Eagle Station

Twenty-Two

A seemingly endless marshland cut by innumerable small, stagnant streams unrolled ahead of the XCV-70 Rustler as it streaked north. Red-tinged late afternoon sunlight sparkled off the surface of hundreds of ponds and small lakes. There were no signs of human habitation, no roads or villages anywhere in sight. This vast stretch of flat, featureless country was almost wholly untouched and unspoiled by modern man.

Strapped into his seat in the Rustler’s cramped cockpit, Brad McLanahan rolled his tight shoulders, trying to loosen them up a little. His muscles ached with the strain of flying so fast and so low for so long. Knowing that they were being hunted by an implacable enemy bent on revenge only added to his growing tension.

One side of his mouth twisted in a wry smile. The good news about flying over this vast, trackless swamp was that he didn’t have to worry about slamming into trees or sharp-edged ridges or electric power pylons. The bad news was the reverse of the same coin. If they ran into a roving Russian fighter patrol or a surface-to-air missile battery out here, there was no cover at all — no higher ground to mask them from enemy radar and let them slip safely past.

“We are down to thirty-six percent of our fuel,” Nadia reported from her right-hand seat. She had several status menus open on her MFDs. To make it possible for Brad to focus wholly on flying, she was monitoring their engines, avionics, and combat systems.

“Copy that,” he replied. He forced a cheerful tone. “Kinda makes me wish I’d stashed a few more cans of jet fuel in the back.”

The twenty-minute supersonic sprint he’d made earlier had enabled them to evade the first Russian attempt at interception. But the cost had been high. They were still more than fifteen hundred miles from the nearest possible point where they could safely rendezvous with a Sky Masters air tanker. Added to that was the inescapable fact that low-altitude flying drank fuel at an alarming rate. Taking the Rustler up into the thinner air at thirty or forty thousand feet would be a heck of a lot more fuel-efficient… except for the fact that it would also get them blown out of the sky by Russian SAMs or air-to-air missiles.

“How bad is this?” Nadia asked seriously.

“Remember that animated movie?” Brad said. “The one where the drunken sea captain climbs out onto the nose of a plane and belches alcoholic fumes into its tank to keep them flying just a few seconds longer?”

“Yes?” she said warily.

He grinned. “Well, it’s not quite that bad.”

“I would slug you if you were not flying this airplane,” she growled.

Brad laughed. “And here people told me being a covert ops pilot was a dangerous job.”

A sharp tone abruptly sounded in their headsets. “Warning, warning, Zaslon-M radar emissions detected at four o’clock,” the Rustler’s computer announced. “Evaluated as two MiG-31 interceptors. Estimated range eighty miles and closing. Moderate strength signal.”

“Ah, crap,” Brad muttered. “Okay, I take it back. This is a dangerous job.”

His mind ran through their tactical situation with lightning speed. Put simply, it sucked.

Those enemy fighters were headed right toward them and fast. Within minutes at most, they’d be close enough for their radars and IRST sensors to pick out the Rustler against this billiard table terrain. And even if his crappy fuel state allowed another prolonged supersonic sprint, he couldn’t outrun the MiGs. At high altitude, a MiG-31 could exceed Mach 2.8—twice the XCV-70’s maximum speed. Worse still, the Russian interceptors were probably armed with R-37M long-range, hypersonic air-to-air missiles capable of reaching out and swatting them out of the air at up to two hundred miles.

All of which really only left them with one option.

Beside him, Nadia had obviously come to the same conclusion. “We cannot hide. And we cannot run,” she said matter-of-factly. “So we fight?”

Brad nodded with equal coolness. “Definitely.” He rolled into a tight right turn, coming around hard to head straight at the oncoming MiGs. The Rustler’s radar cross section was smallest from the front.

“Twelve hundred and fifty knots closure,” their computer reported. “Range now seventy miles and closing fast. Time to radar detection estimated at two minutes thirty seconds.”

“Well, boys, I reckon this is it—” Brad started to joke.

