Eagle Station

Twelve

Kansk-Dalniy’s 2,500-meter-long runway stretched across a flat countryside of fields and scattered patches of woodland. Revetments for the regiment of MiG-31BM Foxhound long-range interceptors stationed at the airfield were clustered near both ends of the strip. Hangars, maintenance shops, weapons bunkers, and barracks for the pilots and ground crews lined the runway’s northwest edge.

Located more than two thousand miles east of Moscow, this relatively isolated rural base was the last place one would ordinarily expect to find a large crowd of Russian military and government officials, along with representatives from the country’s top aircraft companies and design bureaus. And yet, here they were — waiting with growing anticipation to witness what was described as a key test flight in Russia’s top secret Firebird high-speed experimental aircraft program.

Many of the spectators occupied bleacher seating set up along the runway. Others milled around near a large temporary aircraft shelter erected next to the airfield’s wide concrete apron. Enlisted personnel circulated through the crowd, offering drinks and zakuski, hors d’oeuvres of cold cuts, fish, and vegetables.

One of the guests, a trim, efficient-looking lieutenant colonel with short blond hair and icy blue eyes, took a glass of sparkling wine. She nodded curt thanks to the airman who’d served her and then motioned him away. “Quite a festive atmosphere,” she murmured to the big, beefy man in civilian clothes standing next to her.

He snorted. “All but the weather, Colonel.”

Lieutenant Colonel Katya Volkova glanced up at the sky and nodded. Thick gray clouds stretched from horizon to horizon. Her mouth twisted slightly. “Not exactly ideal conditions for a test flight,” she said.

“Do you think it’ll be postponed?”

“God, I hope not,” Volkova said with a short laugh. “Another day spent hanging around this provincial dump? No, thank you.”

Many of those within earshot nodded their own agreement. Moscow was enjoying its best weather of the year right now — a far cry from the gloomy overcast currently covering most of this part of Siberia. Stadium-sized video monitors tuned to cameras broadcasting from Novosibirsk and Omsk showed the same dreary gray skies. And security concerns or not, it seemed absurd to stage this Firebird demonstration flight so far from the capital. Even Krasnoyarsk, the nearest decently sized city, was almost 125 miles away.

As it was, there were only limited windows of opportunity to conduct this test without fear of enemy observation. Careful timing was essential to ensure that America’s Eagle Station and its handful of newly launched reconnaissance satellites were in the wrong orbits to see anything over this sparsely populated portion of the Motherland.

Suddenly, a harsh alert tone blared through loudspeakers around the air base. “Vnimaniye! Attention! The test flight will now commence. Stand clear of the aircraft shelter. Repeat, stand clear of the aircraft shelter.”

More airmen moved across the tarmac in a line, ushering the crowd away from the shelter. Slowly, the giant shelter’s clamshell doors swung open — revealing a very large, swept-wing aircraft with four enormous engines mounted beneath its wings. Those engines were already spooling up, splitting the air with a deafening, shrill howl.

Through narrowed eyes, Volkova studied the huge jet as it rolled slowly out into the open air and turned onto the taxiway. It looked very much like a modified Tu-160 supersonic bomber, she decided, though those engine nacelles were a different shape and significantly larger. That made some sense, since the Tu-160’s airframe was already designed to handle supersonic flight. On the other hand, she doubted strongly that it was suitable for operations outside the atmosphere. If so, this aircraft must be intended primarily as a test bed for those massive new engines.

As soon as it reached the far end of the runway, the modified Tu-160 swung into position and started its takeoff roll — thundering past the crowd at an ever-increasing speed. Three-quarters of the way down the runway, it rotated and soared skyward, trailing plumes of faintly yellowish exhaust. Within moments, it vanished among the low-hanging, thick gray clouds.

Only seconds later, the sharp crack of a sonic boom rattled windows and teeth across the air base. This evidence of incredibly swift acceleration created a stir of excitement among the waiting crowd. Nothing short of a high-performance modern jet fighter should be able to reach supersonic speeds so rapidly.

Eight minutes after that, the big-screen video monitor tuned to Novosibirsk, five hundred miles to the west, registered a second loud sonic boom. Another exultant murmur rippled through the onlookers.

“Does that mean what I think it means?” the big man said, keeping his voice low.

