Osprey, page 3
Twelve seconds flat had turned the up-pointing helicopter rotors into forward-aimed airplane propellors. Proprotor indeed. Shuffling aloft at two hundred-and-fifty knots—already a hundred faster than his Merlin’s top speed—and climbing like a house afire? He had become the Thunder God. Take that, Ironman.
“Bloody hell, Yank.” He knew why the Fleet Air Arm had given these birds a pass fifteen years ago. In their infancy, the teething problems had been horrendous, frustrating mechanics and killing too many pilots. Now? Perhaps he was getting a taste for Hawaiian shirts. “You’re going to ruin me for life.”
“You said it, brother. Ready to defect to the Colonies?”
“If you can guarantee me a seat in one of these lovely birds, we’ll have to talk.”
Dave laughed aloud, then called out an altitude and heading. The transition from helo to fixed-wing flight had been both effortless and notably efficient.
The advantages of both in a single aircraft wasn’t playing fair. Josh reminded himself that he hated and mistrusted these things. He’d lay down a fiver with the bookmaker that the Osprey merely chose to bide its time before killing him.
“Control is yours.”
“I have control,” Josh responded, pleased that he didn’t squeak like his young niece. In addition to having a warrior’s confidence, Dori was the age where nothing was merely delightful, it was always super-cali-fantastical delightful. She lived in a world of rainbow-unicorn wonder no matter how mundane the moment. Someday he’d find the right lady and they’d have a Dori of their own. Sooner rather than later he sent a quick prayer to Odin the Father God before focusing back on the feel of the Osprey—though Odin had been an inconstant bastard. Maybe…
With the hydraulic controls, it was very light to the touch with only minimal feedback to the pilot. He would never admit to his relief that Dave kept his hands riding on the controls, lightly but there.
Still, putatively controlling the Osprey was seriously squeal-worthy.
A helicopter was often described as “a hundred thousand parts that just happened to be flying in the same direction”—and they felt that way. Always juddering about like awkward teenage males at their first dance.
In forward flight, all of that smoothed out and this girl ripped ahead like Freyja, Norse Goddess of War and Beauty, while bearing a serious grudge. Even Odin messed with her at his own peril.
As they slid northeast over the Cotswolds at fifteen thousand feet climbing to twenty-five, Dave talked him through standard flight and emergency procedures, a comfortably familiar pastime among pilots. They blasted high above his hometown of York. Josh’s Viking ancestors had turned the large town into a key trading center over a thousand years ago—and lost it a century later, leaving a lot of half- and full-blood Viking farmers and their babies scattered all over Yorkshire.
He waggled the Osprey’s wings to wave at his sister. She wouldn’t see, of course, but he’d promised he always would every time he flew this way. The body motion felt wrong during the wave. In a helicopter, the body of the helo swung a little side-to-side like a pendulum under the rotors. In this contraption, he was at the center of rotation. He lodged a complaint with Dave, which led to a discussion of flight characteristics during transition modes from helo to airplane and back.
At a cruising altitude of twenty-five thousand feet, they followed the direction of his retreating kinsmen out over the North Sea.
“Where’s your boat?” Josh hadn’t thought to look up where the US Carrier Strike Groups were.
“The USS Gerald R. Ford is off Stavanger, Norway.”
A hard four-hour flight in his Merlin, most of it over water—which was never a comfortable place to be in a helicopter. The Osprey would knock it out in under two.
The next thought? Far less comfortable and had nothing to do with the Osprey or his Merlin.
The Yanks had eleven of those fearsome aircraft carriers.
Britain’s second one had failed shortly after commissioning while trying to cross the Atlantic to visit the Yanks for a training exercise. Even now it remained in drydock eight months later while they replaced the bent propellor shaft and all the damage that had caused. Bloody Prince of Wales. He’d never been a fan of the now King, a leftover from a childhood crush on Princess Di and his mum’s devastation at her death.
He kept his mouth shut on that point; graduates of Britannia Royal Naval College weren’t supposed to be staunch Republicans. The more vocal anti-monarchists in the service often tangled with the upper ranks who’d proudly served a lifetime under the Queen—tangled and lost. Outside of the family house and the voting booth, he kept his politics to himself.
The Yanks rotated their eleven carriers through nine Carrier Strike Groups—the other two passing through phases of scheduled maintenance. A CSG was a daunting collection of missile cruisers, destroyers, submarines, and an entire Air Wing. But they only sent those CSGs into the world’s hotspots, three always around North Korea and Taiwan, another one or two off the South China Sea, and another in the Eastern Med.
What the hell was the newest and most powerful of those boats doing in the North Sea? And one of the Yanks’ vice admirals had just paid a visit to the boat? That coincidence wasn’t some friendly inspection tour.
An old itch said that evaluating the Ospreys might be the least of his worries on this assignment.
3
“Again?” Captain Natalia Ivanovna’s attempt to not sound bitter failed even to her own ears when the flight engineer called out the reason for an ordered course correction.
“Again, Captain.” Senior Lieutenant Viktor Arsenyev had been with her long enough to not take offense or threaten to report her to the Gromovo Air Base commander for unseemly behavior—again. His tall console directly behind her seat kept them from exchanging meaningful glances.