Nadia forestalled him. “Do not say anything about ‘toe-to-toe nuclear combat with the Russkies,’ or I swear to God I will punch you and die happy,” she warned.

Brad surrendered. “No, ma’am,” he said devoutly.

Beside him, Nadia’s fingers danced across her MFDs, prepping their defensive systems. “SPEAR is online and ready to engage. Chaff is configured for R-37 radar-guided missiles. Flares ready.”

“Range now forty-five miles. Enemy radar strength climbing. Time to detection now one minute,” the Rustler’s computer interjected.

She glanced across the cockpit. “Do you have a plan? Or are we simply going straight for the enemy’s throat?”

“I’ve got a plan,” Brad assured her. Speaking fast, he outlined the tactics he had in mind.

A wolfish grin lit her face. “Oh, very sneaky! I like this plan!”

Major Stepan Grigoryev glanced out his MiG-31’s cockpit canopy. Phantom Four was visible only as a distant gray dot roughly ten kilometers off his right wing. Although their data links would have allowed a much wider separation, he wanted his wingman in close support range if they found the Scion stealth aircraft they were hunting. Intelligence briefings had stressed that the private American company’s mercenary pilots were cunning and aggressive. So Grigoryev saw no point in giving one of them the chance to jump a lone aircraft. If this turned into a fight, he wanted the odds on his side.

“Radar detection!” Alexey Balandin, his weapon systems officer, yelled from the rear cockpit. “Small contact, probably a stealth aircraft, bearing three o’clock moving to four o’clock at very low altitude. Indeterminate range!”

Christ, Grigoryev thought coldly. Somehow the Scion aircraft had sneaked around his flank… and now it was trying to slide in behind him.

“We show the same contact,” Rudensky, Phantom Four’s pilot, radioed excitedly. “Turning to engage.”

Grigoryev yanked his stick right, rolling the big, twin-tailed MiG into a hard 4-G right turn as he followed his wingman around. A green diamond blinked into existence on his HUD. The enemy stealth aircraft was now somewhere out ahead of them, off to the northeast. He banked back left to keep the target centered and thumbed a switch on his stick. Two missile symbols appeared in the corner of his HUD. Two of his four R-37M radar-guided missiles were armed and set for a salvo launch as soon as they got a solid lock on this target. “Weapons hot!”

And then just as suddenly as it had first appeared, the green diamond vanished from his HUD.

“Contact lost!” Balandin said over the intercom. “I’m attempting to regain a lock.”

“We’ve lost it, too,” Rudensky admitted a second later. “But the enemy aircraft was definitely headed northeast. And it was moving at around nine hundred kph.”

“Did anyone get a range?” Grigoryev demanded.

Balandin sounded hesitant. “It wasn’t close, sir. Probably more than a hundred kilometers out.”

Grigoryev nodded to himself. Having failed in its bid to slip past them undetected, the Scion aircraft must now be running hard — hoping to open the range further and evade their search again. “We’ll chase along this heading for a while,” he decided. “But stay on your toes. This bastard’s a slippery customer. He may try that trick again.”

Acknowledgments flooded through his headset as he trimmed the MiG-31 for level flight and headed northeast at high speed.

“SPEAR disengaged,” Nadia reported. She looked across the cockpit with a slight smile on her face. “Both MiGs have turned northeast. They are pursuing my now-invisible ghost.”

“Nice work,” Brad told her. She’d used their ALQ-293 Self-Protection Electronically Agile Reaction system to spoof the enemy radars — creating a brief false contact for them to chase. To avoid triggering the anti-manipulation software protections built into Russian avionics, she’d deactivated SPEAR after a few seconds. Russian radars and other electronic systems now conducted periodic self-tests, looking for anomalies showing that their security was being penetrated. Although it was a crude measure, it did hamper Scion’s ability to use SPEAR unchecked.

Much as he’d like to believe those enemy pilots would go on hunting along the wrong heading while the Rustler bolted for home, he knew that was a fool’s dream. All too soon the Russians would figure out that they’d been tricked. He needed to finish this fight before that happened.

