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  “Good.”

  “Oh, and one personal item, Admiral: please have someone call my wife and tell her to change our PIN.”

  “Right. I’ll call her myself. Good hunting, Captain.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Andreas thumbed off the phone, his thoughts still whirling as he barked out the orders to dive, dive, dive!

  It was at Army Airborne School in Fort Benning, Georgia, that Team Sergeant Nathan Vatz had been taught how to wear a parachute harness and had stood near the mock door, waiting for his turn to learn the proper method of exiting an aircraft.

  The parachute landing fall platform had allowed him to develop the proper landings, while the lateral drift apparatus had helped him acquire the proper technique for controlling the chute during descent.

  Then there was the good old thirty-four-foot tower, which let you experience a jump into nothingness. And once you got to the 250-foot tower, you were feeling good about yourself—until you saw someone make a mistake.

  Still, Vatz had survived, made his qualification jumps, and had kept current by jumping at least once every three months.

  Yes, it seemed like yesterday. Felt like yesterday, too. He still got the jitters every time he jumped, despite the hundreds of hours in other training courses he’d attended at Fort Bragg, the ones that had really kicked his butt.

  Now that butt was firmly planted on the bright red web seat of a C-130’s vibrating hold with the rest of his new twelve-man ODA team.

  Vatz had barely gotten to know these guys, and he still mixed up a few names. That was all right. There’d be plenty of time to get to know one another, after they finished their work.

  And thanks to the Russians, the best way to get to work was to engage in HALO operations, an SF specialty.

  What you did was you jumped from your perfectly good aircraft at a high altitude, in their case 25,000 feet, allowed yourself to freefall for a while at terminal velocity, then engaged in a low opening of your parachute so you could glide in clandestinely on your target from miles away, the target in this case being the sleepy little town of High Level, population: less than five thousand.

  In order to perform such a miracle, Vatz and his fellow operators had to don their heavier helmets and oxygen masks. Their high-speed downward fall, coupled with their forward airspeed and the fact that they wore a minimal amount of metal, would allow them to defeat Russian radars.

  A report from the pilot came in: winds were at twelve knots and holding. That was good. If they got up over eighteen knots, they’d have to abort the jump.

  Thirty minutes prior they had all been breathing one hundred percent oxygen to flush the nitrogen from their bloodstreams, and the flight psychologist was making sure no one flipped out before the ramp opened.

  Breathing in all that pure oxygen was a huge deal because hypoxia was a huge enemy. Without enough air, you could lose consciousness, fail to open your chute, and literally dig your own grave.

  Vatz had seen it happen. Twice. And both times the problem had occurred when changing over from the pre-breather to the oxygen bottle. Those guys had allowed nitrogen to slip back into their bloodstreams. At least neither had felt the impact. They’d just blacked out, dropped, hit the ground.

  He shuddered. A dozen other things could go wrong, too, stuff he couldn’t even imagine. They had to jump in a tight-knit formation, and one bad move by himself or a fellow operator could result in a fatal midair collision. No, Vatz had never seen anyone die from that, but he’d seen a lot of guys slam into each other.

  At their stage of the game, though, those things shouldn’t be issues. But if your name was Nathan Vatz, you always thought about them in the minutes before the jump.

  And there wasn’t much else to think about. If he didn’t focus on that, he’d be back to Doletskaya or Green Vox, imagining himself exacting revenge on those bastards.

  Or he’d be back to that night in the chopper, watching his brothers die before his eyes—

  And asking the same damned question over and over: Twelve good men went into Moscow, and only one came out. Why me?

  The jumpmaster gave them the twenty-minute warning, which they all acknowledged with a great cheer: it’d been nearly four hours since they’d lifted off from Gray Army Airfield.

  Then the jumpmaster went through his checklist. Helmets and oxygen mask, check. CDS switches, load marker lights, anchor cable stops, ramp ADS arms, cargo compartment lights, all good for him.

  “Complete!” he boomed.

