Arctic Storm Rising

Twenty-One

Under the ECR’s bright overhead lighting, it was impossible to tell that it was still pitch-dark outside, with more than an hour remaining before the sun rose. But in a concession to the early morning hour, coffee carafes and china cups were set out along the large central conference table.

Jonas Murphy took a cautious sip from a steaming cup and then set it back down. Miranda Reynolds, seated next to him, raised an eyebrow. “Any good?” she asked.

“It seems to contain caffeine,” the director of national intelligence said thoughtfully, after a moment’s consideration. “Apart from that, I refuse to testify on the grounds that it might insult our hosts.”

From his position at the head of the table, Bill Taylor chuckled. “Flattery won’t get you anywhere, Jonas.” Then the secretary of defense nodded to Reynolds. “Glad you could join us this morning, Ms. Reynolds. I understand we have you to thank for the extraordinary video we’ve all seen?”

“Yes, Mr. Secretary,” the CIA’s chief of clandestine operations said. The short recording he referred to was from a Russian Air Force pilot, Colonel Alexei Petrov. In it, he claimed to have successfully stolen Moscow’s much-touted stealth bomber prototype. The video had been emailed to her through the same covert server used by the shadowy Russian contact she’d met in Prague. She’d immediately relayed it to Murphy, who, in turn, had passed it straight on to the defense secretary and the Joint Chiefs. Before she’d even had time to finish dressing, she’d received a secure call summoning her to this early morning conference.

“So what’s your assessment of this message?” Taylor asked, not beating around the bush. “Is it genuine?”

Reynolds pursed her lips. “The man speaking does appear to be the real Alexei Petrov,” she said. “His facial features are a perfect match with other verified photos in our databases.” The CIA, like other intelligence agencies, amassed huge amounts of information on foreign government officials, military officers, business leaders, and the like — most of it from publicly available sources, including newspaper and magazine articles, television news broadcasts, and even internet sites. “And we can confirm that he’s regarded as one of Russia’s top test pilots, especially for multi-engine aircraft. Given that, it would be logical to expect him to head up their stealth bomber flight test program.”

“But is there anything in the guy’s record to suggest that he’d pull a stunt like this?” General Frank Neary asked suspiciously. The Air Force chief looked plainly skeptical. “I mean, Jesus, actually flying away with the most expensive and advanced experimental aircraft in the whole Russian inventory? That’s not exactly like walking into an embassy somewhere and asking for political asylum!”

“No, sir,” Reynolds admitted. “From what we know, Colonel Petrov was a highly decorated, highly regarded officer, one of apparently unquestioned loyalty.” She smiled slightly. “Then again, if there were any obvious reasons for Moscow to believe he might defect, Petrov would be in a Russian military prison or dead, and not sending us demand notes from a stolen high-tech aircraft.”

Murphy leaned forward. “Plus, he’s looking at a potential cut of several billion dollars,” he pointed out. “That’s a darned strong possible motivation, right there.”

The other men and women around the table nodded in agreement. In his recorded message, the Russian pilot had made it clear that this was an auction, with the PAK-DA bomber going to the highest bidder.

“Then you think this is the real deal?” Taylor pressed. “That one of Russia’s top test pilots is actually trying to sell us his country’s most valuable aircraft? A stealth bomber that he’s already got safely parked in some secret hiding place?”

Miranda Reynolds shot a quick sideways glance in Murphy’s direction. The DNI shrugged slightly, as if to say that it was her call. Her mouth tightened. If she walked all the way out on a limb here, what were the odds that he wouldn’t just saw it off behind her the moment anything went wrong? Along with selective leaking, blame shifting was almost a professional sport for senior government officials and politicians alike… and Jonas Murphy, she reminded herself, was a man who wore both hats. It was effectively a coin toss, she decided. Then again, her fingerprints were already all over this bizarre situation. She wasn’t going to be able to duck the responsibility, no matter how things went down. So she raised her chin and looked straight at the secretary of defense. “Yes, sir, I do. Crazy as they sound, Petrov’s claims fit the facts we see.”

Taylor’s eyes gleamed approvingly behind his thick, black-framed glasses. “Okay then. We’ll proceed, for now, on the assumption that this Russian colonel has possession of an experimental stealth bomber that we’d sure like to have… and that Moscow desperately wants back.” He turned to Neary. “If we want to find Petrov first, General, where should we be looking?”

“I had the Air Staff work the problem, using our best guesses as to the PAK-DA bomber’s fuel load and flight characteristics,” Neary told him. “Their analysis strongly indicates Petrov must have landed somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere — anywhere from Russia itself to Alaska, northern Canada, or possibly Greenland. Maybe even somewhere out on the polar ice cap itself.”

