Mirror Image

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

The two-crewmen "glass cockpit" was low, flat, and dark behind a narrow, curved windshield. Three of the six flat color screens in the cockpit formed a single tactical panorama, while an extra wide HUD— heads-up display— provided flight and target information that expanded upon the data contained on displays mounted inside the visor of the pilot's helmet. There were no dedicated gauges. The displays generated all of the information the pilot required, including input from the sophisticated sensors mounted to the exterior.

Behind the cockpit was a matte-black fuselage sixty-five feet, five inches long. There were no sharp angles on the flat-bellied craft, and the NOTAR tail system— no tail rotor— and advanced bearingless main rotor made the Mosquito virtually silent in flight. Ducted air forced, under pressure, through gill-like sections in the rear fuselage provided the craft with its anti-torque forces; a rotating directional control thruster on the tail boom enabled the pilot to steer. Already relatively lightweight because of the absence of driveshafts and gearboxes, the craft had been stripped of all extraneous gear, including armaments, which cut the aircraft's empty weight from nine thousand to just six thousand, five hundred pounds. With an extra tank of fuel carried outside and burned off first— so the bladder could be jettisoned over the sea and recovered— and coming home from a mission fifteen hundred pounds heavier than it went in, the Mosquito had a range of seven hundred miles.

It was a breed of flying machine the press and lay public called "Stealth," but which the officers of the Mosquito program at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base preferred to call "low-observable." The point of such aircraft was not that they couldn't be seen. Enough radar energy directed at the F-117A or the B-2A or the Mosquito would enable an enemy to see it. However, there was hardly a weapons system in the world that could track and lock onto such an aircraft, and that was its advantage.

None of the low-observable aircraft currently in service would have been able to execute the mission at hand, which was why the Mosquito program had been inaugurated in 1991. Only a helicopter could fly in low over mountainous terrain at night, deposit or extract a team, turn around and get out again— and only a low-observable could hope to do that in the carefully monitored and cluttered skies of Russia.

Flying at two hundred miles an hour, the Mosquito would reach its target at just before midnight, local time. If the helicopter took more than eight minutes to complete its pickup in Khabarovsk, it wouldn't have enough fuel to reach the carrier that would be waiting for it in the Sea of Japan. But having run through every aspect of the mission on the cockpit computer simulator, pilot Steve Kahrs and copilot Anthony lovino were confident in the prototype, and anxious for it to earn its wings. If the special forces team did their job, this would send them back to Wright-Patterson heroes and, more important, would deliver yet another body blow to the once proud Russian military.