The Moscow Offensive

Ten

The Southern Military District had its headquarters in a five-story neoclassical building in downtown Rostov. If it weren’t for the iron rail fence and small white guard post blocking access to a door bearing the double-headed eagle emblem of Russia’s armed forces, passersby would ordinarily have thought it was just another luxury apartment building, art gallery, store, or bank.

No one could have made that mistake now.

Armed soldiers in camouflaged battle dress and body armor patrolled the neighboring streets. Police cars barricaded every major intersection. Staff officers streamed into the building in twos and threes, summoned back to duty by emergency phone calls to suburban homes and country dachas. One by one, lights flicked on behind tall, curtained windows on every floor.

Short and stocky, still built like the tank commander he had once been, Colonel General Vladislav Nikitin stormed into the crowded operations center in a foul temper. It was irritating enough that this sudden emergency had ruined a delightful romp with his newest mistress, a beautiful blond soap-opera actress. Arriving to find his staff scurrying around in what appeared at first glance to be total confusion was worse. Everywhere he turned, phones were ringing off the hook. Cigarettes smoldered in overflowing ashtrays. And throughout the room, groups of officers clustered around maps, gesturing wildly while they argued about which units should be deployed where.

Scowling, Nikitin shoved past them, ignoring their startled looks and frantic salutes. He found his chief of staff, Major General Maxim Borovkov, hunched over a map of his own. This one showed the entire region around Rostov, stretching from Ukraine and the Sea of Azov in the west, to Georgia and Azerbaijan in the south, and the Caspian Sea and Kazakhstan to the east. Even Borovkov, tall, wiry, and ordinarily as cool as ice, looked ruffled.

“How bad is this?” Nikitin demanded.

“Pretty bad,” his chief of staff admitted. He pointed to Bataysk. “Earlier this afternoon, a captain and sergeant of the Twenty-Second Guards Spetsnaz Brigade were murdered — gunned down inside the headquarters building there. Their bodies were discovered after a Ministry of Defense official reported receiving a strange, interrupted telephone call from this Captain Leonov. The captain was trying to check up on the identity of two strangers on base, one of whom claimed to be a colonel on the general staff.”

“Sukin syn! Son of a bitch,” Nikitin muttered. Donning his reading glasses, he glared down at the map. “So was this a terrorist attack? Or some sort of espionage operation that went wrong?”

Borovkov didn’t hesitate. “Probably the latter. The sentries at the gate confirm there were only two visitors during the time in question, a man and a woman. Both had what seemed valid identification papers. From what we can tell, these people drove straight to the Twenty-Second’s headquarters, spent roughly an hour inside, and then left. Searches haven’t turned up any evidence they planted explosives or other destructive devices, as one would expect terrorists to do.”

Nikitin nodded, thinking that over. The other man’s assessment made sense. But what in the hell could spies have been looking for at Bataysk? The Spetsnaz units based there hadn’t seen active service since the short, abortive war with Poland three years ago. Why target them now?

“The local police found the vehicle the attackers used, a GAZ Patriot SUV, abandoned several kilometers away,” Borovkov continued.

“So they’ve switched cars.”

“Quite probably,” Borovkov agreed. He shrugged. “Unfortunately, we don’t have any description of this other vehicle. The police haven’t yet been able to find any witnesses who saw the switch.”

“Better and better, Maxim,” Nikitin said acidly. He took off his reading glasses, closed his eyes for a moment, and pinched the bridge of his nose. He could feel a headache threatening to develop. “So, what is being done to find these enemy agents?”

“All airports, railway stations, bus terminals, and border control points are on high alert,” Borovkov reported. “We’ve also established roadblocks on all the major highways and secondary roads leading out of Bataysk and Rostov.”

“Who’s manning these roadblocks?”

“Mostly the local police,” Borovkov said. “I’ve ordered more troops flown in from the Seventh Guards Mountain Air Assault Division and the Fifty-Sixth Guards Airborne Brigade, but they won’t arrive for several more hours.”

