The Moscow Offensive

Two

The lights came back on.

“Senior exercise personnel should report to the main conference room,” the computer said. “Simulation debriefing is scheduled in ten minutes.”

Blinking in the sudden brightness, Brad McLanahan squirmed out of the simulator’s haptic interface module. Now that he wasn’t connected through it to the computers and virtual reality setup, the touch of the gray, gelatinous membrane made his skin crawl. Strapping in or disconnecting always felt a lot like wriggling through a narrow tube full of body-temperature, oozy mud. At the bottom of the cockpit, he tapped a glowing green button.

A metal hatch slid open. Carefully, he squeezed through the small opening, slid down a short ladder, and then, keeping his head low, crab-walked out from under the egg-shaped Cybernetic Infantry Device simulator. Set in the middle of a large opaque dome, the cockpit nested inside a bewildering array of hydraulic jacks.

Once clear of the complicated, Rube Goldberg — looking assembly, Brad straightened up to his full height. For several seconds, he twisted and stretched his neck and shoulders and hips, working out the kinks in muscles that felt cramped and sore. Most of the time he didn’t mind being tall and broad-shouldered, but there were a few places where his build was a definite disadvantage.

Yeah, like cramped, instrument-filled aircraft and CID cockpits, he thought with a wry grin. Which just happened to be where he spent a huge portion of his working hours. Smooth career move, McLanahan, he told himself, heading for the door out of the dome. He could have been anything from an aerospace engineer to a bartender, but no, he’d wanted to be a combat pilot, just like his old man.

He emerged into a cavernous hangar. Two more of the big domes crowded the vast space. Each looked very much like one of those inflatable planetariums used for traveling astronomy shows. Color-coded fiber-optic and power cables snaked across the bare concrete floor, linking the domes to banks of big-screen monitors and powerful computers.

Ordinarily, the simulators gave rookie CID pilots a taste of what it was really like to command one of the big fighting machines. Once you were strapped inside, the combination of haptic interfaces, full-motion capability, and three-dimensional virtual reality projectors provided an experience that sounded, looked, and even felt real. It was a relatively fast, cheap, and easy way to weed out newbies who couldn’t hack the job.

Today, though, the simulator domes had been repurposed to run veteran Iron Wolf pilots through a series of immersive combat scenarios. Fighting virtual battles avoided wear and tear on their expensive robots… and on the Polish countryside. Live-fire exercises with CIDs might be exciting, but they were hell on equipment, buildings, and the landscape.

Even worse, open field maneuvers risked exposing key intelligence about the lethal machines and their advanced capabilities to Moscow’s spies. Warsaw’s Military Counterintelligence Service was top-notch, but Poland was a free and democratic country. There was no way to build an iron curtain of secrecy around its armed forces — or those of its high-tech allies, the Iron Wolf Squadron and its corporate parent Scion, a private military company.

And Brad knew only too well that Russia and its ruthless, belligerent leader, Gennadiy Gryzlov, had every reason to pry deeply into their secrets. He felt his mood darken.

For three difficult and dangerous years, the foreign-born pilots, commandos, and intelligence specialists who formed the nucleus of Iron Wolf had helped the Poles and other Eastern Europeans defend their freedoms against Russian aggression. Together they’d stopped Gryzlov’s forces cold — in the air, on the ground, and even in the strange digital battlegrounds of cyberspace. But the cost had been high. Too many of his fellow pilots and soldiers were dead.

Right now Poland and its allies were not openly at war with Russia. But neither were they really at peace. Sure, maybe nobody was actively shooting, slipping malware into power grids and banking systems, or lobbing bombs and missiles into cities, but that didn’t mean the two sides were ready to beat their swords into plowshares.

This current lull had lasted for more than a year. No one with any common sense believed it would last much longer. Like the leopard who could not change his spots, Gennadiy Gryzlov wasn’t going to abandon his ambition of making Russia the most powerful nation on the planet. The only open question was when he would make his next aggressive move… and what form it would take.

Warily, Brad poked his head in through the conference room’s open door.

Waiting for the hammer to fall was starting to wear on a lot of nerves around the squadron. This morning’s fiasco wasn’t going to make anyone feel really warm and fuzzy.

Whack Macomber and Nadia Rozek were already seated at the big, oval table. No surprise there, he thought. They both got “killed” in the sim before he did. Neither looked especially happy about what had just happened. Like most dedicated soldiers, both were intensely competitive and fiercely determined. Losing gracefully was for the other guys.

Nadia glanced over her shoulder when he came in. A fleeting smile briefly brightened her blue-gray eyes. She patted the empty chair beside her. “Come and join the ranks of the dishonored dead, fellow ghost.”

