Out in the night sky far off on their starboard side, the two Coyotes dropped back down to two hundred feet. They separated, with one veering left and the other right. Once they were several miles apart, the two MQ-55s slowed and started circling — orbiting low over wooded slopes that marked the eastern edge of the high ground west of the Amur River. The Howler kept going straight southeast, apparently headed for the coast, Sakhalin Island, and then the Sea of Okhotsk.
Nadia checked the status of each drone through her data links and nodded. They were carrying out the plan she had devised. Now to see if it would work. She opened a com window and entered a brief situation report, including their current position, heading, and speed. It ended with a short declarative statement: HOUNDS UNLEASHED. ACTION IMMINENT. As soon as she finished, their computer took over. It encrypted and compressed her message to a quick millisecond-long burst sent via satellite uplink.
Fifteen thousand feet above the ocean, a very large, black, blended-wing aircraft banked gently — beginning yet another slow, lazy turn in the racetrack holding pattern it had already been flying for more than an hour.
“Round and round we go, and when we stop only Martindale knows,” Hunter “Boomer” Noble groused.
The S-29B’s copilot, a petite redhead named Liz Gallagher, laughed. She was a former U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel who had more than a thousand hours in B-2 stealth bombers before joining Scion. “C’mon, Boomer, toughen up,” she teased. “This is a piece of cake. I used to fly forty-hour-plus round-trip missions all the time.”
“Yeah, and I bet when you were a kid, you had to walk ten miles to school… going uphill both ways. In the snow.”
“It was only six miles,” she said with a sly grin. “And I had my older brother’s hand-me-down bike.”
Boomer had to admit he was beginning to find Liz Gallagher mighty attractive. Sure, she was a little older than the women he usually dated, but maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. Much as he hated to admit it, he might be getting a little long in the tooth for twentysomethings. Plus, she had a lot more in common with him than the ditzy cocktail waitresses he’d been spending so much of his time and money on over the past couple of years.
“Boomer, this is Reyes,” a voice said over the intercom from the spaceplane’s aft cabin. Javier Reyes was another former air-force officer, like the rest of the crewmen Martindale had recruited to fly and fight this S-29B Shadow. He was their data-link officer, charged with monitoring their communications and the information flow from other sensor platforms — satellites, other aircraft, ships, and ground installations. “We just received a priority signal from Ghost One.”
Boomer snorted. Ghost One was the call sign Martindale had given himself for this mission. He figured that was a perfect fit, given the former president’s penchant for operating in the shadows. “Go ahead,” he said. “What’s the word from ol’ Spooky?”
“Sending it to you now,” Reyes told him.
One of Boomer’s MFDs pinged. He tapped at it, opening the message from Martindale. He whistled softly as he read it. Then he glanced across the cockpit at Gallagher. “Okay, Liz, we just got the go-code. Let’s get this baby configured for supersonic flight.”
“On it, Boomer,” she said crisply, all business now. She brought up their automated checklists and set them in motion… double-checking the computers at every step. Like many Sky Masters — designed vehicles, the S-29 Shadow was fully capable of autonomous operation, if necessary. In fact, its advanced computers could handle all routine flight tasks, up to and including air-to-air refueling, supersonic flight, and orbital insertion. The same went for its sensors, data links, and defensive microwave emitters. The human crewmen assigned to each of those stations were there primarily to monitor the automated systems, intervening manually only in case things went wrong.
Today, though, Boomer planned to make this a hands-on flight wherever possible. After all, complex computer programs sometimes crashed, especially when a number of different programs had to interact with one another in perfect sync. In his experience, anyone who relied too heavily on automated systems in a largely untested aircraft like this B-model S-29 was pushing the envelope way outside the edge of common sense.
“All checklists complete,” Gallagher reported. “All engines and systems are go for supersonic flight.”
“Roger that.” Boomer spoke over the intercom to the aft cabin. “All right, boys and girls, it’s showtime. Buckle up tight and stand by on all sensors and defenses.”
He banked the big spaceplane again, bringing its nose back around to the northwest. Then his right hand pushed the throttles forward. The roar of their five powerful engines changed.
Instantly, the S-29 responded — streaking across the sky at an ever-increasing speed.
Thirty-Seven
Six pairs of Su-35S Super Flanker fighters flew onward in line abreast at three thousand meters above the undulating river valley. Lights twinkled at widely spaced intervals, identifying small towns and villages that lined both sides of the two-kilometer-wide river.
Colonel Ivan Federov scowled beneath his oxygen mask. They were well northeast of Komsomolsk now and very close to where he’d expected to intercept the American rescue aircraft as it fled Russian airspace. But neither he nor any of his pilots had spotted anything yet. The sky ahead still seemed utterly empty. Had he misjudged the situation? Were the Americans instead heading deeper into Russia to throw off his pursuit rather than bolting straight for the coast? Should he detach some of his fighters to cover that possibility?
Suddenly a sharp tone sounded in his headset, signaling a possible detection by his radar. A green diamond blinked onto the lower right corner of his HUD and then vanished almost immediately. Instantly, Federov glanced down at his radar display. That brief moment of contact had revealed a target out around forty kilometers ahead of his Su-35—moving southeast across his field of view at more than eight hundred kilometers per hour. And it was flying less than two hundred meters above the ground.
That was definitely a stealth aircraft, he thought.
Federov’s scowl smoothed into a tight-lipped smile. He’d been fretting over nothing. The Americans were acting exactly as he’d predicted, running like frightened rabbits to escape out to sea. He keyed his radio. “Sentry Flights, this is Sentry Lead. Stealth target bearing two o’clock moving to three at low altitude. Range approximately forty kilometers. Intermittent radar contact only. I am turning to intercept!”
Reacting quickly, he rolled his fighter to the right and dove. Trading altitude for more speed would let him close on this elusive enemy that much faster. One finger pushed a switch on his stick. Two missile symbols appeared in the corner of his HUD. Two of his six R-77 radar-guided missiles were armed and set for a salvo launch. “Weapons hot.”
Eager voices greeted his declaration of intent. The other eleven Super Flankers were turning tightly with him — straining to be in at the kill.
Twenty-three nautical miles ahead of the Russian fighters, the EQ-55 Howler’s threat-warning sensors recorded the first faint brush of Federov’s IRBIS-E radar as it momentarily locked on. That triggered one of the commands Nadia had programmed in minutes before. Circuits closed within the business-jet-sized, flying-wing drone. Three things happened in quick succession. First, the Howler’s electronic jamming gear activated — blasting out radio waves at frequencies designed to disrupt the active enemy radars it detected. Next, its own AN/APG-81 radar powered up. In seconds, this system had locked on to all twelve Su-35S Super Flankers. And last of all, the Howler allocated the targeting data it collected into separate packets and relayed them to the two MQ-55 Coyotes loitering forty nautical miles to the northwest.