“That’s a hell of a big patch to search,” Taylor commented wryly.

“Yes, sir,” the Air Force chief of staff agreed. “Several million square miles of ice, tundra, mountains, and forests for a start.”

Reynolds frowned. “Hold on, wouldn’t Petrov need a runway to land on — one long enough to handle a very large aircraft? Doesn’t that significantly limit the places we need to look? Even if he picked an abandoned airstrip or some remote, out-of-the-way airport—”

Neary shook his head. “It’s not that simple, I’m afraid. The Russians put a lot of emphasis on designing their combat aircraft to fly out of rough, improvised airfields. Given some luck and skill, all this guy would need to set down safely was a long enough stretch of compacted snow or ice.” He shrugged. “We fly C-130s onto a similar snowfield down at McMurdo Station in the Antarctic. Now, I sure wouldn’t try that myself with a heavy bomber, but I’m not a test pilot… or a Russian.”

“Can we task our satellites to do the job?” Taylor asked. “We’ve got a number of radar and photo-imaging platforms in orbit right now.”

Murphy answered this one. As DNI, both the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency fell under his authority. “We’d have to get very lucky,” he warned. “Satellite surveillance works best against fixed installations or other targets whose coordinates are at least generally known. Expecting our analysts to zero in on a single, heavily camouflaged aircraft out in the middle of all that territory would be like expecting them to win the lottery by buying one ticket.”

“So, a fifty-fifty shot, then,” Taylor said with a quirky grin.

Murphy matched him with a sardonic smile of his own. “I wouldn’t know, Bill. You’re the Pentagon’s resident Silicon Valley math nerd. By training, I’m just a simple country lawyer.”

“Coordinated searches by a large number of reconnaissance aircraft and drones equipped with air-to-ground radar would be a better bet,” Neary said. “At least inside our own airspace.”

Reynolds felt a frown cross her face. “Can we keep that kind of effort quiet?” she asked.

“From the media?” The Air Force chief of staff shook his head. “Probably not, ma’am. Any reasonably sized effort covering that much territory would involve dozens of aircraft and hundreds of aircrew. Word would be bound to leak out, no matter how big a classified label we slapped on the operation.”

Reynolds shook her head in dismay. “Which means we could end up with nothing for all our pains. Nothing, that is, except a massive ecological and political disaster and a lot of egg on all our faces.”

Taylor, Murphy, and the others nodded slowly, seeing her point. In his video, the Russian pilot had warned that any American attempt to seize the PAK-DA prototype without payment would result in its immediate destruction, along with devastating radiological consequences, thanks to the multiple 250-kiloton thermonuclear warheads stored in its weapons bays.

“That’s another thing,” the defense secretary said. “Is Petrov’s story about having a payload of nuclear-armed cruise missiles aboard that bomber even remotely plausible?”

“If this was an American experimental aircraft, I’d say there was no way in hell,” Neary told him forcefully. “But the Russians play by very different rules, especially when it comes to nukes. Hell, back during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it turns out they deployed tactical nuclear weapons that some Cuban or Soviet general could have used against our troops if we ever invaded the island — even without an explicit okay from the Kremlin. So this guy’s claim that they were trying to compress their flight test program by loading armed missiles as part of a war game isn’t that far-fetched.”

Taylor sighed. “Which makes Ms. Reynolds right. In the circumstances, a large-scale air search effort would be too risky. We wouldn’t gain anything by provoking Colonel Petrov to destroy his aircraft, especially if it does carry nuclear weapons.”

From the far end of the table, Rear Admiral Kristin Chao spoke up. “We do have one possible indication of the Russian stealth bomber’s whereabouts,” the head of the Pentagon’s operations directorate reminded them. “Our North Warning System radar station at Barter Island picked up an unidentified contact last night. At least for a few seconds, anyway. This bogey might have been the PAK-DA bomber entering our airspace.”

“Or just as likely an equipment glitch or some kind of weird weather phenomenon,” Neary argued. “The whole Arctic region’s getting hammered by snow and ice storms right now.”

“Yes, sir,” the admiral agreed calmly. “But it’s at least a data point.”

“One that doesn’t get us much further,” the Air Force chief of staff retorted. “The North Warning System radar network creates a relatively thin air surveillance zone along the northern frontier of both Alaska and Canada. Once the perimeter is penetrated, we have almost no ability to track an unidentified aircraft flying deeper into the North American interior, especially if it’s coming in low or has stealth features.”

