December (23 page)

The red alarm on the wall flashed and the buzzer blared.

Captain Anton Brodsky and his wingman, Lieutenant Denis Chernov, were slumped in armchairs in the crewroom watching a rerun of their favourite Russian cops and robbers show,
The Specials
.

Brodsky was one of the top fighter pilots in the Russian Federation; his reactions were like lightning.

Within a second, he had leaped up, chucked his coffee cup in the bin, grabbed his helmet and was out of the door and running down the corridor, Chernov a couple of yards behind him.

Brodsky slammed open the heavy doors into the huge, underground hangar, and ran over to his large interceptor with Russian Airforce red star markings. The alarm buzzer was going, lights flashed and ground crew hurried across the chamber.

The pilots both bounded up the ladders and jumped into the cockpits of their aircraft. Brodsky didn’t like what the Krymov regime had done to the economy and freedom, but, as a pilot, he was able to offset this with the sheer pleasure at the new toy that the increased military spending had given him. Since Krymov had forced the merger of all Russian aircraft manufacturers into the United Aircraft Corporation,
the famous fighter aircraft design bureaus of Sukhoi and Mikoyan had come together and, with the extra money, had produced their most radical design ever.

He was now sitting in the cockpit of a brand-new, sixth-generation fighter, the Suk-MiG-41 Berkut, ‘Golden Eagle’, NATO designation ‘Fury’.

It was an improbable-looking aircraft, as if a model aeroplane kit had been wrongly put together by a child. The main wings were mounted right at the tail, instead of in the middle of the fuselage, and pointed forward towards the cockpit instead of sweeping backwards in the usual way. Two small triangular wings, called canards, had then been stuck just under cockpit. They could be tilted quickly back and forth to a maximum angle at which they were flat against the airflow past the aircraft.

The whole thing was totally unstable in flight and would simply fall out of the air if it were not for the eighty onboard computers and automatic flight control system that made constant changes to the wing surfaces. This apparently illogical setup meant that Golden Eagle could achieve mind-bending agility in flight, from lightning-quick turns in any direction to almost being able to hover in midair. Brodsky’s favourite trick was pulling a snap loop and then allowing the jet to actually drift backwards through the air for a second before powering it forward again.

The huge, twin AL-41F engines generated twenty-five tons of thrust, a massive amount for a single-seater aircraft, and powered it through its instability by thrust vectoring, using nozzles on the jets that could twist up to thirty degrees in any direction, rather like a duck waggling its tail feathers.

Brodsky wasn’t sure what he was going to be shooting down today but he was looking forward to putting all this new technology into action. Sitting in his narrow cockpit,
he held his arms up as the ground crew leaned in, connecting up his life-support, comms and G-systems. The suit began pressuring up ready for the massive Gs of take-off.

As he did so, the large covers over the exit ramps from the underground airbase were sliding smoothly back on their hydraulic rams. It was another Krymov regime money-no-object innovation: burying an airbase so it was impervious to first-strike missile attacks from the US. It was built in the wastes near Vologda as part of Northern Air Defence Command, against incursions from over the North Pole.

The planes were launched along underground tunnels with the same catapult turbines used on aircraft carriers. As Brodsky glanced forward through his windscreen now, he still couldn’t get over the alarming feeling that he had the same view as a bullet had sitting in the barrel of a gun, except that the barrel looked as if it was blocked by a concrete wall. In fact, what he was looking at was a narrow underground corridor that gradually angled up, like the ski ramps used on carriers, so that it would fling him up into the air.

During his flight, a short runway on the surface, with arrestor wires, would be cleared with a jet engine, to allow the planes to land and then taxi down a ramp back into their subterranean lairs again.

As the technicians continued clipping in his parachute and ejector seat around him, Brodsky leaned forward and ran through his pre-flight checks. He flipped down the visor of his helmet so that he now looked like a bug-eyed alien with his oxygen mask sticking out of it like a proboscis. Inside the visor was a full-colour display that allowed him to see in all weather and at night using remote sensors all around the aircraft. As he moved his head around he could even ‘see’ through the floor of the cockpit.

Data was already being fed through to the display imposed
on this view from the air controllers at Central Air Defence Command in Moscow. He read the details of what he was going to be hunting that day:

Target: Gulfstream G550

Max speed: 0.8 Mach

Offensive systems: None

Defensive systems: None

The display flicked to a map showing that the target was coming in towards Moscow from the east; it had just passed Perm, so the projected intercept point was marked over the forests leading up to Nizhniy Novgorod. The map showed that once Brodsky was airborne he would accelerate to attack speed of Mach 2.9, 3552 km/h and use his new-generation, forward-looking, pulse-Doppler radar with a phased antenna array to seek out the target. Moscow command would track it and feed him updates all the way into the target.

