The Moscow Offensive

Twenty-One

“While the White House will not confirm it, informed sources close to the president tell CNN that she is currently aboard one of the nation’s airborne command centers — and that she is directly coordinating the federal government’s response to this vicious terrorist attack against the United States. Her likely opponent in the fall, Governor Farrell, remains huddled in his mansion, meeting with political advisers—”

With a snort, John Dalton Farrell turned off the television in his book-lined office. He turned to the group of men and women gathered around the antique oak ranch table set in the middle of the modest-sized room. “Well, there you have it, folks.” He gave them a lopsided grin. “Apparently, we’re the ones cowering in a corner, while Stacy Anne Barbeau heroically leads the fight… from inside a heavily guarded airplane flying around at forty thousand feet.”

“Jesus,” one of them murmured. “Those bastards in the media aren’t even pretending to be unbiased anymore. That so-called news report might as well be a full-on Barbeau campaign commercial.”

Farrell shrugged. “No one ever said this would be easy, did they?” Seeing their glum faces, he deliberately struck a dramatic pose. “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!”

His senior campaign staffers groaned. Sure, their boss’s love for occasionally quoting old movies like Animal House was endearing. But they couldn’t help worrying that a hostile press would hear about him joking like this and use what he said, out of context, to paint him as an uneducated moron.

Farrell relented. “Okay, so the press hates my guts and worships the ground Stacy Anne treads on. Well, we knew that going in. Nothing’s changed, except that now we need to figure out exactly what I’m going to say about this terrorist attack on Barksdale Air Force Base and, it sure looks like, against the president herself.”

They nodded. The boilerplate condemnation the campaign had released earlier was good enough as far it went, but they needed something more concrete. Except for his criticisms of Barbeau’s weakness toward the Russians and the crony defense contracts she doled out to big contributors, most of the governor’s focus had been on domestic policy. Today’s horrific assault on a major American military installation was guaranteed to shift public attention to national security and defense policy — which was, traditionally, a boon for any Oval Office incumbent.

“You think they were really trying to kill her?” Sara Patel asked skeptically. The University of Chicago — educated daughter of Indian immigrants, she was Farrell’s top aide for trade policy.

“You saw the videos,” he said. “There were one heck of a lot of bullets and missiles flying around out there at Barksdale. If whoever hit us there wasn’t really trying to kill President Barbeau, they sure as shit made it look that way.”

Slowly, she nodded.

“Well, crap, Governor, if these terrorists were actually gunning for her, it’s too bad they missed,” Michael Dowell said with a cynical laugh. Dowell, short and wiry with the build and aggressive attitude of a welterweight boxer, was an acknowledged expert on banking regulation and small-business formation. “It would have saved us a few hundred million in projected campaign spending.”

He fell abruptly silent when Farrell turned an icy glare on him. “Stacy Anne Barbeau is still our president and this nation’s commander in chief, Mike,” the powerfully built Texan said coldly. “You may not like it. Hell, I don’t like it. Which is why I plan to beat her like a dirty rug come November. But in the meantime, everyone in this room will show the proper respect due her office. Is that understood?”

Dowell stared at the table for a moment and then quietly agreed. “Yes, Governor.”

“Good,” Farrell growled. He looked around the crowded room. “And we will make damn sure we don’t fall into the trap of siding, even rhetorically, with the assholes who’ve just killed and wounded so many of America’s brave soldiers and airmen. Is that clear enough for y’all?”

They nodded quickly, with murmured, embarrassed-sounding assents.

For a moment longer, Farrell stared them down. These were good people, he knew. Smart people. But like a lot of smart people, sometimes they lost sight of the forest for the trees. For all her many faults and manifest failings, Stacy Anne Barbeau was still a fellow American. Yes, he was in this campaign to win, but he wasn’t in it to lose his soul along the way.

