War Hawk: A Tucker Wayne Novel (44 page)

Pravi frowned. “Place be high and”—he made an angle with one hand—“
strm
.”

Steep
, Tucker guessed, which he could also tell from the map’s topography. He began to despair, knowing they didn’t have much time.

Pravi offered a thin hope, grinning slyly. “But maybe I know way.”

34

October 27, 12:33
P
.
M
. CET

Kamena Gora, Serbia

Tucker careened the ŠKODA Yeti up the mountain road. Pravi sat in the passenger seat, acting as their navigator, while Jane and Nora shared the back with Kane. The shepherd was again fully outfitted in his gear.

The final member of their party whispered in Tucker’s earpiece on a channel Rex had encrypted and kept masked from eavesdroppers. “
Tucker, the tanks are beginning to roll across the border . . . headed our way
.”

He had left Frank with the villagers at the cavern cellars. Tucker hated to leave the man behind, but Frank had insisted. He was determined to use the last of Rex’s battery life to keep an eye on the border and use the drone’s electronic warfare suite to protect the people as best he could. To do that, he needed to remain in the village.

“
They’ll be on us in the next twenty minutes
,” Frank warned, adding pressure to the already strained timetable.

Even without Frank’s call, Tucker could have guessed the tanks would begin to roll. The artillery barrage had fallen silent for the past several minutes. Apparently the rain of shells had softened the cluster of hamlets sufficiently enough. Now would come the true terror.

Tucker touched his throat mike. “We’re almost to the perimeter of Skaxis Mining. Do your best to hold the fort.”

Pravi was taking them up a rutted tract. It was an overgrown old cart road dating from medieval times, a path only the locals knew about. It was so narrow and heavily forested that the SUV’s side mirrors brushed through low pine branches. Several of the men from Kamena Gora used this shortcut to come and go from the mines. It ended at an abandoned section of the complex, where the ground had been emptied of its rare-earth minerals, leaving behind a deep scar.

The C3 hub lay almost directly across from that spot, a good seven miles away.

Pravi had offered a solution for quickly traversing that distance.

Frank radioed again. “
Tucker! I just sent Rex for a high pass over those tanks. Something ain’t right here
.”

“What?” he asked while struggling to keep the SUV on the muddy tract.

“
Rex is picking up electromagnetic signatures from the tanks, identical to Tangent’s drones. Same across every frequency
.”

“What’re you getting at?”

“I think the tanks are drones, too. I think they’re unmanned.”

Is that possible?

Tucker called back to Nora and explained the situation.

She leaned forward. “He could be right. Odisha was only one of a scatter of labs around the country. There were rumors that other places were working on ground versions of our aerial fleet.”

Tucker realized that such unmanned vehicles might work to Kellerman’s advantage. Back at White Sands, all that had remained after the Warhawks’ bombardment of the Soviet hardware was smoldering slag. With no bodies inside, Kellerman could further mask his involvement.

But this thought gave Tucker another idea.

“Frank,” he radioed back, “do you think you could use Rex to hack into one of those tanks and commandeer it to the defense of the village, like you were able to pull off with the Warhawk in New Mexico?”

Tucker pictured that winged drone crashing into the desert bunker.

“
Maybe
,” Frank said. “
But Rex is flying on fumes, so to speak. If he can manage it, it won’t last long
.”

Still, it could buy them a few extra minutes.

“Give it your best,” Tucker encouraged him.

Pravi pointed to a clearing at the side of the road, where the trail ended at a moonscape of jumbled boulders and pyramidal mounds of gravel and dirt. A single battered open-bed truck was parked in the clearing, likely another of the miners’ vehicles.

Tucker parked his muddy SUV next to it.

“We go,” Pravi said, and climbed out his side.

Tucker bailed with the others. The young man led them through the remaining edge of the forest, then along a winding path across the rubble. Tucker felt exposed out in the open, but they had no choice. Before leaving, Josif had gathered heavy coats and jackets from the locals, to better hide them from any casual scrutiny. Still, Tucker hoped all eyes were on the battle in the valley and not on this remote corner of the complex.

