goggles and risked a look out of the passenger window. The horizon indeed displayed a faint blue glow, which signified the beginning of nautical twilight. Soon enough, the landscape surrounding them would start to appear without the aid of night vision, exposing them to simple observation by border patrols or aircraft. He hoped to be flying across Kazakhstan in a helicopter by that point.

The vehicle bucked again, slamming the side of his head into the metal doorframe.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered.

“Serves you right,” Misha said.

The left, front side of the vehicle dropped and rebounded, shaking the entire vehicle, but sparing Farrington any further physical damage. Sasha moaned from the rear compartment, feeling the full impact of their off-road voyage, strapped against the thinly cushioned troop bench. His morphine had started to wear thin before reaching Slavgorod, but they didn’t feel comfortable giving him more painkillers without a better assessment of his condition, and so far they hadn’t been able to spare the time for a more comprehensive examination. He was moaning, which meant he was still alive, and that was about the best they could manage at the moment.

Farrington’s satellite phone vibrated, and he immediately answered.

“Blackjack, this is control station. Black Rain has detected helicopters inbound from the north—”

“Is this our pickup? We’re not over the border yet,” Farrington said.

“Negative. Two Mi-8 Hips at low altitude. Scan north to northeast of your position. We’re trying to find them on satellite…shit, check your four o’clock!” Karl Berg said.

“Scan four o’clock for hostile helicopters!” Farrington yelled.

“Scanning!” Gosha yelled.

“Where the fuck are my helos, control?” Farrington said.

“En route to primary extract. ETA three minutes,” Berg said.

“You need to redirect them to our position. We can’t fight off armed helicopters,” Farrington said.

“I’ll do what I can. Until then, I have one last parting gift for you,” Berg said.

Gosha spotted the helicopters and swiveled the grenade launcher as far to the right as possible, unable to line them up in the launcher’s sight. Unlike the American “Humvee,” the GAZ Tiger didn’t feature a fully rotatable gun ring enabling gunners to engage targets in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree arc. He was limited by the Tiger’s forward direction of travel.

“I have two helicopters coming in low at four o’clock,” Gosha said.

“How far?” Farrington said.

“Not far enough.”

He couldn’t guess their distance in the dark and had no intention of taking his hands off the grenade launcher to try and mark them with his rifle-mounted laser. By the time he determined the range, projectiles of various calibers would start arriving. He assumed the helicopters hadn’t been armed with air-to-ground missiles, or they would have fired them already, serving up the same result as the Hellfire missiles fired from the drone overhead.

Without air-to-ground missiles, the transport helicopters would have a limited number of attack options, all strictly dependent upon the types of guns installed. The most typical weapons arrangement for the Mi-8 Hip troop transport involved door guns, which would leave them with two options: high-speed strafing runs alongside the Tiger or standoff gunnery at low speed. The Tiger’s grenade launcher could outrange most of the weapons mountable in the Hip’s doors, making a slow or stationary standoff attack unlikely. One 30mm grenade could cripple the lightly armored Hip, and the pilots would be unlikely to take that chance. Gosha counted on them to favor less accurate, high-speed tactics which, combined with the one Hellfire missile still owed to them by Black Magic, gave them a fighting chance to reach the border.

Almost on cue with this thought, the lead helicopter exploded in midair, spinning ninety degrees and dropping to the horizon. Upon impact with the ground, a secondary detonation expanded skyward, blinding his night vision goggles. He couldn’t tell if the explosion had simply masked the second helicopter from sight or enveloped the second helicopter in the storm of shrapnel and fire that illuminated the countryside. He prayed for the latter. He raised his NVGs and scanned for any sign of a second crash site, unable to see past the firestorm that appeared well within his grenade launcher’s range.

“Splash one helo! I don’t have a visual on the second,” he said.

“Second helo peeled off in a wide arc,” Farrington said. “We might have caught a break. Get us to the border, Misha. I don’t care how you do it.”

Misha accelerated the Tiger forward through the rough terrain, making a final push for the border. They travelled several seconds before Farrington broke the bad news over the intrasquad radio.

“Control reports that the second Hip appears to be back in the fight, approaching from our seven o’clock. They have a bird’s-eye satellite view of the situation and can estimate range. We’ll turn into them at 2000 meters so you can engage with the grenade launcher,” Farrington said.

“How far to the border?” Gosha asked, pushing his NVGs down over his face.

“One point five kilometers. We just have to stay in the game for three minutes! Control is telling me to stand by to maneuver. Three, two—” Farrington said.

“I don’t have a visual,” Gosha said, scanning the indicated sector for a dark object hovering over the horizon.

“Hard left! Accelerate!” Farrington said.

The vehicle banked left, swinging Gosha into the metal lip of the hatch and breaking his grip on the grenade launcher’s handle. When the Tiger straightened on its new southerly course, Gosha swung the launcher left, expecting to see the Hip lined up within a few degrees to either side of the weapon’s barrel. Instead, he saw nothing in a one hundred and eighty degree arc.

“I can’t see it!”

Before Gosha figured out his error, a continuous line of green tracers hit the ground in front of the Tiger, ricocheting in every direction. Misha managed to turn the vehicle out of the rapid-fire onslaught less than a second before the flow of 7.62mm projectiles hit them. The buzz-saw sound of the Hip’s minigun filled the air, competing with the general panic on their internal communications net, as he followed the last line of tracers back to the source. The helicopter had attacked them from a high angle, which he clearly hadn’t expected.

Misha’s quick maneuver had saved them from certain oblivion. This Mi-8 Hip was fitted with GShG 7.62mm miniguns, capable of accurately firing 6,000 rounds per minute out to 1000 meters. The gunners aboard the Hip only needed to line the Tiger up in their minigun sights for one second to shred the Tiger with over one hundred steel-jacketed projectiles. While his grenade launcher could saturate a stationary target at twice the range of the minigun, hitting a moving target was a different story altogether. The grenades took forever to reach their target and didn’t travel in a straight trajectory, making it nearly impossible to calculate the necessary trajectory to successfully lead a fast-moving target. He wasn’t the least bit optimistic about hitting a helicopter moving at 150 miles per hour with one of his grenades. Not before they were torn to pieces by the Hip’s miniguns.

Instead, they would have to work together to dodge the obtrusively lethal green line of tracers. If they could maneuver wildly enough at the last moment, the gunners would have a hard time lining up a shot. The last gun run had lasted fewer than three seconds, which was all the time the Russian gunners would get if the pilots continued to play it safe and conduct high-speed strafing runs. He watched the Hip bank left and commence a slow turn, while Misha pointed the Tiger toward the border and floored the engine.

Chapter 67

The president turned to General Gordon and demanded an explanation for what they had all just witnessed on the screen.

“Did one of our helicopters just crash in Russia? I did not authorize the extraction force to cross the border!” he said, turning to Manning next. “Find out what the hell is going on there!”

“That was not one of our helicopters. Black Magic is sitting three kilometers west of the border. I’m talking with the SOCOM air controller right now,” General Gordon said, putting his right hand over his ear to drown out any noise from the room. “I’ve just been told that Black Magic saw the explosion. They also report another helicopter in the area firing on Blackjack.”

“Mr. President,” Manning said, “Blackjack reports that they are under attack by Russian helicopters. Heavily armed Mi-Hip transports. Blackjack is less than a kilometer from the border and requests immediate extract.”

“Black Magic Zero One is armed, Mr. President,” General Gordon said.

“We don’t know how many Russian helicopters are out there. What if there are more? We don’t even know where these helicopters originated!” Jacob Remy said.

“Our analysts are pretty sure they came from the airbase at Novosibirsk,” Manning replied. “Probably helicopters in transit to Georgia or Murmansk from a squadron based in Irkutsk. They feel confident that this is all we’ll see.”

“All I heard was ‘pretty sure’ and ‘probably,’ Mr. Manning. We can’t afford any more surprises here. General Gordon?” the president said.

“Yes, sir?”

“Get Black Magic out of there. Roll the whole package back to Manas.”

“Understood, Mr. President.”

Manning couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Against all odds, Farrington’s team had made it close enough to the border to get within visual range of Black Magic, and they were still going to pull the plug on the operation.

“We could have them onboard our helos in less than three minutes, Mr. President. We’ve come too far to give up at this point,” Manning pleaded.

“Correction, Mr. Manning. We’ve gone too far at this point. I’m responsible for a trail of Russian corpses extending nearly two hundred miles from Novosibirsk to Kazakhstan, and now we’ve just added a Russian transport helicopter to the list. I’m already facing a hard fucking day on the diplomatic front tomorrow. I won’t risk compounding the situation with the loss of an American helicopter on Russian soil, especially not one of those prototypes. I don’t know how I let any of you convince me to authorize their use. General Gordon, are those helicopters heading back?”

“They just received the order, Mr. President,” the general said.

“You’re making a big mistake leaving them behind, Mr. President,” Manning said. “If any of them are captured alive, you’ll be facing more than a bad day on the diplomatic front.”

“Stand down, Mr. Manning,” Director Copley said.

“I want him out of here,” Remy said, prompting Manning to stand up.

The Secret Service agents standing at the door stirred, responding to Manning’s sudden movement. He wondered if they would physically remove him from the room if he refused to leave, and found himself not caring. He activated the communications channel to Karl Berg and passed information that he knew would result in his immediate expulsion from the Situation Room.

“Berg, this is Manning. The president refuses to send the helicopters to assist Blackjack. Black Magic has been ordered to return to Manas Airbase. Make sure they know who’s responsible.”

“What in the hell are you doing?” the president said.

“Informing Blackjack that they’ve been abandoned, so they can properly adjust their tactics,” Manning said. “I suggest we all cheer on the Russian helicopter gunners at this point,” Manning said.

“And why is that?” the National Security Advisor asked.

“Because if I was in that Tiger, I’d sell this pit of vipers out to the highest bidder if I managed to survive,” Manning said. He paused to listen to his headset for a moment and responded, “Negative. It appears they never had any intention of extracting the team. They’re on their own.”

“That’s a bald-faced lie!” Remy yelled.

“Good luck convincing anyone of that. I’ve sat here for the past hour watching you do everything short of breaking out the beer and chips to cheer on the Russians at every roadblock. You looked like you’d just seen a ghost when we restored the satellite feed,” Manning said.

“Director Copley, I don’t want to see this man again,” the president said. “Get him out of here.”

