Ian Slater - Darpa Alpha

“A hundred thousand dollars a month!” said Beria with a whistle.

“But what is this equipment, this capability, he talks about?” said Abramov.

“I don’t care!” said Beria. “I’m broke.”

“I want to know,” said Abramov, as the three of them made their way back into the hotel, “whether this capability is real or not. I at least want to ask him if it’s in place, ready to go, or are we expected to start from scratch? I need to know that much if I’m to decide.”

Abramov posed the questions quietly but without preamble as they met the two officials in the foyer. “What capability are we talking about? At least give us a rough idea.”

The two officials looked at each other and decided that a little more bait was necessary to hook the generals.

“A capability,” Big answered him, “that is staggering, General, and which will be ready for full production in two months if our acquisition of the data is successful. But beyond that I will discuss it in detail only if you wish to join our team.”

“Whose team is that?”

Little, who had spoken nary a word since the three generals had returned from outside, suddenly leaned forward, his suit’s crease crumpling as he did so. “The old team,” he told Abramov, as if the tank general was a student who’d forgotten his most important lesson, a lesson which governed all others, “the team which the stupid Americans think is washed up but is just waiting, as their George Washington did, to cross the Delaware, to regain what has been stolen, stolen from our party’s grip because some generals didn’t have the balls to overturn all these ridiculous democratic reforms. Are you with us or not? Do you want to slave away for kopecks in this so-called new democratic Russia or be able to hold your head up again, armed with some real weapons for a change, with something our clients can hit the Americans with, so fast, so utterly, that they’ll be pissing themselves in the streets. And which, if successful, if organized correctly, will act as a nucleus to attract more of our comrades to reinvigorate the party. Now, are you with us or not?

Abramov thought for a second. His final humiliation had been having to tell his daughter that she’d have to stop taking her beloved studies in ballet because of the money. He’d stopped her dream. “Da!” he told Little. “I’m with you.”

And so were Beria and Cherkashin, the air force general asking gleefully, “Now we’re in. Tell us, how do we get the Americans pissing their pants?”

Looking at the three generals in turn, Big asked, “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘Flow-In-Flight’ data?”

None of them had.

His recurring dream evicted from consciousness upon his arrival at Fairchild. Aussie, with Freeman and the other six members of the team, was now aboard an oily-smelling Chinook helo heading for the lower, southernmost, end of northwest Idaho’s ninety-thousand-acre Lake Pend Oreille. To Choir Williams’s extreme discomfort, the team encountered a gut-rolling turbulence as a low-pressure weather system rushing in from the Pacific coast hit a Canadian Express, a stream of freezing air pouring down from the Arctic through British Columbia, a little more than sixty miles to the north of the lake.

As the general studied his Tactical Pilotage map of the rugged 48-mile-wide, 75-mile-long Idaho panhandle that contained both Lake Pend Oreille and Priest Lake, thirty miles north-northwest of Pend Oreille, he shook his head.

“What’s up, General?” Aussie shouted over the roar of the Chinook’s engines.

Freeman’s face was creased by what his team had come to call his George C. Scott look, one of concern and hard focus. It wasn’t worry, however. Douglas Freeman tried to spend as little time as he could worrying, a devotee of the man Muslims saw as a holy prophet, and Christians, the Messiah: “Set your mind on God’s kingdom and his justice before everything else, and all the rest will come to you as well. So do not be anxious about tomorrow; tomorrow will look after itself. Each day has troubles enough of its own .”

Even so, Freeman had to think ahead and Sal, seeing the general’s frown of concentration, asked, “Problem?” It was a question that an enlisted man would hardly be expected to ask a general, at least not so casually, but this SpecFor team, with the exception of Tony Ruth, had been in action together before. Besides, the easy familiarity between officers and enlisted men came naturally to such small groups of men who’d been in combat and who’d bivouacked in close quarters.

Freeman’s voice thundered over the Chinook’s combined rotor slap and engine noise. “No problem, gentlemen. No problem at all.” He looked down at Prince, the five-year-old black spaniel whose floppy ears were covered by earmuffs that Choir Williams had made especially for him, and who seemed to perk up as if reading the general’s mind.

“The first thing we need to know,” the general continued, “is which way those bastards headed off from the DARPA installation at the end of the lake. And for that answer—” He leaned forward and scratched Prince affectionately behind his ears, the dog immediately half closing his eyes in canine ecstasy. “—we need to get Prince here a scent from those terrorist creeps, if we can. That right, fella?” The general’s right hand moved from Prince’s ears to beneath his chin. Panting happily, Prince eagerly thrust his head forward, asking for more.

From the helo’s open door, the slipstream roaring like rushing water against his goggles, Freeman caught a glimpse of the densely forested mountain fastness of the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness Area that flanked Lake Pend Oreille to the east beyond the Idaho-Montana border. To his left, northwest, he could see the six-thousand-foot-high summit of Bald Mountain, and, south of the lake, Cedar Mountain. On the long, ear-shaped lake, which looked to him more like an elongated question mark than an ear, lay several rectangular shapes: DARPA’s barge out from the shore, designated DARPA ALPHA on his map; the data hut on the shoreline; and several other storage buildings scattered around the small settlement of Bayview on the ear’s lobe, with Coeur d’Alene another twenty miles to the south. Freeman also saw there was only one road leading out from the DARPA installation to Interstate 95, eight miles west of the lake. Prince’s nose was at his side, the spaniel’s eyes watering from the icy-cold wind that swept over the misty blue mass of the Cabinet Mountains and the Kootenai National Wildlife Refuge beyond the lake where rivulets, born in snowcapped peaks, fed both Lake Pend Oreille and Priest Lake to the northwest.

“Gonna see a grizzly, eh?” Freeman asked Prince, who remained incommunicado as he basked in the extended chin scratch the general was giving him and the back scratch that, now that the turbulence had subsided, Choir was lavishing on him.

“Grizzly?” put in Aussie. “I certainly hope not. Terrorists are one thing, grizzly bears are something else.”

“Then,” Freeman told the team, “you’d better check your weapons, guys. Make sure you’re loaded for bear as well as scumbags.”

Salvini had selected a 22.1-pound, 49.2-inch Belgian general-purpose machine gun, or GPMG, a weapon that could fire fifty-round belts of the big 7.62 mm slugs over an effective killing range of three-quarters of a mile, should a “long punch” firefight break out.

For his part, Choir had chosen the German-made Heckler Koch general-purpose MG36, which was a lighter and shorter machine gun. The MG36, with folding stock and carrying handle, had a transparent thirty-round magazine, fired standard NATO 5.56 mm-caliber rounds, and had a kill reach of more than a third of a mile. In his pre-op briefing at Fairchild, the general had told the other seven men in his eight-man team that while the trail would most likely lead them through thick bush and forest, there would also be open alpine meadows at the higher elevations of the Bitterroot Mountains. In such places, the shorter-range Heckler Koch’s famous MP55.6-pound submachine gun was favored by most others in the team. The general’s weapon of choice was an AK-74, an updated AK-47 which he’d chosen for its relatively light weight—7.5 pounds — easy maintenance, and greater range than the Heckler Koch MP5. The general had had his AK-74’s original folding metal frame stock replaced with wood so that it could be used as a “door opener” or “skull crusher,” should the occasion arise.