Sourly, Nikitin nodded. Unfortunately, most of his active-duty army units were scattered widely across the vast Southern Military District — either on occupation duty in eastern Ukraine and the Crimea or guarding the border with Georgia and Azerbaijan. Aside from the 22nd Guards Spetsnaz Brigade itself, his immediately available forces were limited to a relative handful of military police troops and a few motor-rifle platoons detached from their parent units to act as guards for key installations in and around Rostov.

“Get those paratroops here as fast as possible,” he ordered. “I want a solid cordon around Rostov and Bataysk before dawn tomorrow. Let’s try to pin these spies close to the city. Then, if necessary, we can send in our soldiers to go house to house hunting them.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And tell the air defense forces I want every SAM regiment in this area at maximum readiness. Then contact the air base at Krymsk. I want some of our Su-27 fighters aloft as soon they can be armed, fueled, and made ready.”

Borovkov raised an eyebrow. “Do you think someone will try to fly the enemy agents out?”

Nikitin shrugged. “Hell if I know. But now that we know we have burglars prowling around, let’s not make the mistake of leaving the windows open.”

Beneath scattered clouds, isolated points of light marked the small towns and villages dotting a darkened landscape. This part of southern Russia was mostly farmland. Even with spring planting well under way, many fields still lay fallow. In the distance, off to the northeast, the city lights of Rostov-on-Don glowed pale yellow on the horizon.

With Major Nadia Rozek piloting from the right-hand seat, a specially modified PZL SW-4 light helicopter skimmed low over the ground, heading east at nearly one hundred knots. Called the Puszczyk, or Tawny Owl, by its Polish designers, this particular single-engine machine had been configured for covert missions deep in enemy territory by Scion technicians.

The helicopter’s fuselage and tail boom were covered with a special Israeli-invented radar-absorbent paint. This coating soaked up the electromagnetic energy from incoming radar waves and shunted most of it off as heat. Some energy would still get back to the emitting enemy radar, but only in greatly reduced and scattered form. And like most stealthy aircraft, a film of vapor-deposited gold covered the helicopter’s cockpit. Radar waves that would ordinarily penetrate the cockpit and reflect back off pilots, passengers, seats, and controls were deflected away by this ultrathin metal coating. To further reduce its radar signature, this PZL SW-4’s landing skids retracted tightly into what had once been a baggage compartment. Overall, the Sky Masters — modified helicopter had a radar cross section about that of a Hellfire missile, just a bit bigger than that of the U.S. Army’s canceled stealth RAH-66 Comanche helicopter.

The Scion-owned helicopter’s small size and ability to fly nap-of-the-earth, together with these modifications, made it difficult to detect — even by Russia’s most powerful air defense radars. A suite of advanced threat-warning sensors and defensive countermeasures systems further enhanced its abilities to undertake clandestine missions in hostile airspace.

Even so, Nadia Rozek was only too aware that penetrating this deep into Russian territory without being spotted was a lot like threading a needle. Wearing thick gloves. In the dark. At high speed. And with the ever-present risk of crashing into some of the electric power transmission lines and pylons strung across her flight path if her concentration wavered for even a fraction of a second.

A high-pitched tone pulsed sharply in her earphones, signaling the detection of yet another active enemy air-search radar. From the sound, it was close. Maybe dangerously close. She fought back against the instinctive reaction to jink away. She was flying just a little more than one hundred feet off the deck. At this low altitude, sudden, violent maneuvers were far more likely to slam her helicopter into the ground than to avoid trouble.

“That’s an S-band search radar at two o’clock,” Brad McLanahan reported from the left-hand seat. For this mission, the powerfully built young American was acting as Nadia’s copilot and systems operator, a reversal of their usual roles. Thanks to her Polish special forces training, she had a lot more stick time in helicopters than he did. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him leaning over to study one of the large, softly glowing MFDs, multifunction displays, set between them. “The computer figures it’s about thirty-five nautical miles away. We should be okay.”

“Zrozumiany. Understood,” Nadia said, relaxing slightly. That was the 96L6E “Cheese Board” air-search radar system operating with the S-300 SAM regiment based around Rostov’s international airport. At this altitude, even if the Russians had the radar set’s forty-meter-tall mast fully extended, the helicopter was still several nautical miles below its horizon.

She heard another soft ping, this one indicating they had just received a compressed and encrypted radio signal.