  And as all safety-minded paratroopers did, they checked the gear of the men ahead of them. Again. And again. Perhaps four, five, maybe six times.

  Some said the last twenty minutes before a jump were the longest of their lives. Not for Vatz.

  He blinked.

  And they were on their feet, the ramp open and locked, the navigator coming over the radio to say, “Ten seconds.”

  They were nearly on top of the CARP—the computerized airborne release point—which accounted for all the data coming in from the aircraft’s systems and the current weather conditions. Vatz was glad neither he nor anyone else in the company had to figure out those calculations. They’d thrown some of that math at him back at Fort Bragg, and he’d spent most of the time ducking.

  All right, the time had finally come.

  The eight officers, seven warrant officers, and sixty-seven enlisted soldiers of Vatz’s Special Forces company were about to go for a little walk.

  But then the pilot cursed, and the navigator screamed over the radio: “We got a missile locked on! Get ’em out! Get ’em all out!”

  Vatz’s mouth went to cotton. He now knew those pilots had discovered they’d been probed by enemy radars a while ago, but they hadn’t said anything. No need to cause a plane full of SF guys to get unraveled. The Russians had poured so much money into new technology that they’d been routinely defeating JSF electronic countermeasures, and wasn’t it Vatz’s luck that his ride up to Canada had a bull’s-eye painted on its nose?

  Nevertheless, the reaction of the men inside the cargo hold was a testament to the professionalism of Special Forces operators everywhere.

  There was no frantic rush to the ramp, no mob scene of helmeted troopers stampeding to get out.

  They began the jump as they ordinarily did—just ten times faster, the jumpmaster hidden behind his visor and waving them on. Vatz’s helmet was equipped with the latest, greatest, and smallest generation of night-vision goggles attached over the visor. A host of other readings, including data from his wrist-mounted altimeter and parachute automatic activation device (AAD), were fed to him via a head’s-up display in the visor itself. The unit automatically switched on as he left the ramp, among the first twenty or so to exit, along with their heavy equipment/ordnance crates.

  Down below, lights shone like phosphorescent stitching on a black quilt, but those stitches were few and far between. This part of Canada was scarcely populated.

  Also somewhere down there was the railroad, and the river, but he couldn’t see them just yet.

  No one said a word over the intra-team radio.

  They were all holding their breaths, Vatz knew.

  A slight flash came from the corner of his eye, and he craned his head, just as the missile struck the C-130 in the tail, impacting right above the open ramp—even as operators were still bailing out.

  He couldn’t even say Oh my God.

  He was shocked into silence. The aircraft exploded in a fluctuating cloud of flames that swallowed the operators floating away from the tail.

  Vatz deliberately rolled onto his back and watched as the roiling sphere of death grew even larger, pieces of flaming debris extending away from it, trailing tendrils of smoke.

  And it was all delivered to Vatz in the grainy green of night vision as operators suddenly appeared from the cloud, on fire and tumbling hopelessly toward the earth.

  The voices finally came over the radio, burred with anger, tight with exertion, high-pitch
ed in agony. He listened to his brothers try to save each other, listened to some gasp their last breaths . . .

  As he floated there with a front-row seat, his pulse increasing, his breath growing shallow, every muscle in his body beginning to tense.

  Until suddenly someone struck him with a terrible thud, knocking him around into an uncontrollable barrel roll.

  Flames flashed by.

  He’d been hit by one of the dead guys.

  He had to recover and fast. The longer he rolled, the longer it’d take to recover.

  He arched his back, extended his arms, but kept rolling. Someone called his name.

  Part of him thought it was no good. He should’ve died back in Moscow with the rest of them. He’d been living on borrowed time.

  Then he heard Rakken telling him how lucky he was, having escaped death twice. Why not make it a hat trick?

  Hell, he could’ve been blown up with the plane. Giving up now would be a terrible waste.

  And then he thought about his dead brothers. They needed him to carry on. He remembered the last few lines of the Special Forces Creed:

  I am a member of my nation’s chosen soldiery. God grant that I may not be found wanting, that I will not fail this sacred trust.

