Patriot

CHAPTER 52

Waking after a restless night, Colonel Brett Beauregard rose from his cot and ventured outside the tent and into the clearing. There, he added some wood to the still-glowing embers of the campfire that had probably saved his life the night before. Not until he bent to pick up the first piece of fallen timber did he see he still had his assault knife clenched in his hand. He’d realized his MP5 would be useless if the beasts got inside his tent while he was asleep. That knife would be his only chance at survival. Or so he had reassured himself, drifting off at some unholy hour.

The damp, deep forest air outside the tent was deeply cold. He was stiff as a board, having barely slept a wink all night. The goddamn howling in the wee small hours! The wolves, he imagined, had been teasing him, playing with him by making noises close by one minute, retreating deeper into the forest the next.

He swung his long legs over a fallen timber, sat down, and looked at his watch, a relic from his days of glory. A Rolex Daytona he’d bought in Lucerne. Those were the days. Fat Rolodexes and fat Rolexes and a seat at the table with the Big Dogs.

It was nearly 0600.

No time to dillydally thinking about what used to be.

After three cups of piping black coffee and two hard biscuits, he went about the surprisingly emotional business of digging Corporal Tolstoy’s grave. He had a good U.S. Army camp shovel and he made short work of the roots and stones and the ice-hard soil. Before going to sleep, he had gathered up what remained of the young soldier. He carefully wrapped his remains in a dark green tarp. Now, he placed the boy at the bottom of the fresh grave. Saying a prayer over the corpse, he began to shovel the dirt.

A quarter of an hour later, he’d packed up camp. His jeep was following the muddy, deeply rutted timber road shown on his map. A winding river that had no name snaked through woods and meadows toward his rendezvous with Captain Koczak. They were to meet at 0800 in the foothills of a mountain range located a good fifty miles to the south. Fifty miles on the wrong side of the Chinese borderlands. The Chinese side.

The seldom used unpaved road was rough and jarring, and Beauregard had to mind the twisty trail lest he put the jeep on the wrong side of the riverbank. He was going far too fast for conditions, he knew, but he’d overslept and he had a reputation for never being late for a military rendezvous, and this was no time to start.

He careened over an old covered wooden bridge and crossed into China. Then he drove exactly fifty-three miles deeper into the blasted wasteland that was northern China. A few minutes later, his overheated jeep crested a stony hilltop. He saw his team spread out down below. They were already pitching camp and establishing a defensive perimeter to keep out Chinese raiders looking for Russians to kill.

In the center of the concertina fence line was his command-and-control vehicle. God only knows how the boys had extracted it from the runoff ditch. But they had, and he accelerated down the hill toward them, happy to be back among his men, his fighters, once more. He saw the Russian captain huddled with a few of his men outside the newly pitched field operations tent. Koczak huddled over the map table, studying their escape route once the mission was accomplished.

“Welcome, Colonel!” he said, not looking up. “We got your e-mail about poor Tolstoy. We are only thankful that you survived the vicious wolf attack.”

“Captain Koczak, good morning! How long until the Avenger radar is operational?”

The captain whipped his head around and said, “Avenger Team SAM is saying we need three hours, Colonel.” The two men had an uneasy peace. The seasoned Russian Army officer resented having to report to an American mercenary.

“Look at your watch, Captain. Inform them they’ve got two.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We have system power up? Are the Avenger generators online?”

“Soon.”

“Now.”

“But of course, Colonel. I will order them to double their efforts.”

Beau looked up at the broad expanse of clear morning sky, noting the position of the sun. And then at his watch. They would be ready, all right, come what may. He knew there were roving bands of heavily armed Chinese peasant militias carrying bazookas and mortars. Like the Huns, they preyed on the weak and lost. Russian peasants who unwittingly crossed the border into China and made camp for a few nights had zero chance of survival should they fall prey to the vicious marauders from the mountains.

The colonel had surrounded the Avenger launch site with a steel cordon of heavily armed soldiers with orders to shoot on sight anyone coming within a thousand yards of his operation. Two people had been shot and killed a little after daybreak, after straying inside the colonel’s no-man’s-land, the captain had informed him. They turned out to be two starving women who had been scrounging the barren land in search of food.

