“Yes, sir,” the Air Force chief of staff agreed. “Several million square miles of ice, tundra, mountains, and forests for a start.”

Reynolds frowned. “Hold on, wouldn’t Petrov need a runway to land on—one long enough to handle a very large aircraft? Doesn’t that significantly limit the places we need to look? Even if he picked an abandoned airstrip or some remote, out-of-the-way airport—”

Neary shook his head. “It’s not that simple, I’m afraid. The Russians put a lot of emphasis on designing their combat aircraft to fly out of rough, improvised airfields. Given some luck and skill, all this guy would need to set down safely was a long enough stretch of compacted snow or ice.” He shrugged. “We fly C-130s onto a similar snowfield down at McMurdo Station in the Antarctic. Now, I sure wouldn’t try that myself with a heavy bomber, but I’m not a test pilot . . . or a Russian.”

“Can we task our satellites to do the job?” Taylor asked. “We’ve got a number of radar and photo-imaging platforms in orbit right now.”

Murphy answered this one. As DNI, both the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency fell under his authority. “We’d have to get very lucky,” he warned. “Satellite surveillance works best against fixed installations or other targets whose coordinates are at least generally known. Expecting our analysts to zero in on a single, heavily camouflaged aircraft out in the middle of all that territory would be like expecting them to win the lottery by buying one ticket.”

“So, a fifty-fifty shot, then,” Taylor said with a quirky grin.

Murphy matched him with a sardonic smile of his own. “I wouldn’t know, Bill. You’re the Pentagon’s resident Silicon Valley math nerd. By training, I’m just a simple country lawyer.”

“Coordinated searches by a large number of reconnaissance aircraft and drones equipped with air-to-ground radar would be a better bet,” Neary said. “At least inside our own airspace.”

Reynolds felt a frown cross her face. “Can we keep that kind of effort quiet?” she asked.

“From the media?” The Air Force chief of staff shook his head. “Probably not, ma’am. Any reasonably sized effort covering that much territory would involve dozens of aircraft and hundreds of aircrew. Word would be bound to leak out, no matter how big a classified label we slapped on the operation.”

Reynolds shook her head in dismay. “Which means we could end up with nothing for all our pains. Nothing, that is, except a massive ecological and political disaster and a lot of egg on all our faces.”

Taylor, Murphy, and the others nodded slowly, seeing her point. In his video, the Russian pilot had warned that any American attempt to seize the PAK-DA prototype without payment would result in its immediate destruction, along with devastating radiological consequences, thanks to the multiple 250-kiloton thermonuclear warheads stored in its weapons bays.

“That’s another thing,” the defense secretary said. “Is Petrov’s story about having a payload of nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard that bomber even remotely plausible?”