by Dale Brown
And then Sam Kerr burst out of the forest. Leaning far over, she slewed her small motorbike almost sideways through a sharp turn—straightening out only when she was headed right at the Rustler. She skidded to a stop just yards short of the ramp.
Wearily, she climbed off the motorcycle. But then, both physically and emotionally spent, she slumped to her hands and knees. In a flash, Ian Schofield was on his own feet. Slinging his carbine, he threw one arm across her shoulders and helped her up. Together, they staggered across the clearing and up the ramp into the waiting aircraft.
“Go! Go! Go!” Schofield yelled. “I have Ms. Kerr! We’re inside!”
“On it,” Brad replied. He tapped a control on his display. A high-pitched hydraulic whine penetrated the cockpit as the ramp closed and sealed. He advanced the throttles. Outside the cockpit, the Rustler’s four large turbofans spooled up. He glanced at Nadia with a crooked grin. “Okay, now comes the hard part.”
She nodded silently. They’d lost the element of surprise. The Russians knew they were here. And now their only way home meant crossing almost two thousand miles of heavily defended hostile airspace . . . in broad daylight.
Inside the Rustler’s cramped passenger compartment, Ian Schofield finished strapping himself in. He studied Samantha Kerr for a few moments. The slender Scion agent looked exhausted and deeply sad. He unclipped a hydration pouch from his combat webbing, unscrewed the top, and offered it to her.
She took a small sip. Her eyes widened slightly. “That’s not water.”
“Indeed not,” Schofield agreed. He took out another pouch and raised it in a toast. “To absent friends and comrades.”
Blinking back tears, Sam imitated him. “To Marcus and Davey. They were the best,” she said quietly.
Schofield nodded. “That they were.”
With a sigh, she closed her eyes and leaned back against the bulkhead as the aircraft lifted off and banked sharply back to the north.
Twenty-One
National Defense Control Center, Moscow
That Same Time
Marshal Mikhail Leonov listened to Lieutenant General Varshavsky’s bad news in silence. His face showed no discernible emotion. At last, the commander of Russia’s Central Military District finished his dreary litany of disaster—two advanced Ka-52 helicopters shot down, one Mi-8 transport ambushed and blown up while landing, and nearly thirty Russian soldiers and airmen dead . . . along with at least two of the Scion agents they’d hoped to capture alive.
“So what is the situation now?” he asked calmly when Varshavsky fell silent.
“I’ve ordered my helicopter units to fall back and regroup at Lesosibirsk,” the other man admitted.
Leonov nodded. That was a sensible move. Without support from the two downed helicopter gunships, the Spetsnaz force’s surviving troop carriers were easy prey for the Americans’ missile-armed stealth aircraft. He looked at the blurry picture hastily snapped by a combat cameraman aboard one of the retreating Mi-8s. It showed a distinctive black flying-wing-shaped airplane, one that bore a striking resemblance to the much-larger U.S. Air Force B-2 Spirit stealth bomber. When the photograph was taken, it was flying at very low altitude with its landing gear deployed.
He looked back at Varshavsky. “And you’re sure the Scion aircraft made a rough field landing after your helicopters retreated?”
“Yes, sir,” the general said. “But it took off again within minutes.”
“Then at least one of the enemy agents is still alive,” Leonov commented. “And on board that aircraft.”
Varshavsky nodded. No other conclusion made sense. He looked stricken, like a man told he had an incurable disease. “My resignation will be on your desk this evening, Marshal,” he said wearily. “I take full responsibility for this fiasco.”
“Resignation?” Leonov snorted. “Don’t be ridiculous, Nikolai. This wasn’t your fault. We sent your troops out on a rabbit hunt . . . only to learn that we were chasing a bear instead.” He shrugged. “What is it the Americans themselves say? Sometimes you get the bear—”
“And sometimes the bear gets you,” Varshavsky finished grimly.
