Suddenly, they heard a voice say directly behind them in terrible, electronically synthesized Russian, “Ya plokha gavaryoo parooskee, tovarisch. I don’t speak much Russian, comrade. Neither does my friend over there.” They turned and saw a figure dressed in a dull-gray bodysuit wearing some sort of space-age full-face helmet with bug-eyed electronic sensors.
“Who in hell are you?” the first police officer shouted in Russian.
As if in reply, there was a flash of blue-white light, and bolts of lightning shot out from small electrodes on the figure’s shoulders. The first police officer screamed, stiffened as if he had touched a high-tension wire, and fell flat on his face in the snow, twitching as if every nerve ending in his body was firing uncontrollably.
“Yop tvayu mat!” The second police officer swung his body, flinging his submachine gun hanging on its shoulder strap from behind his back around into his hands, and he fired a three-round burst from his hip from a distance of no more than fifteen feet. At that range, he couldn’t miss … but to his amazement, the stranger didn’t go down, only staggered back a few steps. “Ya nee paneemayoo …?”
“Spakoyniy nochyee, dude,” the stranger said, and he hit the second officer with another bolt of energy. Sparks of electricity leapt from the officer’s body to the gun until the officer finally fell unconscious to the ground.
The stranger quickly bent down to examine Linda Maslyukov. “It’s her, Chris,” he told his partner via short-range datalink. He hefted the woman over his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. “I’ll take her. You cover us. Make sure our grimy friends behind us don’t try to get too brave.”
“Roger. Follow me,” the second stranger responded, and he headed out back toward where the helicopter had landed.
But they had not gone too far when they heard the sound of several sirens approaching fast. “Well, this is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into this time, Ollie,” the strangely costumed figure carrying Maslyukov said in an electronically synthesized voice. His helmet-mounted electronic displays showed a two-dimensional depiction of the vehicles, including their speed, direction of travel, and an electronic guess of the vehicle type, based on the strength of the millimeter-wave radar return. “Aces, I’ve got a couple visitors at my three o’clock, three hundred and twenty yards, two inbounds. One armored vehicle, maybe a BTR.”
“Copy, Tin Man,” a voice belonging to Duane Deverill, mission commander of an EB-1C Vampire bomber flying nearby, responded. Seconds later, there was a tremendous explosion, and the armored personnel carrier disappeared in a ball of fire.
“Good shooting, Aces,” Briggs said. “C’mon, Sarge, let’s move.”
“For Pete’s sake, sir,” the strange figure’s partner responded in his microphone with an exasperated voice. The big commando, his face a death’s mask in black and green camouflage makeup beneath his multifunction combat helmet, turned toward his partner, his mouth curled in a sneer. The U.S. Marine Corps veteran looked like some sort of monster beetle — along with the oddly shaped helmet with large electronic “eyes,” the commando wore a battle-dress uniform composed of thin ceramic armor plates, a web harness with several devices and pouches attached to it, and a utility belt with as many computer modules and sensors attached to it as weapons. “It’s Stan, not Ollie. Oliver Hardy would say that to Stan Laurel. And it’s not fine mess, it’s nice mess. ‘Here is another nice mess you’ve gotten me into, Stan.’ You keep on mixing them up like that, sir, and I’ll have to waste you.”
U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Hal Briggs, the man carrying Linda Mae Maslyukov, shrugged his shoulders, which only accentuated his very unsoldierlike appearance. While his partner, Marine Corps Master Sergeant Chris Wohl, looked unusual in his insectlike exoskeleton, his commanding officer looked even stranger. Hal Briggs wore a sleek, dark gray body suit resembling a scuba diver’s wet suit, with only a thin backpack, bullet-shaped shoulder-mounted devices, and a utility belt with several small modules attached. His helmet, too, had A large bug-eyed electronic sensors, but it was a full-face helmet that completely sealed the outfit. He-wore all-terrain boots with thick soles and strange extensions on the backs of his calves.
“Stan, Ollie, Sergeant Chris Wohl — they’re all just a bunch of old farts to me,” Briggs quipped. He ignored Wohl’s dark scowl. Through his electronic visor, he could see the exfiltration helicopter in the distance. “Follow me.” Staying close to whatever cover he could find, but not really bothering to use proper cover techniques, Hal Briggs dashed off in the direction indicated on his visor’s navigation display. Wohl followed closely behind, taking a bit more care to keep himself concealed but not wanting to lag behind.
Air Force Major John “Trash Man” Weston swore he could feel the heat from the exploding Russian armored personnel carrier through the cockpit of his MV-22 Pave Hammer special operations transport, even though he was a couple miles away from where the vehicle suddenly exploded, at night, in the dead of an eastern European winter. “Check in, Tin Man,” Weston radioed. “Was that explosion yours?”
“We’re on our way, Hammer,” Briggs radioed back. “That was our guardian angel helping out. Our ETA two minutes.”
Weston and his six-man crew were part of a team called “Madcap Magician,” a secret cell of the Intelligence Support Agency. The ISA was composed of a series of such cells, unknown to each other, deployed all over the world to assist the CIA in high-value rescues, high-risk attacks, reconnaissance, intelligence-gathering, or other missions considered too “hot” for field operatives and too politically sensitive for the military.
This was by far the riskiest operation Weston’s crew had ever flown as special ops crews: deploy from the U.S. Special Operations Command detachment based at Batman Air Base in eastern Turkey across the Black Sea and the Republic of Ukraine, refuel at low level with an MC-130P aerial refueling tanker over eastern Ukraine near Char’kov, then fly another five hundred miles across southwestem Russia to the outskirts of Moscow itself.
But that twelve-hundred-mile trip was only the beginning of Weston’s extraordinary mission. Dodging civilian and military air defense radar coverage around Moscow and Zhukovsky, Air Base, Weston and his crew had to search four different contact points around Zhukovsky Air Base, looking for a single agent who was probably in hiding. The MV-22’s infrared scanner was the primary search sensor; if the sensor showed any individuals in the area, Weston would drop off Briggs and Wohl, who would search the area near each contact point for the agent. They had less than an hour loiter time to find her before fuel would run low and they’d be forced to return to the MC-130P Hercules tanker flying in northeastern Ukraine to refuel. They had enough daylight for only two such searches before they’d have to return to Batman Air Base before sunrise.
Their only advantage: they knew that the agent would be at one of those four contact points.
The thirty-two year-old aircraft commander, married and father of two, had been briefed on the importance and dangers of this mission, but he had volunteered anyway. As shitty as he felt his job was sometimes, being a spy for the United States government had to be an even shittier job. If he had the skills to attempt to save this spy’s life, he had an obligation to use them. And with the MV-22E Pave Hammer I special operations transport, he definitely had the gear to do the job. The MV-22E was modified with more powerful engines and stronger wings for low-level flying; an air refueling probe for extended range; rugged landing gear for landing on unimproved surfaces; ultraprecise satellite and inertial navigation systems, night vision, forward-looking infrared scanners, and terrain- and obstacle-avoidance radar for treetop-level flying in any weather, day or night; and threat countermeasures equipment such as radar jammers, radar warning receivers, and decoys to protect the crew from hostile antiaircraft fire.