Giving up with a muttered curse, he reeled into the cockpit and dropped into his pilot’s seat. Sickeningly aware of the hot blood soaking the sleeve of his flight suit, Petrov reached out with his left hand and quickly brought up a menu on one of the MFDs. Blurry shapes appeared, and he tapped an icon that would retract the ladder and close and seal the belly hatch. With a sigh, he released the brakes and sat back in a daze—feeling the PAK-DA bomber start its programmed takeoff roll.

Flynn saw the big aircraft lurch into motion, lumbering forward out of the tentlike hangar, accompanied by a steadily increasing roar from its jet engines. The crew ladder extending from its hatch had started to slide upward and out of sight. “No fucking way,” he snarled. He threw the rifle aside, lowered his head, and ran even faster, plunging across the snow with rapidly lengthening strides.

Moving all out now, he raced under the bomber’s fuselage—heading for the open hatch he’d seen. It was already swinging shut. Frantically, he jumped high, caught hold of the coaming, and hauled himself up through a rapidly narrowing gap. He wriggled away onto a metal deck just as the hatch slammed shut and latched tight behind him. From the vibration and noise all around him, it was clear that the Russian aircraft was still moving . . . bouncing up and down as it trundled onto a rough runway created out of compacted snow and ice.

Oh, smooth move, Flynn thought wryly. He’d just managed to scramble aboard an enemy aircraft that was obviously getting ready to take off. That was all well and good, except that his personal piloting skills had topped somewhere around the model airplane stage. Maybe he should have stopped to think about this whole idea first. Now what was he supposed to do?

Well, when in doubt, improvise like hell, he decided. And, like Teddy Roosevelt said, carry a big stick. Or, in this case, a 9mm Glock 19. He got to his feet and drew his pistol before moving forward into the cockpit.

To Flynn’s surprise, although there were seats for four crewmen, only one, the pilot’s position, was occupied. A Russian Air Force officer, a colonel named Petrov according to the name tag on his flight suit, sat strapped in, bleeding profusely, ashen-faced, and clearly in terrible pain. Through the clear canopy, Flynn could see the snow-covered landscape sliding past at increasing speed as the stealth bomber rolled down the runway. He leveled his pistol at the pilot’s head. “Ostanovi etot samolet seychas zhe!” he snapped. “Stop this aircraft, now!”

To his surprise, Petrov forced an agonized smile. “Or what?” he retorted in lightly accented English. “You will shoot me? And then we crash?”

“Yeah, if that’s what it takes,” Flynn growled.

Still smiling crookedly, the Russian held up his empty left hand. His shattered right arm was immobile. “Shooting me will not change anything, Captain . . . Flynn,” he said tiredly, reading the name off Flynn’s own uniform. “I am no longer in control. The computers are.”