Gently, he squeezed the trigger on his stick.

With a high-pitched whine, two bays under the wings cycled open. And one by one, four missiles were dropped into the air and ignited. Trailing smoke and fire, they slashed across the night sky—streaking toward their assigned targets at more than two and a half times the speed of sound.

All four missiles covered the distance in less than six seconds.

Taken completely by surprise by this treacherous attack, neither Su-57 pilot had time to realize what was happening—let alone take evasive or defensive action. Four blinding flashes lit the darkness. Ripped apart by proximity-fused warheads, both Su-57s tumbled out of the sky, strewing burning debris across the snow-covered forest below.

Horrified by what he had just done and yet strangely exultant, Petrov banked his stealth bomber to the left, rolling to the northeast toward the frozen Arctic coast now eighteen hundred kilometers ahead. He deleted Bunin’s half-completed flight plan from the computer and substituted his own—one he had prepared over the course of the past several weeks. Whatever else happened, he was fully committed now. There was no going back.

Sixteen

National Defense Management Center, Moscow

Several Hours Later

President Piotr Zhdanov lit another cigarette, drew on it for a moment, and then, irritably, stubbed it out in an already-overflowing ashtray. The soft, background hum of the secure conference room’s ventilation system rose slightly in pitch as overhead fans strained smoke out of the air. Sophisticated electronics and tobacco contaminants were not a good mix.

Zhdanov looked up at the wall-sized map display again. Glowing concentric rings showed the estimated detection ranges for active radar stations across Russia’s Far East region. Other rings depicted the engagement zones for S-300 and S-400 surface-to-air missile units. Fighter icons showed the current reported locations for patrols scouring the skies for any sign of the PAK-DA stealth bomber prototype. He scowled. Nothing seemed to have changed.

At first, the apparent inability of Russia’s alerted air defense networks to catch even a fleeting glimpse of Petrov’s stealth aircraft had seemed like good news to Zhdanov and his military commanders. It was seen as a sign that Tupolev’s vaunted bomber prototype was living up to its promise. But as the hours ticked past in silence, this early optimism had given way to a growing sense of unease.

Impatiently, Zhdanov swung around on Lieutenant General Yvgeny Rogozin. “Well? Where are they? What the devil is going on?”

“I’m not sure,” Rogozin admitted hesitantly. The chief of Russia’s Air Force used a control to sketch a glowing line across the digital wall map—one that crossed the coast considerably north of Vladivostok and then curved back over the Pacific Ocean toward Ghost Strike’s assigned targets. “It’s possible that Petrov has chosen a longer, more elaborate flight path to evade our defenses. Fully fueled, the aircraft has more than enough endurance to fly a route something along these lines. But there is a problem with this theory—”

“Which is the simple fact that those Su-57 fighters Mavrichev added to the strike package don’t have anywhere near that kind of range,” Zhdanov interrupted acidly.