Before the tepid applause could fade into embarrassing silence, Barbeau made a big show of shushing the crowd. “Thank you! Thank you so much,” she said with grace and tremendous warmth. Sincerity was one of the first things she’d learned to fake when she’d picked out politics as her path to the top. “And so together, we’re going to—”
And then a missile screamed in low across the runway, ripping past the crowded dais at more than five hundred knots. It slammed straight into the base of the ten-story-tall control tower and exploded. A burst of searing white light flared for a millisecond, followed by a roiling cloud of orange-and-red flame.
For what seemed an eternity but couldn’t really have been much more than a second, Barbeau stood frozen, rooted to her podium in utter disbelief. Then one of her Secret Service agents hurtled across the dais. He knocked her flat and covered her with his body. “Stay down! Stay down!” he screamed.
More missiles shrieked past, veering off to strike different targets. One after another, Barksdale’s communications center, hangars, machine shops, and fuel storage areas went up in towering columns of smoke, flame, and falling debris. The ground rocked. As the missiles detonated, the noise was so loud that each separate blast struck with the force of a physical blow. Across the wide concrete apron, airmen and reporters and White House staffers scattered frantically in all directions, seeking cover.
With their weapons out and aimed in all directions, Secret Service agents formed a human phalanx around Barbeau as she lay prone, still winded and gasping for air. Special Agent in Charge Rafael Díaz leaned over and yelled loud enough for her to hear over the high-pitched howl of incoming missiles and deafening, bone-rattling explosions. “We’re getting you out of here, Madam President! Right now!” Without waiting for a reply, Díaz whirled around to his nearby agents. “Get the Beast moving! Let’s go! Let’s go!”
Painfully, Barbeau turned her head, blearily peering through the crouched huddle of agents who were shielding her from flying fragments and falling debris. Just a few yards away, her big black fifteen-thousand-pound limousine, nicknamed the “Beast,” started rolling forward from its assigned station. Agents leaped off the dais and yanked the car’s rear door open using coded taps on hidden sensor panels. With their sole priority being to remove the president from immediate danger as quickly as possible, two agents unceremoniously grabbed her by the arms and hustled her bodily toward the moving car. Without pausing, they pushed her through the open door and onto the limo’s plush rear seat. One agent leaped in behind her as the other agent slammed the solid, eight-inch-thick door shut.
Then, with all four tires squealing across the pavement, the Beast took off. Its powerful V-8 turbo engine labored under tons of armor plating, bulletproof glass, communications gear, and defensive systems. As it accelerated, the limousine barreled straight through a mob of panic-stricken journalists and camera crews scrambling to get out of its way. Muffled thumps and screams showed that not all of them succeeded.
The Secret Service agent who’d piled in before the door was shut squirmed around on the seat and stared back through the rear window. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed. “What the hell are those things?”
“Specter Lead to all Specter units,” Colonel Ruslan Baryshev radioed from inside the cockpit of his KVM. “Attack. Repeat, attack.”
Gleeful acknowledgments poured through his headset. But he was already in motion — sending his war robot lunging out of the forest lining the east side of Barksdale’s long runway. His battle computer silhouetted the two dozen American F-35 stealth fighters lined up wingtip to wingtip on the apron, identifying them as priority targets. They were more than a thousand meters away.
Closing the distance at more than seventy kilometers an hour, Baryshev raised his 30mm autocannon and opened fire on the run. Multiple armor-piercing, high-explosive rounds hammered the distant fighters. Hit repeatedly, the F-35s disappeared behind a rippling curtain of smoke and fire. Jagged fragments of wings, canopies, and fuselages cartwheeled away out of the smoke. American airmen caught in the path of his bullets vaporized, blown apart into bits of flesh and shattered bone.
The other KVMs were shooting, too — pounding the XB-1F Excaliburs and the just-landed B-21 Raider prototype with their own autocannons and the Israeli-made Spike antitank missiles. Plane after plane down the flight line exploded. “This is a turkey shoot!” Imrekov yelled exultantly over their secure link. “We’ve caught the Americans with their pants down! They can’t touch us!”
With a harsh laugh, Baryshev shifted his aim, zeroing in on one of the mammoth B-52H bombers parked next to the fighters. Bigger than the single-engine, multirole F-35s, the Stratofortress absorbed several direct hits before slewing sideways, wrecked and cloaked in dancing orange flames and oily black smoke.
Panting, Barbeau hauled herself upright in the limo’s rear seat as it raced away at sixty miles an hour. She turned to look back at the nightmarish scene behind them. Her bruised ribs sent pain sleeting through her brain like white-hot, stiletto-sharp needles. For a moment, she thought she would vomit.
Then her vision cleared.
There, out of the thick billowing clouds of smoke, several tall spindly metal shapes appeared, moving with eerie precision and terrifying grace. The weapons they carried spat fire and death — slaughtering everyone in their path and destroying stationary aircraft with contemptuous ease.
Barbeau’s eyes widened in horror. She knew only too well what those creatures were.
An antitank missile launched by one of the robots streaked across the path of the speeding limousine. Trailing smoke and fire, it slammed into the fuselage of Air Force One and exploded.
“Pop smoke! Pop smoke!” the Secret Service agent next to her screamed into the intercom.
Whummp. Whummp. Whummp.
Three multispectrum infrared smoke grenades triggered by the driver exploded around the Beast. In a fraction of a second, billowing white clouds blotted out Barbeau’s view of the two-legged war machines that were systematically destroying Barksdale Air Force Base. Terrified almost out of her wits and desperately trying to tell herself that what she’d seen with her own eyes could not possibly be real, she sat frozen, staring back into the swirling veil of protective smoke as her limousine sped away toward safety.
Through his neural link, Imrekov “felt” several rifle-caliber rounds smack into his KVM’s rear composite armor. They ricocheted off. No damage, his computer reported. Hostiles at six o’clock.
Irked, he whirled through a half circle. There, half hidden by the blazing wreckage of the American president’s 747 jetliner, his sensors showed several airmen lying prone on the pavement. They were shooting at him with M4 carbines and pistols. That is brave, but very, very foolish, he thought. And it will be fatal.