“We’re in contact with the team,” Brad said, reading the message sent by the Scion intelligence operatives they were here to retrieve. “They’re at Rendezvous Point Alpha and in the clear. At least so far.”

“Dobry,” Nadia said, with a tiny nod.

From the moment they crossed into hostile airspace, Brad had been monitoring radio and cell-phone transmissions that showed Russian army and police units were conducting a large-scale manhunt for the “foreign terrorists” who’d shot up the headquarters of the 22nd Guards Spetsnaz Brigade. Fortunately, the Russians were focusing their roadblocks and patrols along the roads heading out of Rostov and Bataysk. They seemed to be acting on the logical assumption that their quarry would want to put as much distance as possible between them and the scene of the crime.

For now, this rural backwater closer to the coast of the Sea of Azov was a lower priority. Nadia couldn’t fault the Russians’ reasoning. After all, in daylight, strangers would stand out like sore thumbs among the area’s farms and small villages. But now that the sun had set, those same farmers and peasants tended to stick close to their own homes — which gave the Scion team room to maneuver without being spotted. Of course, every passing hour allowed the Russians to bring in more troops from their outlying garrisons. Given enough time, they were bound to cordon off the coast and start sweeping inland.

So the trick was to deny them that time.

Brad rapidly tapped virtual “keys” on the MFD he’d set to navigation guidance. “RP Alpha coordinates laid in.”

“Bardzo dobrze. Very good.” Nadia tweaked the cyclic gently, altering course to follow the new steering cue transferred to her heads-up display.

Fields, orchards, and distant houses glowed an eerie green in her night-vision goggles. Several kilometers ahead, a blinking LZ icon highlighted an empty, unplanted field. Rows of trees planted as windbreaks lined its west and east sides.

Nadia started working the cyclic, pedals, and collective to reduce their airspeed while still in horizontal flight. The field they were heading for grew larger in the windscreen as they slid lower.

She thumbed a control on the cyclic. Hydraulics whined as their landing skids swung down out of the fuselage. A new icon flashed on her HUD.

“Green light. The skids are locked,” Brad confirmed. “We’re go for landing.”

Totally focused, Nadia brought the helicopter in low across the field, just a few feet off the ground. A cloud of dust and dirt kicked up by the rotors whirled behind them. Slowing fast, they flared in and touched down with a gentle thump.

With the rotors still turning, Brad grabbed the Polish-made Radon assault carbine stowed next to him. Then he popped the cockpit door open and dropped out onto the ground.

“Be careful,” Nadia said quietly.

He grinned back at her. “Yes, ma’am, I will.” His smile tightened. “But if there’s company we’re not expecting out there, yank this crate into the air and get out fast.”

Without waiting for a reply, Brad swung away and moved off toward the eastern tree line. His pulse accelerated. In the darkness, every sound — the muffled whump-whump-whump of their helicopter’s slowly spinning rotors, the soft crunch of his boots on freshly turned dirt, and even the gentle breeze sighing through the nearest trees — seemed magnified.

Fifty meters from the windbreak, he dropped to one knee. He pulled a tiny, high-powered infrared flashlight out of one of the pouches on his assault vest and a monocular night-vision scope from another. If those hidden somewhere in the shadows ahead were friendlies, it was time to confirm his own identity. Or to make yourself an even bigger damn target if they’re Russians instead, he thought grimly.

Quickly, he pointed the flashlight toward the trees and clicked it on and off six times, signaling that he was Scion Six. Almost immediately, a tiny, answering dot of light blinked three times in reply.

Brad breathed out in relief. That was the correct countersign.

Three people emerged from the shadows and came out to meet him. Two of them were men — one of them tall and heavyset, the other short and whip-thin. The third was a slender young woman. Even in the darkness, he could tell that she was very good-looking. And that she seemed awfully familiar.

Abruptly, he recognized her. It was Sam Kerr. She’d helped him evade both Russian and FBI surveillance in Mexico three years ago, back when he’d first been secretly summoned to join Scion and what would later become the Iron Wolf Squadron.

