Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

At Okean-27, he would be safe. Untouchable. Reunited with Drajan Petrovik, the man whose role he’d played to perfection at the Wolf’s Lair. Lured to it by a perfectly conceived and executed charade—a plan of genius, really—the Americans responsible for the problems and disruptions of the past four months had been deceived into thinking he was the Wolf himself. They would stay close behind. But they wouldn’t dare follow him onto Russian federal territory.

Besides, they were about to find themselves with more pressing concerns.

Gustav Zolcu drove on. It seemed ages since he, Drajan and their boyhood friend Emil had done their first hacks. Small-time scams—wire fraud, identity theft, stolen test answers. But the three of them were the nucleus of the technologie vampiri . The core group of what was now a vast global operation. Though Zolcu supposed he could include Emil’s sister Stella, who had seemed peripheral back then but would become instrumental to last summer’s strike at America.

He toed the gas pedal a little farther down and the car responded with a quiet, purring sigh.

Which somehow reminded him of Clinia. He wished he hadn’t been forced to cut her loose so soon and get out so fast tonight, but he felt no regrets. Everything had been calculated. Everything was part of the setup. His time in Romania was at an end. There were new worlds to conquer.

He whipped past a derelict farmhouse on his left, the car’s traction controls keeping it perfectly stable even at his extreme high speed. There were no lights in the windows, no lights anywhere. The blackout was still eerily complete. With the trees around him flocked with snow and the road pitch-black except for his headlights pushing out ahead and nothing else in sight, it was almost as if he was speeding through an abandoned movie set. A replica countryside unspooling on both sides and behind him.

New and better worlds were ahead. Time to say goodbye to the old.

Glancing into his mirror as if to confirm it was all behind him, Zolcu sped on north through the cold, wind, and snow.

In Raven ’s cockpit, Luna and Cobb saw the Regera go streaking past the spot where the road divided, the imagery beamed to their HUDs from the Sentinel drone flying out beyond the fork.

“Ready and set,” Cobb said in the gunner’s seat.

For him this was fun time. He did not intend to hit a moving object. This was, moreover, not a strike against a building standing in proximity to other buildings and innocent civilians, a situation where he wanted to avoid collateral damage. His target was a section of deserted country road in the middle of a remote nowhere. Nothing else around for miles. No other factors to consider. Not even snowplows.

Luna nodded as he got a radar lock on the segment of road they were about to blow. She had based their choice of a target on a single criterion. Actually, a criterion and subcriterion. The criterion was that it lay between the Regera and the next possible turnoff, which would severely limit its driver’s options. The subcriterion was that it was far enough ahead of the driver for them to demolish it without injuring him. There were questions only he could answer about the strike on New York, among many other things. Carmody wanted him bagged and out of the country in one piece.

“Go!” she said from the pilot’s station.

Cobb gripped the fire-control handle. His HUD’s radar overlay showed multiple sets of targeting coordinates, all of which the AI was repeating in his ear. He could have released the Hellfire III with a virtual button on the cabin-wide touch screen. He could have done it with a verbal command, giving the AI a mission-specific firing code. But he was a certified Army sniper and preferred the tactile reassurance of a physical trigger.

He pressed the button to initiate the missile’s launch sequence. A millisecond later, its solid propellant fuel ignited, the gases produced by its rapid burn generating five hundred pounds of thrust.

Cobb and Luna both felt Raven shudder from nose to tail as the Hellfire III shot from its rail, hissing off toward their target at Mach 13, a fiery plume of exhaust trailing behind it into the night.

At Mach 13, a missile was traveling about a thousand miles per hour, a hypersonic velocity many times exceeding the speed of sound. The section of road Luna and Cobb had tagged for destruction was a half mile to their north.

The Hellfire III took 1.8 seconds to reach it. Two blinks of their eyes.

At launch, the Regera was roughly midway between Cobb and his target, therefore midway between the Hellfire and its designated target. And while the car was streaking forward at a hundred thirty miles per hour, which was extremely fast for a vehicle on the ground, it might as well have been standing still relative to the missile.

Gustav Zolcu never heard it pass overhead. Its contours were designed to avoid creating a loud sonic boom, and the whooshing roar of its rocket engine would take a while to reach him. In fact, he never glimpsed its brilliant exhaust trail scratching through the clouds. Nine-tenths of a second after its launch, a single blink of his eyes, the missile soared over and past him and then slammed into the road a quarter of a mile to the north.

The initial flash of the explosion took a spherical shape, like ball lightning. Momentarily blinded, Zolcu felt the entire car shake. The column of flame that rose at the point of impact looked like a blazing arm punching up through the ground. The road there was completely obliterated in the detonation, leaving a ten-foot crater that stretched from one embankment to the other. The asphalt at the edges of the crater broke into sizzling black chunks of pitch that spattered the trunks and branches of the roadside trees and clung, gummy and burning, to their dry outer bark. Many trees were incinerated as pressurized, superheated air washed over them. Others ignited more slowly, blisters of hot sap popping and sizzling on their trunks as the fiery globs of road material lit them up like torches.

Stunned, Zolcu hit his brake pedal hard. The Regera’s tremendous horsepower was directed from its V-8 engine to two electric-drive motors mounted over its rear tires. At his rate of speed, the enormous torque generated by a short stop would have sent almost any other car into a forward rollover, the stresses on its frame instantly making it crack up. But its robotic stabilizer system kept it intact with all four wheels to the road.

The blast crater’s rim still sixty feet in front of him, Zolcu came to a halt and stared silently out at a solid, pulsating wall of flame.

“Cacar in palarie,” he swore under his breath. “Shit in a hat.”

In Raven ’s cockpit, Cobb glanced over at Luna.

“Bull’s-eye,” he said.

A full minute after the blast, Zolcu was still staring out into the conflagration. The snow had gotten lighter, at least for now, but he kept his windshield wiper on to bat off the persistent flurries. What had just happened here? His first thought was that he’d tripped a mine, but the detonation must have occurred twenty yards up the road from him. A mine wouldn’t be planted so far ahead of its intended target.

No, he decided at once. It wasn’t a mine. A planted explosive would have been set to go off directly beneath his car. More importantly, how could anyone have predicted he would be driving this road? This was no random hit.

He took a deep breath. The wall of flames throbbed and crackled up ahead. Could it have been a rocket strike? He didn’t think it all that far-fetched. A shoulder-launched rocket or even a missile fired from a drone seemed possible, even plausible, given who he believed was behind tonight’s raid. The Americans would have the resources and the balls. And there were certainly precedents for it. Like when they hit the Iranian general in Baghdad. Soleimani had not been the first. Nor would he be the last.