Brown, Dale - Patrick McLanahan 09 (46 page)

           
“Roger. Be advised, Dewey and
Deverill have been captured.”

           
“Oh, shit.”

 
          
“Annie
is still in contact with us,” Luger went on. “They were captured by locals and
turned over to Border Police. They’re not on the move right now—we think
they’re in a vehicle. but stationary right now. Deverill is unconscious. Stand
by . .. your magnetic course is one-one-seven degrees, range two-two-three
nautical miles. One thousand feet AGL should be a good emergency safe altitude
for you.”

 
          
“I’ve
got a good visual on the terrain,” Briggs said. “We’re on our way. ETA, seventy
minutes.” The Ukrainian pilots did lot have night-vision goggles, but Briggs
could see everything with perfect clarity with his electronic visor sensors.
“One-one-seven degree heading, boys,” Briggs shouted to the pilots. “And step
on it.”

 
          
“Step
on it.
Bistro. Ochen bistro.
Haul ass, right, Mr. Robot?” the pilot
echoed, laughing. Obviously, the pilots were much more excited about this
mission than the base commander was. They lifted off the ground and headed off,
staying just above the treetops.

Codlea
,
Romania

That same time

           
About a hundred miles
north-northwest of the Romanian capital of Bucharest, nestled within the
foothills of the Transylvanian Alps, Codlea was the site of a former Warsaw
Pact bombing range and dispersal airfield, long ago sold to Pavel Kazakov—he
never said why a Russian “businessman” needed an entire military base in the
Carpathian Mountains, and the Romanian government, after seeing how much
Kazakov was willing to pay for the abandoned ghost town of a base, didn’t ask.

 
          
Romania
was a rich source of weapons, fuel,
maintenance personnel, intelligence officers, and fighters—all it took was
money, and the supplies seemed unlimited.
Romania
, once only a junior member of the Warsaw
Pact, had developed a substantial weapons-manufacturing industry during the
Nicolae Ceausescu regime, manufacturing license-built and copies of Soviet and
Chinese weapons of all kinds, from small-arms ammunition to jet fighters. With
the fall of the
Soviet
Union
,
Russia
and
China
flooding the markets with weapons, and hard
economic times in most of
Eastern Europe
, those weapons factories turned to the underground weapons dealers to
stay alive. Kazakov was a regular and welcome customer in
Romania
.

 
          
From
the outside, the big hangar looked as decrepit and as much in danger of
collapse as all the buildings out there. But on closer inspection, one would
first notice that the tall five meter-high barbed-wire fence surrounding the
hangar was new. As one got closer, it’d be apparent that the peeling paint,
loose siding, and rusty bolts on the outside of the hangar actually hid a
soundproof steel lining, and that the old hangar door actually sat squarely on
well-lubricated rollers. Although grass still popped up through cracks all over
the runway and taxiways, some of the grass was clearly mashed down in places,
denoting very recent activity by heavy vehicles.

 
          
Inside
the fifty year-old hangar was one of the world’s most modern aircraft—the
Metyor-179 “Tyenee” stealth fighter-bomber. After its raid on Kukes, Pavel Kazakov
had had Stoica and Yegorov fly the plane to this isolated, virtually unknown
destination, where fuel, maintenance, and weapons were waiting. A crew’ of
thirty technicians and workers were standing by, ready to check out the plane,
download postmission data from its computers, and get it ready for its next
mission.

 
          
After
its first taste of action, the Mt-179 was in almost perfect condition. The
pilot. Ion Stoica, was examining the aircraft with the maintenance chief during
an early-morning status briefing, "That’s the worst of it, Mr. Stoica,’’
the maintenance superv isor said. He pointed to the leading edge of the wing
near the muzzles where the air-to-air missiles were fired, "The missiles
are ejected from the launch tubes by a slug of compressed nitrogen gas. The gas
slug is supposed to push the missile thirty to forty meters from the wing
before the missile’s motor fires, to avoid any exhaust damage to the wing. For
some reason, the missiles are only being pushed ten to fifteen meters away before
the motor ignites. The tube’s shutter, which is titanium. protects the inside
of the wing from exhaust damage, but the exhaust is badly corroding the surface
of the leading edge, and it appears that the shutter is partially open when the
motor fires, because we are seeing some heat damage inside the launch tube
itself."

 
          
"What
do you recommend?’’ Stoica asked.

 
          
"Several
things: a larger and higher-pressure nitrogen bottle, bigger feed lines to the
launch tube, redesigned replacement seals inside the launch tube, perhaps a
faster-acting shutter to protect the tube, and perhaps some extra titanium
sheathing around the muzzles to protect the wing,” the maintenance chief said.

           
“How soon can we get these things?”

 
          
“Not
long at all—-if we were at Zhukovsky,” the maintenance chief said. “Out here in
the middle of
Transylvania
, there’s probably not a piece of titanium
anywhere for three hundred kilometers. It will take time to obtain and
fabricate these parts. And if Mr. Kazakov moves us again, it will only delay
repairs even longer.”

 
          
“Can
we still use the interior launchers?” Gennadi Yegorov, the Mt-l79’s weapons
officer, asked.

