A high-pitched tone pulsed sharply in her earphones, signaling the detection of yet another active enemy air-search radar. From the sound, it was close. Maybe dangerously close. She fought back against the instinctive reaction to jink away. She was flying just a little more than one hundred feet off the deck. At this low altitude, sudden, violent maneuvers were far more likely to slam her helicopter into the ground than to avoid trouble.
“That’s an S-band search radar at two o’clock,” Brad McLanahan reported from the left-hand seat. For this mission, the powerfully built young American was acting as Nadia’s copilot and systems operator, a reversal of their usual roles. Thanks to her Polish special forces training, she had a lot more stick time in helicopters than he did. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him leaning over to study one of the large, softly glowing MFDs, multifunction displays, set between them. “The computer figures it’s about thirty-five nautical miles away. We should be okay.”
“Zrozumiany. Understood,” Nadia said, relaxing slightly. That was the 96L6E “Cheese Board” air-search radar system operating with the S-300 SAM regiment based around Rostov’s international airport. At this altitude, even if the Russians had the radar set’s forty-meter-tall mast fully extended, the helicopter was still several nautical miles below its horizon.
She heard another soft ping, this one indicating they had just received a compressed and encrypted radio signal.
“We’re in contact with the team,” Brad said, reading the message sent by the Scion intelligence operatives they were here to retrieve. “They’re at Rendezvous Point Alpha and in the clear. At least so far.”
“Dobry,” Nadia said, with a tiny nod.
From the moment they crossed into hostile airspace, Brad had been monitoring radio and cell-phone transmissions that showed Russian army and police units were conducting a large-scale manhunt for the “foreign terrorists” who’d shot up the headquarters of the 22nd Guards Spetsnaz Brigade. Fortunately, the Russians were focusing their roadblocks and patrols along the roads heading out of Rostov and Bataysk. They seemed to be acting on the logical assumption that their quarry would want to put as much distance as possible between them and the scene of the crime.
For now, this rural backwater closer to the coast of the Sea of Azov was a lower priority. Nadia couldn’t fault the Russians’ reasoning. After all, in daylight, strangers would stand out like sore thumbs among the area’s farms and small villages. But now that the sun had set, those same farmers and peasants tended to stick close to their own homes — which gave the Scion team room to maneuver without being spotted. Of course, every passing hour allowed the Russians to bring in more troops from their outlying garrisons. Given enough time, they were bound to cordon off the coast and start sweeping inland.
So the trick was to deny them that time.
Brad rapidly tapped virtual “keys” on the MFD he’d set to navigation guidance. “RP Alpha coordinates laid in.”
“Bardzo dobrze. Very good.” Nadia tweaked the cyclic gently, altering course to follow the new steering cue transferred to her heads-up display.
Fields, orchards, and distant houses glowed an eerie green in her night-vision goggles. Several kilometers ahead, a blinking LZ icon highlighted an empty, unplanted field. Rows of trees planted as windbreaks lined its west and east sides.
Nadia started working the cyclic, pedals, and collective to reduce their airspeed while still in horizontal flight. The field they were heading for grew larger in the windscreen as they slid lower.
She thumbed a control on the cyclic. Hydraulics whined as their landing skids swung down out of the fuselage. A new icon flashed on her HUD.
“Green light. The skids are locked,” Brad confirmed. “We’re go for landing.”
Totally focused, Nadia brought the helicopter in low across the field, just a few feet off the ground. A cloud of dust and dirt kicked up by the rotors whirled behind them. Slowing fast, they flared in and touched down with a gentle thump.
With the rotors still turning, Brad grabbed the Polish-made Radon assault carbine stowed next to him. Then he popped the cockpit door open and dropped out onto the ground.
“Be careful,” Nadia said quietly.
He grinned back at her. “Yes, ma’am, I will.” His smile tightened. “But if there’s company we’re not expecting out there, yank this crate into the air and get out fast.”
Without waiting for a reply, Brad swung away and moved off toward the eastern tree line. His pulse accelerated. In the darkness, every sound — the muffled whump-whump-whump of their helicopter’s slowly spinning rotors, the soft crunch of his boots on freshly turned dirt, and even the gentle breeze sighing through the nearest trees — seemed magnified.
Fifty meters from the windbreak, he dropped to one knee. He pulled a tiny, high-powered infrared flashlight out of one of the pouches on his assault vest and a monocular night-vision scope from another. If those hidden somewhere in the shadows ahead were friendlies, it was time to confirm his own identity. Or to make yourself an even bigger damn target if they’re Russians instead, he thought grimly.
Quickly, he pointed the flashlight toward the trees and clicked it on and off six times, signaling that he was Scion Six. Almost immediately, a tiny, answering dot of light blinked three times in reply.
Brad breathed out in relief. That was the correct countersign.
Three people emerged from the shadows and came out to meet him. Two of them were men — one of them tall and heavyset, the other short and whip-thin. The third was a slender young woman. Even in the darkness, he could tell that she was very good-looking. And that she seemed awfully familiar.
Abruptly, he recognized her. It was Sam Kerr. She’d helped him evade both Russian and FBI surveillance in Mexico three years ago, back when he’d first been secretly summoned to join Scion and what would later become the Iron Wolf Squadron.
“Nice to see you, McLanahan,” she said cheerfully, with an impish grin. “But the timing’s still bad for a quick roll in the hay.” Then she glanced around the rural Russian countryside. “Although I’ve gotta say there is a lot more hay here than there was in Cancún.”
Brad felt himself turning red with embarrassment. Before he found out Samantha Kerr was a Scion agent, he’d tried to pick her up for a little light, no-strings-attached, beach-resort sex. Suddenly he was very glad that it was so dark and that Nadia was well out of earshot. Even though his encounter with Sam had occurred before he met Nadia, he was pretty sure that was a part of his past he’d rather not have to explain to the woman he loved.
The big man, Marcus Cartwright, saved him. “Go easy on this guy, Sam,” he said with a soft chuckle. “Somehow I don’t think we’re going to find another ride out of here anytime soon.”
Still blushing, Brad led Sam and Cartwright and their backup man, David Jones, across the field to the waiting helicopter. One after another, he helped them into the tiny passenger cabin behind the cockpit. It was a tight squeeze. This PZL SW-4 was only rated for a pilot and four passengers and that was before Scion technicians had packed in all their added sensors and other electronics.
Once the Scion team was strapped in, he climbed back into the copilot’s seat and reconnected his headset. Immediately he heard a repeated series of high-pitched tones from their threat-warning system. He tapped one of the MFDs, bringing up a visual defensives systems display. The computer’s evaluation scrolled across his screen. Multiple airborne X-band search radars detected. A map opened up, depicting the estimated positions and courses of those hostile radar emitters. They were off to the west, over the Sea of Azov, and flying what looked like a north — south racetrack oval.