That certainly seemed to be the case at the moment. Several groups of men stood atop the surrounding slag heaps and rock piles, watching the destruction below. Tucker could only imagine what they were thinking. How many of them had family among the villages? How many had abandoned the mines to go to the defense of their loved ones? He could almost feel the anger flowing down the slopes from those standing in furious vigil.

With that much pent-up hostility, it would not take much to stoke that fire into an all-out attack on Montenegro.

Leading them steadily onward, Pravi eventually took them to where two cargo helicopters rested on concrete pads. Pravi had them hold with a raised palm. He hurried over to a neighboring shed next to a pair of large red fuel tanks.

Jane sidled next to Tucker, her arms crossed over her chest. Both of them had holstered pistols—the same SIG Sauers from Trinidad—under their coats. Flying in under EU call signs and passports, they hadn’t needed to pass through customs, so ferrying the weapons in hadn’t been a problem. She stared now toward the shed, clearly wary, likely wondering if she would have to use her weapon in another moment.

Pravi appeared again and waved them forward. He headed to one of the helicopters with a pair of fellow workers in tow. Tucker didn’t know what Pravi had told the men to gain their cooperation, but if they were locals, it might not have taken much.

Pravi spoke to one man, who then climbed behind the controls of the helicopter. The other worker dragged a thick cable and secured it to the undercarriage of the aircraft. The other end snaked to a large metal ore bin.

Pravi rushed them in that direction.
“Zuri!”
he urged them.

Pravi had suggested using one of the company’s choppers to reach the coordinates in the mountainous corner on the complex’s far side, but Tucker had come up with this last detail of the plan. He had remembered watching one of the cargo helicopters hauling debris. He hoped such a means could also be used to deliver a secret payload of passengers to the destination atop the distant ridge.

It was risky—but they had no better option.

As the helicopter began warming its engine, Tucker helped Nora inside the tall-walled bin, then he and Jane got Kane up and over the lip. Tucker tossed his pack inside, and he and Jane scrambled up and over to join the others.

Pravi threw in a folded tarp and said something in Serbian that Tucker could guess meant
keep out of sight
. Tucker shook out the tarp and got everyone under it. Before ducking away, he watched Pravi climb into the helicopter.

Moments later, the helicopter’s rotors began churning faster and the engine whined into a growl. Rotor wash whipped across the mouth of the bin, requiring all of them to hold fast to the tarp before it was ripped away.

Then the helicopter rose from its pad, the metal cable slithering over the concrete.

“Hang on,” Tucker warned.

The bin jerked sideways, tilting scarily and scraping a couple of feet to the left—then it lifted skyward.

Here we go
.

12:49
P
.
M
.

As they flew, Tucker leaned his palm against his ear to hear Frank’s report. But his friend’s voice was cutting in and out as they passed beyond the radio’s range.

“
The tanks . . . two headed to each village. ETA . . . be here four or five minutes
.”

“Any luck commandeering one?” Tucker yelled.

“
Still . . . working . . . Rex . . . not as familiar with these ground drones as his fellow winged brothers.
”

“Keep at it.”

Frank tried to respond, but the transmission became too garbled.

Tucker finally gave up. For now, it was up to Frank to protect the village. He turned to Nora. “Are you ready with Sandy’s code?”

She patted her jacket pocket. “I’d better be.”

Kane crouched next to Jane. She absently rubbed the shepherd’s head, her gaze gone again into that thousand-yard stare. He shifted next to her and took her hand. She flinched, but he gripped harder.

She finally looked at him, her eyes focusing back. “I’m okay.”

No, you’re not
.

All too often, he had heard that refrain—
I’m okay
—from his fellow soldiers. It was what one said, what was expected of you. The stigma of asking for help, especially among those in Special Forces, was deeply ingrained.

Suck it up
was as much a motto as
semper fi
.

