The Moscow Offensive

Thirty-One

Kirill Aristov lay prone along the crest of the hill, scanning the barren slopes to the west through his night-vision binoculars. He ignored the deep whump-whump-whump coming from the row of 140-meter-tall wind turbines built along the service road just behind him. About five kilometers away, fires lit the night sky. Several buildings on the Sandia National Laboratories’ Livermore campus were burning — set ablaze by antitank missiles and incendiary cannon rounds.

Nikolai Dobrynin scuttled up beside him and dropped to one knee. “Any sign of Baryshev and the others yet?” Aristov shook his head. “What the hell are they waiting for?” Dobrynin hissed.

Two police helicopters appeared out of the night, clattering toward the burning lab complex. Their green and red navigation lights strobed rhythmically. Dazzling white spotlights probed at the ground, hunting for the attackers. Suddenly there were two blinding flashes from near one of the shattered buildings. Trailing bright plumes of exhaust, two surface-to-air missiles streaked skyward — already guiding on the helicopters. Explosions lit the night as the shoulder-launched SAMs detonated. Enveloped in flames, both helicopters spun down out of control and smacked into the ground. Shards of torn metal and shattered Plexiglas pinwheeled away from each crash site.

“That, I think,” Aristov said coolly. Now that they’d disposed of the threat of aerial surveillance, he could see six big human-shaped machines sprinting out of the wrecked American science complex. The KVMs were moving at more than sixty kilometers per hour, covering ground with every long-legged stride as they climbed into the hills. He lowered the binoculars and looked at Dobrynin. “The colonel’s robots are on the way now. They’ll be here in a couple of minutes. Is everything on our end set?”

The other man nodded. “Our guys are standing by to load the trucks.”

Aristov got to his feet and stuffed his binoculars into a backpack. Their three converted tractor-trailers were parked at points along the deserted service road. Once they had Baryshev’s war machines safely aboard, it was a short thirty-kilometer drive through the Altamont Pass to another safe warehouse. This one was located on the outskirts of the town of Tracy. By the time the Americans could respond in force to this new attack, both the RKU security team and the colonel’s KVM unit would be well hidden.

With Dobrynin, he waited at the crest of the hill.

When the tall gray war machines drew near, they slowed down. Five stalked silently past the two former Spetsnaz officers, moving on toward the parked trucks. The sixth KVM stopped a few meters away. Its antenna-studded head swiveled toward them. “Any problems, Captain Aristov?” a cold, synthesized voice asked.

“No, Colonel,” Aristov replied. Then he noticed the dark smears of blood streaked across the robot’s torso and limbs. His voice faltered. “Good God, what happened down there?”

“Oh, this?” the machine asked, holding out a large, metal-fingered hand that appeared to be coated in dried blood and torn human skin. “After I expended all of my ammunition, some of the American scientists and engineers were still alive. They tried to hide in one of their labs. So I liquidated them at close quarters.” For a moment, the KVM appeared to reflect. Then it said, “The exercise was very… satisfying. In fact, we may be able to conserve our limited ammunition supplies by employing similar tactics on a bigger scale in the future. I will have to consider this option more closely.”

Without waiting for a response, the robot turned away and strode off into the darkness.

Aristov stared after the KVM in horror. He fought down an urge to vomit.

“Nu ohuet teper. Okay, we are fucked,” he heard Dobrynin whisper. “Whatever that thing is now, I don’t think much of it is really Colonel Baryshev. Not any longer. What the hell have these guys done to themselves?”

Patrick McLanahan closed his eyes, accessing the wireless computer links built into his LEAF. Most of the exoskeleton’s computers and machinery were devoted solely to keeping his crippled body alive, but the system retained a small fraction of the neural-interface capability employed by Cybernetic Infantry Devices. It gave him the ability to assimilate and analyze large amounts of data in a fraction of the time it would have taken an unassisted human brain.

Ordinarily, he significantly restricted his use of this ability — fearing that it might trigger the same sense of profound, debilitating isolation and mental instability he’d suffered while forced to exist entirely inside one of the robots. But the news from the United States was bad and growing worse with every passing hour. Unless he somehow worked out how the Russians were conducting this secret war of cruise-missile strikes and war machine raids, his son’s Iron Wolf combat team might as well be based on the dark side of the moon for all the good that it could do.

Without information that would allow them to hit Gryzlov’s forces, Kevin Martindale was right, he thought grimly. Right now, Brad and the others were simply hostages to fortune. If they were caught or even spotted by forces loyal to Barbeau, the repercussions would be almost unimaginable. Poland was not his native country, but the years he’d spent in its service had taught him to admire its proud, fiercely independent people.

A wry smile creased Patrick’s worn, lined face. Okay, perhaps not to the same extent as his son, who was plainly head over heels in love with Nadia Rozek. Still, seeing the Poles crushed between a hostile America duped by Gryzlov’s machinations and Moscow’s tank and motorized rifle divisions was not something he could accept. So even if rapidly analyzing their painstakingly accumulated fragments of intelligence required him to risk a bit of his regained sanity, it was worth trying, he decided.

