They nodded quickly, with murmured, embarrassed-sounding assents.
For a moment longer, Farrell stared them down. These were good people, he knew. Smart people. But like a lot of smart people, sometimes they lost sight of the forest for the trees. For all her many faults and manifest failings, Stacy Anne Barbeau was still a fellow American. Yes, he was in this campaign to win, but he wasn’t in it to lose his soul along the way.
Suddenly his smartphone started playing music, indicating that he was receiving an incoming call. He stared down at it in surprise. Not only had he set the phone to vibrate, but that snippet of Aaron Copland’s Billy the Kid was not the ringtone he had set. To his wife’s occasional dismay, he was more of a country-and-western fan. Which meant someone had hacked the device. In and of itself, that wasn’t a crisis. Unlike a lot of people, Farrell used his smartphone sparingly, and never for anything seriously confidential. His aides sometimes joked that if their boss had his way, he’d still be transacting official business by telegram and mounted courier.
For a brief moment, he considered handing the problem off to his security people, but then his natural curiosity got the better of him. Whoever was responsible had gone to a lot of time and trouble to set this up. Why not find out who?
Farrell looked up at his advisers with an apologetic look. “If y’all don’t mind, I think I need to take this in private. Let’s take a short break and come back at this in ten minutes.”
Once they’d filed out clutching their array of briefing books and personal laptops, he swiped a callused finger across the smartphone’s screen to accept this mysterious call. But instead of connecting, his swipe activated software hidden deep inside its operating system. Rows of random-seeming numbers and symbols flowed across the screen and then vanished. LEVEL FIVE ENCRYPTION PROGRAM ACTIVE, LINK FULLY SECURE appeared in their place — followed immediately by the live video picture of a man with longish gray hair and a neatly trimmed gray beard. He looked back from the screen with a hint of amusement.
Farrell raised an eyebrow. “And here I’d thought your reputation for pulling technological rabbits out of the hat was somewhat exaggerated, Mr. President. I guess I was wrong about that.”
“I apologize for this unexpected intrusion, Governor,” Martindale said, though without sounding very sorry. “But since President Barbeau seems determined to make the same foolish mistakes over and over again, I need to brief you on what Piotr Wilk and I believe is actually happening.”
Two hundred and seventy nautical miles and thirty-six minutes after crossing into U.S. airspace roughly halfway between El Paso and Nogales, the XCV-62 Ranger zoomed low over high alpine forests, sharp-edged canyons, and cliffs. Against a night sky speckled with thousands of stars and the softly glowing band of the Milky Way, the Iron Wolf stealth aircraft was nothing more than a dark shadow rippling across a pitch-black landscape empty of any man-made light.
Brad McLanahan pulled his stick gently to the left, banking to follow the glowing navigation cues on his HUD. A jagged pillar of rock slid past outside the right side of the cockpit and then vanished astern. Without his input, the XCV-62 pitched up slightly, streaked over a low rise, and then descended again before leveling off just two hundred feet above the ground. They were relying on the Ranger’s digital terrain-following system to keep them safe even at 450 knots. Using detailed digitized maps stored in the aircraft’s computers and repeated short bursts from its radar altimeter, the DTF system allowed feats of long-distance, low-altitude flying that would be almost impossible for any unaided human pilot.
“AN/APY-2 Pulse-Doppler radar still active. Bearing now four o’clock. Estimated range is one hundred and fifty miles,” their computer reported. “Detection probability at this altitude remains virtually nil.”
In the Ranger’s right-hand seat, Major Nadia Rozek leaned forward. She checked a menu on her threat-warning display, watching as the computer compared the signature of the radar emissions it was picking up against its database. “That is the same E-3 Sentry we saw earlier,” she told him.
Brad nodded tightly, keeping his eyes on his HUD. “Yeah, they must be circling over Kirtland AFB outside of Albuquerque. There’s a huge underground nuclear weapons storage complex on the base. Nobody there wants to get blindsided by another cruise-missile attack.”
Even before the XCV-62 crossed the U.S. border from Mexico, they’d started picking up the emissions of several E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft deployed to cover the Air Force bases in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Each of the modified Boeing 707s had a thirty-foot diameter rotating radar dome mounted atop its fuselage. Their radars could scan huge volumes of airspace — spotting nonstealth targets out as far as two-hundred-plus miles. And where those radar warning planes were, he knew pairs of F-16 and F-15 fighters were bound to be orbiting also — ready to intercept any unidentified aircraft the Sentries detected.
Slipping through this airborne web without setting off alarms meant flying an intricately plotted course at extremely low altitude, using the rugged terrain so prevalent in the American southwest to mask their passage wherever possible. So far they’d been fortunate. The Air Force had deployed its limited number of AWACS aircraft pretty much as Brad had predicted. There were gaps in effective radar coverage they could exploit.
Following the cues on his HUD, he banked left again, harder this time. With his left hand, he pushed the throttles forward a scooch, adding power to the engines to keep his airspeed up through this tighter turn. Then he leveled out again and reduced power, decreasing their thermal signature.
They were flying northwest now, headed directly into the badlands of Utah’s Grand Staircase — Escalante National Monument. Once the Ranger broke free of that labyrinth of canyons, cliffs, and soaring buttes and mesas, they should have a straight shot to Battle Mountain in northern Nevada.
Three hundred fifty nautical miles farther on, the Iron Wolf stealth transport swooped low over a jagged ridge and dropped back down into a wide, lifeless valley. Brad peered through his HUD. More high ground spread across the horizon. Seen through their forward-looking night-vision cameras, those steep, rocky slopes took on a green-hued glow. Nevada was the most mountainous state in the Union, with over a hundred and fifty named ranges, and thirty separate peaks that soared more than eleven thousand feet into the air.
He blinked away a droplet of sweat. His flight suit was soaked. Even with all of their advanced avionic and navigation systems, this prolonged nap-of-the-earth flight was imposing a serious strain on both his mind and his body.
“Not much longer now, Brad,” Nadia said quietly, offering him some encouragement.
He forced a tired grin.
“Caution, S-band multifunction phased array radar detected at ten o’clock. Range approximately forty miles,” the Ranger’s computer reported. “Evaluated as Sky Masters ARGUS-Five. Detection probability low, but rising.”
That was the advanced “civilian-grade” radar sited at McLanahan Industrial Airport. One of Jon Masters’s last designs, it was almost as capable as some of the U.S. military’s top-end radar systems… and at a fraction of the cost.
“Nice to see that our friends are awake,” Brad muttered.
“Can you blame them?” Nadia said. “By now, Dr. Noble and the others at Sky Masters must know the Russians have their own combat robots. They are wise to take precautions against unexpected and unwelcome visitors.”