Brad pushed his throttles all the way forward and turned northeast after the MiGs. The XCV-70 accelerated smoothly, breaking past the sound barrier and going to 800 knots in seconds. Burning more fuel now would hurt them later… but going supersonic was the only way he could pull within Sidewinder range of those enemy fighters.

“Tease ’em again,” he requested. “Only this time, plant the lure to make it look like we’ve dodged north of them, okay?”

Again, Nadia’s fingers flashed across her displays, issuing orders to the SPEAR system. And again, the MiG-31s took the bait, swerving north to follow the flickering false image she’d planted in their radars.

Brad banked again, this time turning to come in behind and to the left of the Russian interceptors. Two target brackets popped onto his HUD. Each outlined a twin-tailed MiG-31, still invisible to the naked eye at this distance.

“Range now twenty-five miles,” the Rustler’s computer said.

He clicked a button on his stick. Three missile icons popped onto his HUD. They had three AIM-9X Sidewinders left in their internal weapons bays. Quickly, he assigned two of the heat-seekers to the lead MiG, saving the last missile for its trailing companion.

“Assigned targets are beyond effective missile range,” the computer cautioned.

“Not for long,” Brad murmured. “Just hold your horses.”

“Command not understood,” the Rustler responded primly.

Nadia snorted in amusement. Sky Masters — designed computer systems were high-tech marvels, but they had definite limitations, especially where English-language idioms were concerned.

“Contact lost again,” Balandin reported over the intercom.

Beneath his oxygen mask, Grigoryev scowled. This was getting ridiculous. Every time their radars seemed to get a grip on the enemy, the elusive American stealth aircraft somehow shook loose and vanished off their screens. “Keep on it, Alexey,” he ordered.

In response to his radioed reports, Moscow was vectoring the other two MiG-31s in to join the pursuit — but they were still hundreds of kilometers away. For all the help they could offer in this deadly aerial game of hide-and-seek, they might as well be sitting back on the runway at Kansk-Dalniy.

His two fighters should try to catch the Scion plane in a pincer move, he decided — separating and then closing in on any new radar contact from different directions. Stealth technology wasn’t a cloak of invisibility after all. So as the American pilot dodged away from one incoming MiG, the other Russian interceptor might find itself in a position to see it, lock on, and fire missiles.

Grigoryev clicked his mike. “Phantom Four, this is Three. Steer northeast for a minute and then come back in to the west. Let’s see if we can—”

“New contact at two o’clock!” Balandin’s startled call from the rear cockpit cut in.

Again a targeting diamond flashed onto Grigoryev’s HUD, this time in the upper right-hand corner. The Scion stealth aircraft had come up off the deck and was now a couple of thousand meters above them, he realized in surprise. Why? Climbing higher like this only made it easier for their radars to detect it and lock on. Unless—

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.

The sudden shrill warning from their threat-warning sensors overrode conscious thought. Red threat icons speckled the upper right quadrant of his HUD.

“Missile attack!” Balandin yelled. “Multiple small bogies!” And then, “We’re being jammed! The radar display’s nothing but fucking green static!”

Reacting fast on trained instinct, Grigoryev yanked his stick hard left, hurling the big fighter into a high-G turn to the west. “Rudensky! Break left! Break left!”

Behind him, Balandin frantically jabbed at his multifunction displays to activate their countermeasures systems. Automated chaff dispensers fired, tossing cartridges into the air behind their MiG-31. They exploded, spewing thousands of Mylar strips across the sky to create false radar blooms that might lure away radar-guided missiles. A rippling curtain of decoy flares streamed out from under their fuselage, each momentarily brighter than the sun.

Straining against five times the force of gravity, Grigoryev suddenly saw two small gray blurs streak over his cockpit canopy. More enemy missiles! But these were coming from the wrong direction! From the southwest, not the northeast. Somehow the Americans had tricked them into turning directly into their real missile attack!

