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
McFadden craned his neck around hard against the enormous forces pinning him against his seat, desperately searching for any sign of the enemy aircraft that might already be swinging around to slot in right behind him. But there was nothing. Just a churning cauldron of dark gray cloud.
Halfway through its tight, diving turn, his Raptor burst back out into the open air. Alarms blared through the cockpit. Alerted too late, McFadden whipped his head back around to the front . . . just in time to see the huge, propeller-driven Tu-142 directly ahead. “Oh, shit—”
Moving at more than five hundred knots, the F-22 slammed into the Russian reconnaissance plane’s right wing and sheared it off. McFadden was dimly aware of a tremendous, shattering impact that seemed to go on forever, but that could really only have lasted for milliseconds at most. Thrown forward against his straps with rib-smashing force, he saw a mass of blurred red caution and warning lights ripple across the cockpit.
Horrified, he looked up through his canopy and saw the Tu-142 tumbling out of control. Slowly, the huge aircraft rolled over on its left side, trailing debris and burning fuel from the jagged stub of its missing wing. Time to go, he thought groggily. Moving in what felt like slow motion, he reached down between his legs, gripped the ejection seat handle, and yanked hard.
Above McFadden, the F-22’s canopy blew off and spun away to one side. And then the ejection seat’s rocket motor fired. It hurled him up and out of the stricken Raptor—directly into the path of the razor-edged shards of metal spiraling down from the stricken Russian turboprop. Several fragments ripped through the ejection seat’s parachute before it could fully deploy. Others tore into the seat itself and killed him instantly.
A thousand meters higher, Major Vadim Kuryokhin’s Su-35 raced out of one of the towering columns of cloud—still hunting for the highly maneuverable American stealth fighter he’d been tangling with over the past few minutes. To his horror, he saw the Tu-142 spinning toward the ground, wreathed in flames from nose to tail as it fell. “My God, Ilya,” he shouted over the radio. “Those bastards just shot down our recon plane!”
“Two copies. Arming missiles,” his wingman replied coldly. Moments later, Troitsky called out, “Target locked. Missiles fired!”
“Shit-shit-shit-shit,” Lieutenant Allison “Cat” Parilla snarled, seeing the two heat-seeking missiles fall away from under the wings of the Su-35 that had just swung in a couple of miles behind her. Their motors ignited in bursts of flame. Trailing smoke, they streaked across the intervening sky, moving at more than two and a half times the speed of sound.
Immediately, she broke hard left, spiraling upward in a tight, climbing turn. Her thumb stroked the countermeasures button. Dozens of white-hot flares streamed out behind the F-22, each a miniature sun against the glowering mass of dark storm clouds on all sides. Seduced by the flares, both Russian missiles veered away and detonated harmlessly.