Samantha Kerr, currently masquerading as Lieutenant Colonel Volkova of the Russian Aerospace Forces, nodded tightly to her colleague, Marcus Cartwright, another Scion field operative. “If I’ve done my mental math right, what we just heard was an aircraft moving at Mach Five, right at the edge of hypersonic speeds… and a hell of a lot faster than anything else in the Russian inventory.”

The loudspeakers blared again, relaying information that was unnecessary for anyone who’d been paying the slightest attention. “The Firebird has just passed over Novosibirsk at high altitude. Now it is flying on toward Omsk.”

Cartwright lowered his voice even further. “Well, now we know why our Russian friends made it so hard to wangle invitations to their party.”

Sam nodded again. Several weeks ago, Scion’s intelligence operation inside Russia had picked up rumors about this upcoming Firebird flight demonstration. Careful poking around inside several different Defense Ministry classified databases had shown that technical information about the Firebird Project itself was hidden behind a series of impenetrable computer security firewalls. Fortunately, the official list of several hundred military officers, government officials, and aviation industry bigwigs cleared to witness the Kansk-Dalniy test was guarded by slightly less imposing barriers. But even then, it had taken Scion’s best hackers days of painstaking effort to covertly breach those protocols and add their carefully forged credentials — as Lieutenant Colonel Volkova and Sergei Kondakov from the Ministry of Industry and Trade — to the approved list.

As it was, Sam knew that only Moscow’s seemingly odd decision to unveil its top secret Firebird program to so many people at one time made this dangerous covert operation even remotely possible. Posing as a Russian bird colonel and a mid-ranking bureaucrat, even with top-notch fake documents, would have been far too dangerous at a smaller, more intimate, gathering of real experts.

But now that she’d seen this prototype hypersonic aircraft in action, she understood why Marshal Leonov was willing to risk someone spilling the beans. If the Russians already had a manned aircraft that could reach speeds of Mach Five or higher in controlled flight, they were very close to being able to build true single-stage-to-orbit spaceplanes. And the moment a brand-new, experimental spaceplane started flying to the upper reaches of the atmosphere and beyond, the whole world would know exactly what Moscow was doing.

“I guess it’s a good thing I don’t mind being the bearer of bad tidings,” Sam said softly to Cartwright. “Because this news is definitely not going to make Mr. Martindale’s day.”

Ten thousand meters above the Siberian industrial city of Omsk, a large, gray twin-tailed fighter rolled out of the slow, racetrack holding pattern it had been following for several minutes. The railroads and waterways that gave the city its importance as a transportation hub were invisible, obscured by a solid layer of thick clouds.

Inside the MiG-31’s forward cockpit, Major Stepan Grigoryev kept a careful eye on the digital timer counting down along the edge of his head-up display. “Stand by, Alexey,” he announced over the intercom. “Twenty seconds.”

“Standing by,” Captain Balandin, his weapon systems officer, acknowledged from the fighter’s rear cockpit. “Cloud cover remains at one hundred percent. There are no air contacts on my radar.”

“Understood,” Grigoryev said. That was good news. All civilian and military air traffic had been diverted away from this region for the duration of the “Firebird flight test.” After all, there was no point in staging this little magic act if anyone on the ground or in the air could see what was happening. Abruptly, the timer on his HUD flashed to zero.

“Going supersonic,” he snapped. His left hand shoved the MiG’s throttles all the way forward and then slightly to the left — going to full military power, past the detent, and into afterburner. Raw fuel poured into the exhaust stream of both huge Soloviev D-30F6 engines and ignited. Immediately, he felt himself shoved back against his seat as the fighter accelerated with astonishing rapidity.

Seconds later, the boom created by its sudden transition beyond the sound barrier rippled across Omsk and its suburbs. For those watching the monitors back at Kansk-Dalniy, it would seem as if the mythical Firebird test aircraft had just slashed through the sky high above the city at more than six thousand kilometers per hour.

Beneath his oxygen mask, Grigoryev bared his teeth in a wolfish smile. Not a bad piece of sleight of hand, he thought. First, send a Tu-160 bomber — fitted out with fake engine nacelles — up through the clouds and well away from the airfield, out of sight and out of hearing. And then, at precisely calculated intervals, have each of the three MiG-31 fighters stationed over Kansk-Dalniy, Novosibirsk, and Omsk suddenly accelerate beyond the speed of sound… creating the perfect illusion of a hypersonic-capable aircraft streaking across central Russia at incredibly high speed.

