The Moscow Offensive

Twenty-Eight

The XCV-62 Ranger cleared the crest of a steep forested ridge with a couple of hundred feet to spare and dove down the other side, almost skimming the treetops at just over two hundred knots. Another ridge soared black against the night sky just half a mile away. Immediately the navigation cues on Brad McLanahan’s HUD spiked right.

He banked sharply, rolling to follow the cues, and then leveled out. The Iron Wolf aircraft arrowed northeast down a narrow valley between the two higher elevations, following the trace of a gravel road. Ahead, the road dropped toward a dry streambed marked “Fool Creek” on their maps.

“We’re less than two minutes out,” Nadia said from her copilot’s position. She had her eyes firmly fixed on her navigation display. “We have a green light from the Scion ground crew.”

“Copy that,” Brad said tightly. “Hang tight.” He leaned forward and tapped a key that activated preset landing commands he’d entered earlier. Hydraulics whined as the Ranger configured itself for another very short, rough-field landing. Control surfaces opened to their maximum extent, providing extra lift they sorely needed. This high up in the Wyoming mountains, the air was already pretty thin. “Gear coming down.”

There were a series of muffled thumps below the cockpit. A slowly blinking icon on his HUD turned solid green. Their ride got bumpier right away as drag increased. “Gear down and locked.”

They crossed the dry streambed and climbed again, following the ground as it rose toward the even-steeper wooded slopes of Dry Fork East. Brad fed in a little more power to keep up his airspeed.

Not far ahead, he saw a smaller dirt road branch off to the northwest. It paralleled another winding stream, this one full of water flowing downhill toward a distant junction with a larger river. Its name appeared as a small tag on his HUD. “Nice,” he muttered ironically. “What a great omen.”

He banked left, turning to follow this new road. On their right, Dry Fork East towered another couple of thousand feet above them — a dark mass studded with fir and spruce trees and large bare patches of loose weathered scree. The ground below the ridge was mostly open, a mixture of high alpine grassland and sagebrush.

“An omen? Why?” Nadia asked, sounding puzzled.

“Because we’re going to be landing upslope from a tributary of the Little Bighorn River,” Brad explained. “And just about fifty miles north of here is where George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry stumbled into a bazillion Sioux warriors and wound up dead.”

“Then if we are going to play cowboys and Indians, I want to be the Indians,” Nadia said with a laugh.

He felt a tight smile flash across his face.

Through his HUD, he could see a small campsite just off the dirt road, which was little more than a trail now. Besides a couple of tents, there were two parked trucks, both with U.S. Forest Service markings. One was a fuel tanker.

The touch-down point the Ranger’s computer had selected blinked insistently in his HUD. He pushed a button on his stick, confirming the selection. It went solid, slashing across the trail no more than a few hundred feet beyond the trucks. Not much more than a thousand feet up the trail, a stand of tall fir trees blocked the far end of their projected landing zone.

Brad felt his mouth go dry. He was going to have to set this crate down right on the mark. There was no room for error.

Now! He pulled the throttles way back.

The Ranger slid down out of the sky. They dropped onto the rough, brush-strewn ground, bounced back up in the air a few feet, and then came back down with a jolt that rattled his teeth and threw him forward against his straps. The trees ahead loomed ever bigger as the plane roared along the gently inclined slope. Brad reversed thrust as much as he dared. He couldn’t risk skidding out of control if they hit loose gravel or dirt.

They slewed to a halt just a few yards short of the first trees.

Relieved, Brad fed a little power to the engines and swung the Iron Wolf aircraft through a tight, 180-degree. The Scion fuel tanker disguised as a Forest Service vehicle was already rolling toward them. He and Nadia got busy, working with practiced teamwork to shut down their avionics and engines.

Whack Macomber’s deep voice rumbled through his headset. “Where the hell did those guys come from?” Like the others strapped in the crowded troop compartment, he was watching a video feed from the Ranger’s cameras.

“Apparently, there’s a Scion sleeper cell operating out of a hangar at the Casper-Natrona County International Airport,” Brad told him. “Since we would have been a mite conspicuous landing there, this was the next best alternative.”

“Martindale’s got a fricking sleeper cell in Wyoming?” Macomber snorted. “Guarding against what? Another Indian uprising?”

“I don’t know, Whack,” Brad said. He winked at Nadia. “I didn’t ask—”

“And he didn’t tell,” the big man said in disgust. “Yeah, I get it. Seriously, though, kid, sometimes that guy creeps me out.”

Silently, Brad agreed. Part of him understood the former president’s habit of secrecy and his dogged determination to compartmentalize key information — keeping as much as possible about his various covert activities on a strictly need-to-know basis. Throughout recent history, loose lips had sunk far too many important American covert operations. But there were also moments — far too many for Brad’s comfort — when it seemed that Martindale kept most of his secrets simply because he craved the feeling of being the smartest man in any room.

On the other hand, Brad reminded himself, the Scion chief had again come through in the clutch. This new improvised airstrip might be a long way from anywhere that mattered, but at least they were still in the U.S. — ready to act if only they could figure where Gryzlov’s forces were hiding… or where they planned to strike next.

Colonel Yuri Annenkov and his copilot, Major Konstantin Uspensky, entered the missile assembly area at the back of the crowded warehouse. Technicians were busy at several of the workbenches, systematically disassembling a new shipment of desktop computers.

Annenkov found Andrej Filippov, his ordnance specialist, hunched over an open Kh-35 fuselage. The short, balding man didn’t look up at their approach. He was completely focused on carefully plugging a new component into place in the section of the missile dedicated to its navigation systems. The two pilots waited quietly until he finished, stripped off his latex gloves, and turned to face them.

