The Moscow Offensive

Twenty-Two

Unhurriedly, Kirill Aristov sauntered along the withered grass strip lining the north side of Irving Avenue. His hands were buried in his pockets. He came to the corner of a small side street and paused, looking around in all directions as if making sure it was safe to cross. Under the crumpled brim of an oil-stained baseball cap, his eyes were watchful. A few cars and trucks drove past in both directions along the wide, six-lane avenue, but no one seemed to be paying any real attention to him.

His lips thinned. After all, why should they? This late at night, the only people wandering out on the streets were either drunk or crazy or homeless, or most likely all three in combination.

Satisfied that he was clear, Aristov strolled on up the narrower side street. Halfway down the block, he came to a padlocked chain-link gate. A rusting sign wired to the gate warned passersby that this was an FXR Trucking facility and that trespassers would be prosecuted. “Or right now, quite probably shot and killed,” he murmured to himself.

He dug a key out of his jeans pocket, unlocked the gate, pulled it open just far enough to squeeze through, and then relocked the gate behind him. With only three tractor-trailers backed up against a single, slab-sided steel warehouse, the lot looked almost empty — especially when compared to those of the dozen other much-busier trucking companies and freight lines operating out of this run-down industrial neighborhood.

Over time, Aristov supposed this lack of activity might strike FXR’s rivals as odd. Fortunately, he and his men, along with Baryshev’s war robots, would be gone long before anyone got too curious. After one last slow look around to make sure no one was watching, he crossed the parking lot to the warehouse, rapped twice on a door, and then went straight in.

With a curt nod, Pavel Larionov slid his pistol back out of sight. The former Spetsnaz sergeant sat back down behind a solid metal desk that faced the door. A bank of TV monitors showed grainy images captured by low-light security cameras set up at various points outside the warehouse. “Any trouble?” he asked.

“None,” Aristov said. He’d gone out earlier to walk around the neighboring area, looking for any signs that they were drawing unwelcome attention — either from the Dallas police or from America’s domestic spy agency, the FBI. He’d figured that it would be a lot harder to hide a law enforcement surveillance operation now that things were quieting down outside. And he’d been right. The panel vans and unmarked cars favored by the police and the FBI would have stood out like lions among alley cats on those nearly empty streets. They were still safely hidden here.

Nikolai Dobrynin met him just inside the main warehouse area. “We’ve received a new warning order from Moscow. General Kurakin wants us to hit our next scheduled target in forty-eight hours.”

Aristov looked past him to where several men stood grouped around a folding card table. The KVM pilots were studying maps while their leader, Colonel Baryshev, ran through yet another proposed attack plan. “Do they know about this additional delay?”

Dobrynin nodded.

Aristov frowned. Baryshev and his pilots should be grabbing some sack time right now. What were they doing awake this late — especially after learning they wouldn’t be going into action for two more nights? If any of them had slept for more than a couple of hours after reaching this secure site, he’d missed it. Quietly, he said as much to Dobrynin.

“I’ve asked about that. Baryshev and his men claim they don’t need much sleep,” the other man said carefully. “Apparently, they’re taking it in turns to spend some time plugged into those war robots of theirs.”

“For what purpose?”

Dobrynin lowered his voice. “Those machines include advanced medical diagnostics and health maintenance systems. While they’re hooked up, these guys filter out the fatigue toxins from their bloodstreams. Plus, they can juice up on different hormones and neurotransmitters.”

“So Baryshev and the rest of his KVM pilots are screwing around with their brain and body chemistry in order to go without sleep?” Aristov frowned. “Does that sound like a good idea to you?”

The other man shrugged. “In combat, maybe. But outside of an emergency situation? Hell no.” He looked at his team leader with a worried expression. “Should we report this to Moscow?”

“Without more evidence this behavior is causing a problem?” Aristov said slowly. Reluctantly, he shook his head. “No. The colonel and his men have been trained on these war robots. We haven’t. They must know what they’re doing.”

“I hope so.” Dobrynin sounded unconvinced.

