Eagle Station

More airmen moved across the tarmac in a line, ushering the crowd away from the shelter. Slowly, the giant shelter’s clamshell doors swung open — revealing a very large, swept-wing aircraft with four enormous engines mounted beneath its wings. Those engines were already spooling up, splitting the air with a deafening, shrill howl.

Through narrowed eyes, Volkova studied the huge jet as it rolled slowly out into the open air and turned onto the taxiway. It looked very much like a modified Tu-160 supersonic bomber, she decided, though those engine nacelles were a different shape and significantly larger. That made some sense, since the Tu-160’s airframe was already designed to handle supersonic flight. On the other hand, she doubted strongly that it was suitable for operations outside the atmosphere. If so, this aircraft must be intended primarily as a test bed for those massive new engines.

As soon as it reached the far end of the runway, the modified Tu-160 swung into position and started its takeoff roll — thundering past the crowd at an ever-increasing speed. Three-quarters of the way down the runway, it rotated and soared skyward, trailing plumes of faintly yellowish exhaust. Within moments, it vanished among the low-hanging, thick gray clouds.

Only seconds later, the sharp crack of a sonic boom rattled windows and teeth across the air base. This evidence of incredibly swift acceleration created a stir of excitement among the waiting crowd. Nothing short of a high-performance modern jet fighter should be able to reach supersonic speeds so rapidly.

Eight minutes after that, the big-screen video monitor tuned to Novosibirsk, five hundred miles to the west, registered a second loud sonic boom. Another exultant murmur rippled through the onlookers.

“Does that mean what I think it means?” the big man said, keeping his voice low.

Samantha Kerr, currently masquerading as Lieutenant Colonel Volkova of the Russian Aerospace Forces, nodded tightly to her colleague, Marcus Cartwright, another Scion field operative. “If I’ve done my mental math right, what we just heard was an aircraft moving at Mach Five, right at the edge of hypersonic speeds… and a hell of a lot faster than anything else in the Russian inventory.”

The loudspeakers blared again, relaying information that was unnecessary for anyone who’d been paying the slightest attention. “The Firebird has just passed over Novosibirsk at high altitude. Now it is flying on toward Omsk.”

Cartwright lowered his voice even further. “Well, now we know why our Russian friends made it so hard to wangle invitations to their party.”

Sam nodded again. Several weeks ago, Scion’s intelligence operation inside Russia had picked up rumors about this upcoming Firebird flight demonstration. Careful poking around inside several different Defense Ministry classified databases had shown that technical information about the Firebird Project itself was hidden behind a series of impenetrable computer security firewalls. Fortunately, the official list of several hundred military officers, government officials, and aviation industry bigwigs cleared to witness the Kansk-Dalniy test was guarded by slightly less imposing barriers. But even then, it had taken Scion’s best hackers days of painstaking effort to covertly breach those protocols and add their carefully forged credentials — as Lieutenant Colonel Volkova and Sergei Kondakov from the Ministry of Industry and Trade — to the approved list.

As it was, Sam knew that only Moscow’s seemingly odd decision to unveil its top secret Firebird program to so many people at one time made this dangerous covert operation even remotely possible. Posing as a Russian bird colonel and a mid-ranking bureaucrat, even with top-notch fake documents, would have been far too dangerous at a smaller, more intimate, gathering of real experts.

But now that she’d seen this prototype hypersonic aircraft in action, she understood why Marshal Leonov was willing to risk someone spilling the beans. If the Russians already had a manned aircraft that could reach speeds of Mach Five or higher in controlled flight, they were very close to being able to build true single-stage-to-orbit spaceplanes. And the moment a brand-new, experimental spaceplane started flying to the upper reaches of the atmosphere and beyond, the whole world would know exactly what Moscow was doing.

“I guess it’s a good thing I don’t mind being the bearer of bad tidings,” Sam said softly to Cartwright. “Because this news is definitely not going to make Mr. Martindale’s day.”

Phantom Three, at High Altitude over Omsk

Minutes Later

Ten thousand meters above the Siberian industrial city of Omsk, a large, gray twin-tailed fighter rolled out of the slow, racetrack holding pattern it had been following for several minutes. The railroads and waterways that gave the city its importance as a transportation hub were invisible, obscured by a solid layer of thick clouds.