Arctic Storm Rising

Twenty-Eight

Connor “Doc” McFadden eyed the green diamond in the center of his HUD. It marked the radar-designated position of the Tu-142 reconnaissance aircraft they were heading toward at high speed. Glowing numbers next to the diamond showed the range counting down fast. They were now only about forty nautical miles apart, less than two minutes out at their present closure rate. Time to slow that down a little, he thought, especially since the sky over this part of the mountains was a wall-to-wall winter storm front marked by masses of dark cumulonimbus clouds soaring tens of thousands of feet above the ground. Getting any kind of visual lock on that big Russian turboprop was going to be tough in the present circumstances — and it would be impossible if they blitzed right past each other at twelve hundred — plus knots.

“Casino Two, Lead,” he radioed to Cat Parilla. The lieutenant’s F-22 was positioned a few hundred yards off his right wing and about a thousand feet higher. Sometimes he could see her aircraft visually. Sometimes he couldn’t. Visibility dropped to near zero whenever they punched through one of the towering cloud masses. “Let’s rein it in some, to avoid an overshoot.”

“Copy that,” his wingman replied. “Getting to be kind of a rough ride up here, anyway.” Strong turbulence and winds were pummeling the two fighters, subjecting them to sudden jolts and buffets, especially inside the clouds.

“Yeah, I hear you, Cat,” McFadden agreed. “Easing off, now.” He pulled back on his throttles, simultaneously banking left and right in a flat scissors to shake off even more airspeed. Alerted by the data link connecting their two Raptors, Parilla followed his maneuvers. Gradually, both F-22s slowed their headlong rush, dropping from more than 900 knots to around 450.

McFadden checked the diamond icon in his HUD again. It hadn’t budged an inch to either side. That Tu-142 was still flying straight on, showing absolutely no sign of turning back out of U.S. airspace. And by now, those Russians must know they were about to be intercepted by a pair of American jets. Their APG-77s had been locked on to the slower turboprop for several minutes, giving its crew plenty of time to realize they were being painted by radar. One more thing was certain. Wherever those hypothetical Su-35 escorts were, they certainly weren’t hiding in that recon plane’s radar shadow. At this range, any Russian fighters there would have stood out like deer caught in a pair of high-beam headlights.

It was high time he and Cat announced themselves, McFadden decided. He changed frequencies to the guard channel. “Russian Tu-142 military aircraft, this is one of the American F-22 fighters headed your way. You are deep inside our airspace and violating international law. Turn back now. Repeat, withdraw now. Radio your intention to comply with this order immediately, over.” He clicked off his mike and listened. For a few seconds, there was only the hiss of static.

“Russian Tu-142, you are violating—” McFadden started again, now allowing a distinctly hostile edge to creep into his voice.

“American F-22, this is the Russian Tu-142,” the other plane suddenly replied. “We regret that we are unable to comply with your request. We are only conducting a peaceful search for a missing aircraft — one of our polar research UAVs which may have strayed accidentally into this area. We have no hostile intent. Repeat, this is a peaceful search mission.”

McFadden scowled under his oxygen mask. Son of a bitch! These clowns were trying to play games. He stabbed his mike button again. “Listen up, pal, I’m not ‘requesting’ a damned thing. You will turn around immediately and get the hell out of U.S. airspace as quickly as you entered it. Understood?”

Five thousand meters below and twenty kilometers ahead of the four-engine Tu-142, Major Vadim Kuryokhin shrugged his shoulders. There had never been any real chance that the Americans would let Zinchuk and his crew probe so deeply into their national territory without interference. Or that they would buy the ridiculous cover story about some missing drone. This was going to come down to a duel of pilot skill… and guts.

His eyes swept the upper edge of his HUD. Two icons were visible, one for each of the oncoming F-22 Raptors. They were accompanied by rapidly changing numbers showing the estimated range and altitude of the American jets computed by his IRST system. Between their powered-up radars, radio transmissions, and external fuel tanks, neither Raptor was especially stealthy at the moment. But they were getting very, very close, and pretty soon their radars would spot the two Russian Su-35s twisting and turning down among these sharp-edged mountains and icy gorges.