He was pretty sure that spending more time working through the demonstrated powers and tactics employed by the Russian war robots was a dead end. Scion analysts had already milked every pixel of video footage and piece of eyewitness testimony for whatever information they contained. But while they now had a much clearer grasp of what the enemy’s machines could do in battle, they were still no closer to understanding how those robots avoided detection before they conducted their raids. There were simply too many hypothetical ways to do that — ranging from shipping the war machines as separate components and reassembling them before every attack to using trucks or other large vehicles to move them around.

Which left the cruise-missile attacks conducted by Gryzlov’s mercenaries. Patrick strongly suspected that the clues he needed to crack their operational patterns wide open were buried somewhere in all the bits and pieces of evidence gathered in the two different strikes — the first on Barksdale Air Force Base and now the second, on the Pacific Fleet’s San Diego piers.

Seeing what he could deduce from the fact that they’d used versions of Russia’s Kh-35 subsonic cruise missiles in both attacks was his first step. Knowing the maximum range for those weapons — around 160 nautical miles — at least narrowed down the locations of possible launch sites. Reacting to his mental commands, his computer pulled up maps of both the southwestern and southeastern United States, pinpointed Barksdale AFB and Naval Base San Diego, and then drew circles with a radius of 160 miles around each site. Of course, “narrowing down” was a relative concept, Patrick decided dryly, since each of those highlighted zones contained rather more than 100,000 square miles. He could shave that somewhat for the raid on San Diego, since the Navy’s E-2C Hawkeye would have easily detected any launch off the California coast. But even erasing the areas within its effective radar coverage still left a vast region of rough, almost uninhabited deserts and mountains stretching from the Mojave southward deep into Mexico.

Bring up all available video and recorded radar footage from each missile strike, he mentally ordered.

Downloaded through his neural link, the imagery scrolled through his mind at high speed. Okay, Patrick thought, reviewing what he’d observed, each attack involved a salvo of between fourteen and sixteen missiles. And those missiles were fired in rapid succession, with no more than four seconds between each launch. So what did that tell him?

For one thing, it almost certainly ruled out the use of any land-based missile system, he realized suddenly. The Russians did have mobile coastal defense batteries equipped with Kh-35s. But each Bal-E battery contained up to eleven specialized vehicles — including self-propelled command and control centers, launchers, and reloading machines. He strongly doubted Gryzlov’s mercenaries could hope to move that much equipment along the nation’s roads and highways without raising eyebrows somewhere… even if it were possible to believably disguise the launchers and command vehicles as something more innocent.

Nor could they hope to fire the Kh-35s from the ground undetected. The add-on boosters required to accelerate those missiles to attack speed from the ground generated huge plumes of flame and smoke. Maybe you could get away with a stunt like that out somewhere deep in the Mojave Desert, he thought. But not in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Oklahoma, or Texas — the five states within possible striking range of Barksdale. Rural or not, there were too many people living and working in those places for anyone to have missed seeing a torrent of fire climbing skyward that would have made the biggest county Fourth of July fireworks display look like kids shooting off a couple of bottle rockets.

He sat up straighter, hearing the servos in the exoskeleton that supported his body whine softly. That left only one realistic option: The Russians were launching their cruise missiles by air. But how exactly?

Quickly, he called up more data. Like the U.S., Moscow didn’t have many long-range bombers left, no more than a handful each of their sleek Tu-22M-3 Backfires, turboprop-powered Tu-95 Bears, and supersonic Tu-160 Blackjacks. Both the Backfire and the Blackjack maxed out at eight Kh-35 cruise missiles apiece, so a sortie would require two aircraft. And while a single Tu-95 did have the necessary payload capacity, it was impossible to imagine even one of the big, slow-flying Bears successfully penetrating so far into U.S.-monitored airspace without being picked up on civilian and military radars. In fact, none of the Russian bombers were stealthy by any stretch of the imagination. There was just no conceivable flight profile that would let any of them hit either target and escape detection.

Which meant Gryzlov’s forces were flying in plain sight, Patrick thought coldly. They had to be using a civilian aircraft — one converted to launch cruise missiles. What was more, it had to be a good-sized plane, one with multiple engines and plenty of payload capacity. Jerry-rigging Cessnas or Gulfstream business jets to carry a couple of missiles each wouldn’t cut it. And since there was no way the Russians could hope to hang sixteen Kh-35s off the fuselage and wings of any commercial jet without raising all kinds of unanswerable questions, they must have modified their attack plane to carry its weapons internally.

He nodded to himself. No other possibility fit all the known facts. Besides, this wasn’t even a new idea. Way back during the Carter administration, there had been a lot of talk about converting Boeing 747 Jumbo Jets to launch up to fifty Tomahawk cruise missiles as a cheaper alternative to the B-1 Lancer bomber program. He doubted the Russians were using anything as big as a 747 for their clandestine air campaign. If they had, they’d be salvoing a hell of a lot more than sixteen of those Kh-35s in every attack. No, based on the numbers of missiles they were launching, Gryzlov’s pilots were probably flying a converted twin-engine jet — something like a Boeing 737 or an Airbus 300 or 320.

