Iron Wolf (16 page)

23
RD
A
IR
B
ASE,

M
INSK
M
AZOWIECKI
A
IRFIELD,
P
OLAND

L
ATER THAT EVENING

“This is not wise, sir,” Major Dariusz Stepniak said quietly.

Like the rest of Piotr Wilk's security detail, Stepniak wore running shoes, sweatpants, a T-shirt, and a lightweight windbreaker concealing a shoulder holster. Agents of Poland's BOR, the Bureau of Government Protection, its equivalent of the U.S. Secret Service, always accompanied their nation's chief executive in public. That included going with him on his regular evening run—part of a rigorous daily exercise regimen Wilk had maintained since his days as a cadet at the Air Force Academy in Deblin.

Ordinarily, the Polish president took great pleasure in pushing his bodyguards to their physical limits, sometimes running them into the ground. But this evening was different. He had just ordered Stepniak and his three agents to let him run alone.

“The international situation is too unsettled,” the major insisted. “You should not take unnecessary risks.”

Wilk shook his head. “I don't need you dogging my heels tonight, Major.” He waved at their surroundings, the edge of a small forest adjacent to the military airfield's runways and revetments. “We're inside the perimeter fence here. No one who isn't authorized can get in or out past the sensors and security guards.” He smiled. “I promise I'll stick to the trails and I'll have my phone ready, just in case. Okay? Look, what I really need right now is some uninterrupted thinking time—some peace and quiet.”

The roar of a MiG-29 taking off from a nearby runway punctuated his words.

Major Stepniak raised his voice to be heard. “You call this peace and quiet, sir?”

Wilk grinned. “Dariusz, for an old fighter pilot like me, the sound of a jet engine is like a childhood lullaby.” He patted the taller
man on the shoulder. “Now don't worry. I'll be careful. Just wait here for me and only come running if I call, right?”

Ten minutes later, Wilk loped along a dirt trail that wound back and forth among tall oaks, ash, and birch trees. Patches of shadow alternated with slashes of red-tinged light cast by the setting sun. He ran easily, not even breaking a sweat yet. But he kept one hand close to the phone clipped to his windbreaker. Despite the confidence he had shown Stepniak, he couldn't deny that this might turn out to be an incredibly stupid move.

He came around a bend and saw a man waiting for him, standing motionless in the shadows.

Wilk stopped.

Smiling politely, the man came forward onto the trail, out into the sunlight. “Thank you for agreeing to meet me like this, Mr. President,” he said. “I appreciate your trust.”

An American from that accent, Wilk judged. And an educated and sophisticated one, it seemed, wearing a perfectly tailored suit. They were about the same height and build, but the other man was older, with longish gray hair and a carefully trimmed gray beard. Which raised the question of just how someone of that age and dressed so neatly had managed to pass, undetected, through the airfield's security perimeter.

For a moment, the Polish president's hand moved toward his phone. Maybe he should call for backup after all. Then he saw the flash of amusement in the other man's eyes. “My phone has no signal, does it?” he asked carefully in fair English.

“Probably not,” the gray-haired man admitted. He stepped closer. “Captain Rozek's message to my company stressed your desire for absolute discretion. In the circumstances, I consider that very wise. My people tell me the Russians have really ramped up their intelligence operations in your country over the past couple of weeks.”

Wilk shook hands with him and then looked more closely . . . and slowly his eyes widened in undisguised surprise. “Martindale,”
he realized. “You are Kevin Martindale, once the president of the United States.”

“I was,” the other man said calmly. “But now I run Scion.”

“As a private citizen?” Wilk asked.

Martindale nodded. “That's right. Scion takes U.S. government contracts from time to time, but I don't take orders from politicians.” He showed his teeth in a quick grin. “Unless I agree with them, of course.”

“Then you are a . . .”—Wilk searched for the right words—“a
najemnik
? A mercenary? A hired gun?”