“Then let’s have no more of this defeatist talk about resigning,” Leonvov told him. “Send your Spetsnaz detachments back in, on the ground this time. I want that cabin and its surroundings searched from top to bottom for any equipment or documents those Scion spies may have been forced to leave behind. But make sure your troops are careful. We’ve just paid a high price to learn our enemies have a nasty habit of planting booby traps.”
Vashavsky nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Leonov swiped an icon on the screen, closing his secure video connection with Yekaterinburg. He swiveled toward another LED display, this one currently linked to the headquarters of Russia’s Aerospace Forces. Colonel General Semyon Tikhomirov’s worried face looked back at him. “Comments, Semyon?”
Tikhomirov frowned. “How could this enemy aircraft have penetrated so far into the Motherland?”
“We underestimated Sky Masters technology,” Leonov said bluntly. “And not for the first time.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Perhaps the Americans have successfully developed a stealth air refueling tanker after all.”
“That would be . . . unfortunate,” Tikhomirov agreed slowly. Several years before there had been reports indicating the U.S. Air Force was interested in applying stealth technology to a new class of tanker aircraft—with the idea of greatly extending the effective combat range of its F-35 Lightning II and F-22 Raptor stealth fighters.
“So it would,” Leonov agreed. “But what matters most right now is that we intercept that Scion plane before it escapes.”
Tikhomirov nodded. “Per your earlier orders, the 712th Guards Regiment has four MiG-31 fighters at Kansk-Dalniy armed, fueled, and ready for takeoff.”
“Then get them in the air,” Leonov told him. Those long-range supersonic interceptors should be over Lesosibirsk in less than fourteen minutes. Based on radar data and visual observations made during earlier encounters, the Scion stealth aircraft was subsonic only, with a top speed around 900 kph. Even with its current head start, the enemy plane shouldn’t be able to escape its MiG-31 pursuers.
“What instructions should I give my pilots?” Tikhomirov asked. “Do you want them to try to force the Americans down?”
Regretfully, Leonov shook his head. Much as he’d hoped to take at least one of the enemy intelligence operatives alive, the risks were now too great. Learning that the stealth aircraft had air-to-air missiles of its own had changed the whole calculus. “Tell them to shoot that plane out of the sky, Semyon,” he ordered. “The time for clever spy games is over.”
Over Central Siberia
A Few Minutes Later
Eighty nautical miles and ten minutes after taking off again, the XCV-70 Rustler zoomed north over the rugged chain of thickly wooded hills paralleling the Yenisei River valley’s eastern rim. Flying at 450 knots, with its terrain-following system active, the Scion stealth aircraft automatically pitched up to clear the ridges and hills in its path. And then it just as quickly dove back down into the sheltering embrace of the valleys beyond.
Brad clenched his teeth in concentration and banked right—steering into a tree-lined notch between two steeper hills that were each more than a thousand feet high. Even with the Rustler’s DTF system holding them only two hundred feet above the ground, he wanted to take advantage of every piece of radar-masking cover he could find.
“Caution, multiple airborne L-band and X-band passive phased-array radars detected at five o’clock,” their computer reported suddenly. “Estimated range is one hundred and eighty miles. Detection probability at this altitude is currently nil.”
Nadia leaned forward in her right-hand seat. She pulled up a menu on her threat-warning display, watching while the computer compared the signatures of those radar emissions against its database. “The radar signatures match the Zaslon-M system,” she told him.
Brad n
odded tightly. Zaslon-Ms were the powerful radars carried by Russia’s upgraded MiG-31BM interceptors. And their pre-mission intelligence brief had identified the Foxhound regiment stationed at Kansk-Dalniy as the most serious potential threat in this area. “Those guys are hellishly quick off the mark.”
“Too quick,” Nadia said quietly.
Normally it took more time to prep modern fighter aircraft for a combat sortie. Which meant the Russians had those planes armed up and ready to fly long before they’d tangled with those helicopters near the LZ. Brad grimaced. “You ever get the uncomfortable feeling that the bad guys are reading our minds?”
