One of the airmen manning their secure communications board turned toward him. “Sir? The Pentagon is on the line asking for you.”

Huber hid a grimace. Both NORAD headquarters and the Pentagon were receiving live feeds from the operations center here—which was normal, especially considering the extraordinarily high level of Russian air activity around Alaska’s perimeter. It had been a coin toss to guess which group of senior brass would be faster off the mark to horn in on this crisis situation. He took the phone. “Third Wing, Colonel Huber speaking.”

“Colonel?” a woman’s voice said in reply. “We’ve never met, but my name is Miranda Reynolds. I’m in charge of the CIA’s operations directorate.”

Huber felt his eyebrows go up. Of all the people he’d expected to be speaking to today, the chief of the CIA’s clandestine service definitely had not been on his list. “What can I do for you, Ms. Reynolds?” he asked cautiously, strongly suspecting that whatever it was, he wasn’t going to like it much. And the more he listened, the more he knew just how right he’d been.

The Pentagon, Washington, D.C.

That Same Time

Miranda Reynolds hung up the secure phone and looked around the table at the others present—who included Jonas Murphy, Bill Taylor, and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Well, the colonel bought it,” she said with a shrug. “He certainly wasn’t thrilled by the idea, but he’s okayed including members of our specialist go team in the search-and-rescue mission force. He thinks we want them along so they can comb through the wreckage of those Russian fighters and their reconnaissance plane.”

“Those downed aircraft might be all your people find,” General Frank Neary told her.

“That’s certainly possible,” Reynolds agreed coolly. “On the other hand, that Russian reconnaissance probe was pushed a lot harder than any of the others we’ve seen so far, wasn’t it?”

Neary and the others nodded somberly. Not only had the presence of Su-35s so far from the Russian mainland come as a very unwelcome surprise, but so had the willingness of those fighter pilots to mix it up so aggressively with the American aircraft sent to intercept them—aggression that had clearly led to disaster for both sides.

“My strong suspicion is that level of determination is itself evidence that Moscow knows something we don’t about the area their Tu-142 was searching,” Reynolds continued. “The Russians must have solid intelligence indicating their missing stealth bomber is hidden somewhere in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.”

From her position at the far end of the table, the Pentagon’s operations staff chief, Rear Admiral Kristin Chao, nodded. “I see your point. ANWR checks off all the boxes as a good place for this Colonel Petrov to conceal the PAK-DA prototype he stole.”

“Which is why I want our go team on the scene, ready to move in fast if it turns out I’m right,” Reynolds said firmly. “As bad as it was to suddenly lose all those aircraft, it may just have given us the chance we needed to beat Moscow to the prize.”