The Moscow Offensive

Twenty

Barbeau swiveled in her chair to look at Luke Cohen. Her chief of staff had changed out of his torn and singed clothes, donning an Air Force flight suit that was at least a couple of inches too small for his lanky frame. “Well?”

“Wilk was lying.”

She nodded. “Through his teeth. Dithering like that when I asked him to confirm the locations of those robots was the tell. So there’s our confirmation… we were hit by Iron Wolf CIDs.” She frowned. “The circle I can’t square is why Wilk would take a risk like this. Why allow his paid soldiers to attack us? Let’s say their plan worked perfectly and I’d been killed. Even a buffoon like Ray Summers would have to retaliate against Poland big-time once he took the oath of office. Wilk has everything to lose and nothing to gain from letting Martindale run wild.”

“Maybe the Poles really are as much in the dark about this as we are,” Cohen suggested. “That would explain a lot.”

“You think those Iron Wolf mercs have gone totally off the reservation?” Barbeau asked. “That they’re acting without Warsaw’s approval?”

Cohen nodded.

“Then why not just admit that right off the bat?”

“Figure it like this: You go out and buy a big mean pit bull as a guard dog. And then one day, the damn dog breaks out of your yard, runs off, and mauls some kid to death. And when a cop shows up at your door, you say…?”

“That’s not my dog, Officer,” Barbeau said automatically.

“Exactly. That may not be the smartest reaction, but it’s natural.”

She pondered that. All along, she’d been sure that Piotr Wilk would someday learn, the hard way, what the head of Scion was really like. She’d certainly never bought the notion that Martindale would genuinely subordinate his own will to that of anyone else. Why would he take orders from some rinky-dink leader like Poland’s president? His ego was too big. Right from the beginning, the former American president would have seen Wilk and his country as tools to be used and then cast aside when necessary.

Barbeau grimaced. It was a good enough working theory, but she was getting tired of operating on the basis of half-formed and maybe half-baked guesses.

“Okay, so it’s possible the Poles were blindsided by this like we were. But something else still bugs me,” Cohen went on slowly. The tall New Yorker looked down at his lap, deliberately not meeting her eyes — which was a sure sign that he was about to say something he was afraid might piss her off.

She sighed. “Go on, Luke. I won’t bite.”

Cohen forced a nervous half smile. “I understand what you’re saying about Martindale and how he wants someone like Farrell in the White House who’ll do things more his way.”

“Not to mention letting Scion and Sky Masters shove their snouts in a trough full of juicy, big-money Pentagon contracts,” she muttered.

“Yes, Madam President.” Distractedly, Cohen ran his hands through his disheveled hair. “But what I don’t get is why Martindale would do something so obvious.” He dropped his hands back into his lap. “I mean, why not use Scion’s capabilities for something slicker? Say, like sabotaging that B-21 prototype instead? Making sure our fancy new bomber crashed right in front of the TV cameras would have done more political damage to your campaign — without nearly as much fallout.”

Barbeau considered that. Jesus, she thought, Cohen is right. Something about this just didn’t fit. Martindale might be a sneaky, ruthless, corrupt son of a bitch, but he’d also always been a clever, calculating son of a bitch. Screwing around with the B-21’s avionics or even bribing its crew to fake an in-flight emergency would have been a lot easier and safer stunt for him to pull. The kind of pulverizing, direct, all-out assault that hammered Barksdale into smoldering ruins wasn’t his style.

In fact, it was more like something that swaggering, shoot-from-the-hip, militaristic cowboy Patrick McLanahan would have thought was brilliant. But McLanahan was dead…

She shivered suddenly, caught up in a memory that was three years old but that still had the power to give her nightmares. To persuade Gennadiy Gryzlov that the U.S. wasn’t covertly supporting Poland in its war with Russia, she’d ordered Army Rangers and Air Force special operations commandos to assault the Iron Wolf base. Their orders were to stop the mercenaries from carrying out a bombing raid on Russian missile bases near Kaliningrad.

