Without Fear Read online

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  To our wives, Angela Hunt and Lory Pineiro

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Hats off to Robert Gleason for his continued support, as well as the rest of the staff at Tor/Forge, in particular Tom Doherty, Linda Quinton, Elayne Becker, and Karen Lovell.

  Thanks to Matthew Bialer from Greenburger Associates, for a lifetime of guidance and friendship.

  Our gratitude goes to Judge Jeanine Pirro of Fox News, Peter Kostis of CBS, and Howie Carr of Boston’s WRKO The Howie Carr Show for their continued support and unflagging friendship.

  A special thanks to Lt. Col. Steve “Coach” Fournier, USAF pilot, and Col. Delbert “Hound dog” Bassett, U.S. Marine Corps aviator, for their technical assistance.

  A very special thanks to Lynda Tocci, Mary Anne Marsh, and Maria Hardiman of the Dewey Square Group for their very generous assistance in marketing efforts.

  Hillarie Olson also has our sincere appreciation.

  We are grateful to Alice Frenk for her terrific proofreading help.

  And last but not least, we wish to thank our families.

  Courage is fear holding on a minute longer.

  —GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON

  PROLOGUE

  SEPTEMBER 1988.

  KANDAHAR PROVINCE.

  SOUTHERN AFGHANISTAN.

  I hate this fucking country.

  Mikhail Tupolev glared at the starry night beyond the armor-glass canopy of his Su-25TM jet cruising at twenty thousand feet, feeling anxious to exit the airspace of this godforsaken land. The Red Air Force colonel hated its people, its customs, its food, its climate, and its infernal terrain.

  From scorching deserts and wind-whipped plateaus to icy mountains and treacherous caves, everything about Afghanistan was harsh, bitter, unforgiving, and particularly cruel. It was hell on earth; truly the land that God forgot.

  And Mikhail cursed the day his country chose to invade it.

  But above all, the Soviet pilot hated the mujahideen.

  Down to my fucking bone marrow.

  Mikhail tightened his grip on the control column of the Sukhoi close air support jet. Visions of maimed bodies were superimposed on the star-filled sky surrounding the wide-angle heads-up display painting the center of his canopy with flight telemetry.

  Those ruthless insurgents, bearded sons of the devil, weren’t content with simply killing Mikhail’s comrades. The zealous bastards took pleasure in brutalizing young Soviet men in ways that had forever scarred his soul. And sometimes the mujahideen would even lack the decency of finishing them off, leaving them alive for rescue crews to face the horror of their wounds.

  Images of the scourged and writhing bodies of his friends crying in agony as they arrived at Kandahar pierced Mikhail’s mind like burning splinters, disturbing memories stabbing what semblance of sanity he had left. They dominated his days and especially his nights, when demons armed with long and curved pesh-kabz knives crawled out of the darkest corners of his mind.

  But it was his survivor’s guilt that ate him from the inside like a ravenous cancer. Mikhail had lasted six years in Afghanistan while everyone in his flight unit had succumbed to the dreaded Stinger missiles. Or worse, they had managed to eject into the mad world rushing beneath the Sukhoi while holding four hundred knots in a westerly heading of 280 degrees.

  But the madness ends tonight.

  By dawn, he would land at Astrakhan, North Caucasus Military District.

  Home to the Soviet Air Force 116th Combat Training Center, Astrakhan marked the place where the battle-hardened pilot would make a much-welcomed transition to flight instructor.

  The reality, however, was that Mikhail would have welcomed any redeployment.

  Anywhere.

  Anywhere but here.

  Though he had to admit that getting the opportunity to pass on everything he had learned to a new generation of pilots, including his experience of years at the Gagarin Air Force Academy, certainly felt like a second lease on life.

  Mikhail glanced at the class ring adorning his right hand holding the control column and slowly filled his lungs with the hope of a new beginning—a new dawn—away from this place. He also looked forward to the opportunity to see Irina, his wife, and also his daughter, Kira, who had just been accepted to the KGB academy in Minsk when he’d kissed them good-bye on the eve of his deployment.

  The forty-year-old pilot sighed. That was yet another reason to hate this country.

  The Afghan campaign had kept Mikhail from his family, especially from watching Kira graduate and become a promising KGB officer, currently on her first assignment in East Berlin.

  But all of that was about to change. Irina waited for him at Astrakhan, and as chief instructor he would have certain freedoms, including flying anywhere in the Soviet republics over weekends and state holidays, and the list included East Germany.

  The future did seem bright for the veteran pilot, but as he lifted his gaze, he noticed the darkening horizon under a moon in its third quarter.

  Like a pulsating curtain, the weather front swirled by the foot of the Sulaiman Mountains, north of his flight path, and extended south, veiling the desert plains as far as he could see.

  Sandstorm.

  His eyes shifted skyward. The incoming gale crested well above his service ceiling of 22,965 feet, swallowing the stars. The Su-25TM was a close air support platform created to help ground troops. It was Moscow’s answer to the venerable American A-10 Warthog. Its designers built it to take abuse while assisting infantry and engaging tanks. But like the Warthog, it lacked the high ceilings and supersonic speed of an interceptor.