She cocked a hand out into the area between the pilot seats where he’d be able to see it and made a flat-palmed tapping motion as if her throat was there. Fed up with that to here!
Natalia could hear Viktor’s double chest-thump over the intercom, Truth.
She was less sure of their new copilot seated to her right. Three weeks aboard, Lieutenant Sergei Balakin had yet to speak one word that wasn’t required. Yet every time he didn’t think she was looking, she’d caught him staring at her. Why couldn’t she keep a copilot past a few months?
Natalia was used to the stare. A woman pilot in the Russian Air Force was rare. One with bright red hair billowing down to her chest was a startling oddity. But there was something else in his look that said maybe he was a spy sent to catch the day she crossed the line.
Or perhaps he was one of her father’s spies. His role high in the oligarkhi had protected her this long but it also made her a target. Party power no longer counted to any but the unseemly masses. The modern currencies of success in the Russian Federation were wealth, power, and having a nose of the color brown, as the Americans called it. Her father’s had been rammed up the President’s behind probably since he’d had to open the man’s diapers to do it.
Of course, she’d never be stupid enough to say that out loud, because there was no safety in Russia since the time when Rurik had first ruled Ancient Rus’ twelve hundred years ago. Instead, she’d walked away from the life of parties and politics—to which she was being groomed as little more than a prize for whatever grand connection Father wished to forge with her life and body.
She’d taken her mother’s maiden name and the Air Force had taken her in. Changing her name couldn’t hide who she was, which had one advantage: until her family fell out of favor and was forced to flee, she remained untouchable. Mostly. The base commander remained very cautious of her connections—not a big fan.
Not that she blamed him. She wasn’t spoiled—gods, she’d seen enough oh-so-groomed daughters to not ever be that. But a sense of humor held a high-level risk factor in the service of the Motherland.
“I wonder if that’s why they always send me.”
“Why what?” Balakin had control of the plane and was following the new vector that Viktor had given them, not that the Antonov AN-74MP Cheburashka needed much attention. The airplane’s resemblance, with its close-aboard engines on the high wing, to the big-eared cartoon character made the nickname unavoidable. The recent release of the most successful film in Russian history—named for Cheburashka—only reenforced how annoying everyone could be about her sweet plane. The crass Americans, with no understanding of the subtleties of…anything, had called her sweet bird the Coaler, like a dumping truck.
She’d love a chance to show them what the MP stood for. Marine Patrol meant she also carried a twin-barrel twenty-three-millimeter autocannon. And the AN-74 meant she was the Artic capable version of the AN-72. But for the moment it wasn’t the Americans who held her attention.
That simple question, Why what?, was perhaps the first time Balakin had spoken without a direct question. His flight hours were painfully low, below typical for even a junior officer. He was automaton perfect in every maneuver, like a beginner terrified of making a mistake, but had no feel for the aircraft. She wondered how that perfection of flight-school skills would survive a real-world test.
Like her own flight instructor, she actually worked to train those behind her to be better pilots—instead of the more common practice of hogging all the flight hours to herself. Only time would tell her Balakin’s weaknesses.
Command, of course, never treated a weakness as a training opportunity, but rather as a weapon to hold over a pilot’s head. She was sick of the games. Fed up with the superior officers of inferior intellect. Annoyed that they never let her near one of their precious combat jets. Just…done. Fine! She threw caution to the wind and spoke the truth for a change.
“They always send me for their stupidest games. Maybe it is because I play games well or—”
“You scare them to death,” Balakin said over the intercom.
She traded a surprised silence with Viktor. Balakin never offered an opinion on anything.
“Me? How do I scare the Americans?” An Antonov AN-74MP simply wasn’t that scary a plane. Useful, yes. Scary?
“Us. The Russians. It’s your father.”
Everyone knew who he was, of course. They weren’t supposed to, but if a low-ranker like Balakin knew, then everyone probably did. Secrets sold faster than vareniki in Russia.
“They keep waiting for you to use him like a hammer and anvil, and you keep not doing it. That makes you terrifying. If you can control that urge every time they give you a crappy assignment or a stupid order, what would happen to them if they do cross some line with you?”
“So, they send me to scare the Americans why?” They’d been ordered to do a close flyby of a US Navy flight. At some point Russia would finally plumb the depths of the Americans’ patience and get swatted down for doing it.
“You’re the scariest thing in our commanders’ lives—worse than their wives meeting their mistresses. I don’t even think it is conscious. They get the order to spook the Americans and the first pilot to come to mind is—”
“That Natalia Ivanovna girl with the powerful father. If we’re lucky, the Americans will shoot her down for us.”
Balakin briefly bobbled the flight controls. If her hand hadn’t been following his flight on the linked yokes, she might have missed it, but it was there. The first sign there was more than the flying robot he chose to show. Anything short of being shot should never transmit as much to the controls; it was a sign of his inexperience.
Didn’t think of that, did you, Balakin? Flying with me puts you in the line of direct fire.
“What do you think?” She raised her voice in question.
There was a shrug’s worth of silence from Viktor.
