The older man laughed and took a huge gulp before passing the flask up to Bunin, who did the same. “You surprise me, Petrov,” he joked. “I had you pegged as a bloodless technocrat. But now I see that you’re just as big a hell-raiser as your old man!”

Still smiling, Petrov retrieved his flask from Bunin and stowed it away again. Mavrichev had come very close to the truth there. Hell was precisely what he planned to raise. He toggled their secure tactical communications system. Like its strategic counterpart, it encrypted and compressed signals into millisecond-long blips before transmitting them. “Prizrachnyy Polet, Specter Flight, this is Shadow One,” he radioed. “We are descending to five hundred meters. Suggest you take station ten kilometers out in front of me for now. Stay a little higher, though, say one thousand meters.”

“Affirmative, Shadow One,” the lead Su-57 pilot replied. Even with the inherent distortion imposed by signals compression, he sounded confident, almost cocky. “We’ll swat any hostiles out of your way as needed.”

Petrov pushed his stick forward, beginning his descent. Through the canopy, he watched the two fighters pull out ahead. Seen from behind and below through the bomber’s sensitive IR sensors, the Su-57s were marginally brighter against the cold, starlit sky. Despite design features that significantly reduced their engine heat signatures, they were still more detectable from the aft quarter.

He shot a quick glance at Bunin. His copilot’s head slumped forward. The fast-acting drug he’d used to spike the vodka had taken effect. It was a fentanyl derivative, originally concocted by chemists for Russia’s Spetsnaz hostage rescue units. Another swift look over his shoulder showed that Mavrichev was also unconscious. Or perhaps dead. Mixing any fentanyl variant with alcohol was incredibly dangerous, often leading to total respiratory failure. As Bunin’s superior, he’d had access to the younger man’s medical records. When he concocted this plan months ago, he’d run those records past shady medical experts provided by Grishin’s go-between, Pavel Voronin. They’d assured him that his copilot’s risk of a fatal overdose was reasonably low. Mavrichev had no such guarantee.

Petrov shrugged. One more death would make no great difference to his conscience.

He leaned forward and checked the readouts from his navigation and sensor systems again. They matched. Except for the distant interceptors and AWACS planes patrolling far off to the east, there were no other air contacts for hundreds of kilometers in any direction. To clear the skies for this top secret Ghost Strike exercise, Russia’s air traffic controllers had temporarily diverted all routine civilian flights away from this isolated, almost uninhabited wilderness region. Effectively, his stealth bomber and its unwanted fighter escorts were all alone in the middle of nowhere.

Petrov grimaced. He was out of options. And almost out of time. Mavrichev’s surprise move to assign those fighters to this mission had boxed him in. At last, with a frustrated sigh, he entered a new series of commands on one of his displays. Four warbling tones echoed through his headset. Data from the PAK-DA’s thermal sensors had been successfully downloaded to four of the self-defense K-74M2 heat-seeking missiles carried in the bomber’s internal weapons bays. They were locked on target.