Eagle Station

Fourteen

Sam Kerr tapped the brakes gently as soon as she saw the battered pale blue UAZ delivery van parked off on the shoulder of the tree-lined, two-lane highway. Their rented Mercedes sedan slowed in response — giving her time to read the crude, hand-lettered cardboard sign held up by the short, skinny young man standing beside the van. It read, need 520 rubles for petrol. please help me.

Five hundred rubles came to only about eight U.S. dollars, so that wasn’t an extravagant request for money — if it had been genuine.

Her eyes automatically noted the sedan’s current odometer reading as she sped back up and drove on past.

“We’ve got trouble,” Marcus Cartwright said tersely.

Sam nodded. Seeing David Jones waiting for them with an emergency signal meant something, somewhere had gone very badly wrong. The 520 rubles on his sign indicated they were approximately 5.2 kilometers from the place he’d picked out for a covert rendezvous. A quick glance at her rearview mirror showed the Welshman climbing back into his van.

Five kilometers down the highway, they passed a gas station on the left. The next turnoff was a dirt road roughly two hundred meters farther on.

Sam took it, driving slowly uphill past a truckers’ café and a run-down motel. There, not far ahead, was an apparently abandoned garage. Graffiti daubed its pitted concrete-block walls. A section of its rusted metal roof had fallen in at one corner, and there were no windows or doors left — just black openings into an unlighted interior strewn with moldering piles of junk and debris.

Not exactly a garden spot, she thought, but just the place for some quiet, unobserved conversation. She turned in next to the dilapidated building, following a winding, bumpy driveway choked with tall weeds. Around the back, there were a couple of wrecked Ladas that had been stripped and left to rust out in the open a long time ago. She pulled the Mercedes in close beside them and turned off the ignition.

Two minutes later, Jones parked his blue delivery van behind the black rental sedan and clambered out from behind the wheel. Sam and Cartwright went over to meet him.

“How bad is it?” she asked.

“About as bad as bad can be,” Jones told her bluntly. “The whole outfit’s blown sky-high. You, Marcus there, and the Moscow office entirely.”

They listened closely while he briefed them on Orlov’s frantic call. “The only good thing I can see in this is that you’re not being actively tailed right now,” he finished.

“That’s because the Russians know exactly where we’re headed,” Cartwright pointed out grimly.

Sam nodded. Since the FSB’s counterintelligence officers knew they were both booked out on a flight to Moscow in a couple of hours, why risk alarming their quarry prematurely? As far as they knew, she and Marcus were still blissfully ignorant of the danger they were in… and would trot along to Krasnoyarsk’s airport like good little lambs on their way to slaughter.

Which meant that was the last thing they should do, she decided. Even if the Russians didn’t plan to arrest them immediately, or as soon as they touched down at Moscow, it was still too risky to play along with the FSB’s game. Once they were under close surveillance, shaking loose and evading capture would become almost impossible. Anyway, as soon as Q Directorate’s hackers realized they weren’t going to get anything useful out of the Tekhwerk computer network, the Russians were bound to come down on them fast and hard.

Cartwright agreed with her reasoning. “So what’s your plan?” he asked.

“Step one is we ditch the Mercedes here,” Sam said firmly. One corner of her mouth quirked upward in a short-lived, wry smile. “From the look of this dump, nobody’s likely to stumble across it for a while. And I bet anyone who does is just as likely to strip the car for salable parts as they are to report it to the police.”

Both men nodded. Cash was king in poverty-stricken, rural Russia… and certainly worth a lot more than a meaningless pat on the head from local law enforcement. Especially since poorly paid regional police officers might be equally tempted to consider the abandoned rental sedan as a treasure trove for themselves.

“And step two?” Cartwright wondered. “Because all hell’s going to break loose as soon as we miss our plane.”

“There are going to be a number of seriously pissed-off FSB agents wondering where we’ve disappeared to,” Sam agreed.

“Not to mention their bosses in Moscow,” Cartwright said dryly.

“Them, too. Which is why the three of us need to be at least a couple of hundred kilometers away before that particular balloon goes up.” She turned to Jones. “Does that piece of Russian-built crap you’re driving still have its little hidey-hole?”

“It does,” he said, with a nod of understanding. The UAZ delivery van had been used for a number of other Scion covert missions. And among its special features was a small passenger compartment hidden in the cargo space — concealed behind what looked like a floor-to-ceiling mass of shipping crates, boxes, and parcels.

“I’m not exactly built for this,” Cartwright said, with a pained glance at the van.

