“Listen to me closely, Mikhail,” he said coldly. “You will prevent such a disaster.”
Leonov nodded. “I will put my forces on the highest possible alert. If the Americans do attack, their aircraft and missiles will be shot out of the sky.”
“For your sake, I hope this show of confidence is justified,” Gryzlov said bluntly. “Do not forget that others have failed to keep similar promises to me… and regretted it for the rest of their short and pain-filled lives.”
With his boots held above his head in his left hand to keep them dry, Brad McLanahan waded cautiously across a shallow, muddy creek choked with reeds. Huge mosquitoes rose in swarms on all sides — buzzing noisily past his face. He grimaced. With his right arm in its improvised sling, he couldn’t even swat at the ones that came swooping in, hungry for his blood.
“Wonderful, just wonderful. Join Sky Masters and see the festering armpits of the world,” he spat out through clenched teeth. The air was thick with the stench of rotting vegetation.
On the other side of the creek, Brad grabbed at an overhanging branch and hauled himself back up onto drier land, his left arm shaking with fatigue and his right leg threatening to give out at any second. Despite the discomfort involved in walking barefoot through the tall grass and rocky soil, he resisted the temptation to put his boots back on right away. The last thing he needed right now was a case of trench foot, with its attendant blisters and painful skin infections.
Slowly, he toiled up a low rise and worked his way into the cover of a copse of trees. Time for a short breather, he decided. Once his feet dried off, he should be able to make better time.
When he drew near the top of the little ridge, Brad stopped and slumped down. He propped his back up against a tree trunk for support. Bone-weary as he was, lying down was a surefire recipe for falling asleep. Then, noticing that his mouth felt dry, he took out his canteen and swigged a quick drink.
He recapped the canteen and put it away. At least the purification tablets included in his SERE kit ensured he wasn’t short of potable water. Food was another matter. His stomach growled softly. The need to ration his limited stock of protein bars meant he was already running a serious calorie deficit. Ideally, he would have been able to hunt, fish, and forage to supplement his emergency supplies. But that wasn’t possible — not when he still had so much ground to cover before it grew too dark to travel safely.
Exhausted, Brad bent his head and focused on controlling his breathing. With every passing hour, he was growing more footsore and hungry. To avoid being spotted, he’d been forced to fight his way through the worst and most rugged sections of this seemingly empty countryside. The need to detour around clearings and patches of more open woodland added miles to his journey.
In some ways, the worst part was knowing that he was being deliberately kept in the dark about the details of any plans to rescue him. Intellectually, he understood the need for tight security. After all, what he didn’t know he couldn’t spill if the Russians caught him. Still, it was frustrating. And, as tired as he was, frustration felt dangerously close to despair.
The instructions Brad had been given were both clear as crystal and as murky as the bottom of that stream he’d just crossed. On first hearing, they’d seemed simple enough: Head southeast toward a set of map coordinates. And at all costs, reach those coordinates within seventy-two hours. But what he didn’t know, and the Scion agents on the other end of his satellite phone connection would not tell him, was why this was so important. Did that X on the phone’s digital map mark the end of this long trek, the place where someone would be waiting to help him out of this godforsaken country? Or was it only a waypoint on an even longer journey?
Well, Brad told himself grimly, there was only one sure way to find out. He would just have to get off his lazy ass and soldier on. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he tugged the paratrooper boots over his swollen feet, pushed himself back upright, and started walking again.
Thirty
Patrick McLanahan knew he’d given in to sentiment by returning to Sky Masters to carry out his analysis of Russia’s armed space station. The wireless links and limited neural interface built into his LEAF exoskeleton and its associated computer would have allowed him to carry out the work of combing through the accumulated intelligence from almost anywhere in the world. But Battle Mountain had been his adopted hometown — a home he’d shared with his son through much of Brad’s childhood and teenage years. Coming back here now to search out ways to destroy the enemy orbital fortress that had knocked Brad and Boomer’s S-19 out of the sky just felt right somehow.
It was a sentiment Jason Richter certainly understood. The Sky Masters CEO had set him up in an office just down the hall, with complete access to all of the company’s secure computer systems… and to the accumulated knowledge and intuition of its top scientists and engineers.
Right now his eyes were closed. This shut out all outside distractions while he sorted through thousands of pieces of data collected about Mars One, both during Brad and Boomer’s aborted reconnaissance and in the hours and days since then. While his LEAF’s neural link was less capable than those used by the Iron Wolf Squadron’s Cybernetic Infantry Devices, it still gave him the ability to assimilate and analyze information much faster than was possible for an unassisted human brain.
He was drawing on much more than just the material gathered by Sky Masters itself. Years before, while he was still president of the United States, Kevin Martindale had made sure carefully concealed back doors were secretly installed in the operating systems of most of the federal government’s computer networks. Martindale had wanted to be able to bypass the sluggish federal bureaucracy during a national crisis. Now those same hidden back doors enabled Patrick to roam freely through the immense amounts of information collected by a vast array of different government agencies — ranging from the Pentagon to the National Reconnaissance Office to NASA.
Mentally, he dove headlong into this flow of raw intelligence, determined to tease out the significance of even the smallest scrap of data. Visual, radar, and infrared imagery, together with detailed reports prepared by various experts, scrolled through his mind at a rapid clip. Time in the sense used by the outside world ceased to have any real meaning for him.
Sorting through the pictures and other sensor readings amassed by Brad’s nanosatellites during their close approach to the Russian station made several things clear. First, Mars One’s three large modules had both inner and outer hulls. It was a construction technique similar to that used in Russian nuclear submarine designs, though never before for spacecraft. While this double-hulled design added mass and reduced the amount of usable interior space in each module, it also gave the station significant structural strength against damage from micrometeorites, shrapnel, and even weapons-grade lasers. And it provided the Russian station with good protection against radiation, something that was especially important since its relatively high orbit brushed against the lower fringes of the innermost Van Allen belt. Second, the spaces between its inner and outer hulls were occupied by retractable weapons and sensor mounts and stores of consumables — water, food, and oxygen. As another benefit, those stores added even more shielding against cosmic radiation.