Deep Black (33 page)

79

Rubens began speaking even before the Bird commander acknowledged.

“The lasers are going to target our satellites. They have to be taken down. Ms. Telach will give you the coordinates.”

“We can’t just attack,” said Hadash. “We have no proof.”

“If the lasers take out the network, we’ll be blind for six months, if not eighteen,” said Rubens. “We can’t risk that.”

Hadash sputtered. “We need the president’s authorization.”

“You have it,” said Marcke over the Desk Three com system—Telach had cut Hadash’s line into the Desk Three circuit.

“Thank you, sir,” said Rubens. “Gentlemen, stand by for Ms. Tellach’s instructions.”

80

Whacker plotted strikes on both sites, splitting the flight in two. The IP, or initial point, for the bombing run on the first
was ninety seconds away with the gates flooded; the second was fifteen seconds beyond that.

“We won’t have the fuel to recover,” said the navigator– weapons officer.

“Roger that,” said Train. “Punch them in. Malachi, you drive to the second target. Whacker, I want you to sit on that one
and take it. I’ll launch on the first.”

“Good,” said Whacker. He touched his screen, automatically inputting the suggested courses into the flight system. The computer
presented the information immediately to Malachi, essentially giving him a dotted line to follow to the target site.

“Ground intercept radars are up,” said Riddler. “We have an SA-6 battery, an SA-2.”

“Jam them,” said Train, who had the threat icons on his screen. “Malachi?”

“I have control; I’m on course,” he told the flight leader, jacking the throttle.

“Talk it up, talk it up,” said the leader.

“Sorry,” said Malachi, belatedly realizing he’d forgotten to acknowledge the earlier order. “On course. Uh, ninety seconds
to IP. I have both planes. Shit, I’m spiked!”

Either alerted by the earlier encounter or placed on active alert because of the coup attempt, Russian defense radars were
now lighting up all across the country. One had just managed to find Bird Two, “spiking” or locking onto it at very close
range. Riddler was already working to break the contact with the onboard ECMs.

“SA-2 site is on us,” Riddler told Malachi. The original radar that had found the flight had handed off the information to
another radar, which was being used to direct high-altitude SAMs. “We have a launch. Two missiles.”

The SA-2 was a rather old missile—early versions were actually used, with great effect, in Vietnam. Malachi didn’t worry about
them, confident that the electronic fog being poured into the sky by Riddler would confuse them.

The SA-10b battery that fired a few seconds later was considerably more worrisome.

Riddler let out a string of curses as data flowed in about the launch. Six missiles were in the air, all aimed at Malachi.
Riddler cursed and complained that the gear must be screwing up because the SA-10bs—they might be compared to a late-model
American Hawk, with a bigger warhead and more extensive range—seemed to have come from nowhere.

“Relax,” barked Train. “Everyone on their game. Focus.”

Malachi’s threat screen flashed red as the missiles continued to home in on the robot aircraft. Bird Four, which Malachi had
locked into an offset trail about four miles behind the other plane, remained clean.

No-brainer. Two was carrying all air-to-air missiles and could be readily sacrificed. Four was now thirty seconds from the
point at which he would start maneuvering to launch his weapons.

Riddler cursed in his headset. Malachi lost track of what was going on around him. He jinked and tossed chaff from Bird Two,
trying to make it harder for the SA-10b’s onboard guidance gear to close in. Then he pushed his head a few inches from the
flight screen and gave control of Bird Two to the computer to fly a “defensive evade” as he took Bird Four into the target.

Riddler barked a new warning, but Malachi was committed. He dipped the wing hard, pivoting nearly ninety degrees as he dropped
five thousand feet in a half-breath, playing the stick with a bit of body English to keep his nose precisely where he wanted.
In a “real” plane, Malachi would have blacked out from the g forces, and in fact that robot’s wings briefly exceeded their
maximum stress factor as the speed whipped up.

“I don’t have a target,” warned Whacker. The weapons officer was looking at a large screen split into three parts. Similar
to Malachi’s main screen, the top showed a computer-generated picture of the area ahead, with an octagonal reticule at the
bottom indicating his current aim point. The bottom left screen was a simplified grid where the target and missile would be
shown as a box and triangle respectively; the right was a specific target box, complete with continually updated target information.

“Stay with me,” said Malachi. The target area was on the right. The altitude ladder continued to bounce down; he was through
25,000 feet and needed to level off, but the robot was responding sluggishly.

“I don’t have a target,” repeated Whacker.

Malachi turned up the volume on the imaginary song playing in his head—“Kll Ants” by Z—and blew a wad of air out slowly through
his mouth, hanging with the robot as it began to slow, finally answering his tug on the throttle. One of the missile batteries
had spiked him—all sorts of warnings were buzzing, but it was all background noise, all diversion.