“Marshal Leonov is not a fool,” Nadia agreed. She checked her threat-warning display again. By tracking small changes in the enemy radars’ observed bearing and signal strength, her computer could estimate the heading and speed of those still-distant MiG-31 fighters. “I count four MiGs coming our way,” she reported. “Probable speed is eight hundred knots. They’re supersonic.”
“Okay, that is definitely not good,” Brad admitted. He rolled back left to steady up heading due north again. If nothing changed, those Russian fighter jets were going to be right on top of them in thirty minutes or less. Staying low in all this ground clutter would significantly decrease the range at which the enemy’s phased-array radars could detect and track their stealthy Rustler—maybe even down to ten or fifteen miles. But it wouldn’t make them completely invisible, not on radar, not against infrared search and track systems, and certainly not against the Mark I eyeball. The XCV-70’s black radar-absorbent coating made excellent camouflage at night. In daylight it would stand out like a sore thumb.
“Then what can we do?” Nadia asked after he ran through his reasoning with her.
“Well, when I was a kid, the first rule of hide-and-seek was never to be where the other guy figured you’d be,” Brad said with a quick, slashing grin. He toggled a control on his stick. “DTF disengaged.”
He pulled back slightly and to the left. They climbed to a thousand feet and rolled into a turn to the northwest, then leveled off. Ahead through the canopy, the broad blue curve of the Yenisei River stretched across the horizon. “I figure it’s high time we shook the dust off those big new engines of ours,” he said, advancing his throttles all the way forward. “Let’s take this baby supersonic.”
The roar of their turbofan engines deepened and grew louder. Their airspeed rose, climbing steadily past 500 knots, beyond Mach 1, and up to 750 knots. As they accelerated, forested hills and valleys seemed to leap toward them, rushing past and below on either side of the cockpit. Only a couple of minutes later, they streaked back over the Yenisei—crossing the mile-wide river in less than five seconds.
“We are burning a lot of fuel,” Nadia warned, studying her system readouts.
Brad nodded. Running their low-bypass Affinity engines at supersonic speeds increased the XCV-70’s fuel consumption by around 50 percent. That was a hell of a lot more efficient than older jet engines that had to go to afterburner to hit supersonic speeds . . . but it was still a heavy drain on their reserves.
Based on the mission flight plan he’d worked out before they took off from Yellowknife, he could only kick the Rustler above Mach 1 for twenty-five to thirty minutes, tops. Since their fuel consumption on the high-altitude flight into Russia had been lower than predicted, he thought he could eke out another couple of minutes of supersonic flight if necessary. But pushing much beyond those limits increased the chances that their fuel tanks would run dry somewhere over the Arctic. And since a crash landing out on the polar ice was practically the textbook definition of a “non-survivable aviation event,” that seemed like a really bad idea.
“We’ll stay supersonic just long enough to put us out pretty far ahead and off to the west of our predicted track,” Brad promised. “With luck, that’ll fox those MiG-31 pilots. For a while, anyway.”
Watching their flight path as it arrowed northwest across her navigation display, Nadia saw what he intended. The enemy fighters hunting them were still headed due north, now flying along a steadily diverging course. The MiG pilots were obviously acting on the logical assumption that their quarry would take the shortest, most fuel-efficient route out of Russian airspace. And since they didn’t know the Rustler could go supersonic for short sprints, their calculations of when they should intercept the Scion aircraft were going to come up short . . . off by dozens of miles.
National Defense Control Center
Thirty Minutes Later
Leonov sat at his workstation, listening intently to the radio chatter between Tikhomirov’s MiG-31 crews. Arrow-shaped icons moving northward across a large digital map showed them flying at five thousand meters over the jagged highlands of the Central Siberian Plateau, well to the east of the Yenisei River. The four supersonic interceptors were deployed across a two-hundred-kilometer-wide front—using their APD-518 digital air-to-air data links to share sensor information.
“Phantom Lead, this is Three,” one of the pilots reported, sounding frustrated even through the hissing static. “I still do not have any radar, thermal, or visual contacts. Repeat, no contacts. The sky’s totally empty.”