He wondered briefly who was on the plane—terrorists? At the end of the day, he didn’t know and he didn’t care, he was just going to obey orders and get a huge kick out of doing it.

The Gulfstream certainly wasn’t going to be much of a challenge, though.

‘Weapons targeting check,’ he barked out to Nadya, the onboard voice-control system, and the computer quickly overlaid various screens on his helmet display: radar, laser range finder and infrared imager.

Once in range, he could either use one of his latest air-to-air Vympel R-45 missiles with passive IR guidance, or just get close and give it a burst with the 30mm cannon. Even in the era of advanced missiles, he still carried an old-fashioned gun, because once you got into the swirling
mess of a dogfight, where targets came and went in microseconds, there just wasn’t time to prep, target and fire missiles. He would just get in close from behind and see what the air controller told him to do.

Brodsky finished his checks and glanced fifty yards to his left, where Lieutenant Chernov sat in the firing chamber of the other barrel of the underground base. He waved to his wingman, who acknowledged just before the black canopy automatically slid shut over his head, followed by a hiss as it pressured up.

The whole aircraft jolted and Brodsky rocked in his seat as the catapult clamped onto the hardpoints and then dragged him backwards. A shot of adrenalin went into his bloodstream—he never got over this bit.

He eased his throttles forward, building up engine thrust. The jets behind him roared red, flaming anger against the heat shield at the end of the chamber. The aircraft shook as the catapult wire pulled back to its furthest extent and wheels locked into their final slots. The whole machine was now trembling and twitching all around him like a greyhound held tight on its leash. As the forces built up, he felt it must surely snap like a twig bent too hard.

Above him, it was still pitch-black, with a strong north wind blowing snow across the flat arctic wasteland. The two huge covers had pulled back to their fullest extent, exposing the twin muzzles of Krymov’s latest air defence toy.

Two flaming bullets spat out of the ground a second after the other. Already doing 300 k.p.h., they kicked in their afterburners and went vertical at a climb rate of 350 metres per second. The enormous thunder of the jets shook the ground but faded rapidly as they disappeared into the howling snowstorm on their deadly mission.

The covers slid silently back into place.

‘Mr President, you can see the enemy aircraft here in red.’

Fyodor pointed above him at the huge screen that the semi-circular room was focused on. Krymov and Sergey were sitting at the large desk right in front of the screen with all the other banks of computers and technicians radiating out behind them.

‘Our two Berkut aircraft are about to intercept the enemy just east of Nizhniy Novgorod up here.’

Krymov stared dully at the twin blue tracks making their way south to intercept the Gulfstream on its way to Moscow.

‘I will have Captain Brodsky establish visual identification of the target before we shoot it down, and you can listen in to the radio traffic. I will now take personal command of the intercept process.’ With that Fyodor gave a curt nod and walked back behind them to his large desk with an array of computer screens in front of him.

He hit several switches and then, when he spoke into the desk mike, the transmission played over loudspeakers around the room. Krymov grinned and nudged Sergey.

‘Captain Brodsky, this is Lieutenant-General Mostovskoy at Air Defence Command. Do you have eyes on the aircraft yet? Over.’

A crackle of static filled the large room.

In the cockpit of his interceptor, Brodsky was howling through the night at 30,000 feet. He clicked the transmit button and his voice boomed out near Moscow. ‘Yes, I have a twin-engined jet flare at my twelve o’clock.’

He had approached the Gulfstream from behind so as not to show up on its radar, which wouldn’t have been able to make out much of his stealth-engineered profile, anyway. He could see the twin red stabs of the Rolls-Royce jet exhausts above him.

‘I have decelerated and am keeping station with the target until further orders. Over.’

‘Roger that, Berkut One. That’s good, close up now and identify target as white Gulfstream G550. Over.’ Fyodor was typing something on his keyboard as he said this.

‘Roger. Closing now.’

There was a pause and crackle of static as the huge fighter powered up alongside the slow-moving Gulfstream.

‘Roger. I have eyes on. Target aircraft is a white Gulfstream G550.’

There was another pause as Fyodor typed more commands into his system and then said, ‘Roger, engage and destroy target with cannon fire. Over.’