The target was a blurry red rectangle in the right corner of his screen. He nudged toward it. The robot’s tail flew upward—something
had exploded below it.

He struggled to hold the plane on course. His eyes were now less than an inch from the screen.

“I’m on it,” said Whacker. He switched on a laser beam to guide the missile to the target, locked the data into the Paveway
V in the F-47C’s belly, and launched.

With the missile away, Malachi began to pull up. The laser designator in the recently updated system did not have to stay
on the target after the missile was launched, which made it easier for Malachi to take evasive maneuvers as antiaircraft systems
continued to track him. He shut down the active radar gear, released his last bale of chaff and some flares for good measure,
and zigged right. Just as he began to check for Bird Two, his screen flashed—the bomb had exploded.

But not on the target.

“The Russian laser took out the Paveway,” said Whacker.

Before Malachi could respond, his flight screen blanked. Bird Four had just been shot down.

81

Rubens stood in the middle of the Art Room, staring at the screen. The Birds’ position was displayed on a map of central Russia,
along with their targets.

He had nearly been fooled. Kurakin was a very wily enemy.

There was, of course, the possibility that the Birds would fail. There would be enormous consequences if they did.

Rubens folded his arms in front of his chest. There would be enormous consequences if he was wrong about the lasers as well,
but that was a possibility he did not entertain.

82

The computer flying Bird Two had done a better job than Malachi, managing to avoid all the missiles on its own. Malachi struggled
to reorient himself as he took the stick from the machine, but he was rattled; he had trouble locating himself relative to
the laser site.

Train’s first strike on his site had also been turned back. He still had both of his planes and was already lined up for a
second try.

“Malachi, get down low where the radars won’t see you and make your attack from there,” said the flight leader.

“I lost Bird Four.”

“Improvise.”

He may have meant to use the remote aircraft’s cannon, but Malachi decided instead he would use the AMRAAMs, which were still
loaded in the belly.

Then he decided on something better.

“I’m going to kamikaze the son of a bitch,” he told Whacker. “You can stay with Train.”

“Malachi, you’re being spiked!” warned Riddler.

He rolled the Bird downward, falling into a spin as he plunged from fifteen thousand feet. He recovered and then slid south
at about five thousand feet, coming through to four thousand, to three thousand, his heart pounding like the piston of an
old steam engine roaring down a Rocky Mountain grade. Riddler tried directing him away from the radar coverage, giving him
a graphic on the threat screen that portrayed it as purple blossoms in a 3-D landscape. But he switched it off verbally; it
was distracting and the stinking radars were all over the place.

And so were the flak guns. The screen lit up with a thousand water fountains, all spurting toward him. An array of ZSU-23
and larger ZSU-57 antiaircraft guns, radar and optically guided, sprayed lead into the sky before him. Mal-achi was running
through a volcanic field, plunging past the gates of hell.

There was definitely a song in this.

The altimeter ladder at the left side of his screen had descended to one hundred feet, and the indicator was still rolling
downward. Malachi’s entire body moved backward as he lifted his nose, trying to slip under the radars but not hit the earth.
He had an open plain in front of him, strings of tracers and black strings—he was through the guns, past the worst of the
antiair. Something grabbed at his right wing; he jerked the stick back, overcorrected, did the wrong thing, cursed, felt himself
lose the plane.

“You son of a bitch, hold still,” he said.

The computer blared a warning, insisting that he was going to collide.

Then he had a blank screen in front of him.

“Shit,” said Malachi. He pushed back in the seat, exhausted, humiliated.

No one said anything for a good thirty seconds, maybe more.

“They’re down! They’re down!” shouted Riddler. “I have a visual from one of the satellites. You hit the mother square on.”

A picture appeared in the middle of Malachi’s main screen. In one corner was a building with what looked like a blotchy cloud
right over it. It was the laser complex exploding.

“Splash Site One,” said Train as Malachi stared at the laser he had just hit. “Both sites are down. Both sites are down—kick-ass,
boys. Mal, help me get Two to a good self-destruct; then let’s break out the beer.”

83

The passage Dean and Lia found extended into a long, dark tunnel. They had to crouch as they ran, but the passage was clear
and dry.

Dean heard the faint rumble of machinery ahead. After they had gone a hundred yards, Lia grabbed his arm to stop him; she
needed to catch her breath.

“What is this, a sewer?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Where does it go?”

“Hey, you’re the one with the magic map,” said Dean. “You tell me.”

“I’m not getting anything,” she said. “The Russian jamming is cutting down on our signal strength, and down here there’s just
too much interference.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying about high-tech bullshit,” Dean told her. “It’s useless when you need it most.”

