Zinchuk watched his altimeter very, very closely as it spun down, hoping like hell that the meteorology reports he’d been given were halfway accurate. If these clouds went all the way down to the ocean, he’d have to abort this mission—which would definitely not endear him to anyone in Moscow.

Then, at a little over five hundred meters, they came back out of the storm clouds into a faded, murky half-light. Through driving flurries of snow, the Tu-142’s command pilot caught glimpses of a desolate, windswept vista stretching away in all directions. Ridges of rafted sea ice unrolled below the reconnaissance aircraft’s enormous wings, growing larger as they lost still more altitude. Tight-lipped, he took his aircraft down even more before leveling off only two hundred meters above the barren ice cap.

This was a form of madness, Zinchuk knew. For all its many virtues—sheer endurance, payload, and powerful, long-range sensors among them—his mammoth turboprop was not at all designed to make low-level penetrating flights through enemy air defenses. Without any form of terrain-following radar or computer navigation, the slightest lapse in his concentration or control could lead to utter disaster.

But coming in practically right on the deck was the only way the Tu-142 could possibly hope to escape detection by the chain of American radars lining Alaska’s northern coast. Behind him, the two Su-35s reappeared, emerging out of the cloud layer again. Smoothly, the twin-tailed fighters slid forward into their assigned slots, one to his right, the other to his left.

“I’m picking up weak signals from an airborne radar!” Captain Sukachov, the Tu-142’s defense systems operator, abruptly reported over the intercom. With all of their active sensor systems still on standby to avoid prematurely revealing their presence, Sukachov’s radar warning receivers were their primary means of figuring out what the Americans ahead of them might be doing. “It’s a pulse Doppler system. Our computer evaluates it as an AN/APY-2 type.”

“What’s your assessment?” Zinchuk demanded.

“It’s an American E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft,” Sukachov told him. “From the bearing and signal strength, I’d estimate that it’s orbiting somewhere over western Alaska, probably near Nome.”

Based on prior experience, Zinchuk judged that was likely to be true. Any U.S. Air Force early-warning plane operating in that area was perfectly positioned to pick up Russian reconnaissance probes coming east from the Chukchi Peninsula, Asia’s easternmost point—one only a little over a hundred kilometers from American territory. “Can that E-3 spot us?” he asked.

“No, sir,” Sukachov said with complete assurance. “We’re well outside its radar’s effective range and much too low. As far as that enemy AWACS plane is concerned, we might as well be on the far side of the moon.”

Exult One-Five, RC-135V Rivet Joint ELINT (Electronic Intelligence) Aircraft, over Central Alaska

That Same Time

Eighty nautical miles west of Fairbanks, a large four-engine Boeing-designed aircraft orbited at high altitude. Antennas studded its exterior, allowing it to sift the airwaves for even the faintest electronic signal. Inside the RC-135V’s electronic-equipment-crammed aft cabin, Captain Amanda Jaffe knelt down next to Technical Sergeant Philip Kijac, one of the fourteen cryptologic language analysts aboard Exult One-Five. As the information integration officer aboard this flight, it was her job to fit together all the disparate fragments of intelligence its specialists gathered and somehow use them to develop a coherent picture. All too often that was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces were gray and half of them were missing.