“Our suits have all those fancy micro-climate conditioning subsystems, but if the suit fails, you and your family jewels will be glad you got that sock. Trust me.”
Rule grinned. “I hear that, Sergeant.”
McAllen turned and looked the man straight in the eye, then proffered his hand. “The last time I met the Russians, they couldn’t help but fall to their knees and bleed.”
“I hope I have the same effect on them.”
They shook firmly, then Rule rushed off to pack.
McAllen returned to inventorying his gear. He fetched a picture of himself and Jonesy from his footlocker and slipped it into his ruck. They’d been pretty drunk that night, and Jonesy had been the one to get McAllen home. He was like that. Dependable beyond belief. And McAllen had to get it into his head that though no one could replace Jonesy, he had to give Sergeant Rule, nipple rings and all, a chance.
At least the spirit of Jonesy would be heading up into the Great White North, along with the spirit of the Corps.
Whenever they went into battle, every man who had ever been a Marine went with them.
With white-hot chaff flashing beside her wings, Major Stephanie Halverson took her F-35B fighter into another dive, rolling as she did so, then banked sharply to the right, cutting a deep chamfer in the air.
Her pressure suit compensated for what would’ve been excruciating g-forces, keeping the blood from pooling in her legs, yet still she felt the usual and sometimes even welcome discomfort.
One missile took the bait and exploded somewhere above her; she didn’t waste time to check its exact location because the other one was still locked on.
Utilizing all of the jet’s sensors and the helmet-mounted display, Halverson was able to look down through her knees, through the actual structure of the aircraft, and spot the missile coming up from below.
She punched the chaff again.
Then killed the engine and let the fighter drop away like an unlucky mallard during hunting season.
The only problem was, the missile had been designed to “see” whole images rather than just single points of infrared radiation like the heat from her engine.
So that Vympel R-84 with its “potato masher” fins had a decision to make: detonate its thirty kilograms of high explosive in the chaff or continue on to Halverson.
With her breath held, she watched as the missile penetrated the chaff cloud—
And kept on coming.
She cursed, fired up the engine, then started straight for the cargo planes still glowing in her multifunction display.
She pressed a finger against the touch screen, viewing a much clearer, close-up image of the nearest aircraft. She tapped another button, and target designation and weapons status imagery appeared in her HMD. She closed in, the target now being automatically tracked, the crosshairs in her visor locking on the AN-130.
She tightened her fist, pressed the button.
Missile away. She pressed again. Missile #2 streaked off a second behind the first.
The radar alarm was still going off.
And there it was, a glowing dot. You didn’t need a key to the display’s symbols to know what that one meant: death.
“Sapphire, this is Siren, can’t shake my last missile, over.”
“Yes, you can, Siren! Chaff again! Come on!”
And what kind of miracle was that? The damned missile took the bait and exploded in a beautiful conflagration, the dark clouds traced by flickering light.
“Sister, I’m listening to you next time,” Halverson cried. “And here comes another pair of 130s. Let’s get ’em. I want to head back to Igloo empty, refuel, rearm, and do it all over again!”
“Roger that!”
Halverson shut her eyes for just a second.
Major Alice Dennison couldn’t afford to leave her JSF command post in Tampa and was closely monitoring the data coming in to her from Alaska, where the 11th Air Force and 3rd Wing from Elmendorf and the 354th Fighter Wing from Eielson had scrambled to intercept the Russian transports, along with that handful of JSF fighters whose pilots had been training in the Northwest Territories.
She couldn’t leave, but she shuddered with the desire to do so, to travel back to Gitmo and question Doletskaya again.
However, she had arranged the next best thing — a video conference with the prisoner.
And, despite her better judgment, she stole away to a private conference room for ten minutes to speak one last time with Colonel Pavel Doletskaya.
She thought maybe she could put the demons to rest and begin to actually sleep.
The colonel looked even more haggard than the last time she had seen him, gray stubble creeping across his chin, and it seemed an effort for him to keep his head upright. His eyes failed to focus, then finally he blinked and leaned forward, too close to the camera, then threw his head back and suddenly laughed.
“Colonel, stop it.”
After another few seconds, he composed himself and said, “I’m sorry, Major. I just… I can see that look in your eyes. So, are we happy with the information I gave you? Because you don’t look very happy.”
“No, we’re perfectly fine with it.”
His expression grew serious. “You’re bluffing.”
“You cried like a baby, Colonel. I know exactly what Operation 2659 is and exactly who Snegurochka aka the snow maiden is, all right?”
“So then, why have you interrupted my vacation?”
Dennison took a deep breath. Yep, she was bluffing. She hadn’t learned a damned thing — the bastard was the most highly skilled and resistant prisoner the interrogators had ever encountered. In fact, at this point, they swore he knew nothing…
But Dennison refused to believe that. “I just thought it would be in your best interests to formally defect. That way, you would enjoy the benefits of such a decision.”
“You don’t know anything, do you. You ran 2659 through every database in the world, compared the number to other operations, thought it might be an address, a date, a model number for the memory chip of a computer. You’ve had experts from every government agency looking at it, people trained to study ciphers, even that agent from the CIA who swears he decrypted the messages on that statue outside the office in Langley. What’s it called? Kryptos? Yes… But you know nothing — or rather, you know that I know everything about you.”
“Colonel, this is not a game. Do you have any idea how many innocent people are about to die?”
“I do — even more so than you.”
“Is it worth it?”
“Oh, those kinds of questions give me a headache, Major. I want to know if you have redecorated your apartment recently. Maybe you have pulled up the rugs, decided to buy some new lights for the ceiling? Or maybe some new paintings?”
“Operation 2659 is the invasion of Alberta. The snow maiden is the code name for an operative, a female operative who is part of or perhaps leading the mission.”
“Yes, you knew that before we ever met. The Euros fed you that on a spoon. And since then, you’ve spent all your time reading fairy tales…”
“This is your last chance, Colonel. Otherwise, you’re going to rot in prison for the rest of your life. You could defect, tell us what we need to know. You could work with us to bring a peaceful solution to this conflict.”
“Do you want to be president of the United States? Because you sound so convincing.”
