Iron Wolf (11 page)

E
AST OF
Z
AGREB, OVER
C
ROATIA

T
HE NEXT DAY

“Zagreb Control, Pilatus Six-Eight November on final to Bjelovar Airfield,” the pilot of the Swiss-made Pilatus PC-12 turboprop said. “And thank you very much for your assistance.”

“Roger, Pilatus,” the controller radioed back in lightly accented English. “You are welcome. Switch to common traffic advisory frequency approved. Enjoy your stay in Croatia.”

Making sure his mike was switched off, the pilot, a short, broad-shouldered Englishman named Mark Darrow, glanced across the cockpit at Brad McLanahan with a wry grin. “Enjoy our stay in Croatia? Oh, that we will, right? All five dull minutes of it. Then things are likely to get a wee bit exciting.”

Watching the long grass landing strip ahead growing larger through the turboprop's windshield, Brad wondered what the other man meant. Bjelovar was a typical small, noncommercial airfield, used mostly by flying clubs and those wealthy enough to own their own planes. A white-painted wood building and an old-fashioned hangar sat off to one side, with a variety of small, single-engine aircraft parked beside the strip. It didn't exactly look like a hotbed of intrigue or action.

Darrow had met him on arrival in Paris, taken him in tow to a hotel to sleep off some of his jet lag, and then driven him out to Le Bourget Airport. Once the center of French flying and the place where Charles Lindbergh had landed in
The Spirit of St. Louis,
Le Bourget was now used only for general aviation traffic. The Pilatus PC-12 was parked there, waiting for them.

According to its registration papers, the sleek turboprop was owned by a man named Jan Beneš.

“He's a rather eccentric Czech multimillionaire,” Darrow had explained. “The fellow has homes all over Europe, but he never takes the train or drives. Hence this plane.”

“Will I meet him?” Brad had asked.

That was the first time he'd seen the other man's quick, lopsided grin. “I shouldn't think so,” Darrow had said. “Our Mr. BeneÅ¡ is totally fictional. But he pays quite a lot in tax, which is rather a point in his favor as far as the authorities are concerned.”

Now, two hours after taking off from Le Bourget, they were landing at Bjelovar, roughly forty miles east of Zagreb, the Croatian capital. The late-afternoon sun cast long shadows across the grass.

Humming to himself, Darrow brought the Pilatus in low and dropped gently onto the soft grass surface. Slowing gradually, they rolled almost all the way to the end of the strip and then swung around, with the prop still turning.

“Now what?” Brad asked.

“Now we head for our real destination,” Darrow said. “But first I do this.” He reached down to the center instrument panel and turned a series of knobs.

“You're turning off all the transponders?” Brad remarked, not trying to hide his surprise. Darrow gave him a sly wink. Aircraft transponders were a key component in air traffic control and safety. When interrogated by radar, a transponder automatically sent back a code identifying the plane and reported its current altitude. Flying without your transponder on was a definite no-no in civil aviation, because air traffic control then had to rely on radar “skin paint” for aircraft position, which was not very reliable. In some countries, especially in Eastern Europe, an aircraft without a transponder was automatically considered a hostile and was engaged without warning. He looked at Darrow. “Oh, man. We are going to be in
so
much trouble.”

The Englishman laughed. “Only if we get caught.” He pushed the throttles forward. The Pilatus rolled back down the grass strip, gathering speed fast. “And all it takes to avoid
that
little bit of unpleasantness is keeping right down on the deck for a few hundred kilometers or so. Then we stay off everybody's radar.”

“A few hundred kilometers on the deck. At night,” Brad said flatly. “In this crate.”

“Relax,” Darrow told him cheerfully. “I used to fly Tornado fighter-bombers for the RAF before I hired on with Scion. We always said that if you were more than fifty meters above the treetops, you were too bloody high.”

Brad looked pointedly around the cockpit. “This isn't exactly a Tornado.”

“Quite true,” the Englishman admitted. Then he grinned again. “But squadrons in your own U.S. Air Force Special Operations Command use these same aircraft for low-level night infiltration and resupply missions. That's one of the reasons Mr. Martindale likes them so much.”

He pulled gently back on the yoke and the Pilatus soared off the runway, heading east into the rapidly darkening sky. “Next stop, the Scrapheap.”

“The Scrapheap?”

“Our own private air base,” Darrow said. He winked at Brad. “It's a strange little place, full of odd aircraft and rather unusual people. I think you'll like it.”