A predatory grin flashed across Kuryokhin’s face. Better to act now, he thought, before the Americans figured things out and had time to react. “Lead to Bodyguard Two,” he radioed. “You take the high man. I’ll take the low.”

“Two,” Ilya Troitsky said immediately.

“Make them piss their flight suits, but no shooting!” Kuryokhin warned again. “Remember, we’re here to keep them off Prospector’s back, not to start World War Three.”

His wingman snorted over the radio. “Yes, Papa Bear. I’ll be good.”

“Then follow me!” Kuryokhin ordered. He yanked back on his stick and went to afterburner. His Su-35 streaked upward, climbing vertically at more than a thousand kilometers per hour. He broke out of the lower layer seconds later and spotted his chosen target, the lead F-22, almost directly above him, flying through a valley of clearer air between two towering masses of cumulonimbus storm clouds. The American stealth fighter grew larger in his canopy with astonishing speed. He thumbed his radar to air combat mode.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.

“Holy crap!” McFadden blurted, startled by the rapid-fire sequence of high-pitched tones pulsing through his headset. His Raptor was being painted by an enemy radar at close range. Madly, he scanned the sky in all directions. Where the hell—

Suddenly, a blur of white and gray flashed past his canopy just ahead of him and kept on climbing. Jesus, that was an Su-35, he realized, noting the other aircraft’s twin tails and sleek, swept-back wings in a split second. And then the Russian fighter’s wake slammed into him, rattling the F-22 from end to end.

Shaking off the stunning impact, McFadden pulled into a hard, climbing turn toward the Su-35 that had just bounced him. G-forces slammed him back into his seat and his vision grayed out a little. Straining against the g’s, he spotted Cat Parilla’s Raptor rolling away as she dodged a second Su-35 spearing up at them out of the clouds. Her rapid evasive maneuver carried her straight into a column of cloud and she disappeared from sight.

Above him, the first Russian fighter came out of its own turn and then abruptly banked tightly in the opposite direction — maneuvering with incredible speed and agility. It vanished into another cloud.

“Anvil, this is Casino Lead,” McFadden grunted, reporting in to the E-3 AWACS while he reversed back after the Su-35. Everything outside his cockpit turned dark as he entered the clouds himself. He locked his radar onto the Russian. A new diamond blinked onto his HUD, sliding fast down and back to the right again. He slammed his stick hard in that direction, rolling inverted to dive after the still-invisible enemy fighter. “Two bandits just jumped us,” he forced out against the strain of continual tight turns. “No missiles in the air. Maybe these guys want to play, not fight.”

“Copy that, Casino,” the radar controller aboard the distant E-3 Sentry acknowledged. “Sure looks like a tight furball from here.”

For “furball,” read “fucking mess,” McFadden thought fuzzily, as he tightened his next turn even more, now pulling eight g’s and using his F-22’s thrust-vectoring engine nozzles to pull the aircraft’s nose around even faster. He couldn’t see shit in all of these clouds. And he’d lost track of Parilla. Sure, their data link threw a steering cue to her fighter onto his HUD, but it was jinking all over the place as they each maneuvered wildly, trying to pick up an advantage over the two Su-35s that had just bushwhacked them… or to break away from trouble if the bad guys gained a favorable position on them.

He leaned forward, trying hard to see something, anything, through the swirling gray haze ahead of his Raptor. His radar said an Su-35 was out there ahead of him, no more than a few hundred yards away. But he couldn’t make out anything, not even a quick, fleeting glimpse of a camouflaged wingtip or tail fins or a clear canopy. His teeth clenched hard. Chasing these Russian fighters around this storm front was like playing blindman’s bluff with everybody blindfolded, not just whoever was “it”… and stuck at the same time inside one of those whirligig carnival rides that spun unpredictably in every direction.

