Authors: Dale Brown
“Now, Mr. Lupo, you’re starting to sound like you know something,” said Gleeb, smiling and signaling for the check.
Dreamland
T
urk’s foul mood didn’t lift even after General Wallace and some of his aides met him on the way back to the hangar and congratulated him on a great flight.
“The episode at the end demonstrated just how capable the plane is,” said Wallace. “And the pilot.”
“Thanks,” managed Turk.
“Future of the Air Force—manned flight,” said Wallace, emphasizing the last phrase. “Well done. Carry on.”
“Thank you, sir.” Turk didn’t point out that the phrase “manned flight” was actually a slogan from the space program, which wasn’t faring too well these days.
Three of the engineers responsible for the Sabre control systems, faces ashen, met Turk for the debrief. They looked like a trio of ghosts haunting an air wreck. They had already figured out the problem, they said—an errant line of code had prevented the proper routine from loading.
“You told me it was already fixed,” Turk said. “Isn’t this the problem from the other day?”
“This kept the right solution from loading,” one of the men explained. “We fixed it and had to fix it again.”
“It should have been tested.”
“It
was
tested. You were part of the tests.”
I pushed the buttons you told me to push, thought Turk, but it was useless to argue.
Breanna Stockard caught up to him and Tommy Stern a few hours later at Hole 19, one of the all-ranks lounges on the main Dreamland base. Turk, sipping a seltzer, was standing at the bar talking to a nurse whose curly brunette hair hung down over her eyes in what seemed to him the cutest way imaginable. He bought her a drink, then started talking about his Ducati motorcycle, hoping to set up a date to take her for a ride.
Stern, who was married, stood by quietly, occasionally rolling his eyes.
“Captain, there you are,” said Breanna, striding across the room toward the bar. “Do you have a minute?”
“Sure,” said Turk, though in truth he would have preferred the interruption to come a little later.
“I have to be going,” said the brunette.
“Hey, hang out a minute,” said Turk. He reached for her hand but she pulled it away.
“Sorry. Lot of stuff to do.”
Turk watched her walk away. It was definitely his loss.
Stern made his apologies as well, which was clearly fine with Breanna. They took a table in the corner.
“I saw what you did on the landing,” she told him, pulling out her chair. “It was very good piloting.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“And you’re modest,” she said sarcastically.
“Some days.” Turk took a long sip of his seltzer.
“No more Sabre flights until the entire low-altitude protocol is rewritten and retested,” said Breanna. “I’ve already given the order.”
“That’s overkill. There’s nothing wrong with the plane.”
“I’m not talking about the Tigershark. I meant the Sabres and Medusa.”
“Well . . .” Turk suddenly felt protective of the UM/Fs, though he couldn’t for the life of him have explained why. And in fact he’d made more or less the same argument to the engineers earlier. But there was something about having a system that he was working with grounded that put him on the defensive. “I guess.”
“When are you leaving for Prague?”
“Couple of hours.” He held up the seltzer.
Sobriety was actually a nonissue in the Tigershark, because the aircraft’s flight computer put the pilot through a series of mental tests before it would unlock its systems. Supposedly, the test could figure out if you were overtired as well as inhibited by drugs or alcohol. Turk, close to a teetotaler anyway, had never tested it.
“Plane’s ready?”
“All ready.”
Turk was taking Tiger Two. The rail gun had been removed for security purposes; unlike the plane, its existence was still top secret. It also did not have a Medusa unit.
“I’m going with you,” said Breanna.
“In the Tigershark?”
She gave him a funny look. “Of course not. I’m going in the C–20.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What’s in that seltzer?”
She meant it as a joke, clearly, but Turk felt embarrassed.
“I didn’t think you were coming,” he said.
“My family’s going to be there. And I thought I would take a look at what’s new. Supposedly the Russian PAK-FA will be there. It might be good to take a look.”
“At 1980s technology, sure,” sneered Turk.
“I wouldn’t underestimate what the Russians and Indians can do if they work closely together,” said Breanna. “Anyway, if we can get together before the show, I’d like to get your thoughts on the plane’s potential and where we can go from here.”