N
EAR
D
ONETSK,
U
KRAINE

T
HAT SAME TIME

A long line of dingy, rusting yellow dump trucks crawled south along the highway. Piled high with coal, the big KrAZ trucks were headed from nearby mines to factories elsewhere in the Russian separatist-controlled Donbass region. Before the war, railroads moved the coal, but most of the rail lines had been wrecked in the fighting and never fully repaired. Clouds of black coal dust swirled across the road behind the slowly moving convoy.

Men rode in the back of each dump truck, uneasily perched atop the swaying, shifting mounds. From their faded clothing and soot-stained faces, they were miners sent along to help shift the coal once it reached its destination. In war-ravaged eastern Ukraine, men were cheaper than machines.

Near the rear of the convoy, one of the riders kept his eyes fixed on the western sky, squinting against the reddish glare from the setting sun. There, he thought, catching sight of a speck moving so slowly that it almost seemed to be hovering. It was flying low, perhaps less than a thousand meters off the ground. It appeared to be paralleling their course.

After several minutes, though, he saw the glint of sunlight on wings as the object banked back to the north. Moving unhurriedly, he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a short-range tactical radio. It was not much bigger than a cell phone and its signals were far less likely to be intercepted.

“I have a drone in sight,” Pavlo Lytvyn reported. “But it's checked us out and seems to be moving away to the north. We should be clear in five minutes.”

“Any idea who it belongs to?” Fedir Kravchenko radioed back. “The OSCE or our friends from Moscow?”

“The Russians,” Lytvyn said, continuing to follow the drone as it flew slowly away, still heading north. “One of their Israeli-made
Forpost
models, I think.” He watched the drone until it disappeared in the distance. “That's it, Fedir,” he said. “We are alone.”

Below him, riding inside the dump truck's cab, Kravchenko peered out through a coal-dust-coated windshield. In the growing darkness it was difficult to make out much more than the glowing red taillights of the vehicle they were following.

He glanced at the driver, a wizened little man who sat perched behind the wheel, industriously puffing away on a foul-smelling cigarette. “How much further to the turnoff?”

The driver took another drag on his cigarette and then stubbed it out in the overflowing ashtray perched on the seat between them. “About twenty-five kilometers, Major.”

Kravchenko summoned up a mental image of the map he had memorized. Given their current speed, it would be fully dark when the time came for this truck and the others driven by his men to break away from the main group. A cold, satisfied smile flitted across his maimed face. It was perfect. They should be completely unobserved when they headed for the scheduled rendezvous with the rest of his partisan group. And by the time the Russians or their traitorous separatist allies realized several dump trucks were missing from the coal convoy, it would be too late for them to do anything about it.

Far, far too late.

T
HE
S
CRAPHEAP,
F
ORMERLY
S
ILIŞTEA

G
UMEŞTI
M
ILITARY
A
IRFIELD,
R
OMANIA

T
WO HOURS LATER

“Hang on, McLanahan,” Mark Darrow said, banking the Pilatus PC-12 turboprop into a tight turn. Below the night-vision goggles he'd donned shortly after they took off from Bjelovar, the English pilot's mouth twisted into another crooked smile. “This next bit may be just a little rough.”

“Gee, thanks for the warning,” Brad said drily, tugging his seat belt tighter for what seemed the thousandth time. What the hell did this crazy ex-RAF pilot consider “rough” compared to the last couple of hours when they'd been hedgehopping across a pitch-black rural countryside? He'd spent most of the bumpy, turbulent flight low over Croatia, Hungary, and southern Romania gritting his teeth and staring out into the night sky beyond the cockpit—trying to figure out if he'd have time to see the power pylon, tree-studded hillside, or church steeple that killed them before they were, well, actually dead. At more than two hundred and fifty knots, that seemed unlikely.

Oh, he had to admit that Darrow was a damned good pilot. Even with the benefit of high-quality night-vision goggles, pulling off a stunt like this without terrain-following radar required incredible skill. But part of him kind of wished the Englishman weren't acting as though this was nothing more than a fun-filled jaunt on the world's longest thrill ride. Just a little show of nerves would make him seem more human somehow.

“Ah, there you are, you sneaky little bitch,” Darrow said gleefully, rolling the turboprop back level. He chopped the throttles back and dropped the nose. The Pilatus slid down through the night sky, rapidly losing altitude.

“Mind telling me exactly what you're doing?” Brad asked, staring ahead into blackness. Glowing lights off in the distance marked
what looked like a small village. He could just make out what looked like a long patch on the ground, a surface that was only slightly paler than the darker fields and woodlots they were skimming over.

Darrow flashed another wild, madcap grin in his direction. He pushed a lever down and Brad heard and felt the hydraulic whine as the turboprop's landing gear came down. “Oh, didn't I say? We're here.”