Inside the Tu-142 reconnaissance aircraft’s forward cabin, Captain Yuri Bashalachev peered intently at his hooded scope. As the plane’s bombardier-navigator, he had primary control over its powerful Korshun-KN-N search radar. Ever since Colonel Zinchuk ordered their sensors to activate, he’d been using the system to scan the terrain below them. From this altitude, the Korshun had a search radius of more than 250 kilometers, even through the intervening haze of obscuring cloud and wind-driven snow and ice. Around and around, the radar’s rotating beam swept hypnotically — turning up nothing but a seemingly endless jumble of mountain peaks and low-lying valleys.

And then something flashed briefly on the screen. Something that didn’t look at all natural.

Suddenly excited, Bashalachev pressed his face even harder against the radar display’s hood. His fingers raced across his controls, tweaking them to focus in on what appeared to be a wider valley on the southern fringe of this vast range of higher peaks and lower ridges and hills. And then he saw it again, near one end of the valley. He froze the image, staring hard at what he saw.

Those straight and angled shapes, partial and oddly blurred though they were, were definitely not natural, the bombardier-navigator decided instantly. He checked the coordinates against the map pinned up next to his station. Just as he’d thought, this entire region was supposed to be nothing but uninhabited wilderness. Excitedly, he toggled his intercom mike. “Colonel, radar here! Contact, contact, contact! Probable man-made structure. I think it might be what we’ve been looking for!”

“Where?” the Tu-142 commander pilot demanded.

Bashalachev peered down again at his scope. “At our nine o’clock now,” he reported. “About twenty kilometers to the east.”

“Nice work, Yuri! We’re coming around to make another pass over the target,” Zinchuk told him.

Immediately, the huge plane banked sharply to the left, turning steeply to circle back toward what its radar had picked up. Over the intercom, Bashalachev heard the colonel on the radio to Moscow. “Operations Control, this is Prospector. Silver Lode. Repeat, Silver Lode.”

“Silver Lode” was the short code phrase indicating the possible — but not certain — discovery of the stolen PAK-DA stealth bomber on the ground.

At that same moment, Captain Connor “Doc” McFadden saw one of the Su-35s emerge out of the murk — headed straight at him. Desperately, he yanked his stick hard right, hurling the F-22 into another brutal, high-g, diving turn to avoid a possible collision. The Russian fighter roared past no more than a few yards above him and then disappeared as suddenly as it had come.

McFadden craned his neck around hard against the enormous forces pinning him against his seat, desperately searching for any sign of the enemy aircraft that might already be swinging around to slot in right behind him. But there was nothing. Just a churning cauldron of dark gray cloud.

Halfway through its tight, diving turn, his Raptor burst back out into the open air. Alarms blared through the cockpit. Alerted too late, McFadden whipped his head back around to the front… just in time to see the huge, propeller-driven Tu-142 directly ahead. “Oh, shit—”

Moving at more than five hundred knots, the F-22 slammed into the Russian reconnaissance plane’s right wing and sheared it off. McFadden was dimly aware of a tremendous, shattering impact that seemed to go on forever, but that could really only have lasted for milliseconds at most. Thrown forward against his straps with rib-smashing force, he saw a mass of blurred red caution and warning lights ripple across the cockpit.

Horrified, he looked up through his canopy and saw the Tu-142 tumbling out of control. Slowly, the huge aircraft rolled over on its left side, trailing debris and burning fuel from the jagged stub of its missing wing. Time to go, he thought groggily. Moving in what felt like slow motion, he reached down between his legs, gripped the ejection seat handle, and yanked hard.

Above McFadden, the F-22’s canopy blew off and spun away to one side. And then the ejection seat’s rocket motor fired. It hurled him up and out of the stricken Raptor — directly into the path of the razor-edged shards of metal spiraling down from the stricken Russian turboprop. Several fragments ripped through the ejection seat’s parachute before it could fully deploy. Others tore into the seat itself and killed him instantly.