Suddenly his smartphone started playing music, indicating that he was receiving an incoming call. He stared down at it in surprise. Not only had he set the phone to vibrate, but that snippet of Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid was not the ringtone he had set. To his wife’s occasional dismay, he was more of a country-and-western fan. Which meant someone had hacked the device. In and of itself, that wasn’t a crisis. Unlike a lot of people, Farrell used his smartphone sparingly, and never for anything seriously confidential. His aides sometimes joked that if their boss had his way, he’d still be transacting official business by telegram and mounted courier.

For a brief moment, he considered handing the problem off to his security people, but then his natural curiosity got the better of him. Whoever was responsible had gone to a lot of time and trouble to set this up. Why not find out who?

Farrell looked up at his advisers with an apologetic look. “If y’all don’t mind, I think I need to take this in private. Let’s take a short break and come back at this in ten minutes.”

Once they’d filed out clutching their array of briefing books and personal laptops, he swiped a callused finger across the smartphone’s screen to accept this mysterious call. But instead of connecting, his swipe activated software hidden deep inside its operating system. Rows of random-seeming numbers and symbols flowed across the screen and then vanished. LEVEL FIVE ENCRYPTION PROGRAM ACTIVE, LINK FULLY SECURE appeared in their place — followed immediately by the live video picture of a man with longish gray hair and a neatly trimmed gray beard. He looked back from the screen with a hint of amusement.

Farrell raised an eyebrow. “And here I’d thought your reputation for pulling technological rabbits out of the hat was somewhat exaggerated, Mr. President. I guess I was wrong about that.”

“I apologize for this unexpected intrusion, Governor,” Martindale said, though without sounding very sorry. “But since President Barbeau seems determined to make the same foolish mistakes over and over again, I need to brief you on what Piotr Wilk and I believe is actually happening.”

Two hundred and seventy nautical miles and thirty-six minutes after crossing into U.S. airspace roughly halfway between El Paso and Nogales, the XCV-62 Ranger zoomed low over high alpine forests, sharp-edged canyons, and cliffs. Against a night sky speckled with thousands of stars and the softly glowing band of the Milky Way, the Iron Wolf stealth aircraft was nothing more than a dark shadow rippling across a pitch-black landscape empty of any man-made light.

Brad McLanahan pulled his stick gently to the left, banking to follow the glowing navigation cues on his HUD. A jagged pillar of rock slid past outside the right side of the cockpit and then vanished astern. Without his input, the XCV-62 pitched up slightly, streaked over a low rise, and then descended again before leveling off just two hundred feet above the ground. They were relying on the Ranger’s digital terrain-following system to keep them safe even at 450 knots. Using detailed digitized maps stored in the aircraft’s computers and repeated short bursts from its radar altimeter, the DTF system allowed feats of long-distance, low-altitude flying that would be almost impossible for any unaided human pilot.

“AN/APY-2 Pulse-Doppler radar still active. Bearing now four o’clock. Estimated range is one hundred and fifty miles,” their computer reported. “Detection probability at this altitude remains virtually nil.”

In the Ranger’s right-hand seat, Major Nadia Rozek leaned forward. She checked a menu on her threat-warning display, watching as the computer compared the signature of the radar emissions it was picking up against its database. “That is the same E-3 Sentry we saw earlier,” she told him.

Brad nodded tightly, keeping his eyes on his HUD. “Yeah, they must be circling over Kirtland AFB outside of Albuquerque. There’s a huge underground nuclear weapons storage complex on the base. Nobody there wants to get blindsided by another cruise-missile attack.”

Even before the XCV-62 crossed the U.S. border from Mexico, they’d started picking up the emissions of several E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft deployed to cover the Air Force bases in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Each of the modified Boeing 707s had a thirty-foot diameter rotating radar dome mounted atop its fuselage. Their radars could scan huge volumes of airspace — spotting nonstealth targets out as far as two-hundred-plus miles. And where those radar warning planes were, he knew pairs of F-16 and F-15 fighters were bound to be orbiting also — ready to intercept any unidentified aircraft the Sentries detected.