“We wouldn’t have made it this far without it, cowboy.”

A flashlight beam played across the roof from the direction they’d started in. Dean pulled Lia with him, turning off the flashlight
at first even though the tunnel was pitch-black. He had to turn it back on; there was no way to see otherwise.

The tunnel began running downhill and angling slightly. After they’d gone another twenty or thirty yards, Dean saw an air
shaft or something ahead; light played down it. Lia ran to it, but the shaft was barely a foot square, too narrow for even
her to crawl up.

“They’re close,” he hissed. He could hear their pursuers walking into the tunnel behind them.

Ten strides later, Dean nearly collided with the wall as the tunnel took a sharp turn to the right. Twenty yards beyond that,
it split in two.

They went left. The machinery noises were very loud now.

Behind them, one of the men cursed. A gun fired twice and the ricochet of the bullet cracked in Dean’s ears.

“Maybe they killed each other,” said Lia.

“Yeah. And maybe we hit the lottery.”

“Door.” Lia pointed ahead. A metal door stood above a cement-block step on the wall ten feet ahead. In the middle of the door
was a sign with Cyrillic letters. Lia pulled a small lock pick from her pocket and worked at the lock as two more gunshots
echoed through the tunnel. They sounded louder.

“They’re panicking,” said Dean. There was light now back near the V, small flashlight beams.

Lia undid the lock and pulled the door open. Dean nearly fell backward as a rush of steam blew out into the passage.

“Come on,” said Lia, grabbing his hand and pulling him through. They were in a machinery room. The temperature had to be over
a hundred degrees. The noise was deafening.

Lia pulled him along to a catwalk, then down a flight of steps. She let go at the bottom, disappearing to the right. Dean
followed her into a long tiled hall, turning into an archway as she did, then stopping short on a narrow cement ledge, suddenly
in the darkness.

When his eyes adjusted, he saw he was in a subway tunnel. There were lights every fifty feet or so and a flood of white maybe
two hundred yards on his right.

“Come on!” yelled Lia.

Dean took two steps, then watched her jump off the ledge. His heart nearly stopped.

“It’ll be faster on the tracks,” she explained. “Come on! Come!”

Dean froze. All he could think of was horror stories about people getting run over after falling onto train tracks or frying
when they touched the third rail.

“Charlie Dean, get that lovely butt of yours in gear!” yelled Lia, turning back and seeing him frozen. “Don’t be a sissy wimp.”

“Sexist pig,” he answered—but only in a mutter; he was suddenly out of breath.

Dean crouched.

Shit, if she could do it, so could he.

Unless there was a train coming.

He checked, saw nothing.

Still short of breath, Dean jumped down. He landed in a crouch and tumbled over, his face hitting something hard and cold.

It was the rail. It seemed to be humming.

Sure that a train was coming, he jumped to his feet and ran in Lia’s direction. Bullets whizzed by him—two Russians had just
burst out into the tunnel.

Fortunately, they didn’t have a good angle from the ledge. By the time they got down on the tracks, Dean had reached the flood
of light—a station on the outskirts of the city.

Lia had already climbed on the platform. She reached down and grabbed Dean’s hand, helping him upward as the Russians fired
again.

A half-dozen people stood on the platform, their faces a study in disbelief. Lia and Dean began running toward the stairs.
Then she stopped. A man in a long black raincoat appeared at the top of the steps, one hand on his ear and another in his
pocket, obviously holding a gun.

“This way,” said Lia, running past the stairway along the platform.

The men who’d been in the tunnel were out now, yelling at the man on the stairs. They were all chasing, converging around
the steps as Lia pushed her head down and started to run. Dean threw himself forward as well, following as she threw her hand
on the stair rail and pirouetted onto the steps. He looked up to see a large blond bear throw her to the side.

Dean pitched his arm to slug the bastard, but before he could connect, the giant threw him aside, laughing as the off-balance
American fell against the steps and then rolled down onto the subway platform.

Karr.

“Hang tight, Charlie Dean,” said the NSA agent, spinning around at the steps. He had his jacket, a box—there was a massive
roar, the sound the metro engine might make if it exploded in the tunnel.

Two men fell off the platform.

Karr yelled something as the echo of the A-2’s gunshot dissolved into the roar of a train screeching into the station. Dean
saw people backing away, then getting on the train. They looked pale as the doors closed.

“Come on,” said Karr, bolting up past them as they continued to hug the railing. He’d thrown away the jacket, giving up all
pretense of hiding the A-2. “Those fuckers have radios. Come on!”

“How the hell did you know where we were?” Dean asked.

“Had the Art Room track the locators. Can’t beat the technology, Charlie. It’s what I’ve been telling you. Now if we could
use it to hail a taxi, we’d be home free.”