‘Engaging now.’

A harsh buzzing sound cut into the transmission as the cannon fired.

‘Target is hit and breaking up. Over.’

Applause broke out around the room. ‘Good work, Captain Brodsky. You have successfully defended the constitutional order of the Motherland. Over and out!’ Fyodor added this uncharacteristically flamboyant touch as he signed off and walked over to Krymov, who stood up, shook his hand and then embraced him.

‘Mostovskoy, you’ve done a great job! We got that bastard at last! Ha, ha!’ he hooted with relief.

Fyodor smiled his icy grimace. ‘Thank you, Mr President, I will see to the dispatch of helicopters to the crash immediately.’

‘Yes, but first we’re going to get pissed, and after we have seen the pictures, you, Mostovskoy, and you,’ he put his arm around Sergey in a gesture that brooked no refusal, ‘are going to come with me to carry on getting pissed at the Kremlin!’

7.15 A.M. MOSCOW TIME ZONE, TUESDAY 16 DECEMBER

Boris Frolov pulled the dirty VW Transporter pick-up onto the hard shoulder of the A-103 motorway in Moscow and got out. It was snowing and dark.

He walked calmly round to the back of the van, dropped the tailgate, and hopped up onto it. He pulled off the tarpaulin, picked up a jerry can of petrol, unscrewed its lid and poured it liberally over the stack of old car tyres, leaving a little trail of petrol onto the tailgate.

Once it was empty, he tossed the can into the grimy snowdrift on the motorway embankment and jumped down from the back.

A few cars with their headlights blazing hissed passed him through the slush, heading out of town on his, south, side of the road, along the Shchelkovskoye Shosse, A-103, to Balashika. He looked at the heavier flow of traffic on the opposite carriageway from him; he was seven miles to the east of the centre of Moscow and the early morning rush hour was getting going: hundreds of commuters who were rich enough to still drive into work, despite all the petrol rationing. Frolov hated the Krymov regime, which favoured those rich bastards and neglected the poor.

Well, they’d certainly wish they hadn’t driven into Moscow today.

He pulled out his mobile phone and sent a text message. He calmly lit a cigarette, took a couple of slow drags and then tossed it into the back of the truck before walking away. The flame whooshed across the tyres and a thick pall of black smoke began to billow over the motorway.

Two miles further west towards the centre of town, Mikhail Nikitin got the text message and signalled to the men dressed as police officers in the two Lada police cars behind his.

They took off their caps, ducked inside their vehicles and switched on their sirens. The howl and flashing lights of the three cars allowed them to pull out into the traffic on the motorway and quickly spread across the three lanes. Once in line abreast, they began slowing down gradually until they had brought the traffic to a standstill a mile back from where the van was now burning furiously on the hard shoulder.

As the traffic ground to a halt behind them, people shouted and banged their steering wheels in frustration at the thought of missed meetings and wasted time.

‘What are the fucking police doing stopping the traffic like this?’

Once the cars were stationary the six men dressed as police officers switched off their sirens and blocked the gaps between the cars.

A truck’s airbrakes hissed and the cab dipped as it jerked to a halt. The bearded trucker in a checked shirt jumped down and ran over to them.

‘Hey, officer, what’s happening?’

Nikitin looked at him unsympathetically. ‘Got a big pileup ahead,’ he said, and jerked his thumb.

There was a bright flash and a second later they heard the boom as the van’s diesel tank exploded.

‘Look at that, eh?’ He turned round and gestured at the filthy black smoke plume they could see in the orange streetlights, spreading towards them. ‘Really big crash, apparently, it’ll be a while before they—’

His words cut off as a large white shape smashed through the air over their heads and roared down the motorway. The slipstream ripped off his cap and everyone dived for cover.

Arkady struggled to get the Gulfstream lined up on the motorway.

The controls shook in his hands and he fought the rudder hard. He was wrestling with the steering yoke, trying to slot the aircraft into the narrow trench between the row of streetlights in the central reservation to his right and the trees and pylons on the embankment to his left.

He had calculated that the wingspan could just fit into the narrow three-lane tunnel but he hadn’t counted on the northerly crosswind and they kept sideslipping south in the breeze, towards the roadside.

He was so low that snow and ice were ripped up off the verge, the road surface and the central reservation by the slipstream and whorled up under each wing in a vortex curl.

He lowered the flaps to reduce the airspeed.