“Is Zen going to be there?” Turk asked.
“Yes.”
“You know, I’d love to, uh, go like to dinner or something with you guys. If I could, um, you know, kinda hangout.”
“Sure.” Breanna rose. She hadn’t touched her beer, Turk noticed.
“The Defense secretary has arranged for me to talk to some of the NATO representatives in the morning on the future of manned flight,” she added. “There’ll be a panel discussion afterward. I thought you’d be a good person to sit on it.”
“Me?”
“You don’t think you’re qualified?”
“Well, yeah.”
“A sudden lack of confidence. That’s refreshing.” Breanna smirked. “You want some advice, Captain?”
“Sure.”
“Fancy Italian motorcycles can definitely be a turn on, but talking about how close you can get your knee to the ground going around a curve—not so much.”
Northeastern Moldova
T
he Wolf assault team went through the entire sequence twice more, starting with the mock attack inside the steel building and ending with the SUVs. Danny got the impression that they were still at the walk-through stage; they stopped midway through the second time, rearranging how the teams ran to the cottages where the helos were kept.
The SUVs were interesting. They looked like full-sized trucks, but two people could pick them up with ease. Were the trucks extremely lightweight, like the helicopters? Or were the men ridiculously strong?
The exercise concluded at two in the morning. After the choppers were returned to the cottages, the farm looked exactly as it had before sunset.
“You figure they’re going to sleep?” asked Flash.
“Debrief the session first,” said Danny. “While it’s still fresh. Then sleep.”
“Beers, then sleep,” said Flash. “How long—an hour?”
Danny stared at the screen. He wanted to strike during the dark, minimizing the possibility that his attack force would be seen on the way in. Should he hit the force during the exercise or afterward?
Afterward was his preference. Not only would they be tired, but he could pump gas into the building first, increasing the odds of getting them without a fight. His orders called for him to “use nonlethal means of apprehension” if at all possible.
Danny had wide discretion on that. No one was going to complain if everyone in the house ended up dead, especially now that they’d seen their rehearsal.
And if Stoner was there?
T
hey watched the group gather in one of the rooms on the first floor, going back over the exercise as Danny had predicted. A half hour later all but two were in rooms upstairs, apparently sleeping.
Danny wanted to get Stoner out alive, if he was there.
“You keep looking at the images, like you might recognize him,” said Flash.
“Yeah.”
“I thought you thought it was bull.”
“I do. Mostly.”
Flash nodded.
“Tomorrow, we wait an hour after they pack it in, when they’re sleeping like now,” said Danny, as if Flash had asked him what the plan was. “Pump the house full of the gas, hit them quick. First sign of resistance, we flatten them.”
“No argument from me,” said Flash.
Reagan International Airport
G
etting around without the use of your legs was never exactly fun, but being disabled and flying a commercial airline flight could be a special trial. Most of the major carriers had special wheelchairs designed to fit down narrow plane aisles; the chairs could then be folded away in the cabin storage areas. But that still left you beholden to the stewardess when you had to use the john.
The bathrooms were their own special hell, though at least Zen wasn’t claustrophobic. He also had the money to fly first class, and was a U.S. senator.
Having a cute kid and a good-looking coed in tow didn’t hurt either.
“Senator Stockard, nice to have you aboard,” said the steward, who met him in the jetway to the plane. “And is this lovely lady Teri Stockard?”
“Yes, I am,” said Teri.
“Excited about flying?” asked the attendant.
“I like to fly,” she told him. “My mom lets me take the controls.”
Zen smiled. Breanna occasionally rented a twin-engine Cessna.
“You’re Caroline,” said the steward to Zen’s niece.
Caroline nodded. She tended to be a little shy around strangers. Zen thought she had no reason to be—she was smart and attractive, not unlike her aunt Breanna.
“Major Stockard.” The pilot practically jumped out from behind the door, hand out, looking to shake. “You don’t remember me, I’ll bet, but I was driving MC–17s back when you were with Dreamland. We were on a deployment with Whiplash. Great to have you aboard, sir.”