“Same here, Three,” the senior MiG pilot radioed back. “But stay sharp. That American stealth plane can’t be too far ahead of us.”
Leonov frowned. Something had gone wrong with this planned intercept. Based on relative airspeeds and predicted courses, he’d expected at least one of the MiG-31s to spot that fleeing Scion aircraft by now. Their powerful radars were optimized to pick out low-flying targets. So either the enemy plane’s stealth technology was considerably more effective than seemed possible and the MiGs had somehow already flown right past it . . . or . . . We’re looking in the wrong place, he realized suddenly. The Americans hadn’t followed a straight-line course to escape. They must have veered away to the east or to the west, dodging Tikhomirov’s fighters as they raced north.
“Mother of God,” the other man muttered when he contacted him with his suspicions. “I think you’re right, Mikhail. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.”
“Order the MiGs to spread their search pattern wider,” Leonov snapped. “Send two of them northwest and the other two northeast. That Scion plane hasn’t disappeared off the face of the earth. It’s out there, somewhere.”
Tikhomirov nodded rapidly. “I also have Beriev-100 AWACS aircraft and more fighters taking off from bases near Moscow and Murmansk.”
Leonov shook his head. “They’ll be too late and too slow. Our MiG-31s are the only aircraft with any realistic hope of intercepting the enemy before they cross our Arctic coast.”
“Those fighters have been supersonic for a long time,” Tikhomirov warned. “Even with drop tanks, they’ll be running up against the edge of their combat radius pretty soon.”
“Screw their combat radius,” Leonov growled, feeling his temper finally snap under the accumulated frustrations of the day. “If necessary, they can divert to Norilsk or Novy Urengoye.” Both far northern airports had runways that could handle MiG-31s. He glared at the screen. “Tell your pilots to find that damned stealth plane and kill it—at all costs.”
Twenty-Two
Scion Seven-Zero, over the West Siberian Plain
A Short Time Later
A seemingly endless marshland cut by innumerable small, stagnant streams unrolled ahead of the XCV-70 Rustler as it streaked north. Red-tinged late afternoon sunlight sparkled off the surface of hundreds of ponds and small lakes. There were no signs of human habitation, no roads or villages anywhere in sight. This vast stretch of flat, featureless country was almost wholly untouched and unspoiled by modern man.
Strapped into his seat in the Rustler’s cramped cockpit, Brad McLanahan rolled his tight shoulders, trying to loosen them up a little. His muscles ached with the strain of flying so fast and so low for so long. Knowing that they were being hunted by an implacable enemy bent on revenge only added to his growing tension.
One side of his mouth twisted in a wry smile. The good news about flying over this vast, trackless swamp was that he didn’t have to worry about slamming into trees or sharp-edged ridges or electric power pylons. The bad news was the reverse of the same coin. If they ran into a roving Russian fighter patrol or a surface-to-air missile battery out here, there was no cover at all—no higher ground to mask them from enemy radar and let them slip safely past.
“We are down to thirty-six percent of our fuel,” Nadia reported from her right-hand seat. She had several status menus open on her MFDs. To make it possible for Brad to focus wholly on flying, she was monitoring their engines, avionics, and combat systems.
“Copy that,” he replied. He forced a cheerful tone. “Kinda makes me wish I’d stashed a few more cans of jet fuel in the back.”
The twenty-minute supersonic sprint he’d made earlier had enabled them to evade the first Russian attempt at interception. But the cost had been high. They were still more than fifteen hundred miles from the nearest possible point where they could safely rendezvous with a Sky Masters air tanker. Added to that was the inescapable fact that low-altitude flying drank fuel at an alarming rate. Taking the Rustler up into the thinner air at thirty or forty thousand feet would be a heck of a lot more fuel-efficient . . . except for the fact that it would also get them blown out of the sky by Russian SAMs or air-to-air missiles.
“How bad is this?” Nadia asked seriously.
“Remember that animated movie?” Brad said. “The one where the drunken sea captain climbs out onto the nose of a plane and belches alcoholic fumes into its tank to keep them flying just a few seconds longer?”
