Eagle Station

Then they heard the same Russian controller’s bored-sounding voice crackle through their headsets. “Traveler Five-Five-Three, this is Murmansk. Radar contact. Proceed DIRIP to KUTET. Monitor VHF one-three-three point four. At NOTIS, contact Krasnoyarsk Control, six-six-seven-two primary, eight-eight-two-two secondary.”

“I’ll be damned,” Brad said in wonder. “This crazy-ass stunt is actually working. Those guys really don’t know we’re up here.”

Over Central Siberia

A Couple of Hours Later

One of the icons on Nadia’s navigation display turned red. “We are approaching the breakaway point. Thirty seconds out.”

“Copy that,” Brad said, nodding. Rapidly, he blinked away a stinging droplet of sweat. Although not quite as mentally taxing and physically exhausting as prolonged nap-of-the-earth flight, the effort required to keep their aircraft so close to the mammoth 747 for so long had been a serious strain. “Any status change on that Nebo-M radar?”

Nadia checked another of her displays, this one set to monitor hostile radars and other potential threats. Several minutes before, they’d picked up the emissions of a mobile VHF-band Russian air surveillance and tracking radar operating a couple of hundred miles to the west. She suspected it was assigned to an S-300 SAM regiment guarding the vital West Siberian oilfields. “No change,” she reported. “The Nebo-M radar is still active.”

“Too bad,” Brad said. He shrugged. “Guess we’ll just have to roll the dice.”

This far out, that enemy radar shouldn’t have any real chance to detect them — even when they broke away from the sheltering embrace of the Traveler Air Freight cargo jet. But there was always the possibility of some eagle-eyed Russian spotting something odd on his screen and raising an alarm. The Rustler’s stealth design and radar-absorbent coating significantly reduced its radar cross section in some wavelengths and from certain aspects, especially from the front. But they couldn’t render the Scion aircraft completely invisible.

“Ten seconds,” Nadia said.

Brad breathed out. His hands settled firmly on the controls.

The nav icon on Nadia’s MFD flashed green. “Execute breakaway!” she snapped.

Instantly, Brad throttled back to minimum power and rolled right, going almost inverted as he dove away from the bigger jet. As a last precaution, he’d turned west to keep his nose pointed toward that distant Russian air surveillance radar. He hoped that would keep XCV-70’s radar cross section as small as possible during the critical few seconds before they fell below the Nebo-M’s horizon.

Negative G’s tugged him forward against his seat straps. The roar from the Rustler’s engines faded away — replaced by the shrill shriek of the wind as it plummeted almost vertically toward the ground. The altitude indicator on his HUD decreased precipitously.

91st Radio Technical Regiment, Near the Eastern Edge of the West Siberian Oil Basin

That Same Time

Junior Sergeant Anatoly Yanayev frowned. Had he really seen what he’d just seen? He swiveled in his seat. “Captain Dyomin?” he said.

Frowning, his commander poked his head back into the operations van. He’d been enjoying a smoke outside in the early afternoon sunshine. “What is it, Sergeant?”

Yanayev indicated his console. “I think I’ve detected an unidentified air contact.” He shrugged. “Well, at least for a second or two…” He let his voice trail off uncertainly.

With a sigh, Dyomin pitched his cigarette away and climbed back into the van. “Show me the recording,” he demanded.

“I was tracking a big American air cargo jet transiting south about three hundred kilometers east of here,” the young enlisted man explained. “As practice, you see.”

Patiently, Dyomin nodded, deciding not to point out that Yanayev was only following the orders he personally had issued at the beginning of this training session. Tracking the passenger jets and air freighters using Polar Route 1 to cross Russian airspace wasn’t exactly a challenging test of their equipment, even at such a long range, but at least it was a task he’d hoped might be within Yanayev’s capabilities. The junior sergeant wasn’t exactly one of the regiment’s shining stars.

“Well, suddenly I saw this… er… second blip for a couple of seconds. It sort of looked like something maybe falling off that American 747.” He pushed a couple of buttons beside his console’s seventeen-inch LCD display, replaying the short sequence it had automatically recorded.

Dyomin sighed even harder, as he watched the tiny transitory radar blip flicker into existence slightly below the larger cargo jet and then vanish. “What you just saw, Junior Sergeant Yanayev,” he said heavily, “was a perfect example of a minor systems glitch.”

“But—”