Martindale shook his head. “Not exactly.” He looked closely at Wilk. “As president of the United States, I focused most of my energy and attention on its defenses and on the defense of the whole free world.”

Wilk nodded. “Of course.”

“Well, that's still my focus,” Martindale said. “In some ways, I find it a lot easier now. Operating out of the limelight and without all the fretting about short-term politics means that Scion can be far more effective than any government outfit—even those supposed to act covertly like the CIA.”

Wilk frowned. “But acting without government sanction seems—”

“Dangerous?”

Wilk nodded again. “I was going to say ‘irresponsible,' Mr. President.”

“Irresponsible, no,” Martindale said. “Dangerous . . . of course. The world is still a dangerous place, perhaps even more dangerous than it was during the first Cold War,” he continued softly. “Men like Gennadiy Gryzlov and other rogue state leaders don't feel constrained by ideology or even caution and common sense the way the old Communist Party hacks often were. They're increasingly aggressive and increasingly willing to use force to achieve their objectives.” The American studied Wilk for a few moments. “Then again, you know that better than anyone, don't you?”

The Polish president nodded stiffly.
“Tak, panie prezydencie,”
he said. “Yes, Mr. President.”

“Well, that's where Scion comes in,” Martindale said. “You've been looking for a means to offset Russia's superior numbers and more advanced weapons. My company has what you need. We can provide Poland with a small but extremely powerful and incredibly effective combined ground and air strike force—one that will be able to conduct deep-penetration raids against the Russians if they attack you again.”

“Under whose command?” Wilk demanded. “After all, you've just told me that you don't take orders from politicians. And I, for my sins, am the political leader of my country.” He stared hard at the gray-haired American executive. “But first and foremost, I am the commander in chief of Poland's armed forces, Mr. Martindale. I have no interest in employing other military forces beyond my control. Which means I will not hire soldiers or pilots or weapons technicians whom I cannot trust to obey my orders.”

“That's a fair point,” the other man acknowledged. “What I would propose is this: as Poland's president and commander in chief, you would retain absolute strategic control over any Scion strike forces we provide. That means you pick the targets and you decide whether or not to execute any operations using our people. But you leave the operational and tactical decision making to us. You tell Scion what to hit and when to strike, but you leave the details of how we employ our weapons and systems to accomplish those missions to us.”

“In other words, I should not act like another Lyndon Baines Johnson during the Vietnam War, sitting in my office and picking out bomb loads and aircraft routes?” Wilk suggested with a thin smile.

“Precisely,” Martindale said with an answering smile. “If you hire us, you're hiring experts who understand all the ins and outs of the advanced weapons we can bring to bear. You fight the war. Let us fight the battles.”

“Your offer is tempting,” Wilk said slowly. “And I know how effectively your Scion teams fought against the Turks invading Iraq.”

“But?”

“But Russia's ground and air forces are more powerful than the
Turkish divisions and fighter squadrons your company faced, perhaps by an order of magnitude.” Wilk sighed. “As impressive as your capabilities are said to be, I do not see how they can provide a significant edge against Moscow. No matter how powerful your weapons are individually, the sheer numbers of tanks, artillery, and aircraft Russia can bring to any battle will inevitably overwhelm any small force. No matter how much I fear and despise Gryzlov and his kind, I would be irresponsible to stake my country's fate on a confrontation we cannot win.”

“John F. Kennedy once quoted the Irish statesman Edmund Burke as saying that ‘all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing,' ” Martindale said. “Burke also wrote that ‘when bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.' ”

He looked closely at Wilk. “Give me access to a secure military area, Mr. President,” Scion's chief executive suggested quietly. “And I will show you some of what we can do together against our common enemies.”

What we think, or what we know, or what we believe is, in the end, of little consequence. The only consequence is what we do.