Manning handed his headset to Director Copley and raised his hands above his head, easing his forced departure from the conference room. The Secret Service agents grabbed his shoulders, forcibly guiding him from the room. Director Copley wore a grimace that indicated he was powerless to step in. Manning understood why. The CIA couldn’t afford a presidential coup within Langley, and the simultaneous removal of the CIA Director and National Clandestine Service Director would create a power vacuum that the White House would be eager to fill. Copley wouldn’t make it that easy for Remy. Not after this fiasco.

“Good luck explaining the Russian mafiya connection!” Manning said over his shoulder at the doorway.

“What is he talking about?” the president said, directing his question at Director Copley.

“I have no idea, but it sounds like something you might want to ask him yourself,” the director said.

“Hold on. Bring him back!” the president said. “What are you talking about?”

“Who do you think helped Sanderson’s team set up the entire operation within Russia?” Manning said.

“I thought it was an activist group. Some kind of eco-terrorist network,” the president said.

“Unfortunately that fell through. We had to pay the Solntsevskaya Bratva several million dollars to arrange the logistics, surveillance and assassinations necessary to complete the mission,” Manning said.

“You set us up!” Remy said.

“I think it’s time to crack out the chips and salsa, Jacob, you’ve got a lot of cheering to do for that Russian helicopter,” Manning said. “I’d hate to imagine what the survivor would do with that information, not to mention Sanderson.”

“Don’t think you can scare me with this last-minute revelation,” the president said. “I don’t care if you contracted with Osama Bin Laden to take down Vektor. After the biological attack against U.S. citizens less than a month ago, I could nuke Novosibirsk and not raise an eyebrow at home. A Russian mafiya connection? Grow up, Mr. Manning. Sanderson’s operatives understood the risks involved. Sending helicopters into Russia was not part of the deal. Get him out of here.”

Manning was struggling against the Secret Service agents’ efforts to push him through the door when Director Copley’s voice broke through the commotion. Manning planted a foot in the doorframe, temporarily arresting his rapid departure so he could hear what his boss had to say. Copley was a man of few words, but his brief discourses typically held far more sway than his quiet nature might suggest.

“I suggest we keep the helicopters in place so that we have the capability to honor the deal if they cross into Kazakhstan,” Director Copley said.

“What if the Russian helicopter doesn’t back off at the border?” the president asked.

“Let’s cross that bridge when we reach it.”

The president considered his comments for a moment and turned to General Gordon. “Rescind my previous order. Black Magic will remain on station until the pickup time has expired.”

“What about the enhanced rules of engagement?” the general asked.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we reach it,” he said, staring at Director Copley.

Manning released all of the tension in his body and allowed the agents to whisk him away down the hallway, satisfied that he had done everything possible to give Farrington’s team what little chance they might have to escape Russia.

Chapter 68

Major Borelli eased Black Magic Zero One into a hover forty feet above the ground and glanced through one of his left cockpit windows. Through his panoramic night vision goggles, he saw Zero Two’s dark green form pull even with his helicopter, roughly one hundred meters away. Zero Three remained two kilometers behind them, watching the area to the west and standing by to replace either one of them at a moment’s notice. They were back in position to extract the special operations team. He had no idea what was going on at SOCOM, but he was glad to be back. It didn’t feel right to abandon the team so close to the end.

“Blackjack reacquired,” he heard through his helmet’s communication suite.

The Forward Looking Infrared (FLIR) pod mounted in the nose of his MH-60K Stealth Hawk had quickly found the friendly Tiger. The 160^th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), aptly named the “Night Stalkers,” had taken possession of the three prototype stealth helicopters ten months ago, putting the highly modified Black Hawk frames through hell and back for U.S. Special Operations Command. Major Borelli had been quietly assigned to lead the assessment, which still remained a secret within a secret at the 160^th SOAR, frequently vanishing with his handpicked flight crews to Area 51, where the prototype helicopters were hidden from prying eyes.

The birds looked ungainly sitting on the ground, built wider and longer than the standard Black Hawk to accommodate the angled hull designed to defeat aerial search radar waves. In the air, the Stealth Hawk performed reliably, though the controls behaved sluggishly compared to the MH-60K. Built on the Black Hawk frame, designers still struggled to distribute the additional weight of the extended hull in correct proportion to the original design. Every time they returned to fly the prototypes, the helicopters looked different. Still slightly unstable, the helicopters had come a long way since his initial flight.

“Distance to Blackjack?” Borelli asked.

“Twenty-six hundred meters,” the sensor operator replied.

The Stealth Hawk was configured with an electronics warfare console mounted directly behind the copilot and manned by a specially trained member of the 160^th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. The console operator controlled the FLIR pod, monitored hostile electronics emissions, and managed their outgoing radar profile, freeing the pilot and copilot for the near impossible task of flying nap-of-earth through enemy territory at night. If necessary, the console operator would join the crew chief and man one of Zero One’s M134 miniguns to defend the aircraft or provide suppressing fire during a “hot” extraction.

His helicopter was the only prototype fitted with an organic weapons platform. Zero Two and Zero Three were unarmed, except for the personal weapons carried by the crew. SOCOM planners had wanted to send all three helicopters into Kazakhstan unarmed, but Borelli had pressed the issue, insisting that the task force have some defensive capability other than stealth. SOCOM compromised by arming Zero One with two M134 systems. A stream of tracers appeared above the horizon and bounced off the landscape in a cascade of green sparks several meters to the north of Blackjack.

“Mills, track that hostile contact. I don’t want any surprises.”

“Tracking,” his sensor operator said.

“Are we heading over to help, Major?” Sergeant First Class Papovich asked.

“My orders are to wait for them to cross the border,” Borelli said.

“Don’t forget the two-thousand-meter restriction, Boogie,” his copilot said.

“And that,” Borelli mumbled.

“The two thousand meters only applies if they’re under fire from a hostile force,” Papovich said.

Another line of tracers raced to the ground in the distance, sputtering skyward after impact with the ground.

“They’re engaged by a hostile force, Pappy. I can’t touch them,” Borelli said.

“Then we might have to remove the hostile force, so we can comply with our rules of engagement,” the crew chief said.

“I’m not even going to ask how you came up with that.”

“Simple, Major,” Papovich said. “It gets pretty confusing on these operations and this is a prototype aircraft prone to bugs and glitches. As long as we bring them back, nobody’s gonna give a shit how far we were from the border.”

“Distance to Blackjack?”

“Twenty-four hundred meters.”

With the Hip conducting gun runs, the Tiger wasn’t making enough progress to reach the border in time, and there was no way he could keep the Stealth Hawks on station past 4:55. He needed a thirty-minute high-speed run before sunrise in order to clear any inhabited areas near the border and arrive at FARP “Blacktop” undetected. There was no way the Tiger would make it if they didn’t intervene. He nudged the helicopter forward at a steady fifty miles per hour.

“Revised distance to Blackjack?”

“Twenty-four fifty. They lost some distance zigzagging,” Mills said.

“Pappy, help him with the laser rangefinder, I’m getting some strange readings on my helmet-mounted HUD,” Borelli said.

“Roger that, sir,” Papovich replied. “I never did trust all of the gizmos in this thing. I’m reading nineteen hundred meters and closing.”

“Can you confirm that, Mills?”

“Affirmative. Nineteen hundred meters and closing,” Mills said, finally climbing onboard the bullshit bus.

“Gentlemen, my sensors indicate that Blackjack has crossed into Kazakhstan,” he said, keying the taskforce communications net.

Chapter 69

Richard Farrington’s shoulder slammed into the front passenger door as Misha yanked the wheel left to avoid the Russian helicopter’s next fusillade of projectiles. Halfway through the turn, he heard the AGS-30 automatic grenade launcher start to discharge rounds at its cyclic rate, in a futile attempt to disrupt the attack. The Hip’s pilots and gunners had conducted five gun runs at this point, and it was only a matter of time before they figured out how to compensate for Misha’s evasive tactics. If his Tiger didn’t reach the border within the next seven minutes, the Russians would have all day to figure it out. When a second stream of tracers struck the ground in front of their vehicle immediately after the first, he realized the chase had come to an end.

The entire cabin erupted in a blinding green light as tracers bounced off the hood and streamed past his face. His night vision goggles disappeared in a flash of heat. His ears filled with an incredible racket that sounded like multiple jackhammers pounding away at the sheet metal. Human screams competed unsuccessfully with the intense noise, barely registering. A warm spray blurred his vision…and the storm ended just as quickly as it started, leaving him stunned in his seat.

The Tiger slowed to a stop, with smoke pouring from its partially open, punctured hood. It was still too dark to see inside the cabin without night vision, but he didn’t need to visually confirm the fact that they were combat ineffective. Misha’s head leaned against the steering wheel, his hands still tightly gripped in the ten and two o’clock position. He muttered unintelligibly, or maybe Farrington was still too dazed to comprehend what he was saying. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Gosha lying on the deck of the rear compartment, trying to raise himself up on an elbow.

The deep thumping sound of the Hip’s rotors jarred him back into action, and he opened the door, gripping his AK-107 rifle. He hopped down from the vehicle, expecting to fall into the tall grass on useless legs, but instead landed in a steady crouch. Grateful that he had somehow escaped the maelstrom unscathed, he reached instinctively for his missing night vision goggles. Failing to find them attached to his helmet, he cursed and moved to the back of the Tiger, hoping to spot the lumbering beast against the early dawn sky.

He caught a glimpse of the dark shape moving right to left and considered climbing up the side of the Tiger to use the grenade launcher. He knew it would be pointless. The Russians would engage the vehicle from behind, rendering the AGS-30 useless. His only course of action at this point was to drag his team clear of the vehicle and try to reach the border. The thought was insane, given what he had seen inside the Tiger, but it was the only plan he could conjure while tracking the Hip’s movement against the royal blue strip of horizon. The terrifying buzz saw sound of the Russian helicopter’s miniguns filled his ears, causing him to involuntarily brace for the inevitable green storm that would unceremoniously tear him to shreds three hundred meters from the Kazakhstan border. They’d almost made it.

The sound of rapid gunfire continued, but he didn’t disintegrate along with the Tiger. Instead, a long line of red tracers raced toward the Russian helicopter, bouncing off the Hip’s metal hull like a Fourth of July sparkler. The visual effect gave the deceptive impression that the Hip was impervious to the gunfire, but Farrington knew better. For each tracer that bounced off the Hip’s thin aluminum hull, at least fifteen 7.62mm steel jacketed rounds pounded the helicopter in a continuous stream of kinetic energy. The three-second burst of tracers put well over three hundred high-velocity projectiles into the Hip, most likely killing it.

