SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.
The Antonov An-72AT jet cruised at forty-five thousand feet over the desert, under an international flight plan to deliver oil refinery control systems equipment from the port of Karachi, in Pakistan, to the Basrah refinery, in Iran. Its current altitude and flight path kept it too high and too far south to be of any consequence to NATO operations out of Kandahar Airfield.
Still, since entering Afghan airspace thirty minutes ago, Kira Tupolev had kept a close watch on the radar, standing behind the navigator station. The midsize Russian jet, powered by twin Lotarev D-36 turbofans positioned high over the wings, utilized the engine exhaust gases blown over the wings’ upper surface to increase lift.
The Coandă effect, she thought, recalling the short lesson in aerodynamics given by the pilot. The unusual design feature not only increased the jet’s range by allowing it to cruise at a lower power setting but also improved takeoff performance. The An-72AT could land in short, unpaved fields typically reserved for small planes and some turboprops.
“Ten minutes!” the pilot announced over the earpiece secured inside her helmet.
Satisfied that no one from KAF would be bothering with them tonight, Kira patted the pilot on the shoulder and headed back to the main cabin. This version of the An-72 family was designed as a freighter capable of air-dropping up to ten tons from its hinged rear ramp.
But tonight it only hauled seven Spetsnaz operators and their gear.
Kira regarded her handpicked team occupying some of the folding side seats near the middle of the cargo area. They wore black one-piece wingsuits made of a mix of nylon and spandex fibers, black tactical helmets, new prototype powered boots, and a slim backpack housing a HALO chute and two canisters—the large one to power the boots, and a small one connected to the oxygen mask each had hanging from their neck.
She sat next to Sergei Popov, who was screwing a sound suppressor cylinder to the muzzle of his black Kalashnikov AK-9 fully automatic assault rifle. He was tall, slim, and muscular, like Kira and the rest of the group, a physical requirement to maximize aerodynamic efficiency in their upcoming high-altitude drop.
“All set?” she asked her second-in-command.
Sergei wore his wingsuit zipped to his waist, exposing the top of his one-piece Nomex and Kevlar battle dress. “Yeah,” he replied, tilting his square chin at the group. “They are. Me? I’m just triple-checking things.”
He secured the AK-9 to the Velcro straps on the side of his battle dress, which also held a half dozen spare twenty-round magazines, an encrypted radio, a Kizlyar titanium tactical knife in its nylon sheath, and a KBP P-96 9mm pistol along with three spare magazines.
Sergei’s equipment, identical to everyone else’s, was also handpicked by Kira, along with the small rucksack packed with enough energy bars and drinks to see them through the first five days of their mission.
After that I need to reassess, based on where we are, she thought. A mission like this one could only be planned so much, and success relied on the initiative, ingenuity, and patience of its operators to see it through. The wishful thinking scenario would be for Kira to track the courier to the bomb within the first few days while remaining completely hidden and then to use her sat phone to call in a missile strike. Sukhoi fighters loaded with supersonic BrahMos cruise missiles were standing by in Iran, less than two hundred miles away. Then it would be a race to the exfiltration point before NATO or the Taliban figured out what had taken place.
But wishful thinking was for amateurs. The reality was that no plan survived the first shot; thus the reliance on the three pillars of a successful mission.
Initiative, ingenuity, and patience, she thought, as Sergei stood and zipped up his suit. A two-inch digital display secured to the front of his tactical helmet interfaced via Bluetooth with the altimeter hugging Sergei’s left wrist and with a small GPS receiver on the back of the helmet—again, all standard equipment. As was the switch built into the palm of his right glove, which would activate the twin rockets in each boot. Only Kira wore an additional piece of hardware: a digital tracker tuned to the same frequency as the transponder embedded in the components provided to Prince Mani al Saud by the Russian Mafia.
Kira had trailed the RN-40 spare parts across two continents by tasking satellites from Russia down to Turkey, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, then across the Indian Ocean and into Pakistan, then into southern Afghanistan.
And now it’s less than a hundred miles away.
“You trust these boots?” Sergei asked, staring at them. They resembled ski boots, sporting a hard shell made of various heat-retardant composites meant to protect the wearer from the extreme temperatures inside the miniature combustion chambers.
“I trust our training and the laws of physics,” she replied. “And they tell me we can’t reach our target without them. So…”
“Yeah.”
“But look at the bright side,” she added. “We have a forty-knot tailwind helping us—”
“Five minutes!”
A red light came on in the rear of the cabin.
The team stood and formed a single line, with Sergei at the front and Kira bringing up the rear.
“Masks and goggles!” she ordered into the microphone inside her mask.
Everyone secured their masks and lowered their ZAO high-performance tactical goggles, made specifically for GRU Spetsnaz. They featured shrapnel and flame protection, fog resistance, particle filtration, and were incredibly comfortable, with full air circulation for extended wear. Plus, they were coated in a new-generation optoelectronic polymer that automatically amplified the available light for nighttime operations or transitioned to a UV-protective tint for daytime missions.
At the moment, they seemed completely clear, but as soon as she lowered them over her eyes and let them adjust, the cabin interior became a bit brighter, with a barely noticeable shade of green.
