Eagle Station

“Unless you think FedEx is now dropping bombs on the Motherland?” Dyomin growled with biting sarcasm.

“No, sir,” Yanayev admitted, chastened.

“Then wipe that useless recording,” the captain ordered. “And get back to work.” Shaking his head in disgust, he turned away, fumbling in his shirt pocket for another cigarette.

Scion Seven-Zero, Low over Central Siberia

That Same Time

What had been a mostly featureless patchwork of green and brown earth cut by the winding blue trace of the Yenisei River grew sharper and sharper as the Rustler plunged downward at ever-increasing speed. Suddenly, an indistinct blur of green flashed into the needle-edged tops of pine trees stabbing upward.

Grinning wildly, Brad slammed his throttles forward. He leveled off only a few hundred feet above the treetops and banked hard left. Curving south, the Scion stealth aircraft streaked low across the forest canopy at nearly five hundred knots. “Engage DTF, two hundred, hard ride!” he ordered.

“DTF engaged,” the Rustler’s computer acknowledged.

He relaxed a bit. With their aircraft’s digital terrain-following system engaged, they were reasonably safe flying this low, even at high speed. Using detailed maps stored in its computers and quick bursts from its radar altimeter, the DTF system enabled feats of low-altitude, long-distance flying beyond the ability of any unaided human pilot.

Beside him, Nadia leaned forward against her straps. Quickly, she toggled a sequence of virtual “keys” on her open navigation display, cueing up the precise coordinates of their preselected landing zone — a 1,600-foot-long clearing in the middle of the woods northwest of Lesosibirsk. They were currently a little over 150 nautical miles away, less than twenty minutes flying time. She selected it and tapped another icon. “LZ coordinates laid in.”

The steering cue on Brad’s head-up display shifted slightly as his computer accepted the updated information. He tweaked his stick left. The Rustler banked a touch, altering its heading by a fraction of a degree. “We’d better give Sam and her people the good news that we’re getting close.”

“I am on it,” Nadia said. She opened a com window. Her fingers blurred across the display, entering a short message. As soon as she finished, their computer took over. It compressed and encrypted her signal into a millisecond-long burst and then transmitted it via satellite uplink. “Message sent.”

Nineteen

Northwest of Lesosibirsk

A Few Minutes Later

Captain Oleg Panov peered forward through the Mi-8MTV-5 helicopter’s windshield, looking for his next allotted target. He was flying low, practically skimming across the treetops at just one hundred kilometers per hour. In the left-hand seat, his copilot was eyes down, updating their mission plan on the center console computer. Since refueling at Krasnoyarsk’s airport earlier in the day, they’d been sweeping these forests from the air — systematically overflying supposedly deserted hunting cabins and logging huts, looking for any signs of life. More than a dozen other Mi-8 helicopter troop carriers and Ka-52 gunships were engaged in this same task. So to avoid wasting time and fuel, it was important to check off each building they’d cleared and report the results to the Spetsnaz brigade staff back at headquarters.

Not more than a kilometer ahead and just off to his left, Panov caught the faint glint off a metal roof nestled among the trees. He swung the helicopter toward it. “Stand by on the sensors, Leonid,” he ordered.

Obediently, his copilot looked up from their computer. “Standing by,” he confirmed. “I am receiving good data from both pods.”

The Mi-8MTV-5’s upgraded cockpit had five modern multifunction displays set across its instrument panel — enabling its crew to rapidly and easily switch between different system readouts. Currently, the two leftmost displays were set to show imagery gathered by the sensor pods attached to their helicopter’s pylons — one equipped with a forward-looking infrared camera and the other containing a ground surveillance radar.

Panov took them in right over the log cabin he’d spotted, coming in so low that his tricycle landing gear almost knocked over a thin metal stovepipe chimney rising above the roof. He only had time to see that it was two stories high and maybe big enough for a couple of separate rooms on each floor. A black plastic tarp covered what was probably a large woodpile. It fluttered wildly, hammered by their rotor wash.

Then they were past, clattering on across the top of the forest.

“Contact! Contact!” his copilot shouted. “I show heat emissions in that cabin. Human-sized. Multiple sources.” He tapped a button, rewinding the thermal scanner images to show the moment of their pass. Green glowing shapes appeared briefly against the cooler background of the cabin’s interior. Then he punched another control. “And look what our radar picked up at the same time!”