For more than one hundred years, the Lubyanka had been the center of state terror in Russia. From its maze of identical corridors and cryptically numbered offices, the secret police, whether called the Cheka, OGPU, NKVD, KGB, or FSB, waged a never-ending clandestine war against foreign spies and anyone else unlucky enough to be declared an enemy of the state. It was a brutal conflict fought without pity or remorse. Those dragged inside the Lubyanka for questioning rarely left its dank, bloodstained cellars alive.

In recent years, however, the old ways of extracting information desired by the Lubyanka’s masters — physical torture, truth drugs, and sleep deprivation — had been supplemented by more subtle means. Q Directorate’s skilled programmers and supercomputers were among the most important of these new weapons. Originally organized to conduct offensive cyberwar and computer-hacking operations, the directorate was now also expected to defend Russia’s critical industries and computer systems against foreign espionage and sabotage.

It carried out this vital work from a highly secure facility built into the very heart of the Lubyanka. Thick walls, floors, and ceilings with interwoven layers of metal paneling, wire mesh, acoustic fill, and gypsum wallboard protected its offices from electronic eavesdropping. The rooms themselves were utterly plain, devoid of anything but desks, chairs, and masses of ultramodern computer equipment. There were no windows. And the only way in or out was barred both by armed guards and rigorous biometric screening procedures.

The Spartan décor of Major General Arkady Koshkin’s private office matched those of his subordinates, with only a small sideboard and silver samovar for making tea as obvious luxuries. At first glance, Koshkin’s physical appearance was equally unimposing. He was a short, slight man with a high, wrinkled forehead and thick spectacles. Anyone passing him on the street would have mistaken him for a minor functionary in some unimportant ministry.

All in all, the head of Q Directorate was a textbook example of how first impressions could be deceiving, Marshal Leonov thought approvingly. Only Koshkin’s eyes, gleaming with ambition and intelligence, gave him away.

In an odd sense, the man sitting beside Leonov in front of Koshkin’s desk was an illustration of the same principle. Though tall and powerfully built, Minister of State Security Viktor Kazyanov was a physical and moral coward, fit only to be a toady and yes-man for those who were stronger and more ruthless. Gennadiy Gryzlov had kept him on as head of Russia’s intelligence services for precisely those reasons. Now Kazyanov’s weaknesses served Leonov’s own purposes. Through Kazyanov, he could exercise effective control over the nation’s secret police and foreign intelligence operations without unduly alarming the other government ministers who unwisely imagined they were still his equals.

The sleek computer on Koshkin’s desk chimed once. “Well?” Leonov demanded.

“We have a match for one of our two suspects,” Koshkin said evenly. He turned his flat-panel display so that the others could see the image it displayed. The broad-featured face of a very large man filled the screen. “According to his identity papers, this is Sergei Kondakov — a mid-ranked official in the Ministry of Industry and Trade.” His thin smile never reached his eyes. “And if we were relying only on the personnel records of that ministry, we would believe him to be exactly who he says he is.”

“Because those records have been hacked,” Leonov said dryly. Koshkin nodded. “So who is he really?”

“Probably an American. And almost certainly an agent for Scion.” Koshkin touched a key, bringing up a new picture. This one showed the same man, only this time wearing a far more stylish business suit. “But for the past several years, we have believed him to be a German national named Klaus Wernicke, a senior executive for Tekhwerk, GmbH.”

Leonov’s eyes narrowed. “How… interesting,” he ground out.

“Indeed,” Koshkin said flatly. Tekhwerk, GmbH was supposedly a jointly owned German and Russian import-export company specializing in advanced industrial equipment. Since its operations helped Russia evade Western sanctions, Moscow’s law enforcement and regulatory agencies tended to allow it wide latitude, often turning a blind eye to its occasionally irregular business activities. If, as now seemed likely, the company was actually a front for Scion’s spies operating on Russian soil, that had been an unforgivable error.

