Citadel Of Fear

“The payroll?”

“My payroll. You contract is terminated with these people after I smashed your mission and captured you. You’re currently unemployed, Nick. You want a job or do you want to go back to Orsk?”

Propenko’s pale eyes narrowed. “You wish to employ me against former employers? This is not strictly honorable.”

“They’re terrorists. Work against them or for them.”

“I am not aware of this.”

“I’m betting on that, Nick.”

“I am willing to entertain these ideas, but I must warn you. People I worked for apparently had ability to mint own money,” Propenko replied.

“Fine. Then double.”

Propenko blinked. “You do not know yet how much I am paid.”

“Make up a number—but, be a good lad and do try not to go stark ravers about it.”

“You do not work for British Intelligence,” Propenko declared.

McCarter sipped liquor.

“You do not work for American Intelligence.”

McCarter neither confirmed nor denied.

“Who are you?”

McCarter spit in his palm and held out his hand. “Your boss.”

Propenko slammed his hand into McCarter’s. The Russian had a grip like a clam but he stopped just short of the bone-breaker. “Unless you move, you must expect attack before dawn. I am surprised it has not happened already.”

“How much?”

“We talk money later. Now? I will be needing to lose handcuffs and get gun.”

“One condition.”

“And, so?”

McCarter nodded toward Hawkins. “His name is Hawk.” He tossed the Swedish M-40 pistol onto the table. “Uncuff him.”

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_8dc26a6f-c7e9-51ed-b8fb-c9a4a813a69a)

The War Room

Aaron Kurtzman observed as T. J. Hawkins operated on the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle thousands of miles away in Scandinavia. Kurtzman would have preferred to have done the surgery himself, but security protocols dictated the little UAV helicopter traveled no farther until they could make sure they weren’t bringing a Trojan horse into the Farm’s precincts.

Kurtzman secretly wished Hermann “Gadgets” Swartz was in the operating theater, but Hawkins wasn’t bad. The UAV was a standard quad-motor helicopter with four equidistant rotors on stalks sticking out of the main body. This one had a very powerful and sophisticated camera that was night-vision capable. Hawkins had separated the motors and the camera; they were amazing pieces of technology.

“Here we go…”

Gummer leaned in carefully. He was the team’s explosives expert and this was the point where everyone wondered if the UAV would blow sky-high. Hawkins carefully separated the two halves of the fuselage as if it were the shell of a crab.

Kurtzman leaned forward in his wheelchair and peered at the feed from Sweden on his screen.

The guts of the UAV were extremely interesting.

Much like a crab shell, nothing was attached to the top. All the good stuff was attached to the bottom half.

Hawkins looked into the camera. “Bear, I don’t know what half this stuff is.”

Gary Manning sat back, nodding to himself. “I don’t see a booby trap. If there are any explosives in there, they are tiny and made to wipe the equipment instead of kill anyone who might be tampering.”

“Wait a minute, before you two touch anything else.” Kurtzman took control of the camera on his end and began panning and scanning the UAV’s internal organs.

The power supply system was easy to spot and very impressive. It was a flat stack and Kurtzman suspected this UAV would have double the range and endurance of a standard commercial model of comparable size. He had to admit he had never seen a CPU like the one he beheld mounted in a UAV like this. Most similar models were equipped with a simple GPS that allowed them to return to their launch point if they lost contact with their human operator. The sophistication of this drone’s CPU implied to the Stony Man cybernetics whiz that the drone was capable of making a number of decisions autonomously and could operate in independent search, patrol or mapping functions.

Kurtzman was also willing to bet that this machine was capable of being operated by, or cooperating with, other autonomous drones operating as autonomous units. In effect, this baby was capable of engaging in independent small- and large-unit actions without the benefit of a human operator in control.

It was an incredibly sophisticated piece of machinery.

Kurtzman leaned back in his chair. It was a very strange thing to be shot down out of the sky during an engagement with Russian mafiya thugs. Of course the mafiya thugs had showed up with antiaircraft artillery. It all led to the inescapable conclusion that there was a much larger game afoot.

Hawkins pointed his screwdriver at a small, yellow, rectangular casing that almost seemed off in a corner by itself. It didn’t appear to be connected to the UAV’s power supply, CPU, engine or guidance units. “What do you figure the little yellow box is?”

“I figure that little yellow box is the little black box.”

“A flight recorder?” Manning offered. “On a little rig like this?”

“You’re right,” Kurtzman agreed. “You don’t usually see that on a UAV this size. But it’s not attached to anything and it hasn’t blown up. A drone is the same as any other vehicle. You don’t want the flight recorder attached to anything else in the system. You want it to independently record what happens in case the vehicle gets lost, shot down, captured or, most important, hacked and hijacked.”

“So it’s on right now?” Hawkins asked.

“I suspect its transponder is pinging away.”

As a demolitions man, Manning knew something about electronics. He eyed the little yellow box. “So the bad guys know where we are? Even here?”

“Depends on the range. That is a pretty small unit and you have flown it across the Baltic. It’s not like you left it where it fell in Gdansk. Then again? Just about everything inside that rig appears to be about ten times more powerful than any standard, comparable commercial model UAV. Heck, a lot of its electronics are more sophisticated than similar-size stuff the United States military issues to our troops, including Special Forces. This fellow is not standard issue anywhere. It’s made to look like a commercial rig, but it was made custom from top to bottom, to customer specifications, and that customer had money to burn.”

“So the bad guys know where we are?” Hawkins asked again.

Kurtzman made a judgment call. “Normally, I would say no, unless of course the bad guys have their own satellite talking to it.”

McCarter leaned in to the conversation. “You think these guys have their own satellite?”

“I would bet they have one. Or, given the level of sophistication, they can access someone else’s satellite and the owners don’t know about it.”