- -
- 100%
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Kurtzman was also willing to bet that this machine was capable of being operated by, or cooperating with, other autonomous drones operating as autonomous units. In effect, this baby was capable of engaging in independent small- and large-unit actions without the benefit of a human operator in control.
It was an incredibly sophisticated piece of machinery.
Kurtzman leaned back in his chair. It was a very strange thing to be shot down out of the sky during an engagement with Russian mafiya thugs. Of course the mafiya thugs had showed up with antiaircraft artillery. It all led to the inescapable conclusion that there was a much larger game afoot.
Hawkins pointed his screwdriver at a small, yellow, rectangular casing that almost seemed off in a corner by itself. It didn’t appear to be connected to the UAV’s power supply, CPU, engine or guidance units. “What do you figure the little yellow box is?”
“I figure that little yellow box is the little black box.”
“A flight recorder?” Manning offered. “On a little rig like this?”
“You’re right,” Kurtzman agreed. “You don’t usually see that on a UAV this size. But it’s not attached to anything and it hasn’t blown up. A drone is the same as any other vehicle. You don’t want the flight recorder attached to anything else in the system. You want it to independently record what happens in case the vehicle gets lost, shot down, captured or, most important, hacked and hijacked.”
“So it’s on right now?” Hawkins asked.
“I suspect its transponder is pinging away.”
As a demolitions man, Manning knew something about electronics. He eyed the little yellow box. “So the bad guys know where we are? Even here?”
“Depends on the range. That is a pretty small unit and you have flown it across the Baltic. It’s not like you left it where it fell in Gdansk. Then again? Just about everything inside that rig appears to be about ten times more powerful than any standard, comparable commercial model UAV. Heck, a lot of its electronics are more sophisticated than similar-size stuff the United States military issues to our troops, including Special Forces. This fellow is not standard issue anywhere. It’s made to look like a commercial rig, but it was made custom from top to bottom, to customer specifications, and that customer had money to burn.”
“So the bad guys know where we are?” Hawkins asked again.
Kurtzman made a judgment call. “Normally, I would say no, unless of course the bad guys have their own satellite talking to it.”
McCarter leaned in to the conversation. “You think these guys have their own satellite?”
“I would bet they have one. Or, given the level of sophistication, they can access someone else’s satellite and the owners don’t know about it.”
Hawkins tried one more time. “So the bad guys know where we are?”
“Oh, I’d bank on it,” Kurtzman confirmed. “Speaking of which, did you get the guns?”
Hawkins had taken the elite trajectory from United States Army to United States Army Ranger to Delta Force before he had taken a meeting with Mack Bolan and company. All of his life, guns were artillery pieces. Firearms were weapons. He had given up trying to explain this to Kurtzman. Hawkins often had to remind himself that despite the man’s utter brilliance, Kurtzman was, and always would be, a civilian. “The guns arrived, Bear. Swedish steel is good steel.” Hawkins made a face. “Too bad they’re fifty years old…”
“Short notice?” Kurtzman vaguely milled his hands. “Sweden?”
“They’re charmingly retro,” quipped Calvin James from where he sat in an armchair assiduously cleaning and oiling his weapon. “I’ve met some old-timers at the SEAL meets who’ve told stories about being issued Swedish Ks.” He made a face that matched Hawkins’s. “In Nam—”
“Retro is right,” Hawkins grunted.
The Swedish K submachine guns had no optics, laser designators, suppressors or tactical lights. They looked as though they belonged in a Bond film; nothing later than early Roger Moore, and Sir Roger probably would have scowled at them. They only operated on rock and roll and didn’t even have a safety. Though that part Hawkins perversely kind of liked. He also kind of liked the fact that the models the CIA had procured were so old they had the original adapter for Finnish 50-round magazines. Hawkins got back to the matter at hand. He turned to McCarter. “So, boss. Do I do anything about the black box or not?”
McCarter leaned over the table and peered at the little yellow question of the day. “Bear, what do you think?”
“My guess is they have been able to track you, and they had all day to cross the Baltic or organize something in your neighborhood. If you want to move, they’ll be able to track you. Maybe you want to do that and set a trap? Or you could remove it, put it on a train to nowhere and send the bad guys on a wild-goose chase, then maybe we can take a stab at tracking them.”
