Price of Duty

THIRTY-ONE

GRU major Leonid Usenko carefully lit another cigarette before turning back to the English-language crossword puzzle he was wrestling with this evening. It was from an American newspaper, the Wall Street Journal. He preferred the American style to those published in the British papers. The English crosswords, he thought, were maddeningly indirect, full of mysterious allusions that meant nothing to those who hadn’t been educated at one of that nation’s elite public schools, like Eton or Harrow. American puzzles, while often cleverly constructed, were far more decipherable — requiring only a solid knowledge of the language, American idiom, and popular culture.

For a moment, he considered sharing this insight with Captain Artem Mikheyev. The other intelligence officer sat at a table just on the other side of the tiny living room of the small lakeside vacation cabin they’d bought through a series of cutouts. But then he reconsidered. Mikheyev was hunched over his laptop computer, grumbling and swearing about something under his breath. One of the problems with any prolonged covert surveillance mission, especially when it involved living in relatively tight quarters, was that tempers naturally frayed over time. The younger man, especially, was feeling the strain. As a cybernetics and computer expert, he was supposed to have been on his way back to Moscow and his regular duties weeks ago. Instead, he had been ordered to stay on with Usenko and Rusanov while they maintained a distant watch on the Iron Wolf base and its activities.

Usenko bent back over his crossword. What was a seven-letter word for “a Roman legionary officer”? he wondered. Was it a—

Suddenly the front door burst open. Both Usenko and Mikheyev looked up in alarm. Usenko shot to his feet. “What the hell…?”

Captain Konstantin Rusanov hurried inside and slammed the door shut behind him, breathless with excitement. The short, dark-haired man had been on duty observing activities at the airfield from a concealed vantage point. “Something’s up,” he panted. “The base is under complete lockdown, with troops patrolling along every meter of the perimeter fence. And the Iron Wolf mercenaries just launched an aircraft, of a type I’ve never seen before — some sort of new stealth craft from the look of it. It took off and then flew due north.”

Usenko shoved his half-finished crossword puzzle aside. “Did you get a picture?”

Rusanov nodded. He dropped into the chair opposite the major and slid his smartphone across. On the surface, the phone looked very much like any of the major brands. Only close examination would reveal that its built-in camera was far more powerful than anything on the civilian market and that it included encryption technology that was beyond cutting-edge.

Usenko expanded the image with his fingers. His subordinate was right. At first glance, the batwing-shaped aircraft bore similarities to the American B-2 Spirit stealth bombers. But there were subtle differences. He looked up. “How big would you say this plane is?”

“Offhand?” Rusanov shrugged. “Smaller than a big strategic bomber, I would guess. But significantly larger than a fighter.”

The major pursed his lips. That was an odd size, he thought — neither fish nor fowl. Well, perhaps the experts in Moscow could make something of it. “We’d better report this at once,” he said.

Mikheyev got up from his chair. “That will be a problem,” he said gloomily. “Our Internet service is down. And so are all cell-phone and landline networks. I can’t find any connections anywhere.”

“You’re kidding,” Rusanov blurted out.

“Unfortunately, I’m not,” Mikheyev said. His mouth twisted in a crooked, sardonic smile. “I think our glorious Q Directorate comrades are up to new cyberwar tricks.”

“Shit.” Usenko took a long drag at his cigarette and then stubbed it out with an angry gesture. “Now would be a damned good time to have a satellite phone.”

The others nodded. Unfortunately, the geniuses at the Ministry of State Security had prohibited the use of satellite phones by deep-cover operational teams, especially those tasked with spying on the Iron Wolf mercenaries and their CID combat robots. Two GRU agents taken prisoner last year in Poland and exchanged at the end of the brief shooting war had blamed their capture on the use of a satellite phone near one of those terrifying machines.

“If the Poles can’t clear their communications networks sooner, we’ll have to report this during our next scheduled radio-contact window,” Usenko decided. He checked his watch. He scowled. “Which won’t open for almost another four hours.”

Their GRU team had a high-powered radio transmitter equipped to send compressed encrypted transmissions. Since even a short signal might still be picked up by Polish counterintelligence, it was a risky procedure. It was also a poor way of trying to send actionable intelligence. For security reasons, Moscow only listened for transmissions during certain set times. Signals sent outside those narrow communications windows would be ignored. They might even be treated as evidence that the Poles had captured Usenko and his subordinates and were trying to feed false information to Russia.

