The Moscow Offensive

Forty-Two

Colonel Ruslan Baryshev pushed his KVM up the steep slope, painfully clawing his way from tree to tree. Loose soil and chalky scree shifted under the robot’s considerable weight with every step. He grimaced. He and Imrekov were already several minutes behind schedule, slowed down by his decision to advance over this high ground overlooking Farrell’s compound instead of rushing straight up the paved drive from the main gate. His original plan had called for a near-simultaneous assault. Instead, his two-robot teams were engaging the enemy as separate units… and paying a much higher price than he’d anticipated.

In their first three attacks against the Americans, none of his KVMs had taken anything more than superficial damage. Now, in a matter of moments, a single Iron Wolf combat robot had apparently destroyed two of them. How was that possible?

Suddenly the beacon representing Specter Four, Novikov’s machine, vanished from his tactical display. At almost the same moment, his team commander, Zelin, snapped a terse report that he was in pursuit of yet another Iron Wolf war machine. Over their dedicated circuit, he heard Imrekov’s growled oath. “Chert voz’mi! Damn it! What have we walked into here, Lead?”

Baryshev bit down on the urge to unleash his own string of profanity. This was supposed to be a soft target, for God’s sake! Instead, half of his robots had been turned into burned-out wrecks… with their highly trained pilots blown to charred bits. For a split second, he considered ordering a retreat. But then, just as quickly, he discarded the notion as cowardice. This was not a game, and casualties were inevitable in war. Besides, neither he nor Imrekov had yet encountered any opposition. And once they reached the top of this hill, the whole ranch would be at their mercy — laid out before their guns and missiles like a lamb trussed for the slaughter. “Keep going, Two,” he ordered. “The American defenses cannot possibly be strong everywhere.”

“Very well, Specter Lead,” the other man said, after a noticeable delay.

Seconds later, Baryshev made it to the hilltop, joined almost immediately by Imrekov’s Specter Two. The two KVMs went forward through the trees and down the other side until they reached a vantage point on the military crest that gave them a clear line of sight across the whole valley. Fires glowed orange in the woods off to the south. Otherwise, everything seemed unnaturally silent.

From seven hundred meters away, Baryshev was puzzled to see that Farrell’s large, single-story ranch house was completely dark, without any lights showing anywhere. Nor were there any lights on at the stable, equipment shed, or garage. The sedans and SUVs shown in Aristov’s surveillance photos were still parked next to the house. Only the horse paddock was empty.

Movement in the open pastures to the north caught Baryshev’s attention. Instantly alert, he swiveled that way, bringing his weapons to bear. Horses only, his computer reported, analyzing the fast-moving thermal signatures it detected. No human riders.

Ah, he thought, the sounds of battle must have spooked those animals. Well, there was no sense in wasting his limited ammunition on them. He was here to kill two-legged beasts.

“Lead, I’m not picking up any IR signatures in the house or in any of the other buildings!” Imrekov reported, sounding perplexed.

Baryshev turned his own thermal sensors to the task. His readings, or rather, the lack of them, confirmed the other man’s findings. He wasn’t able to pick up any human-sized heat sources inside the ranch house or its outbuildings. His mouth tightened. Where were the men they’d come to assassinate — Farrell, Martindale, and McLanahan?

He considered the house. Those stone walls were thick. When this battle began, the three Americans must have retreated to a safe room or cellar deep in the interior. Certainly there were no signs of them on the grounds or even on the wooded slopes rising west of the compound. Anyway, if they had bolted for safety in that direction, Captain Aristov would have spotted them and reported in.

CCRRACK!

Another huge flash lit the woods to the south. Major Zelin’s KVM went off-line immediately.

For a long, frozen moment, Baryshev stared at his readouts in shock. Two-thirds of his force gone? Just like that? In a few minutes of battle? For the first time in a long while, he felt the ice-cold sensation of fear crawling up his spine. He and the other KVM pilots had reveled in their strength, confident of the near invulnerability given them by these powerful war machines. But now it was only too clear that this sense of godlike invincibility had been nothing more than a dangerous illusion. They could be killed. In fact, they were being killed — struck down one after another by enemies who seemed like ghosts, able to move unseen in the shadows.

