Intellectually, Pollock knew this wasn’t as bad as Pearl Harbor. The vast majority of the Pacific Fleet’s surface warfare ships were still afloat and undamaged. Nor had any serious damage been inflicted on its vital shore installations. But the knowledge was cold comfort in the face of so much death and suffering.
Thirty-One
Kirill Aristov lay prone along the crest of the hill, scanning the barren slopes to the west through his night-vision binoculars. He ignored the deep whump-whump-whump coming from the row of 140-meter-tall wind turbines built along the service road just behind him. About five kilometers away, fires lit the night sky. Several buildings on the Sandia National Laboratories’ Livermore campus were burning — set ablaze by antitank missiles and incendiary cannon rounds.
Nikolai Dobrynin scuttled up beside him and dropped to one knee. “Any sign of Baryshev and the others yet?” Aristov shook his head. “What the hell are they waiting for?” Dobrynin hissed.
Two police helicopters appeared out of the night, clattering toward the burning lab complex. Their green and red navigation lights strobed rhythmically. Dazzling white spotlights probed at the ground, hunting for the attackers. Suddenly there were two blinding flashes from near one of the shattered buildings. Trailing bright plumes of exhaust, two surface-to-air missiles streaked skyward — already guiding on the helicopters. Explosions lit the night as the shoulder-launched SAMs detonated. Enveloped in flames, both helicopters spun down out of control and smacked into the ground. Shards of torn metal and shattered Plexiglas pinwheeled away from each crash site.
“That, I think,” Aristov said coolly. Now that they’d disposed of the threat of aerial surveillance, he could see six big human-shaped machines sprinting out of the wrecked American science complex. The KVMs were moving at more than sixty kilometers per hour, covering ground with every long-legged stride as they climbed into the hills. He lowered the binoculars and looked at Dobrynin. “The colonel’s robots are on the way now. They’ll be here in a couple of minutes. Is everything on our end set?”
The other man nodded. “Our guys are standing by to load the trucks.”
Aristov got to his feet and stuffed his binoculars into a backpack. Their three converted tractor-trailers were parked at points along the deserted service road. Once they had Baryshev’s war machines safely aboard, it was a short thirty-kilometer drive through the Altamont Pass to another safe warehouse. This one was located on the outskirts of the town of Tracy. By the time the Americans could respond in force to this new attack, both the RKU security team and the colonel’s KVM unit would be well hidden.
With Dobrynin, he waited at the crest of the hill.
When the tall gray war machines drew near, they slowed down. Five stalked silently past the two former Spetsnaz officers, moving on toward the parked trucks. The sixth KVM stopped a few meters away. Its antenna-studded head swiveled toward them. “Any problems, Captain Aristov?” a cold, synthesized voice asked.
“No, Colonel,” Aristov replied. Then he noticed the dark smears of blood streaked across the robot’s torso and limbs. His voice faltered. “Good God, what happened down there?”
“Oh, this?” the machine asked, holding out a large, metal-fingered hand that appeared to be coated in dried blood and torn human skin. “After I expended all of my ammunition, some of the American scientists and engineers were still alive. They tried to hide in one of their labs. So I liquidated them at close quarters.” For a moment, the KVM appeared to reflect. Then it said, “The exercise was very… satisfying. In fact, we may be able to conserve our limited ammunition supplies by employing similar tactics on a bigger scale in the future. I will have to consider this option more closely.”
Without waiting for a response, the robot turned away and strode off into the darkness.
Aristov stared after the KVM in horror. He fought down an urge to vomit.
“Nu ohuet teper. Okay, we are fucked,” he heard Dobrynin whisper. “Whatever that thing is now, I don’t think much of it is really Colonel Baryshev. Not any longer. What the hell have these guys done to themselves?”
Patrick McLanahan closed his eyes, accessing the wireless computer links built into his LEAF. Most of the exoskeleton’s computers and machinery were devoted solely to keeping his crippled body alive, but the system retained a small fraction of the neural-interface capability employed by Cybernetic Infantry Devices. It gave him the ability to assimilate and analyze large amounts of data in a fraction of the time it would have taken an unassisted human brain.
Ordinarily, he significantly restricted his use of this ability — fearing that it might trigger the same sense of profound, debilitating isolation and mental instability he’d suffered while forced to exist entirely inside one of the robots. But the news from the United States was bad and growing worse with every passing hour. Unless he somehow worked out how the Russians were conducting this secret war of cruise-missile strikes and war machine raids, his son’s Iron Wolf combat team might as well be based on the dark side of the moon for all the good that it could do.
Without information that would allow them to hit Gryzlov’s forces, Kevin Martindale was right, he thought grimly. Right now, Brad and the others were simply hostages to fortune. If they were caught or even spotted by forces loyal to Barbeau, the repercussions would be almost unimaginable. Poland was not his native country, but the years he’d spent in its service had taught him to admire its proud, fiercely independent people.
A wry smile creased Patrick’s worn, lined face. Okay, perhaps not to the same extent as his son, who was plainly head over heels in love with Nadia Rozek. Still, seeing the Poles crushed between a hostile America duped by Gryzlov’s machinations and Moscow’s tank and motorized rifle divisions was not something he could accept. So even if rapidly analyzing their painstakingly accumulated fragments of intelligence required him to risk a bit of his regained sanity, it was worth trying, he decided.
He was pretty sure that spending more time working through the demonstrated powers and tactics employed by the Russian war robots was a dead end. Scion analysts had already milked every pixel of video footage and piece of eyewitness testimony for whatever information they contained. But while they now had a much clearer grasp of what the enemy’s machines could do in battle, they were still no closer to understanding how those robots avoided detection before they conducted their raids. There were simply too many hypothetical ways to do that — ranging from shipping the war machines as separate components and reassembling them before every attack to using trucks or other large vehicles to move them around.
Which left the cruise-missile attacks conducted by Gryzlov’s mercenaries. Patrick strongly suspected that the clues he needed to crack their operational patterns wide open were buried somewhere in all the bits and pieces of evidence gathered in the two different strikes — the first on Barksdale Air Force Base and now the second, on the Pacific Fleet’s San Diego piers.
Seeing what he could deduce from the fact that they’d used versions of Russia’s Kh-35 subsonic cruise missiles in both attacks was his first step. Knowing the maximum range for those weapons — around 160 nautical miles — at least narrowed down the locations of possible launch sites. Reacting to his mental commands, his computer pulled up maps of both the southwestern and southeastern United States, pinpointed Barksdale AFB and Naval Base San Diego, and then drew circles with a radius of 160 miles around each site. Of course, “narrowing down” was a relative concept, Patrick decided dryly, since each of those highlighted zones contained rather more than 100,000 square miles. He could shave that somewhat for the raid on San Diego, since the Navy’s E-2C Hawkeye would have easily detected any launch off the California coast. But even erasing the areas within its effective radar coverage still left a vast region of rough, almost uninhabited deserts and mountains stretching from the Mojave southward deep into Mexico.