Slipping through this airborne web without setting off alarms meant flying an intricately plotted course at extremely low altitude, using the rugged terrain so prevalent in the American southwest to mask their passage wherever possible. So far they’d been fortunate. The Air Force had deployed its limited number of AWACS aircraft pretty much as Brad had predicted. There were gaps in effective radar coverage they could exploit.

Following the cues on his HUD, he banked left again, harder this time. With his left hand, he pushed the throttles forward a scooch, adding power to the engines to keep his airspeed up through this tighter turn. Then he leveled out again and reduced power, decreasing their thermal signature.

They were flying northwest now, headed directly into the badlands of Utah’s Grand Staircase — Escalante National Monument. Once the Ranger broke free of that labyrinth of canyons, cliffs, and soaring buttes and mesas, they should have a straight shot to Battle Mountain in northern Nevada.

Three hundred fifty nautical miles farther on, the Iron Wolf stealth transport swooped low over a jagged ridge and dropped back down into a wide, lifeless valley. Brad peered through his HUD. More high ground spread across the horizon. Seen through their forward-looking night-vision cameras, those steep, rocky slopes took on a green-hued glow. Nevada was the most mountainous state in the Union, with over a hundred and fifty named ranges, and thirty separate peaks that soared more than eleven thousand feet into the air.

He blinked away a droplet of sweat. His flight suit was soaked. Even with all of their advanced avionic and navigation systems, this prolonged nap-of-the-earth flight was imposing a serious strain on both his mind and his body.

“Not much longer now, Brad,” Nadia said quietly, offering him some encouragement.

He forced a tired grin.

“Caution, S-band multifunction phased array radar detected at ten o’clock. Range approximately forty miles,” the Ranger’s computer reported. “Evaluated as Sky Masters ARGUS-Five. Detection probability low, but rising.”

That was the advanced “civilian-grade” radar sited at McLanahan Industrial Airport. One of Jon Masters’s last designs, it was almost as capable as some of the U.S. military’s top-end radar systems… and at a fraction of the cost.

“Nice to see that our friends are awake,” Brad muttered.

“Can you blame them?” Nadia said. “By now, Dr. Noble and the others at Sky Masters must know the Russians have their own combat robots. They are wise to take precautions against unexpected and unwelcome visitors.”

He shook his head. “No, I can’t blame them. But the fact they’ve got that big-ass radar powered up this late is going to make things a little trickier.”

“Perhaps Martindale should have warned them we were coming.”

“Too risky,” Brad countered. “It’s unlikely that the feds or the Russians have penetrated Sky Masters communications, but if either of them has…” He let the thought trail off.

Nadia sighed. “It would be a very bad day for us.”

“Yep. So the name of the game tonight is still How Not to Be Seen.” He thought for a moment. “Bring up NavPlan Two.”

“Understood. Going to NavPlan Two.” Nadia pulled up her navigation display. Deftly, she entered commands instructing their computer to switch to one of the several alternate flight plans Brad had plotted before leaving Poland.

Their cues on his HUD shifted immediately. Brad tugged the stick to the right, pulling the Ranger into a tight turn toward the north. This new course would take them around the outer edge of that Argus-Five radar’s detection envelope. Once they put the concealing mass of the Sheep Creek Range between them and the Sky Masters — operated airport, they could safely swing back south. Land-based radars could not see “through” higher ground.

“New S-band Doppler radar detected at eleven o’clock,” the computer said suddenly. “Signal strength increasing.”

That was the kicker, Brad knew. Evading the Sky Masters Argus-Five meant flying almost straight into the zone of another radar, this one sited high up in the Sheep Creek Range’s jumble of high plateaus, rounded rises, and boulder-strewn washes. The good news was that this new radar was one of the U.S. Weather Service’s NEXRAD stations. And that gave them a chance to spoof it without being noticed.

