Parilla reversed her evasive turn and rolled into the clouds again. She’d seen the steering cue for McFadden’s Raptor vanish suddenly off her HUD. Now she knew why. The Russians had decided, for reasons of their own, to turn this cold air war hot. The green diamond identifying the Su-35 that had just tried to kill her slid into view, pulling out ahead of her aircraft as the other pilot desperately turned in an effort to bring her back into his sights.

“Too late, asshole,” she snapped, squeezing the trigger on her stick. One AIM-120 AMRAAM and then a second dropped out of her main weapons bay. They flashed away into the gray haze at Mach Four, already guided by their own internal active radar seekers, since the range was so short, essentially point-blank for missiles designed to reach out and kill at more than eighty nautical miles.

A dazzling orange flash lit the clouds. In that same moment, the target diamond blinked off her HUD, signaling the destruction of the enemy aircraft. But before she could fully savor the kill, shrill, chirping tones through her headset warned that the second Su-35 had locked on.

Reacting fast, Cat Parilla dove for the deck. More flares rippled out behind her violently maneuvering Raptor. One of the two missiles closing in on her chose a decoy instead and went off harmlessly in her curving wake. She never saw the second, which arrowed on through the spreading cloud of tiny suns and detonated just above her cockpit.

Major Vadim Kuryokhin saw the American F-22 stagger when his missile exploded. Slowly at first, and then faster, the Raptor rolled over and fell away, spewing smoke and fire. Eager to confirm his kill, he followed the stricken aircraft down into the clouds, tracking it by the red-tinged glow. Abruptly, it flashed brightly, spraying glittering sparks outward through the concealing gray mists.

Had that dying F-22 just blown up? he wondered. Deciding he’d seen enough, the Russian Su-35 pilot started to turn away—and slammed head-on into a jagged mountain peak shrouded in cloud. His fighter disintegrated in a ball of fire.

Some kilometers away, Alexei Petrov came outside into the blizzard’s unnatural darkness and freezing winds. Bondarovich’s men finally had the necessary repairs to their aircraft shelter in hand, freeing him to head back to camp for a short rest. He straightened up to his full height to stretch aching muscles . . . and then he stopped dead, staring off to the west.

A bright white glow lit the sky there, slowly falling through the darkness and thick clouds. Then, suddenly, it vanished with a blinding flash, followed by a dull red gleam in the distance that slowly faded away.

“What was that?” one of the exhausted mercenaries who’d followed him out of the shelter asked in astonishment. “Some sort of weird lightning from the storm?”

Petrov shook his head in dismay. “No,” he ground out slowly. “I think that was trouble for us. Very serious trouble.”