Chao looked unmoved. “At the very least, it suggests Colonel Petrov has chosen to conceal the bomber in territory we control, rather than inside his own country’s borders. That could provide us with a useful clue to his ultimate goals.”

“For God’s sake, Kristin,” Neary snapped, “I don’t see how you can possibly draw that conclusion—”

“Hold on there, you two,” Taylor interrupted, jumping in to tamp down what was threatening to become an open argument between the two high-ranking military officers. “You can’t fight in here. This is the War Room.”

For a moment, both the general and the admiral stared at him in astonishment. But then, almost unwillingly, they grinned sheepishly. “Sorry about that, Mr. Secretary,” Neary told him. Chao nodded her own mute apology.

“Don’t sweat it,” Taylor said mildly. “I don’t imagine anyone here got much sleep last night, so it’s no surprise if tempers are a little frayed.” He looked carefully around the table. “Which is why, right now, I’d like to focus our limited energies on the biggest question we face.”

“Which is: do we pay Petrov to get our hands on the PAK-DA prototype?” Miranda Reynolds said quietly.

“Score one for the CIA,” Taylor said with a slight smile.

Absentmindedly, Murphy rubbed at his chin, frowning a little when he felt the patches of stubble his quick shave on the way to the Pentagon had missed. “There are a lot of pluses,” he said carefully. “Sure Petrov’s asking for a lot of money, but conventional intelligence efforts to acquire accurate data on Russia’s stealth bomber program could easily end up costing us nearly as much over time. Not to mention taking years to produce results… and, in all probability, yielding far less useful information. The same goes for those advanced cruise missiles he says are aboard. Not only that, but just knowing that we’ve got their prototype, its electronics, and its weapons payload would compel Moscow to dramatically reengineer their stealth bomber and missile programs — at a huge expenditure in time and money.” He turned to General Neary. “How much did the B-2 Spirit program cost us?”

“Somewhere north of forty billion in current dollars, not counting procurement,” the Air Force chief of staff told him.

Murphy nodded. “Exactly. So by spending what’s basically pocket change in the context of the federal budget, we could force the Russians to pony up billions more for a whole new bomber design. It’s a win-win for us.”

Neary frowned deeply.

“You have a problem with the director’s analysis, General?” Taylor asked.

“Yes, sir, I do,” Neary said. “What if we’re wrong about this? What if Petrov didn’t steal the PAK-DA bomber prototype at all? What if this is just an elaborate ruse orchestrated by Russian intelligence… and the aircraft that we’re supposedly buying is still sitting safely inside a hangar on some Russian air base?”

“Jesus,” Taylor muttered. “That would be… bad. Very bad.”

Neary nodded. “We’d get caught paying billions of taxpayer dollars to Moscow for nothing. Not only would that inflict a lethal political blow to the president and his administration, it would humiliate the entire U.S. national security establishment as well. We’d be the laughingstock of the whole world.” He shrugged. “Sure, the video sent to Ms. Reynolds shows this guy Petrov in some kind of fancy cockpit. But none of us knows what the inside of the real PAK-DA bomber looks like. Nor are there any shots of the outside. For all we really know, the whole thing could easily have been shot on a GRU- or SVR-built film set.”

“There is another problem, even if Petrov’s offer is genuine,” Rear Admiral Chao commented. “It’s pretty clear that he’s getting a lot of help from someone we don’t know anything about. If it turns out he’s in league with Russian organized crime, or drug lords, or maybe even terrorists, the blowback from our funneling so much U.S. government money to them could be horrific.”

Taylor winced, obviously imagining how that would play out in Congress and the press. The defense secretary wasn’t a Washington insider by experience or inclination, but even a few short months on the job had taught him the savagery with which political war was waged in the nation’s capital. He sighed. “Okay, it looks like whether or not we meet Colonel Petrov’s demands is a decision that’s way above all our pay grades. I’ll brief the president as soon as I can, but my bet is that nobody in the White House is going to want to jump in with both feet on this. Not without a hell of a lot more information than we can give them right now.”

“I do have one request, Mr. Secretary,” Miranda Reynolds said. “I’d like your permission to deploy the specialist go team I’ve organized to Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska.”

“The one with experts from the Air Force’s Foreign Material squadron?” Taylor asked.

She nodded. “Plus CIA and Air Force security personnel.” She looked down the table toward Chao. “If the rear admiral is correct, and Petrov has landed somewhere in northern Alaska or northern Canada, staging out of Elmendorf would put our team in position to move fast if we spot the PAK-DA bomber on the ground. Or in case we do strike a deal.”

“Good thinking,” Taylor said simply. “You’ve got my blessing. Get your team on its way to Anchorage as soon as possible.”