“Nice to see you, McLanahan,” she said cheerfully, with an impish grin. “But the timing’s still bad for a quick roll in the hay.” Then she glanced around the rural Russian countryside. “Although I’ve gotta say there is a lot more hay here than there was in Cancún.”

Brad felt himself turning red with embarrassment. Before he found out Samantha Kerr was a Scion agent, he’d tried to pick her up for a little light, no-strings-attached, beach-resort sex. Suddenly he was very glad that it was so dark and that Nadia was well out of earshot. Even though his encounter with Sam had occurred before he met Nadia, he was pretty sure that was a part of his past he’d rather not have to explain to the woman he loved.

The big man, Marcus Cartwright, saved him. “Go easy on this guy, Sam,” he said with a soft chuckle. “Somehow I don’t think we’re going to find another ride out of here anytime soon.”

Still blushing, Brad led Sam and Cartwright and their backup man, David Jones, across the field to the waiting helicopter. One after another, he helped them into the tiny passenger cabin behind the cockpit. It was a tight squeeze. This PZL SW-4 was only rated for a pilot and four passengers and that was before Scion technicians had packed in all their added sensors and other electronics.

Once the Scion team was strapped in, he climbed back into the copilot’s seat and reconnected his headset. Immediately he heard a repeated series of high-pitched tones from their threat-warning system. He tapped one of the MFDs, bringing up a visual defensives systems display. The computer’s evaluation scrolled across his screen. Multiple airborne X-band search radars detected. A map opened up, depicting the estimated positions and courses of those hostile radar emitters. They were off to the west, over the Sea of Azov, and flying what looked like a north — south racetrack oval.

“Well, that sucks,” Brad muttered, drawing Nadia’s attention to the display. “Someone out there just decided to bar the barn door before the horse gets out.”

“Is there a problem?” Cartwright asked from behind them.

“Yes, a bit of a problem,” Nadia told him. Her voice was cool, almost completely unruffled. “The Russians now have at least four Su-27 fighters patrolling across our planned flight path.”

“Can we sneak past them?”

“Not a chance,” Brad said, glancing back into the crowded cabin. “Those Su-27s are equipped with upgraded radars that can detect us pretty far out, even with all the stealth features our guys added to this helicopter.”

“So how about flying around them, then?” Sam asked.

This time, Nadia answered. “I am afraid that is not possible either. We do not have enough fuel for any detour that would evade both those fighters and the SAM units stationed at Rostov and in the Crimea.”

Brad nodded. Off-the-shelf SW-4s had a maximum range of nearly five hundred nautical miles. And while the Scion techs who’d worked on this one had squeezed in some extra fuel capacity, it was just enough to offset the added weight of its stealth coating and new electronics. Toss in the fact that penetrating Russian air defenses required flying long distances at extremely low altitude, which significantly increased fuel consumption, and the reality was that they were already dancing right on the ragged edge of their available fuel. As it was, safely reaching their planned refueling point, a covert Scion airstrip in unoccupied western Ukraine, was going to test Nadia’s piloting skills to the limit.

Sam looked more irritated than scared. “So we’re basically screwed?”

“Not if the contingency plan Captain McLanahan developed for this mission works,” Nadia assured her.

“What kind of contingency plan?”

“Sometimes the mountain comes to Mohammed,” Brad said as he brought up a com window on his display and typed in a short message. The system beeped once as it compressed, encrypted, and then sent his message as a single, millisecond-long burst via satellite uplink. “But other times we have to persuade Mohammed to fly off to the mountain.”

Two Polish F-16C Vipers circled low over the sea, only a couple of hundred meters above wave height. Their mottled light and dark gray camouflage made them difficult to spot visually and their current altitude rendered them effectively invisible to the Russian radars painting the night sky along the Crimean and Caucasus coasts.

“Talon Lead, this is Air Operations Center South,” a Romanian-accented voice said through Colonel Pawel Kasperek’s headset. “Execute WRIGGLE ONE. Repeat, execute WRIGGLE ONE.”

He clicked his mike. “Acknowledged, Center. Executing WRIGGLE ONE.” Briefly, he glanced down at the cockpit map display set to show the current position of the MQ-55 Coyote drone data-linked with his F-16. He smiled under his oxygen mask. The stealthy unmanned aircraft was right where it should be — orbiting very low above the sea about two hundred kilometers south of the Crimean Peninsula.

