The duplicity had been pure borscht, reminding him of what had happened in Yugoslavia after the bombing war back in the ’90s, when Moscow had no sooner cut a deal with NATO not to enter Kosovo than it had ordered a military occupation force into one of Pristina’s key strategic airports. Back then, they’d had a President who’d looked and acted like a huge leech pickled in vodka to blame for the supposed confusion… but what sort of excuses were they making now?
Ricci shook his head gravely. He knew Roger Gordian had been in repeated contact with Yuri Petrov, trying to persuade him to stick to his original commitments. But Ricci’s own last conversation with Gordian had taken place twelve hours ago, at which point he’d been told to sit tight and await further news. Gordian hadn’t sounded optimistic, though, and there had been nothing from him since — a clear indication that Petrov had fallen victim to the hereditary Russian breast-beating reflex and would keep thumping away until he keeled over backward. In other words, negotiations were stalled indefinitely and Ricci’s curtailed functions would continue to be the status quo until after the ISS launch was history.
Assuming it occurred without disaster striking first.
Ricci studied his map, feeling stretched thin in every sense. His exhaustion and jet lag, the haste with which he’d needed to organize his guard force, the ongoing logistical problems of building it up to a reasonable level of adequacy, Petrov’s frequent curve balls and increasing restrictions upon his authority… the whole kit and kaboodle was grating on him. Nor had there been a bit of encouragement in anything he’d heard about the strike on the terrorist camp in the Chapadas. Whoever had been occupying that base had flown the coop aboard the Lockheed, which had itself vanished without a trace. And if they were as good and well-equipped as his information led him to believe, Ricci figured they’d have a network of safe, tucked-away airfields where they could make layover and refueling stops en route to their ultimate destination.
And where do you think that’s going to be? he thought. Come on, take a guess.
Ricci studied the map, thinking they were out there someplace close by, knowing it with a strange and implacable certainty he could not have explained to any other human being… with the possible exception of Pete Nimec. Sometimes when he was with the BPD and had worked a criminal investigation to where a bust was imminent, he’d been able to feel the accelerating energies of the thing with his nerve endings, the way he supposed animals in a forest could sense a coming storm.
They were out there, out there someplace — but where? Even the weather was working to his disadvantage. As long as the low-pressure front remained in a holding pattern over southern Kazakhstan, the Hawkeye-II satellite would be wearing what amounted to a blindfold of clouds, severely reducing its capabilities. To offset this handicap, Gordian and Nimec had shipped Ricci another of their little toys, a SkyManta unmanned air recon vehicle that looked for all the world like a flying saucer in some 1950’s-era drive-in masterpiece. Earth versus the Aliens from Zanthor. He’d seen other drones in his military days, including the Predator, which had been in its experimental stages at the time, and was eventually given over to the exclusive use of the Air Force’s 11th Reconnaissance Squadron… the Predator, and another UAV called the Hunter, both of which had outwardly resembled conventional airplanes.
UpLink’s pilotless vehicle was in another class. While far from a scientific wizard, Ricci was a quick study, and his understanding based upon Nimec’s apprisal was that its outer shell was called a “smart skin,” a composite alloy imbedded with microelectromechanical systems — MEMS was the acronym Pete had used — which included sensors tiny enough to be carried by ants, and which gave it the ability to pick up infrared heat concentrations, plus near-real-time video, and most significantly under present meteorological conditions, synthetic aperture radar images that could penetrate the cloud cover hindering his surveillance efforts. Pitch black like a Stealth bomber, it had a circumference of thirty-five, maybe forty feet, making it difficult to eyeball from the ground at night. Also, something about its saucer shape, he wasn’t quite sure what, would allow it to slip past ground-to-air radar arrays even more easily than aircraft with Stealth design.
The technical operators that had brought the SkyManta from Kaliningrad had launched it about an hour back, and Ricci was leaving it to them to keep tabs on its transmissions. If anything of interest turned up, they’d give him a shout. But what he’d needed this evening was a few hours of solitude, a chance to simply think.
Ricci looked at the map, running his fingertip over the topographical features of the Cosmodrome’s surrounding terrain. Everywhere he looked, there were tucks and folds in the hills where an assault force with a basic knowledge of cover and concealment techniques could have been assembling for days or even weeks. And whereas they could choose the time and place to hit — and hit they would, said his own low-tech internal sensors — he was shackled by Petrov’s hairy-chested exercise in self-assertion.
Shaking his head again, leaving the map on the table as he rose to brew some coffee, Ricci wished himself the best of luck trying to stop them if that hit came soon.
Dressed in the uniform of a lieutenant in the Voenno Kosmicheskie Sily, Kuhl rode up to the checkpoint station at the north gate of the Cosmodrome in the two-seat cabin of an MZKT-7429 military semi-trailer truck. He was on the passenger side. Oleg, a native Ukrainian with whom he had seen action in many mercenary operations, was at the wheel. In back were Antonio and four of Kuhl’s best, most dedicated men from Brazil— men who had replaced the original occupants of the truck, actual Russian Military Space Police, now dead in a ditch some miles away with bullets from Antonio’s.22-caliber pistol in their heads. With Kuhl and his men aboard the trailer was the High Power Microwave cannon — tested and proven when used against the commuter train outside Sao Paulo — and its smaller but far more potent cousin, the long-range Havoc HMP device that would be placed aboard the Russian space station module. Using ISS’s solar array as its power source, it would be both reusable and retargetable — allowing Harlan DeVane to virtually destroy the electronic infrastructure of any major city on earth at his remote command.
There were five sentries at the gate. Two wore the dark blue attire of UpLink’s security team; three had VKS uniforms like Kuhl’s — but with privates’ patches on their field jackets.
Kuhl slipped his hand off the MP5K beside his seat. The Russian presence might make using it unnecessary.
As Oleg slowed the truck to a halt before the gate, one of the Sword guards approached, coming around to the driver’s-side window.
“We need your identification, please,” the guard said in English. Then in choppy guidebook Russian: “Pakuhzhee-tyeh, pa-zhal-stuh rigis-tratsiuh. ”
Oleg was reaching down for his own submachine gun when Kuhl nodded slightly for him to be still, unrolled his window, and leaned his head out.