It wasn’t a bad plan and McCarter had considered it. However, in his opinion, Phoenix Force had already frittered away a day crossing the Baltic and hanging out in Sweden. He had to admit the food and rest had been welcome and that as an asset Nikita Propenko got more interesting by the minute. “Or I could destroy the black box right now, let our opponents know we found it and force the bloody sons of bitches to act before they lose us.”
“There is that,” Kurtzman conceded.
McCarter decided. “Hawk, gut it.”
Hawkins unbolted the little yellow box from the UAV fuselage. He held it up and almost dropped it as it made a single, plaintive, electronic peep. “Bear?”
Kurtzman sighed. The cat was out of the bag. “If I had to guess, someone, somewhere, is now aware that the flight recorder has been removed from the UAV body.”
“Then the jig is up and an attack is imminent.” McCarter took the flight recorder and slid it across the table to Propenko. “Here, this is your first job. Take this and—”
The bottom of Propenko’s scarred fist slammed down on the flight recorder like a hammer. Bits of thick, weather-sealed plastic armor flew in all directions.
McCarter nodded. “And do something like that.”
Propenko scooped up the little black box’s innards and made a fist around them. Little bits of technology cracked and popped. The Russian rose, went to the sink, turned on the tap and flicked on the garbage disposal. Propenko dropped the shattered remnants down the drain and the flight recorder of Drone 1 met its final mastication. McCarter noted that not only had the Russian’s English gotten better but his leg seemed to be bothering him a lot less.
Everyone froze as the lights suddenly went out and the garbage disposal spun to a grinding, snapping halt. For a moment the only sound was the tap water trickling. The lights of the neighbors on the surrounding hillsides and the lights of Kalmar below didn’t flicker a single watt. Someone had cut the safe house’s power. Propenko turned the tap off.
“Gear up,” McCarter ordered. “We’re about to get hit.”
Phoenix Force’s armament might have been archaic but they still had their mission night-vision gear, armor and com equipment.
Jack Grimaldi’s voice shouted across the link. “Two choppers just flew by! Low and fast and inbound on your position. They have door gunners and they are not Swedish Coastal Patrol!”
Encizo spoke from his lookout point in the loft. “I see them. Coming in hot.”
McCarter spoke into the com. “Jack, get airborne.”
Grimaldi was on the beach. He had flown Phoenix
Force in illegally below Swedish air control radar and was three klicks south. He was about to rise and announce himself to Swedish airspace. “ETA five!”
McCarter nodded to himself. Phoenix Force was going to have to take the shot. He highly suspected the enemy ground teams were already on top of them. “Well, lads, they didn’t sick the local bobbies on us, so it looks like they’re spoiling for a fight. Let’s knock one down! Backyard! Everyone except you, Fish. I think they’ll sweep the main level.”
“What if they sweep the loft?”
“Then you’re screwed, mate!”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah…”
“All right. Backyard! Behind the chimney! Brick and mortar are our best friends! Watch your leads. They’ll be flying over the house and nap of the earth up the mountainside. We might get a good shot. Go for the second bird!”
Phoenix flowed out the back door. The safe house’s backyard was little more than a carved-out flat space with a brick barbecue attached to the chimney and a hot tub and a sauna. Beyond that the mountain ran almost straight up. The sound of rotors beat against the hillside. Multiple machine guns ripped into life and echoed over Kalmar. Bullets tore through the little mountain house, shattering glass and ripping wood. McCarter smiled as the rotors beat overhead. The enemy wasn’t hovering and firing. Someone had told them what had happened in Gdansk. They were making fast gun runs.
The two choppers swung up the mountainside in echelon bare meters above the treetops of the near-vertical forest.
Grimaldi’s voice came over the link. “These boys aren’t bad.”
“Screw ’em,” Hawkins snapped.
“Rear target!” McCarter bellowed over the overwhelming rotor noise overhead. “Fire!”
Six stone-cold soldiers opened up. The two choppers were little more than thundering shadows save that they were commercial copters and their running lights flying straight up the mountain and barely overhead made for perfect target frames.
The chopper flying wing position took three hundred and fifty 9 mm rounds up his ass in the space of three seconds. The helicopter slewed and made a stuttering whirp-whirp-whirp noise as broken engine parts and severed hydraulic lines failed. The lead chopper summitted and disappeared into Sweden.