Her ears began to ring as the pilot slowly depressurized the cabin in anticipation of their drop and also throttled back, slowing the jet to the predetermined drop speed of 160 knots while starting a slow turn south to head back to Pakistan.
“One minute!”
The LED at the rear of the cabin switched from red to yellow, and a moment later the ramp lowered, revealing the silvery tops of a thin layer of clouds some ten thousand feet below them. And well above them, a moon hung high in the southern skies.
The LED turned green and the group immediately moved to the rear in silence.
Sergei led the jump, running somewhat awkwardly down the ramp because of the stiff boots. He extended his arms and separated his legs the moment he leaped off the edge, stretching the membranous surfaces of his tri-wing suit between his arms and torso and between his legs, transforming his human form into a full-body wing.
He vanished from view as the next jumper shadowed him, three seconds later, and the next, and the next, just as they had drilled this high altitude–low opening—HALO—insertion, to the point of obsession. The last two operatives were the least experienced of the group, which meant they each had more than a hundred night jumps like this one.
Kira followed almost a full twenty seconds behind Sergei, spreading her webbed wing surfaces the instant she stepped off the ramp.
Air rushed through the inlets of three sets of ram-air membranes—under the arms and between her legs—inflating them, instantly turning them into semirigid airfoils. This allowed Kira to relax, as she did not need to use sheer force to maintain the shape of the tri-wing suit. The aerodynamics of the suit design took care of that.
But as her combined altimeter and GPS map display at the top of her field of view indicated, at her current forward airspeed of sixty-eight miles per hour, the suit by itself could only achieve a glide ratio of 5 to 1, meaning five feet forward for each foot of lost altitude. And that further meant that, even with the tailwind, starting at forty-five thousand feet, or around 8.5 miles high, her team would glide for forty-three miles before having to deploy their chutes, placing them exactly thirty-eight miles short of the current location of the hardware.
Too far.
“Boosters in five,” she spoke into her oxygen mask, before adding, “Four, three, two, one, fire!”
She threw the switch in her right palm, opening the valve that allowed the pressurized liquid rocket fuel to reach the small combustion chambers built into the sides of her boots.
The thrust was immediate and powerful, increasing her forward airspeed to ninety-four miles per hour while decreasing her angle of descent by nearly fifteen degrees.
A flash ahead and below her drew her attention from the display recalculating her new glide ratio.
The operative who had jumped behind Sergei had a malfunction. His legs were on fire.
Dammit!
She heard his scream as he tried in vain to jettison the booster system, dropping from the flight path as flames propagated up his waist, then his chest. Somewhere around a thousand feet below the group, his fuel tank detonated in a burst of orange flames.
“Fucking boots!” Sergei cursed over the secure channel.
“Steady!” she said, forcing her mind to focus on the display. “Stay the course.”
Thirty-nine thousand feet.
The computerized system recalculated flight parameters after the booster increased the glide ratio to 9.7 to 1, extending her range to eighty-two miles. On paper, that should have been more than enough, but the boosters only had enough fuel to burn for roughly a third of their total glide time. The simulations back home had shown that, after taking into consideration the increased speed and glide ratio, she would be less than five miles from her target. But that didn’t allow for the winds aloft, which worked in her favor, and other atmospheric conditions. And that all meant she would not know for certain until the boosters cut off and the system recalculated the new touchdown location.
So we wait, she thought, making minute adjustments to follow her team coasting slightly below and ahead of her, their paths marked by streams of light shooting out of their boots. The wingsuit and the battle dress she wore beneath it temporarily shielded her from the freezing temperatures as she breathed in slowly, trying to stretch her limited supply of oxygen.
Easy does it. And—setting aside an equipment malfunction—that was the key to a successful glide: being relaxed. It not only minimized the amount of oxygen she consumed but it also worked to optimize the overall stability of her high-altitude insertion, keeping her in the desired pipe.
Twenty-eight thousand feet.
The boosters cut off just as they reached the top of the clouds, and the system automatically jettisoned them to reduce weight. This also exposed the boots integrated with her battle dress, so she would be ready for action the instant she reached the ground.
They now approached the most critical phase, since she would lose the horizon for the thirty or so seconds it took to break through the clouds.
“Steady now,” she spoke into her mask, as the team vanished one by one. “Remember your training,” she added, which called for forcing oneself to avoid making any flight adjustments in response to the brain’s natural tendency to compensate for the sudden loss of being able to tell up from down. The problem, experienced by pilots immersed in instrument conditions, was that the brain would lie. Pilots would enter deadly turns or descents while thinking they were just making corrections to remain in level flight. But unlike Kira and her team, pilots could rely on their instruments, especially the attitude indicator—also called the artificial horizon—to keep them out of trouble.
But she lacked such instruments.
When she finally broke through at twenty-four thousand feet, Kira had remained in proper glide attitude. But there was a problem. There had been five team members ahead of her when they entered the clouds. Kira now saw only three.
Risking a brief downward glance, she spotted two figures spinning out of control a couple thousand feet below. It was the two least experienced gliders, but they still knew better.
