“No, sir.”
Sakhan raised his hands. “So there we have it. You can expect a representative from your embassy to arrive shortly, and we will secure the, wreckage of your aircraft and assist your injured in any way we can.”
“I’m sorry we couldn’t get any authorized assistance, sir,” Briggs said.
Sakhan narrowed his eyes. “This means what, soldier?”
Briggs and Wohl walked down the taxiway and made their way over to the mass helicopter parking ramp. Sakhan and several of his officers and personnel followed. They walked down the middle of the ramp until they saw a Mil-8MTV twin-turboprop helicopter gunship readying for takeoff, with a machine gun mounted on the nose but its weapon outriggers empty. “We’ll take this one,” he said.
“Pereproshopyoo?” Sakhan exclaimed, the rising anger apparent in his voice. “You will ‘take’ this helicopter? What do you mean?”
“I mean, sir, that I will take this helicopter to Russia on a rescue mission, or my associate will destroy it.”
“Destroy it? How dare you?”
Briggs turned to Wohl. “Demonstrate,” he ordered.
Wohl turned and, shooting from the hip, fired a depleted uranium projectile into another parked helicopter about a hundred yards away. The projectile created a bright one-inch contrail through the moist predawn sky that was very visible under the ballpark lights illuminating the ramp. Several large pieces of the helicopter’s engine compartment flew off, and the rotor mast listed sideways so far that one rotor blade tip sagged all the way to the ramp.
“Gavnuk! That little display of false bravado just cost your government five million dollars, and cost you a year in prison!” Sakhan shouted. He turned to two of his security men standing behind him and issued an order in Ukrainian.
But when the guards leveled their assault rifles on Briggs and Wohl, Briggs immediately sent both of them to the tarmac with one quick electric blast each from his electrodes. Wohl covered Briggs with the big rail gun but did not aim it at anyone. The other officers around Sakhan were stunned, not daring to make a move. Briggs nodded toward another helicopter. “Now that one.”
“Nee! Zhoda! Zhoda! Very well, very well,” Sakhan said angrily, holding up his hands. “If you wish to kill or maim dozens of my men just so you may sacrifice your lives and the life of one of my helicopter crews over Russia, I cannot stop you. But I wish you to know that you are in violation of Ukrainian law and I will see to it that you are punished.”
“Thank you, sir,” Briggs said. He and Wohl trotted over to the helicopter that had just started engines; meanwhile, Sakhan had issued orders over a portable radio to the crew. As the two Americans approached, several crew members departed the helicopter. When Briggs and Wohl climbed aboard, only the pilot and copilot remained.
Briggs strapped into the flight engineer’s seat behind the copilot, then swiveled the seat so he sat between the two pilots. He saw their shocked reactions as they stared at the weirdly outfitted man. “Stand by for instructions,” he told the pilot. He nodded in return — obviously he understood English and could hear Briggs’s synthesized voice. Briggs activated his satellite transceiver: “Briggs to Luger secure.”
“Go ahead, Hal.”
“Me and the master sergeant just got a ride,” Briggs said. “We might need to smooth things over with the Ukrainian army, but we’ll deal with that problem later. I need a heading and as much intel as you can give me to the shootdown point.”
“Roger. Be advised, Dewey and Deverill have been captured.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Annie is still in contact with us,” Luger went on. “They were captured by locals and turned over to Border Police. They’re not on the move right now — we think they’re in a vehicle, but stationary right now. Deverill is unconscious. Stand by … your magnetic course is one-one-seven degrees, range two-two-three nautical miles. One thousand feet AGL should be a good emergency safe altitude for you.”
“I’ve got a good visual on the terrain,” Briggs said. “We’re on our way. ETA, seventy minutes.” The Ukrainian pilots did not have night-vision goggles, but Briggs could see everything with perfect clarity with his electronic visor sensors. “One-one-seven degree heading, boys,” Briggs shouted to the pilots. “And step on it.”
“Step on it. Bistra. Ochen bistra. Haul ass, right, Mr. Robot?” the pilot echoed, laughing. Obviously, the pilots were much more excited about this mission than the base commander was. They lifted off the ground and headed off, staying just above the treetops.
Codlea, Romania
About a hundred miles north-northwest of the Romanian capital of Bucharest, nestled within the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps, Codlea was the site of a former Warsaw Pact bombing range and dispersal airfield, long ago sold to Pavel Kazakov — he never said why a Russian “businessman” needed an entire military base in the Carpathian Mountains, and the Romanian government, after seeing how much Kazakov was willing to pay for the abandoned ghost town of a base, didn’t ask.
Romania was a rich source of weapons, fuel, maintenance personnel, intelligence officers, and fighters — all it took was money, and the supplies seemed unlimited. Romania, once only a junior member of the Warsaw Pact, had developed a substantial weapons-manufacturing industry during the Nicolae Ceausescu regime, manufacturing license-built and copies of Soviet and Chinese weapons of all kinds, from small-arms ammunition to jet fighters. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia and China flooding the markets with weapons, and hard economic times in most of Eastern Europe, those weapons factories turned to the underground weapons dealers to stay alive. Kazakov was a regular and welcome customer in Romania.
From the outside, the big hangar looked as decrepit and as much in danger of collapse as all the buildings out there. But on closer inspection, one would first notice that the tall five meter-high barbed-wire fence surrounding the hangar was new. As one got closer, it’d be apparent that the peeling paint, loose siding, and rusty bolts on the outside of the hangar actually hid a soundproof steel lining, and that the old hangar door actually sat squarely on well-lubricated rollers. Although grass still popped up through cracks all over the runway and taxiways, some of the grass was clearly mashed down in places, denoting very recent activity by heavy vehicles.
Inside the fifty year-old hangar was one of the world’s most Modern aircraft-the Metyor-179 “Tyenee” stealth fighter-bomber. After its raid on Kukes, Pavel Kazakov had had Stoica and Yegorov fly the plane to this isolated, virtually unknown destination, where fuel, maintenance, and weapons were waiting. A crew of thirty technicians and workers were standing by, ready to check out the plane, download postmission data from its computers, and get it ready for its next mission.
After its first taste of action, the Mt-179 was in almost perfect condition. The pilot, Ion Stoica, was examining the aircraft with the maintenance chief during an early-morning status briefing. “That’s the worst of it, Mr. Stoica,” the maintenance supervisor said. He pointed to the leading edge of the wing near the muzzles where the air-to-air missiles were fired. “The missiles are ejected from the launch tubes by a slug of compressed nitrogen gas. The gas slug is supposed to push the missile thirty to forty meters from the wing before the missile’s motor fires, to avoid any exhaust damage to the wing. For some reason, the missiles are only being pushed ten to fifteen meters away before the motor ignites. The tube’s shutter, which is titanium, protects the inside of the wing from exhaust damage, but the exhaust is badly corroding the surface of the leading edge, and it appears that the shutter is partially open when the motor fires, because we are seeing some heat damage inside the launch tube itself.”