Two hours and nine hundred nautical miles after departing Powidz, Brad McLanahan brought the XCV-62 down for a smooth landing on Kemijärvi’s fourteen-hundred-meter-long runway. He taxied off onto the apron, where a Scion maintenance, security, and refueling team waited.

This airport, just inside the Arctic Circle and deep amid Lapland’s forests and lakes, was a good choice for an interim refueling stop. Used mainly by private jets, Kemijärvi was also an Arctic test site for UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, operated by Sky Masters and other manufacturers. Which meant that oddly configured aircraft were a relatively common sight here, far less likely to attract unwanted attention. As it was, their flight into the field had been logged as a cargo flight carrying equipment for the region’s timber industry.

Quickly, he and Nadia Rozek ran through their postlanding checklists. Then he clicked the intercom, opening a channel to the troop compartment behind the cockpit. “How are things back there?”

“No problems,” Whack Macomber told him from inside one of the two CIDs squeezed into the compartment alongside Schofield, his four commandos, and their weapons and gear. “Other than Charlie pestering me to ask if there’s time for a quick drink at the airport bar.”

Brad smiled. “Maybe on the way back.” He glanced down at the fueling status indicator shown on one of his MFDs. “We should be gassed up and back in the air in about fifteen minutes or so.”

Beside him, Nadia finished typing a short message on her left-hand display. She hit the send button. “I have informed Powidz of our arrival here and estimated time of departure,” she reported. Seconds later, her MFD pinged, signaling the receipt of a new transmission via satellite downlink. Her fingers flew over the virtual keyboard, ordering their computer to decode the incoming signal. “It’s an intelligence update from Martindale,” she said. “So far, the Russians are sticking precisely to their announced schedule of air-defense exercises.”

“That’s mighty generous of them,” Brad said with a quick, slashing grin. While he bet Gryzlov hadn’t intended this sudden round of SAM and radar drills as anything but a bit of saber rattling, it had certainly made their mission planning a little easier. When they crossed into enemy airspace about ten minutes after takeoff from Kemijärvi, Russia’s Aerospace Forces would be focused on testing their defenses around St. Petersburg — more than 350 nautical miles south. “Anything else?” he asked.

“There are no signs yet of any higher alert level anywhere along our planned flight path or in the region around their Perun’s Aerie complex,” Nadia read. “Also, Colonel Kasperek’s covering force is completing its movement to the forward air base. His fighters will be fueled, armed, and on ready alert in sixty minutes.”

Brad nodded. With luck, they would never need to call on Pawel Kasperek’s F-16s for help. First, because that would mean things had gone really wrong. The whole point of this mission was to hit the Russian cyberwar complex by surprise, blow it to hell, and then get out while Moscow was still trying to pick up its drawers. And second, because there probably wasn’t a lot the Polish fighter pilots could do except die gallantly if they were thrown into battle against Russia’s S-300 and S-400 SAMs, Su-27s, and other advanced combat aircraft.

If it were up to him, he would have vetoed the idea of putting Kasperek’s squadron on standby. But both President Wilk and Kevin Martindale had insisted — labeling it a last-ditch contingency option.

“Wolf Six-Two, you’re fully fueled and good to go,” the Finnish ramp manager said, less than twenty minutes after engine shutdown. “As the Scion maintenance team requested, the tower has cleared you for departure without further communication. No other flights are inbound or outbound. Good luck and Godspeed.”

“Roger that, Kemijärvi Ground,” Brad acknowledged. “Thank you for your assistance.” Scion’s close working and financial relationship with the Finns meant they could take off again without risking the routine aircraft-to-control-tower transmissions that could be intercepted by Russian SIGINT posts just across the nearby border. He glanced at Nadia. “All set?” She nodded tightly. “Okay, let’s run through the takeoff checklists and get this beast airborne, pronto.” He opened the intercom channel to the troop compartment again. “Right, guys. This is it. Strap in tight. The ride’s likely to get a little bumpy.”

Colonel Pawel Kasperek watched the last of his squadron’s F-16C Vipers taxi into one of the camouflaged aircraft shelters built along the airfield’s northern side. He felt himself relax. Not much. Just a bit. Whatever happened, at least his fighters were in position.