“Long time ago,” said Zen, who didn’t remember the pilot. He’d left Dreamland as a lieutenant colonel, so the rank narrowed down the time frame a bit, just not enough to help. “How have you been?”
“Great, great. How’s the political life treating you?”
“Can’t complain. I have a lot of bosses. Meet one of them.” He held his hand out to his daughter. “Teri, this our captain.”
“Pleased to meet you.” The pilot bent down and shook her hand, then looked at Caroline. “This can’t be your wife.”
Caroline blushed.
“My niece Caroline,” said Zen.
Two of the other flight attendants came out and helped Zen and the girls get squared away. The rest of the passengers flooded in, most looking a bit harried and anxious to get going.
Cockpit door closed, the aircraft pushed back from the gate, then slowly began trundling toward the runway.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m glad to have you aboard with us this evening for our flight to Prague,” said the pilot, introducing himself and the crew. “Bob and Lisa will be reviewing some of our emergency procedures with the help of a short video in just a second. Before we get to that, though, I wanted to let you know that we’re flying today with a former member of the U.S. military who has been decorated for bravery under fire more times than most of us breathe. He’s now a member of the U.S. Senate. I knew him as Major Zen Stockard; you might just call him Senator. I’d like to salute him and thank him for his service to our country.”
The passengers broke into spontaneous applause.
Zen glanced down at his daughter. His eyes were starting to swell with tears.
“Something wrong, Daddy?” asked Teri.
“Nothing wrong, baby. Now make sure your seat belt’s tight, right? Pilot can’t take off without it good and snug.”
Northeastern Moldova
N
uri’s suspicions about the minister proved to be correct—within a few minutes of the CIA officer’s visit, the NSA intercepted two calls from the minister to people who lived in the northeastern corner of the country. The phone calls were short and to the point: the minister said he was taking a vacation for a few days, and they should, too.
Nuri guessed that they took his advice. He wasn’t particularly concerned with the details, however, since neither man owned property anywhere near the Wolves’ farm.
He called the minister’s cell phone the next morning at exactly eight o’clock and told him that the farm was near Drochia, the capital of the province of the same name. This was fairly vague as well as incorrect, but it satisfied the minister.
“One of my deputies will call you within the hour,” he told Nuri. “In the meantime, if you need further arrangements, please let me know.”
The minister’s tone suggested that it would be very much all right with him if they never spoke again. Which was fine with Nuri as well.
The deputy, Johann Lacu, called within the hour. He spoke English fairly well and had a clipped, professional style Nuri liked.
The deputy asked how many men he needed; Nuri told him no more than six.
“Six is a very small number,” replied Lacu. “These criminals may be very desperate.”
“Six is all we need,” Nuri told him. “We can even do with less.”
“You will need cars to take them away in.”
Ambulances more likely, thought Nuri.
“We already have transportation arranged,” he said. “The operation really is under control.”
“That is very good,” said Lacu. “We will assist in any way possible.”
They arranged to meet at 11:00
P.M.
at a small church in a village two kilometers north of Drochia. Nuri would brief them, then find some excuse to keep them occupied for a few hours until the raid was complete. At that point they would drive to the farm, which was roughly a half hour away. Gleeb, meanwhile, would stay in the capital to cover any further contingencies with the military or the interior ministry.
N
ot knowing what to expect and not having anything else to do in Chisinau, Nuri left the capital shortly after noon. He arrived at the town just after sunset.
The place looked quiet enough, a typical Eastern European town down on its luck. The church overlooked a small cemetery and an even smaller park with a monument to soldiers who had died in the Great Patriotic War—the Second World War, as the West remembered it.
The town was so small it didn’t have a restaurant. Nuri drove until he came to another village about four kilometers away. The main and only intersection in town featured a café. He parked in a lot around the corner.
The restaurant was empty, and the middle-aged hostess nearly jumped as he came in the door.
“Good evening,” she said in Moldovan.
Nuri answered in Moldovan, but his accent drove her to English. She told him he was very welcome and showed him to what she called the best table in the house. This was not coincidentally in the front window, where she undoubtedly hoped his presence would attract other customers. She gave him a menu and asked if he would like an aperitif.