“If you’re shrugging back there, Viktor, I can’t see it.” She was half tempted to release her harness and lean out far enough over the central console to look back at him. Maybe offer a gesture questioning his manhood.
“A shrug is as good an answer as I have.” His tone implied much more; that it might be something deeper.
Was Balakin setting a trap? Natalia couldn’t ask Viktor’s opinion on that over the open intercom. She removed her hand from the yoke, no longer liking the connection to the unknown beside her.
Did Lieutenant Sergei Balakin hope to entice her to speak ill of command or Russia in general so that he could report it and ruin her to promote his own career? All those stupid political maneuverings. That’s why she’d run away from home to join the Air Force; well, that and the flying. She loved the flying. Now if she could find a man who fit her even half as well as her Cheburashka…
“How long?” she asked for a subject change.
“Direct target acquisition in one-five minutes,” Victor reported.
Balakin’s tone was wry as he added, “That’s if the reported satellite tracking is even a little accurate for once.”
Natalia twisted to inspect him. Joking and disloyal to the Party? Was it possible her new robotizirovanny copilot was human after all?
He kept his attention carefully on the flying.
Fly more, worry less?
Da, that was a fantasy life she’d never achieve.
She kept her attention on Balakin. “What’s your sad story?”
4
Sergei Balakin knew exactly why Natalia Ivanovna terrified him. And that defined his sad story.
He had been a nobody at Lomonosov School where most of the Moscow elite attended; Natalia had been the czarina. The volleyball captain driving the team to league victory four years in a row. There wasn’t a male in the entire school who missed a chance to watch her win the school track meets with her long legs and her hair streaming behind like she was sticking a giant red tongue out at all the runners who couldn’t keep up.
That her father was one of the President’s closest advisors only added to the mystique.
Balakin had paid numerous bribes to be assigned to her plane. Rather than paying commanders, which would drive the price up, he paid other copilots to ask for transfers until the position was labeled as cursed. The bribe cost fell precipitously over time. When he’d—grudgingly—agreed to take the seat, his commander had been so smug about finding someone for the cursed position of Balakin’s own creation that he’d half expected his commander to bribe him.
Balakin knew that he’d never be worthy of such a woman, but right now he was the one who served with her and that was worth any price. Her mastery in the air—even in the unassuming Cheburashka patrol airplane—shone fire-bright. She was a flame that drew him as undeniably as any moth.
Natalia might think that flybys on the Americans were mundane, but it was his first.
He swallowed against a dry throat and monitored the radar. No sign of anything. Perhaps Moscow had gotten the Americans’ vector wrong, he could always hope.
5
After two years as the lead imagery intelligence analyst—IMINT—at Menwith Hill, Ian Faulkner didn’t need the alarm to notice the course change of the Antonov AN-74. Any Russian flight that passed west of Helsinki was automatically tracked by the NRO’s satellites.
The National Reconnaissance Office had more birds in orbit than all other global intelligence services combined. And the bulk of those were tracked through the three big intelligence sites: Buckley Space Force Base in Colorado, Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap in the Australian Outback, and Royal Air Force Menwith Hill here in the Yorkshire dales. Each had dozens of radio dishes, safe inside giant geodesic domes like great white orbs scattered on the heath, aimed at the satellites—both friendly and not—watching the world’s communications up above.
Despite their pretty names, they were all owned and run by the Americans’ National Security Agency. The NSA called all the shots, which had included Ian’s own assignment to the UK.
Up until now, the Russian plane had been flying an unremarkable route. They’d eventually emerged west out of the Baltic after a careful slalom course between Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian air space. This far from home, they were either on a training run or hurrying some hardware out to yet another broken submarine. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, flight training had fallen to miserable levels to conserve fuel and aging aircraft.
He’d been following the Antonov’s passage with occasional check-ins in case it turned out to be another reactor meltdown or a drifting ship that would eventually need a tow—but only after Russia once again proved their inability to service their own fleet in distress.
After holding steady out to sea for twenty minutes, the aircraft altered its heading by thirty-seven degrees to the south.
A quick scan of assets in the area answered why.
They hadn’t turned toward the USS Gerald R. Ford’s carrier group, which lay almost due north of the Antonov’s westerly emergence from the Baltic Sea. Instead, they were headed southwest, on an intercept course with a Navy COD flight. Carrier On-board Delivery aircraft had never been the target of a Russian flyby before that Ian had ever heard.
“SIGINT, IMINT,” Ian called out over the headset.
The Menwith Hill Ops Floor included the leads for each area of operations. In other rooms, each of them had a team monitoring every aspect of information gathered by the US and UK intelligence satellites. Technically Canada’s, New Zealand’s, and Australia’s as well, but those were few and far between in orbit. The Five Eyes Alliance depended heavily on its two primary members.
Among the leads on the floor, they ran an open intercom, which included the Mission Director.
“SIGINT,” Verity responded from two seats to his right on the middle arc of desks. She had one of those lovely West Country accents that impossibly made even Signals Intelligence sound sexy. It was always a pleasure to listen to, even if she was plumpish and happily married with three teenage kids.