“Activate SPEAR,” he told Nadia. “Target that S-band Doppler weather radar.”

Her fingers danced across one of her MFDs, bringing their ALQ-293 Self-Protection Electronically Agile Reaction system online. SPEAR transmitted carefully tailored signals on the same frequencies used by radars hunting for their XCV-62. By altering the timing of pulses returned to a potentially hostile radar, it could trick that radar into thinking the Ranger was somewhere else in the sky… or even render it effectively invisible. “SPEAR is engaged,” she said. “Matching frequencies.”

Crossing his fingers mentally, Brad held his course north. Since the primary mission of the WSR-88D radars in the NEXRAD network was weather tracking, they were highly automated. Plus, any meteorologist who was up so late keeping tabs on this particular radar should be paying more attention to cold fronts, thunderstorms, and the like than to a single tiny blip that quickly faded off his or her screen.

“NEXRAD radar now at ten o’clock. Range thirty miles.”

Nice theory, McLanahan, Brad thought, trying not to hold his breath. Now to see if it matched reality. They were almost broadside to that radar now, without any terrain between them high enough to provide cover. If they were going to get pinged, this was the time. Seconds passed, each seeming longer than the last while the Ranger streaked on, flying low over the arid Nevada desert.

“No detection,” Nadia said finally with mingled relief and satisfaction. “SPEAR has control over that radar. It can’t see us!”

“Copy that.” Brad tweaked his stick again, following the steering cues on his HUD as they slid left a few degrees and then kept moving. “Starting our final turn toward the LZ.”

The XCV-62 banked slightly, starting a long, curving turn that would bring them back around to the southwest — coming in along the spine of the Sheep Creek Range. The aircraft’s nose pitched up, climbing to stay above the fast-approaching high ground. Brad started throttling back, slowly shedding airspeed.

Beside him, Nadia had her eyes fixed on a computer-generated map. “We are three minutes out from the landing zone,” she told him.

“No visual yet,” Brad said tightly. They were roughly fourteen nautical miles out from the straight stretch of little-used dirt road he’d picked out earlier from satellite imagery as a possible place to land. It was still hidden in among the rugged hills and gullies ahead of them. “DTF disengaged,” he said, toggling a control on his stick that turned off the Ranger’s terrain-following system. He pulled back slightly, gaining more altitude to take a look at their planned LZ. Their airspeed dropped to three hundred knots.

Abruptly, a cursor blinked into existence on his HUD. “There it is.”

“Ninety seconds out.” Nadia slaved one of her MFDs to their forward-looking passive sensors and zoomed in her view. “The LZ appears clear. I am not picking up any unidentified thermal contacts.”

Brad nodded. Except for occasional hikers, no one spent much time this high up in the Sheep Creek Range. Through his HUD, he could see the dirt road rolling away into the distance. It was a thin, bright green line against the darker green of the surrounding plateau. Using another control on his stick, he selected a touch-down point. Instantly, the Ranger’s navigation system updated his steering cues. “We’re go for landing.”

“Sixty seconds out.” Nadia tapped a key, alerting their passengers in the troop compartment that they were making their final approach.

Brad entered a quick command on one of his own MFDs. “Configuring for a short-field rough landing.” Then he throttled back some more. The Iron Wolf aircraft slid lower.

The muffled roar from the Ranger’s four turbofan engines diminished fast. As their airspeed dropped, hydraulics whined shrilly. Computer-directed control surfaces opened along the trailing edge of the wing, providing more lift. The XCV-62’s nose gear and twin wing-mounted bogies swung down and locked in position.

The dirt road, with a glowing line drawn across it to mark Brad’s desired touch-down point, loomed ahead through the windscreen, growing larger quickly as they descended. They came in low over the road, thundering along just feet above the ground. His left hand hovered over the throttles.

One hundred yards. Fifty yards. Twenty-five yards. The computer-drawn touch-down marker was suddenly a fiery green blaze across his whole HUD.