—
J
OHN
R
USKIN,
B
RITISH ART CRITIC, WRITER, AND PHILANTHROPIST

D
RAWSKO
P
OMORSKIE
M
ILITARY

T
RAINING
A
REA,
N
ORTHWEST
P
OLAND

S
EVERAL DAYS LATER

Set in western Pomerania's patchwork of woods, rolling hills, swamps, broad clearings, and villages, the military training area was the largest of its kind in Europe, with more than one hundred and thirty square miles of territory available for maneuvers and live fire exercises. Littered with the burned-out hulks of old Soviet tanks and self-propelled guns, it had been used by the Polish Army since 1945 and by NATO forces since 1996.

Now Drawsko Pomorskie had been turned over to Scion. For more than seventy-two hours, Sky Masters cargo aircraft had been busy flying in more old military equipment—U.S. Army surplus
Humvees, M-60 tanks, M-113 armored personnel carriers, Huey helicopters, and aircraft salvaged from the U.S. Air Force's Boneyard, including F-4 Phantoms and T-38 Talon trainers. Polish Army combat engineers and other technical specialists had dispersed this array of vehicles and aircraft across a sector of the exercise area. At Kevin Martindale's suggestion, they had also liberally seeded the range with barbed-wire entanglements, antitank obstacles, concealed minefields, and hidden machine-gun emplacements set to fire by remote control. None of the minefields or machine-gun nests were marked on the maps given to Scion's demonstration team.

President Piotr Wilk, Defense Minister Gierek, Martindale, and a handful of trusted aides and senior Polish officers crowded inside a secure bunker built into a hillside. Firing slits and observation ports overlooked a valley now filled with dozens of pieces of camouflaged military hardware.

“All monitoring and defense systems ready,” Captain Nadia Rozek told them, repeating the radioed message passed along by the training area's exercise control team. She listened to the next transmission as it came through her headset and looked up. “All perimeter security units on full alert. Standing by.”

Wilk lowered his binoculars and glanced at Martindale. “I hope that you are sure about this. Between the minefields we have emplaced and the heavy weapons zeroed in on this sector, it is a potential deathtrap for the personnel in your demonstration unit.”

Scion's chief executive smiled. “I think our guy will be okay.”

“One man?” Wilk asked in surprise. He nodded toward the exercise area. “Against a simulated force larger than a battalion?”

“That's right,” Martindale said. He shrugged. “I told you that Scion could give you an edge against the Russians if the balloon goes up. Well, it's time to show you exactly what I meant.”

“I suggest we give Mr. Martindale his chance to dazzle us, Piotr,” Janusz Gierek said drily. Since being briefed on Scion's offer, the defense minister had made no secret of his doubts about the company's claims. “Then, after all of his special effects fade away, we can make a sensible and pragmatic decision.”

“I hope you will forgive Janusz,” Wilk said to the American with a smile. “He is our resident skeptic. If I tell him it is a dark night out, he usually insists on personally verifying that with a light meter.”

“No offense taken, Mr. President,” Martindale said. He chuckled. “Every good government needs a take-no-prisoners bullshit detector. My own country could probably have saved a few trillion dollars over the past couple of decades if we'd listened more carefully to our own folks like Defense Minister Gierek.”

“Very well,” Wilk said. “Then you may tell your Scion unit to move into position.”

“He's already there,” Martindale said, grinning openly now. He glanced at his watch. “By my estimate, he's been in position at the edge of those woods about two kilometers west of here for at least the last half hour.”

“That is impossible!” Gierek snapped. “That area has been under constant observation—both visually and with thermal imaging systems—since the sun rose. No one has reported any movement there.”

“You asked Mr. Martindale to dazzle us, Janusz,” Wilk said carefully, hiding his own amusement. “Perhaps he has already begun.” He turned back to the gray-haired American. “You can signal your man to begin the demonstration.”

Martindale turned to Nadia Rozek. “Would you do that for me, please, Captain?” he asked, with another broad smile. “Just broadcast, ‘You're good to go, CID One,' over that radio of yours.”

Nadia arched a finely sculpted eyebrow. “Over which frequency, Mr. Martindale?”

“Oh, you can pick one at random,” he told her confidently. “That should do the trick.”