“Up yours, dude,” Hawkins swore. He and the rest of the team slammed in fresh 50-round magazines.
The stricken copter nosed up to apex in the starlight. It suddenly auto-rotated and nosed downward. Sparks and smoke belched out of it and the helicopter began wildly swinging down the mountainside, still barely above the tree line and suicidally straight at the safe house.
Hawkins reassessed. “Aw, damn…”
Behind them Phoenix Force heard glass and wood breaking as the enemy team hit the house.
Fire exploded out of the kamikaze helicopter as it came on like doomsday.
McCarter roared. “Forward! Forward! Forward! Hug trees!”
Phoenix Force ran forward. Olympic synchronized swimmers would have admired how they vaulted the hot tub and the tiny, motorized-current lap pool. As a unit they each found a beautiful pine tree, ran just past it and then fell against it.
The burning helicopter plowed into the back of the safe house. Rotors snapped, fuel tanks ruptured, the house’s natural gas tank detonated and the world went orange. McCarter had ordered his teammates to hug trees. They were mostly cringing as heat washed up the mountainside and black smoke followed in billowing waves. James had taken cover behind the sauna but the sauna was now on fire. Encizo burst from the house and was vaguely smoking as he ran out and hurled himself into the stationary lap pool.
McCarter watched the tail rotor of the enemy chopper slowly turn as heat rose through it. The chopper’s blackened tail boom tilted through the roof of the burning house where the chimney used to be. The house was burning out of control. McCarter spoke into his link. “Jack, do we have movement?”
“You have ashes settling,” Grimaldi returned. “Flawless victory.”
“Phoenix, sound off!”
Everyone complied from behind their smoldering tree. Encizo rose from the lap pool and shot a thumbs-up.
McCarter surveyed his team. “Where’s Nick?”
James and Manning snapped up their K guns to watch their flanks.
Propenko limped out of the burning safe house, the enemy UAV’s fuselage halves clamped beneath his arm trailing scorched wires and guts. “I am figuring you are still wanting this.”
“You bet, bubba!” Hawkins said.
McCarter was duly impressed but stayed on mission. “Jack?”
“Lead chopper is gone. I wanted a piece of him but he has headed straight north into the Swedish hinterland. You want me to pursue or do you want extraction?”
There was very little way Phoenix Force could wander down the mountain after a gunfight, ghost helicopter crash and a flaming cabin. McCarter could already hear police and emergency vehicle sirens down in Kalmar proper.
“Jack? We need extraction now.”
“Where to? Swedish police channels are blowing up, much less Swedish air traffic control. My range is severely limited. Norway? Denmark? Pick a Baltic republic. They are all about incursions!”
“Poland,” McCarter decided.
Grimaldi was unusually flabbergasted. “You want me to fly you back across the Baltic into Poland?”
“Right back to Gdansk,” McCarter affirmed, and he felt good about it. “It’s the last thing any idiot we are dealing with will ever expect.”
CHAPTER FOUR
The Annex, Stony Man Farm
“Wow!” Akira Tokaido proclaimed. “Just…wow.”
The insides of the little UAV Phoenix Force had captured in Gdansk were even more impressive in person. Phoenix Force had managed to get the unmanned vehicle’s remains delivered to the United States Embassy in Stockholm and a private courier jet had gotten them to the United States in just under twenty-four hours. Tokaido, Kurtzman, Huntington Wethers and “Gadgets” Schwarz might as well have been in an operating theater.
The slightly scorched and smoke-stained patient had taken half a dozen steel fléchettes, but the damage had done nothing to mar the UAV’s majesty in the eyes of everyone assembled. Save one. Able Team happened to be in-house and Carl “Ironman” Lyons stood like a stone Buddha as the geek talk flew fast and thick. He finally began to lose patience with all the oohing and ahhing.
“So, can Phoenix trace any of it?” Lyons inquired. The Able Team leader was the one Stony Man member who had been a policeman rather than a soldier before he had been tapped by the Farm. He had risen to the rank of detective, and he was very good at it. “Can I?”