But the assault failed. And then the lethal-looking combat robot piloted by McLanahan had looked straight into a camera carried by one of her captured soldiers… looked straight at her. “You are a traitor to your country, Barbeau,” the machine had growled in its menacing, electronically synthesized voice. “If we get out of this alive, I’ll make you pay. I promise.”

Barbeau had believed him. That was one of the reasons, besides Gryzlov’s threats that he would launch a wider war, that had prompted her to order American F-35s to shoot down every Iron Wolf plane that survived the attack on Kaliningrad. She’d been determined to make sure that Patrick McLanahan really was dead this time. It was the only way she could think of to stop him from fulfilling the terrifying promise he’d made. Her pilots had obeyed their orders — blowing the last two Iron Wolf XF-111 SuperVarks out of the sky.

No one had heard anything from the retired Air Force general since then.

Until now, maybe, she thought in growing horror. Could McLanahan somehow have survived… again? It seemed impossible. For all his skills, he had been a man, as mortal as any other human being. He wasn’t a machine. No, she thought desperately, Patrick McLanahan is dead. He had to be dead. Because otherwise, he’d be coming for her—

Involuntarily, Barbeau’s hands tightened on her chair’s armrests. Her face felt numb, as though it were carved from stone.

“Madam President?” Cohen said uncertainly. He looked worried.

She forced herself to let go of the chair. “I need you to get in touch with Ed Rauch right away,” she said. Her voice sounded strange in her own ears, as if it was coming from millions of miles away. “Tell him I want the NSA and the other agencies to reexamine every piece of intelligence that led them to conclude Patrick McLanahan was killed when his XF-111 went down over Poland three years ago.”

Her chief of staff stared back at her. “Do you think—?”

“I don’t know what to think!” Barbeau countered harshly. “But if there’s a chance… any chance at all… that psychotic bastard is still alive, I need to know about it!”

Perched high in the cab of his FXR Trucking — registered eighteen-wheeler, Kirill Aristov checked his side-view mirror. He could make out the unit’s two other big rigs stuck in the traffic jammed up behind him. They were all separated by at least ten to fifteen other vehicles, which made it less obvious that they were traveling in a convoy. Not that any of us are going much of anywhere right now, the former Spetsnaz captain thought irritably. A long line of cars and trucks bottlenecked this stretch of single-lane highway looping around Texarkana. They were stopped dead.

Up ahead, maybe a mile or so, he could see what was causing the holdup. Flashing red-and-blue lights showed where police, ambulance, and fire crews were working to clear a serious accident that had blocked the highway.

“Specter Lead to Checkmate One, what’s going on up there? Why are we stopped? Is there a mechanical problem with your vehicle?” Colonel Ruslan Baryshev asked suddenly through Aristov’s headphones. They’d rigged up an intercom between the truck’s cab and the trailer it was hauling — enabling communication with the pilots of the two KVM robots hidden aboard.

“We’re fine, Colonel,” Aristov assured the other man. “We’re just stuck in traffic. The local American authorities are clearing a wreck ahead of us. Once they’re finished, we’ll be moving again.”

“Are you sure that isn’t a security checkpoint set up by the American military or spy services to hunt for us?” Baryshev snapped. “This so-called accident could be a ruse.”

Aristov exchanged glances with Nikolai Dobrynin in the passenger seat. The other veteran Spetsnaz trooper rolled his eyes. The captain shrugged his own shoulders in a wordless reply. Their passengers were still jumpy. Baryshev and his KVM pilots seemed to be taking a long time to come down off the adrenaline high they’d experienced during their attack on the American Air Force base.

“We’re already more than one hundred and twenty kilometers from Barksdale, sir,” Aristov said patiently. “That’s well beyond the zone of any likely search. The Americans would have to deploy thousands of soldiers and police to cover all the possible roads and highways this far out. And they simply do not have that kind of manpower available to them.”