“Landing… now,” he said decisively. With a smooth motion, he chopped the throttles back almost all the way.

The Iron Wolf stealth transport dropped out of the sky. It touched down with a sharp jolt — shaking and rattling hard as it bounded down the rutted dirt road. Plumes of dust and sand kicked loose by its passage drifted away on a light breeze. Quickly, Brad reversed thrust, gradually bringing them to a full stop about a thousand feet from where the Ranger’s landing gear first kissed the earth.

For a moment, he sat still, breathing hard. Then he grinned over at Nadia. “Well, check off one more successful landing in this crate. Or, depending on how you look at it, one more narrowly avoided crash.”

She made a show of peering out both sides of the cockpit and then looked back at him with a crooked smile of her own. “Since the aircraft does seem to be in one piece, I suppose your more optimistic appraisal is warranted.” She turned more serious. “Now what?”

“Now we drop the ramp and have Captain Schofield and his merry band of scouts guide us to a somewhat less conspicuous position a little off this road. Before the sun comes up, we need to be out of sight, especially from the air.”

Thirty minutes later, the Ranger was parked near the opening of a draw lined with sagebrush just east of the dirt road they’d used as an improvised landing strip. Schofield and one of his men were draping Scion-designed camouflage netting across the aircraft to shield it from visual, thermal, or radar detection. The rest were hard at work smoothing out the tracks left by the aircraft’s gear when it taxied into this hiding place.

Inside the cockpit, Nadia opened a com window on her display and typed in a short message reporting their safe arrival. Their computer automatically encrypted, compressed, and transmitted her message via satellite.

An icon flashed within seconds, signaling an acknowledgment and urgent message. “It’s from Martindale,” she said to Brad and Whack Macomber. Her brow furrowed as she read through the decoded message. “He urges us to exercise extreme caution. We are to avoid detection by U.S. authorities at all costs.” With an exasperated sigh, she glanced up at the two Americans. “Apparently your President Barbeau is more than half convinced that we are the ones responsible for destroying your country’s bomber base.”

“This just gets better and better,” Macomber growled. “How the fuck are we supposed to smack down a raid on Sky Masters without being spotted? I don’t care how nifty-keen these Mod IV CIDs are. All the fricking camo systems in the world won’t hide a rail-gun shot or autocannon fire.”

“Oh, once that happens, we won’t have to hide any longer, Colonel,” Nadia said with forced good cheer. “It’s simple. When the Russians do attack, we kill them. Then we show their wrecked machines and mangled corpses to your government.” She shrugged. “That should be proof enough, even for a shortsighted cretin like your president. And then we can all go home without all this sneaking around.” That drew a reluctant, rare laugh from Macomber.

Brad joined in, glad that Nadia could still shake Whack out of his occasional fits of gloom. Inwardly, though, he couldn’t shake a nagging worry of his own. What had appeared an obvious course of action back in Poland seemed a lot less obvious now that they were here on the ground deep inside the States.

Sure, realistically, he and the others had no way to hunt down the covert forces Gennadiy Gryzlov was using to attack the U.S. There were too many possible hiding places and America was just too big a country. All of which made stationing their CIDs on overwatch near Battle Mountain the only rational play. Viewed logically, Sky Masters had to be a high-priority target for the Russians. Now that Moscow had its own combat robots, the high-tech weapons and other equipment developed by Sky Masters were sure to be the key to survival for Poland, its allies, and the United States itself.

They were essentially employing the same tactics used by big-game hunters when setting out to bag a tiger in the trackless jungle. Instead of beating around futilely in the bush, the idea was to stake out a live goat as bait… and then lie in wait until the hungry big cat came prowling into your rifle sights. Well, Sky Masters was their bait.

But what if the tiger had other prey in mind?

That was the worry Brad couldn’t shake. What if he’d misread Gryzlov’s plans? Then what?