Dammit!
She followed their near-vertical trajectories as they jerked their suits to attempt to break the spins. However, the tri-wing suit’s lack of a vertical stabilizer, like those used to apply opposing rudder in planes, made it quite difficult to counter a spin.
Realizing there wasn’t a damn thing she could do for them, she maintained her profile while reviewing the new flight parameters, which had her touching down six miles from the current location of the hardware.
It’ll do.
Now she could see the Sulaimans in the distance as she soared over the desert, which reflected the moonlight filtering through the clouds, creating a faint sheen across this war-torn land.
Afghanistan.
She cringed at the thought of what these bastards had done to her father, maiming his body and mind.
Focus.
Desert dunes became visible as they dropped below twenty thousand feet, as the distant lights of Lashkar Gah loomed over the eastern horizon.
Kira continued making slight adjustments, primarily moving her shoulders, hips, and knees, which changed the tension applied to the fabric wings, optimizing her overall glide angle.
Eighteen thousand feet.
They crossed the edge of the desert, leaving sand dunes behind and rushing over the agricultural plains surrounding the Helmand River as it flowed out of the mountain range before curving east toward Lashkar Gah.
The computer system now had her landing five miles from the target, and the only explanation had to be stronger-than-anticipated southerly winds.
I’ll take it, she thought, following the winged formation as they broke below ten thousand feet, dashing through the air at almost seventy miles per hour, completely in control. Her mind stayed ahead of the tri-wing glider, making minute corrections while shifting her attention between the computerized real-time glide ratio, altitude, and speed and the picture in front of her as her team rushed toward their landing zone.
Fifteen thousand feet.
The mountains rose higher as she managed her flight efficiency with constant body-shape manipulation, optimizing her forward speed and fall rate.
Thirteen thousand feet.
The terrain began to rise as they officially left the valley and crossed over the foot of the range, initially rocky and desolate, its jagged features casting shadows in the moonlight. And for the first time she spotted her own shadow shooting over this rugged land, like a predator hunting for prey.
Eleven thousand feet … and now for the tricky part, she thought, realizing that the altimeter provided altitude relative to sea level and not to the rapidly rising terrain. Lacking a radar altimeter, which would have provided her with true distance to the ground, Kira would have to eyeball it.
And that’s where HALO experience came into play, enabling her to determine what five hundred feet high looked like.
Sparse vegetation gave way to a sea of pine trees layering the mountainside, sporadically broken by rock-strewn ledges as they dropped below ten thousand feet. But the thick canopy below them appeared to be less than a thousand feet away.
Sergei led the way, almost a quarter mile ahead, pulling his rip cord just as he appeared about to crash headfirst into the side of the mountain.
His dark canopy blossomed a moment later, arresting his forward speed before he reached a small clearing between clusters of trees.
The rest of the team followed suit, rectangular parachutes deploying in short intervals just as a rocky precipice filled her field of view.
The parachute tug killed her momentum in the blink of an eye, the straps compressing her chest as she tightened her muscles, and she cringed while transitioning from a glide to a gradual descent. She pulled on the steering handles, guiding herself toward the same small clearing where Sergei now gathered his parachute.
She landed softly with a short run, pulling on the canopy as it lost tension, letting it fall behind her while she released the straps and worked the heavy-duty zipper of the tri-wing suit from neck to groin.
Walking out of it in her skintight battle dress, Kira tested the integrated boots, the spring-loaded heels cushioning her feet. They certainly gave her a nice bounce while walking, lessening the strain on her legs.
She removed her oxygen mask and took a deep breath of fresh mountain air strong with a pine resin fragrance.
Reaching for the sound-suppressed AK-9 strapped to the side of her utility vest, she verified a chambered round before setting the safety/fire selector lever to semiautomatic or single-shot mode.
She readjusted the goggles and the helmet, the latter made of layers of Kevlar and carbon fiber. She pulled up the long stretchable neck of her battle dress and connected it to the base of the helmet, forming a unified armored profile without losing flexibility.
The other two operatives made their way to the clearing a couple of minutes later, joining Sergei and Kira, who reviewed the information on her helmet display.
“Just under five miles that way,” she said, pointing her AK-9’s silencer to the east.
“What the hell is out here?” Sergei asked.
She shook her head, reading the GPS, which included any structure left over from the days of the Soviet Union’s invasion.
“Well,” Kira finally replied, “the closest thing besides our old bases at Kandahar and Lashkar Gah is a concrete bunker used to house forward deployments.”
“Could the courier be going there?” Sergei asked.
She shrugged. “Anything is possible. Everyone set?”
Sergei and the two surviving operatives nodded in unison.
“All right. Single file. Five-meter spacing. Go,” she said.
Not off to a good start, Kira thought, as Sergei led the way. Losing 40 percent of her team before the hard part even started had not been in any of her planning scenarios.
Initiative. Ingenuity. Patience.
Sighing, she fell in line behind her remaining operatives, hoping that a maniacal focus on the pillars, combined with their training—and perhaps a bit of luck—would be enough to achieve their objective and get them off this mountain in one piece.