“Let us hope you are right, Aristov,” the colonel replied. “Stay alert. If you are wrong and there are American police or military units blocking our path, my machines will eliminate them.” And the intercom went dead.

Dobrynin shook his head. “Those guys are a little too kill-happy for my comfort, Captain. If it’s all the same to you, I’d rather make it to Dallas without having their robots burst out of those trailers and start shooting up the whole highway.”

“That makes two of us.” Aristov saw the traffic ahead of him starting to inch forward. He reached down to put the big rig in gear. “Let’s hope they calm down once we reach the warehouse and get them out of those metal suits.”

Gennadiy Gryzlov prowled back and forth across his office like a caged animal. From time to time, he paused to check the newscasts streaming across the screen of his smartphone. But never for very long. After the first deeply satisfying images of burning aircraft and dead Americans, no new information had emerged. Instead, journalists around the world were busy doing what they always did in times of crisis — replaying the same tired video clips, indulging in pointless speculation, and interviewing the usual groups of “experts,” none of whom could shed any useful light on events.

He was getting tired of waiting. In his view, patience was a virtue desirable in underlings, not for those with real power. A soft chime sounded from his phone. He stabbed the answer button icon. “Yes?”

“Mr. Kurakin has arrived, Mr. President,” his long-suffering private secretary, Ivan Ulanov, announced. “By your orders, I have not logged his arrival.”

“Good,” Gryzlov approved. Now that things were heating up, it was time to make sure there were no obvious connections between Russia’s head of state and Vladimir Kurakin’s “private” military company. “Send him in.”

He spun on his heel and sat down at his desk while Ulanov ushered the head of RKU into the office. A curt nod sent his secretary scurrying back to his post. He waited only long enough for the door to close before demanding, “Well?”

“Our attacks were completely successful,” Kurakin reported. It was clear that he was enormously relieved. From the moment Gryzlov set Stacy Anne Barbeau’s political rally at Barksdale Air Force Base as Shakh i Mat’s first target, he had been focused on the dangers involved in carrying out a military operation that could easily kill or wound America’s national leader — even if only by accident.

“Spare me the standard briefing boilerplate, Vladimir.” Gryzlov nodded the other man toward a chair. “I want solid numbers.”

“Yes, sir.” Kurakin pulled out his own smartphone. He opened up several files. “From satellite photos, my analysts estimate that fourteen of our Kh-35 missiles hit their assigned targets.”

“And the other two?”

“One detonated prematurely seconds before impact,” Kurakin said. “The other appears to have crashed in the swamps east of the air base, probably due to an engine or avionics failure of some kind.”

“So the Americans will find it?”

“Eventually,” Kurakin agreed. He shrugged his shoulders. “But even then, the wreckage shouldn’t lead their investigators anywhere.”

Gryzlov nodded. Besides Russia, at least eight other countries around the world used the same subsonic cruise missiles. Many of them were building their own versions of the Kh-35 under license or reverse-engineering their own designs. No one would be shocked by the possibility that some of them had filtered out onto the international arms black market. As an added precaution, the missile components shipped covertly to Annenkov and his men had been thoroughly “sanitized”—stripped of any identifying serial numbers. That would certainly arouse suspicion, but it would also delay any investigation.

“Has your 737 returned to its base?” Gryzlov asked.

“It landed in Utah an hour ago,” Kurakin confirmed. “Annenkov made his scheduled stop at Dallas/Fort Worth and then continued on as planned without any delay.” He smiled thinly. “In the circumstances, the local airport officials were only too glad to expedite the departure of as many aircraft as possible.”

“I can imagine,” Gryzlov said dryly. News of the attack had caused the American FAA to temporarily ground or reroute all passenger and cargo flights scheduled to pass anywhere within a couple of hundred miles of Barksdale. Naturally, the effects had rippled across the entire United States, spreading havoc as connecting flights were canceled or delayed. With eastbound passenger jets and air freighters stacking up at their gates and on their runways, Dallas/Fort Worth’s managers had no interest in holding up planes headed in other directions.