Ämari was an old Soviet-era air base, once home to a Russian naval aviation regiment flying Su-24s. Upgraded to NATO standards several years ago, the base was just a little over three hundred kilometers west of St. Petersburg — thirty minutes’ flight time at the F-16’s cruise speed. That put them practically on Russia’s doorstep, at least by combat standards. Best of all, as far as he could tell, they’d managed this emergency operational movement without the Russians picking up so much as a whiff that something odd was happening.

His squadron’s F-16s had been taking off in pairs from Minsk Mazowiecke at varied intervals over the past several hours. In and of itself, that was nothing out of the ordinary: fighter patrols over Warsaw had become a regular sight ever since the Kalmar Airlines crash. What was different was that each pair of Vipers, instead of climbing to orbit the Polish capital, had flown north at extremely low altitude — flying out into the Baltic and then turning northeast to Estonia along several different, precleared air corridors. That had kept them off Russian radar and held radio transmissions to an absolute minimum.

Bomb-handling trailers loaded with thousand-pound AGM-154A Joint Standoff Weapons, or JSOWs, and AIM-9X Sidewinder and AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, were already in motion — heading for the aircraft shelters. The ground crews flown in earlier on Poland’s American-made C-130s were inside waiting to arm their planes with a mix of air-to-ground and air-to-air ordnance.

Kasperek turned to his Estonian counterpart, Lieutenant Colonel Inar Tamm. “So now we wait, Colonel.”

“Jah. Yes,” the other man said simply. Then he smiled thinly. “And perhaps we should pray too, eh?”

Kasperek nodded fervently. Ordinarily he wasn’t much for prayer, but there were moments when you wanted to make sure you covered every possible angle. This was definitely one of them.

One hundred and twenty nautical miles and sixteen minutes after crossing the Russian frontier, the Iron Wolf stealth aircraft streaked low over a landscape of dense snow-cloaked forests and ice-covered lakes. Thousands of stars shimmered high overhead, only partially obscured by thin wisps of cloud.

Brad McLanahan pulled his stick a bit to the right, banking onto a course that took the XCV-62 between two low tree-covered hills and then back out over a dully gleaming expanse of ice. Cameras set to cover the rear arc of their aircraft showed roiling vortices of loose snow swirling in their wake — ripped off the earth by the sheer speed of their low-altitude passage. He frowned. By rights, he ought to gain more altitude. If some eagle-eyed Russian fighter pilot were on the prowl in the skies above them, he might spot the glittering snow-crystal trail they were tearing across an otherwise darkened countryside. If that happened, they were screwed.

Unfortunately, there were other, even more compelling reasons for him to keep this bird right down on the deck.

“S-band search radar at eleven o’clock. Estimated range is one hundred fifty miles,” the Ranger’s computer reported. “Detection probability at this altitude nil.”

“It’s a 96L6E ‘Cheese Board’ system,” Nadia said, checking the signal characteristics shown on her threat warning display. “Probably operating with the S-300 regiment deployed to cover the submarine construction and repair yards at Severodvinsk.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Brad agreed absently. He was almost entirely focused on following the HUD cues provided by their navigation and digital terrain-following systems. He pulled back on the stick a tiny bit as they left the ice lake behind — climbing slightly to clear the tops of the trees by just a couple of hundred feet. To avoid losing airspeed in the climb, he inched the throttles forward, feeding just a scooch more power to the Ranger’s four turbofan engines.

“New S-band search radar at two o’clock. Range is one hundred sixty-five miles,” the computer said suddenly.

“It’s the same radar type,” Nadia told him.

Brad nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on his HUD. “That’ll be the radar around Petrozavodsk, guarding the interceptor air base there.” He forced a tight grin. “This is what we call threading the needle.”

Russia was an enormous country with around thirty-six thousand miles of land borders and coastline to guard. Even with a vast network of powerful air-surveillance radars, there was no practical way for Moscow to continuously monitor so large a perimeter. Instead, the Russians deployed their radars, SAM regiments, and fighter patrols to protect key sites like major cities, important military installations, and vital industries. In theory, that made it possible for a small, highly stealthy aircraft to duck and dodge and bob and weave its way through the porous web of radars.

Plotting that kind of course was relatively easy against fixed radar sites. Unfortunately, the Russians also had a substantial force of highly mobile detection units, many of which could be up and running within minutes if ordered to activate. Sure, Scion and Polish intelligence analysts had done their best to plot a relatively safe route to Russia’s Perun’s Aerie cyberwar complex, but penetrating deep into Russian airspace without being detected was still a crapshoot.