Devil's Fortress, page 4
Tight-lipped with concentration, he aligned the head of the rocket, rotating it a degree or so until it was aimed squarely at the distant, moonlit perimeter fence. He took one more quick look to verify that he was on target, and then reached into the back of the open case. Gently, he pulled the pin on a green metal cylinder at the far end of the coiled line. That armed a tiny explosive charge intended to pop open a small drogue parachute. One more careful movement took out the pin on a similar black cylinder fastened at the front of the line charge. Now the rocket itself was armed and ready to fire.
Showtime, Hynes thought. His fingers curled around the base of the rocket and tugged out a third pin, the final safety. All set, he pulled down sharply on a black retainer ring dangling below the rocket assembly—activating its ignition timer.
Aware that he had just fifteen seconds to get clear, Hynes rolled off to the side and wriggled backward through the tall grass. Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . he counted down silently. Now!
With a loud, crackling hiss and a pulse of flame, the little rocket soared into the night sky—trailing the swiftly uncoiling line charge behind it. A fraction of a second later, the drogue chute snapped open at the rear of the rippling nylon tube, braking the whole assembly so that it arced down to drape across the top of the razor wire–topped metal fence.
That drew startled shouts from the Raven Syndicate troops on guard there.
whummp.
As the dozen or so grenades in the line charge detonated simultaneously, thousands of fragments ripped outward, slicing apart the chain-link fence and razor wire in the blink of an eye. A dense pall of black smoke, blast-thrown dust, and whirling shards of shredded bark and splintered tree limbs billowed high into the air.
inside the perimeter
that same time
Faces pressed hard against the dirt, Flynn and Kossak clung to the ground as it heaved, jolted by the enormous nearby explosion. Bits and pieces of debris hurled skyward by the colossal blast pattered down all around them.
Cautiously, Flynn opened his eyes. A roiling cloud of smoke and dust cut visibility to only a few feet. And his ears were ringing, temporarily deafened by the shattering sound of Hynes’s breaching charge. He shook his head to clear it, clapped Kossak on the shoulder, and then rolled to his feet. Nodding, the Pole scrambled upright himself. It was time to go.
Together, they charged forward into the thick haze of swirling dust and smoke. Trees and clumps of underbrush appeared out of the darkness and then disappeared just as suddenly behind them. Brambles and thorns tore at their clothing and gear.
Flynn ran past a Raven Syndicate guard writhing in agony on the ground and kept going. The injured Russian’s torn, smoking, and blood-spattered clothing and empty, weaponless hands made it clear that he no longer posed a threat. Faced by an armed enemy, Flynn would kill without hesitation, but he drew the line at shooting people if he didn’t need to.
Still running, they reached the area where Hynes’s breaching charge had detonated. Where a ten-foot-high fence festooned with razor wire had once barred the way, there was now only a blast-torn gap. Blackened and twisted pieces of metal littered the ground.
Flynn and Kossak leaped over the tangled heaps of smoldering debris and sprinted out into the cleared ground beyond the perimeter. They high-tailed it north through tall grass toward another stretch of woods that separated Voronin’s compound from the nearest village, a tiny farming hamlet. Hynes arrowed over to join up with them.
“Prowlers are out!” Flynn radioed. “All Lynx elements fall back to the rally point. We’re bugging out of here ASAP.”
“Wait one,” he heard Shannon Cooke reply. “We’ve got company coming. There’s a helo headed your way. Altitude very low at my one o’clock.”