“Lead? What do we do?” Imrekov’s tense voice broke through his sense of growing terror. “Should we withdraw?”

“No!” Baryshev snarled, shoving his fears aside with an act of will. Retreating now, when they had their target in sight, would be an act of supreme idiocy… as well as unforgivable cowardice. “We’re not running, Oleg! We’re going to finish this now!”

He yanked one of his three Spike fire-and-forget antitank missiles from a weapons pack. Imrekov did the same. Cued by their computers, they fired simultaneously.

Both missiles streaked downslope, punched through the ranch house’s metal rooftop, and exploded inside. Windows shattered, blown out by the twin blasts. Thousands of tiny glass shards flew outward, twinkling eerily in the flickering light cast by orange-and-red fireballs soaring through the gaping holes torn in the roof.

They fired again. Two more explosions rocked the house. Fires glowed through the empty windows. One of the outer stone walls sagged inward. Imrekov switched to his 30mm autocannon and started shooting through the mangled rooftop, using incendiary rounds to set more fires among explosion-shattered bookcases and furniture. The colonel held his third missile ready. If Farrell and the others were still alive in what was fast becoming a roaring inferno, they might try to make a last-minute dash for one of the vehicles parked outside.

And then a burst of sun-bright white light flared on the wooded hill facing them. Oleg Imrekov’s KVM disintegrated — hit by a metal projectile moving at supersonic speed. Jagged pieces of man and machine sprayed across the slope.

Horrified, Baryshev saw his computer highlight a new target several hundred meters away. He recognized the unmistakable outline of an Iron Wolf CID standing among the trees. That’s impossible, he thought. One moment, the enemy robot wasn’t there… and the next moment, there the damned thing was. Without wasting time on further thought, he fired his antitank missile. It slashed across the valley, visibly guiding on the other war machine.

Target destroyed, Major Nadia Rozek’s CID computer reported calmly. She laughed in delight — knowing she’d just made sure there was one less Russian bastard to make trouble in the world. She raised her rail gun again, seeking out the second enemy robot.

Her warning system went off with a shrill BEEP-BEEP-BEEP. Launch detection. Threat axis one o’clock. Missile has IR lock. She saw a tiny bright dot streaking straight at her, growing bigger with astounding speed. She didn’t have time to reactivate her thermal camouflage. “Damn,” Nadia said softly. In the last possible instant, she hurled herself to the side — desperately crossing both of the CID’s metal arms in front of its torso.

WHAAMM. WHAAMM.

She felt herself smashed backward in a dazzling flash of orange and red light. And then everything went black.

“Got you!” Baryshev crowed, seeing the bright orange burst engulf the Iron Wolf CID. He saw pieces fly off as it flew backward, crashed into a stand of trees, and collapsed in a heap. He turned away, thoroughly satisfied. No robot could have survived the rapid-fire detonations of his missile’s tandem warhead — a smaller shaped charge to strip away any explosive reactive armor and a primary charge designed to penetrate the underlying armor of a modern heavy tank.

His mood darkened again at the sight of the smoldering wreckage of Imrekov’s KVM. This victory had come at too high a cost. Filled with wrath, he strode downslope toward Farrell’s gutted ranch house. It was time to make sure the men his leaders wanted him to kill were truly dead.

Baryshev switched back to his own autocannon on the move. He came out onto level ground and closed in on the burning building. When he got to within fifty meters, he started circling it — methodically probing the ruins with his visual sensors, microphones, and chemical sniffers set at maximum sensitivity. He found nothing.

The Russian scowled. There should be some indication of dead bodies in there, even if it was only a glimpse of a mangled arm or leg half buried in the rubble or even just the smell of burning flesh. The flames roared higher, fed by cooler night air being drawn into the conflagration.

Unidentified movement. Right rear quadrant, the KVM’s computer said. Range two hundred and twenty meters.

Startled, Baryshev whirled around… and found himself staring at the empty horse corral. Dust kicked low across the bare earth, blown by the wind sweeping in toward the burning house at his back. “Replay your detection footage,” he ordered.