Wethers stood tall and stretched from all the hunching over the table. The distinguished, brilliant, black university professor was a key member of the Stony Man Farm cybernetics team. If you were one of the bad guys, Hunt Wethers turning his mind upon you and your operation as a problem that needed solving probably meant your ass. “Not exactly, Carl.”
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
“It means, technically, these components are untraceable.”
Lyons blinked. “What, it’s a People’s Republic knock-off and there are no serial numbers? We’ve dealt with that before. There’s a factory someplace that manufactured this stuff, and they will have left their stink all over it.”
Wethers shook his head. “Not this time.”
“You’re saying there’s no factory?”
“Not precisely, no.”
“It wasn’t manufactured?”
“No.”
Lyons shrugged. “You’re saying some closet-case, geek genius just built it in his garage out of pipe cleaners, bubble gum and baling wire? Hunt, even pipe cleaners, bubble gum and baling wire have a trail. I know, I’ve followed them.”
“You’re exactly right, Carl. Except that this exceptional little machine was not manufactured or cobbled together by some—” Wethers rolled his eyes “—geek genius in his garage.”
“You’re saying it was conjured out of thin air?”
“Exactly!” Wethers smiled happily as if Lyons were a student who was slowly but surely bringing his grades up and just might graduate on time. “Every last piece of that UAV, from stem to stern, motors to rotors, GPS, CPU—you name it—guidance, flight controls and the fuselage itself, were all conjured out of thin air.”
Lyons’s blond brows slowly bunched as he chewed all this over. “You’re saying it was printed.”
“Carl, you get an A.”
“Thanks, Prof.” The Able Team leader surveyed what he considered to be a shot-down toy helicopter. He was aware of the burgeoning world of 3-D printing, but mostly over the hysterics surrounding the idea of people being able to print their own guns. He hadn’t found the single-shot, .22-caliber zip guns the size of a small megaphone all that impressive, but he knew the technology involved was growing by leaps and bounds and revolutionizing a lot of industries. “The whole thing?”
“Every component save the wiring was put together one micron-thin layer at a time.”
“So we can trace the wires?”
“Oh, yeah.” Tokaido nodded absently as he tried to make the UAV’s CPU communicate with his laptop. The young hacker frowned. The CPU’s encryption was fighting him. To his chagrin it was holding its own. Whoever had designed the CPU, its programming and encryption was starting to disturbingly remind Tokaido of himself. “The wires came from China.”
“That’s a start?”
Schwarz looked at his Able teammate wryly. “Carl, do you have any idea how many meters of wire the PRC manufactures per year?”
“Millions?” Lyons ventured.
“Billions.”
“Oh.”
“This specific component wire could have been bought in any Radio Shack in America or, for that matter, any place that sells wire on planet earth. I myself happen to own reams of it. Trying to trace the wire is a nonstarter, buddy. Sorry.”
Lyons gazed down upon the remains of the immaculately conceived UAV. The detective part of his mind had already leapfrogged past the wire. “So this was an expensive proposition?”
Kurtzman shook his head at the wreckage in admiration. “Carl? You have no idea.”
“Give me an idea.”
“All right. The United States military has all sorts of unmanned vehicles, aerial, terrestrial and aquatic vehicles both surface combatant and submersibles. But this baby? Every last piece is custom designed and printed. You could not get Congress to pass a spending budget that included something like this. The Europeans? Forget it. The Chinese or the Russians? Maybe, just maybe, if they were really that motivated, but they would probably have to subcontract the work and why bother? They’ve got their own unmanned vehicles, not as good as ours—at least not yet. But again, why wouldn’t they just use commercial parts and if the UAV got captured just deny everything? It’s what they do. Someone cared enough to make this baby from scratch.”
Lyons leaned over the table. “Cal shot this bird down over Gdansk, and it was watching a bunch of Russian mafiya assholes that had been sent to wipe out Phoenix, except they didn’t know who Phoenix was or they wouldn’t have been so stupid.”
Kurtzman agreed. “Exactly.”
Lyons’s instincts spoke to him. “This is a private venture, a very well-funded private venture, and they’ve got an agenda we haven’t even begun to fathom.”
“That sounds about right,” Wethers agreed.
Lyons nodded to himself. “Somewhere there is a money and a technology trail. Whoever these guys are they used Russian muscle in Gdansk. That’s where the money trail starts. Where’s David and Phoenix now?”