Oh, fricking joy, Flynn thought darkly. He glanced back over his shoulder . . . and saw the unwelcome shape of a Kazan Ansat helicopter lifting off the pad near the Russian oligarch’s sprawling country home. Its nose swung toward them as it leveled off just above the treetops. “Crap. I really, really hate it when the enemy does smart shit,” he muttered to himself.
over the raven’s nest
that same time
Pilot Valentin Khutakov worked the cyclic, collective, and foot pedals in combination—transitioning his Kazan Ansat gunship from near-vertical takeoff mode to level flight. He dropped the nose slightly as the helicopter slid forward across the pine forest below. They weren’t moving especially fast yet, no more than thirty kilometers per hour. His left hand shifted toward the throttle grip on the collective, ready to feed more power to the helicopter’s twin engines, but then he stopped. After all, what was the hurry? They were chasing down enemies fleeing on foot, right? So accelerating now would only make it easier to accidentally overshoot their targets. Better to do the job right and show his employer, Pavel Voronin, the superiority of combat aviation over Annenkov’s glorified, gun-toting security guards—the morons who’d already so singularly failed to stop the intruders who’d broken into the Raven’s Nest.
“Three faint IR contacts moving north across the open ground ahead of us,” his copilot reported. “Approximately nine hundred meters out.”
Khutakov nodded. He could see the same, wavering images through his own night vision gear. He blinked rapidly, but they remained stubbornly out of focus. Ah, he understood, those fleeing enemy commandos must be wearing sophisticated camouflage cloth that blurred their heat signatures.
A wolfish smile creased his broad face. High-tech camouflage or not, the result would be the same when his door-mounted 12.7mm machine guns opened fire—hosing the whole area down with hundreds of rounds moving at nearly a thousand meters per second. Those intruders scrambling to get away would be chopped into mincemeat. “Stand by, Misha,” he instructed his right-door gunner, who was crouched and ready in the crew compartment behind him. “I’ll veer off in a moment and come around to give you a steady gun platform to light up those targets.”
“Copy that, sir,” the gunner replied.
But then the situation all went to shit.
From his position, the Ansat’s left-door gunner saw a blindingly bright flash erupt from the ground. A dazzling spark slashed through the night sky—climbing fast on a rippling plume of gray-white smoke, curling around to head straight for them. “Missile! Missile!” he yelled in horror. “At our nine o’clock!”
“Fuck,” Khutakov grunted, slamming all his flight controls over in a desperate bid to hurl the helicopter into a tight, evasive turn away from the oncoming missile. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw his copilot frantically stabbing at icons on his defense control panel in an effort to trigger a burst of anti-missile flares and chaff.
But the Ansat was far too low and far too slow. Before more than a handful of incandescent flares had rippled outward from the helicopter’s wing-mounted pods, the Russian-made 9K333 Verba surface-to-air missile streaked across the intervening distance and detonated only meters away. Hundreds of fragments ripped through the helicopter—killing and wounding its crew and smashing vital electronics and flight control systems.
Trailing smoke and fire, the Kazan Ansat gunship rolled over and slammed into the forest. A huge orange-white flash starkly outlined the shapes of trees for a millisecond. When it vanished, all that remained was a thickening pillar of oily black smoke curling away on the light wind—a pillar lit at its base by a few, dully flickering red-tinged flames.
west of the perimeter fence
that same time
“Nailed the son of a bitch,” Shannon Cooke reported. “Bugging out now.” He tossed the spent SAM launch tube aside and sprinted across the field toward the fringe of trees.
He wasn’t worried that anyone could trace the anti-air weapon he’d just fired. Like the rest of the military hardware for this operation, Quartet Directorate operatives had snagged the missile system on the international arms black market. The Russians themselves had originally sold it to their Syrian client state. And using a Russian-manufactured missile to knock a Russian-made helicopter out of the sky added a nice touch of irony. Around and around the weapons you sell go, and where they’ll eventually be used, nobody knows, the ex-Special Forces operator mused. Since it was the only one their team had been able to smuggle this deep into hostile territory, he was glad the shoulder-launched SAM had worked as advertised. Many supposedly sophisticated Russian weapons looked great on paper but turned out to be garbage in the real world.
Once in the cover of the woods, Cooke headed straight for the rally point they’d mapped out earlier. Flynn and the rest of the team were there ahead of him. Van Horn and Vucovich were busy stripping away leaf-and-branch-studded camouflage netting that concealed three battered-looking Ural motorcycles, each with its own attached sidecar. Meanwhile, Flynn, Kossak, and Hynes were all hurriedly shrugging out of their military-style fatigues and assault vests and changing into civilian clothes. The others, including Cooke, already wore jeans, T-shirts, hoodies, and dark jackets. All of their gear and weapons, except for small, easily concealable pistols, disappeared into zippered duffel bags.