  Inside his oxygen mask, Mikhail frowned at a storm that had most definitely not been in the forecast during his briefing three hours ago.

  He shook his head. Even leaving this country was difficult.

  Sighing, he considered his options: return to base or go around the storm. The latter meant flying over the Sulaimans, the southern extension of the Hindu Kush mountain range controlled by the mujahideen. Mikhail had flown countless sorties over those rugged and forested slopes traversing this nation, but always accompanied by his flight squadron plus swarms of Mi-24 Hind-D gunships in coordination with infantry divisions.

  Strength in numbers.

  That had been Moscow’s answer to the exponential increase in Stinger attacks by the mujahideen: overwhelming and coordinated firepower. And even that had failed to strip the determination from the obstinate insurgents.

  But tonight Mikhail flew alone—alone with his precious cargo: a single RN-40 thirty-kiloton tactical nuclear bomb secured to its port inboard pylon.

  Mosc
ow had secretly ordered the RN-40s to the Afghan theater as a desperate measure to root out the rebels from their mountain hideouts. However, for a number of reasons—including the Kremlin’s growing fear of America’s President Ronald Reagan—it never used them. Now the time had come to ferry them home as part of his country’s massive troop and equipment withdrawal from the region. But it had to be done as covertly as when they were first delivered here: via solo night flights.

  The logical decision would have been to turn back and wait for the weather to clear, especially given the high sensitivity of his cargo. But after a decade of the most brutal fighting imaginable, logic had long given way to emotion among the tens of thousands of Soviet troops living in this worldly version of Dante’s Inferno. And this sentiment burned even brighter in Mikhail, whose mind replaced the images of his lost comrades with that of the green fields of the Soviet Republic of Turkmenistan, on the other side of the Afghan border.

  And beyond it, the Caspian Sea at dawn and—

  His right hand tilted the control column to a northerly heading while his left hand worked the throttles to their highest setting short of afterburners to conserve fuel while minimizing the time spent over the mountains. He still had a long flight ahead of him, and his hands were a bit sore, probably from handling the controls harder than normal. He eased the pressure, returning to fingertip touch as the Sukhoi accelerated to just under its top speed of 526 knots, or Mach 0.82.

  Mikhail gave his safety corridor a backwards glance over his shoulder as he placed the storm off his left wingtip and pointed the nose straight toward the distant snowcapped peaks. The desert rushed beneath him for another five minutes as he shot over the town of Lashkar Gah before reddish-brown sand dunes glistening in the moonlight gave way to the rugged terrain rising sharply to become the Sulaimans.

  Skirting the northern edge of the squall, Mikhail slowly banked the Su-25TM back to a westerly heading. But he kept the deadly sandstorm at least five kilometers off his left wingtip, well aware that the dual Soyuz/Gavrilov R-195 turbojets would not react well to the high concentration of sand inside that boiling cloud.

  As he exited the turn and leveled his wings, Mikhail realized the depth of the storm. The northern edge of the front resembled a torrid vertical wall extending at least fifty miles to the west. And that meant he would have to fly over the mountains for several minutes before he could return to his safety corridor.

  With a little luck—and considering his speed, altitude, and the late hour—he hoped to be back on track without incident.

  However, for reasons he could not explain, Mikhail Tupolev did something he had not done since he was a boy dragged into church by his Russian Orthodox mother: he briefly closed his eyes in prayer.

  * * *

  Wide awake, CIA officer Glenn Harwich bolted up in his cot. Sleep was a luxury. Those deployed in every war or dangerous assignment yearned for it but never got it, until they were back home—and sometimes only with pills.

  He turned his head slightly to the source of the noise and stopped breathing, trying to discern its source.

  A jet … A Sukhoi!

  Even on less than four hours of sleep a day for weeks, Harwich recognized that sound.

  Leaping to his feet, he grabbed a pair of field binoculars and his .45-caliber SIG Sauer P220, tucking the latter into the holster designed for the small of his back.

  Wearing desert sandals, faded jeans, a cashmere tunic, and a pakol, an Afghan round cap made of fine wool, Harwich rushed out of his tent, which was nestled beneath a rocky outcrop at the edge of a plateau halfway up the mountain.

  The air was dry and cold, and the young CIA officer filled his lungs while blinking rapidly, trying to clear his sight as well as his mind. Walking briskly, he reached the edge of the narrow plateau where they had made camp for the night.

  To the south, a sandstorm swept across the desert, its leading edge swirling like a vertical cyclone, kicking up sand and debris in an impressive display of nature’s unbridled power.

  Harwich had been alarmed by the South Asia storms in the beginning, when he had first arrived in this country after graduating from the Farm, the CIA training facility in Williamsburg, Virginia. No one liked to talk about it, but environmental adjustments to time zones, climate, altitude, food, and clothes—all tied together with anticipation and fear—took some getting used to, and not all could handle it. Harwich’s adjustment had meant being tired for the first few weeks in-country, where he learned that physical training, diet, and hydration were not just buzzwords but really helped his transition.