“Just water,” he said.
She returned with a tray of homemade cordials, each brightly colored and most with some sort of fruit in the bottle.
“No, that’s all right,” said Nuri.
“For free, for free,” she insisted.
Deciding that courtesy called for a small drink, he had a glass of what looked like the least exotic concoction, an orange-tinted syrup that he hoped would taste something like Grand Marnier, or maybe cough syrup.
It was more like liquid fire. Jelled liquid fire. Like napalm, it clung to his throat.
“Good?” asked the woman.
“Oh yeah. Good,” managed Nuri. “Can I have some water?”
She came back with the menu as well. It offered food in three languages—Moldovan, English, and Russian.
“Do you get a lot of Russians in here?” he asked the hostess after he ordered a small steak.
“Russian?” The woman made a face and said something Moldovan that was too low for the computer to pick up but was clearly not a compliment.
“The Russians cause problems?” Nuri asked.
“You are Russian?”
“No, no. American.”
“I thought,” said the woman. She nodded approvingly and began talking. She didn’t like Russians. She told him that they were dirty pigs and often didn’t pay their bills. The café got a few every few months, big lugs who smelled like sweaty cows.
“Four yesterday, for lunch,” she said. “Enough for a year.”
“Are they tourists?”
She made another face.
“You have a lot of tourists?” Nuri asked.
“Tourists? Here? We have one place to stay. A small place. And this restaurant. What tourists would come here?”
“I don’t know.”
“There are no other restaurants or hotels—that is why people stop here. The countryside, maybe. They see, they like. Every so often, though—Russians.”
“Why? They looking for a bargain?”
She shrugged.
“They say they train for Olympics,” she told him. “Bicyclists.”
“Bicyclists?” Nuri wasn’t sure he heard the word right.
The hostess frowned and waved her hand. “I know what bicyclists look like. Skinny. These are always big. American football. Bicyclists? Ha!”
She walked off, shaking her head.
N
uri remembered the woman’s complaints an hour later, after dinner, when he left the restaurant and heard Russian being spoken behind him. He walked another step, then stopped, looking both ways as if trying to see if it was safe to cross the street.
Two men were entering the café. They were the only other people out.
He thought about them as he walked back to his car. The Russian mafiya was involved in many of the marijuana operations in Moldova, and while this wasn’t a big area for pot cultivation, he had firsthand proof that it wasn’t entirely bereft of it either.
Would the Wolves stop here on their way to the farm? If you didn’t want everyone descending in one swoop, maybe. It was right on the road.
More likely not, he decided. But he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind. He walked back, glancing into the restaurant from the other side of the street. The men were seated toward the back of the room, barely visible through the large window. Clearly, the hostess didn’t see their presence as helping business much.
Nuri thought of going in and leaving a bug—he had several in his bag in the car. But it was likely the woman would greet him in a way that made it obvious he’d decided to come back. Even if he came up with a plausible excuse, he might make the Russians suspicious.
He changed direction and headed back toward his car. Just as he was about to cross over, he saw the sign for the hotel the hostess had mentioned. It was more house than hotel, a small, late nineteenth-century residence divided into guest rooms.
Nuri got his bag out of the car and went to the hotel. The clerk at the desk was also the owner, a rotund but friendly woman in her fifties, who smiled when Nuri told her the owner of the café had recommended he stay there.
“I’m a little tired and just need the night,” he said in Moldovan, with MY-PID’s help. “You have rooms?”
They had four. Three were open.
“Maybe my friend is in the other?” he asked, switching to English.
The sign outside had indicated that English was spoken, but the woman didn’t know much beyond “hello” and “credit card.” Nuri was counting on this—he started describing his friend in great detail.
The woman held up her hands and told him in Moldovan that she didn’t understand.
“My friend, my friend,” he said. “A businessman—he came from this town.”
“We have two guests,” she said. “Russian. In Room 4. They’re foul-smelling oafs, but money is money.”
“Money, yes,” said Nuri, pretending that he hadn’t understood entirely. “You have my credit card.”
“Everything good.”
“Great,” he said. “Where is my room?”