“We’re just configuring the weapons for your next attack,” Filippov said. Gently, he patted the cruise missile. “Moscow approved my request for the use of our new jam-resistant GLONASS receivers on this mission.”

Annenkov snorted. “I imagine General Kurakin was not particularly happy about that.” Upgrading their Kh-35s to receive in-flight course corrections from the GLONASS constellation of space-based navigation satellites measurably increased the odds of someone figuring out that Russia itself was hip-deep in this clandestine war.

“Not especially,” Filippov agreed. He shrugged. “But it was either that or find a different set of targets. There was simply no other way to resolve the technical and tactical problems involved.”

Annenkov and Uspenksy both nodded. To avoid detection on launch for this mission, their missiles would have to fly a long, complicated, and extremely precise path through very rough terrain. Relying on inertial navigation was a nonstarter. Too many seemingly small errors would inevitably accumulate throughout the flight — resulting not only in a large number of catastrophic crashes en route, but also in the likelihood of any surviving missiles missing their targets by dozens of meters.

“Even with satellite navigation, how many hits can we really count on scoring?” Uspensky asked bluntly. “By now the Americans must have GPS and GLONASS jammers deployed around all of their key military installations. Once they realize there are missiles inbound, they’ll bring those jammers online fast.”

“We will probably lose a few weapons to jamming-induced guidance errors,” Filippov said, with equal frankness. “Our upgraded GLONASS receivers are untested under combat conditions. On the other hand, the American jamming systems are almost equally untested. Without more data, the range of likely outcomes is difficult to accurately calculate.” For a few seconds, his narrow face took on a detached expression, almost as though he were running through a number of different scenarios in his mind. Then he shrugged his shoulders again. “Reaction time is the key, Major. Deny the enemy time to act and you greatly reduce the effectiveness of his defenses. So long as you achieve tactical surprise, your missiles will kill many Americans.”

Team Sergeant Casimir “Kaz” Ostrowski stopped for a short breather. He squatted down on his haunches and took a quick sip from his Camelbak hydration pack. Out of long habit, he glanced left and right, checking the alignment of the other Green Berets in this extended skirmish line. They were all separated by at least fifteen meters.

He frowned. Dispersed this way as they scouted across the high desert plateau, their twelve-man A-team was screwed if it made contact with an enemy force — but it was also the only formation that would let them cover their assigned patrol territory in any vaguely reasonable amount of time.

When he’d asked what they were looking for, their CO, Captain Michaelson, had at first only said, “Robots, Kaz. Big nasty killer robots.”

Pressed for more details, the captain had finally relented far enough to tell him that some of the 4th Infantry Division’s brass had already had the jitters — imagining the hell that would break loose if the same kind of war machines that blew the shit out of Barksdale and that Fort Worth aircraft factory came charging down off the high ground above Battle Mountain to attack them. Then, earlier today, when a helicopter pilot ferrying supplies into the occupied Sky Masters complex reported that she’d thought she’d seen “something weird” up in the Sheep Creek Range… well, that was enough to set off alarms all the way back to Fort Carson.

And so here Ostrowski and his teammates were, humping across a desiccated landscape apparently empty of everything but sand, sagebrush, rocks, and more rocks. They had been sweeping north, following the line of a little-used trail, for hours. It hadn’t taken them very long to figure out that the Army helicopter pilot’s “something weird” was nothing more than a heap of boulders that maybe looked a little like a giant man lying prone — if, that is, you squinted at it with one eye closed and had a really overactive imagination.

Unfortunately, Captain Michaelson had decided that today he was a firm believer in turning a dumb-ass, rookie pilot’s mistake into a useful training and endurance exercise. Which was why they were doggedly plodding deeper into this sunbaked wasteland instead of turning back to hitch a nice, relaxing helo ride out.

“Getting old, Kaz?” the captain’s voice crackled through his tactical headset. “No offense, Team Sergeant, but you seem a little slow today.”

“Just conserving my energy, Captain,” Ostrowski retorted. “Because I figure I could be stuck carrying your exhausted, eager-beaver ass back down this mother of a big, damn hill come sundown.”

Michaelson laughed. “I appreciate you keeping my welfare in mind, Sergeant.”

Yeah, I bet you do, Ostrowski thought sardonically. In most respects, the captain was a top-notch officer, but he had his weaknesses. Showing off for the battalion commander was one of them. Hence his decision to volunteer them for this grueling recon so that he could demonstrate his team’s physical fitness and devotion to duty.

Scowling, the Green Beret noncom got back to his feet and started on again, pushing his pace a little to catch up with the others. He was working his way through a withered clump of sagebrush about fifty meters east of the trail they were following when he spotted his very own “something weird.”

Ostrowski swung out of line to check it out. He frowned. What he saw looked a little like someone had taken a huge divot out of the hard-packed sand with a golf club… only it would have to be a golf club that was maybe twice the height of a man. Almost immediately he spotted another, almost identical, big divot in the ground, offset from the other, and nearly two meters farther on. More of them were visible in a line heading away to the north. Turning around, he could see the same strange marks vanishing off into the distance.

Jesus, the sergeant thought, feeling suddenly cold despite the scorching heat. Those were tracks. But they weren’t tracks made by any kind of animal he’d ever encountered. Whatever had made them moved on two legs… and based on the stride length, the fucking thing had to be at least twelve feet tall.

“Captain!” Ostrowski said urgently into his throat mike. “Remember those big nasty killer robots you were talking about? Well, sir… I think we’ve found them!”