Obediently, the computer cycled the brief snippet of video imagery captured by its night-vision cameras across his display. Watching closely, Baryshev saw a patch of ground ripple in the breeze… almost as though it were cloth instead of solid earth. An eyebrow rose in surmise. Could that be—?

He headed toward the paddock.

Hugging the dirt with Martindale and Farrell in a shallow scrape near the middle of the paddock, Patrick McLanahan saw the IR camouflage netting stretched over their heads flutter slightly in the wind. Immediately he dialed up the sensitivity of the audio pickups built into his life-support helmet. Well, damn, he thought bitterly, hearing the tempo of the Russian robot’s footsteps change and grow louder. That’s torn it. So much for Plan A — which had called for the three of them to hide out here while Brad and the rest of his Iron Wolf team fought it out with Gryzlov’s forces. Too bad there really wasn’t a Plan B.

He glanced at Martindale and Farrell, seeing their eyes gleaming in the darkness. He put his hand on their shoulders, one after the other, pressing down in a peremptory command to stay down, no matter what happened. Tightly, they nodded.

Time’s up, Muck, Patrick thought, deliberately using the nickname his friends had given him years ago… many of whom were long dead, killed in combat, in air crashes, or by terrorists. It seemed appropriate, somehow, considering he’d probably be seeing them soon. Besides, if he was going to die, he’d much rather meet his end out under the open sky than cowering in a covered ditch.

Quickly, not giving himself time to crap out, he wriggled out from under the camouflage netting. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself upright, ignoring the way the servos in his supporting exoskeleton protested the sudden movement. Then, moving awkwardly, he jog-trotted away across the dusty paddock.

Colonel Ruslan Baryshev saw the strange figure scramble out from under the camouflage net and turn to run. “Identify that man,” he snapped.

Profile matches most recent photograph of Lieutenant General Patrick McLanahan, his KVM’s computer replied. Target priority per Moscow’s most recent orders is Alpha-One.

Baryshev nodded. Given President Gryzlov’s personal desire for revenge against McLanahan — the man whose bombs had killed Gryzlov’s father and led directly to his mother’s suicide — that was no surprise. It was certainly a desire he shared. As an officer in Russia’s air force, he’d seen hundreds of friends and comrades killed by the American and the forces he’d commanded. He raised his autocannon. His finger started to tighten on the trigger… and then it eased off. Why give McLanahan so easy a death? After all, what was it that Gryzlov had said to Kurakin, a message passed on verbatim by the general when he’d ordered this attack? Oh, yes. “I don’t want that murdering piece of shit crippled! I want him torn to fucking pieces!”

His lips twisted in a savage grin. Well… why not follow those orders to the letter? Turning away from the camouflaged shelter he’d spotted, he stalked slowly after the fleeing American, gliding along like a cat toying with a terrified mouse.

Warning. Warning. Multiple systems failures. Severe damage. Weapons off-line. Sensors at ten percent efficiency. Power supplies at critical level. Warning. Warning. Immediate pilot action required.

Groggily, Nadia Rozek swam back to consciousness, pulling herself away from what had seemed a dark, lightless abyss filled with terrifying creatures. Her CID computer’s recitation of its litany of woes continued. The crackling static in her ears and the weirdly shaped blotches obscuring some of the virtual readouts it was sending to her suggested the neural link was damaged.

She shook her head, trying to wake up faster, and winced as a sharp pain stabbed at her. Blood dripped from a gash on her forehead. The bitter odor of burned-out electronics and circuitry hung heavily in the stagnant air. She grimaced. Evidently, her life-support system was dead, too.

Her CID’s left arm was gone — blown off at the socket. The robot’s right arm was nothing more than a stump. She had a vague memory of desperately throwing them up in front of her to shield the section of torso that contained her cockpit. Blearily, she realized they must have taken the brunt of that antitank missile’s blast.

Nadia strained to get the CID back on its feet. Using the damaged haptic interface made her feel as though she were slogging through hip-deep quicksand… with fifty-pound weights fastened to her ankles. Leg servos and actuators screeched shrilly, audibly on the edge of total failure. She gritted her teeth, ignoring both the painful, head-splitting noises and the cascade of yellow and red caution and warning lights that suddenly blossomed on her last working equipment display.