N
uri’s room was directly across from the Russians’. He put his bag down in it, then went across the hall and knocked on their door, just to make sure no one was there.
When no one answered, he played a hunch, fitting his room key into theirs. The door opened without his even needing to jiggle it.
He slipped a bug into the light fixture, then decided that was too obvious. He found a better spot in the baseboard heater, and left another in the bathroom beneath the sink.
Could he do more?
He looked around the room. The men had each brought a small overnight bag containing only a change of clothes and a couple of bottles of vodka. There was no laptop to inspect, no papers to rifle through. He had a tracking bug, but he thought it would be conspicuous inside either piece of luggage, given that there were no interior pockets or other crevices where it could be easily hidden.
Back in his room, he tossed his bag out the window into the yard so it wouldn’t be obvious he was leaving for good. That turned out to be unnecessary—the proprietor had gone into her own apartment to watch television when he came down, and didn’t even see him leave.
As he walked around to get his bag, he noticed a small parking lot at the back of the house. He scooped up his bag and walked over to the two cars in the lot—a ten-year-old Toyota, and a new Hyundai.
Which one belonged to the Russian?
The Hyundai surely, he decided, but with two trackers in his pocket, he bugged both, slipping the devices over the cars’ gas tanks.
N
uri drove around the countryside for over an hour, partly to kill time and partly to get a feel for the area. The gentle hills and abundant streams made for excellent small-scale farming, but small-scale farming couldn’t compete with the much larger operation elsewhere in Europe, let alone the rest of the world.
On the one hand, the Moldovans had an almost idyllic setting and lifestyle; on the other hand, they were poor, at least by Western standards. He had seen incredible poverty in Africa, and no place in Europe would ever match that. But he couldn’t help feeling somewhat sympathetic to this country, which seemed better suited for the nineteenth century than the twenty-first.
His job wasn’t to be sympathetic. He was just starting to head for the meeting with the police when MY-PID reported that the Russians had returned to their rented room. Listening to them was better than the radio, and so he had the computer translate for him as he drove.
The beginnings of the conversation were mundane—they criticized the food they’d just eaten and debated whether the hostess would have been worth taking to bed.
Then they broke out the vodka.
“We ought to just go out tonight,” said one. “Better to sleep there than in this flea trap.”
“And risk Black’s wrath? You’re a fool.”
“So what if he’s mad?”
“He killed Ivanski for less.”
“Ivanski was a fool.”
“A dead fool now.”
“Coming up in two and threes and fours—always cautious. He’s overcautious. A coward.”
“Call him a coward to his face. That I would like to see.” The Russian laughed. “You assume he will be there.”
“We’re to work with him.”
“I wasn’t told that. Were you?”
“No. But every time we come to this armpit, who do we work for?”
“I worked for the Frenchman once.”
“A good man to work for. Plenty to drink. Unlike Black.”
“It will be good to work again.”
“I’m ready. I would go tonight.”
“Going at seven is plenty of time for me. At least we will get a good night’s sleep.”
“Not a good breakfast, though.”
“The café will have a good breakfast. They’ll have strong coffee.”
“I feel like going back and screwing the woman.”
“She’s older than your grandmother, and not half as good looking.”
They traded insults, then fell silent, and soon were snoring.
N
uri was surprised to see a dozen police cars parked outside the church. Even more surprising, there were nearly fifty officers inside, all dressed in riot gear.
“You are the American!” said a thin, jolly man who met him near the door. He spoke English with more enthusiasm than polish. “You are very welcome.”
“Are you Johann Lacu?” said Nuri.
“No, no—there’s Johann.”
“Mr. Lupo—Mr. Lupo.” A tall, thin man with a goatee and moustache separated himself from the crowd. “Here I am.”
“There were only supposed to be six people,” said Nuri. “Less.”
“We need more for a raid,” said Lacu cheerfully. “These are dangerous people. I have more men on the way. And an armored car.”
Nuri rubbed his forehead, wondering how he was going to keep the crowd busy for the next several hours. They didn’t have all that far to go—the farm was under ten miles away—and he didn’t want to give away the location until Danny and the rest of the team was in place.