Iron Wolf (5 page)

Before the echoes of the blast faded, the two Ukrainians were up and running toward the headquarters building. Lytvyn tossed his windbreaker aside and opened fire with his AKS carbine on the move, hammering the fallen Spetsnaz troops with short bursts. Hunks of bullet-shattered concrete danced and skittered away. Kravchenko drew a Makarov pistol from his shoulder holster and thumbed the safety off.

Off to their right, a rifle cracked—dropping the pilot of Voronov's helicopter with a single shot.

Across the pad, twin turboshaft engines whined shrilly as the crews of both Ansat gunships went for emergency starts. Slowly at first and then faster, their rotors started turning.

Two of Kravchenko's men broke cover and dashed to the edge of the tarmac. They carried RPG-22 antitank rocket launchers. Both men stopped, braced, and fired almost simultaneously. Finned, rocket-propelled grenades streaked across the pad and slammed into the gunships.

The Ansat-2RCs blew up, torn apart by the RPG warheads and the detonation of their own fuel and ammunition. Twisted pieces of rotor and fuselage spiraled outward. Clouds of oily black smoke lit by fire boiled away from the heaps of blazing wreckage.

Pavlo Lytvyn charged into the OSCE headquarters building without slowing down. Kravchenko followed him.

Two ashen-faced Russian officers spun away from the windows looking out across the helicopter landing pad. They frantically clawed for the pistols holstered at their sides.

Lytvyn shot them at point-blank range and moved on down the central corridor.

The wide hallway ended in a door marked
BIROU DE COMAND
ă
and
KAMANDA OFIS
—“Command Office” in Romanian and Belarusian.

The big man kicked the door open and slid inside, moving sideways to cover the three stunned men—the two young officers who commanded this OSCE post and Lieutenant General Mikhail Voronov—grouped behind a large conference table covered with official documents and maps. He settled the stock of the AKS firmly against his shoulder. “Stay very still, gentlemen. And, please, keep your hands where I can see them.”

Fedir Kravchenko entered the room. He heard the shocked, indrawn breaths when they saw the mutilated left side of his face. Kiev's best plastic surgeons had done their utmost to repair the damage, but there hadn't been much left for them to work with.

He moved behind Voronov and the others, deftly relieving them of their sidearms. He tossed the pistols across the room and stepped back a pace.

“What do you want from us?” one of the two OSCE officers asked stiffly, keeping his eyes locked on the unwavering muzzle of Lytvyn's carbine.

“From you? Nothing,” Kravchenko said. He shrugged. “We are not your enemies. Once we're done here, you will be released safe and sound. Why, with a bit of luck, none of your men have even had their hair mussed.”

“Then I suppose you want
me
as your hostage,” Voronov growled.

With a faint smile, Kravchenko raised his Makarov and shot the Russian in the back of the head. “Wrong, General,” he said quietly. “Dead men are useless as hostages.”

Two minutes later, he led his strike team at a steady lope northwest across the tarmac. Skirting the burning Russian helicopters, they entered the forest, heading toward the Bug River several hundred meters away.

“You know those arms inspectors are going to start screaming for help over their cell phones any second now,” Pavlo Lytvyn said.

“Yes, I know.” Kravchenko nodded. He glanced at his subordinate with another quick, humorless grin. “In fact, I'm counting on it.”

O
FFICE OF
D
R.
H
UNTER
“B
OOMER
”

N
OBLE,
C
HIEF OF
A
EROSPACE

E
NGINEERING,
S
KYMASTERS,
I
NC.,

B
ATTLE
M
OUNTAIN,
N
EVADA

“Thanks, guys!” Brad said cheerfully to the stone-faced corporate security guards who had just ushered him into the office. “I probably would have gotten lost without you.”

The tall, lanky man sitting on the other side of the desk frowned. “Put him in a chair and get out,” he told the guards. “I'll handle this.”

Once the security personnel were gone, Brad looked across the desk with a wry grin. “Hey, Boomer! Long time no see.”

Hunter “Boomer” Noble shook his head in disgust. “Christ, Brad. I thought you had a handle on that dumb-ass McLanahan temper of yours. And then you pull a stunt like this?” He leaned forward. “Do you have any idea of the kind of money Sky Masters is going to have to lay out to keep this son of a bitch Carson from filing criminal assault charges against you?”