A second crimson stream reached out and connected with the Russian helicopter. Before the minigun’s deadly echo had faded, a tremendous explosion lit the ground to the east, briefly exposing the black helicopter that had undeniably saved their lives. Farrington turned to the Tiger and opened the rear hatch, using the light from the burning wreckage to survey the damage. The blood-slicked deck didn’t buoy his hopes.

“Blackjack elements, report!” he yelled, checking Sasha’s pulse, which was strong.

“I’m hit in at least two places,” Gosha whispered, “left shoulder and hip.”

“Looks like you got hit in the head too,” Farrington said, searching his vest for a flashlight.

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Gosha replied.

“Misha?” he said, getting no response.

He slid along the left side of the Tiger to the driver’s door, directing his flashlight through the smoke to assess the damage. The hatch showed several sizable, paint chipped dents, where rounds had bounced harmlessly off the vehicle’s armor plating. The window frame showed similar damage, which made him wonder how many of the projectiles had passed through the open window, potentially striking Misha. A bloodied hand appeared and gripped the bottom of the window frame.

“Misha?” Farrington repeated, exposing the operative to the bright LED beam.

“Yeah, I’m fucked up,” he grunted.

“Can you move?” Farrington said, trying to open the door, which was stuck.

“I don’t think so. I’m hit all over,” he whispered.

Farrington pulled on the door several times, finally dislodging it. Misha’s assault rifle tumbled to the ground, landing under the Tiger. Glistening scarlet ribbons lined the instrument panel and center column, extending across the dashboard to the passenger side. The operative turned his head toward the light and smiled weakly. In the bright LED beam, Misha looked pale and listless. A deep gash ran across his chin, dripping blood onto the bottom of the steering wheel.

“We made it,” Misha said.

“Somehow,” Farrington said. “Let’s get you out of there.”

A gust of wind poured through the cabin from the open passenger side door, pelting his face with dirt. Squinting to see through the door into the murky darkness beyond, he detected the presence of something big lowering to the ground beyond the Tiger. Not wanting to take a friendly bullet between the eyes less than three hundred meters from the Kazakhstan border, he put his hands over his head and stepped back from the vehicle. Moments later, six heavily armed, dark-clad figures sprinted through the swirling cloud of dirt and descended on the vehicle.

“I need two stretchers!” one of them yelled, hopping down from the rear hatch and walking up to Farrington.

“We need to get out of here, sir. The entire 21^st is headed right to this grid square. I don’t know what you did, but you sure as shit pissed them off!” the commando said.

“You have no idea,” Farrington said.

He grabbed the Delta operator’s shoulder before the man had a chance to turn.

“I’ll take care of the KIA,” he said.

Farrington slung his rifle and helped the soldiers lower Misha onto one of the foldable stretchers produced by the helicopter’s extraction team. By the time he had finished securing Misha to the stretcher, the rest of his team had been spirited off into the night. He pulled Seva’s body out of the Tiger’s troop compartment and heaved it over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. No man left behind. He raced through the choking swirl of Siberian dirt to catch up with the men loading Misha’s stretcher onto the strangest helicopter he’d ever seen.

Eager hands pulled Seva’s body into the troop compartment, grabbing him just as quickly. The ground lifted away from his feet before he had fully entered the helicopter.

“Sorry about that, sir, but we really need to get moving,” the Delta operator said, gripping Farrington’s combat vest.

The helicopter banked left, giving Farrington a sweeping view of the Siberian steppe. The dark blue eastern horizon had started to show a faint, blood-red hue under the thinning clouds. The helicopter’s crew chief reached out and pulled the sliding door shut. Dark red lighting bathed the compartment, exposing the urgent effort to stabilize Misha. Toward the rear of the helicopter, one of the Delta soldiers methodically stripped away his body armor and outer garments, while another prepared several IV drip bags. On the bench in front of him, a third operator pressed a medical compress to Gosha’s leg. Sasha’s stretcher lay at his feet, jammed into the compartment. The helicopter’s hasty departure hadn’t allowed for an orderly loading process.

“They’re in good hands, sir. This is one of our combat trauma teams,” said the Delta operator next to him.

He noted that the compartment resembled a stripped-down version of a Black Hawk, configured with eight troop seats and a sophisticated medical station equipped to handle two casualties. An additional station behind the copilot’s seat resembled something he’d seen inside a command-and-control Stryker vehicle.

“What is this thing?” Farrington said.

“Highly classified. That’s about all I know. They didn’t want to send these in after you,” the lead Delta operator said.

“I’m glad they changed their minds,” Farrington said.

“They didn’t. Our task force commander made the call. They’re probably choking on the hors d’oeuvres back in Washington.”

“I hope so. Saves me from having to choke them,” Farrington said.

Chapter 70

The president closed the door and took a seat on the leather couch, ready to jump down Jacob Remy’s throat if the man said another word about the helicopters. Yes, they had all watched Black Magic violate the established rules of engagement to the fullest extent possible, by not only crossing into Russian airspace but also destroying one of the Russian helicopters. And yes, this could have ended badly, with the wreckage of a prototype stealth helicopter and the bodies of a dozen or more American servicemen strewn across the Siberian countryside. But none of that mattered because it didn’t happen. None of it had ever happened, and Jacob Remy needed to get that clear. The operation succeeded, leaving no physical evidence behind, and the Russians were in no position to press the matter.

“Well?” he said, shrugging his shoulders at Remy.

“We’ve got a bigger problem than two Russian helicopters,” Remy said.

“I don’t really care at this point,” the president said.

“You have to care, sir. The CIA has gone rogue. Manning has lost control of the National Clandestine Service. I want to show you something.”

“Go ahead.”

Remy activated one of the large flat-screen monitors, which displayed satellite imagery. He sat behind a small computer station in the corner of the study and zoomed in on one of the images.

“This was taken over Slavgorod right after the mysterious blackout. Thermal imaging confirms the wreckage of seven armored vehicles. All six vehicles situated along the approach road to Slavgorod were destroyed. There’s no way that Blackjack could have done this. I was willing to believe that they had somehow slipped away, but this is clearly the work of something else. Either a drone or stealth bomber,” Remy said.

“General Gordon decided against the use of surveillance drones over Kazakhstan,” the president said.

“Right, and I don’t think anyone stole a stealth bomber. The Pentagon tends to notice when things like that go missing. Do you know what this means?”

The president shook his head apathetically.

“The CIA put an armed drone over Russia without your permission and attacked Russian army units en masse. Renegade special operations pilots destroyed two Russian helicopters,” Remy said. “We’re looking at fifty plus Russian casualties, easily. This thing spiraled way out of control. We should have taken action earlier to limit this.”

“How? By sending our own drones in to take out Blackjack on the Ob River? Or maybe passing along Blackjack’s exfiltration route to the Russians? After they successfully destroyed Vektor, of course,” the president said.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Really? Because I’m beginning to wonder. Jacob, I learned a valuable lesson tonight. Something I’ve lost sight of. Politics has no place in an operation like that. We either check our politics in at the door, or we don’t walk into the room, because the men and women carrying out these missions don’t care about any of that crap. They execute the mission. End of story. If we can’t support them one hundred percent, then we have no business asking them to do our dirty work in the first place.”

“We didn’t come up with the idea to take out Vektor,” Remy reminded him.

“Once we put our stamp of approval on it, we owned it. Thomas Manning, the helicopter pilots, and whoever made the decision to put an armed drone over Slavgorod? We owe them a debt of gratitude for correcting our mistake. Don’t ever forget that, Jacob.”

Jacob Remy remained silent for several seconds. By not offering an immediate contradictory statement, his chief of staff indicated that he understood the president’s point and would abide by it.

“We should meet with the secretary of state and White House counsel within the hour. They’re going to need most of the night to prepare for tomorrow’s fun,” Remy said, closing the link to the satellite picture.

“Let’s call them in, though I’d be surprised if tomorrow held much drama for us. I predict that the Russians will quietly sweep this under the rug. Bioweapons are an ugly business.”

“So is invading another country,” Remy said.

“Agreed, which is why we’re going to politely hold the rug up for them. The sooner this goes away, the better,” the president said.

Chapter 71

Karl Berg shut down his computer and locked his KSV-21 Crypto Card in his desk. He stood up and removed the sport coat draped over the back of his chair, eyeing the small carry-on bag next to his open office door. He needed to be on a non-stop flight to Burlington, Vermont, that left Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport at 10:10 PM. He’d rent a car and check into the closest hotel, hopefully settling in by one in the morning. He’d wake up early and drive to the Mountain Glen Retirement Facility, where he would personally put an end to the last twisted legacy of the Russian bioweapons program.

Thomas Manning appeared in the doorway before he could turn off the brass-finished banker’s light on his desk. Shit. He had really hoped to avoid Manning tonight. Based on the NCS director’s last transmission to the CIA operations center, Berg got the sense that Manning’s career had just suffered a severe setback. The fact that Director Copley handled all communications from that point forward further reinforced the hypothesis. Whatever happened between Manning and the president triggered a series of events that brought the surviving members of Farrington’s team home. If Manning was willing to torpedo his own career to do the right thing, Berg had no intention of making excuses for the drone stunt. Shit rolled downhill, and Audra had made it clear that she would no longer protect him from the avalanches of shit he called down on himself. He’d take whatever Manning came here to deliver, standing up like a man.

“Karl, do you have a minute?” Manning asked.

“Of course, Thomas. I have a 10:10 flight to Burlington, but I can’t envision the drive taking me more than thirty minutes on a Sunday night. Interesting day, huh?”

Manning stepped into the office and gently closed the door. “That’s one way of describing it. We did some good today.”

“We certainly did. It’s been a long few months since I received the first tip that the Russians were looking for Reznikov. I’ll be glad to put this whole thing to rest tomorrow,” Berg said.

“You did an unbelievable job with this, Karl, which is why I’m willing to overlook the fact that you hijacked a twenty-million-dollar drone from Afghanistan and declared war on Russia’s 21^st Motor Rifle Division.”

“And one helicopter,” Berg added.

“I was wondering. Why not both helicopters?”

“We used one of the Hellfires to create a diversionary explosion in Slavgorod. If we’d saved that missile, the end wouldn’t have been so dramatic,” Berg said.

“Sanderson’s men are in stable condition at the FARP,” Manning said. “SOCOM will fly the whole package back to Manas after nightfall.”

“He seemed pleased with the outcome. I think he expected to lose more of the team.”