“Any more signs of trouble?” Flynn asked quietly, looking up at his arrival.
Cooke shook his head. “Not so far. Not from the air, at least. My bet is those other two Syndicate helicopter pilots aren’t exactly in a hurry to commit what could be suicide.”
Flynn nodded. The combination of total surprise, darkness, and drone- and rocket-delivered high explosives had acted as force multipliers—making it virtually impossible for Voronin’s security forces to get an accurate read on the actual numbers of those attacking them. That should make them cautious, unwilling to risk their remaining helicopters in case more missile teams were waiting to ambush them.
But their self-imposed paralysis wouldn’t last long, Flynn recognized, which made it imperative that his team get moving again and break contact before the Raven Syndicate forces recovered their nerve.
Flynn finished pulling a plain gray hoodie over his head and then glanced around. “Everyone set?”
Heads nodded. “Just waiting on you, cowboy,” Van Horn said with a grin. She and Cooke were already astride two Ural motorcycles, with Hynes and Vucovich seated in their sidecars. “We figured there was no point sticking around until the bad guys come calling. They seem a little pissed off at us.”
Flynn matched her smile. “Shooting things up does have that effect on people, I guess.” He swung his leg over the remaining motorcycle and waited while Kossak scrambled aboard. He hit the ignition switch, and the bike’s 650 cc engine rumbled quietly to life. Special mufflers were fitted to reduce the motor’s noise, especially in low gear.
One by one, they took off slowly, bumping along a narrow dirt track that meandered generally west through a patchwork of woods, darkened farms, and rocky, brush-covered ground. They were headed toward Voskresensk, a small city on the banks of the Moskva River only a few kilometers away.
CHAPTER
FIVE
raven’s nest security control center
a short time later
Pavel Voronin stalked into the blue-lit control center. Kiril Rodin and four bodyguards trailed in his wake. Startled, Annenkov and his security team scrambled to their feet and snapped to attention.
“Well?” Voronin demanded. “What’s the situation? How many troops are pursuing these intruders?”
There was an awkward silence.
Voronin’s eyes narrowed. He marched closer to the heavyset security chief. “I asked you a question, did I not?”
“I’ve ordered our surviving guards to stay inside the perimeter for now,” Annenkov admitted. “At least until we obtain a clearer picture of the threat we’re facing.”
Voronin stared back at him for a long, painful moment. His mouth compressed. “Is it possible, Vladimir Ivanovich, that you did not understand my orders?” he asked finally.
“No, sir.”
“Then, why,” Voronin continued carefully, “are your men sitting here safe on their cowardly asses . . . instead of going out there to track down, capture, interrogate, and then eliminate the insolent bastards who just tried to kill me?” Every word came out of his mouth with the icy precision of a serpent coiling to strike.
Annenkov stiffened. “Sir, we’ve already suffered thirteen casualties—all of them veteran combat soldiers or air crew and all of them dead or dying. Plus, we’ve had a helicopter gunship downed by a surface-to-air missile. These losses were inflicted in a matter of minutes in separate attacks staged at several points inside and outside our perimeter. Attacks carried out by enemy forces of unknown strength.” He gestured at the screens, which showed green-tinged night vision imagery from the surviving cameras along the outer fence. “Right now, we cannot know how many of them may still be out there, waiting to ambush any reaction force we send out. But we do know that these attackers seem liberally equipped with missiles and explosives.”
Voronin stared at him. “Are you suggesting they may plan to hit us again?”
The other man nodded. “It’s possible, though perhaps not likely. But the enemy has already significantly attrited our security forces. Given that, risking more troops in action beyond the perimeter could easily weaken our defenses to the breaking point.”
Voronin felt a hand on his elbow. He turned. It was Rodin.
“Annenkov is right,” the gray-haired man said. “In the circumstances, pushing more men out into the darkness would be a fool’s game.”
