The Ranger’s rear ramp whined down. Before it even settled into the tall grass, four men rushed out of the troop compartment and leaped to the ground. One went prone, sighting through the nightscope attached to a magazine-fed Remington sniper rifle. The other three Scion commandos sprinted toward him. They wore night-vision goggles, body armor, and carried HK416 carbines.
In the dim moonlight, Brad recognized the leader as soon as he came within a few yards. “Geez, Ian, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”
Ian Schofield pushed his night-vision goggles up his forehead and gave him a fast once-over. He shook his head with a quick, fleeting grin. “Whereas I’d have to call you more a sore sight to my eyes, Brad. No disrespect, but you look like hell.”
“Yeah, well,” Brad said, making an effort to match the other man’s wry smile, “I kinda took a bad spill getting out of my spacecraft. The first few hundred miles went fine. But the last hundred thousand feet down were a little rough.”
Schofield nodded sympathetically. He turned his head to his subordinates. “In the circumstances, gentlemen, I think we should offer Captain McLanahan a lift.”
“You got it, Major,” one of the two agreed. He slung his carbine over one shoulder, knelt down, and unfolded a collapsible field stretcher. He looked up at Brad. “Ready when you are, sir.”
“I know being carried aboard isn’t exactly dignified, Brad,” Schofield murmured. “But we’re in a bit of a hurry. The Russians aren’t known for extending a friendly welcome to trespassers.”
“Screw dignity,” Brad said gratefully, easing himself down onto the stretcher. He closed his eyes, fighting against another wave of pain from his shoulder when they strapped him in. “The quicker we’re out of here, the happier I’ll be.”
Within moments, the litter team was on its way back to the Ranger, moving at a rapid trot. The aircraft’s engines were already spooling back up, preparing to take off the moment they were aboard with the ramp sealed.
Thirty-Six
“Still no radar contact with the second American strike group. All systems are operational. All launchers remain ready to fire.”
Colonel General Leonov listened to the steady flow of reports from the 1529th Guards Air Defense Missile Regiment’s headquarters with a growing sense of unease. He checked the digital clock on one of his screens and frowned. Where were those U.S. Navy strike fighters? Based on their observed track and speed over Hokkaido, the new attack group should have been picked up by Titov’s 91N6E acquisition and battle management radar several minutes ago. The first raid, apparently composed entirely of decoy drones, had been conducted with flawless precision and timing. So why this unexplained delay now? What the hell were the Americans playing at? Every minute they loitered below the radar horizon over the Sea of Japan only burned more fuel and gave his defenses that much more time to recover from their earlier confusion.
He furrowed his brow, weighing different options. The 23rd Fighter Aviation Regiment had twelve of its Su-35S Super Flankers flying a fuel-conserving racetrack holding pattern west of Khabarovsk. Perhaps he should send them southeast to scout for the missing U.S. Navy planes, like beaters scaring up game in a hunt?
Just as quickly, Leonov dismissed the idea. If the Americans had more tricks up their sleeves, such a move might play into their hands. After all, to have any hope at all of striking the Vostochny launch complex, the enemy would need to wear down all of his outer defenses first… including his fighter regiments. So it was possible this was an effort to lure his best fighters into a trap of their own, somewhere outside the protection of Russia’s S-400 SAM units.
No, he decided, it was better to hold tight and wait for the Americans to come to them. In any battle fought deep inside Russian airspace, his forces held all the advantages. Impatiently, he checked the clock again. Unfortunately, even knowing that time and distance were in his favor did not make this waiting any easier to bear.
At an adjacent workstation, Tikhomirov was on a secure phone, speaking softly and urgently with someone at Dzemgi Air Base. He looked perplexed. At last, he nodded. “Very well, Major. Keep me posted if you get any more details.” Then he hung up.
Leonov swiveled toward his deputy. “Trouble?”
“An anomaly, certainly,” Tikhomirov said carefully. “That was Uvarov, the 23rd’s executive officer. He wanted to relay a strange report from one of the regiment’s junior officers, a Lieutenant Khryukin.”
Leonov raised an eyebrow. The other man wasn’t an idiot. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t waste time with irrelevancies in the middle of a battle. There had to be more to this story than the babbling of some eccentric young lieutenant. “Go on.”
“Khryukin was sent north from Komsomolsk to investigate reports of a UFO landing near a little village in the middle of nowhere.” Tikhomirov opened a digital map at his station. “Here, at the Oldjikan State Nature Reserve.”
Leonov estimated that was more than four hundred kilometers north of Knyaze-Volkonskoye. “So? What did he find on his ET hunt? A few scraps of weather balloon?”
Tikhomirov shook his head. “No… and that is what is odd. According to the lieutenant, the locals dug up what appears to be some kind of advanced space suit, along with what might be a disposable one-man reentry capsule.” He looked apologetic. “It sounds like nonsense to me, of course, but Uvarov claims Khryukin is sure of his facts.”
Leonov felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. His mouth fell open in shock. Suddenly the real reasons behind the events of the past couple of hours came into clear focus.
“Sir?” Tikhomirov sounded concerned. “Are you all right?”
“No, I am not all right!” Leonov snapped. He spun back to his own keyboard and brought up the recorded track of the crippled S-19 Midnight spaceplane as it fell out of orbit. It crossed high over the Oldjikan nature reserve. “Mother of God,” he muttered. Scowling, he swiveled back to face his deputy. “Those American bastards have tricked us, Semyon! There is no real attack against the Vostochny Cosmodrome. Instead, everything we’ve seen so far is simply an element in an elaborate search-and-rescue mission.”
Tikhomirov stared at him. “A rescue operation? For whom?”
Angrily, Leonov jabbed a finger at the map. “For one of their astronauts! One of the crewmen aboard the Sky Masters spaceplane we destroyed must have survived reentry!”
His deputy swallowed hard. “Then the decoy drone attack on Colonel Titov’s regiment was—”
“Part of a much larger deception,” Leonov finished grimly. He felt cold, imagining Gennadiy Gryzlov’s likely reaction to this screwup. “We saw exactly what the Americans wanted us to see… and reacted precisely as they hoped we would.”
His eyes narrowed in thought as he calculated distances and probable flight times. The start of this rescue operation must have been timed to coincide with that first detection of U.S. Navy aircraft over Hokkaido. From that moment on, Russia’s air defenses and surveillance radars had been focused on what they thought was the developing threat against Vostochny and its outer defenses. There was no possibility that the Americans were using helicopters for their rescue operation. The Oldjikan wilderness area was more than a thousand kilometers inside Russia’s defense perimeter — well outside the combat radius of any U.S. helicopter, or even their MV-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft.
Leonov nodded to himself. There was really only one aircraft suited to this kind of mission, the stealthy short-takeoff-and-landing airlifter Poland’s Iron Wolf mercenaries had used before against the Motherland. Little was known about its flight characteristics… except that it did not appear to be capable of achieving supersonic speeds. Which meant there was still a chance for his forces to intercept and destroy the American rescue plane before it escaped from Russia’s airspace.