“I think he expected to lose all of them,” Manning said. “This was always a one-way trip in my mind, which is why I didn’t hold back when they broke through Slavgorod. I knew what was going on as soon as the satellite feed died, and I wasn’t about to let the president and his weasel-faced chief break their promise to those men.”

“I told Sanderson what you did. He owes you one.”

“No. Once again, we owe him. Keep your eyes and ears open, Karl. Not that you have any friends in the White House. Jacob Remy will throw Sanderson to the wolves if the opportunity arises. The least we can do is run interference.”

“You’d be surprised who I know and who Sanderson knows,” Berg said.

“Good. Between you, me and Audra, we should be able to make good on that debt.”

“I don’t think Audra and I are on speaking terms any longer.”

“She’ll get over it. I’m transferring you to the Special Activities Division’s Special Operations Group as the new acting deputy director. Jeffrey McConnell is slated to take over the entire division by the first of next year, which should give you more than enough time to familiarize yourself with his job.”

“His job as director of SOG?”

“I could really use someone with your planning ability and instincts over there,” Manning said.

“Isn’t this technically a demotion?” he said jokingly.

“Considering the fact that I basically created your current position under Bauer out of thin air? No. This is a promotion. Actually, it was Bauer’s idea,” Manning said.

“Wow. She really is pissed at me,” Berg said.

“I don’t think that had anything to do with her recommendation. She submitted your name two weeks ago,” he said, pausing for a moment. “I’ll let you get going. Good luck tomorrow.”

“I shouldn’t need any luck,” Berg said, “hopefully.”

“There’s nothing easy about killing someone. That’s why we usually have other people do it for us. They can take care of Reznikov’s ‘retirement’ you know.”

“I know,” Berg said, turning off his desk lamp.

Chapter 72

The SUV slowed to a stop, and Berg heard the vehicle’s front doors slam shut. They had arrived at the compound. Moments later, the right passenger door opened, exposing him to the same drizzly, overcast day he had experienced on the entire drive from Burlington. Berg gripped his black nylon briefcase and nodded to the serious-looking man holding his door. The security agent escorted him to the colonial-style structure, where Gary Sheffield waited.

“You’re turning into a regular up here,” Sheffield said, shaking his hand.

“This should be my last trip for quite some time. Running across someone like Reznikov is pretty rare in my experience,” Berg said, stepping inside the hallway foyer.

“I’m glad to hear that because he’s by far the creepiest inmate we’ve ever had the displeasure of housing. I don’t particularly care for any of the guests, but I’ll be extremely glad to see him go. Something about him is really off.”

“That’s truly an understatement in his case. I can think of a lot of people that share your sentiment, which is why I’m back so soon.”

“Can I get you some coffee or breakfast?” Sheffield said.

“Maybe after I’m done.”

“I’ll put something together. Shall we?” Sheffield said, motioning toward the end of the hardwood hallway.

The compound’s quaint façade ended several steps into the house. Through the door leading left out of the front hallway, he saw wall-to-wall flat-screen monitors organized around a half-dozen workstations. Security personnel monitored the sensors and cameras installed in the residences and public buildings from here. The doorway to the right was closed, but he knew from previous visits that Sheffield’s people kept an eye on the external sensors and communications from that room. Sheffield walked past these rooms and approached a metal door flanked by a biometric fingerprint scanner. He pressed his thumb down first, then his ring finger, holding it there until the door clicked and opened a few inches.

“What do you do if there’s a power failure?” Berg said.

“We have generators to keep that from happening, but the door automatically opens if the house loses power for more than ten seconds,” Sheffield said.

He pushed the heavy door open to expose a walk-in-closet-sized room lined with racks of military-grade weaponry.

“Expecting an invasion?” Berg said.

“Some of our guests commanded private armies in their previous lives,” Sheffield said.

He reached to the right, just out of sight and withdrew a semiautomatic pistol fitted with a short suppressor. He pulled back on the slide, locking it in the open position before handing it to Berg.

“This should do the trick. Sig Sauer P250 compact. Magazine holds fifteen rounds, not that you’ll need that many…I hope.”

“I’m not that bad of a shot,” Berg said.

“Not saying you are. There’s no safety on this pistol, so—”

Berg released the slide, chambering a round. “Double action only?”

“Correct. But it’s a light pull. 5.5 pounds.”

Berg placed the pistol inside an easily accessible Velcro pouch within his briefcase. The nylon bag held a mock file and a 750 milliliter bottle of expensive vodka, which Reznikov would never taste.

“All right,” Berg said.

“Perfect. Reznikov has ordered breakfast for 8 o’clock, which is earlier than usual. I’ll send a cleanup crew down instead,” Sheffield said.

Berg nodded, feeling suddenly anxious about what he had calmly envisioned doing for the past month. The look on his face must have betrayed his apprehension because Sheffield put a hand on his shoulder.

“You don’t have to do this. In the three years I’ve been here, we’ve retired eight guests. Nobody from Langley has ever showed up for one of the retirement ceremonies,” Sheffield said.

“Do you really call it a retirement ceremony?”

“That’s what they’ve always been called,” Sheffield said.

“This guy doesn’t deserve the euphemism. I’ll take you up on the coffee and breakfast when I get back. I might have a shot of this vodka too,” Berg said.

“Fair enough, Mr. Berg. I’ll show you out.”

A few minutes later, Berg turned down path number five and entered a thick stand of pine trees that concealed Reznikov’s soon-to-be-vacated residence. He rang the doorbell, expecting to wait several minutes for the drunken maniac to answer. Reznikov had used his fifth satellite phone call yesterday afternoon to confirm that Vektor bioweapons program had been successfully destroyed. His Solntsevskaya contact confirmed that the operation had succeeded at the laboratory. A brief description of several simultaneous plumes of fire at the site had been enough to convince Reznikov that Berg’s team had succeeded. Sheffield said he celebrated well into afternoon before passing out without ordering dinner.

Berg was caught slightly off guard when Reznikov opened the door. He’d expected to find the scientist stumbling around in a cotton robe, nursing a massive headache and rubbing his perpetually bloodshot eyes. Instead, Reznikov looked rested and alert, wearing an outfit suitable for a day hike in the mountains. Something seemed off about this.

“Oh. It’s you?” Reznikov said.

“Going for a walk?” Berg said.

“Uh, well. Now that I am a permanent resident, I figured it might be time to embrace my surroundings. So, I suppose congratulations are in order?” he said, glancing nervously over Berg’s shoulder.

“They are. I thought we’d celebrate,” Berg said.

Berg withdrew the bottle of vodka from his briefcase and offered it to Reznikov, who accepted it reluctantly.

“I really do feel like getting some fresh air this morning. I celebrated a little too hard yesterday afternoon,” Reznikov said, taking a step forward.

Berg blocked the doorway, flashing a disingenuous smile. “I insist that we take a moment to celebrate. It should help you take the edge off. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Reznikov took a moment to consider Berg’s offer, displaying an anguished look out of character with someone who routinely downed a bottle like this before ten in the morning. The Russian’s eyes shifted to the forest again before he finally relented and stepped back into the cottage.

“Where are my manners? Of course. A quick toast, then I really should get out for some fresh air. You’re welcome to join me,” Reznikov said.

Berg pulled the door shut and followed him inside, sliding his hand into the black nylon briefcase. He felt for the Velcro flap that covered the hidden compartment, suddenly hardened for what he needed to do.

Greg Marshall yawned and rubbed his eyes. A few more minutes and his eight-hour shift monitoring the compound’s remote sensor network would come to an end. He’d eat a massive breakfast and crash out for several hours upstairs, until his natural biorhythms forced him out of bed. He closed his eyes and imagined the grease-laden farmer’s breakfast waiting for him in the sunroom. Security work at the compound might be tedious, but the food was plentiful and he had plenty of time between shifts to work it off. He could imagine worse work within the agency.

When he opened his eyes, he immediately saw that one of the eastern-based sensor arrays had detected movement. Damn it. Now his watch turnover would be delayed by at least fifteen minutes while a team was dispatched to investigate what would undoubtedly turn out to be another bear. The system could eliminate most non-human signatures based on speed, size and thermal characteristics, but it had a hard time differentiating between a young black bear and a human being. The system would track the bear accurately while it ambled along on all fours, but suddenly flash an alert when it rose up on its hind legs to pick berries. Now his breakfast would have to wait. He pulled his chair up to the desk and started the checklist.

The fifty-inch LED screen mounted at eye level in front of his desk displayed a digital map of the area surrounding the compound. Two sectors showed movement, which was a little unusual. He moved his hand to the red phone at the edge of the workstation and considered ringing Sheffield. Not yet. Sheffield hated when they rang him without gathering any information. He dragged the cursor over to the closest red sector and double-clicked, activating the two screens flanking the center monitor.

The top screen displayed multiple camera feeds from the sector, which he could change from traditional full color day view to thermal imaging. The bottom screen presented information from the motion sensors, pressure plates and thermal scanners in numeric and map form. The sector boundary map on this screen indicated that the signals were rapidly approaching the fence line. Multiple signals. The data flowing next to the map told him which cameras to search for a view of the targets, presenting hyperlinks that would change the view on the top screen to reflect what he had selected. He clicked on of the links and momentarily froze in his chair. What the fuck? Two heavily armed men sprinted toward the only section of fence exposed directly to the security complex beside the front gate. He didn’t bother to check the second sector before charging the entire eastern fence line and picking up the red phone.

The former Russian GRU Spetsnaz soldier raced toward the ten-foot-high section of chain-link fence directly ahead of him and threw himself to the ground several feet in front of it. He quickly extended the bipod attached to his RPK-74S Light Machine Gun and pressed the weapon firmly into the ground. Through the 3.4X ACOG sight attached to the RPK’s top rail, he sighted in on the front door of the gray two-story house and disengaged the weapon’s safety.

His partner had already stopped several meters back, having found a thick tree stump to support his .50 caliber sniper rifle. They would both start engaging targets as soon as it became apparent that the alarm had been sounded. The RPK would be used against security personnel, while the .50 caliber sniper rifle would initially target the building’s communications array. Based on the second team’s progress, they would breach the fence and provide close-up support as requested.

Nearly on cue with his arrival, three men spilled out of the front door onto the gravel driveway. One of the men peeled left and crouched against the front bumper of a black SUV, aiming an assault rifle in his general direction, while the other two took off in the opposite direction. He fired a sustained burst through the fence at the man next to the truck, kicking up gravel around the truck and connecting with the SUV’s metal frame. The man flailed backward, obviously hit by at least one of the rounds, so he shifted his aim to the two men fleeing toward an outcropping of dark ledge near the house.