  He was part of Operation Cyclone, the code name for the CIA program to arm the mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet invaders. But after two years rotating through countless rebel groups operating in the region, Harwich viewed the storms as a royal pain in his ass, and he was glad that his missions kept him mostly high up the mountains. Here, the much colder air sweeping down the sides of steep slopes resulted in an outward flow near the base that countered that of the desert storms, keeping them a good distance away.

  A tall and bearded man in his early thirties, in charge of this rebel group, ran up to Harwich from another tent. He had a long and wide nose, dark eyes, and full lips under a white turban. Harwich only knew him by his nickname, “Al-Amir”—meaning “the Prince,” because rumor had it he came from some billionaire Saudi family. If that was true, then Harwich had to truly tip his pakol at the man, because he sure as hell wouldn’t be in this lovely corner of the world if his parents were billionaires.

  Al-Amir had his ever-present SVD Dragunov sniper rifle with its wooden thumbhole stock and matching two-piece wooden hand guard slung behind his back. The SVD’s long barrel, thinly profiled to save weight and ending with a slotted flash suppressor, projected above his right shoulder like an antenna. A thick Russian Army belt crowned the top of his partug pants, from which hung a Tokarev 7.62 × 25mm pistol in a desert camouflage holster. According to yet another rumor, the mujahideen fighter had allegedly pried both weapons from the dead fingers of some elite Russian sniper.

  His young nephews followed him. Akhtar was the oldest, at around ten or eleven years old. Pasha looked around seven or eight. The kids yawned while rubbing the sleep from their eyes. The boys referred to Al-Amir as Akaa, “Uncle.” The rest of the dozen men in the mujahideen enclave, whom Harwich had trained for the past two weeks in the use of the FIM-92 Stinger missile system, also emerged from their tents. Everyone gathered by the brink of the gorge, overlooking the desert and the edge of the storm.

  Scanning the western skies while fingering the binoculars’ focusing ring, Harwich quickly located the jet just above the horizon.

  “It’s a TM,” he whispered, referring to the improved version of the original Su-25, which had engines positioned so close together that missile damage to one caused collateral damage to the other. The TM model sported 5mm armor plates between the two engines, and it also increased the flare capacity from 128 to 256, making it quite difficult to shoot down with a single Stinger.

  Harwich frowned while tracking the jet, wondering what in the world it was doing out here alone in the middle of the night. The latest Soviet tactics always called for multiple attack jets and Hind-D gunships in support of ground troops. But there were no other planes in sight, and Red Army soldiers had not ventured up these mountains for months.

  Is this guy lost?

  “Can it be done, Ba’i?” asked Al-Amir in his thick accent, which sounded a bit British, calling Harwich by the nickname that translated loosely to “merchant” or “provider of goods.” The man seemed well educated—far more than anyone Harwich had trained in this country—speaking good enough English to lessen the need for Harwich to use his bastardized Pashto.

  The CIA man lowered the binoculars and considered the question while gazing into the determined dark eyes of this enigmatic warrior. Over the past two years, he had shown mujahideen enclaves like this one how to use Stingers to shoot down Hind-D gunships, t
ransport helicopters, and also the original Su-25. But never a TM.

  “Only one way to find out,” Harwich replied, deciding that, lost or not, the lone Sukhoi presented them with a unique opportunity to see if the new and improved Soviet jet could be brought down with a coordinated attack. “But we’ll need two,” he added, stretching the index and middle fingers of his right hand like a peace sign before pointing them at the containers of missiles stacked by the side of his tent. The Stinger had a range of twenty-six thousand feet on paper. But on a cold night, the denser air worked in his favor. Plus their plateau stood at almost nine thousand feet, increasing the weapon’s actual ceiling to thirty-three thousand feet.

  Al-Amir gave the command and his men retrieved two Stingers from their round containers and rushed them over to him.

  Akhtar and Pasha snagged a pair of wooden launcher mock-ups Harwich had carved out of tree branches to minimize handling the real thing during basic training. The Afghan men nodded approvingly and patted the boys on the back as they took their positions next to Akaa.

  Harwich ignored them while verifying that the battery coolant unit was in place inside the handle before shouldering the thirty-three-pound weapon and grasping the pistol grip with his right hand. Al-Amir copied his movements, just like in training—and to Harwich’s growing annoyance, so did his nephews, whose seriousness matched those of the craggy and unshaven warriors observing the live demonstration.

  Using his left hand, Harwich unfolded the antenna, removed the front-end cap, raised the sight assembly into position, and inserted the IFF interconnecting cable into the grip stock.

  The identification, friend or foe circuitry was designed to avoid shooting down friendly aircraft, though in these mountains every aircraft was a “foe.” Still, Harwich wanted to instill some level of discipline in these characters so they didn’t accidentally take down a commercial jetliner if they ever operated near the borders with Pakistan or Iran. But it wasn’t just the moral dilemma of killing hundreds of innocent passengers that made Harwich fastidious about his training. He was also trying to cover the Agency’s ass. Traditionally, the CIA provided insurgents with Soviet or Chinese-made weapons in order to plausibly deny its involvement. The Stinger had been a gross deviation from that policy. He’d even heard a congressional staffer say once that with the Stinger, Congress had finally popped the Agency’s cherry.