Ruefully, Brad did as she suggested. “Yeah, I guess that’s us,” he said. “So do they give virtual wraiths government-issued chains to clank around in? Or do we have to buy our own?”

Macomber snorted and looked away. The big man’s arms were folded across his chest. From the set of his jaw, he was just about mad enough to go off and bust a few heads in a bar somewhere, preferably one full of the meanest, nastiest sons of bitches around.

Oh, boy, Brad thought worriedly. He knew that look. So would a lot of MPs and civilian cops around the world who’d ever made the mistake of trying to stop Whack from blowing off some steam. There were a lot of stories about the colonel from his younger days in the U.S. Air Force’s Special Operations Command. Some of the wilder ones were even true.

Nadia’s warm hand slipped into his. Almost against his will, he felt himself relax a little. They’d first met almost three years ago, when she was assigned as Polish president Piotr Wilk’s military liaison to Scion and the newly formed Iron Wolf Squadron. If he’d been asked way back then, he would have bet good money this was going to be one of those short-lived “stunning local girl takes pity on lonely foreigner” kind of flings. Instead, whenever duty allowed, they were still spending almost every waking and sleeping moment together. So much, in fact, that Brad was taking a lot of flak from friends who wondered when they were getting married.

He thought about that. If he ever got up the guts to propose to her, would she say yes? Or would she just laugh, tell him not to be an idiot, and then drag him away to their bed to take his mind off the impossible?

Suddenly Nadia shot him an amused, sidelong glance from under her eyelashes. Brad felt himself reddening. Christ, was she reading his mind now?

Fortunately, before he could dig himself in any deeper, another man entered the conference room. Shorter than either Brad or Macomber, the newcomer was in his midsixties, with longish gray hair and a neatly trimmed gray beard. Moving fast, he crossed to the opposite side of the table and dropped heavily into a chair. From there, he surveyed the three Iron Wolf officers with a coldly displeased expression.

Kevin Martindale, once president of the United States, now ran Scion. He was also a close adviser to Piotr Wilk and the other leaders of the fledgling Alliance of Free Nations. They all knew that the high-tech weaponry, innovative tactics, and intelligence expertise Martindale and his people provided were the margin between their continued survival as free nations and renewed Russian domination.

“Well, that was a mess,” Martindale said at last, breaking an uncomfortable silence. “Three CIDs wrecked beyond repair. Three top-notch pilots who would certainly have been killed if they were lucky, and captured if they were not. And all for nothing.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Macomber said through gritted teeth. He stabbed a finger back at Martindale. “What the hell was that little bolt-out-of-the-blue bushwhack supposed to prove? That we can get killed in these tin cans? Tell me something I don’t already fucking know!”

Brad felt Nadia stiffen beside him. Fifteen months ago, during the last round of fighting with Russia, Whack Macomber had led a raid on Perun’s Aerie, a secret Russian cyberwar complex buried deep in the icy, snow-cloaked Ural Mountains. They’d walked into a cleverly planned ambush. Charlie Turlock, one of their best friends, had been killed — unable to bail out of her damaged CID before it self-destructed. Whack himself had been captured by the Russians when his own robot was knocked out. He’d been rescued, but climbing into one of the Iron Wolf war machines still put him on edge.

“Adding those simulated Russian war robots was my idea,” someone said calmly from the doorway behind them, coming to Martindale’s defense. “Consider it a warning shot.”

Brad hid a grin. His father, retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Patrick McLanahan, always did know how to make a dramatic entrance.

Heads turned as the older McLanahan came into the conference room and moved to join Martindale. A motor-driven, carbon-fiber-and-metal exoskeleton supported his torso, arms, and legs, whirring softly as he moved. The exoskeleton, a bulky life-support backpack, and the clear helmet enclosing his head gave the impression he was wearing an eccentrically designed space suit.

In a very real sense, Brad knew, that was exactly what the LEAF, or Life Enhancing Assistive Facility, was… a piece of advanced hardware designed to keep his father alive in a hostile environment. Only the hostile environment wasn’t just the cold vacuum of space, it was the whole wide world itself.

Years before, Patrick McLanahan had been critically wounded during an unauthorized retaliatory strike against the People’s Republic of China. Most people thought he’d been killed. They hadn’t been far off. His injuries were beyond the power of modern medicine to heal. Only a CID’s automated life-support systems had kept him alive. And so for year after long year, he’d been forced to exist inside a machine designed solely for war, robbed of all normal human contact — able to interact only through the CID’s sensors and computers.

