Eagle Station

Watching their flight path as it arrowed northwest across her navigation display, Nadia saw what he intended. The enemy fighters hunting them were still headed due north, now flying along a steadily diverging course. The MiG pilots were obviously acting on the logical assumption that their quarry would take the shortest, most fuel-efficient route out of Russian airspace. And since they didn’t know the Rustler could go supersonic for short sprints, their calculations of when they should intercept the Scion aircraft were going to come up short… off by dozens of miles.

National Defense Control Center

Thirty Minutes Later

Leonov sat at his workstation, listening intently to the radio chatter between Tikhomirov’s MiG-31 crews. Arrow-shaped icons moving northward across a large digital map showed them flying at five thousand meters over the jagged highlands of the Central Siberian Plateau, well to the east of the Yenisei River. The four supersonic interceptors were deployed across a two-hundred-kilometer-wide front — using their APD-518 digital air-to-air data links to share sensor information.

“Phantom Lead, this is Three,” one of the pilots reported, sounding frustrated even through the hissing static. “I still do not have any radar, thermal, or visual contacts. Repeat, no contacts. The sky’s totally empty.”

“Same here, Three,” the senior MiG pilot radioed back. “But stay sharp. That American stealth plane can’t be too far ahead of us.”

Leonov frowned. Something had gone wrong with this planned intercept. Based on relative airspeeds and predicted courses, he’d expected at least one of the MiG-31s to spot that fleeing Scion aircraft by now. Their powerful radars were optimized to pick out low-flying targets. So either the enemy plane’s stealth technology was considerably more effective than seemed possible and the MiGs had somehow already flown right past it… or… We’re looking in the wrong place, he realized suddenly. The Americans hadn’t followed a straight-line course to escape. They must have veered away to the east or to the west, dodging Tikhomirov’s fighters as they raced north.

“Mother of God,” the other man muttered when he contacted him with his suspicions. “I think you’re right, Mikhail. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.”

“Order the MiGs to spread their search pattern wider,” Leonov snapped. “Send two of them northwest and the other two northeast. That Scion plane hasn’t disappeared off the face of the earth. It’s out there, somewhere.”

Tikhomirov nodded rapidly. “I also have Beriev-100 AWACS aircraft and more fighters taking off from bases near Moscow and Murmansk.”

Leonov shook his head. “They’ll be too late and too slow. Our MiG-31s are the only aircraft with any realistic hope of intercepting the enemy before they cross our Arctic coast.”

“Those fighters have been supersonic for a long time,” Tikhomirov warned. “Even with drop tanks, they’ll be running up against the edge of their combat radius pretty soon.”

“Screw their combat radius,” Leonov growled, feeling his temper finally snap under the accumulated frustrations of the day. “If necessary, they can divert to Norilsk or Novy Urengoye.” Both far northern airports had runways that could handle MiG-31s. He glared at the screen. “Tell your pilots to find that damned stealth plane and kill it — at all costs.”

Twenty-Two

Scion Seven-Zero, over the West Siberian Plain

A Short Time Later

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.