Shaking his head in delighted disbelief, Gryzlov muted the monitor. He turned to Vladimir Kurakin with an exultant, predatory grin. “Astounding, eh? That overstuffed, oversexed cow Barbeau has done half our work for us! And she’s done it out of sheer malice and seemingly invincible stupidity.”
Cautiously, Kurakin nodded. “Yes, Mr. President.”
Gryzlov heard the hesitation in his voice. “You still think we should have attacked Sky Masters ourselves?” he asked. “Using your KVMs and Annenkov’s cruise missiles?”
The other man shrugged. “I only worry that its scientists and engineers are still alive.”
“And dead men and women build no robots and stealth aircraft?” Gryzlov suggested dryly. He shook his head. “Don’t fret, Vladimir. Trust me, what Barbeau has done today will inflict almost as much damage on Sky Masters in the end.” He waved a hand at the screen, which was still showing video clips of heavily armed infantrymen kicking open doors and searching buildings. “Pictures like that are racing around the world at light speed. After this humiliation, where will Sky Masters find the money to design, test, and manufacture its expensive weapons and aircraft? Who will risk investing in such a company? For that matter, how many of those scientists and engineers you worry about will dare to go back to work at Battle Mountain once they’re released?”
He wagged a finger in mock reproof at Kurakin. “No, hitting Sky Masters with your robots and missiles would have put Russian fingerprints all over this operation. After all, why would the Iron Wolf mercenaries attack their own arms supplier? Not even Martindale is that crazy. Instead, we’ve managed to trick the Americans into waging war against their own best and brightest weapons designers! What could possibly be more satisfying?”
“I see,” Kurakin said slowly. “I’m afraid that I have been focused more on operational considerations than on the broader political implications. You have my apologies, Mr. President.”
With a self-satisfied air, Gryzlov waved his apology away. “No matter. You were right to let me look after the big picture.” He looked more carefully at the other man, noting his pained expression. “You still look as though you’re chewing lemons, Vladimir. What’s eating at you now?”
“Only the thought that this might be the best possible moment to withdraw our forces,” Kurakin suggested with some reluctance. “They’ve been lucky so far. They can’t be lucky forever. But if we bring them home now, before any of our men are caught or killed, the Americans will be left with no one to blame but Poland’s own mercenaries.”
Briefly taken aback, Gryzlov stared at him for a long, unpleasant moment. Nothing in the other man’s military record had suggested he was a coward or a fool — or even one of those overcautious commanders afraid to spend men’s lives to achieve a decisive victory. For an instant, he considered explaining his deeper political and strategic objectives in launching this clandestine war. But then he thought better of the impulse. Looked at rationally, Kurakin and his men and machines were nothing more than tools, weapons to be expended as he saw fit. And one did not waste time explaining higher strategy to a rifle bullet or a bomb.
Instead, he snorted. “You give our enemies too much credibility. Right now, the Americans are too busy chasing their own tails to think straight. So this is the time to close in and hit them even harder. Russia has years of humiliating defeats to avenge, Kurakin. This is not the moment to turn tail and run!”
Twenty-Eight
The XCV-62 Ranger cleared the crest of a steep forested ridge with a couple of hundred feet to spare and dove down the other side, almost skimming the treetops at just over two hundred knots. Another ridge soared black against the night sky just half a mile away. Immediately the navigation cues on Brad McLanahan’s HUD spiked right.
He banked sharply, rolling to follow the cues, and then leveled out. The Iron Wolf aircraft arrowed northeast down a narrow valley between the two higher elevations, following the trace of a gravel road. Ahead, the road dropped toward a dry streambed marked “Fool Creek” on their maps.
“We’re less than two minutes out,” Nadia said from her copilot’s position. She had her eyes firmly fixed on her navigation display. “We have a green light from the Scion ground crew.”
“Copy that,” Brad said tightly. “Hang tight.” He leaned forward and tapped a key that activated preset landing commands he’d entered earlier. Hydraulics whined as the Ranger configured itself for another very short, rough-field landing. Control surfaces opened to their maximum extent, providing extra lift they sorely needed. This high up in the Wyoming mountains, the air was already pretty thin. “Gear coming down.”
There were a series of muffled thumps below the cockpit. A slowly blinking icon on his HUD turned solid green. Their ride got bumpier right away as drag increased. “Gear down and locked.”
They crossed the dry streambed and climbed again, following the ground as it rose toward the even-steeper wooded slopes of Dry Fork East. Brad fed in a little more power to keep up his airspeed.
Not far ahead, he saw a smaller dirt road branch off to the northwest. It paralleled another winding stream, this one full of water flowing downhill toward a distant junction with a larger river. Its name appeared as a small tag on his HUD. “Nice,” he muttered ironically. “What a great omen.”
He banked left, turning to follow this new road. On their right, Dry Fork East towered another couple of thousand feet above them — a dark mass studded with fir and spruce trees and large bare patches of loose weathered scree. The ground below the ridge was mostly open, a mixture of high alpine grassland and sagebrush.
“An omen? Why?” Nadia asked, sounding puzzled.
“Because we’re going to be landing upslope from a tributary of the Little Bighorn River,” Brad explained. “And just about fifty miles north of here is where George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry stumbled into a bazillion Sioux warriors and wound up dead.”
“Then if we are going to play cowboys and Indians, I want to be the Indians,” Nadia said with a laugh.
He felt a tight smile flash across his face.
Through his HUD, he could see a small campsite just off the dirt road, which was little more than a trail now. Besides a couple of tents, there were two parked trucks, both with U.S. Forest Service markings. One was a fuel tanker.
The touch-down point the Ranger’s computer had selected blinked insistently in his HUD. He pushed a button on his stick, confirming the selection. It went solid, slashing across the trail no more than a few hundred feet beyond the trucks. Not much more than a thousand feet up the trail, a stand of tall fir trees blocked the far end of their projected landing zone.
Brad felt his mouth go dry. He was going to have to set this crate down right on the mark. There was no room for error.
Now! He pulled the throttles way back.
The Ranger slid down out of the sky. They dropped onto the rough, brush-strewn ground, bounced back up in the air a few feet, and then came back down with a jolt that rattled his teeth and threw him forward against his straps. The trees ahead loomed ever bigger as the plane roared along the gently inclined slope. Brad reversed thrust as much as he dared. He couldn’t risk skidding out of control if they hit loose gravel or dirt.
They slewed to a halt just a few yards short of the first trees.