He ordered that the corpses be removed from where they had fallen and given a proper burial.

And less than an hour later, they informed the colonel that all generators were online, all offensive combat systems were powered up and running. Team Avenger, along with their Russian Spetsnaz “advisors,” were ready to execute the mission. Spetsnaz had long been the umbrella term for all Russian special purposes forces. These were elite units operating under the command of the GRU, or Main Intelligence Directorate, Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency. The two Spetsnaz technicians, who had designed, maintained, and prepared to unleash the American Avenger system weapons control were seated in the tracking cockpit of the tracked SAM carrier. The Dark Rider had demanded in a recent memo that one of the Spetsnaz officers must pull the trigger once the target had been acquired.

Avenger had been developed at Vulcan’s Port Arthur, Texas, weapons lab; it was a highly modified version of the truck-mounted Buk Russian missile system. The design and implementation and the combined Russian and American mercenary warfare training teams had been led by the colonel himself.

The target aircraft, Beauregard knew, would be traveling at roughly 965 kph, or 600 miles per hour. It was now flying at a mandated altitude of 33,000 feet at a heading of 180 degrees, SE.

The old Russian SA-11 Buk surface-to-air system, and likewise the newer Avenger, were find-and-follow systems. The colonel’s new launcher, though, was a vastly more sophisticated variant of the much older design. It was designed to track a target with radar long before interception, and then throughout the flight of the missile until it detonated.

Once launched, the target’s radar data were transmitted continuously to the missile, guiding it toward the target. Avenger could find and follow targets at altitudes up to 70,000 feet. But it was not without its drawbacks. For instance, it couldn’t distinguish between a military transport plane and a large passenger aircraft, or even a heavy bomber. The team Beauregard had put together knew only the coordinates of the target and the approximate time the airplane would be within range.

The eighteen-foot Avenger air defense missile carried a high-explosive warhead that would detonate, not upon impact, but within a preset distance from the moving target. A blast field of bolt-sized shrapnel would perforate the engine nacelles, the cockpit, the entire fuselage, causing the aircraft and anyone aboard to simply disintegrate in midair. However successful the Avenger was, the results on the ground were not going to be very pretty. Death rarely was.

The colonel looked up at the towering blue skies and donned his headset. He and the rest of the men scanning the heavens through powerful telescopes did not have long to wait.

Six silent minutes had ticked off the countdown timer display when a voice cracked the stillness.

“Target heat signature acquired, sir,” the Spetsnaz commander said in his headphones. “Radar tracking initiated… and, uh… yes… we now have radar lock, sir.”

“Radar lock. Roger that,” Beauregard said. He could see the crew inside the plexi-bubble cockpit high atop the tracked carrier, both giving him a thumbs-up. The entire bubble and its occupants were now swiveling in a clockwise direction as they tracked the invisible target high above.

He heard a scratchy noise in his headphones, and then this: “Target flying at 37,000, range is 90.5 nautical miles uprange and closing. All missile launch and radar component systems are a go. And… we are now approaching optimum launch parameters, sir.”

The colonel replied, “Thirty-seven thousand altitude at 40.5 miles and tracking, roger.”

“Avenger missile is armed…”

Beauregard raised his binoculars even though there was nothing visible at that altitude and said, “Missile armed, roger.”

He suddenly heard the launch commander say, “And… on my mark… and… Mark. Five… four… three… two… ONE! Launch sequence initiated… and… Launch! Avenger is away… onboard missile systems now tracking target… and… okay, we are approaching optimum detonation parameters… looking… uh… looking good… climbing through 10,000… 15,000… our airspeed is maxed at Mach 4.6… missile climbing through 20,000 feet… 25,000… 30,000 feet now… we, uh… we have critical…”

A brilliant flash of white light exploded in the skies almost directly above the colonel’s head. He looked up at the sound of an enormous c-r-a-a-a-ck from on high.

