The other man shook his head. “Net shansov v adu. Not a chance in hell.”

“A pity,” Voronin commented dryly. Without taking his eyes off the fur trapper, now more than a hundred meters away, he reached out. Understanding his intent, Bondarovich handed him his scoped rifle. Briefly, Voronin inspected the weapon. It was a C14 Timberwolf, the civilian bolt-action rifle the Canadian military had selected to convert for use by its snipers. He nodded in appreciation.

Then he chambered a round, raised the rifle to his shoulder, and smoothly sighted through the scope. Gently, he squeezed the trigger.

Craack.

Struck squarely between the shoulder blades by a .338 Lapua Magnum round moving at nearly nine hundred meters per second, Jensen went down in a spray of red blood against the snow-white landscape. The American writhed once and lay still, sprawled like a rag doll on the hillside.

Voronin studied the dead man for a moment longer. Slowly, he lowered the rifle. “Make sure the body isn’t found.”

“That won’t be a problem,” Bondarovich assured him. “By the time anyone notices this American is missing, he’ll have vanished forever.”

“You seem very confident of that,” Voronin said.

Bondarovich nodded. “This Arctic wildlife refuge contains nearly eighty thousand square kilometers of wasteland. No search party can cover that kind of ground. For all that anyone will ever know, Jensen might as well have been snatched by the Na’in.”

“The Na’in?” Voronin asked.

“A mythical monster of the local native tribe, the Gwich’in,” the ex-Spetsnaz major explained. “Translated, it means ‘the Brush Man,’ a creature that wanders the woods alone in search of human prey.”

Over Southern Russia

That Same Time

Tupolev’s manta ray–shaped PAK-DA stealth bomber prototype streaked low across a darkened landscape west of the Don River. Occasional pockets of light marked small farming villages, and a string of glowing beads stretching from east to west outlined the path of the A-260 highway between Volgograd and the Ukrainian border near Donetsk. An advanced digital terrain-following system allowed the aircraft to stay as low as one hundred meters off the deck—climbing and diving in tiny increments of a few meters at a time as it raced across the steppe’s low, rolling hills and shallow ravines. Abruptly, it banked sharply to the right and soared higher, gaining altitude fast.

Inside the cockpit, Major Oleg Bunin kept his eyes on his displays. “We are executing an attack program,” he reported. His hands were in his lap, away from any controls.

From the left-hand pilot’s seat, Colonel Alexei Petrov nodded. “Copy that.” The altitude bar on his HUD stabilized at five thousand meters as their aircraft rolled back out of its turn and leveled off. Fighting the instinct to regain active control over the bomber, he locked the fingers of his own hands across his stomach. “Our engines are throttling back,” he announced, seeing the settings change without any input from him.

“Target selection,” Bunin said quietly, watching his own screens shift yet again. “Range one thousand kilometers.” He glanced across the cockpit. “That’s the dummy missile complex south of Ryazan.”