Barbara Price, Stony Man’s mission controller, stepped into the room. “They’re about to sneak into Russia.”
* * *
Kaliningrad, Moskovsky District
IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL, sunny day in the Russian Federation oblast. The past three days of misting rain had stopped and the sun had broken out.
McCarter, Manning and Propenko were not in a very beautiful part of town. The Kaliningrad oblast was almost the Russian version of Okinawa. The exclave was a small landmass overloaded with naval bases, air bases and army bases. That many military men crammed into such a small amount of acreage required a great deal of off-duty entertainment.
In the Moskovsky District the strips that provided neon-lit clubs with strippers and liquor quickly gave way to the back streets that provided prostitutes and drugs. Those gave way to the rotting back alleys that provided shooting galleries and the worst of streetwalkers.
McCarter and his two-man team walked through the worst part of town at high noon. The area, much like most of its denizens, was decidedly unattractive in direct sunlight. Spent needles and cigarette butts littered the gutters. Russia did not believe in recycling, so no bums collected the sea of empty liquor bottles. Garbage and human sewage was openly dumped in the streets, and snarling, sprung-ribbed mongrel dogs ate the parts they could digest. Given the smell and the swarm of flies, McCarter was fairly certain one of the soiled-newspaper-covered bums they had passed was dead.
The plan was fairly simple. Phoenix Force had deliberately left Propenko’s two remaining associates alive and sent an anonymous call to Polish State Security forces. The Polish State Police had arrived to find a fairly massive, recent battleground, a sea of bodies and weapons, and two Russian mobsters handcuffed to a truck. Polish gun-control laws were fairly lax compared to a great deal of Europe, but owning and operating antiaircraft guns was strictly illegal. Poles as a general rule had very little love for Russians, much less Russian gangsters without visas but with automatic cannons. The Polish state justice system was not particularly known for its leniency; it was, however, known for being utterly corrupt.
Neither Phoenix Force nor Propenko was surprised to learn that Ilya and Artyom Gazinskiy had made the Polish equivalent of bail and disappeared. Using Occam’s Razor, the obvious answer was that whoever had bailed them out had most likely had them killed. However, Ilya and Artyom were Kaliningrad mafiya born and raised. They would have connections and, for a short time, possibly even people who would protect them. The question was where would they go to ground?
Propenko had not hired the Gazinskiy brothers. Rather, they had been bequeathed onto him by money-hemorrhaging parties unknown. Still, he had run the Gazinskiys in the Gdansk operation, listened to them drink and shoot their mouths off, and he felt as though he had a pretty firm idea of where they might be found if they were to be found at all.
That would be the worst part of the Moskovsky District.
Walking across the Polish/Russian Federation oblast border and walking to Kaliningrad had been a very bold move, but even in a militarized area like the oblast, borders were mostly long and unguarded things. In the city of Kaliningrad the team was simply three very dangerous-looking men in a very dangerous part of town. No one gave them a second look. In fact, most of the local denizens immediately cast their gaze down and refused to make eye contact.
Propenko pointed at a sagging, grimy, prewar, three-story tenement. All the windows were boarded up. It didn’t have a neon sign or even a red light. However, over the door faded red paint in a very sloppy version of western graffiti read $$$Luffy-Land$$$.
“Luffy?” McCarter inquired.
“Ilya and Artyom brag about how they are ‘pimping large’ when not kicking ass. This is establishment. Luffy-Land.”
Manning stared at the hideous, rotting building. He could almost swear the spavined structure was staring back, malevolently. “Why is Luffy written in English instead of Cyrillic?”
Propenko kept a remarkably straight face. “Classier.”
“I thought you said they didn’t speak English,” McCarter mentioned.
“I lied. They speak better than me.”
“Thanks.”
“This serves, easier for you to interrogate, and I lied for them. This may be enough to make them trust for a few minutes. Gives us advantage. They only dealt with Nubian. Gummer was sniper, not seen. You, English, were mostly being smoke-obscured man behind cannons. We may be able to be lying our way in.”
Manning nodded reluctantly at McCarter. “He keeps making sense. I’ll give him that.”
“How’s your leg, Nick?” McCarter asked.
“Not bleeding again yet. Nubian does good work.”