One of them leaned over him. “I’m Dr. Dan Evans,” he said. “I’ll be doing the operation, Mr. President. Hang on, we’re going to get you through this, sir.”
Carlucci smiled. “Dr. Evans, I hope you’re a member of the American Party.”
The surgeon looked seriously at the president. “Mr. President, today we are all members of the American Party.”
Deputy Chairman of the FSB, Colonel General Avdey Ozols, glumly surveyed the large crowd in the courtyard of the Kremlin, the afternoon shadows of the Annunciation Cathedral and the Cathedral of the Archangel growing across the sand-colored bricks. Against Ozols’ emphatic warning, and the warning of the SBP security detail chief, President Vostov insisted on giving his traditional state of the union speech outside. Vostov insisted that the danger was gone now that the traitorous SBP sniper had been dispatched to the next world, and he desperately wanted to show his strength to the Russian people. What better way, he’d asked, than to give the speech outside in a large supportive crowd? Of course, the members of that crowd were vetted, a large number of them working for FSB and SBP, some of them armed, others not, but all wearing discreet communications gear with tiny, flesh-colored earpieces and microphones on their collars with battery packs worn in the small of their backs.
Suddenly there was a loud chopping and buzzing sound.
What—
Ozols lunged his right hand into his jacket to expose the holster of his MP-443 Grach, the weapon small enough to avoid bulging out of his jacket, but in 9 mm caliber for stopping power. His fingers closed on the grip.
the fuck—
Ozols pulled the weapon out of its holster and cleared the fabric of his suit coat and began to bring it to point upward.
is that fucking —
Ozols brought his left hand to the grip to meet the right, his right index finger inside the trigger guard. He aimed.
thing?
Ozols pulled the trigger once, then a second time, the weapon recoil making it jump in his hands.
And where the hell did it come from?
As he began to pull the trigger on his third round, the SBP sniper rifles joined his attack, their bullets slamming into the thing.
Is that thing down yet?
It fell to the bricks, its rotors smashing into fragments, its right-side gun still firing. Ozols ran toward it, continuing to shoot at it until his magazine was empty, and the thing lay there on the courtyard bricks, smoking, its right-side gun finally stopping.
What the fuck is this thing?
Ozols reached the helicopter drone, the unit’s bulbous front end two meters long and a meter tall. It had a tail rotor and tail boom like a normal helicopter, but was miniaturized and robotically driven. Where a helicopter would have skids to land on, this had struts that held the right-side and left-side rifles. The right-side weapon was a 9 mm automatic rifle, fed by a large magazine. The left-side unit lay under the wreckage, but Ozols could see it was a belt-fed machine gun. By the look of it, it must have jammed before it could get any rounds off.
Get the fuck away from it before it—
The helicopter drone’s self-destruct explosives lit off, scattering pieces of the drone in an orange ball of flames that turned to billowing black smoke. Ozols had been blown backward into the crowd, several bodies breaking his fall. He regained his feet, checking that he had no broken bones, but there was a piece of shrapnel that had penetrated his left cheek and he was pouring blood onto his suit and shirt.
He turned toward President Vostov’s lectern to see what damage the drone had managed to do. A crowd was bending over a place a few meters away from the lectern. It had to be Vostov, Ozols thought. He made his way through the crowd and got to Vostov just as the sirens of the ambulances wailed from their staging area at the Ivanovskaya Square. The president had been hit, what looked like twice in the chest, but he was still alive, grimacing and putting his hands to his bloody chest’s right side. Three of Vostov’s aides were hit as well, one of them taking a bullet in the forehead.
Ozols looked back at the wreckage of the helicopter drone. It must have flown in from the Moskva River side and hidden itself in the glare of the sun, obscured by Taymitskaya Tower until the last second of its flight. He shook his head. It was damned lucky only the magazine-fed rifle had functioned. If the belt-fed machine gun had fired, it would likely have torn Vostov’s body in half.
The rest of the afternoon seemed to pass in slow motion, then blur to a fast-forwarded film, then slow to a crawl again. Ozols found himself in the prime minister’s conference room, his cheek bandaged and stitched, a new suit and shirt replacing the bloody garments. He was seated with the council of ministers and other senior members of Vostov’s staff.
Prime Minister Platon Melnik called for quiet in the room. As Vostov’s nominal second-in-command, Melnik would step in as the Russian president until such a time as they knew Vostov’s medical condition. Melnik wasted no time in barraging the men in the room with questions.
“What’s the president’s status?” he barked.
“Sir, President Vostov is in the VIP facility of Moscow Central Clinical Hospital,” FSB Chairman, General Gennadi Sevastyan, said quickly. “He’s been shot twice. Nine millimeter rounds. One in his upper right lung, the other just below his heart. He’ll be in surgery for hours.”
“What was this thing, Sevastyan?” Melnik asked, annoyed.
“Our Science Directorate believes this is a Chinese-designed and manufactured drone.”
“Red China or White China?”
“Sir, that’s the thing. We and SVR’s Science Directorate both think it was designed by the White Chinese and fabricated by the Reds. They cooperated on this unholy thing.”
“How the hell did it penetrate Moscow airspace? And get over the Kremlin wall without being detected?”
Sevastyan took a deep breath. “Our radars are tuned for bigger and faster things, sir. Remember when that kid landed a Cessna in Red Square in the 80s? Since then we screen for slower aircraft — and lower altitude aircraft — but this is even smaller than our radars would seek. Plus, it was assembled somewhere close. We think its entire flight was only a few hundred meters.”
The door to the room swung open and an FSB aide to Sevastyan hurried into the room, to Sevastyan’s seat. She handed him a pad computer, whispered something in his ear and rushed back out of the room.
“Mr. Prime Minister,” Sevastyan said, “we have captured an individual who had in her possession a controller. It looks like it could be the one that controlled the flight of this drone.”
“Did you get her alive?”
“Yes, sir. We’re bringing her to the Lubyanka now. Her name is Jingmai Lin.”
“Is she from White China or Red?”
“She had Shanghai identification on her, making her from White China,” Sevastyan said, putting on his reading glasses and peering at the pad computer. “But she has identification to enter Zhongnanhai, the central headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party and the State Council of Red China.”
Melnik sat back in his seat for a moment. “The Reds and Whites are really cooperating? To assassinate the president of a superpower?”
“That would seem to be the case, sir,” Sevastyan said.
Melnik turned to Lana Lilya, the acerbic head of the SVR, the foreign intelligence branch of what used to be the KGB. Lilya was in her mid-forties, with straight, sleek, dirty blonde hair cut in a chin-length bob. She had a pretty oval face with piercing blue eyes, and she was unusually tall, often towering over the other ministers. She crossed her arms over her chest and pursed her lips, her expression a deep intimidating scowl.