Just about the size of a small business jet, the Sky Masters — built Coyote had a flying-wing configuration, twin wing-buried turbofan engines, stealth coating, and just enough avionics to allow a ground- or air-based pilot to fly it remotely or to follow simple, preprogrammed flight plans. Originally designed as a missile truck, a low-cost platform capable of carrying up to ten AIM-120 advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles in its internal weapons bay, this MQ-55 was intended to play a very different role tonight.

“Time to strut your stuff, little bird,” Kasperek murmured. He activated the data link and punched in the command needed to trigger a new flight plan buried in the Coyote’s tiny onboard computer.

Four hundred kilometers east of where the Polish F-16s were stationed, the MQ-55 drone broke out of the slow, lazy circle it had been tracing over the Black Sea and headed due west. Its turbofan engines whined louder, powering up as the Coyote climbed steadily into the cloud-speckled night sky.

“I have intermittent contact with an unidentified aircraft approximately two hundred kilometers south of our position,” one of the battalion’s radar operators reported suddenly. His voice cracked with mingled excitement and frustration. “But I can’t lock it up for very long. The target keeps fading in and out on my screen.”

Colonel Ivan Zaitev spun toward the boyish-looking lieutenant. His eyes narrowed. “Intermittent contact? Are we being jammed?”

“No, sir.”

“What is the estimated course and speed of this contact?” Zaitev asked.

“Direction of flight is roughly two-six-five degrees. Speed is more than six hundred kilometers an hour.”

“Altitude?”

“Perhaps one thousand meters,” the lieutenant said hesitantly.

“That certainly sounds like a stealth aircraft of some kind,” Zaitev’s executive officer commented from his station.

The colonel nodded. His lips thinned. “So it does.” His fingers drummed on a console in time with his speeding thoughts. “And if it is, now we know right where those spies the whole Southern Military District is hunting have got to.”

“Should we fire now?” his XO asked. He sounded uncertain. “At that speed, they’ll be out of our effective engagement range in less than ten minutes. I know we haven’t got a tight lock on this bastard, but maybe if we put enough missiles in the air—”

“Fire? Without confirming we have a valid target? Christ, no!” Zaitev snapped. The sky over the Black Sea was full of commercial airliners crisscrossing to and from Europe, Turkey, and the rest of the Middle East. Lobbing effectively unguided missiles into that tangle would be insane. The diplomatic repercussions if his battalion accidentally blew a passenger jet out of the air would be horrific. Just imagining the Kremlin’s likely reaction to such a disastrous mistake was enough to make his skin crawl.

“Then what can we do?”

“We make the flyboys earn their pay for once,” Zaitev said, coming to a decision. He stabbed at the button that opened his direct secure link to the headquarters of the Southern Military District. “This is Colonel Zaitev. I need to speak to Colonel General Nikitin immediately!”

While he waited for Nikitin to come on the line, his executive officer frowned. “But what can those Su-27 pilots do that we can’t? Our radar is better than theirs… and if we can’t lock up this contact, how will they?”

“The old-fashioned way, Yevgeni,” Zaitev said with a lopsided smile. “With their own eyes. After all, we’re getting enough data off this unidentified contact to vector them into the right sector. And then, if this really is one of those damned Iron Wolf stealth planes, our fighters should be able to shoot it down without too much trouble.”

Peering down at his display, Brad saw the icons representing the Russian Su-27s suddenly break out of the racetrack patrol pattern they’d been flying and head southeast at high speed. He whistled. “I’ll be damned. My cockeyed idea actually worked.”

“So Mohammed really is going to the mountain?” Sam asked from the darkened cabin behind him.

“Just as fast as their afterburners can take them, Ms. Kerr,” Nadia said matter-of-factly. She throttled up. Overhead, the PZL SW-4’s rotors spun ever faster. She pulled up on the collective, changing the pitch of the rotors, and pressed down on her left pedal — counteracting the torque produced by the three big blades.

The helicopter lifted off.

“So now we get you back to Poland,” Nadia continued. “And then we see if what you discovered at Bataysk was really worth all this trouble.”