Voronin eyed him coldly. “So you agree that we should simply huddle here in terror? Leaving these would-be assassins free to strike again or to escape unscathed?”
Rodin shook his head. “Not at all. We’ve been attacked. The sensible move is to call for reinforcements.” He indicated the secure communications links at Annenkov’s workstation. “You have the president’s direct line. And those of the security services and the Ministry of Defense. We’re only ninety kilometers from Moscow. An airborne reaction force from Spetsgruppa ‘A,’ for example, could be here in less than an hour.”
Voronin kept a tight rein on his expression. Spetsgruppa “A” was a highly trained anti-terrorist commando unit. It operated under the authority of the FSB, Russia’s internal security service. On the surface, Rodin’s suggestion made good sense. But only on the surface.
There were two reasons why Voronin knew he could not risk relying on assistance from the FSB—or from any of the other anti-terrorist troops controlled by the government, for that matter. First, because he had spent several years and tens of billions of rubles building the Raven Syndicate into an independent special intelligence and military force within the Russian state. In matters of politics and government, power fed perception and perception fed power. His power rested primarily on President Zhdanov’s continuing belief that the Syndicate was more capable and more effective than its official counterparts: the military, the GRU, the SVR, and the FSB, whose near-universal record of defeat, failure, and humiliation over the past decades was infamous. Begging for help from the security and defense ministries would puncture this carefully nurtured image of strength. Given the current tenuous state of his relationship with President Zhdanov, it would be an admission of weakness he simply could not afford.
But there was another, even darker, reason Voronin believed calling for help from Moscow would be too dangerous. And that was the strong possibility that this attempt to kill him was actually the work of some of Russia’s own special forces units. Not on direct orders from the president himself. After all, if Zhdanov wanted him dead, Rodin was already in place to pull the trigger. But there was a chance—a significant chance—that one of his many jealous rivals inside the nation’s military and intelligence elites had secretly orchestrated tonight’s bloody attack. What if someone inside the FSB, the GRU, the SVR, or the military had decided to take him out now and seek forgiveness from Zhdanov later? If so, summoning more troops from Moscow might well be the equivalent of handing his would-be murderer a sword and then baring his own breast for the fatal blow.
His decision made, Voronin shook his head. “No,” he said. “If it’s too hazardous to chase after these attackers ourselves, we’ll handle this another way.” He stabbed a finger at Annenkov. “Contact the police commanders in Voskresensk, Yegoryevsk, Kolomna―” Swiftly, he rattled off the names of half a dozen towns and cities in a wide radius around the Raven’s Nest. “I want checkpoints set up on all roads and transit stations in and out of this region. Their officers are to be on the lookout for suspicious groups of men attempting to leave the area. Warn them these men are suspected terrorists and likely to be desperate and heavily armed.”
Annenkov nodded his understanding. From the moment he’d started building this fortified country estate, Voronin had worked hard and successfully to buy the loyalty of all the local law enforcement authorities. The “special pay supplements” he authorized more than tripled their official salaries. With that much money on the line, the police would be only too happy to obey his instructions. And since it was well after midnight, anyone trying to escape the immediate area—whether headed toward Moscow or somewhere else—should stand out like a sore thumb.
on the outskirts of voskresensk, southeast of moscow
that same time
Voskresensk was an industrial city of about ninety thousand people stretching along the Moskva River’s east bank. Manufacturing plants producing concrete, rolled steel, and fertilizer were the major employers. Like many of the other small localities of the region, it had largely been missed by the waves of economic prosperity that occasionally washed across Moscow itself. None of Russia’s government-owned mega-corporations saw the value in pouring significant amounts of time or money into Voskresensk or its neighboring towns. As a result, anyone scooped up by a time machine at the tail end of Stalin’s dictatorship and plopped down again eight decades later would have seen nothing alien or unexpected in their surroundings. There were the same drab brick and concrete low-rise apartments, factories, schools, and stores. The same trash-littered empty lots and rusting metal fences. The same sense of impoverished stasis.