Desperately, he craned his head around — just in time to see Rudensky’s MiG-31 vanish in a blinding explosion. Trailing pieces of debris and wreathed in smoke and flames, the shattered aircraft tumbled toward the earth.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.

“Christ!” Grigoryev yanked his stick back to the right… and a massive fireball exploded off their left wing.

The shock wave slammed the MiG-31 sideways. Red caution and warning lights lit up across the cockpit. His left engine was on fire! Desperately he punched controls — ordering the engine to shut down, cutting off the fuel flowing toward the flames, and triggering fire extinguishers.

Several of the red lights dimmed. The fire warning alarms went out.

Slowly, Grigoryev regained control over his tumbling fighter, sluggishly pulling it all the way through a complete 360-degree turn. With just one engine left, the huge, twin-tailed MiG wallowed through the air like a pig in deep mud.

“Our radar is back online,” Balandin said suddenly over the intercom. “New radar contact! Twelve o’clock low! At thirty kilometers! I have a lock!”

This time Grigoryev saw the enemy aircraft with his own eyes. Outlined against the vast green marshland below them, its black batwing shape was plainly visible. Without hesitation, he squeezed the trigger on his control stick — commanding his computer to fire the two-missile salvo he’d readied earlier.

One of the two R-37M radar-guided missiles dropped from under the MiG’s right wing and ignited. Riding a plume of fire and smoke, the huge four-meter-long missile slashed across the sky at six times the speed of sound. The second R-37 had been riddled by pieces of shrapnel when the American Sidewinder heat-seeker blew up. It detached, but its damaged rocket motor failed to light and it fell harmlessly toward the ground.

Without waiting to see the results of his attack, Grigoryev banked right again, urging his damaged fighter through a slow, shuddering turn to the northeast. More caution and warning lights came on as additional systems failed. Black smoke curled away from his wrecked turbofan engine. He just hoped he could hold this slowly dying machine in the air long enough to reach the emergency field outside Norilsk, two hundred kilometers away.

“Warning, warning, radar missile launch at twelve o’clock,” the Rustler’s computer announced. “One missile inbound at Mach six.”

“Time to impact, fifteen seconds,” Nadia said. Her eyes were locked on her displays. “Countermeasures ready.”

Brad saw a streak of fire racing toward them from dead ahead. Jesus, he thought, this is going to be close. Jamming the MiG-31’s radar wouldn’t help them now. That R-37 was on inertial guidance, ready to switch to its own active radar seeker in the last moments of its attack.

The missile came straight at them.

“R-37 seeker head is active,” the computer reported.

Three. Two. One. Now! He slammed the Rustler into a hard left turn, breaking across the Russian missile’s flight path. G-forces shoved him hard back against his seat. His vision grayed out. “Countermeasures!” he snapped.

Nadia jabbed her defensive systems display. Chaff cartridges rippled out behind them and detonated. Unconvinced by the false radar images they created, the R-37 ripped on through the drifting clouds of Mylar strips and then began curving around to come back at them.

“Time to impact six seconds.”

Brad rolled back right, turning in the opposite direction.

Gritting her teeth, Nadia leaned forward, fighting the G-forces pinning her in her seat. Her fingers flashed across her display, entering a new command. “Engaging that missile with SPEAR.”

Streams of carefully tailored radio waves caressed the Russian missile’s active seeker head. Seduced by false data, its simple-minded computer concluded that the enemy aircraft it was trying to kill was… right here. Relays closed.

And the R-37’s sixty-kilogram fragmentation warhead detonated. A huge ball of fire lit the sky — well behind the XCV-70 Rustler.

Breathing hard, Brad rolled the aircraft out of its second high-G turn and swung back onto a heading that would take them across Russia’s Arctic coast… and then home.

The Rustler sped onward, flying low over a wilderness of unbroken ice. Hundreds of miles farther south, night was at last beginning to fall across Siberia. But this far north, not far from the top of the world, the sun would never set during these summer months.

Nadia checked her engine and fuel status monitors again. Her mouth turned down. “Our fuel reserves are down to ten percent.”