Carefully controlling her expression, Nadia turned back to her American-made SINCGARs combat radio set and punched in a new frequency—deliberately choosing one far away from that which she had been using all morning. Then she picked up the
handset and said, “This is Drawsko Pomorskie Exercise Control. You are good to go, CID One.”

Crouched down in a clump of bushes at the edge of the forest, Patrick McLanahan waited patiently. It had taken some careful maneuvering to get his twelve-foot-plus-tall Cybernetic Infantry Device so close to the exercise area without being spotted. Those who had never seen one of these humanlike machines in action would not have believed it possible for something so big to move so quietly and agilely, taking advantage of every available piece of cover and fold in the ground. Sometimes he thought Kevin Martindale enjoyed these moments of showmanship a bit too much, but there was no denying that the former president knew how to wow an audience.

A red dot pulsed at the edge of his vision. The CID's sensors, which automatically scanned all radio frequencies, had picked up an incoming transmission at the very edge of the VHF spectrum. He flicked a finger and heard Captain Rozek's voice giving him the “go” signal.

Without waiting any longer, Patrick surged into motion. His CID burst out of the woods, already accelerating toward the exercise area at a speed of more than sixty miles an hour. A shape, an old M-60 main battle tank draped in camouflage netting, was suddenly silhouetted off to his left, more than a thousand yards away. The CID's battle computer evaluated it as a priority target.

“Gotcha,” Patrick said under his breath. He detached the electromagnetic rail gun from one of the weapons packs his CID carried and powered it up. Still running, he swung the gun toward the tank and fired once. In a burst of plasma and with a deafening, tree-shaking
CCRRACK!
a small superdense metal projectile hurtled downrange at more than Mach 5. Slamming into the M-60, it ripped straight through the tank's heavy armor and punched out through the other side. The enormous impact vaporized metal in a dazzling white flash and set the air inside the turret and hull on fire.

More targets appeared, each marked in a different color corresponding to its perceived threat level and the weapon the CID's computer judged most appropriate. In quick succession and while moving at high speed, Patrick switched between firing the rail gun, a 40mm grenade launcher, and a 25mm autocannon—often firing two weapons almost simultaneously at different targets.

Humvees, armored personnel carriers, and parked aircraft were torn apart by explosions or shredded from end to end. A dense cloud of smoke by the burning vehicles drifted across the exercise area.

Patrick plunged ahead, charging directly into one of the fake villages built by the Polish Army for urban combat training. He skidded around the edge of a building and ran down the main street. Suddenly a remotely controlled machine gun opened up on him from a second-floor window; 7.62mm rounds hammered his torso, ricocheting off its composite armor in a shower of sparks.

He swiveled and fired, sending a 40mm high-explosive grenade straight through the window. It went off. The machine gun, wrecked by the blast and fragments, fell silent.

Patrick veered right. His CID smashed through the walls of one of the buildings without slowing and erupted out into open ground again in a cloud of dust, broken concrete, and splintered wood. He angled back to the left, circling around the village while systematically knocking out defensive positions highlighted by his sensors.

Still on the move, he fired the electromagnetic rail gun again, smashing a tank parked hull down near a mocked-up church, complete with a tall steeple. Explosives rigged to simulate stored ammunition inside the M-60 cooked off. A huge explosion sent its massive turret tumbling skyward and turned the church into smoldering pile of shattered rubble.

A tangle of barbed wire loomed up out of the smoke. The computer highlighted a swath of ground twenty meters wide beyond the wire. Its thermal imagers and radar had detected a belt of antipersonnel and antiarmor mines sown to catch anyone breaking through the barbed-wire obstacle. More remotely controlled machine guns were sited to kill anyone trying to clear the mines.

“Nice try, fellas,” Patrick murmured, grinning now. “But not today.”

Without hesitating, he raced right up to the barbed wire and then jumped—bounding high into the air, soaring across the minefield and well beyond it. While still in the air, he fired again and again, smashing machine-gun nests with grenades and 25mm cannon shells. His CID came down on the run and put on more speed.

