“Meaning?” prompted Brad.
Martindale zoomed the map out, showing the cyberwar complex’s location in a broader geographic context. Mount Manaraga lay deep inside northern Russia, more than 1,400 nautical miles east of Poland, and only 250 nautical miles south of the frozen Barents Sea.
“Oh, fuck,” Macomber muttered, with an unhappy look on his hard-edged face.
Silently, Brad echoed the sentiment. That mountain was one hell of a long way inside enemy territory.
“How sure are your analysts of this?” Wilk asked, studying the same image repeated on a display in his hospital room.
“Just about one hundred percent,” Martindale said. “Like I said, once Truznyev pointed us in the right direction, our people were able to do some discreet and focused poking around inside various National Security Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency databases. They hit pay dirt fairly quickly.” He tapped another control, bringing up a succession of satellite images and short transcripts of intercepted Russian radio and phone conversations.
Several months-old satellite photos showed freight cars loaded with the spoil from underground excavations sitting on sidings around Pechora. Other images taken around the same time showed what might be traces of new roads built through the pine forests surrounding Mount Manaraga. Later photos showed no signs of those same roads. Either they had been destroyed, or more likely, better camouflaged.
Among the intercepts was a signal from Atomflot headquarters to the Ministry of State Security protesting an explained directive that Atomflot sell a naval nuclear reactor intended for one of its new Arktika-class icebreakers to “an entity under your ministry’s control” at cost. A terse reply informed the state-controlled company that its protest had been rejected “at the highest authority” and that any further discussion of the issue was “forever foreclosed by Presidential National Security Decree 117.”
Heads nodded slowly around the table, seeing the picture this was all painting.
“And then when our people went digging inside the corporate records of a Russian computer manufacturer named T-Platforms, we turned up a purchase order for an extremely powerful supercomputer,” Martindale continued.
“A purchase order from who?” Brad asked.
“A company we’ve long suspected of being a front for the FSB,” Martindale said.
“And where was this supercomputer delivered?” Nadia wondered.
Martindale smiled. “That’s the curious fact of the dog that didn’t bark in the night, Major Rozek. As far as T-Platforms’ records are concerned, the computer was never delivered. But neither is it still in their inventory.”
Nadia wrinkled her nose. “That was sloppy.”
“It was,” Martindale agreed. Then he shrugged. “On the other hand, without the added clues Truznyev gave us, we’d just be looking at another tantalizing dead end.”
“How could American intelligence miss this secret project?” Wilk wanted to know. “With all these images showing new excavations and construction work around this mountain, I mean.”
“Because it’s like looking at one particular grain of sand on a whole beach,” Martindale explained. “The major industry in this part of the Urals is mining. New tunnels and roads are a dime a dozen. The only reason my folks are pretty sure this isn’t just some new commercial mine is the effort the Russians made to hide their tracks — along with the fact that there are no records of any mining claims registered for Mount Manaraga.”
“And that was even sloppier,” Nadia said.
“Maybe,” Martindale replied. “But remember, our spy satellites take enormous numbers of images every day — more images than we have the ability to thoroughly analyze in anything approaching real time. More and more of the work is automated, but—”
“Computers only see what they’ve been programmed to look for,” Nadia finished, sounding disgusted.
“Exactly,” Martindale said. “In the old days, satellite intelligence analysts had to make bricks without straw, stretching tiny fragments of information to the breaking point to make a case. Now they’re flooded with more and more imagery captured from wider and wider swathes of the earth. More images than they can possibly examine closely in any normal human lifetime.”
“Which means analysts only focus on issues they’ve been tasked to address,” Brad realized. “And nobody in the States had any idea Gryzlov was building this cyberwar complex in the first place.”
Martindale nodded.
“All this is just peachy-keen,” Whack Macomber said gruffly. “But assuming this fucking mountain really is what we’ve been looking for, do we have the slightest damn idea of what kind of defenses the Russians have deployed to protect it?”
“That’s a good question, Major,” Martindale said coolly. He tapped another control, bringing up two side-by-side images of the mountain. One was dated from more than two years ago, presumably before any serious construction began. The other was only several weeks old.
To Brad’s untrained eye, they looked absolutely identical.
When he said as much, Martindale looked pleased. “Yes, they do, Captain McLanahan. That’s why I had our best analysts dive in deep, scouring these images right down to the individual pixel. They wrote special programs to speed up the work. And this is what they turned up…”
With a muted flourish, Scion’s chief clicked to another version of the second satellite photo. This one showed dozens of red circles scattered across the mountain’s rugged slopes and the narrow valleys around it. “By very, very carefully comparing every square meter of terrain captured in these two separate images, our people were able to spot places where some kind of change — man-made change — had taken place. In some cases, the indications are as small as a boulder shifted a meter or so out of place, or a section of rock or soil raised slightly above where it was in the original images.”
“Those are camouflaged weapons bunkers,” Macomber said grimly.
“Most are. The others are probably sensor posts and concealed surface-to-air missile positions,” Martindale agreed. He looked around the table again. “Which raises the very real question of whether we stand any chance of successfully attacking Perun’s Aerie at all.”
Brad frowned. “There’s no way we can hit it successfully from the air,” he said. “No combat aircraft or drone in our inventory has the range and penetration ability, let alone the ordnance load needed to do the job.”
“Hell, even a big-ass tactical nuke would probably just scratch the surface,” Macomber muttered.
Brad nodded. “Well, yeah, Whack, and as it happens, we’re fresh out of nuclear weapons anyway.” He saw Piotr Wilk and Nadia exchange glances. “Aren’t we?”
Wilk shrugged. “Sadly, that is true, Captain. After winning our freedom from the communists, we relied entirely on the nuclear umbrella provided by the United States.” He smiled lopsidedly. “It’s only now beginning to occur to some of us that we may need to fill that rather large gap in our defenses. But acquiring such weapons is a much longer-term project.”
“In which case, we really only have one option,” Brad said quietly. “And that’s a bolt-out-of-the-blue attack by Iron Wolf CIDs flown in on the XCV-62 Ranger.”
“Oh, man,” Macomber growled. “I knew I should have upped my fucking life insurance when I had the chance.”
Brad escorted Martindale into the large bomb-resistant hangar used to prep Iron Wolf aircraft and CIDs for combat missions. The massive concrete-and-reinforced-steel building was a sea of purposeful activity and noise.