Ian Slater - Darpa Alpha

“Because,” said a loader, “they’re the ones yelling at everybody.”

Freeman laughed easily. “Maybe, but the surest sign is that they’re the best dressed. Lot of them are still like the British officers in past wars. If they can afford it, they have their combat fatigues as well as full-dress uniforms made on Nevsky Prospect.”

“Where’s that, sir?”

“St. Petersburg,” said Freeman, glancing at the airspeed indicator. The Super Stallions were capable of around 170 m.p.h. but with a load of fifty marines and because fragments of the AA hit had bled off some hydraulic lines, they were down to 141 m.p.h. Even so, the warning amber light would be coming on soon. Someone asked Freeman how it was that the terrorist H-block had been missed by satellite surveillance for so long.

“It’s cold,” Melissa Thomas ventured. “Wouldn’t show up on the infrared?”

“No,” said Freeman. “Buffalo’s cold in winter too, but SATPIX’ll pick up any building in Buffalo because of all the heating vents. They show up beautifully on the IR cameras. So our best intel guess is that the terrorist tech wizards have designed a thermoslike roof shield so that the H-building shows up as a thermos, without giving us any idea of what’s inside.” The moment he said this, Douglas Freeman felt an ice-cold tremor run through him. What if the soil analyses, et cetera, were wrong, and the damn place was an empty shell, a trap? He was determined to keep the possibility to himself. His job now was to keep morale as high as possible. “So,” he told Melissa and every other marksman, which, given the marines’ standard, meant every man on the helo, “you should look for the bastards with the best-pressed battle fatigues and shoot them first. I hope you notice that I, on the other hand, am no better dressed than any of you. I’m indistinguishable from any of you, ’cept for my big mouth.” More laughter, more confidence-building after the bloody disaster that had just taken place aboard this, the marines’ second helo. Huey One, carrying Tibbet and his HQ communications group, was a half-mile ahead.

“Ten to amber!” came the crew chief’s voice. Freeman was wondering what had happened when the Harriers dove on the AA position. Had it been completely destroyed, its guns as well as its crew? Or would it be re-crewed and play havoc with the second wave? As so often happened, those in the middle of the action were the least able to discern exactly what was transpiring. He thought of Hitler again and the dark room. The Nazi Führer had been right about that.

The loud “boom” that reverberated across the frozen marshlands and savannahs and through the woodland of Lake Khanka was unmistakably that of an anti-personnel mine exploding. Normally neither Abramov, Beria, nor Cherkashin would have bothered even looking up from their respective offices in the H-block, but this morning was different. With a marine expeditionary unit known to be en route to the complex, the detonation caused each general to immediately check the computer-controlled security display on his monitor. The half-mile-wide perimeter that ran around the ABC complex was mined and patrolled by Beria’s motorized rifle company’s amphibious BMPs, Boyevaya Mashina Pekhoty, infantry fighting vehicles. The BMPs, traveling between dug-in squads of eight men, maintained a 24/7 perimeter watch, while a mobile “Animal Squad” on standby was ready to dash out from the H-complex and replace any of the mines. There was eager competition for the night shift because deer were the most probable trespassers, and the commanding officers, for all their missile-made money, couldn’t get a steady supply of venison due to past overhunting either by the Chinese, who worked the rice fields west of the lake, or by the Russian population east of Lungwangmia.

The phone jangled on Beria’s desk, he being responsible for perimeter defense.

“Da?”

“Major Kermansky here, General. It was a Vulpes vulpes .”

Beria was gruff. “Don’t show off, Kermansky. What the hell is that?”

“A red fox, sir. Very rare nowadays.”

“Fur any good?” asked the general brusquely. Normally Beria didn’t care a fig about what animal or bird it was, but red fox was an endangered species, and a fox-fur collar would make an exciting gift for his mistress in Avdoyevka, twenty miles east of the complex. ABC had put it under curfew.

“I doubt it,” said Captain Kermansky, one of those recruited with bonus bait from the naval infantry battalion south in Vladivostok and a man who, though he had sold out to ABC, insisted on wearing his old unit’s badged beret and blue-striped T-shirt beneath his battle smock.

“Is none of it salvageable?” asked Beria. Kermansky could be lying, saving the prized red fur for himself.

“No, sir. Sometimes they only get a foot blown off but he was blown to hell.”

If the anti-personnel mine had blown the fox to hell, wondered Beria, how come Kermansky could tell it had been a male?

“I’ll bury it deep,” said Kermansky, as if he was doing the general a personal favor instead of doing what every man in Beria’s infantry company had been told to do in order to prevent any enviro crazy hearing about it on the bush telegraph.

But this time Beria surprised him. “Bring it to me. Maybe I can get a collar out of it.”

“But sir—”

“Bring it to me!” snapped Beria. “Or you won’t see a bonus this week.” With that, the general slammed the phone down. The call, intercepted like all other Russian or Chinese radio traffic by the operators in McCain ’s cutting-edge signal exploitation space, was duly logged by the duty officer as a useless piece of information, along with all the other intercepts of nonenciphered Russian and local Chinese military traffic.

“What was that all about?” asked Landing Signals Officer Ray Lynch, bored now that McCain had launched its quad of Joint Strike Fighters, on radio silence, to catch up with the Harriers who, in response to news of the anti-aircraft fire against the Super Stallions, were now following the south bank of the Ussuri River.

“Mr. B of ABC,” the translator reported to Lynch, “wants the coat of a red fox that blew itself up on a mine. Says he’d like a collar made from it but his comrade—” The operator paused and called back the intercept note on his monitor. “Some guy called Kermansky, sounded like an officer, he says the fox was blown to pieces. High intel, huh?”

The SES’s officer of the watch shrugged, but nevertheless reminded the translator that any ABC intercepts were to be forwarded to Freeman or Colonel Tibbet. “Maybe they can make something of it.”

“What the hell’s a dead fox gonna tell them?”

“That the perimeter’s mined,” put in Ray Lynch.

The SES team resented Lynch being in the SES. The Blue-tile Area, because of the ultrasecret status of its advanced supercomputers, was strictly off-limits to all but designated ship’s officers and the captain. Though Lynch had clearance, he had no real business there. SES called him “Lizard Lynch” because he was always lounging around in SES like a lizard in the sun and looking over their shoulders.

“Well,” the CPO countered Lynch, “General Freeman already knows the perimeter’s mined, so we don’t have to tell him that. But our SATPIX have picked up a number of heat splotches where there’s a temperature differential between undisturbed frozen ground and the ground that’s been dug for a mine. That’ll give him specific locations of mines.”

The message, sent from the surreal quiet of the Blue-tile room to the thunder of the Super Stallions, was being deciphered by the copilot, who jotted it down on his sidearm computer. He tore off the two-inch-wide printout: “A red fox has been killed. Stepped on a mine.”