  A sacred trust.

  Damn it, he would not let them down.

  He arched his back again, thrust out his arms, and screamed to regain control.

  The roll slowed, and he was disoriented, the altimeter’s digital readout ticking off his descent, the ground still spinning a little, but he was on his belly, and his detachment commander was calling him on the radio.

  He took a deep breath, about to answer, when he spotted the long column of smoke in the distance . . .

  Where the C-130 had once been.

  NINETEEN

  Rearmed and refueled, Major Stephanie Halverson streaked down the runway, engine roaring, her gear just leaving the ground as dozens of Russian bombs finally hit Igloo Base.

  She pulled up and away, banked left, and came around to witness a chilling sight.

  The snow-covered Quonset huts housing the enlisted soldiers’ bunks, the offices, and the officers’ quarters burst apart, ragged pieces of metal flying everywhere as chutes of fire swept through them and ignited the stands of lodgepole pines behind the base.

  Barely two seconds later, the refueling trucks went up like dominoes, their crews trying to evacuate in HMMWVs but caught in the blast.

  Those explosions triggered several more among the smaller vehicles parked nearby, just outside the two hangar facilities that stood only a moment more before two bombs suddenly obliterated them.

  Inevitably, the small, five-story tower and adjacent command center took one, two, three direct hits from thousand-pound bombs and were lost in mushroom clouds that rose and collided with each other, throwing up a black wall of fire-filled smoke.

  Halverson was exhausted, overtired, her thoughts consumed by horror and disbelief.

  From her vantage point, the devastation below was silent and seemingly less significant.

  But she’d met nearly everyone at that base, and she realized now that there would be no survivors.

  “Oh, God, Siren, you see that?” asked Sapphire.

  She could barely answer. “Yeah.”

  They had one job left, one last sortie.

  There was nowhere to refuel. Nowhere to rearm. And the last orders they’d received from Igloo were to engage the enemy.

  So they would.

  She and Lisa Johansson were the only two left. Had their refueling gone a minute longer, they, of course, would already be dead.

  Dozens of Russian cargo ships soared through the sky, their escort fighters engaging the squadrons from Alaska.

  “Where are the Canadians?” Sapphire asked.

  “I don’t know, but I have a feeling they won’t watch this happen for very long.”

  “Roger that.”

  Halverson took a long breath to steady her nerves. “This is it, girl. You ready?”

  “Ready.”

  “Let’s go get ’em!” With that, she engaged the afterburner, accelerating with a force that was hard to describe to someone who’d never sat in a cockpit.

  Just as she hit Mach 1, the Prandtl-Glauert singularity occurred, a vapor cone caused by a sudden drop in air pressure that extended from the wings to her tail. She left the cone behind in her exhaust trail.

  They held their steady course, ascending over the enemy aircraft, bound for coordinates seventy-five kilometers northwest of Behchoko, where dozens of AN-130s had landed and were off-loading their BMP-3s.

  The five-hundred-pound JDAMs under Halverson’s wings were accurate to within thirteen meters, and she and Sapphire could launch those precision-guided bombs from up to twenty-four kilometers away during a low-altitude launch or up to sixty-four kilometers during a high-altitude launch. You plugged in the coordinates, delivered the munitions—

  Barring of course, angry swarms of Russian fighters whose pilots thought otherwise.

  The AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapons in the F-35B’s internal bays were the “C” variant developed for the Navy. The weapon utilized a combination of an imaging infrared (IIR) terminal seeker and a two-way data link to achieve point accuracy and was designed to attack point targets. It was a thousand pounds of general purpose destruction.

  And it was most definitely time for her and Sapphire to flash their fangs and lighten their loads.

  “Two minutes,” Halverson warned her wingman.

  “Roger that. I have two targets on the ground on the east side of their staging area, over.”

  “I see them,” Halverson said, checking her own display. “I’ve got two more 130s on the west side. Christ, you see all those BMPs?”