She staggered upright… and gasped out loud at what she saw through her only functioning camera: General McLanahan, Brad’s much-loved father, stumbling away across a dusty field, with a sleek, deadly-looking Russian war machine in pursuit.

“No,” Nadia said brokenly, imagining the sorrow the man she loved with all her soul would feel on learning of his father’s gruesome death at the hands of their enemies. The news would pierce Brad’s heart like a sharpened sword. She stiffened. “No. I will not allow it!”

Doggedly, she lurched down the hill, overriding every one of the dying Iron Wolf CID’s fail-safes and damage protocols to move faster.

Laughing now, Baryshev strode on after the crippled American. That odd metallic carapace the other man wore was a pale imitation of the powered exoskeleton at the core of his own KVM. Perhaps he should begin by forcibly peeling those bits of metal away from the writhing, screaming coward, he mused… before moving on to wrench off McLanahan’s physical arms and legs.

Through his link, the computer tried to attract his attention. Movement al—

With an impatient gesture, Baryshev silenced the alarm. This was a moment to savor… without pointless distractions. The robot’s sensors must have spotted the other two Americans — Farrell and Martindale — making their own futile dash for safety while he chased after this one. Let them run, he thought coldly. They couldn’t get far. Once he’d finished mutilating McLanahan’s corpse, they would become his next quarry.

And then something crashed hard into his KVM from the side, knocking him off balance. Despite his safety harness, the sudden impact was forceful enough to slam his head up against one of the backup instrument panels. His robot stumbled, falling to its knees.

Enraged by this intrusion on his private hunt, Baryshev spat out blood from the lip he’d just bitten. “Sukin syn! Son of a bitch.” His KVM got back up and spun toward this new attacker.

His eyes widened in surprise as he recognized the Iron Wolf machine he thought he’d killed with his antitank missile. The enemy war robot was a battered wreck, with both arms gone and most of the sensor panels mounted on its weird, hexagonal head reduced to slag and broken bits of circuitry. But the damned thing was still moving somehow… deliberately putting itself between him and McLanahan.

Not for long, Baryshev thought viciously. He fired his autocannon — perforating the Iron Wolf CID as it stumbled toward him again. Sparks and smoke danced around the punctures his rounds tore through its already weakened armor. With a harsh laugh, he stepped aside from the other machine’s lunge and watched it crumple to the ground.

Triumphantly, he looked back to find McLanahan. The American had stopped running away. Instead, he was rushing toward the downed robot with a look of horror on his lined face.

Grinning, Baryshev raised his autocannon again, taking careful aim.

Patrick McLanahan dropped to his knees beside Nadia’s CID. Through his partial neural link, he made contact with the machine’s computer. It was failing fast, shutting down more and more core memory and command functions in a futile effort to stay online for its pilot. He had only had time to order it to open the emergency hatch before it went dead.

The hatch cycled. Smoke and the harsh, coppery smell of blood eddied out through the opening.

“Trying to hide, little man?” he heard a cold, synthesized voice say in accented English. “Gennadiy Gryzlov sends his regards.”

With a wry smile, Patrick looked up, right into the muzzle of the Russian war robot’s 30mm cannon. “Does he? Well, you tell that asshole I’ll see him in hell,” he said coolly. At a faint glimpse of movement far off in the darkness, well beyond Farrell’s blazing ranch house, he smiled more genuinely. “But you know, I have a feeling you’ll get there first.”

“Brave words for a—”

CCRRACK!

The Russian combat robot blew apart in a ball of fire — hit squarely in the back by a rail-gun shot that went through and through at Mach 5. Its head and broken limbs spiraled away into the air… and came crashing down in different places scattered across the dusty corral.

Painfully, Patrick pushed himself back up onto his hands and knees from where he’d been thrown by the blast. He crawled back over to Nadia Rozek’s dead Cybernetic Infantry Device as fast as he could. His lips moved silently. Prayer wasn’t usually his thing, but right now he’d take any help on offer. Especially when the alternative was watching his son’s heart shatter into a thousand pieces.