Then he heard Captain Koczak screaming. Debris from the target was thudding into the rocky desert just shy of the mountains surrounding them.

Almighty God, the colonel thought, what have I done?

He ran ahead a thousand yards toward the spot where a giant piece of engine nacelle had just impacted the ground. Captain Koczak was right on his heels. Within minutes the two men were standing just outside a vast and growing debris field. But what they saw next shook Beauregard to the core. It was raining people. Bodies, and pieces of bodies, were plummeting from the sky… even severed heads thudding to earth all around him. Bodies fell, still trapped inside their seats. Luggage, clothing, newspapers, a Raggedy Ann doll… it was hailing death.

Captain Koczak looked away, grey and stricken, as two small corpses, children, landed within a hundred feet of his position. By some miracle, they were still holding hands. The Russian officer clearly had no idea what was happening now. Or even how to assimilate this civilian human carnage into what they had all been told was to be a strictly military mission.

The captain and all his men had been led to believe they were taking down a military transport plane. And the colonel as well had been led down that same fabricated road himself.

“Good God, Colonel!” Koczak cried out. “There’s been a terrible mistake! It’s a fucking passenger plane, Colonel! We’ve just shot down a civilian airliner!”

Beauregard remained silent. He watched the still-flaming engines and torn wings full of jet fuel as they slammed into the mountains a half mile away, burning every tree and bush in sight, scorching the earth black.

“Colonel, you need to see this,” a young soldier said.

One of the troops had approached the colonel. He had a charred piece of the disintegrated A-320’s fuselage in his hand. It was pockmarked with jagged holes that Beauregard recognized as damage inflicted by high-energy particles. In other words, shrapnel from the warhead of the Avenger missile.

Emblazoned on the lower right-hand corner of the plate-sized fuselage piece he held in his hand was a red, blue, and white emblem. The flag of the Russian Federation! Beauregard went rigid at the sight of it.

He’d just shot down a Russian passenger plane.

Uncle Joe had fucking lied to him.

Since the very inception of this mission, and all the subsequent training of his Vulcan crew and battle support troops, the colonel had been led to believe he was tasked with bringing down a Chinese air force military transport carrying troops en route to Beijing. But he had not done that. No, no. He had not done that at all.

Hell, it was an Aeroflot jetliner, the flagship carrier of the Russian Federation, for fuck’s sake. Russians shooting down Russian passenger planes? Way beyond the pale, even for a man who had seen it all. This was a KGB black op of the very blackest persuasion. Why in God’s holy name were the Russian secret police now committing mass murder against their own citizens? Beauregard had done a lot of very bad things in his life, but this nightmare was indisputably evil.

He walked away from the Vulcan site in a fury, fists clenched, shaking his head in disbelief, storming across the blood-soaked ground toward his mud-spattered jeep. He wanted to be alone. He climbed in and sat behind the wheel, pulling out his cigarettes and lighting one.

He saw Koczak striding angrily toward him. He looked like he felt he’d been betrayed by the colonel himself. But then the captain saw the look on Beauregard’s grief-stricken face, stopped abruptly, turned and walked away. He had seen that the American was in shock, clearly just as shaken about what had just transpired as were he and his men.

Beauregard sat there in that open jeep for a long time. Preparations to depart were almost complete. He thought back to his initial meeting with Uncle Joe, the so-called Dark Rider, in his tower office at the winter palace, parsing their entire conversation, word for word. He had a knack for remembering conversations, a mental vault where he stored the valuable ones. He’d made no mistake. Uncle Joe, the very spooky reincarnation of Joseph Stalin, and God knows how many of his new employers, namely, the freaking Kremlin, had duped him. Set him up and played him like a freaking patsy right from the bloody beginning. Betrayed his trust, like many another client had done before them, in the bad old days.

He’d believed he was making a comeback here in Russia. Put all his foolish mistakes and misplaced confidences behind him. And yet. And yet, here he was, thrown right back under the goddamn bus again. The one place he’d sworn he’d never find himself again.

Fuck.

Had the whole damn world suddenly gone crazy?

What the hell was going on?