ABANDONED SOVIET BONEYARD
BLACK SEA COAST, UKRAINE
“TELL ME YOU GOT A LOCATION on that missile.” Tyler stood bare-chested, partially hidden by GROND’s driver-side door, changing out of his pressure suit. “If I know Ivanov, he went straight for it.”
Eddie brought up a map on his main screen. “I tracked him with the beacon you left on the Mark Seven. He flew to an island in the Black Sea, forty-eight miles away.”
“You left a tracker on the Mark Seven?” Talia asked, watching the map zoom in on the island.
“Contingencies.” Tyler emerged from behind the door wearing cargo pants and a tactical vest. “Like I told you before.”
She nodded, then shifted her gaze to Finn and Mac. The Scotsman sat on the back of the box truck while Finn tended his leg wound. Each had also exchanged his pressure suit for tactical gear. “You thought of all these potentialities.” Talia returned her gaze to Tyler. “And yet you still failed to bring me a change of clothes. I look like a half-drowned comic book hero.”
He shrugged, offering a half smile. “I’ll take note of that for next time.”
Mac hobbled over to the van, aided by Finn. “I heard Wee Man sayin’ he found the Mark Seven.” He squinted at Eddie’s screen as he approached, frowning. “I don’t see it.”
“This is old imagery,” Eddie said, with a hint of you’re a brainless Neanderthal in his tone. “Although . . .” He created a green box around the island, a hunk of brown rock half the size of the airfield where they were parked. “We might be able to get a real-time look.”
Darcy laid a hand on his shoulder. “You told me before that you could retask satellites, no?”
“Yes.”
“And was that true, or were you trying to impress me?”
“Both.” Eddie got to work, and soon the telemetry data for a reconnaissance satellite appeared on his secondary monitor.
Darcy leaned down, putting her cheek next to his. “You are a genius.”
“No,” he countered, giving her a peck on the cheek without breaking the pace of his typing. “You are a genius.”
“Yeah . . .” Finn closed his eyes and shook his head. “This will get old fast.”
Talia didn’t care about Eddie’s budding romance. She was worried about the ramifications of hacking a satellite. “I don’t think the Agency wants us tapping into the US reconnaissance constellation. This could bring a lot of heat down on Brennan.”
“It’s not a problem.” Eddie waved off her concerns with the flick of his hand. “I didn’t hack a US satellite. I hacked a Russian one.”
In short order, he had live video of the same brown rock up on the main screen. Eddie pointed at some shading on the eastern side. “That shadow is too uniform to be natural.” He pressed his nose closer to the image and then let out a laugh and tapped the keys. “Oh, I see you now. You can’t hide from me.”
That section of the island grew bigger and the clarity resolved. Talia could make out a man-made structure—brown-painted concrete merging with the surrounding rocks. A rectangular section near the center was angled upward at twenty degrees. “There it is,” she said, “our launch facility.”
“And the Mark Seven.” Eddie lifted his hands from the keys in triumph. He circled a finger over a large object on the north end of the picture, covered with camouflage netting, and looked up at Talia. “We’ve got him.”
“We haven’t got a thing. Ivanov can launch at any time.”
“Actually, he’s on a schedule,” Tyler said. “His promised demonstration is still more than two hours away. And he’s in no hurry. He thinks we’re all dead.” He crouched down beside Eddie. “You can hack a satellite. Can you hack the island?”
“Already working on it. I’m targeting the facility’s network using our satellite’s UHF transmitters. And . . . I’m in.” A schematic of the island popped up on the screen. Eddie zoomed in and the view shifted to a large, angled hangar next to a stacked control room.
Talia knelt down at his other shoulder. “And the missile?”
“I can see the hangar. But I’ve got no access to the hardware. Ivanov is smart. The island’s key systems—locks, security, the missile systems—they are all isolated in closed loops. Without hooking in a wireless receiver, I can’t touch them. Not yet, anyway.”
While Eddie kept trying, the rest of the crew stepped out onto the tarmac to survey their options. Tyler nudged Darcy and thrust his chin at the gunboat she and Eddie had used to tow their explosives into position. “What about your boat? How fast will it go?”
“Ten knots. Assuming she can sustain it. You heard her engine, no? We barely got her back to shore after picking you up.”
Finn turned to Talia. “You’re an American operative. Call in reinforcements?”
“Already have,” Eddie said from the van. “When Ivanov escaped, I alerted an Agency asset embedded with a Special Tactics Team at Incirlik. They’ll be wheels up in thirty, plus three hours’ flight time.”
“More than an hour too long,” Tyler said. “And we can’t ask the Russians for help. They’ll haggle for some kind of recompense like Abu Dhabi carpet dealers. There’s no time for that kind of negotiation.”
Darcy made her pbbt sound. “Then it seems we need a better boat, no?”
“No. Not a boat, per se.” Talia’s eyes had settled on a bunker at the end of a man-made inlet. “We need that.”
The nose of a Soviet beast of legend was poking out of the bunker, a monster long at rest. She could just see its eight jet engines placed like gills on the forward canards. Tubes for anti-ship missiles rose from its back like the spines of a sea dragon. The Soviets had called it an ekranoplan—a half ship, half aircraft designed to fly mere feet above the waves at over three hundred knots. She nodded in the beast’s direction. “All we have to do is get it started, and that thing will get us to the island with time to spare.”