Contents ( 55)
- In Memoriam
- Epigraph
- Cast of Characters
- Americans
- Russians
- Canadian
- Prologue
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- Weapons and Acronyms
- Weapons
- Acronyms
- About the Author
- Also by Dale Brown
- Copyright
- About the Publisher
Accelerating smoothly to nine hundred knots, both Raptors streaked toward the distant Brooks Range.
Over Northern Alaska
A Short Time Later
As the Tu-142 climbed steadily through a swirling sea of gray cloud, Zinchuk was sure that his lumbering aircraft had now been detected. Sukachov’s reports of steadily increasing signal strengths from both the American E-3 AWACS plane and their ground radar station could yield no other possible conclusion. He spoke over the intercom. “Very well. The Americos know we’re here, so there’s no point in staying quiet. Activate all sensors!”
Acknowledgments from the electronics officers stationed in the forward and aft cabins rattled through his headset. Satisfied, he radioed his two fighter escorts. “Bodyguard, Prospector. Recommend you break away now. Use the mountains for cover and take station ahead of us.”
Aboard the rightmost Su-35, Major Vadim Kuryokhin heard Zinchuk’s suggestion with relief. Maintaining a safe distance from the colonel’s reconnaissance aircraft was incredibly difficult in this solid cloud layer, even with his fighter’s IRST, its infrared search and track system, picking up the other aircraft’s enormous heat signature. He’d been dreading the possibility of a fatal midair collision ever since they’d started climbing into this low-hanging mass of snow- and ice-swollen storm clouds.
He raised Troitsky in the other Su-35. “Okay, Ilya. Switch your radar on at low power and set synthetic aperture mode. We’re going down to play hide-and-seek ahead of Prospector. Stand by.”
“Two, standing by,” his wingman replied.
Kuryokhin pushed a button on the side of his left-hand multifunction display. Half the display lit up, showing a highly detailed, three-dimensional image of the surrounding mountains and twisting river valleys. Using its synthetic aperture mode, the Su-35’s IRBIS-E passive electronically scanned array radar mapped the ground ahead—making very low-altitude flight possible even in poor visibility. Swiftly, he sketched out a suggested flight path and sent it via data link to Troitsky.
He took a deep breath. This was going to be . . . a little hairy. “Very well, Two! Break away . . . now!” He pulled his stick sharply right, rolling the fighter into a diving turn away from the huge Tu-142. Down and down he plunged through the clouds with his eyes practically glued to the images on his glowing MFD. A jagged mass of rock, the spire of a thousand-meter-high peak, loomed ahead, growing with alarming speed, and he quickly rolled back to the left to dodge around it.
Then Kuryokhin banked hard right again and pulled back on the stick a little, leveling off as he broke out of the clouds only a few hundred meters above the ground. There, in a widening gap between steep, ice-sheathed slopes and even higher rocky cliffs, he picked out the trace of a frozen river through the snow—like a gray-silver snake winding through white sand. His Su-35 turned to follow it, and he pushed his throttles forward to accelerate out ahead of Zinchuk’s now-invisible Tu-142 as it climbed higher above the clouds. In his rearview mirror, he saw Troitsky’s plane swing in behind him. Curving back and forth along the meandering valley, the two twin-tailed Russian jets flew onward.