Murphy interjected. “I concur, but with the caveat that we still urge caution by our air units operating near Russia’s southern frontier. If a Russian pilot really is trying to defect, I’d rather that we weren’t the ones who shot him down.”

“Doing so carries risks of its own,” Neary warned. “Even a single aircraft conducting a surprise strike can inflict a hell of a lot of damage using modern weapons.”

Taylor considered that carefully. “That’s true, General,” he said after a few moments. “But Director Murphy has a good point, which I’ll pass on to the president.” The defense secretary spread his hands. “Anyway, if the Russians are preparing a serious attack against us, they aren’t going to use just one plane—no matter how well it’s armed—” He broke off abruptly as new digital maps opened on the far wall. These depicted regions of northern and western China. More symbols appeared, thickly clustered near the People’s Republic of China’s border with Russia.

“We’ve received new satellite and SIGINT data, sir,” Admiral Chao confirmed. “All major fighter and SAM units assigned to the PRC’s Western and Northern Theater Commands have just gone on high alert.”

“Seems like Beijing’s getting spooked by the Russians, too,” Taylor said somberly. He reached for one of the secure links at his place. “It’s time I called the president.”

176th Air Defense Squadron, Alaska Air National Guard, Regional Air Operations Center, Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska

That Same Time

Staff Sergeant Peggy Baker sat up a little straighter in her swivel chair. She’d just caught a flash of movement on one of the multiple screens at her workstation. A small colored dot briefly appeared on the feed from the FPS-117 phased array radar at Barter Island. It faded out for a few seconds and then reappeared for another very short interval before disappearing completely.

For a moment, she was tempted to write off the blip as just a radar or weather anomaly. After all, seriously bad weather was closing in over the radar site and all of northern Alaska, complete with high winds and driving snow and ice storms. Then again, L-band radars weren’t affected by storms to the same degree as high-frequency equipment. So whatever that unidentified object was, it could be something real. And from the size of the reflection, it was also very small, no larger than a good-sized bird—but no bird in nature moved at that kind of speed, almost 450 knots. She picked up the phone to her supervisor. “Ma’am,” she told Lieutenant Colonel Carmen Reyes, “I may have picked up a bogey here. It could be nothing, but I think you should take a look at the track.”

“On my way,” Reyes said crisply. She hung up and trotted down the short flight of steps from the observation deck to the main floor of the operations center. It took her less than thirty seconds to reach Baker’s station. “Okay, Peggy, show me what you’ve got,” she ordered.

Rapidly, the sergeant entered a series of commands on her keyboard to pull up a recording of the data from Barter Island’s radar. Reyes leaned over her shoulder, watching as the faint blip appeared, moved slightly across the screen, vanished, and popped up again for a few short seconds. Based on the short observed track, if that was a genuine bogey, it had been heading almost due south across the coast about twenty nautical miles east of Kaktovik. She pursed her lips in thought. “Contact Anchorage Center. See if they know anything about a private jet or commercial airliner that’s gone astray up that way.”