Aristov clapped him gently on the shoulder. “That makes two of us, Nikolai.” His eyes hardened. “Which is why we’re going to keep a very close eye on them from now on. Just to make sure.”

Rubbing at bleary eyes that felt like they’d been sandpapered, Hunter “Boomer” Noble slid behind the wheel of his Lincoln luxury sedan, hit its push-button ignition, and then bit down on a ferocious yawn. Do not start that or you’ll never stop, he thought tiredly. Instead, he ordered, “Open the pod-bay doors, Hal.”

The integrated voice-command system he’d set up to control the lights, air-conditioning, and other electronics in the house he was renting instantly obeyed. With a low rumble, the garage door rolled up — revealing a row of large, two-story homes across the street. With the sun still below the eastern horizon, lights showed behind only a few windows.

Carefully, Boomer backed out of the garage, down his driveway, and out onto the empty street. No other cars were in sight. Naturally. His neighbors were mostly up-and-coming executives working for some of the other tech companies lured to Battle Mountain by Sky Masters’ presence and subcontracts. But not even the eagerest beaver among them made a habit of heading to the office at this ungodly hour. That was a “pleasure” reserved for top-level Sky Masters executives and engineers since the bolt-from-the-blue sneak attack on Barksdale Air Force Base.

He put the Lincoln in gear and drove off. Behind him, his garage door rolled back down and locked automatically.

Boomer rolled through the nearest stop sign and took a left onto a bigger street that would take him to Interstate 80. Suddenly his headlights picked out a man wearing jeans, hiking boots, and a hooded maroon MIT sweatshirt standing right in the middle of the road — apparently trying to thumb a ride.

“Oh, man, you have got to be kidding me,” he snarled under his breath. Now they were getting guys to bum rides in his suburban neighborhood, and practically in the middle of the night? This was the kind of crap that people moved out of places like Las Vegas or San Francisco to escape. What was next? Upscale panhandlers trying to rustle spare change for a round of golf at the local public course?

Still grousing out loud to himself, Boomer started to pull around the would-be hitchhiker. Then he saw the crude, hand-lettered sign the other man held up. It read, will work for food for my wolf.

“Ah, hell,” he muttered, with almost resigned incredulity. “And here I thought today would be boring.” Scowling, he jammed on his brakes, bringing the big Lincoln to a full stop next to the hitchhiker. Silent now, he waited while the other man popped open the passenger door, climbed in, and flipped back the hood of his sweatshirt.

“Well, this is just great,” Boomer said with a wry smile. “So Bradley James McLanahan has come to call. With all the hell breaking loose in the world, I should have figured you’d be dropping by to visit your old pal Hunter Noble and his Sky Masters hangar full of super-duper, high-tech wonder planes.”

“Nice to see you, too,” Brad replied with a lopsided grin. “Hope I didn’t startle you too much.” He shrugged. “I’d have picked a less cloak-and-dagger way to get in touch, but I’m not supposed to be in the States at all, let alone here in Battle Mountain.”

Boomer snorted. “No kidding. If there’s anyone else in the world who’s more non grata as a persona, with both the feds and the Russians, than you and your Iron Wolf compadres, I’d be very surprised.” He raised an eyebrow. “Which makes me curious as to just how far you’re planning to ride with me this morning.”

“All the way to your office,” Brad said simply. “I need to brief you on some developments and I’d rather not do it outside a secure environment.”

“Yeah, see, there’s the problem,” Boomer told him with a frown. “Our corporate security guys have gotten a lot twitchier since someone kicked the crap out of Barksdale. They aren’t exactly going to let you come waltzing through the gate, even on my say-so.”

In response, the younger man unzipped his sweatshirt. A Sky Masters ID card was clipped to his shirt pocket. Made out in the name of someone named Michael Kelly, it showed a recent photo of Brad wearing a coat and tie and it looked completely genuine. Not only that, but the ID indicated that he was a “special projects engineer” for Sky Masters’ aerospace unit — the same outfit headed up by one Dr. Hunter Noble, Ph.D.

Boomer stared at it for a long second. Then he shook his head in disgust. “Don’t tell me… that shiny new ID of yours is already planted in our personnel system, too, right?”