“A lot?” Brad guessed.

“Yes, a lot,” Boomer said. “As in free tuition for his courses and probably at least a six-figure, tax-free settlement.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. Ouch,” Boomer agreed. He sighed. “Look, I went to bat for you with Richter and Kaddiri for this internship. They admired your dad, but they didn't always see eye to eye with him. And they are not going to be real happy to hear that his son shares his less appealing qualities.”

Brad nodded. As chief executive officer and chairman of the board respectively, Jason Richter and Helen Kaddiri ran Sky Masters as a tight-knit team. They didn't exactly manage business matters with a nakedly iron hand, but there was definitely a touch of something hard and inflexible inside the velvet glove. According to the corporate rumor mill, they were also a heck of a lot more than mere business associates, but nobody had any hard evidence of a romantic affair.

“Sorry, Boomer,” he said, trying to put a little sincere contriteness into his voice. In truth, he was genuinely sorry. Despite the long hours and lack of pay, this internship at Sky Masters had been a dream come true. In two months, he had picked up more about the subjects he really loved—flying, aerospace technology, and tactics—than he could ever have learned in four years at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs or at Cal Poly–San Luis Obispo, where he was a student of aerospace engineering.

“I bet you really are,” Boomer said. He shook his head again. “But you still couldn't stop yourself from going apeshit crazy on that asshole.”

“I
was
provoked,” Brad pointed out.

“Maybe by the letter of the law,” Boomer agreed. “Too bad that's not the way the corporate world works, even here at Sky Masters.”

“Which means what exactly?” Brad prompted.

“Which means you're out,” Boomer told him. “Canned. Axed. Terminated with prejudice. Pick your own favorite phrase.” He sighed again. “Look, Brad, ordinarily I don't do shit for someone I'm firing, especially not some jackass intern. But I respected your dad a hell of a lot . . . so I'm giving you a onetime severance package.” He tossed a manila folder across the desk. “There. Don't waste it.”

Brad flipped open the folder and found himself staring at his passport, a plane ticket to Mexico, and several thousand dollars in cash. Caught by surprise, he looked up at Boomer.

“Go spend some time hanging out on the beach with the señoritas and get your head screwed on straight, before you restart school,” the other man said. “Just don't plan on blowing the next forty years playing around in the sand, okay?”

This time Brad caught the twinkle in Boomer's eye. Forty years in the desert. EXODUS. Right. Now he knew who had relayed his father's signal through the simulator program. He grinned back across the desk. “I'll be a good boy, Dr. Noble,” he said. “I promise I won't cause any more trouble.”

“See that you don't,” Hunter Noble said with a wry smile. He cocked his head to one side. “But I hope you won't mind if I don't hold my breath on that promise of yours. Because I sure don't hear any ice freezing over down in hell.”

Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.

—
N
APOLEON
H
ILL,
A
MERICAN AUTHOR

O
VER
U
KRAINE

T
HIRTY MINUTES LATER

Two Russian Air Force Su-34 fighter-bombers in black, white, and light blue camouflage streaked west, flying low over the flat Ukrainian countryside. Precision-guided bombs, antiradiation missiles, and air-to-air missiles hung from their external hardpoints.

The lead pilot, Major Viktor Zelin, caught sight of smoke from the wrecked helicopters rising on the horizon. He throttled back as he banked into a hard turn and climbed—a maneuver copied by his wingman, flying in loose formation aft and about two kilometers off his right wing. He craned his neck to get a quick look at the Starovoitove station as it flashed below, catching a fleeting glimpse of flashing blue lights on the highway and around the OSCE post. It looked like the Ukrainian police were on the scene, he thought.
Nu i chto?
Well, so what? What good were ordinary policemen going
to do against a murderous terrorist gang? Especially one that was probably made up of their bastard countrymen?

“Inform Voronezh Control that we have the attack area in sight,” he told the navigation and weapons officer in the right-hand seat.

“Sending now,” Captain Nikolai Starikov acknowledged. He transmitted the message using a series of short, three-figure Morse codes, and then checked the glowing multifunction map display in front of him. “We're right up against the border,” he warned. “We're going to stray across into Polish airspace.”