A massive detonation sounded in the distance on his right, rippling the fence as his next burst of bullets caught the first man and sent him tumbling to the ground in a tangle of collapsed limbs. His partner stopped and crouched low to return fire, but was struck in the head by a well-aimed, short burst from the machine gun.

The RPK’s longer and heavier barrel, designed to allow accurate, sustained automatic fire in an infantry support role, combined extremely well with the combat telescopic sight to yield an effective sharpshooting weapon. He reacquired the front door of the house and demonstrated the light machine gun’s true purpose on this mission, pulling the trigger and cycling through the remaining seventy seven rounds of 5.45mm in long sweeping bursts that raked the front of the house from top to bottom, splintering the cedar siding and shattering all of the windows.

Karl Berg’s hand froze when he heard the first muffled staccato burst of gunfire. His first thought was that Sheffield had picked a really shitty time to conduct target practice for his security team. He dismissed that thought when the house shook violently, followed immediately by the thunderclap of a nearby explosion. He put it all together before the next burst of gunfire tore through the compound. Reznikov had somehow led the Russian mafiya to Mountain Glen.

He fumbled with the Velcro flap in his briefcase, almost missing Reznikov’s sudden attack. The thick bottle of vodka he’d given the scientist appeared overhead, plunging toward his head. Berg abandoned the effort to draw his pistol and raised the briefcase upward to deflect the heavy glass bludgeon. With most of his hand-to-hand combat training years behind him, the CIA officer’s instinctual response was far from graceful.

The bottle crashed into his forearm with a sickening thump, driving his arm down below his head. Reznikov raised the bottle to strike him in the head, but Berg kicked him in the sternum, disrupting the attack. The Russian stumbled backward, dropping the bottle onto the hardwood floor, where it shattered. Berg considered trying to retrieve the pistol from the briefcase at his feet, but Reznikov charged the door, and he had no intention of losing the Russian that easily.

The Russian grabbed the doorknob with both hands, unable to defend himself from Berg’s front kick, which was aimed at his hands. Berg’s sturdy hiking boots crushed Reznikov’s fingers against the brass knob, causing the Russian to recoil from the front door, howling in agony. Less than a second later, a klaxon sounded in the house, and Reznikov threw himself at the door, screaming. Now Berg understood why he had been so focused on the door. The house could be put into lockdown mode from the security station, which would complicate whatever plan the lunatic had conjured.

Reznikov yanked at the door to no avail and quickly scrambled left to one of the picture windows. Berg glanced at the window to his immediate right and saw metal shutters descending outside of the windowpanes. He heard glass shatter and turned his attention back to Reznikov. The crazed scientist had cracked the other window with the base of a table lamp. Judging from the shutters’ rate of descent, Berg wasn’t worried about Reznikov escaping through the window. The security shutters next to him had already blocked most of the light from the outside. In a fit of rage, the Russian repeatedly struck the window frame in an ineffectual display of fury, yelling orders to his hidden rescuers.

Berg decided that this would be a good time to grab his pistol. Trying to ignore the excruciating pain in his left arm, he opened the flap and withdrew the pistol, just as a fusillade of bullets tore through the door and the drywall next to him. The CIA officer dropped flat against the floor and fired three hastily aimed shots through the cloud of obliterated drywall dust at Reznikov’s silhouette. Another long burst of gunfire penetrated the front of the house, ripping through the furniture and collapsing the closest end table.

He hadn’t fully processed Reznikov’s verbal tirade, which had obviously directed indiscriminate automatic weapons fire into the left side of the house. He needed to get clear of the free-fire zone before Reznikov directed the next barrage right onto him. Searching for a target with his pistol, Berg scrambled forward, quickly reaching the archway to find the library room empty. He heard a chair scrape across the kitchen tile and turned his attention to the doorway leading out of the library and deeper into the house.

Before he could process the thought any further, he heard two separate Russian voices outside of the house yell, “Clear!” Berg’s options at this point were extremely limited, but one of them wasn’t standing in the library, exposed to the front door. He passed through the doorway less than a millisecond before a small explosion shook the house. The explosion cleared his mind and engaged some of the mind processes buried under years of bureaucratic deskwork at Langley. He hoped this temporary reboot would be enough to keep him alive.

He’d been one of the CIA’s premier case officers in Europe during the Cold War’s final decade, sidelining as a “black ops” field supervisor long before retired Special Forces operators filled those roles. He knew what would come through that door, and that his chances of walking out of here alive were poor, but Berg was a survivor, and he still had plenty of fight left in him. He immediately started forming a strategy.

Reznikov’s Solntsevskaya benefactors would have used highly trained professionals for this job, most likely former Russian army Spetsnaz, which didn’t bode well. Spetsnaz operators were notoriously savage and barely restrained by rules of engagement within the Russian military. As hired guns for the Russian mafiya, there would be no limit to their brutality. The only factor working in his favor at this point was an intimate familiarity with Special Operations tactics.

Special Forces teams worldwide could attribute their incredible success rate to training. Repetitive training. Especially in close-quarters combat. There was little variation in training and tactics, which is why he wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear metal objects hit the hardwood floor somewhere in the front of the house. Flashbangs. He glanced toward the staircase off the kitchen and made a quick calculation. He had at this point all but forgotten about Reznikov, who was nowhere in sight.

A long burst of distant gunfire preceded the multiple flashbang detonations inside the house, reminding Yergei that the compound’s security team was still in play. He didn’t need to cue the two men that flanked the door. They had practiced this drill hundreds of times together as a Russian Spetsnaz direct-action team and several dozen more times as private contractors. The only real difference between the two was that he routinely got paid more for one of these privately funded operations than he made in an entire year as a Russian army sergeant.

The four-man team assembled on Reznikov’s doorstep had worked exclusively together throughout the world for the past three years, making money hand over fist doing business with some of the nastiest people alive. Assassination, kidnapping, extortion, blackmail…all for sale to the highest bidder, and the Solntsevskaya Bratva was by far their best customer.

When the flashbangs exploded, the assault team’s point man peeled away from his position next to the smoldering doorway and slid into the house. The operative on the other side of the door started to follow, when two gunshots knocked the point man’s lifeless body back onto the granite porch in a cascade of brains and blood. The second man fired a burst from his shortened AK-74 into the house, which instigated mayhem. Yergei heard screaming, followed by several rapidly spaced pistol shots, all of which competed with the sound of crashing furniture.

“He’s upstairs, you fucking idiots. He shot me in the face!” yelled a Russian voice from inside.

“Watch your fire!” he yelled to the team.

His instructions had been clear. If he didn’t recover the scientist alive, they had no reason to return to Russia. They would be out of business, simple as that, targets of the next team standing in line to take their place…and there were many. Their bratva contact had made this painfully clear, which underscored the importance of the mission and better explained the exorbitant fee they had been able to negotiate. Reznikov was critically important to the Solntsevskaya Bratva.

“Hit the upstairs,” he said, pointing at the cottage’s shuttered dormer windows.

The two remaining operatives sprinted several meters back from the house and turned, each firing an entire magazine at the second floor. Yergei charged through the door during the mayhem and headed right, hearing the snap of a bullet pass inches from his head. The pistol’s report was lost in the hammering of automatic weapon’s fire from just outside the house, but he had caught a glimpse of the shooter on the staircase.

He spotted Reznikov sitting against a floor-to-ceiling bookcase, precariously close to a splintered doorframe he presumed to be fully exposed to the shooter who had just fired on him as he entered the house. Reznikov muttered to himself, holding a blood-covered hand to his face while repeatedly hitting the bookshelf with the back of his head. Scarlet fluid oozed through his fingers and dripped into a widening stain on his right thigh.

Yergei aimed his rifle high along the room’s interior wall, pointing in the presumed direction of the staircase off the kitchen. He fired several controlled bursts through the thin drywall while advancing toward the scientist. He arrived at the splintered doorframe next to Reznikov with enough ammunition in the rifle’s thirty-round magazine for a short, well-aimed burst at the staircase. As he fired the rifle, two more bullets snapped past, missing his head by inches and striking the wall behind him. He yanked his head back, satisfied that he had done enough damage to the shooter to escape safely with Reznikov. A sizable bloodstain had appeared on the wall at the top of the stairs.

“We’re getting you out of here,” Yergei said, reloading his weapon.

“Team. Inside left! Watch the stairway!” he said.

Within seconds, the two operatives appeared inside the house, fanning to the left and occupying the corners of the room. He pointed at the ceiling above them and gave the hand signal to open fire. The men crouched and aimed at the ceiling, firing wild bursts of automatic fire into the drywall above. Yergei joined them, sending most of the steel-jacketed rounds from his fresh magazine into the remaining ceiling areas that didn’t show significant damage. He always retained a few rounds just in case.

“We’re done here!” he said to his men, walking back to Reznikov.

They didn’t have any more time to play around with the mystery shooter. They had less than five minutes to secure a landing zone behind the security building, which still presented a considerable obstacle to their success. The constant sound of small arms fire, intertwined with the deep boom of a .50 caliber sniper rifle, reminded him of why they had been paid so much for this job. Nobody said it would be easy.

“You have to make sure he is dead!” Reznikov said.

“We don’t have time for that! My job is to get you out of here alive! So stand up and move out! I don’t see anything wrong with your legs,” Yergei said.

“You could at least be polite about it,” Reznikov protested.

“I don’t get paid for that, so don’t push your luck. Get on your fucking feet and move!” he said, spurring Reznikov into action.

He pushed the scientist through the front door and activated his shoulder microphone.

“Support team. Move up on the house. We’re on our way.”

Berg pressed his hands against his ears, wincing from the pain that radiated through his left arm. The flashbangs detonated moments later, whitewashing the kitchen in a six-million-Candela flash, but essentially causing no distress to his eyesight. Similarly, the one-hundred-and-seventy-decibel subsonic deflagration emitted by the grenade was reduced to a tolerable level by his hands. The suppressed gunshots fired from his pistol moments earlier had produced significantly more discomfort. He sprang into action and crossed the kitchen, torn by his decision to seek safety instead of hunting down Reznikov. He was in pure survival mode at this point, with little on his mind beyond getting upstairs, where he might be able to put up a better defense.