He leaned forward. “What about your ground units? What’s their status?”

“The trucks carrying Baryshev’s KVMs and Aristov’s covering force have reached our safe house in Dallas,” Kurakin continued. “Again, without incident.”

Like the sites Aristov’s teams had set up in several other places across the U.S., the Dallas secure site was a warehouse nominally owned by FXR Trucking. Most were located on the outskirts of cities and large towns — in busy industrial parks where no one would be surprised by trucks and other vehicles coming and going at all hours of the day and night. As far as FXR’s American corporate executives were concerned, these warehouses now belonged to yet another fledgling subsidiary funded by the company’s new owners. Employees who once worked in those warehouses had either been transferred to other facilities or laid off with generous severance packages.

“Very good,” Gryzlov said. “Now, how much damage did your war machines inflict?”

Kurakin smiled more broadly. “More than my planners’ most optimistic hopes. For once, the American media is not exaggerating. Colonel Baryshev’s robots destroyed every single military aircraft on the ground at Barksdale.”

“All of them?”

“Yes, Mr. President,” Kurakin said proudly. “Including Air Force One.”

Gryzlov felt a huge, answering smile of his own spread across his face. With one blow, he’d further ravaged the already weakened American strategic bomber force and wiped out an entire squadron of its most advanced stealth fighters. Best of all, there was no indication that Barbeau or her advisers had any idea that Russia was responsible for this attack.

To his surprise, the American president hadn’t even raised the alert status of her forces beyond DEFCON Three. In fact, there were no signs of any unusual activity by ground, air, or naval units deployed outside the continental United States. It was a very different story at military bases on U.S. soil. Satellite imagery and signals intercepts all showed that they were on high alert, with fighters and early-warning aircraft aloft on patrol. Their combat squadrons and other air units were being dispersed to alternate fields. Army units had been deployed to nearby military bases and high-value government buildings, and reserve and National Guard units had been activated.

The picture those facts painted was clear. The Americans did not know they had been attacked by a foreign power. They were taking purely defensive measures, not preparing to conduct a retaliatory strike against an identified aggressor. Which meant that Gryzlov’s plan, in all its cunning permutations, was unfolding just as he had intended.

“Do you have any idea of how many casualties you caused?” Gryzlov asked.

“No precise numbers,” Kurakin said. He shrugged. “I don’t think even the Americans have an exact count yet. But they were substantial. My best guess would be that we killed or badly wounded several hundred of the enemy, including many of their best pilots.”

“Molodets! Well done,” Gryzlov told Kurakin, openly delighted. For years, the Americans and their hirelings had battered Russia and its allies, often without paying any significant price. Exacting a measure of revenge for those years of pain and humiliation was incredibly satisfying. Knowing that this was only the beginning was even better. “I’d have you convey my personal congratulations directly to RKU’s troops and pilots, Vladimir.” He grinned. “Except, of course, that might imply I have some knowledge of your criminal and wholly unauthorized actions.”

“I can’t imagine what you’re referring to, Mr. President,” Kurakin agreed with an answering smile of his own. “After all, I was never here.”

Gryzlov nodded approvingly. “Of course not.” His eyes hardened. “So, when do you plan to strike your next target?”

“My forces can be ready to strike again within twenty-four hours,” Kurakin promised.

The Russian president held up a hand. “Not so fast,” he said with a sly smile. “Pospeshish’—lyudéy nasmeshish’,” he continued, quoting an old proverb. “‘If you hurry, you’ll just make others laugh.’ Give the Americans a little time to work themselves into a frenzy, eh? Let them sit and wonder and fret about what’s going on while they exhaust their pilots and policemen with fruitless searches and patrols. Then, once they begin to relax, that will be the time to hit them hard again.”