Abruptly, the Pilatus touched down, bounced back up in the air, and then came down again with a teeth-rattling jolt. Suddenly the plane was rolling along a badly cracked and overgrown runway, lurching, rocking, and shuddering through the clumps of brush and tall grass growing between each slab of old concrete. There were no lights. Everything outside was perfectly dark and still. The ex-RAF pilot applied beta, using the big propeller as a huge speed brake; a few seconds of reverse thrust; then tapped the brakes gently, gradually slowing the turboprop in its madcap, bounding rush.

A ray of light shot onto the unlit runway ahead of them, widening fast as two big hangar doors slid open off to their right.

Sliding the prop lever forward again, Darrow slewed the Pilatus toward the opening door and taxied straight into the hangar. He cut off the engine and turned toward Brad with a faint smile. “Welcome to the Scrapheap, Mr. McLanahan.” The hangar doors were already rolling shut behind them.

For the next hour, Brad followed the Englishman on a quick, guided tour through an array of aircraft hangars and other facilities. Everywhere he looked, he saw a bewildering mix of old and new. The pattern, though, was clear. Seen from the outside, the onetime Romanian Air Force base was nothing more than a collection of worn-out buildings surrounding a runway that looked as though it hadn't been used for at least a decade. But seemingly dilapidated hangars were full of sophisticated manned and unmanned aircraft. Garages with peeling paint were crowded with upgraded Humvees, Land Rovers, and other vehicles. And the airfield's tower, warehouses, and other buildings were jam-packed with the latest computers, communications gear, and sensors.

“We try to keep a low profile,” Darrow explained, leading the way through an old barracks that had been extensively renovated, though only on the inside, and partitioned into separate living quarters for the Scion personnel stationed at the Scrapheap. “As far as the locals are concerned, this place belongs to an international holding company with more cash reserves than business sense. From time to time, the nominal owners float various proposals to reactivate the field as an air freight depot, but nothing ever seems to come of them.”

“Which is why that runway is left in such crappy shape,” Brad realized.

“Exactly,” Darrow said, grinning. He shrugged. “It's actually in much better condition that it looks. A number of camouflage experts put rather a lot of work in on it. In daylight, it may look like an overgrown rubbish pile, but quite naturally we don't want any real FOD left lying about.”

Brad nodded. FOD, foreign object damage, was a constant menace for any field operating jet aircraft. Small rocks and other bits of solid trash sucked into a jet-engine air intake could seriously mangle turbine blades.

They left the barracks and headed toward what looked like a rusting equipment shed. It was surrounded by mounds of worn-out tires and empty oil barrels. “Well, this is where I leave you,” Darrow announced.

“Here?” Brad asked, staring at the ramshackle building in front of them.

“Go on, McLanahan,” the other man said matter-of-factly, nodding toward a pair of large doors. “There's someone inside who very much wants to see you.” He yawned. “As for me, I'm off to get some kip. All play and no sleep makes Mrs. Darrow's fair-haired lad a very dull flier.”

Brad waited until the Englishman was gone and then slowly, almost reluctantly, pushed open one of the big doors to the shed. He stepped inside and closed it behind him.

The interior was brightly lit and clean. Various pieces of electronic gear and a few metal canisters lined the walls. Other than a
single, sleek, twelve-foot-plus-tall shape standing motionless facing the door, the center of the shed was completely empty.

Brad stared up at the enormous, humanlike machine. Spindly-looking arms and legs were joined to a long torso, which sloped from broad shoulders to a narrower waist and hips. A six-sided head studded with sensor panels rested atop the robot's shoulders.

It was a Cybernetic Infantry Device—a human-piloted robot first developed by a U.S. Army research lab years ago. Sheathed in highly resistant composite armor, the CID's hydraulically powered exoskeleton was faster, more agile, and stronger than any ten men put together. A special haptic interface translated its pilot's muscle and limb motions into movement by the exoskeleton's limbs, enabling the CID to move with almost unnatural grace and precision, despite its size and power. Sensors of all kinds, coupled with a remarkably advanced computer interface, gave its pilot incredible situational awareness, and the ability to aim and fire a wide array of weapons with astonishing speed and accuracy. Boiled down to the essentials, a single CID could carry heavier firepower and possessed more mobility and recon capability than an entire U.S. Army infantry platoon.

Brad took a deep breath and then let it out. He stepped closer. “Hi, Dad.”

“Hello, son,” said the electronically synthesized voice of former Air Force Lieutenant General Patrick McLanahan. “Welcome to Romania.”