“I’m heading for the air lock,” Brad radioed, moving carefully toward the edge of the vault. His eyes narrowed, looking for a clear path through the clouds of superheated steam still billowing off the reactor.
There.
He jumped down. And fell sprawling across the concrete floor when the CID’s right leg refused to flex. “Shit!”
Partial hydraulic failure, the computer reported. Emergency override inoperative. Brad swore again, seeing whole sections of his system schematics wink yellow and then red. He forced the robot upright, hearing damaged servos and actuators whining shrilly in protest.
Dragging his CID’s immobile right leg, he limped awkwardly toward the open air-lock door.
Warning. Warning. Chemical alert.
“You have got to be kidding me,” Brad snarled at his computer. What now? He was right at the edge of the air lock, for Christ’s sake! Exasperated, he swung around.
In his display, the clouds of steam venting off the reactor vault now glowed bright red. The CID’s chemical sniffers were picking up a growing volume of flammable hydrogen gas mixed in with the water vapor, rising higher and higher toward the distant ceiling. His jaw tightened. Too much hydrogen accumulating up there could trigger an explosion powerful enough to blow the containment building apart.
“Tell me this isn’t really a problem, Vasile,” he said quietly.
“It is not a problem,” Enescu said confidently. “We have a network of automated igniters spaced around the top of the containment area. They will burn off the hydrogen before it reaches a dangerous concentration.”
Brad stared up through the maze of pipes and machinery. He shook his head in disgust. “Yeah, that would be great. Unfortunately, your fucking automated igniters aren’t firing.”
For a moment, there was stunned silence over the radio circuit. “O Doamne! Oh my God!”
Catastrophic suit failure in forty-five seconds.
Scowling, Brad took out his autocannon and loaded a single 25mm incendiary round. He backed up to the very edge of the open air lock. “Look,” he told Enescu. “Right now I can probably set off the hydrogen pocket near the roof. But what I need to know and fast is if that’s just going to blow the shit out of this whole place.”
There was another long silence.
Twenty-five seconds. Twenty-four seconds. Twenty-three seconds.
“Our calculations show that any hydrogen flare or explosion now should inflict only minimal damage,” Enescu said at last.
Seventeen seconds. Sixteen seconds.
“How sure of that are you?”
Fourteen seconds. Thirteen seconds.
“Only somewhat sure,” the other man admitted.
Eleven seconds. Ten.
“Works for me,” Brad said simply. He aimed upward, zeroing in on a bare patch of concrete on the containment roof. Then he squeezed the trigger. The autocannon bucked.
WHUUUMMMMP!
A bright orange flash overloaded his vision screens. They went black. In that same instant, a shock wave slammed into the CID. Servos howling, Brad stumbled backward into the air lock.
His displays flickered back online and he breathed out in relief. Both the roof and the intricate, interwoven assembly of pipes and machinery around the reactor appeared intact.
Seven seconds to suit failure. Six seconds.
Reacting fast, Brad dropped the autocannon, grabbed the heavy air-lock door, and hauled it shut. Then he frantically spun the handwheel clockwise. One after another, the door’s locking mechanisms clicked into place — sealing out the lethal radiation and heat still emanating from the crippled reactor core.
Catastrophic suit failure averted, the robot’s computer said coolly.
Wearily, Brad closed his eyes, ignoring the ever-lengthening recitation of the computer’s list of damaged or destroyed components. Slowly and very deliberately, he slid down the side of the air lock. “Never again,” he murmured. “I am never doing anything that crazy again.”
“How much do you want to bet on that?” he heard Charlie Turlock say cheerfully over his headset. “Because you’re a McLanahan, remember, and I’ve got my eye on a brand-new sports car that’s way above my current pay grade.”
Several hundred people milled around the edges of a kilometer-deep “emergency exclusion zone” hastily proclaimed around the damaged reactor. Policemen and some soldiers in riot gear were stationed to keep the onlookers — a mix of news crews and the morbidly curious — from getting any closer. Bright lights and logo-emblazoned vehicles marked the presence of television reporters jabbering away excitedly in half a dozen different languages, urgently relaying a mix of pure speculation, ill-informed guesswork, and wildly inaccurate information to audiences around the globe.
No one paid much attention to the small, three-man team working inside the back of a panel van parked near the outer fringes of the growing crowd. According to their licenses and ID cards, they were employees of EuroSlav News, a tiny, independent news agency whose business was selling content over the Internet and to small local papers across Eastern and central Europe. Behind the façade, however, EuroSlav News was a GRU front used both as a cover for intelligence gathering and as a means of disseminating covert pro-Russian propaganda to unsuspecting audiences.
One of the GRU agents, Captain Konstantin Rusanov, sat hunched over a bank of electronics equipment. Tasked with monitoring radio and computer signals from the plant, the short, dark-haired man was intensely focused. His mouth turned down suddenly as a new flood of signals reached his earphones and displays. He turned toward their team leader. “The Romanians and the Iron Wolf team have successfully prevented a containment breach,” he said glumly, unable to hide his disappointment.
Major Leonid Usenko shrugged and stubbed out his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray. “That is unfortunate,” he agreed. “But that reactor is still badly damaged, isn’t it?”
Rusanov nodded. “Beyond repair, in all likelihood.” He glanced at the third man, rail thin and balding, sitting next to him, busy watching over his own array of equipment. “Do you concur, Mikheyev?”
“I do,” Captain Artem Mikheyev confirmed. He was a “special technical officer” assigned specifically for this mission. He smiled happily. “Best of all, the voice and video transmissions I’ve recorded should provide Moscow with much useful new data. Now that we’ve seen one in action, further technical analysis should teach us much about the strengths and weaknesses of these supposedly invincible Iron Wolf fighting machines.”
FOUR
Flanked by two AH-1Z Viper gunships, a Polish-made W-3 Sokół VIP helicopter came in low over the snow-dusted woods surrounding the base at Powidz. Rotors beating, it flared in for a landing right outside a large hangar. Even before its engines finished spooling down, the left-hand copilot’s door slid back and Polish president Piotr Wilk dropped lightly onto the tarmac.
Moving fast, he crossed to the Iron Wolf hangar and headed straight for the conference room at its far end. Middling tall, trim, and not yet fifty, Wilk still carried himself like the veteran fighter pilot and charismatic air-force commander he had been before entering politics. There were many moments when he regretted leaving the military life he’d loved — of no longer being allowed to scramble into a MiG-29 Fulcrum or an F-16 Fighting Falcon and go head-to-head against his country’s enemies. But those were also the moments when he reminded himself that true service to Poland and the cause of freedom required sacrifice.