Eagle Station

Without waiting to see the results of his attack, Grigoryev banked right again, urging his damaged fighter through a slow, shuddering turn to the northeast. More caution and warning lights came on as additional systems failed. Black smoke curled away from his wrecked turbofan engine. He just hoped he could hold this slowly dying machine in the air long enough to reach the emergency field outside Norilsk, two hundred kilometers away.

Scion Seven-Zero

That Same Time

“Warning, warning, radar missile launch at twelve o’clock,” the Rustler’s computer announced. “One missile inbound at Mach six.”

“Time to impact, fifteen seconds,” Nadia said. Her eyes were locked on her displays. “Countermeasures ready.”

Brad saw a streak of fire racing toward them from dead ahead. Jesus, he thought, this is going to be close. Jamming the MiG-31’s radar wouldn’t help them now. That R-37 was on inertial guidance, ready to switch to its own active radar seeker in the last moments of its attack.

The missile came straight at them.

“R-37 seeker head is active,” the computer reported.

Three. Two. One. Now! He slammed the Rustler into a hard left turn, breaking across the Russian missile’s flight path. G-forces shoved him hard back against his seat. His vision grayed out. “Countermeasures!” he snapped.

Nadia jabbed her defensive systems display. Chaff cartridges rippled out behind them and detonated. Unconvinced by the false radar images they created, the R-37 ripped on through the drifting clouds of Mylar strips and then began curving around to come back at them.

“Time to impact six seconds.”

Brad rolled back right, turning in the opposite direction.

Gritting her teeth, Nadia leaned forward, fighting the G-forces pinning her in her seat. Her fingers flashed across her display, entering a new command. “Engaging that missile with SPEAR.”

Streams of carefully tailored radio waves caressed the Russian missile’s active seeker head. Seduced by false data, its simple-minded computer concluded that the enemy aircraft it was trying to kill was… right here. Relays closed.

And the R-37’s sixty-kilogram fragmentation warhead detonated. A huge ball of fire lit the sky — well behind the XCV-70 Rustler.

Breathing hard, Brad rolled the aircraft out of its second high-G turn and swung back onto a heading that would take them across Russia’s Arctic coast… and then home.

Over the Arctic Ocean

Seventy Minutes Later

The Rustler sped onward, flying low over a wilderness of unbroken ice. Hundreds of miles farther south, night was at last beginning to fall across Siberia. But this far north, not far from the top of the world, the sun would never set during these summer months.

Nadia checked her engine and fuel status monitors again. Her mouth turned down. “Our fuel reserves are down to ten percent.”

“That falls into the category of really bad news,” Brad admitted. Between his earlier supersonic evasive maneuver and their tangle with that pair of MiG-31s, he’d blown through his safety margin. They should still be able to reach the Sky Masters air refueling tanker waiting for them north of Greenland — but it would be a very near-run thing. Pilots could bullshit all they wanted about “flying on fumes” when telling tall tales in the O-club. The truth was that the XCV-70 needed honest-to-God jet fuel to keep its big Affinity turbofans spinning. And right now, they were basically riding the knife edge between speed and fuel consumption.

“Zaslon-M radar emissions increasing in strength,” their computer said. “Bearing now six o’clock and holding steady. Range sixty miles and closing.”

“Swell,” Brad muttered. They’d been picking up the radar emissions from two more MiG-31 fighters for the past several minutes — and it was clear that the Russians had a pretty good idea of where they were and where they were headed. Now those supersonic interceptors were closing in, getting set to launch their long-range missiles the moment they secured a solid radar lock. And that wouldn’t be long now, no more than a few minutes. A combination of chaff and SPEAR might enable the Rustler to fend off one or two of the Mach 6–capable missiles. But there was no way they could stop a full salvo of eight R-37s.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t anything more he and Nadia could do to break out of their increasingly grim tactical situation. They couldn’t evade, because the Rustler was too short on fuel to maneuver effectively. And they couldn’t fight, because they’d already expended all of its air-to-air missiles.

“You know what really pisses me off?” Brad said pensively.

“Slow drivers in the fast lane? Over-officious bureaucrats? The infield fly rule?” Nadia guessed.