But that still left a hell of a lot of possibilities. Between Boeing and Airbus alone, well over twenty-two thousand of those planes were still flying worldwide. And more than two thousand commercial cargo flights crisscrossed U.S. airspace on any given day. Was there any way he could winnow out the single kernel of wheat he wanted from all that chaff? For a few moments more, he contemplated the problem — raising possible approaches and as rapidly discarding them.

And then, with the sudden zigzag streak of lightning-like inspiration, he saw the answer.

Access Federal Aviation Administration flight plan and air-traffic-control databases, Patrick told his computer through the LEAF’s neural link.

Access achieved, it reported. If ever a collection of circuit boards and software could sound smug, this one did. Years ago, while he was still president, Kevin Martindale had made sure he could covertly gain entry to most of the federal government’s computer networks — using carefully concealed back doors written into their operating systems’ software. He’d justified his actions to those in his inner circle by arguing he needed a way to bypass elements of the cumbersome federal bureaucracy during a crisis. Now that Martindale headed Scion, of course, those same hidden back doors allowed his intelligence analysts and field operatives to roam practically at will through the mountains of information routinely collected and squirreled away by a host of different government agencies and departments. The FAA, for example, kept recordings of everything its air traffic controllers saw on radar and said over the radio or telephone for forty-five days.

With the assurance of long practice, Patrick began sorting through thousands of filed flight plans and air-traffic-control radio contacts — ruthlessly discarding anything but that pertaining to commercial aircraft transiting the critical zone centered on Barksdale Air Force Base within thirty minutes of the time the first Kh-35 missile exploded. Given the enormous volume of airspace it contained, he still wound up with a list of dozens of different planes that could have been in the right place at the right time to carry out a missile launch.

While that was a measurable advance over their prior state of complete ignorance — usually abbreviated as NFC, for “no fucking clue,” on internal Scion reports — it was still insufficient. But now, solely because the Russians had carried out a second cruise-missile strike, he should be able to winnow that list down even further.

Unfortunately, when he ran the same kind of search focused on the possible launch zones for the Kh-35s that had hammered the Pacific Fleet, he drew a blank. Oh, there were plenty of cargo aircraft flying through U.S. airspace or bound for Mexico during the half hour or so before the cruise missiles were detected… but none of them matched those on his list from the attack against Barksdale.

Patrick frowned, deep in thought. Had he gotten this wrong? Was he missing something obvious?

Of course he was, he realized suddenly. He’d committed a classic error of intelligence analysis — relying on assumptions that were too narrowly focused. Expand my time parameter, he ordered. Retrieve all available information for flights through the highlighted regions for up to six hours before the attack.

Within milliseconds, the computer did as he asked. His list of suspect aircraft expanded almost exponentially. Take one step forward and end up two steps back, Patrick thought dryly. So now it was time to take a running jump.

Now, he thought, cross-check this list of planes against those observed flying through the Barksdale missile launch zone.

Only one plane appeared on both lists.

“Gotcha,” Patrick growled, looking at the tail number assigned to a 737-200F cargo jet owned by a company called Regan Air Freight. To make sure, he activated another of Scion’s concealed software back doors to enter the databases of SENEAM, Servicios a la Navegación en el Espacio Aéreo Mexicano—the Mexican government’s equivalent of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

After clearing American airspace, the Regan Air plane had landed at San Felipe. In and of itself, that wasn’t too big a black mark — big planes usually landed in Tijuana, and light planes landed in San Felipe, but either was legal. But then, barely an hour later, it had taken off again, this time heading deeper into the mountains running down the spine of the Baja peninsula. And there, right around the time those missiles could have been launched toward San Diego, radar data from the Mexican station at Puerto Peñasco Sonora showed the 737–200 orbiting over the Baja hinterlands… just close enough to the U.S. naval base to carry out a maximum-range strike. And it had the payload capacity to carry the number of Russian cruise missiles used in each attack.

Bingo, Patrick thought. The crew of that aircraft had the means and the opportunity to hit both Barksdale and San Diego. Their motivation, whether Russian patriotism or mercenary greed, was unimportant. Still using his LEAF’s interface, he opened a secure channel to Martindale in Warsaw.

The older man answered right away. “What is it, General?” Quickly, Patrick filled him in on what he’d discovered. “Regan Air Freight? Yes, I see the significance,” Martindale said grimly. “I’ll see what my people can learn about this corporation. And as fast as possible.”

Patrick heard the strain in his voice. “What’s happened?” he asked.

“Gryzlov’s combat robots just destroyed a number of research labs at Sandia’s Livermore campus,” Martindale said. “Including one the administration funded to try to replicate Jason Richter’s work on Cybernetic Infantry Devices.”

“Oh shit,” Patrick growled. “I can’t think of anything more likely to convince Stacy Anne Barbeau that we’re gunning for her.”

“Nor can I,” Martindale agreed. “Which is undoubtedly Gryzlov’s plan.” He sighed. “We never had much time to stop him before this spirals out of control, General. Now we have even less.”