  “I do. Two bad we weren’t packing more punch.”

  Sapphire was right. Thousand-pound JDAMs instead of five hundred would have really done the job.

  “One minute,” Halverson announced.

  That’s all we need is one minute, thought Halverson. She glanced up through the canopy, where the first streaks of dawn turned the sky a light purple on the horizon.

  Just thirty seconds now. Give me thirty seconds.

  Sapphire cursed into the radio. “Four bogeys at our eleven o’clock, closing in.”

  Halverson swore under her breath as she checked her own radar. “They ain’t ours.”

  “Nope. Got ID: Su-98s. Countermeasures seem ineffective. I think they have us. We better launch before they do!”

  The Sukhoi S-98 was Russia’s latest single-seat fighter, deemed by most JSF pilots as the most deadly in its arsenal and capable of carrying up to 18,000 pounds of ordnance.

  “Just keep course. Fifteen seconds.”

  “They’re going to get missile lock!”

  Halverson’s voice turned strangely calm as her years of training kicked in, like muscle memory. “Sapphire, let’s make it all worth it. We’re almost there.”

  “Oh my God,” gasped Sapphire. “We won’t make it!”

  “Hang on! Five, four, three, two . . . Bombs away! Flares, chaff, evade!” Halverson cried.

  The two JDAMs fell away from her wings as behind her, the chaff and flares ignited.

  Sapphire did likewise, and Halverson lost sight of her as they both rolled inverted and dove away in a split S, the oldest trick in the book, hoping the sudden maneuver would prevent those Su-98 pilots from getting missile lock.

  As she came upright, flying in the Russians’ direction about two thousand feet below, the bad news flashed: missiles locked.

  And her wingman confirmed the next inescapable fact: “Siren, they’ve fired!”

  Halverson longed for the days of good old dogfighting, when maybe she and Sapphire could’ve pulled out the old Thach Weave, one of them baiting an enemy pilot while the other waxed him from the side.

  Though they would occasionally get to tangle with the enemy, it was mostly distant and faceless now, missiles launched from kilometers awa
y from jets you never saw—

  And those missiles you’d only glimpse for a second, your last.

  Halverson reacted out of pure instinct, jamming the stick forward and plunging straight down, even as she hit the afterburner.

  Her first thought was to outrun the incoming missiles, get her fighter up near Mach 2, practically melt off the wings. She imagined the missiles running out of fuel behind her and simply dropping away.

  But that was a fantasy.

  The Vympel R-84 had a range of at least one hundred kilometers, and everything Halverson knew about missiles and evading them told her that if these Vympels didn’t take the flares or chaff, then she was in their no-escape zone.

  She blasted through the clouds and checked her screens.

  Twelve seconds to impact.

  “Oh, God, Siren, I don’t think I can—”

  Sapphire’s transmission broke off, and her fighter vanished from Halverson’s display.

  Her wingman hadn’t even ejected.

  Halverson blinked hard. Is this how it’ll be, then? Give me more time. I’m not finished yet.

  No barrel roll, split S, break turn, chandelle, or wingover would save her now.

  No maneuver in the world.

  No amount of thrust from her engines.

  She cut the afterburner, hit the damned brakes. Hard.

  Below lay the haphazard rows of Russian cargo planes, and Halverson’s AGM-154s were locked on a pair of targets.

  So, with seven seconds left, she cut loose both bombs—

  Then tugged the black-and-yellow striped handle between her legs.

  The canopy blew off with a violent shudder.

  Nearly at the same time, the Martin-Baker Mk. 16 ejection seat rocketed her out and away, the straps and padded cuffs of the leg restraint system pinning her shins to the seat, even as the wind struck her squarely and sent her rushing back and away, long flames extending from her boots.

  An explosion lit in her helmet, but it turned into a streak as she continued back a second more.

  Then the seat’s drogue chute caught the wind, abruptly yanking her down, and she pendulummed toward the earth; the main chute, stowed behind her headrest, deployed while the seat dropped away, yanked up by its own chute.