“Yep.”

Boomer let out a breath. “How the hell did Martindale—?” Then he stopped himself and just held up a hand, with a deep, frustrated sigh. “Never mind, I really do not want to know.”

He grimaced. Every time the former U.S. president and current head of Scion pulled one of these spooky stunts, Sky Masters security people scrambled around like maniacs trying to plug whatever gaps he’d found in their systems. Martindale was one of the company’s best customers, despite Stacy Anne Barbeau’s efforts to close off their sales to him, so this was more like a game than anything more serious. But it was still a game Boomer was getting tired of losing.

“Mind telling me what you’re up to?” he asked finally.

“Right now?” Brad offered him a seriously shit-eating grin. “I’m going to grab a little shut-eye on the way into work. I put in a couple of incredibly long days just getting here, you know.” With that, he reclined the Lincoln’s comfortable leather passenger seat and closed his eyes.

Idly contemplating whether his neighbors would really mind so much finding a corpse sprawled across one of their nice, neat streets when they woke up, Boomer took his foot off the brake and drove on toward Sky Masters.

Brad looked around Boomer’s cluttered office while the other man sat down and fired up his office computer. Stacks of aircraft manuals, binders crammed full of engine specifications and test results, and printouts of other scientific and engineering data occupied almost every flat surface. Detailed models of every aircraft and spacecraft Hunter Noble had ever flown lined the shelves behind him.

He nodded at one of them,a l:64th-scale version of the sleek, single-stage-to-orbit S-19 Midnight spaceplane. It was a cutaway model, showing the S-19’s revolutionary triple-hybrid engines, which could transform from air-breathing supersonic turbofan engines to hypersonic ramjets to pure rocket engines. “Getting any flight time these days?”

Boomer looked up from his computer and followed Brad’s gesture. “On the S-19s?” With a sour look, he shook his head. “Zero. Zip. Nada. All of our spaceplanes are mothballed for now. Stacy Anne Barbeau is allergic to orbital operations, especially by anything with the Sky Masters logo on the side.”

“What’s her excuse? Too expensive?” Brad asked.

“Nope, it’s not that,” Boomer replied. “She’s all about spending taxpayer money… but only as long as the money stays well inside the earth’s atmosphere.”

“And ends up in the pockets of contractors who back her politically?” Brad guessed.

Boomer snorted. “I hate to hear someone so young sounding so cynical.”

“Especially when I’m right?”

“Well, yeah,” Boomer admitted. He rocked back in his chair. “But I bet you didn’t come all this way to Nevada just to talk politics.” His eyes narrowed. “And I really hope you weren’t planning to acquire another one of the X-planes we’ve got stashed out in Hangar Five. Because I can tell you that’s a total nonstarter, in the current circumstances.”

Brad shook his head, hiding a grin. Though he would never probably confess it openly, it was pretty clear that Boomer hated the idea of letting any of the highly advanced prototypes stored here at Battle Mountain slip through his fingers. Most of them were the products of the late Jon Masters’ irreplaceable genius. Every one of them was literally one of a kind. They incorporated revolutionary technologies and design concepts that might someday be applied to new aviation projects. Watching any of those experimental aircraft fly off into danger with the Iron Wolf Squadron or some other Scion covert outfit must be like seeing one of your kids ride a tricycle out into traffic.

“Your X-planes are safe from my nefarious clutches… this time,” Brad promised, holding up three fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

“Okay, so why am I not feeling hugely relieved to hear that?” Boomer asked quietly. He leaned forward again. “Look, if you’re not here to snag a new plane, why the hell are you here?”

Brad lowered his hand. The other man was right. It was past time to get serious. “I’ve got a team of three CIDs parked up in the hills just north of here,” he said flatly. “Because we think the Russians are likely to hit Sky Masters next.” Quickly, he outlined his reasoning.

When he was done, Boomer sighed. “Yeah, that all makes sense. I wish it didn’t.” He forced a tired smile. “But other people around here see the situation the same way you do. I know the possibility of a Russian attack against us has been on my mind ever since I saw the pictures out of Barksdale. And it sure explains a lot of the weird shit we’ve been doing over the past couple of days.”

