Authors: Chris Stewart
“Now, let's get back under the hatch, and get on our way.”
Keloslysky pushed the gunner's head back down into the steel turret, then waved to the driver to push through a small clump of trees.
DARK 709
Major Vasyl Peleznogorsk flew his fighter by pure instinct. He adjusted the throttles and airspeed, selected switches, maintained his altitude, and adjusted his radar, all without looking, doing it only by feel. Glancing to his left, he checked his wingman, who was still in a loose, night-tactical formation, one mile behind, 500 feet below him, and slightly off to his left. He monitored the tactical frequency on his radio, trying to get a feel for the situation as he listened to what little he could catch of the battle going on to his west.
He sat in an SU-27, the most advanced and maneuverable fighter in the world. When it came to finding, tracking, targeting, and shooting down other aircraft, the SU-27 was unmatched. It was better than the F-15. Better than the F-16. And far better than any NATO aircraft.
As he listened to his ground controllers, screaming directions to his squadron mates and vectoring them toward the incoming Ukrainian forces, he swore once again to himself.
How could he have been so unlucky?
All those marvelous targets. All those wonderful pieces of steel and wire. All the missiles and tracers and bullets. The hope and the glory. The thrill of a kill. The thrill of escape. The rush of quick heat in his head. It was life. It was death. It was all this and more.
He had been waiting for this moment for all of his life. Waiting and hoping and training.
The largest aerial engagement since World War II.
And he was missing it all.
He was stuck out here, hundreds of miles from the aerial action. Assigned to guard the eastern border. Assigned to drone in endless circles, searching the sky for attackers that he knew weren't even there.
So, just like Richard Ammon, who was 18,000 feet below him and twenty miles off to his right, Major Vasyl Peleznogorsk sat and cursed at his luck.
Only he did it for a much different reason.
REAPER'S SHADOW
Morozov was busily punching numbers into his offensive computer system. Their first target, a scattered deployment of mobile tactical missile launchers, hidden in a small valley and protected by a battery of SAMs and AAA, was still over two hundred miles to the north. But they were making good progress. It was all looking good. Passing the heavily defended border would be the most dangerous part. But so far, they were clean. No detection by enemy fighters. No detection by any of the ground-based radar or missile sites. Everything was going according to plan.
Morozov had already selected and programmed the weapon he would use to destroy the Russian nuclear missiles. A B-88, air-burst nuclear bomb.
Might as well start things out with a bang, he thought. Get things off to a real good start.
He finished punching the commands into his computer, double checked the coordinates, then sat back in his ejection seat and smiled.
DARK 709
Major Vasyl Peleznogorsk slammed his fist once again. They were just wasting time. There wasn't anything here. And they needed him out to the west.
Glancing back, he checked his wingman's position.
“Dark seven-oh-nine, what do you see?” he asked tersely into his mask.
“Nothing here, Major.”
“Yeah ... I've got nothing but Bread,” Peleznogorsk replied. Bread-code word for no action. No targets. Nothing to get excited about.
Peleznogorsk glanced at his radar and compared the terrain to his chart, then keyed his microphone switch once again.
“Dark seven-oh-nine, let's drop down to 4,000 feet. See if we can find any Bandits down low.”
REAPER'S SHADOW
Ammon looked at his time-to-target display. Thirty-five miles to the launch line. Just over three minutes to go. At two minutes, he would have to power up the Sunbeam's batteries and start to feed flight coordinates into its on-board computers. Up to that point, Morozov would have no idea. Prior to that, he still wouldn't know.
But at sixty seconds, when the Sunbeam went into its final countdown, a bright, red caution light would illuminate on Morozov's center CRT.
“SELECTED MISSILE IN FINAL COUNTDOWN,” the message would read.
The instant the message displayed on Morozov's screen, Ammon would make a quick turn to the west. Pushing his throttles up, he would make his last dash to the launch line. Morozov would then see the missile in its final countdown. He would read the target destination. He would feel the turn to the west. And then he would know. It might take him a moment to put it together, but soon enough, he would finally understand.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
President Allen took a quick sip of ice-water and swirled it around in his mouth before washing it down his dry throat. He looked at his watch for the thousandth time in the past twenty minutes.
“Any indication the Russians arc wary?” he demanded once again.
“Negative, sir,” the communications controller replied. “As of this moment, they have no indication. The Russian tactical communications are following a very familiar pattern. There has been no movement of any of their defensive air-patrols to the southeast. They still have their forces concentrated along the northwestern corridor.”
Blake looked up, his face a tight wad of concentration, his forehead furrowed. “The missile will be airborne within two minutes, sir.”
“Any word on the target?” the President asked for the fifth time in the past half-hour.
Blake shifted again in his seat. “No, sir. Not yet. But he's there. We will find him. I promise you that.”
EYE 27-27 SATELLITE
Forty-five miles above the earth, centered above Moscow, the newest American satellite was working in high gear. Its enormous radar antenna had already been deployed and was being used to create a stunning visual scene, even through the darkness of night. Powerful infrared sensors, designed to detect the most minute differences in heat sources, scanned the target location with enough definition to tell which individuals were wearing coats and which ones were not, based on the heat that escaped from their bodies. Working in conjunction with a series of computer-enhanced telescoping cameras, the satellite beamed through its search area. And what it saw was no less than amazing. The detail was perfectly dear.
Inside its central computer, the satellite put the information together. The radar. The infrared. The laser sensors. The optical scene. It pulled it all together and overlapped the different images into one incredible display. Through the crystal-clear vacuum of space, it continued to search for Fedotov.
MOSCOW, RUSSIA
The president of Russia sat at his desk inside the old stable and stared at the tactical display board which was mounted on the far wall. The screen depicted the air-land battle as it occurred over the Ukraine. His swollen eyes ran across the depiction of the various aircraft that were preparing for battle. Twelve hundred kilometers away, the Ukrainian prime minister hunkered in a deep underground command post and stared at an identical screen.