A thousand meters higher, Major Vadim Kuryokhin’s Su-35 raced out of one of the towering columns of cloud — still hunting for the highly maneuverable American stealth fighter he’d been tangling with over the past few minutes. To his horror, he saw the Tu-142 spinning toward the ground, wreathed in flames from nose to tail as it fell. “My God, Ilya,” he shouted over the radio. “Those bastards just shot down our recon plane!”

“Two copies. Arming missiles,” his wingman replied coldly. Moments later, Troitsky called out, “Target locked. Missiles fired!”

“Shit-shit-shit-shit,” Lieutenant Allison “Cat” Parilla snarled, seeing the two heat-seeking missiles fall away from under the wings of the Su-35 that had just swung in a couple of miles behind her. Their motors ignited in bursts of flame. Trailing smoke, they streaked across the intervening sky, moving at more than two and a half times the speed of sound.

Immediately, she broke hard left, spiraling upward in a tight, climbing turn. Her thumb stroked the countermeasures button. Dozens of white-hot flares streamed out behind the F-22, each a miniature sun against the glowering mass of dark storm clouds on all sides. Seduced by the flares, both Russian missiles veered away and detonated harmlessly.

Parilla reversed her evasive turn and rolled into the clouds again. She’d seen the steering cue for McFadden’s Raptor vanish suddenly off her HUD. Now she knew why. The Russians had decided, for reasons of their own, to turn this cold air war hot. The green diamond identifying the Su-35 that had just tried to kill her slid into view, pulling out ahead of her aircraft as the other pilot desperately turned in an effort to bring her back into his sights.

“Too late, asshole,” she snapped, squeezing the trigger on her stick. One AIM-120 AMRAAM and then a second dropped out of her main weapons bay. They flashed away into the gray haze at Mach Four, already guided by their own internal active radar seekers, since the range was so short, essentially point-blank for missiles designed to reach out and kill at more than eighty nautical miles.

A dazzling orange flash lit the clouds. In that same moment, the target diamond blinked off her HUD, signaling the destruction of the enemy aircraft. But before she could fully savor the kill, shrill, chirping tones through her headset warned that the second Su-35 had locked on.

Reacting fast, Cat Parilla dove for the deck. More flares rippled out behind her violently maneuvering Raptor. One of the two missiles closing in on her chose a decoy instead and went off harmlessly in her curving wake. She never saw the second, which arrowed on through the spreading cloud of tiny suns and detonated just above her cockpit.

Major Vadim Kuryokhin saw the American F-22 stagger when his missile exploded. Slowly at first, and then faster, the Raptor rolled over and fell away, spewing smoke and fire. Eager to confirm his kill, he followed the stricken aircraft down into the clouds, tracking it by the red-tinged glow. Abruptly, it flashed brightly, spraying glittering sparks outward through the concealing gray mists.

Had that dying F-22 just blown up? he wondered. Deciding he’d seen enough, the Russian Su-35 pilot started to turn away — and slammed head-on into a jagged mountain peak shrouded in cloud. His fighter disintegrated in a ball of fire.

Some kilometers away, Alexei Petrov came outside into the blizzard’s unnatural darkness and freezing winds. Bondarovich’s men finally had the necessary repairs to their aircraft shelter in hand, freeing him to head back to camp for a short rest. He straightened up to his full height to stretch aching muscles… and then he stopped dead, staring off to the west.

A bright white glow lit the sky there, slowly falling through the darkness and thick clouds. Then, suddenly, it vanished with a blinding flash, followed by a dull red gleam in the distance that slowly faded away.

“What was that?” one of the exhausted mercenaries who’d followed him out of the shelter asked in astonishment. “Some sort of weird lightning from the storm?”

Petrov shook his head in dismay. “No,” he ground out slowly. “I think that was trouble for us. Very serious trouble.”