Kasperov probably had great insurance, too, and he’d need it, because as Fisher and Briggs ran parallel to the burning trees cordoning off the wreckage like giant torches, they thought the plane had entirely disintegrated, leaving only a blackened slash mark across the valley. Finally, in the middle of a clearing below more pines littered with debris that resembled metallic confetti, they observed a large portion of the tail section and fuselage, both miraculously intact.
Briggs shot HD video of everything, while Fisher slid his goggles up onto his forehead. The burning trees were doing an exceptional job of lighting the scene, with waves of heat billowing into his face.
He picked his way around the shattered fuselage, navigating between the twisted and charred seats, then he directed a powerful LED penlight into the cabin, whose bulkheads had been blackened. He was searching for charred skeletons, imagining one appearing in his light, but found only mangled metal and melted plastic.
With the stench of all that kerosene-based Jet A fuel and a dozen other chemicals wafting in the air and beginning to get to him, he hustled back outside and jogged forward, following the ragged edge of a huge furrow until he found a small portion of the cockpit lying inverted and jammed between two trees.
The seats were still attached. Seat belts thrown off. No pilots. Had they bailed out? Fisher examined the seat belts again: no signs of tearing, stretching, or strain.
“Hey, Sam? Over here!” cried Briggs.
Fisher raced away from the cockpit, back along the furrow toward Briggs, who was holding a backpack with a large logo embroidered on the outside pocket: four red squares forming a diamond pattern with gray shadow boxes behind them. Beneath the image were the letters “CSCS.” Briggs proffered the bag, and Fisher zipped it open and rifled through textbooks and notebooks.
“The daughter went to school in Zurich,” whispered Fisher. “We got her bag, but where’d she go?”
“Yeah, and if they wanted to fake their deaths, then where are the bodies?” asked Briggs.
Grim, who’d been analyzing the video Briggs had sent, chimed in over the radio. “Break radio silence now, guys. I’ve been monitoring the Russian army’s transmissions, and they’re onto us. Picked you up with infrared before Charlie could start the jam and GPS spoofing. Those Mi-8s are three minutes out now.”
“Sam, it’s Charlie. Like I mentioned, if you can deploy the drone, I’ll remote operate it from here. I’ll be another set of eyes and ears.”
“He’s got soldier envy,” said Briggs.
“What he’s got is our backs,” Fisher corrected. “Charlie, roger that. Deploying the drone.”
From a custom-designed holster sitting low on his right hip, Fisher slipped free another of Charlie’s prototypes: a micro tri-rotor drone even smaller than the first one they’d fielded during the Blacklist mission. Fisher simply tossed the UAV into the air like a softball. The drone’s rotors automatically unfolded and purred to life. After gaining some altitude, the tiny bird boomeranged back toward Fisher, now controlling it from his OPSAT. He plucked two CS smoke grenades from his utility belt pouches and attached them to the drone’s undercarriage via custom release clips that served to pull their pins so the canisters could be deployed down on the enemy. The drone was also equipped with a self-destruct system and served as a remote sonar beacon to watch enemy movements. The larger model could be fitted with a micro 9mm semiautomatic gun on a pivoting mount, but Fisher had chosen the smaller model since the plan here was to go in “ghost,” evade detection, and not engage the enemy. The CS gas would both screen them and give the Russians a tearful moment of pause as it wreaked havoc with their respiratory systems.
“Okay, Charlie, the drone’s all yours.”
“Sweet. I bet that S&R team will fast rope into the crash site. The best time for you guys to extract would be while they’re infiltrating.”
“Yeah, in a perfect world,” said Fisher. “Not sure we can get to the LZ in time. You keep them busy with that drone. I want SITREPs every couple of minutes or sooner,” said Fisher.
“You got it, Sam.”
Fisher looked to Briggs. “Take the backpack. Spot anything else?”
Briggs shook his head. “You know, the bodies could’ve been ejected far away from here, could be dangling from trees, hard to spot now…”
“Pilot seats were empty. They weren’t torn free and the seat belts were unbuckled,” said Fisher. “Either the pilots bailed out, or the jet was fitted with some kind of remote with a pilot on the ground transmitting to the tower while the jet took off.”
“So they flew it out here and deliberately crashed it? Man, that’s an expensive diversion.”
“What does he care? He’s got more money than God. Grim, we need to know if the pilots bailed out.”
“I’m already on it, Sam. Best we can do there is gather HUMINT from witnesses on the ground who might’ve spotted their chutes.”
Fisher gritted his teeth in frustration. “I want to know what happened here.”
Briggs turned around to regard the wreckage. “I still say if Kasperov was really smart, he would’ve planted bodies. That would buy him a little more time until the corpses were ID’d and ruled out.”
“Agreed, but maybe he ran out of time. Just like us. Let’s go!”
Fisher took off running to the west. Their rally point lay.8 kilometers away in a depression where the mountainside grew more level and the trees tapered off into a more barren belt of ridges and ravines. The LZ — landing zone — was just wide enough and just flat enough for their UH-60 Black Hawk with Turkish Air Force insignia and an American flight crew to set down. The chopper’s call sign was Paladin Two.
“Sam, one of the Russian choppers is breaking ahead,” said Grim. “Past the crash site.”
Fisher glanced up as the whomping troop transport cut overhead like a black cloud, running lights flashing. “ETA on our extraction helo?”
“Another fifteen minutes. We kept him on the ground to avoid being intercepted.”
“Sorry for the delay, Sam,” Charlie cut in. “I usually have no trouble disrupting the Mi-8’s radar system. I’m jamming their FLIR now, sending phantom blips to get them off our extraction bird. Two soft kills to be sure, but if those pilots visually ID the Black Hawk, there’s not much I can do about their door-mounted guns, which, according to the specs, have a thousand rounds apiece.”
Confusing a radar electronically was what Charlie called a “soft kill.” The method Fisher preferred, the “hard kill,” involved ramming a Hellfire missile down their throats.
He watched the chopper fly ahead of them, then wheel around and hover. “Shit, they’re trying to cut us off.”
“Exactly,” answered Grim.
“All right, tell our pilot business as usual. We’ll worry about those troops. Charlie, you pick the drone’s targets very carefully. You gotta buy us time.”
“It’s cool, Sam. Looks like the Mi-8 can hold up to twenty-four troops, so the odds aren’t bad at alclass="underline" forty-eight to four! We got this!”
Charlie wasn’t much of a math major, it seemed.
Fisher knifed past two more trees, broke hard left, and kept moving, with Briggs hard on his heels.
They both had activated their sonar systems. The deep hues of the forest dissolved into the black-and-white contrast of an X-ray. The system relied on sonic pulses, combined with an advanced AI controller, to penetrate through objects and walls so that they could literally see through them to mark targets. Downtime between echoed bursts along with jamming vulnerabilities and distorted images while they were on the move were the system’s chief weaknesses, but the sonar did come in handy when obstacles and terrain made threat assessment difficult.