The computer chimed again. Two new images appeared — the first showing the attractive, blond-haired woman the Defense Ministry’s digitized personnel files identified as Lieutenant Colonel Katya Volkova of the Aerospace Forces. The second showed what was unmistakably the same woman, only in this photo she wore elegant civilian business clothes and her hair was a dark red color.

“And this one?” Leonov asked grimly.

“She is also supposedly a German national.”

Leonov snorted. “Who is also employed by Tekhwerk?” he guessed.

“Yes,” Koshkin said. “According to her passport, her name is Erika Roth. Nominally, she’s a corporate accounts executive — though based in Berlin, rather than here in Moscow.” He sat back, looking pleased with himself. “It appears that the glittering lure of the Firebird’s magical feathers has worked just as we hoped.”

Leonov nodded. Besides helping create the illusion of a serious Russian program to develop its own version of America’s spaceplanes, the Firebird test was also a trap. Q Directorate specialists had created two initially identical lists of those authorized to witness the Kansk-Dalniy demonstration flight — one protected by a tough, but hackable, security firewall, and the other, the real one, sheltered behind impenetrable barriers. A cross-check of both lists several hours ago had immediately revealed evidence of tampering… and the false identities being used by the two imposters.

Armed with that information and using concealed cameras rigged at various points around the airfield, Koshkin’s experts had easily obtained a number of high-resolution photographs of “Lieutenant Colonel Valkova” and “Sergei Kondakov.” These pictures were then fed into one of Q Directorate’s supercomputers. Sophisticated facial recognition software first developed by a leading American high-tech company for the People’s Republic of China made it possible to cross-check them against a large number of government and industry databases in near real time… yielding these more accurate identifications of the two Scion agents.

Leonov discounted the possibility that Wernicke and Roth were operatives for the CIA or one of the other Western intelligence services. The boldness and skill with which these two spies had infiltrated what was supposedly a top secret flight demonstration had all the hallmarks of a Scion operation. Government-run espionage organizations were far more cautious, hobbled by bureaucratic and political restrictions that inevitably reduced their effectiveness.

More information scrolled across Koshkin’s screen. “Both agents arrived at Krasnoyark’s Yemelyanovo International Airport this morning on a flight from Moscow,” he reported. He smiled wryly. “Like everyone else genuinely invited to Kansk-Dalniy, they have tickets on a return flight to Sheremetyevo leaving this evening.”

Leonov snorted his own amused understanding. Apparently, no one from Moscow would willingly spend an hour longer in a Siberian rural backwater than was absolutely necessary. Not even a couple of enemy agents.

For the first time, Viktor Kazyanov spoke up. “I can have an FSB team ready to arrest these spies at Sheremetyevo when they land,” he suggested hesitantly.

“Absolutely not! Don’t be an idiot!” Leonov snapped. He saw the other man’s face turn gray with anxiety and sighed. Useful though Kazyanov’s timidity was to him, watching him act more like a mouse than a man could still be extremely irritating.

“Look, Viktor, there’s no point in spooking the Americans now,” he explained patiently. “Remember, we want Wernicke and Roth to pass on the false information we’ve just fed them.” He shook his head decisively. “No, we’ll give these Scion agents plenty of room for the moment.”

“While we dig deeply into Tekhwerk and all of its operations?” Koshkin suggested.

“That’s exactly right, Arkady,” Leonov agreed. He looked at both Koshkin and Kazyanov. “Understand this: I want a very thorough, but also extremely careful, investigation, gentlemen. Q Directorate will handle the cyber end of things, while the FSB does the physical legwork. But before you move in to make any arrests, make sure you’ve learned just how far this Scion front company has burrowed into our military and defense industry infrastructure.”

He stabbed a finger at Koshkin’s computer screen, which now showed new live pictures of the two foreign spies. They were standing side by side, looking up at the sky as the modified Tu-160 made its final approach back to the airfield. “Of themselves, those two are nothing. But if we play our cards right, they’ll lead us right where we want to go. And when the time comes, I want Scion’s whole Russia-based espionage network in the bag. Here. In the Lubyanka’s basement cells… singing like birds while your interrogators work them over. Is that clear?”

“Perfectly clear, Marshal,” Kazyanov said quickly. Koshkin merely nodded.

“Good.” Leonov stood up. His jaw tightened. “Because it’s high time we cut this damnable cancer out of the Motherland. Now get to it.”