 
          
“You
see how much damage was done after one launch, Mr. Yegorov,” the maintenance
chief said. “One more launch could severely damage the composite wing, and then
we’re looking at a long and complicated repair job. If it damages the structure
around the launch tube, we could be looking at replacing the entire inboard
wing section—that could take weeks, even months,”

 
          
Yegorov
looked at Stoica, then shrugged. “We can keep the tubes loaded in case of
emergencies,” he suggested, “and depending on our mission, we can load missiles
on wing pylons.”

 
          
“How
much do loaded wing pylons increase our radar cross-section?”

 
          
“Ya
nee znayoo
, ” Yegorov replied. “I would guess about ten to fifteen
percent—more if we had air-to-ground missiles. But if we needed the stealth
capability more than the missiles, we could always jettison the pylons and we
would regain our stealth cross-section, and we’d still have air-to-air weapons
on board in case of emergency.”

 
          
“The
internal launch tubes that you did not use on your last flight are loaded with
R-60s and they’re ready to go,” the maintenance chief said. “We need to clear
the damage from the other launch tubes before we can load missiles in there. We
can get the shutters to retract, but we need to find out if there’s any
internal damage.”

 
          
“You’d
better get started, then,” Stoica said. “I don’t know what the boss has in
store for us, but I’d like to be ready to fly as soon as—”

 
          
Just
then, one of the planning officers ran up to them. “Did you guys hear? There’s
some kind of air defense emergency declared on the Russia-Ukraine border. The
Russian Air Force is scrambling dozens of jets. Sounds like a war going on!”

 
          
They
all hurried over to the operations office, where they monitored several UHF.
HF, and satellite channels belonging to the Russian Air Force and other Russian
military agencies, courtesy of Colonel-General Zhurbenko. It did indeed sound
as if a full-scale air war was in progress. Several Russian aircraft and air
defense sites had already been destroyed. The entire southeast military
district was under an air defense emergency.

 
          
“Vi
shooteetye!"
Yegorov exclaimed. “I wish we were up there! We could
show them all what a
real
fighter jet can do!”

 
          
Stoica
shrugged, then looked at the maintenance chief. “Well, let's go. Load those
missile pylons on board, give us a full load of missiles, and let's see what
happens.”

 
          
“You're
crazy!”

 
          
“We
need to test what our detection threshold is for pylon- mounted weapons,”
Stoica said. “We still have some darkness left—we'll be back over the
Carpathians well before daylight. Let's do it.”

 
          
Everyone
had the same thought—what will Pavel Kazakov do when he finds out we launched
his stealth fighter without permission?—but everyone was game if Ion Stoica was
willing to okay the flight. If he was going to take the heat, that left
everyone else off the hook.

 
          
The
maintenance crews already had pylons ready to upload—they just had to transfer
weapons from the weapon storage area: several steel and concrete containers
flown in by transport plane—to the maintenance hangar Stoica selected two R-60
heat-seeking air-to-air missiles on each pylon, plus One R-27 radar-homing missile
mounted on the bottom of the pylon. The R-27 missile, developed at Metyor
Aerospace, was designed to attack airborne radar aircraft and electronic
warfare aircraft from long range—the missile could home in on enemy radio,
radar, or jamming transmissions, as well as be guided by the Mt-179's fire
control radar.

 
          
Although
the Tyenee with its long forward-swept wings, seemed to completely engulf the
mounted weapon pylons, the externally mounted weapons also obviously spoiled
the stealth fighter's smooth, sleek lines. “It’s certain our stealth
characteristics are going to suffer,” Stoica said. “But we need to find out by
how much. If we can penetrate
Belgorod
airspace and cruise around undetected, we
know we have a good system.”

 
          
“And
maybe we'll bag ourselves a Ukrainian or Turkish fighter,” Yegorov said
happily. He waved a sheet of paper. “I've got the latest radar plots and fixes
on the unidentified aircraft—we can be there in twenty minutes.”

Aboard the Ukrainian Mi-8 helicopter

 
          
Just
as the first rays of light were peeping over the horizon, the Ukrainian
helicopter crossed the Russian border. “Dave, how are we doing?” Briggs asked
via the satellite transceiver.

 
          
“Five
degrees right, then straight ahead, thirty-one miles,” Luger replied. “
Belgorod
early-warning radar is forty miles south,
but I think you're below their coverage. Continue terrain masking. Dewey and
Deverill are on the move. Looks like they’re in a vehicle, heading southeast
toward
Belgorod
. They might be on the highway, judging by how
fast they’re moving. They’re about twenty miles north of the town of
Jakovlevo
. We’re trying to get a good satellite image
of the area to see if we can identify the vehicle, but I don’t think there’s
time. I’ll vector you in as close as I can, and then you’ll have to take it
from there.”

 
          
The
chase took only a few more minutes. The highway they were following was growing
quickly—it was the main highway between
Moscow
and
Sevastopol
, running almost the entire width of western
Russia
. Traffic was increasing rapidly as the
workday began. “This is going to be like finding a needle in a haystack,”
Briggs said grimly. “We can see several dozen vehicles out here.”

 
          
“
Twelve o’clock
, five miles,” Luger said. “Speed forty-
eight knots ... four miles, straight ahead ... three miles ... speed forty-five
knots ...”