Kit left the helicopter idling and ducked under the spinning rotor blades as he waved to the men at the blockade just up the street. “Bystro! Idi syuda, speshite!” Kit called out in Russian. Quick, come here! Hurry up!
Starlight provided the ambient lighting, and the three men from the blockade ran forward in the dimness. As they got close, Kit leveled his Sub-2000 at them. “Stop! Drop your weapons!”
But one of the men wanted to be a hero and raised his gun.
The shoot-out was over in a couple of seconds, and all three men lay dead.
Yulana scrambled over to Kit and looked without compassion at the dead men.
“Sorry you had to see that,” said Kit.
“Men such as this came in the middle of the night to take my daughter,” she said coldly. She bent down and grabbed a pistol from a dead man. “Maybe you don’t trust me quite yet, but I think I should have a gun.”
“All you had to do was ask!” Kit smiled. “Hey, do me a favor, go grab the keys out of that truck. I don’t want Popov’s other rats to drive away before the police arrive. Then wait for me here, okay?”
Kit ran off toward the Mainichi building. Buzz and Angel were still exchanging small-arms fire with men at the front gate. Then Kit heard an engine whine and could make out the R66 lifting off from inside the compound.
“Damn!” Kit stopped in his tracks. He aimed carefully and fired three-shot bursts at the rising helicopter. As he reached for the radio on his belt, the D10 bulldozer exploded though an exterior wall of the Mainichi building, sending chunks of concrete, plaster, and grit flying everywhere. The yellow behemoth belched black diesel exhaust as it hurtled across a small grassy area, then crashed through the steel fence and careened onto the street.
“Buzz, disengage and grab the RT-Seven,” said Kit into the two-way.
“Roger that!”
Kit loaded a new magazine without taking his eyes off the bulldozer, and fixed on the blond man in the lighted cab; the man turned on a spotlight and swung the beam, illuminating Kit like a Broadway star delivering a solo.
“We have cascading blackouts now hitting the city!” crackled Jen’s voice over the radio.
“I could use a little blackout right now,” mumbled Kit to himself. He fired a burst but missed the spotlight. The blond dozer operator then lifted the huge steel scoop and accelerated.
Kit turned on his heels and ran like hell. “Get into the copter!” he yelled at Yulana.
She saw him running forward with the dozer chasing him, so she moved quickly into the cockpit, which sat facing the charging bulldozer.
Good thing I didn’t shut the bird down! Kit didn’t waste time with the seat belt. As he looked up, the tracked yellow giant, with its steel teeth glistening on the scoop, hurtled closer. Kit twisted the throttle to maximum power as he yanked up the collective.
The MD 530F lifted straight into the air as the scoop rose high on the D10, trying to catch the helo. The raised scoop of the skittering dozer missed the rising helicopter’s skids by inches.
Kit pushed the cyclic forward, and the copter tilted forward and accelerated as it found altitude. He’d last seen Popov heading north and so directed the bird northward, pushing it to its limits. Popov’s R66 was a slower aircraft, and Kit scanned the sky for his prey.
Kit put on his headset and shot Yulana a quick look. “Any idea who the blond guy was?”
“Yes: a crazy man. Did they get what they came for?” she asked, over the headset.
“Probably. But unless he has more tricks, Popov can run but he can’t hide.”
“Vegas PD is rolling up in force to Mainichi. They’re already chasing down men on foot,” said Jen over the radio.
“Jen, have you hacked into the BRITE radar display from McCarran?” asked Kit.
“Roger. He’s painting pretty weak, but I have him at your eleven o’clock, heading northeast, crossing Russell Road at Jones Boulevard right now.”
“Got him!”
Kit eased the cyclic stick to the left as he closed the gap between him and Popov.
“The rolling blackouts are heading toward the Strip,” said Jen, over the radio. “What do you think the other target is?”
“Maybe he’s going there right now.”
CHAPTER 39
The electricity was still working on South Las Vegas Boulevard near Agate Avenue. Security lights illuminated the old boarded-up motel compound that secretly functioned as Viktor Popov’s headquarters.
Next door to the motel was an AT&T facility surrounded by a barbed-wire-topped, ten-foot-high chain-link fence. Huge wooden spools held cabling as thick as your fist and sat stacked in the parking lot, next to parked utility trucks, bucket trucks, and mobile generators mounted on trailers.
A bone-colored two-story, cement-block, L-shaped building suggested little about the contents inside, although a square, four-story-tall microwave tower rose up from the roof.
But who notices microwave towers anymore? The whole AT&T complex, in fact, was hard to notice in a city like Las Vegas. So much screams for attention in Sin City, so many glittery, sensual, over-the-top visual distractions assault the senses, that the unassuming easily goes unnoticed.
Unless you were a communications techie or geek. Or a thief looking to steal some copper or a mobile generator or maybe the Keys to the Kingdom.
Alex Bobrik tried to relax as he sat on an overturned plastic crate in the subterranean room. The constant harmonics of the humming electronics and the soft glow of dozens of LED lights felt soothingly reassuring in a kind of bizarre, postindustrial way. His back ached like crazy from all of the tunnel crawling and now from sitting frozen in place, one hand holding the voltmeter connected to a junction box, the other hand just inches from a metallic red toggle switch on his electronic toaster.
His assistants sat quietly; there was nothing to say. The unspoken fear for all three people was that something would go wrong and Popov would have them killed. Or something else could go wrong and the American authorities would catch them and put them in prison for a very long time.
If everything went right, then, well, maybe, they could get back to the safety of Moscow, and their families would be left alone. Yes, they were being well paid, but they weren’t here for the money; they were here for the lives of their loved ones, although they had never once spoken about it with one another.
The voltmeter in Alex’s hand dipped dramatically, and the room went dark. Alex instantly flipped the red toggle switch, and a series of green lights began to appear, first from the toaster, and then from the electronic collar around the fiber-optic trunk, and then from Alex’s and his assistants’ laptops.
“We’re in! We’ve got it! We’ve got all of it! We have spliced into America’s cerebral cortex!” whispered Alex with considerable elation.
The toaster and electronic collar were Alex’s inventions, and like a lot of Russian technology, they were crude, rugged, and effective. Popov had approached him three years ago with an offer he couldn’t refuse, so he’d been working eighteen-hour days ever since. The toaster and collar were game-changing technological breakthroughs that might never see the light of day, but so what? He had done it. Before now, it had not been possible to splice into more than one strand of a fiber-optic trunk at a time. His modest equipment had just accessed all thirty thousand of them.
After only a few seconds, the lights in the room slowly came back on, softer now, since they were powered by the backup generators.
“Begin the data transfer from the first two fibers to our two fibers,” said Alex.