Brad swallowed hard, remembering the sorrow he had felt as the man who’d raised him slowly disappeared into a shadowy, inhuman world of binary 1s and 0s. This Sky Masters — designed LEAF, risky and highly experimental though it was, had come along just in time to save his father’s sanity. While the suit might look a little weird, at least it let Patrick McLanahan see other people with his own eyes and touch them with his own hands. It also let him speak to them in his own voice.

And that was a precious gift… even when what he said with it pissed them off.

“A warning shot?” Whack repeated angrily. “Nobody else has CIDs. Using them against us in the sim was a bullshit move, General.”

Patrick shook his head. “I’m afraid not, Colonel.” He looked around the small group. “Gennadiy Gryzlov may be a psychopath, but he’s also quite intelligent. He knows the kind of force multiplier our combat robots represent. Obtaining CID technology for his own armed forces has to be very high up on his priority list. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s what he was after in that ambush that killed Charlie.”

“Maybe so,” Whack agreed reluctantly, obviously wrestling with painful memories. Surrounded by overwhelming numbers of the enemy, he and Charlie Turlock had gone down hard — destroying dozens of Russian tanks and armored vehicles in a desperate last-stand fight. “But there sure as shit wasn’t a lot left of our gear when those bastards finished shooting us to pieces.”

Patrick sighed. “I’ve spent months analyzing the last few minutes of telemetry relayed from your CIDs, Whack. And I’m afraid more components might have survived intact than we first thought.” His mouth turned down. “For example, Charlie’s robot lost an arm to a Russian tank shell before it blew up.”

“Yeah, so?”

“There are some indications that the impact point was high up, on the CID’s shoulder, and not on the arm itself. In which case, the arm’s actuators and control links might not have been severely damaged,” Patrick said quietly. “The same goes for your machine, Whack. It took a hell of a beating before the end, but the Russians could still have salvaged any number of functional or near-functional systems from the wreckage.”

Brad stared at his father. “You really think Gryzlov could reverse-engineer the CIDs from a bunch of half-fried odds and ends?”

“Let’s just say it’s a possibility I can’t rule out,” the older man said. “But we can be sure his scientists and engineers are hard at work studying whatever they retrieved from the battlefield. And now that they know what our CIDs can do—” He shrugged.

“‘What one man can invent, another can discover,’” Nadia quoted slowly, looking worried.

Patrick nodded. “Sooner or later… hopefully much later… the Russians are likely to figure out how to build their own war robots. And when that day comes, Gryzlov isn’t going to be shy about using them in combat.”

“Facing off against Russian CIDs?” Brad grimaced. “Well, crap, Dad. Based on what we just experienced in the simulator, that would really suck.”

His father nodded. “Which is why we better start figuring out how to fight and win that kind of battle.” He offered Macomber a wry, half-apologetic smile. “Hence the sucker punch today, Whack.”

“One thing still bugs me, though,” Brad said, thinking back over the way the enemy CIDs had seemingly materialized out of nowhere. “You programmed in those Russian robots with the equivalent of our thermal and chameleon camouflage systems, didn’t you?”

“Yep.”

Nadia frowned. “But we stripped the thermal tiles and chameleon plates off the CIDs we sent to Perun’s Aerie before the raid itself. In those arctic winter conditions, neither camouflage system was worth the weight or power expenditure.”

“True,” Patrick agreed.

“So there’s no possible way the Russians could reverse-engineer our camouflage gear. Not from anything they might have pulled out of the wrecks,” Brad pointed out.

“Nope,” his father agreed again.

“Then why throw that kind of high-tech invisibility-cloak shit at us in the sim?” Whack demanded. “What’s next? Force fields and plasma guns?”

“‘Train hard, fight easy,’” Patrick said with a grin, quoting the famous eighteenth-century Russian soldier Field Marshal Suvorov. Then his expression turned more serious. He tapped the exoskeleton sheathing his crippled body. “Look, Colonel, most of this complicated hardware is necessary just to keep me breathing. There’s no way I’ll ever fly a plane or pilot a CID again. So, the way I see it, I have one job. Just one. And that’s to do whatever I can to make sure the rest of you are ready for the fight that may be coming.”

His lopsided smile returned. “Even if I have to cheat like crazy to do it.” He looked around the table. “Anyone here have a problem with that?”

There was a moment’s silence. Finally, Nadia cocked her head to one side, looking thoughtful. “No, what you say makes sense.” She matched the older McLanahan’s grin with one of her own. “Better that we die a thousand times in the computer than get our asses kicked just once on a real battlefield.”