“Like what?”

“Richter’s had all of us — all of his top people — working like dogs to secretly transfer all of our CID-related materials, components, and software to hidden storage facilities off-site,” Boomer explained. “By the time we’re finished, which should be in the next couple of days, you could walk in here and never realize that Sky Masters had anything to do with those machines.”

Brad felt himself relax slightly. Learning that Jason Richter, Sky Masters’ chief executive officer, was on the ball was a relief. Even though the Russians already had their own combat robots, it was a safe bet that their war machines were not quite as advanced as the Cybernetic Infantry Devices built and continually upgraded by Richter and his cybernetic engineers. But given Russia’s enormous resources, it was also probable that Gryzlov’s robot force now had numerical superiority over the Iron Wolf Squadron. Which meant that allowing the Russians to attain technological parity using information they captured at Battle Mountain would be catastrophic.

Unfortunately, though, CID technology was only the tip of the iceberg.

“What about everything else?” he asked. “All of your X-planes, UAVs, advanced weapons, and sensors. Are you dispersing them, too?”

Boomer shook his head gloomily. “No can do,” he said. “The feds have their guys keeping close tabs on the airport. And more FBI types are arriving all the time. It’s getting so crowded that the trench-coat-and-fedora boys are practically tripping over each other outside our main gate. Right now, I can’t fly anything bigger than a quadcopter toy without setting off alarms from here to Washington, D.C.”

Brad thought about that. “Are you sure all of these new arrivals are FBI agents?” he asked. If Gryzlov was planning a raid on Sky Masters soon, he was bound to have a recon team deployed to scout the company’s Battle Mountain facilities.

“Hell no,” Boomer said, shaking his head. “We’ve got spies hanging off us like fleas on a mangy old dog. Exactly who works for whom is anyone’s guess.” He looked hard at Brad. “Which kind of raises the question of how you’re proposing to set up a defensive perimeter to protect us without getting tagged yourselves.”

“That’s a definite problem,” Brad acknowledged. “The camouflage systems on our CIDs are fantastic, but we can’t run them for more than a few hours without draining our battery power. So with federal agents… and maybe Gryzlov’s people… crawling all over Battle Mountain, the best I can do is post my CIDs high up in the Sheep Creek Range. That way our sensors and computers will have a shot at spotting any incoming missile or ground attack.”

“And then what?”

“Then we’ll come running,” Brad said.

Boomer sighed. “No offense, kid, but I’m sensing a heck of a lot of ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’ and ‘hope so’s’ in this plan of yours.” He looked out his window. “How close do you figure you can post your robots without being detected?”

“About six miles away,” Brad said reluctantly.

“Which means it’ll take your CIDs at least ten minutes to get here if the balloon goes up,” Boomer pointed out grimly. “The problem being that it took less than ten minutes for the Russians to wipe Barksdale off the map.”

Brad nodded again, even more reluctantly this time. “Which is why it might be a smart idea to move your people away from Battle Mountain until this is over.”

“Because burned-out buildings can be replaced more easily than good scientists and engineers?” Boomer suggested. He shrugged his shoulders. “Helen Kaddiri, Richter, and I have already hashed that possibility out. And it’s not going to fly.”

“Why not?”

“Can you imagine what our brilliant president, Stacy Anne Barbeau, would think if she heard we were closing up shop here? Given her long-standing deep regard and admiration for Martindale, your dad, and Sky Masters, I mean?” Boomer asked dryly.

Brad winced. “She’d think you were guilty as hell and hoping to get out of Dodge ahead of the posse.”

“Exactly,” Boomer replied. “Which is why we’re just going to sit here going about our normal business like the good little boys and girls that we are.” His face was a lot darker than his tone.

Slowly, Brad nodded in agreement. The prospect of using friends as bait for Gryzlov’s mercenaries was looking more unpalatable than ever. No matter how quickly his Iron Wolf team reacted, a lot of good people were likely to die.