Another alert pinged his senses. Audio pickups, filtering out all the battle noise, were picking up the sound of rotors drawing closer. Patrick twisted, seeking the source of the noise. There!

A Scion drone, configured to emulate the noise and heat signature of a Russian Mi-28 helicopter gunship, popped up over a distant hill and sped toward him. Without pausing, he slid the 40mm grenade launcher back onto its weapons pack mount and detached a Stinger surface-to-air missile. While running across the track of the oncoming drone, he swiveled his CID's torso, letting the handheld missile's infrared seeker scan. A harsh buzz sounded. The Stinger had locked on.

He fired.

The missile tore away in a plume of fire and white exhaust, visibly guiding on its target. Hit just below its rotors, the drone blew up in a cloud of fire, black smoke, and spinning fragments.

“Exercise complete. Repeat, exercise complete!” Patrick heard Captain Rozek radio. Her voice, up to now so calm and businesslike, contained an undercurrent of shock and awe. “Weapons safe, CID One. Halt in place for further instructions.”

“My God,” Wilk said, peering through his binoculars. The valley below their bunker was a sea of wrecked and burning vehicles and buildings. “It is incredible. Absolutely incredible.” He glanced over his shoulder at Martindale. “The reports I read do not come anywhere close to capturing what your weapons systems can do. They certainly do not do justice to the astonishing power of these manned war machines.”

“True,” the American said. He shrugged. “And we've worked very hard to make sure that they don't. Fortunately, very few political or military decision makers are willing to believe the stories told by those who've survived close contact with the CIDs. So far, we don't think the Russians or the Chinese have the ability to reverse engineer this technology, but we'd rather not give them any more incentives to try than they already have.”

Martindale looked toward Janusz Gierek. “Well, Defense Minister? Can I consider you dazzled?”

Slowly, Gierek turned away from the firing slit. His face was pale. He looked down at his watch and then back up at Wilk and the others in amazement. “Twenty minutes!” he said hoarsely. “A whole battalion destroyed in twenty minutes. By
one
piloted robot.”

“In fairness, a battle fought against maneuvering armored vehicles and aircraft manned by living, thinking opponents would have been more difficult,” Martindale said. “But in the essentials, the outcome would have been the same.”

“You say this machine, this Cybernetic Infantry Device, is invincible?” Wilk asked, still studying the large, humanlike machine standing motionless amid the drifting smoke.

“Invincible?” Martindale shook his head. “No. Not invincible. But in the hands of a skilled pilot employing the right tactics, the CID can fight and expect to defeat larger enemy forces with substantially more firepower.” He gestured toward the distant war machine. “Together with the other weapons and technologies Scion can put in the mix, the CID's combination of speed, agility, precision targeting, and protection acts as a remarkable force multiplier.” Then he chuckled. “That may sound like a hack-written defense-contractor marketing brochure, Mr. President, but now you know it's the God's honest truth.”

Wilk nodded slowly. “No one can dispute that.” He studied Martindale's face. “I would like to take a closer look at this astonishing machine of yours, if that is allowed.”

“Certainly,” Martindale agreed. “But let's have him come here. Your combat engineers planted a few too many land mines out there
for my taste.” He held out his hand to Nadia Rozek. “May I, Captain?”

Still shaking her head in disbelief at what she had just witnessed, she handed him the radio mike.

“CID One, this is Scion Prime,” Martindale said, keying the mike. “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and report to the observation bunker. It's show-and-tell time.”

Five minutes later, the small group of Polish officers and government officials stood blinking in the sunlight outside the bunker, staring up at the Cybernetic Infantry Device towering over them. When it was seen up close, hundreds of small hexagonal tiles covered a significant portion of the robot's “skin.”

“This is a Mod III CID,” Martindale told them. “We've upgraded some of the sensors and squeezed out better battery and fuel-cell life. But those tiles represent the major improvement we've made to this version.”