* * * *
But he was out of time. Hernandez woke from a light, uncomfortable doze into frigid green daylight, the morning sun ‚ltering through the command tent.
“Sir!” Lucy McKay shook his arm.
“Where is—” He heard ‚ghters. “I want missiles right into them, do it now before—”
The scream of the jets was away from his mountain, receding quickly. Hernandez staggered up and grabbed his jacket and boots in a confusion of people as Anderson and Wang rolled out of their sleeping bags.
McKay looked wild with her hood down and her color high in her cheeks. “It’s four F-35s, sir,” she said. “They’re ours. Looks like they’re going east.”
“Are there choppers out of New Mexico?”
“Command hasn’t said anything on the radio.”
He got outside with McKay still crowding his side. She was holding binoculars for him, their best, a pair of 18 × 50 image-stabilized Canons. Hernandez nodded thanks, although there was nothing to see. The jets were on the north side of the mountain. At a glance, the sky to the south was empty, too. There were less clouds than during the night. He studied the long slants of yellow sunlight.
McKay continued to ‚dget and Hernandez said, “Stay on the radio. Don’t call. Just stay on it and shout as soon as you know something.”
“Yes, sir.”
He stepped past Wang at the.50-caliber gun, past Bleeker and Anderson with a missile launcher. Bleeker looked steady but Anderson’s sun-scorched face was tight and Hernandez said, “You’re doing ‚ne, Marine.”
Every alert wore them down a little more. When the ‚ghters scrambled at night, there was the panic between getting outside and putting on enough clothes ‚rst. Four troopers had lost skin on their ‚ngers when they ran to their weapons bare-handed. Another badly bruised her knee when she fell in the dark. But they had to respond. There was no way to know if Leadville was launching an attack or defending against one, and their own lives were on the line.
Hernandez moved completely out of the trench, stepping up above the rock wall. There was shouting across the hill and he used his binoculars to sweep Bunkers 5, 4, and 2.
Lowrey stood at the edge of 2, yelling at someone inside. Then he glanced up with his own binoculars. Hernandez raised one ‚st, then showed an open hand like a traf‚c cop. Hold tight. Lowrey repeated the gesture before he turned and relayed the command to Bunkers 3 and 6, which were beyond Hernandez’s sight. It was ridiculous, but they only had one set of civilian walkie-talkies and just eight spare batteries. They needed to use hand signals or runners as much as possible.
Hernandez was pleased to see that his people continued to look ready, jumpy but ready, and he caught a few words of the hollering over in 2 now. “Up! Shut up so I can!”
They were shouting at each other to be quiet so they could listen for helicopters. Absolutely ridiculous. They needed radar, but all they had were two more binoculars, their naked eyes, and the broken land itself. The mountains channeled sound but also confused it, continuing to echo with the dull hammer of the jets. Hernandez scanned out across the upheaval of black spaces and snow and earth. The hazy sky. Nothing.
* * * *
Forty minutes later he’d given the order to stand down as well as calling in his two lookouts. He was out of position himself. He could have kept his scouts in place but it was shit work, missing hot coffee and food. That was a leader’s prerogative.
Hernandez had climbed up to the saddle of rock at the top of the mountain with his binoculars and a walkie-talkie, hoping for some clue down in the valleys around Leadville. Instead, there was movement far out to the east, a single cargo plane accompanied by a single jet.
At this distance, even the larger C-17 was little more than a dot, but Hernandez recognized the speed and shape of it. That must be one of ours, he thought, because no more ‚ghters had scrambled to meet them. Still, the appearance of the transport was unusual. Nothing ever †ew in from over the plains of the Midwest because there was nothing out there.
He thumbed his send button and said, “McKay, call in for orders. I have a C-17 and an F-35 coming out of the east. Tell them we’re weapons tight. Permission to ‚re?”
The ’talkie crackled. “Aye, sir.”
Hernandez didn’t really have any chance at the planes. He estimated their range at twenty-‚ve miles, although that might shrink to twenty if they continued in toward Leadville. Even if he’d brought a missile launcher, the surface-to-air Stingers had a max range of three miles. Still, he knew that a request to go weapons free would get a response.
It came in less than a minute. The ’talkie hissed again and McKay said, “Hold ‚re. Hold ‚re. They say it’s a Russian envoy, sir. He’s on our side. It sounds like there was some harassment from the breakaways out over the Midwest, that’s why our jets went to meet him.”
“All right. Thank you.”
So the other ‚ghters were providing a protective curtain far to the north. Hernandez felt a moment of empathy for the pilots. There was nowhere to eject if they were hit. Even when they were okay, they rode a tightrope above a world of ruins and death. For once he was glad to be on this mountain.
The two planes passed over the Continental Divide. The C-17 began to descend as its ‚ghter escort pulled ahead. Hernandez couldn’t see the marsh †ats north of Leadville, but he’d watched enough to learn that the long highway had become one of the main runways for local forces. Leadville command seemed to be bringing the C-17 there, rather than using the short strip at the county airport south of town.
Suddenly the cargo plane dipped hard and Hernandez tensed against the frozen ground. Then the plane leveled out again, as if someone grabbed the controls. It circled uncertainly, casting left and right like a bird that had just opened its eyes. It †ew like a different plane altogether. After the violence of its nosedive and the new way the aircraft handled, Hernandez did not doubt that a different pilot sat in the cockpit — and the real proof was in the change of †ight path. The C-17 was already drifting toward the city.
The ‚ghter was more than a mile in front but accelerated into a long, high loop, trying to swing back and catch the larger, slower plane. Too late.
Hernandez stared for one instant, his ‚ngers clenched on his binoculars. Was it a September 11th style attack? A heavy transport might destroy several blocks in the downtown area, but how could the Russians be sure that it mattered? Unless they got the leadership, it would a critical strike but not a deathblow. Unless the plane was loaded with explosives or worse. Some sort of nanotech?
A cold sheet of horror propelled him up from the ground and he turned to run, glancing back despite himself. His gaze fell brie†y to the miles of up-and-down terrain between himself and Leadville and then Frank Hernandez sprinted away, screaming into his walkie-talkie.
“Cover! Take cover! Everybody down right now!”
13
In downtown Leadville, Nikola Ulinov emerged from a Chevy Suburban into the sound of aircraft. He carefully ignored it. His head wanted to turn up toward the distant thrum of jet turbines, but he kept his gaze on the sidewalk as he followed Senator Kendricks and General Schraeder from the car. It wasn’t so dif‚cult. The sound was everywhere, rolling from the mountains, and he didn’t need to look. He knew what was coming.
“This way, Ambassador,” said a young man in a trim blue suit. Pale and clean-shaven, the senator’s aide had obviously never spent much time outside in this high place, and the lack of a beard was its own signal.
The men surrounding Ulinov all shared this luxury, like a uniform. It was the one thing in common between the security units that had accompanied Kendricks and Schraeder to the small plaza in front of city hall. The four civilian agents wore dark suits and carried only sidearms, whereas the two Army Rangers were in camou†age and boots and carried ri†es, but they were all smooth-faced and none of them had that painful thinness he’d seen in so many other survivors.