“What have you got for me, Kij?” she asked.

In answer, he brought up a recording of the weak radio transmissions several of their antennas had picked up a few minutes earlier. Jaffe plugged her headset into his console and listened along to the series of hissing crackles, squeaks, and pops. “Encrypted voice transmissions?” she guessed.

Kijac nodded. “Yes, ma’am, that’s my read.”

“Coming from where?”

He opened a map on his computer screen. “Those signals originated somewhere along a bearing of roughly zero-zero-five degrees from our current position. Triangulating backward and judging by the signal strength when we picked them up, I’d estimate those transmissions were coming from around . . . here.” With a stylus, he tapped a point near the top of his digital map. It was far north of their RC-135V, well out over the ocean.

Jaffe frowned. “That’s what? Nearly three hundred nautical miles off our coast?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kijac agreed. “Which also puts them outside the range of any of our North Warning System sites.”

Reflexively, she tapped a finger against her lips, thinking things through. “Could that have been one of those big Russian recon aircraft reporting back to its home base?”

The specialist shook his head. “I don’t think so. A signal like that would have been a lot more powerful and much easier for us to pick up. No, ma’am, this sounds more to me like multiple aircraft talking to each other, using a real low-powered tactical frequency.”

Jaffe nodded, seeing his point. “Can you match those transmissions with anything else in our databases?” she asked.

Radio transmissions and other electronic signals recorded by RC-135V Rivet Joint ELINT flights all went into giant computer data archives for later analysis and comparison against other intelligence. Transmissions that could be definitively paired with types of aircraft performing distinct activities—things like landings and takeoffs, bombing runs, simulated dogfights and missile launches, and air reconnaissance reports, for example—were especially valuable, since they could be matched against new signals to speed up the process of figuring out what they meant. The system was similar to that used by the U.S. Navy to identify other submarines from passive sonar recordings of their unique acoustic signatures.

“I think so,” Kijac said. “I’ve got the computer running a comparison screen now.” As he spoke, a series of lights lit up along the side of his display. Rapidly, his fingers tapped the touch screen, opening a series of graphs that showed the signal characteristics of the transmissions they’d just detected matched against earlier recordings. He expanded one. “There we go. That’s a match, all right, with a ninety-plus percent certainty.”

Jaffe eyed the computer’s assessment with interest. “So it thinks the signals we picked up were from Russian multirole combat aircraft, either Su-27s or Su-35s, carrying out some kind of air-to-air refueling exercise?” The specialist nodded.

She frowned. Why were the Russians sending frontline fighters so far out from their usual bases? She checked the meteorology plot and her frown grew even deeper. Those faint radio signals had come from right in the middle of a developing storm front. Air-to-air refueling was never a trivial maneuver, even in good weather. And in bad weather, even at high altitude, the aircraft involved would have been contending with high winds and significant turbulence. She shook her head. Whatever was going on out there, this was no routine training mission. Not even the Russians were crazy enough to try a risky refueling op so far from any friendly base, not when a failure would likely doom both the fighter itself and its pilot. Not without a really pressing reason.