An electricity pylon stretched across the road up ahead. Arkady threw the throttles forward again and hauled back on the yoke. They just made it over—the slipstream ripped the cables off their brackets and they cracked and whipped after the plane in showers of blue sparks.

He settled the plane back down into the trench and then suddenly veered the left wing up over a stand of pine trees on the verge. The Gulfstream burst through the cloud of black smoke from the burning van on the side of the road.

People in cars driving on the other carriageway gawped up in horror through their windscreens as the struggling jet
screamed down past them. The slipstream sucked cars in towards it; they veered across the road and the tarpaulin sides of trucks ripped off.

Inside the jet, Alex, Pete, Magnus and the others were thrown around like rag dolls by the roaring, slewing and lurching motion.

Arkady wrestled with a steering yoke, which seemed to be possessed by a demon, trying to veer them off to the side to smash them against the steel streetlights. They had to land soon or a gust would get them eventually.

In an obstacle-free stretch, Arkady got the flaps down hard and brought the nose up. Airspeed dropped away fast and he managed to get the rear wheels to touch down on the slushy road surface and tried applying the brakes. He was too busy fighting to keep the plane on the straight and narrow, but Alex looked ahead and saw a road bridge coming up. He could see two things at a glance: that the solid cement pillars were narrower than the wingspan of the aircraft and that there wasn’t enough distance to take off again before they reached it.

Alex knew that they had to just go for the dead centre of the gap under the bridge. If they hit it off-centre then the impact would spin them off to one side and either smash them into the central traffic lights or flip them off up the embankment.

‘Go for the centre! Go for the centre!’ he shouted to Arkady over the noise, and stabbed his hand forward.

The Russian looked up, saw the gap, frowned and then set his face hard. The nose wheel touched down and he threw in maximum reverse thrust; the plane juddered furiously and balked, veering more wildly from side to side.

Alex glanced at the airspeed indicator: seventy m.p.h.

Fuck—we’re not going to stop in time.

The reverse thrust was making them too erratic on the
slippery road surface; Arkady darted a hand off the yoke and cut the reverse throttle. The plane stopped veering around as much but accelerated away again towards the bridge.

To Alex it looked like the most massive structure on earth: two solid chunks of grimy, pebbledash concrete, one in the middle and one on the side of the road.

Their poor, frail plane was about to smash into it. Arkady fought to get them centred in the channel between the bastions. Alex turned in his seat and shouted into the cabin behind: ‘Brace!’

They hit the bridge.

An explosive screech.

The wings sheared off.

The fuel tanks ripped in half and a great cloud of Avtar whipped back down the fuselage.

It hit the hot jet exhausts.

A fireball exploded around the aircraft.

It scorched the paint off, melted the surface of the Perspex cabin windows and whirled behind them in a torrent of fire.

The shock of the impact jumped through the airframe. Bodies knocked forwards in their seats against straps.

They had hit dead centre and stayed on the road.

Their speed cut away in a horrid lurch. Arkady pulled himself back upright from over the yoke and hit the brakes again. With much reduced momentum the crippled aircraft creaked and ground to a standstill.

The outside aft section was black and smoking, the wings reduced to stubs ending in twisted metal.

Inside the aircraft, the rear cabin was in disarray, gear strewn everywhere. Champagne bottles, trays and rucksacks had all been flung against the front of the cabin and crashed down in a tangle on the floor.

Alex threw off his shoulder straps and dived back through the galley.

‘Out, out, out!’

He had no idea if a secondary fire was going to break out.

The rest of the team were struggling out of their seats.

Roman was hard hit, slumped forward in his straps, gasping for air. Yamba pulled him upright, unstrapped him and got him on his feet.

Seeing everyone was moving, Alex turned back, ripped open the door exit lever and shoved it out with his shoulder. The steps unfolded and banged down hard on the concrete.

He staggered down them and it was good to reach the bottom and feel the hard concrete under his boots and the cold wind fresh on his face.

Across the road, the traffic had slowed to a crawl as people stared out of their windows at the extraordinary sight of a half-burned jet sitting in the middle of the road. Behind it was a long scorched streak on the concrete that steamed from the melted snow.

Alex waved at a good-looking woman in a Mercedes and then ran back up the steps. Inside he could hear Colin in Tasmanian Devil mode shouting: ‘Get yer kit! Let’s go!’

The others needed little prompting. Yamba and Magnus were quickly down the steps after him and formed a human chain to ferry their gear out onto the road: rucksacks, crates of equipment, weapons and ammunition all passed down and then more came as the luggage bay under the aircraft was unloaded.