Sam patted him on the shoulder. “File it under ‘the sacrifices we make not to get caught,’” she said soothingly. Even for her, riding around inside that hidden compartment would be a tight squeeze. It would be far more painfully cramped for the big man. But they didn’t have any other options, not if they wanted to keep out of sight while still putting distance between themselves and Krasnoyarsk… which would be ground zero for the inevitable FSB manhunt.

“We need to be far, far away, to be sure,” Jones said. “But in which direction?”

“There’s the rub,” Sam said flatly. “As I see it, heading west or east is totally out.”

The others nodded their agreement. Only one major east-west highway crossed this relatively sparsely populated region. Before trying to use it as an escape route, they might as well just drive straight up to the local FSB headquarters and surrender — because the end result would be the same.

Driving south was also a nonstarter, she decided. The road net in that direction was equally limited. Plus, going south would ultimately bring them squarely up against Russia’s heavily guarded borders with the People’s Republic of China and Mongolia… neither of which would offer sanctuary to Western intelligence agents with a price on their heads.

“We move north,” Sam told them. “At least if we head that way, we can pick and choose among a few more local roads.”

Cartwright frowned. “Roads to nowhere,” he argued. “For Christ’s sake, Sam, there’s nothing north of here but Siberian forest, forest, and even more forest. Plus a few small and midsize towns, where any strangers — like us, for example — will be an instant sensation.”

“I’m not saying it’s ideal,” she said with a slight sigh. “But north is still our best option. If nothing else, there are a number of logging and hunting cabins scattered through those woods that should be empty at this time of year. So we find one and hole up — at least for a day or two.”

“And then what?” Jones asked seriously.

Sam sighed. “Then we hope like hell that Mr. Martindale can figure out some slick way to pull us out of Russia before the FSB’s snatch teams figure out where we’ve gone to ground.”

“Your secure audiovisual link is live,” a Scion communications technician announced over the speakers. “We have a solid signal.”

Brad McLanahan and Nadia Rozek-McLanahan saw the big LED screen on the wall of the Sky Masters conference room light up. Kevin Martindale and his father looked back at them from the passenger cabin of one of Scion’s executive jets, currently somewhere high over the United States between here in Nevada and Washington, D.C. The image was slightly grainy, an inevitable consequence of the complicated process of bouncing encrypted signals between several different communications satellites.

“I’m glad to see you two,” Martindale said without preamble. Despite the polite words, his face was grim. “Though I certainly wish the circumstances were happier.”

Brad nodded somberly. He and Nadia had returned from their long and thoroughly enjoyable honeymoon — spent traveling across Europe and then various Caribbean islands — some weeks before. But then they’d plunged immediately into the day-to-day grind of helping Hunter Noble train U.S. Space Force crews for duty aboard new S-29 Shadow spaceplanes as they rolled out of Sky Masters production facilities and onto the flight line. They’d both been far too busy to keep an eye on the bigger picture… right up to the moment when emergency signals started blazing across Scion’s secure com links with its operatives inside Russia.

“Where do we stand?” he asked.

“In a world of hurt, with no U.S. cavalry on tap to ride over the hill,” his father said bluntly. Through his LEAF’s clear visor, Patrick’s expression was equally bleak.

Martindale nodded his agreement. “Put simply, our intelligence operation inside Russia is royally screwed.” He spread his hands. “At this point, it’s pretty much just a matter of counting our losses.”

Nadia leaned forward. “How so?” She raised an eyebrow. “My understanding was that Ms. Kerr and her team have evaded capture so far.”

Though her voice would have sounded perfectly calm and in control to a stranger, Brad heard an undercurrent of narrowly suppressed anger. Oh, boy, he thought. Even at the best of times, Nadia had never particularly admired Martindale’s seeming ability to detach himself emotionally from those who risked their lives at his orders.

“That’s true, Major,” Martindale said. He shrugged his shoulders. “For the moment, anyway.”

“Meaning?” Nadia demanded.

Martindale’s mouth tightened. “Meaning that their luck is bound to run out — and probably sooner, rather than later.” He shook his head. “Look, I wish it wasn’t so, but we have to face the cold, hard facts. Before too long, every counterintelligence and police officer between Vladivostok and Moscow will be hunting them. And right now, Ms. Kerr and the others have almost nowhere left to run and very few places to hide.”

“Then we must get them out as quickly as possible,” Nadia said matter-of-factly. Brad nodded.

Martindale shook his head again. “Unfortunately, there’s simply no feasible way to extract Sam’s team.” He opened a map file that mirrored in the corner of their screen. A red dot pulsed slowly just outside Krasnoyarsk, showing the Scion team’s last reported position. “They’re more than two thousand miles from the nearest friendly territory. Even if we could get a rescue aircraft that deep into Russia, past all the radars, SAM sites, and roving fighter patrols, the odds against anyone making it back out in one piece are astronomical. A four-thousand-mile round-trip flight through hostile airspace? That’s a suicide mission.”