Reaching the center hallway, he didn’t hesitate to lean out and search for targets. His experience told him that the men entering the house would rush through the “fatal funnel,” or front doorway in this case, and immediately clear the front corners of the house. Their attention would not be focused forward directly upon entry. A heavily armed operative suddenly appeared in his sights, oblivious to his concealed presence dead ahead. Berg fired two 9mm hollow point rounds at his head, stopping the Russian cold. Based on the crimson explosion behind the man’s head, Berg had no doubt that he had scored a lethal hit. Unwilling to press his luck, he sprinted toward the stairs, barely avoiding a burst of rifle fire centered on the hallway.

Before he reached the stairs, Reznikov burst out of the walk-in pantry to his right, holding a kitchen stool and shrieking like a madman. He sprinted past Berg, swinging the stool at his head, but missing by inches. The CIA officer extended his right hand and fired repeatedly at the fleeing scientist. At least one of the rounds connected, knocking Reznikov against the far wall, but before he could line up a kill shot, Reznikov spilled through the doorway leading to the library.

He had missed his last chance to kill Reznikov, a fact he knew would condemn thousands, if not millions of lives in the near future. The thought of this epic failure kept him from fleeing up the stairs, which probably saved his life. The upstairs landing disappeared in a storm of drywall and splintering wood, as the sound of automatic fire echoed throughout the house. Movement near the front door attracted his attention, and he brought his pistol to bear on a single intruder. He managed to squeeze off one shot, missing by inches, before the commando vanished into the library.

Bursts of automatic fire punctured the wall on the other side of the hallway and chased him upstairs. He reached the top of the stairs and turned, noting a discernible pattern on the downstairs wall. Each burst had shifted left across the wall, indicating that the gunman was moving toward the back of the house. Berg crouched low and steadied his hand against the stairway corner, aiming at the kitchen doorway as bullets continued to pour through the wall. Through the smoke and drywall dust, a head appeared, and he fired twice, never seeing if his rounds connected. He was struck in the upper left shoulder and spun into the bathroom behind him. He landed on his hands and knees, physically stunned and unable to breathe…but fully aware that he was a dead man if he didn’t move.

Gary Sheffield low-crawled down the blood-slicked hardwood floor toward the front door, urging his body forward against every survival instinct his brain had activated within the past five minutes. Another burst of machine-gun fire swept through the front of the house, spraying him with wooden splinters and bits of drywall. The sound of gunfire seemed closer than before. A second distant explosion had shaken the house less than a minute ago, yielding a temporary lull in machine-gun fire. The team had advanced to a new position inside of the fence line.

He stopped for a moment and leaned to the right, peering through the open front door, still unable to spot the shooters. He had no intention of taking a second look. The headless body lying several feet ahead of him served as a grim reminder that the ceaseless machine-gun fire wasn’t the only threat out there. Anyone who exposed a body part for too long or appeared in the same place twice inevitably attracted a .50 caliber projectile. Three members of his team had been gruesomely killed this way.

Satisfied that he wasn’t in their line of sight, Sheffield squirmed through the doorway on the left and surveyed the communications room. Greg Marshall’s bullet-riddled body sat slumped in a chair at the sensor station. He had been killed in the first full machine-gun sweep, along with Sheffield’s assistant. Both of them had been desperately trying to raise CIA headquarters to report the attack, but had not received a response. He suspected that the first few thunderous rifle reports had been directed at their communications dome, knocking out their encrypted satellite connection.

Even if they had managed to contact headquarters, reinforcements wouldn’t arrive for several hours. Protocol for this ultra-secret station didn’t allow them to contact local law enforcement. In the event of an attack, they were on their own until the CIA could arrange for a team to arrive. Under most conceivable scenarios, his security arrangement would have been sufficient to repel any attempted breach of the facility. This morning’s attack had been different, and he couldn’t shake the thought that the timing of Berg’s arrival had not been a coincidence. Greg Marshall’s last report confirmed that the second team had breached the fence line near Reznikov’s residence.

The rest of his survey confirmed that nothing salvageable remained in the room. Sporadic rifle fire erupted from the house, attracting another long hail of machine-gun fire and at least two sniper rounds. Several bullets punctured the north-facing wall, indicating a new threat direction and the arrival of the team sent to either kill or retrieve Reznikov. Disregarding the machine-gun fire that poured through the front of the house, he sprinted into the hallway and barreled into the kitchen, stopping at the back door.

“What do you have?” he yelled at the agent crouched in the doorframe.

“Another team moving across the middle. Four men. One of them is Reznikov!”

Son of a bitch. They were trying to break Reznikov out of his compound. The big question was how? He had no idea how they had arrived, but he figured that they had hiked in. It was the only way to approach silently enough to evade early detection. There was no way they could successfully hike back, with or without Reznikov, at this point.

The only other option involved commandeering vehicles based at the compound. He had personally disabled both SUVs with his rifle, which left them with the ATVs parked in the garage. They could use the ATVs to navigate the access road and hijack a car on one of the county roads, but this seemed like a flimsy exfiltration plan given what his intruders had already accomplished, and they were headed in the wrong direction. The garage was located in the opposite direction they were travelling.

“Is Berg with them?” Sheffield said, still not convinced the CIA agent’s arrival was a coincidence.

“Negative. Three shooters and Reznikov. Fuck! They have a clear angle on us!” the agent said, raising his rifle to engage the group.

Sheffield leaned through the door and sighted in on one of the partially exposed moving targets through the holographic sight attached to his HK416C ultra-compact. He fired in semiautomatic mode, striking the rocks just behind the shooter. The agent in the doorway fired a long burst at the same man, kicking up dirt and rock chips, but failing to score a hit. The two other agents stationed along the back of the house at the corners retreated toward the back door as return fire from the cluster of shooters started to tear into the west-facing side of the house.

A bullet snapped past Sheffield’s head, striking the doorframe above him and forcing his retreat into the kitchen. The rest of his agents piled through the opening as bullets started to slice through the wall, forcing all of them to seek cover deeper inside the house. They had learned the hard way that the structure’s exterior walls barely slowed the high-velocity projectiles fired at them. Firing directly through a window while standing near it only made things easier for the compound’s intruders. He’d lost at least half of his team to gunfire that passed effortlessly through the exterior walls. The compound’s designers clearly hadn’t anticipated the possibility of the team getting trapped inside the house.

Yergei threw himself down against the rocks and hugged the ground, wincing from the pieces of rock that peppered his face. The surviving members of the compound’s security team were putting up a spirited resistance. With this kind of incoming fire, there was no way he could risk directing the helicopter to land, and without the helicopter, they faced a long, arduous trek out of here by ATV. The helicopter was less than a minute away.

His machine gunner fired a five-second-long burst of 7.62mm projectiles through the north wall and stopped to reload while the sniper sprinted to catch up with the group escorting Reznikov. The scientist didn’t have a clue about tactical considerations in a firefight, and his men had to constantly force him down to avoid incoming fire. For a supposed genius, the guy didn’t have the situational awareness of a drunken street bum. When the machine gun started chattering away at the house, he called for their extraction on his handheld radio.

“Eagle, this is Mountain Man, over,” Yergei said.

“This is Eagle, over,” crackled a voice over the gunfire.

“Commence your run to the primary LZ. LZ is hot. I repeat. LZ is hot. All hostiles are buttoned up tight inside the gray, two-story house in the middle of the clearing. You are cleared to engage the house.”

“Roger that. We’re inbound. Thirty seconds.”

He scurried down the backside of the rocky outcropping, staying as low as possible, until he reached a point where he could see his entire team. His sniper had reached the main group a dozen meters away and grabbed Reznikov. With the scientist out of their custody, the two men turned their attention to the house, directing burst after burst of gunfire into the wood siding below and alongside the windows. He signaled for his machine gunner to catch up, and emptied the rest of his rifle’s magazine into the back door.

His gunner dropped to the ground next to him in a state of sheer fatigue from hauling the RPK-74S light machine gun more than three hundred meters over rough terrain.

“Take a break and set up here. I want continuous fire on the back of the house until the helicopter arrives. As soon as the helicopter touches down, you move. Good job so far,” Yergei said, slapping him on the shoulder.

“The barrel is dangerously overheated!” the ex-soldier said.

“It can handle another two hundred rounds. Keep firing until the helicopter lands,” Yergei said. “Move to the LZ! Thirty seconds!” he said, emphatically motioning for the rest of the team to pick up the pace.

The light machine gun unleashed a furious volley against the battered structure, filling the house with deadly fragments of steel and wood. Yergei reloaded his weapon on the run, headed toward several yellow putting flags crowded onto a closely mowed circular patch of grass due west of the house. A massive post-and-beam lodge loomed behind the landing pad, offset to the right and out of both groups’ lines of fire. Three gray-haired, overweight men stood on the deck, bizarrely cheering them on with drinks raised over their heads.

A bullet hissed past him, followed shortly by another as he sprinted for the putting green that would serve as their primary landing zone. He fired controlled bursts at the house while running, letting his machine gunner do most of the work. By the time he reached the short grass, the volume of fire had intensified, kicking up patches of sod around him. He ran onto the soft grass, throwing the flags to the ground as the helicopter appeared over the western tree line.

Sheffield fired a few hastily aimed 5.56mm rounds through the shattered dining room window at the group lying prone next to the putting green, quickly shifting his aim to the commando removing the yellow flags. His last shot missed, mainly because he was more focused on getting back down to the floor as quickly as possible. Standing for more than a few seconds nearly guaranteed taking a bullet from the light machine gun pummeling them from a well-protected position less than a hundred meters away.

The agent positioned in the far corner of the dining room rose quickly to his knees and fired an extended burst through the same window. The drywall below the window framing exploded at the same time, showering them both in a chalky white powder residue. He covered his face with his right arm and buried his head into the hardwood floor as the room took another devastating extended burst from the machine gun outside. He heard the agent’s body hit the ground hard and scrambled through the chunks of building material to reach him.

Bright arterial spray decorated the walls on both sides of the corner, continuing to jet from the agent’s lower thigh. Sheffield instinctively started to remove his belt in an attempt to fashion a tourniquet, but stopped upon further examination of the agent’s contorted, twitching body. A bullet had passed cleanly through the middle of his neck, rendering the level of trauma care he could give at the moment utterly pointless. He had to do something to even the odds and take revenge for the brutal murder of his security agents.

“Lopez, Graham. Get ready to go full auto. Full mags. Pour it on the group next to the green and get down!” he said, pulling a fresh thirty-round magazine from his combat vest.

The two men spread across the kitchen, changed magazines, and signaled him with a thumbs-up.