Alex got his Moscow map out and walked back behind the aircraft to look at the burned road signs on the bridge to try to work out where they were. As he walked back he smiled at the thought of how they had got through the Moscow air defences.

The two Suk-MiG-41s had caught them over the forests a couple of hours east from Moscow. The pilot of the lead one had flown up close to get a visual ID on the Gulfstream.

Alex looked out of the side window of the cockpit and saw the enormous fighter suddenly loom up out of the night. As their jet laboured along on full throttle, the Berkut seemed to hang effortlessly in midair. Alex could see the canard wings just under the cockpit fluttering slightly, as quick as a bird’s wing, constantly adjusting to keep the fighter stable. The cockpit canopy was black and as sleek as a hawk’s head. He couldn’t see what the pilot inside was doing.

Captain Brodsky had his thumb on the 30mm cannon button. He was looking forward to blowing these terrorists out of the air. Moscow Command was being pedantic as usual and insisted on him getting in close and doing a visual ID. He pulled alongside and looked to his right; the lights were on in the Gulfstream cockpit.

What was inside surprised him. The man in the co-pilot seat wore a blue Russian Airforce uniform jacket and an airforce officer’s peaked cap.

The guy seemed relaxed, not in the least bit perturbed at having a state-of-the-art fighter about to blow him out of the night sky. He smiled and waved across at Brodsky and mouthed: ‘
Priyvet
!’ in greeting.

Brodsky ignored him and kept station as he talked to Central Air Command in Moscow on his radio.

As he was doing this, a message flashed across the display screen on the inside of his helmet visor. The red text was preceded by the correct command codes and could only have come from the Head of Air Defence Command. The message read:

TRAINING EXERCISE ONLY.
REPEAT.

TRAINING EXERCISE ONLY FOR
MOSCOW CENTRAL COMMAND.
DO NOT ATTACK GULFSTREAM.

FIRE BURST NEXT TO AIRCRAFT AND
REPORT THAT IT HAS BEEN HIT.
ACKNOWLEDGE ORDER NOW.

Brodsky looked at it indignantly and read it again.

A fucking training exercise! Unbelievable, just when he was getting hyped up for his first kill.

His commander was obviously getting very agitated. Another message flashed up: ‘ACKNOWLEDGE ORDER NOW!’

Reluctantly, Brodsky hit the acknowledge key and then, with a sour expression on his face, said, ‘Firing now,’ and fired a long burst from his cannon past the nose of the Gulfstream. The airframe juddered and the deadly red tracers streamed harmlessly off into the night.

The man in the cockpit clenched his fist and pumped it and then grinned and gave him a thumbs up.

Cocky bastard.

Alex had then seen the huge fighter simply flip over onto its left-hand side and disappear in an instant.

Arkady followed the plan and took the Gulfstream down in a steep dive to a prearranged site in the forest where a white airforce Sukhoi training jet had just been crashed, the pilot having safely ejected.

The whole thing had worked very smoothly. When the airforce search-and-rescue helicopter had located the site half an hour later it was able to film and beam back images of
a crash site complete with broken-off trees, a still burning white jet fuselage and wreckage scattered over a wide area.

The Gulfstream had swooped down low until it was under the radar and then levelled off and continued on its way to Moscow; Fyodor had arranged safe passage for it through the remaining air defences with his supporters in the airforce.

All in all, Alex was very pleased with the way it had gone. Trying to land at one of the conventional airports in Moscow would have been suicide for them. He had got the idea of the motorway landing from Switzerland, where he knew that, in the absence of much flat land, in time of war they requisitioned motorways for use by the airforce.

Planning the landing zone had taken a long time. Fyodor’s experienced pilots had scoured the maps of Moscow motorways to find a suitable runway and then driven up and down the A-103 with a mental picture of the stopping distance of a Gulfstream in their heads, trying to find the necessary straight piece of road. That bit hadn’t worked so well, but at least they were here in one piece.

‘Alex, get back here!’ Colin shouted at him from the plane and he ran back over to it. ‘We’ve got company up ahead!’

Alex saw two helicopters skimming in low over the motorway towards them.

The two small aircraft flared hard and dropped onto the motorway in front of the crashed jet.

Alex waved to them as they landed. The pilots worked for Sergey.

He turned to his right-hand man. ‘Right, Col, get the weapons and the rest of the gear in that one, I’ll take Roman now.’