As the president watched, he could not believe his own eyes. But there it was, right before him. Unable to be denied. The evidence could not be refuted.
For the past ten minutes, he had been watching the Ukrainians assemble what appeared to be everyone of their remaining combat aircraft. The fighters had formed into five main groups and were sweeping toward the Russian border.
They were coming after his army with everything they had. They had scrambled every remaining fighter or tactical bomber, everything that could drop a weapon or shoot a gun, and sent them over the border. Didn't they know that they didn't have any hope?
Vladimir Fedotov suddenly felt very cranky. His fingers tingled and the blood roared in his ears. He fidgeted in an arrogant rage.
“Fools!” he cried to himself. Who did these guys think they were!? They would attempt to challenge his army! It was unbelievable! What did they hope to accomplish? He would smash them with a flick of his wrist. He would pound them into a red pulp of meaty mess. They wouldn't live to offend him again.
Vladimir Fedotov's breathing quickened as he turned to face General Nahaylo, his minister of defense.
“Tell me, what have you found?” he demanded. “What are they attempting to do?”
The minister of defense wiped at his nose. The winter was young, but already he was working his way through his third serious head cold. He quickly dabbed at his eyes, then shoved the dirty handkerchief into his pocket
“Sir, there is no reason to be alarmed. They don't have the forces to hurt us. Not even with such a massive attack. They are desperate, sir. That is all. They know we have readied our missiles, and now they do what little they can do. But it won't matter. Not in the long run. Within a few hours, the enemy fighters will not even have a home to defend.”
HQ/NATIONAL RECONNAISSANCE ORGANIZATION, WASHINGTON, D.C.
There were only four men in the control room, leaving it dark and quiet, which was very unusual. Normally, the control center would have been crowded with satellite controllers, intelligence officers, Space Command watch-supervisors, and other assorted technicians, busily going about their jobs as they hustled and jabbered with one another. But tonight, almost all of these men and women had been cleared from the room, leaving it lonely and quiet.
The satellite operations officer continued to punch commands into the computer to tighten up the picture. Beside him, the CIA and DIA directors watched in silent amazement.
An image of the Russian presidential fleet garage emerged on the enormous wall screen. Moving the satellite image just five or six feet at a time, the controller scanned the garage from above, using a combination of infrared and focused X-ray to cut through the thin metal roof and provide them with a picture of what was inside.
“As you can see, gentlemen, the presidential limousine is parked here, next to the door,” the controller said, while using his computer mouse to draw a circle around a dull glob of light. “Based on this infrared return and an analysis of its intensity, we have determined that the engine block is quite cool. Between fourteen and seventeen degrees Celsius. Just better than ambient temperature inside the garage. The vehicle has not been used for some time. Therefore, the target must still be somewhere inside the Kremlin.”
“Incredible,” Weber Coy muttered, more to himself then the others.
“Yes, it really is,” the operations officer replied. “In fact, 'incredible' might still be a bit of an understatement, for it would seem that, with the EYE, we now have a nearly unlimited opportunity to see pretty much whatever we want. All of it real-time. We watch as it happens. Instant gratification! What a beautiful thing.”
“Okay, okay.” the DIA director prodded. “We don't have much time. Let's go over to the square and take a look.”
The operations officer nodded to the satellite watch controller, who punched another series of keys at his computer. The image on the screen faded away and was lost in a thick darkness.
Above the earth, the EYE moved its enormous phased-arrayed radar and infrared sensors just a few millimeters to the north. The optical cameras moved just a fraction of a degree while tiny sensors refocused the lenses.
Then a startling image appeared on the screen. This one wasn't infrared like the image before, but a relay from the satellite's video cameras. The lighting was dim and subdued, but bright enough that the men could clearly see the cluster of military vehicles parked outside the back entrance to Fedotov's quarters. They watched as a group of soldiers milled underneath a bright security light, talking and pointing to each other. They could see the rank on their shoulders. They could make out the mist of their breath as it condensed in the cold night air.
The lights inside the apartment were off.
“What do you think?” Coy asked the controller.
“I'm not really sure,” the operations officer replied. “Let me see if we can get a good laser shot at the window.” He nodded to the controller, who initiated the proper commands.
“What do you mean, laser shot?” the DIA director asked. “What good will the laser do us now?”
“Sir, the laser has many purposes other than to lock onto and designate targets. For example, what we are doing here is to focus the laser on the target's front window. If there is anyone inside who is talking, the laser will detect the vibration in the glass from their voices. This kind of technology is really nothing new. It's something we have been doing for over a decade now. It's just that this is the first time we can do it from one of our birds up in space.”
Coy looked to the DIA Director and smiled. Such an incredible toy. He was proud.
“Just a minute, sir,” the controller called out. “We are getting just a hint of vibration. Someone is talking from inside the president's quarters.”
“Bingo!” Coy whispered to himself.
The operations officer turned to his satellite controller. “Let's go in and have a good look around,” he said.
With a few keystrokes, the visual scene faded away and was replaced by an infrared image once again. The soldiers appeared ghost-like, their bodies nothing but blurry masses of white light. The heat from the vehicle engines burned brightly on the huge screen. The controller moved the picture to the inside of the “quarters. Several white circles and half a dozen long, white lines filled the screen.
“These are hot water pipes and the hot water heaters,” the controller explained while he circled each object on the screen. “This is the furnace. And this ... ” he paused for a moment, “ ... this looks to be a big-screen television. See how it glows. It is warm. It is on. This could be the source of our voices.”
“Okay,” Coy barked out. “It is really quite fascinating, but forget the tour. Just tell us if you think he's there.”