“Pour it on those motherfuckers!” he screamed, rising up in defiance of the steel-jacketed rounds cracking overhead.

All three of them emptied their magazines on full automatic toward the group huddled near the putting green. Within three seconds they had unleashed ninety 5.56mm bullets in a hail of gunfire that struck down the group’s leader, who just kneeled next to the group. He saw thick splatters of blood erupt from behind the commando, but that was all he could confirm before dropping out of sight and preparing for the inevitable, overwhelming response. Upstairs, he heard at least one friendly gun continue the shooting spree and something else. Shit. Now he understood.

“Helicopter inbound! Get away from the wall!” he said.

All three of them clambered on their hands and knees for the center hallway in a desperate attempt to move deeper into the house. Sheffield was the last man through the opening before bullets started to tear into the kitchen and dining room at a downward trajectory that would have killed most of them immediately. The deep thumping of the rotors competed with the utter devastation unleashed on the house, rapidly growing along with the intensity of incoming fire.

“Keep going out the front door! Out the front door!” he said, pushing them along until they tumbled down the granite steps and onto the gravel driveway.

Bullets continued to rip through the house, passing completely through the structure and forcing them to huddle behind the thick granite steps and concrete foundation. He just hoped that the helicopter didn’t plan to circle the house. They’d have nowhere to go but back inside, where they would eventually die. The machine-gun fire continued, but didn’t change trajectory, leaving him with the impression that the helicopter was here for one single purpose. To extract the team.

He turned to the two men, hoping to muster one last attempt to stop Reznikov’s escape, but both of the agents had taken multiple hits. None of the bullet wounds looked immediately life-threatening, but he could tell by their eyes that they were thinking the same thought that Sheffield had just pushed out of his head. There’s no point anymore. It’s over.

He crawled along the foundation to the right corner of the house and risked a peek toward the putting green, which was partially obscured by the far end of the house. The helicopter’s tail rotor protruded into his view, giving Sheffield hope that he might be able to disable the helicopter. They’d still have to contend with two light machine guns and four commandos, but at least he’d make it a little harder for them to get away. He didn’t care how good they were, escaping on ATVs would present a whole host of problems that the CIA might be able to contend with.

He aimed at the tail rotor and fired a burst, seeing sparks fly off the rotor assembly. His burst was answered by concentrated machine-gun fire from rocks northwest of the house. He’d hastily assumed that the machine gunner had already fled for the helicopter. The rounds chewed up the concrete foundation and splintered the painted wood above him, leaving him no choice but to withdraw. He waited a few seconds and leaned to the right, squeezing off three shots at the rocks, which were not met by return fire. He rolled along the gravel until the machine gunner appeared, running full speed for the helicopter. Sheffield found the fleeing figure in his holographic sight and centered it in the red circle. He fired two rounds before the gravel ten meters in front of him erupted, barely giving him enough time to roll out of the way of the helicopter door gunner’s fusillade.

He backed up to the porch and prepared to climb inside the house to seek shelter, unsure of the helicopter’s intentions. He could tell by the whine of the engines and the deeper pitch of the rotors that the helicopter had taken off at high speed. Seconds later, the sound started to fade, and he stood up, walking back to the corner of the house. He watched a red and white, Bell 427 medium utility helicopter disappear beyond the western tree line.

“Check on the rest of the team in the house, then get the staff in the lodge organized. I want all hands on deck helping out with the casualties. Full prisoner count in five minutes. Get on one of the handheld satellite phones and notify headquarters,” Sheffield said.

“Got it. Where are you going?” Graham said, leaning on Lopez’s shoulder for support.

“To check on Karl Berg. He was here to permanently retire Reznikov,” he said.

He started to jog down the center gravel path, stopping for a moment to survey the putting green. He counted two bodies on the ground, indicating that his final shots had found the machine gunner’s back.

Sheffield slowed down once he entered the forest and cautiously approached the residence. Scanning over the barrel of his compact assault rifle, he immediately saw that the front of the cottage had suffered the same fate as the security complex, but that the damage had been contained to the left side. A body lay in a widening pool of blood on the covered porch, which caused him to stiffen, until he realized that the man was dressed in the same camouflage pattern as the rest of the assault team that tore up his compound. There was no need to examine the body. The back of the man’s head was missing, giving him some hope that Berg might still be alive inside the house.

He stood quietly for a moment, listening for signs of movement in the cottage. Hearing nothing, he stepped inside, sweeping the rifle left to right to ensure that the attackers hadn’t left a wounded man behind. The attack had progressed so quickly from his perspective that he couldn’t rely on what they had momentarily seen on the camera feeds. He had counted six men approaching the fence, but his count had been quickly interrupted by automatic fire directed against his Quick Reaction force.

His hopes of finding Berg alive were crushed when he caught sight of the ceiling to his left. Bullet holes riddled the entire surface, leaving very few areas intact. Combined with the damage he’d seen on the exterior of the house, he couldn’t imagine any scenario in which Berg had survived. The assault team had made a concerted effort, inside and outside of the house, to take him down.

“Berg! Karl Berg! You in there?” he said, walking toward the kitchen.

No response.

“Karl. It’s Gary Sheffield!”

Glancing through the kitchen, he noticed several bullet holes in the far wall, which caused him to point his rifle toward the staircase to his left. He spotted a dark red stain on the wall at the top of the stairs.

“Berg! Answer me, damn it!” Sheffield said.

“I’m up here,” a weak voice responded.

“Are you alone?”

“Yes,” Berg said.

Sheffield slung his rifle and mounted the stairs, expecting to find him lying in the hallway. The hardwood floor in the hallway was cracked and splintered from wall to wall, covered in a fine dust from the damage to the ceiling above.

“Where are you?” Sheffield said.

“Taking a bath,” Berg said.

He peered into the bathroom just off the hallway and found himself staring directly at the business end of the suppressed pistol he had given Berg less than fifteen minutes ago. The top of Berg’s head protruded just far enough over the top of the cast-iron, claw-foot tub to effectively aim the pistol. The pistol disappeared into the tub, along with the rest of Berg’s head.

“Reznikov?”

“He escaped by helicopter. They had us pinned down from the start,” Sheffield said, stepping into the bathroom.

Like the hallway, the bathroom had been effectively obliterated. Most of the white tile floor had been shattered, along with the toilet, sink and mirror. The shower stall’s glass door lay in pieces within the bullet-perforated fiberglass enclosure. Karl Berg lay crumpled inside the only safe location on the second floor, bloodied and pale. Sheffield extended a hand to Berg and pulled him out of the tub, helping him to the floor in the hallway.

“Your team?” Berg said.

“I lost most of them in the house.”

“Shit, Gary. I don’t know what to say. I have no idea how this happened. Mountain Glenn is off the grid. Way off the grid,” Berg said.

“Can you move?” Sheffield said.

“Yeah. Just grazed me,” Berg said, touching his shoulder.

“Looks more like a through and through. You got lucky,” he said, examining the floor and looking toward the bathtub.

The tub’s white porcelain coating was chipped in at least five places that displayed minor denting from the shallow angle of impact along the side. Since the tub was located against the outer wall of the bathroom, it probably didn’t take more than one or two deeper angle hits against its bottom, which was fortunate. Contrary to popular belief, a cast iron tub wasn’t bullet proof. Repeated, high-velocity direct hits could shatter the brittle metal, penetrating the steel curtain and peppering the occupant with metal shards from the inside.

“For the first time ever, I’m glad they didn’t spare any expense building this place,” Berg said.

“I can think of a few improvements,” Sheffield said.

“Surface-to-air missiles would be a good start,” Berg said.

“I don’t know if that would have helped. Between the machine gun and .50 caliber sniper rifle, we couldn’t do shit. What now?”

“The border is less than fifty miles away. If they get him over the border, he’s gone,” Berg added.

“Then he’s gone. You know the protocols for this place,” Sheffield said.

“Unfortunately, I know them entirely too well. I updated them three years ago to enhance the agency’s deniability. Reznikov is definitely lost…for now,” Berg said.

Chapter 73

Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Philip Regan accepted Minister-Counselor Leonid Novikov’s hand in a warmly enthusiastic embrace before gesturing toward the decorative coffee table adorned with a tea service set and a small but opulent selection of bite-sized pastries. Once the two diplomats settled into the two luxurious red leather high-back wing chairs, the dance began, starting with tea and a mid-morning snack.

“Can I offer you some tea?” Regan said.

“Thank you. That would be wonderful,” Novikov said in polished, Russian-accented English.

Regan poured him a cup of black tea from a polished bronze samovar presented in the early eighties by the Russian ambassador to George P. Shultz, President Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state. Novikov took a sip from the glass teacup and smiled in approval. They both indulged in a few pastries and traded pleasantries about family for the required amount of time before Philip Regan placed his teacup onto a shiny bronze tea service tray and leaned back in the chair.

“I know for a fact that the tea and pastila at your embassy puts this humble offering to shame, so I assume that something important brings you here during the morning tea hour,” Regan said.

“I’m afraid so,” Novikov said, putting his cup down. “This is a delicate matter,” he added.

“You have my undivided attention and discretion,” Regan said.

“Last night, we had an incident at the State Research Center for Virology and Biotechnology in Novosibirsk,” he said.

Regan pondered the Russian’s words for a moment, slowly furrowing his brow in a controlled, deliberate effort to look concerned.

“What kind of an incident?” he said.

“Terrorists attacked the biocontainment facility at Vektor Laboratories,” Novikov said.

“Dear heavens. What were they trying to accomplish?” Regan said.

“We don’t know very much at this point, but the attack put the entire Novosibirsk region on alert. We lost two helicopters in an unfortunate collision near the Kazakhstan border.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that. Please let me know if you need our Centers for Disease Control to help in any way. As Vektor’s sister facility, I’m sure they would be eager to lend a hand. Were there casualties at the facility?”

“Several, including a scientific team that was working late over the weekend on a special project,” Novikov said, reaching for his cup on the tray.

Regan poured each of them another cup. They were about to broach the matter at hand.

“Their CDC and World Health Organization counterparts will be heartbroken. Such a loss is sure to be profound among such an elite group of dedicated scientists. Do preliminary investigative reports indicate a possible threat to other facilities worldwide?”

“We hope that this is an isolated attack,” Novikov said, responding to his hidden suggestion.

“So do we. We stand by to assist your country in any way possible. Given recent events here in the United States, I can assure you that we are committed to keeping facilities like Vektor and our own CDC secure against terrorism. Bioweapons are a frightening prospect on the world scene.”

