Jerome Preisler - Net Force--Attack Protocol

But what was the old saying? Igra ne stoit svech. The game wasn’t worth the candles.

It was only a perfect stroke of luck that had spared him from the demon bitch in the castle. A falling pile of stone at the right moment. If it hadn’t come between them, she would have smashed him to a pulp with her motorcycle. She would have killed him.

If Matei had believed in signs from the universe, that chunk of the ceiling coming down would have been one loud, crashing warning that it was time to disengage. But fuck signs. The gods of war offered no signs. He had instincts and trusted them, and they told him the same.

The castle was burning. Falling. Crumbling to the ground. A huge, fiery sacrifice to the future.

His time would come.

“Treceti-le pe langa,” he said. “Pass them by.”

A second later, man and dog and castle were behind him and then gone, the Rezvani’s driver taking a curve and bearing east at over seventy-five miles per hour. The road ahead was dark. The trees, fences, farms, cottages, the entire countryside around him...dark. As if swallowed by the void.

The game here was played, but a new phase was already being launched elsewhere. The Russians were master gamesmen, and Koschei a master of masters. They owned all that was to come in the future; it had been shrewd of Drajan Petrovik to partner with them.

Matei would join him at Okean-27, the secret city, and prepare for the next move. As for the Americans, and especially the demon bitch...

A hand played wasn’t game over.

He would see her again. And make sure she received her due.

Kali stopped the bike on the access road leading to the front gate. Rover One was just ahead, pulled across it. She and Carmody dismounted and walked toward the vehicle, their feet leaving vague, shallow prints in the thin coating of snow.

There was a chain of explosions behind them. Both turned to look.

Several hundred yards to the north, Castle Graguscu was being consumed by flames. The drones were still swooping down at its ravaged walls in clusters, detonating with bright flares of light. Sparks and embers danced in the sky above it like fireworks. Acrid smoke poured upward, slanting toward them on the southwestern breeze.

They turned back toward the BearCat. Max Spencer stood to one side of the hatchway and lowered the platform to let them on.

Carmody saw the body as he came aboard. It had been transferred to a stretcher, covered with a white sheet, and strapped down flat to the floor.

“Emerick got hit coming in. We did what we could.” This from Singh, the medic. He nodded toward Kali. “She made it easier for him.”

The vehicle jolted into motion, backing up off the road and then angling on again with its nose pointing south. Carmody knelt over the body for a long moment, his head slightly bent, then turned toward the forward cabin. Dixon was in the driver’s seat, Schultz on the passenger side.

“Wheeler’s team,” he said. “What’s their status?”

“They’re out,” Dixon said. “With Long.”

“Banik and the dog?”

“Same.”

Carmody nodded silently. The BearCat rolled forward.

“No offense, boss,” Schultz said, his eyes on the digital rearview. “You look like shit.”

Carmody crouched there another second or two, then sat down on the metal floor of the vehicle. He pushed himself back against its side with his heels, brought his knees up in front of him, and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. It came away smeared with blood.

“Obviously,” he said, his voice too low for anyone to hear.

18

Baneasa, Romania

FOB Janus

It was 2:40 a.m. when Fernandez got back on the move with the tight wedge of fighting vehicles. He was alone in front, Howard behind him in the jump seat. Wasserman had unstrapped from his seat and climbed into the aft troop section.

“We’re almost in position,” Fernandez said to Howard.

The colonel sat there with an H&K M320 stand-alone grenade launcher on his lap. Crisscrossing his chest were two bandoliers, each holding eight 40x46 mm cartridges.

“How long before the ’hogs engage?” he said.

“Optimum lock-on for their RPGs is probably twelve hundred yards. But I want them closer.”

“I asked how long. ”

Fernandez frowned, doing a rough calculation as they chugged over the frozen grass-and-dirt field toward the parade grounds. “Three minutes,” he said. “Give or take.”

“Give-or-fucking-take,” Howard muttered. He lowered the blooper’s foregrip, popped its receiver, and slid in one of the fat explosive projectiles. Then he slapped the receiver shut and thumbed the selector switch forward. Pushing the butt plate against his shoulder, he raised it to firing position and pressed his eye to the ladder sight as if he was about to trigger a round.

After a second he lowered the weapon and craned his head around toward Wasserman.

“Where’s the rest of my ammo?” he said.

The E4 clambered up from the rear and handed him a second cartridge belt. “Here, sir. Want some help putting it—”

“Shit, no.” Howard grimaced as he slung it across the other bandolier. “ How long , Julio?”

“About ninety seconds,” Fernandez said.

He studied his console. The Pumas’ FOG soft-kill active protection system would theoretically counter the ’hogs’ antitank rockets. But he had never war-gamed the APS and didn’t like relying on it. Except he would have to because if it didn’t work, they were all probably dead. The ’hogs’ thermobaric grenade was brutal. Right before impact, it would shoot a jet of white-hot liquid metal through armor, lancing through it like a hot needle through wax. Then the main warhead would enter the vehicle’s interior and blow everything inside it to bits.

He rolled on. Another thirty seconds and the rough, bumpy ground under his wheels would give way to level pavement. He was positive the ’hogs would take a defensive posture before they got that far. They had their own system of countermeasures. Range finders that could detect the vibrations of an incoming rocket and instantaneously relay its position to their onboard computers. They could read its speed and trajectory, predict when and where it would strike.

It was a system based on evasion, not deflection. Different premise than the FOG suite, same desired result. And with good reason. The Pumas were slow and cumbrous. Hedgehogs the opposite: light, fast, and mobile. Their reaction time limited only by the speed it took for electrical commands to travel from their computers to their mechanical actuators. Maybe a trillionth of a second. Maybe less. They could dodge, swerve, do other things to elude the missiles. Their system perfectly suited their capabilities.

So, the real question for Fernandez wasn’t how long it would be before the ’hog engaged. It was whether he could get close enough, fast enough, to beat it to the punch.

But how many would they be facing? One? Two? Probably not all four. Probably at least a single robot would stay on guard at the bunkers to stop anyone trying to escape.

Probably-schmobably.

Fernandez knew the robots had fairly deep decision trees relative to their actual machine IQs. They could make judgment calls. But their judgment had been twisted. Infected. Hijacked. A foreign algorithm had taken up residence in their minds like an invasive virus. It piled uncertainty upon uncertainty, and he didn’t like that much at all. Uncertainty wasn’t his thing.

He looked at his console. The wedge of Pumas had almost traversed the field.

“How long ?” Howard asked a fourth time.

Before Fernandez could reply, two of the ’hogs turned away from the blaze and began trundling toward the Pumas. His readouts said the lead wagon was within fourteen hundred yards of their line.