He leaned forward, trying hard to see something, anything, through the swirling gray haze ahead of his Raptor. His radar said an Su-35 was out there ahead of him, no more than a few hundred yards away. But he couldn’t make out anything, not even a quick, fleeting glimpse of a camouflaged wingtip or tail fins or a clear canopy. His teeth clenched hard. Chasing these Russian fighters around this storm front was like playing blindman’s bluff with everybody blindfolded, not just whoever was “it” . . . and stuck at the same time inside one of those whirligig carnival rides that spun unpredictably in every direction.

Inside the Tu-142 reconnaissance aircraft’s forward cabin, Captain Yuri Bashalachev peered intently at his hooded scope. As the plane’s bombardier-navigator, he had primary control over its powerful Korshun-KN-N search radar. Ever since Colonel Zinchuk ordered their sensors to activate, he’d been using the system to scan the terrain below them. From this altitude, the Korshun had a search radius of more than 250 kilometers, even through the intervening haze of obscuring cloud and wind-driven snow and ice. Around and around, the radar’s rotating beam swept hypnotically—turning up nothing but a seemingly endless jumble of mountain peaks and low-lying valleys.

And then something flashed briefly on the screen. Something that didn’t look at all natural.

Suddenly excited, Bashalachev pressed his face even harder against the radar display’s hood. His fingers raced across his controls, tweaking them to focus in on what appeared to be a wider valley on the southern fringe of this vast range of higher peaks and lower ridges and hills. And then he saw it again, near one end of the valley. He froze the image, staring hard at what he saw.

Those straight and angled shapes, partial and oddly blurred though they were, were definitely not natural, the bombardier-navigator decided instantly. He checked the coordinates against the map pinned up next to his station. Just as he’d thought, this entire region was supposed to be nothing but uninhabited wilderness. Excitedly, he toggled his intercom mike. “Colonel, radar here! Contact, contact, contact! Probable man-made structure. I think it might be what we’ve been looking for!”

“Where?” the Tu-142 commander pilot demanded.

Bashalachev peered down again at his scope. “At our nine o’clock now,” he reported. “About twenty kilometers to the east.”

“Nice work, Yuri! We’re coming around to make another pass over the target,” Zinchuk told him.

Immediately, the huge plane banked sharply to the left, turning steeply to circle back toward what its radar had picked up. Over the intercom, Bashalachev heard the colonel on the radio to Moscow. “Operations Control, this is Prospector. Silver Lode. Repeat, Silver Lode.”

“Silver Lode” was the short code phrase indicating the possible—but not certain—discovery of the stolen PAK-DA stealth bomber on the ground.

At that same moment, Captain Connor “Doc” McFadden saw one of the Su-35s emerge out of the murk—headed straight at him. Desperately, he yanked his stick hard right, hurling the F-22 into another brutal, high-g, diving turn to avoid a possible collision. The Russian fighter roared past no more than a few yards above him and then disappeared as suddenly as it had come.