“I couldn’t agree more. We’d like nothing more than to put the Vektor attack behind us and renew a joint commitment to stamping out these weapons internationally,” Novikov said.

There it was. The Russians wanted a clean slate between them.

“That’s very good to hear. I’m sure the American people would strongly support this kind of bilateral effort, and I know that my president is eager to put recent events as far behind us as possible,” Regan said.

“Most excellent, my friend. I will relay this to Moscow immediately. Sorry to…how do you say it? Eat and run? But this is a matter of urgency, and your offer of bilateral support will be most happily received.”

Both of them stood and shook hands vigorously.

“I’m pleased that we could come together on this one. Don’t be a stranger, Leo. Moscow was by far my most enjoyable posting, and I don’t often get the opportunity to regale in stories about Russia. Plus, I rarely have occasion to showcase this wonderful gift from your homeland,” Regan said, pointing at the samovar.

Novikov admired the samovar and tea set. “Nineteenth century Tsarist Russia, I believe. Very rare, but a shame to keep hidden away for my infrequent visits.”

“I’ll have to take your advice and keep it out as a reminder of our friendship. Please keep me posted on any developments related to the terrorist attack, and I’ll be sure to let you know if we pick up anything on our end.”

“Very well, Phillip. We’ll be happy to put all of this behind us.”

“And so will we,” Regan said, showing Novikov to the door.

Once the door closed, Philip Regan settled into the high-backed chair and finished his tea. He had little idea what the exchange had truly meant and suspected the same about Novikov. He had received explicit instructions from the secretary of state regarding the outcome the president desired, which had included just enough information to work out a diplomatic solution in the most vague terms. He knew Vektor Laboratories had been attacked and that the attack might be related to the issue in Monchegorsk, though he had been specifically prohibited from mentioning the Kola Peninsula incident in any way.

Regan had been encouraged to mention the recent bioweapons scare in the United States and suggest that the administration would support any and all bilateral efforts to eradicate the world bioweapons threat. Philip could connect the dots. He had a strong suspicion that the attack against Vektor had been a demonstration of the White House’s previous and future unilateral commitment to preventing another attack against the homeland.

Chapter 74

Alexei Kaparov shook his head and smiled for most of the walk back to his office. Maxim Greshnev, chief counterterrorism director for the Federation Security Service, had summoned him unexpectedly for a second time today. The first had occurred at 4:45 in the morning, soon after he had reported to headquarters in response to an urgent roster recall. He had learned that terrorists had attacked Vektor Laboratories, Russia’s State Research Institute for Virology and Biotechnology, targeting the biocontainment building. Vektor officials had assured Greshnev that the virology division’s infectious disease samples had not been stolen or tampered with in any way.

Kaparov had fought to stifle a grin throughout the early morning meeting, never imagining that he’d have to fight the same battle twelve hours later during a one-on-one meeting with Greshnev. Smiling was not one of Kaparov’s strong suits, but today had made him infinitely happy.

He reached one of the doors leading into the Biological/Chemical Threat Assessment Division’s cubicle farm and concentrated on presenting the same sour face his agents had grown accustomed to seeing over the years. Normally, his division resembled a ghost town at this point in the evening, but thanks to Karl Berg, the entire counterterrorism department was still a beehive of activity and showed no signs of slowing down.

Thousands upon thousands of hours would be wasted in the Lubyanka Building over the next few weeks, possibly months, and he would have to appear enthusiastic, knowing for a fact that it was an exercise in futility. He was in for a long summer.

Yuri Prerovsky stood up from his cubicle located directly outside of Kaparov’s office.

“Anything new to report?” Kaparov said, continuing into his office.

“Center for Special Operations units are mobilizing small teams to assist with the execution of emergency warrants against our high-priority watch-list targets,” Prerovsky said, hovering just outside his door.

“Come in. I hate when you linger like that. Do they require any of our personnel in the field?”

Prerovsky stepped inside and closed the door behind him. “Not at the moment, but they’re going to run out of agents to chase down everyone on that list, which is what I presume they’ll have to do,” Prerovsky said, eyeing him.

“Well, given what Greshnev just told me, the entire investigation is about to take an interesting detour. Are you ready for the latest?” Kaparov said, lighting a cigarette.

“Probably not.”

“Greshnev asked me to reopen the investigation into Anatoly Reznikov. Information has surfaced suggesting a possible link between the scientist and Monchegorsk,” he said and leaned back in his chair.

“You have to be fucking kidding me. May I presume that you did not use the phrase ‘I told you so,’ at any point in the conversation?” Prerovsky said, taking a seat in the small folding chair next to the door.

“You can’t imagine what I was thinking. I could barely keep from laughing in Greshnev’s face,” Kaparov said.

“This is a genius move on their part…”

“Whose part?” Kaparov said, exhaling smoke toward the nicotine-stained ceiling.

“Whoever decided that this was the perfect opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons. Monchegorsk is an undeniable international public-relations disaster that makes Chernobyl look like a routine ten-car pile-up on the Moscow Ring Road. Linking a disturbed scientist to the terrorist attack on Vektor and ultimately Monchegorsk isn’t the prettiest option, but it’s sure as hell better than the version of events they’re currently peddling to the international community,” Prerovsky said.

“I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way. I was just wondering how the hell they were going to investigate a dead man.”

“That’s not a problem for the puppet masters. I’m quite sure that Reznikov will be killed by SVR agents a few months from now, just as he is about to poison another city in Russia. Probably won’t be much left of his body after the raid.”

Kaparov nodded and took a long drag from his Troika cigarette, exhaling as he spoke. “You’re probably right. Until then, we have to go through the motions. Greshnev wants us to prepare a detailed file on Reznikov. Everything we have. We’re to activate all protocols previously used to track Reznikov’s whereabouts, foreign and domestic.”

“None of those protocols had been particularly effective in the past,” Prerovsky said.

“I guess it doesn’t really matter. We won’t be the only ones going through the motions if your theory is correct.”

“And Monchegorsk? How should we proceed?” Prerovsky asked.

“I’ve been told to stand by for further direction,” Kaparov said, raising an eyebrow.

“Of course,” Prerovsky said.

“Look on the bright side, Yuri. When they find Reznikov, service commendations and medals will shower the division. We should celebrate. Drinks are on me tonight.”

“Sounds like a plan, as long as your idea of drinks on the town doesn’t involve a park bench,” Prerovsky said.

“Of course not. I only drink on park benches during weekend afternoons.” Kaparov laughed. “If you’d give me some privacy, I need to make a quick phone call. Business-related. Overseas.”

“Yes. I’ll be right outside. Can I start sending agents home, or are we in here for the night?”

“Start cutting people loose at seven. I want the entire department back on deck by five in the morning.”

“Understood,” he said and departed, leaving Kaparov alone in the office.

Kaparov pulled a cell phone from his briefcase and dialed the number Karl Berg had given him, which bounced his call from a legitimate Moscow number to the CIA officer’s cell phone. All he had to do was speak a four-word phrase to activate the transfer. Otherwise, the phone would continue to ring at the ghost location somewhere in Moscow. The call rang long enough for Kaparov to wonder if Berg had finally abandoned him. When the CIA officer answered, Kaparov could tell by his voice that something wasn’t right.

“I’m glad you called. We lost him,” Berg said, sounding tired.

“Lost who?” Kaparov said, hoping he didn’t mean Reznikov.

“I can’t spell it out on the phone. Science type.”

Kaparov tried to process what Berg had just said, but was having a hard time closing the loop in his mind. He couldn’t imagine any scenario in which the CIA simply lost one of the most dangerous people on the planet.

“What do you mean by lost? I thought he was in one of your most secure locations, which I assumed to be a dark cell, deep under the fucking ground? Better yet, why isn’t he dead?”

“It’s complicated. He was in a very secure location,” Berg said.

“Obviously not secure enough. Dare I ask what happened?” He quickly lit another cigarette, noting that there were not enough Troikas remaining in the pack to calm him down from what he had just been told.

“The compound was hit by a small army right after I arrived. I escaped with a gunshot wound to the shoulder. The rest weren’t so lucky. We lost fourteen men trying to stop them,” Berg said.

“How the fuck did this happen? I told you to be careful with him. He’s not to be underestimated.”

“We couldn’t have pulled off the raid without his help. We had to make some concessions to keep the information flowing, but we were extremely careful. I can’t for the life of me imagine how he pulled this off.”

“This information couldn’t come at a worse time. I’ve just been asked to reopen his fucking file! They’re going to blame him for the recent events, including the one you just pulled off,” Kaparov hissed.

“They can’t. How could they possibly pull that off at this point?”

“Shall I march into the Kremlin and demand an explanation?”

“I don’t know what to say. This is an utter disaster on both ends,” Berg said.

“Disaster is an understatement. It appears that we will have to hunt him down for real. I just need to find some credible leads before they cough up a body to satisfy the world,” Kaparov said.

“I’ll do everything I can to help you with that. This is my responsibility.”

“You can start by pointing me in the right direction. Do you have any idea who was responsible?”

Another long pause ignited Kaparov’s suspicion that he wouldn’t get the full story.

“We took down three of the shooters. Tattooing suggests army Spetznaz and a possible bratva connection,” Berg said finally.

“Let’s just hope there is no connection to the latter group.”

“Unfortunately, it’s a distinct possibility. We contracted with some of their assets to make certain logistical arrangements,” Berg said in a defeated voice.

“You have no idea what you’ve unleashed. This is the worst-case scenario. I’ll need to see every detail you can provide. You can no longer keep anything from me. Is that understood? At the very least, I have to prove he is still alive before my government produces a corpse and shuts down my investigation,” Kaparov said.

“I didn’t tell you about the bratva because I wanted to keep the information compartmentalized, given what was happening in and around your office.”

“If I had known they were involved, I would have told you to cut your ties immediately, even if it meant shutting down the mission. You have unwittingly made the world a much more dangerous place. I’ll call you tomorrow to set up an arrangement to receive any information you have on our friend. This changes everything. I have to go…oh, I hope your shoulder is all right. Goodbye,” he said and hung up.

“Prerovsky!”

Kaparov’s assistant deputy burst into the room with an alarmed look, which immediately turned to confusion. “I thought you might have finally caught fire in the mess,” he joked.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Shut the door and take a seat.”

“This doesn’t sound good. Is the celebration cancelled?” he said, following Kaparov’s instructions.

“The celebration is cancelled, but I still plan on drinking myself into a coma, and after you hear what I’ve just learned, you’ll want to do the same,” Kaparov said.