hoped, Luger had dredged up vital technical memories of his years in the United States Air Force and had applied his knowledge to a Soviet design-and the aircraft he remembered the most was the Old Dog. With the help of Viktor Gabovich's extensive brainwashing and personality-reprogramming procedures, Luger had unconsciously duplicated the Old Dog's weapons fit on the Tuman Fi- 170, and in doing so made it a much more formidable aircraft.

Although it was a stealth aircraft, Tuman had three hardpoints on each Wing for external stores, the philosophy being that all external stores would be jettisoned, and its stealth characteristics restored, long before it got within hostile radar range. On its two outboard wing hardpoints, Tuman carried two 1 ,500-dekaliter fuel tanks, which had already been jettisoned (on this mission, both tanks were empty and fitted with parachutes so they could be recovered and reused). On each center hardpoint, Tuman carried four long-range AS- 17

rocket-powered antiradar cruise missiles, developed at Fisikous and designed to destroy coastal early-warning and fighter-intercept radars before the bomber got within the enemy radar's effective range. The AS-17, which had a range of nearly two hundred kilometers, used inertial guidance to get close to the radar; it would then activate a seeker that would home in on the radar emissions and destroy the radar. On each inboard hardpoint, Tuman carried four AA-9 radar-guided air-to-air missiles for long-range bomber self-defense.

Tuman had two bomb bays along its centerline, each four meters wide and seven meters long, capable of carrying nine thousand kilograms of ordnance each. It would eventually be adapted to carry every air-launched weapon in the Soviet inventory-or whoever's inventory Tuman would eventually be in, although that was not a concern of the scientists at Fisikous.

For this test-bombing mission, however, it carried four huge 500-kilo gravity bombs in the aft bomb bay and two AS-l 1 laser-guided missiles in the forward bomb bay.

Internally, Tuman was something of a throwback; it served to highlight the Soviets'

deficiencies in advanced electronics. Tuman did have an electronic flight-control system and fly-by-wire technology, but it was a relatively low-tech analog system instead of a high-speed digital suite. The navigation system was a simple Doppler flight computer, operated by

"Strike" sitting in the copilot's seat, with intermittent position and velocity updates provided by the Commonwealth of Independent States' GLOSNASS satellite navigation system or by ground-mapping radar. The low-level navigation system was a standard ground-mapping radar, set into a cavernous nose bay that destroyed the plane's nose-on stealth characteristics, with a terrain-avoidance system spliced on top of it, similar to the G-model B-52-it simply painted a profile view of the terrain ahead. It provided no inputs whatsoever to the flight-control system, nor would it keep a pilot from flying into the hills.