“It’d be tough, sure. But not impossible,” Brad argued. “It’s been done before. Twice, in fact.”

“True,” Nadia said quietly. Three years ago, she and Brad had flown a covert ops team deep into the Ural Mountains, to carry out a raid against a heavily fortified Russian base. And although the assault team itself had suffered terrible losses, they’d returned safely to Poland, if only by a very narrow margin. Then, just last year, she and Peter Vasey had succeed in rescuing Brad himself from Russia’s tightly guarded Pacific coast, after his spacecraft had been shot down while on a reconnaissance mission against the Mars One orbital station.

Martindale frowned. “It was one thing to risk lives and valuable equipment going after a vital strategic target, or even to retrieve someone whose head happened to be stuffed full of crucial information about our spaceplane technology. But the equation’s significantly different in this situation, where most of the damage has already been done. Whatever happens to Sam Kerr and her team, the Russians are already in a position to roll up most of our intelligence network inside their country.”

“The equation?” Now Nadia didn’t bother hiding her disdain. “Is that how you see this? As a bloodless mathematical game where you assign values to human lives… and discard them if the numbers don’t balance?”

“I call it like I see it, Major,” Martindale said dispassionately. “Sam and the others are professionals. They knew the risks going in.” His eyes were cold. “Let me be clear: I will not authorize some wild-eyed rescue mission that would only throw away more lives and more equipment. Our task now is to figure out how to save what we realistically can — and then to start thinking about how to rebuild our Russian operations once the heat dies down.”

Quickly, before she could erupt, Brad laid a restraining hand on Nadia’s arm. Surprised, she glanced at him. “Let me take this,” he said. She nodded tightly.

“This question is not open for further discussion, Major McLanahan,” Martindale warned.

“I don’t plan to discuss anything,” Brad continued quietly. “Whether you authorize it or not, Nadia and I are going to start prepping a mission to extract Sam and her team. And if it’s at all doable, we’re going.” He noticed a quick look of approval cross his father’s lined face.

Martindale’s eyes narrowed. “That sounds a lot like mutiny.”

Brad shrugged. “Call it what you like.” He looked right into the camera. “Neither Nadia nor I are bean counters. We’re soldiers.” He smiled crookedly. “Though admittedly a little on the irregular side. And as soldiers, our code says you do not throw your people to the wolves just because the fucking cost-benefit ratio doesn’t look favorable.”

“If I fire you for insubordination, you won’t have access to Scion-owned aircraft, weapons, or equipment,” Martindale pointed out carefully.

“Yep, that’s so,” Brad said in agreement, without dropping his smile. “Then again, I bet we can talk Hunter Noble into letting us ‘borrow’ a few toys from the Sky Masters inventory if we have to.” He looked the other man straight in the eye. “So it’s your decision, Mr. Martindale: You can back us on this now, despite the risks. Or you can sit back and watch a pretty fair-sized fraction of your stateside operations team jump ship at the same time the shit’s hitting the fan in Russia.”

For a long, uncomfortable moment, Martindale sat quiet, glaring back at him out of the screen. Brad held his breath, wondering if he’d gone too far. He felt Nadia press her warm palm against his back, offering reassurance.

Then his father spoke up. “My son’s right, Kevin. This isn’t a fight you can win. For that matter, this isn’t really a fight you should want to win. Sam Kerr and the others have obtained priceless intelligence for us in the past… and risked their lives in the process. We owe them a chance now, however small it may seem.”

“Et tu, Patrick?” Martindale retorted.

With a whir of tiny exoskeleton motors, Patrick McLanahan held up an open hand. His face creased in a slight smile. “No dagger, see? Just the truth, as I see it.”

Martindale grimaced. “Very well, then.” His eyes were still cold. “Much as I dislike yielding to pure emotional blackmail, I’ll make an exception in this case. This one case,” he stressed. He turned back to Nadia and Brad. “All right. You can prep your rescue mission.”

“Thank you, sir,” Brad said. “I appreciate this.”

“Don’t thank me too quickly, Major McLanahan,” Martindale snapped. “You may have just bought yourself — and Nadia — a one-way ticket. If things go wrong out there, that’s it. I will not risk any more lives on some damned fool crusade. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Brad said evenly. “We’ll do our best.”

Martindale’s angry expression softened slightly. “Oh, I don’t doubt that.” He sighed. “But I’m afraid that even your best isn’t likely to be good enough. Not this time.”