“No shit,” Zelin grunted, continuing the turn and bleeding off more speed. Even with its superb maneuverability and flying just fast enough to stay in the air, the Su-34 had a turning radius measured in kilometers. There was no way his flight could orbit close enough to the OSCE post to keep it in sight and stay entirely on the Ukrainian side of the frontier.

Suddenly a warning tone sounded in both men's headsets.

“Search radar spike,” Starikov said, studying his displays. “L-band. Single emitter. Computer evaluates it as a long-range Polish RAT 31DL radar. Strength is sufficient to detect us.”

“No surprise now that we're off the deck,” the major commented. He showed his teeth. “But I bet some fucking Pole just crapped his pants when we popped up onto his screen.” Then he shrugged against his harness. “Let's hear what they have to say.”

“Switching to GUARD channel,” Starikov reported. The international emergency channel was commonly used for communication between aircraft and ground stations belonging to different nations.

“This is the Warsaw Operations Center calling the two aircraft now turning two hundred and twenty-five degrees over Starovoitove at one thousand meters, identify yourselves. Repeat. Identify yourselves,” a Polish-accented voice said in their earphones.

“Nice of him to speak Russian,” Zelin snorted. He keyed his mike. “Warsaw Operations Center, this is Sentinel Flight Leader.”

“Sentinel Leader, you are on course to violate our airspace!” the Polish air defense controller radioed. “Withdraw to the east immediately. Repeat. Turn east immediately!”

The major glanced at his subordinate. “Find out what Voronezh wants us to do. Meanwhile, I'll try to buy us some time.”

Starikov nodded, already tapping out another series of short Morse codes that would alert their own commander to their situation and ask for new orders.

“Warsaw Center, this is Sentinel Leader,” the Su-34 pilot said. “Regret unable to comply with your request. We are conducting an emergency antiterrorist operation.”

“That is not a request, Sentinel Flight!” the Polish air defense controller snapped.

Zelin and his comrade stiffened as another warbling tone, shriller this time, sounded in their headsets.

“X-band tracking and fire control radar. Forward right quadrant,” Starikov said tightly. “Source is an SNR-125 and it has a lock!”

“Damn it,” the major muttered. That was the radar used by S-125M Neva surface-to-air missile system, the type NATO code-named the SA-3B Goa. Though old, it was still a highly capable weapon, especially with the digital component upgrades the Poles had made. Plus, circling like this left them sitting ducks against a SAM attack. If he stayed, he was risking two billion-ruble fighter-bombers.

He shook his head. It was a losing proposition. And no one in Moscow would thank him for triggering a shooting war with Poland without positive orders.

Followed by his wingman in the second Su-34, Zelin banked harder and dove, turning back to the east. The radar warning faded away.

“Voronezh approves a withdrawal to an ACP thirty kilometers east of the frontier,” the navigator told him, entering coordinates on one of the keypads at his station. “Cue up.”

Faintly glowing bars appeared on Zelin's HUD, above and to the right of his current course. He pulled back on the stick and turned, centering the bars on his display. These flight-director bars were a navigation cue that would lead them toward the ACP, the
air control point, selected by the staff back at Voronezh's Malshevo Air Base. Once there, the two Su-34s would fly a racetrack holding pattern designed to conserve their fuel.

“And when we get there, Nikolai? Then what?” he asked angrily, still furious at having been forced to turn tail and run. “Do we just fly around and around while those bastard Poles practice their radar search techniques against us?”

Starikov ignored his commander's ill-tempered outburst. He was too busy reading their new orders, freshly decoded by the Su-34's computers, as they scrolled across his display. “No, sir,” he told Zelin. “We're ordered to provide on-call air support for a Spetnaz quick reaction force. They've been tasked to hunt down and kill these terrorists, and their transport helicopters and Mi-24 attack helicopters are only ten minutes out. Vornezh is also vectoring two Su-35 fighters to the ACP to back us up. Further orders will come straight from the Kremlin.”

Major Viktor Zelin took that in and then smiled broadly. “
Otlichno!
Excellent! Maybe somebody in the high command just grew a pair!”