“That falls into the category of really bad news,” Brad admitted. Between his earlier supersonic evasive maneuver and their tangle with that pair of MiG-31s, he’d blown through his safety margin. They should still be able to reach the Sky Masters air refueling tanker waiting for them north of Greenland — but it would be a very near-run thing. Pilots could bullshit all they wanted about “flying on fumes” when telling tall tales in the O-club. The truth was that the XCV-70 needed honest-to-God jet fuel to keep its big Affinity turbofans spinning. And right now, they were basically riding the knife edge between speed and fuel consumption.

“Zaslon-M radar emissions increasing in strength,” their computer said. “Bearing now six o’clock and holding steady. Range sixty miles and closing.”

“Swell,” Brad muttered. They’d been picking up the radar emissions from two more MiG-31 fighters for the past several minutes — and it was clear that the Russians had a pretty good idea of where they were and where they were headed. Now those supersonic interceptors were closing in, getting set to launch their long-range missiles the moment they secured a solid radar lock. And that wouldn’t be long now, no more than a few minutes. A combination of chaff and SPEAR might enable the Rustler to fend off one or two of the Mach 6–capable missiles. But there was no way they could stop a full salvo of eight R-37s.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything more he and Nadia could do to break out of their increasingly grim tactical situation. They couldn’t evade, because the Rustler was too short on fuel to maneuver effectively. And they couldn’t fight, because they’d already expended all of its air-to-air missiles.

“You know what really pisses me off?” Brad said pensively.

“Slow drivers in the fast lane? Over-officious bureaucrats? The infield fly rule?” Nadia guessed.

Almost unwillingly, he smiled. “Well, yeah, them, too.” He shook his head. “Right now, though, it’s the possibility that Martindale was right about this being a suicide mission.”

Brad felt her hand squeeze his shoulder.

“We are not dead yet, drogie serce, dear heart,” she said gently.

“Two large unidentified airborne thermal contacts detected at twelve o’clock,” the Rustler’s computer broke in. “Range indefinite, but closing at three-thousand-plus knots.”

“Scion Seven-Zero, this is Shadow Bravo One,” Dusty Miller radioed from one of the fast-approaching S-29B spaceplanes. “Hope you don’t mind us crowding you a little.”

Brad felt a huge weight lift off his shoulders. “Not a bit, Bravo One,” he replied. “Welcome to the party.”

Beside him, Nadia saw a new com icon flashing on her left-hand display, indicating an urgent high-priority signal. She opened it.

Immediately, they heard a familiar voice come over their headsets. “Mr. Martindale may have talked about leaving y’all hanging out to dry if you ran into trouble,” President John Dalton Farrell drawled. “But I sure as hell never said any such thing.”

“Our air defense radars at Rogachevo, Nagurskoye, Sredny Ostrov, and Zvozdnyy all confirm the same thing. Two American Space Force S-29Bs have just dropped out of polar orbit and are moving to intercept our MiG-31s,” Tikhomirov said grimly.

Marshal Leonov only nodded. “Recall your pilots, Semyon.” He shrugged. “There’s no point in tangling with those spaceplanes. Or in provoking an open military confrontation with the United States.” He smiled dryly. “Not yet, anyway.”

Tikhomirov looked relieved. “Yes, sir.”

Leonov cut the secure connection. He sat back, deep in thought. While the escape of one of the Scion spies was exasperating, Russia would still profit from these events. If nothing else, the rapid, aggressive response of his Spetsnaz troops and MiG-31 fighters should convince the Americans that his fake Firebird Project spaceplane program was genuine. Equally important, thanks to the trap he’d sprung at Kansk-Dalniy, he’d successfully crippled Scion’s espionage network inside Russia.

The Americans were now completely blind. He nodded in satisfaction. The timing was perfect. The first elements of Heaven’s Thunder — the true focus of his secret alliance with the People’s Republic of China — were only months away from launch. And by the time the United States and its allies realized what was really happening, it would be far too late.