He pulled her closer. “I’m sorry, Jane. I shouldn’t have been so hard on you earlier. I know you’re harder on yourself than anyone.”

Especially when it comes to protecting Nathan
.

She swallowed and nodded. There were no tears, but he suspected they would come with time. “I’ll be all right.”

That he could believe.

Happy to have made these meager amends with her, Tucker scooted up and peeked out from under the tarp. Cold winds stung his eyes, but he squinted against the burn. Ahead the carved landscape of the mines ended at a tumble of sheer cliffs, topped by green forests. This corner of the complex looked untouched by the strip-mining.

Why?

Tucker pulled out a set of binoculars.

He scanned the area, trying to discern where across those escarpments the C3 hub might be hidden. Then he noted a shadow halfway up one cliff face, four stories above the ground.

A structure perched there, its facade protruding from the rock’s sheer surface. At the top were two towers, separated by a rampart of waist-high crenellated battlements, several sections of which had crumbled away, giving them the appearance of a row of chipped teeth. Below the ramparts stretched a set of tall narrow windows, peaked at their tops. And under them stood massive oak doors, crisscrossed with iron braces.

Tucker remembered Pravi saying something in Serbian when this spot was pointed to on the map.

Manastir, da . . .

He now understood:
manastir
meant
monastery
. While driving from the airport, Tucker had spotted other such churches, dating back centuries, nestled and hidden in valleys.

No wonder this section of the mine had been spared
.

Besides the monastery’s historical value, the religious piety of the locals likely kept this old church preserved—not that it hadn’t been repurposed at the moment.

Tucker spotted cables running along the switchback of narrow steps that led up to those iron-framed doors. At the foot of the cliff, camouflage netting obscured a barricaded compound, where there were generators humming and trucks parked. Swinging his gaze back to the top, he noted rows of parabolic dishes positioned along the ramparts, all aimed toward the south.

This definitely must be the operation’s C3 hub.

But how are we going to storm that castle?

The original plan had been for the helicopter to swing low over the highland forests, pretending to be workers fleeing the battle at the border. Once near enough, the helicopter would dip low—hovering briefly enough for Tucker’s group to offload into the dense forest—then it would continue north again.

Once safely on the ground, Tucker had hoped to sneak overland to the compound and reach the servers that controlled this operation, where Nora would hack Sandy’s lobotomy code into the transmission systems.

Tucker suddenly had no faith in these plans—especially when he spotted something wing out of a ravine to the left and sweep into the sky.

A Shrike.

Lyon’s group must be using the nearby valleys and rifts to hide their fleet, readying for phase two of these plans, which was surely to finish the destruction and destroy the invading tanks and vehicles.

But that was not this drone’s objective. It banked around and fired at the helicopter. Tucker craned up and watched rounds rip through the bulk of the aircraft. Smoke burst forth from its engine. The helicopter bobbled, whipping the bin wildly beneath it.

Tucker got tossed to the floor.

The Shrike streaked past, its work done.

The helicopter tipped and plummeted toward the ground.

7:50
A
.
M
. EDT

Smith Island, Maryland

Locked securely in his office, Pruitt Kellerman stood once again before his bank of wall monitors. A few screens showed news channels beginning to receive word of the skirmish along the Serbian border. Reports remained preliminary, full of speculation due to the remoteness of the mountainous region. But even at this early stage, he had false information being threaded through various media outlets, using an advanced encryption algorithm based on Alan Turing’s old papers.

All due to the foresight of my grandfather
.

The remaining monitors ran with secure feeds from the operation center at Skaxis Mining. One screen showed the smoky image of a village on fire. Another revealed a bombed-out armory near the Montenegrin city of Bijelo Polje, courtesy of a late-morning airstrike by a Warhawk, which left nothing but a cratered ruin in its wake. More faked reports had already been seeded, which would show fabricated grainy footage of a caravan of Montenegrin tanks and military vehicles leaving that armory two days prior, headed for the Serbian border. Kellerman had needed some explanation for the source of military hardware that would be found demolished at the border.