Then the army flier went back to the group of operators. He had been through this before on other special missions. Their sense of loss had set in during the ride and the battered operators felt they could only communicate to those who had endured exactly the same experience. “Hey, guys. I’m sorry about your friend. Rough one.”
Perry lifted his gaze. “Yeah. Well, thanks for coming to get us.” Swanson and Baldwin also muttered appreciation.
Allen took over. “Look. I know this is a dirty thing to do, but you three men have to get on that airplane over there and get the hell out of here.”
Swanson’s eyes glittered like green crystal in the harsh fluorescent lights of the big building. “Not leaving her behind.”
“Yes, you are going to do exactly that, sir. She was not left on the battlefield, so the conditions are different. Give her to us now, and we will take her back to our own base, our own people. We will render every possible consideration, as if she was a Nightstalker herself. My entire crew and I personally promise that.”
Sergeant Baldwin and Corporal Perry watched their leader. Swanson was still swathed in dark, dried blood and shaky on his feet. “The major is right, Kyle,” Gray Perry said. “To keep this story secret, we have to get back to the Vagabond.”
“So it will be like we had never been anywhere else at all,” Baldwin agreed. “That’s important.”
The pilot added, “Honest to God, Mister Swanson. It will be an honor for our team to take care of this operator. You’ve got to go.”
Kyle knew they were right. The end of the mission was as important as the start. He had planned it to the minute, and it was best to stick to the schedule. Had it been from anyone else, he probably would have refused. Major Allen was one of them, and had flown unflinchingly into a mortar barrage to bring them out. He deserved to be heard. Swanson inhaled a deep breath and blew it out. Get back on the horse. Deal with the shakes later.
He reached back into the helo and wrapped his hand around one of Anneli’s small boots and squeezed. He didn’t have the proper good-bye words, and this wasn’t the time. “It’s better to die young and have truly lived, than to grow old merely to exist,” he said, louder than intended.
“What’s that, Kyle?” asked Perry.
“Something she told me the first day we met, when I asked if she understood the risks she was taking by being such a rebel.” Then he picked up his weapons and his pack and walked away, followed by the two British shooters.
Ivan Strakov ripped open a pink packet of artificial sugar and dumped it into his morning coffee, and then used his fingernails to open three small plastic tubs of creamer. It was 0900 on Saturday morning, April 16. The election in Narva was tomorrow.
“You seem to be feeling better this morning,” said Colonel Tom Markey, sipping his own coffee.
“It was just a nasty bug of some sort. I thought I would shit myself to death.” Strakov gulped the hot brew. “This nectar of the gods will finish the cure. I saw on the morning TV news that Russia and Lithuania are trading accusations about provocation. Some general got shot? What’s that all about?”
“Not my monkeys; not my circus,” Markey said. “I’m just a NATO nerd, so let’s talk about why we are here.”
Strakov wandered over to a window, cup in hand, its heat warm to his palm. The morning was bright and the outside temperature was warming. All was well in the world. “Blaise Pascal started it all, don’t you think? The Frenchman who built the first mechanical calculator to help out his tax-collector father?”
Markey played along. “Pascal gets the credit, but Gottfried Leibnez in Germany and Charles Babbage in England were just as important. The history of computers is hazy, going back to Arab and Chinese merchants using beads on a string or an abacus to count. Don’t fuck around with history, Ivan. You are just wasting time again.”
The Russian came back to the table and fingered a triangle of toast, then bit off a corner. “Let me continue in this vein, Tom. You’ll see my point in a minute. Anyway, after the manual age, like the beads on the string, the mechanical devices moved in, with inventors such as Pascal, Babbage and Leibnez. Handcrafted metal and wood counting machines could do basic computations.”
“Uh-huh. Then electricity comes along and, presto, we are into punch cards and rudimentary computers as big as warehouses.” Markey drank from his cup, waiting.
“Follow that trail into war and the space age and computer science really surges forward.” Ivan seemed more animated than usual.
Markey enjoyed the history of computers. You couldn’t understand today without knowing about yesterday. “Silicon chips and miniaturization, and now automobiles that possess more computing power than the early rockets that went into space. Almost everybody has a desktop computer.”
Ivan was back in his chair with a fresh cup of coffee, his eyes almost sparking. “And it all goes to prove that computer science is not static. What comes next? That is where you and I come in, Tom, about halfway through the play. We specialize in cyberwarfare and are always looking for the next shiny thing so we can kill each other better and faster. A new and improved space race; both sides have to have it first!”
Markey was puzzled by this new direction. “What are you talking about, Colonel?”
“We, I mean the Russians, are, I estimate, about a year ahead of you guys.”
“We are all working on optical systems. Everybody in the world is trying to figure it out.”
Strakov leaned back and cupped both hands around his coffee. “Once again, Russia was first. The Z-seed protocol was the key, Tom. We already have a fully operational optical computer system. I watched it at work, and it is about a thousand times faster than today’s best digital systems.”
Markey tried to keep his emotions in check and his face neutral. If Strakov was telling the truth, then everything NATO had on line was obsolete. “Bullshit. We would have known.”
“Right. Remember that you didn’t know about the Armata weapons systems being in the field until I told you? Same story again, Tom. The first militarized optical computers are ready — think of it; computing with accelerated lasers through the air instead of electricity through circuit boards, using photons instead of electrons. We call it the Nehche, which means ‘Eyeglasses.’ This is good information.”
Markey recognized it as another game-changer. The frustrating Ivan Strakov was once again proving his worth. Markey and others in the cyber-war field believed that such a gizmo was barely in the theoretical stages at the Skolkovo Innovation Center, the Moscow version of Silicon Valley. “Where is it?”
“Not an it, Tom… them! Plural. I helped install the first Nehche myself.”
“Where?”
“Up north. Actually, it is not too far from where the MiG tangled with that Finn missile. This is all part of the Arctic Circle strategy. Moscow chose to put the first optical lens up there because there is no place more important for President Pushkin’s climb to regain superpower status.”
Colonel Markey unconsciously looked up at the camera recording the session. He hoped other people were hearing this news, too. “Actually, we have that iceberg territory under pretty tight control,” he said, feeling somewhat defensive. He could not comprehend NATO and the United States having fallen behind in optics.