“I can’t stomach traitors,” Russell said. “A career military guy, turning tricks for the other side — I can’t stand it. I’d plug the guy myself if I could. But if you still want him, if he means something to you, then we’ll sit on him until you cook up a plan. All right?”
“He means something to a lot of very important, highly placed people, believe me,” Curtis said. “Some of those people owe him their lives. I think you’ll find, when you read the Old Dog file, that the world probably owes him for helping bring down the Soviet Union itself.”
Central Belarus is very flat.
One hundred kilometers south of Minsk and four hundred kilometers east of Warsaw, its thick forests, vast empty plains, and marshlands extending for hundreds of thousands of acres are not a great challenge for low-level flying. But an hour into the flight, they were still nearly a thousand meters above ground, and Dave Luger was ready to tear his hair out. The boredom was making him think about how stiff and uncomfortable the instructor pilot’s seat — a metal bolt-in seat between the two cockpit officers’—really was. He was itching to see some action.
“Pilot, this is I-One,” Luger said over the aircraft interphone. “How about taking it down now?”
There was a pause; Luger was about to repeat his question, but just then the weapons-systems officer in the copilot seat, nicknamed “Strike,” replied, “We have high terrain at twenty kilometers, pilot. Recommend zero-point-eight K meters altitude.”
Like the B-2 Black Knight bomber, this aircraft used a pilot-trained navigator in the right seat to manage the navigation, weapons, and defensive systems; an engineering officer, located in a forward-facing ejection seat behind the weapons officer, monitored essential aircraft, flight, and engine systems.
“Copy. Zero point eight. Descending.” The aircraft descended the scant two hundred meters, and the autopilot came back on. Luger fell silent, biting his lip to keep from yawning into his oxygen mask.
Normally Luger wouldn’t have been so bored flying at night on a simulated low-level bombing mission, especially since he was in the flight engineer’s station of the incredible Fisikous-170 Tuman stealth bomber. But he was bored because the Soviet-trained pilots and engineers flew the thing like a couple of old women, which he really didn’t understand. Somewhere, deep within the far reaches of his mind, something tugged at him, telling him a flight like this could be so much more exciting…
Still, even the by-the-book pilots and engineers didn’t diminish Luger’s growing love for the Fi-170. With two hundred and eight thousand kilos of composites and muscles, nearly half of that fuel, Luger usually felt like he was king of the sky in the bomber. Externally, nothing compared to the deadly war machine. It was shaped like a giant manta ray, with thin, curved wings that rolled upwards away from the center, then gently downwards toward the rounded wingtips. The four engines were buried within the oblong body, with grilles screening both the inlets and exhausts to prevent radar energy from reflecting off the compressor blades and to cut down on heat emissions. A split aileron system replaced rudders, with the ailerons deflecting up or down depending on the desired degree of roll or pitch—Tuman had no vertical surfaces whatsoever that might reflect radar energy. Tuman had three long, spindly landing gear — it was not designed for rough-field operations — and two twenty-five-meter-diameter drag chutes for stopping itself after landing.
Although Tuman had been first designed in the early 1980s, its weapon fit was not finalized until just a few years ago, with the arrival to the design- and flight-test program of Dr. Ivan Sergeiovich Ozerov — it was David Luger who almost singlehandedly decided and designed the weapons fit. Tuman was designed for very long-range strike missions against the United States and China, and also designed to be self-sufficient, with a minimum of support from other aircraft. Long-range bombers were inherently vulnerable to fighter and surface-to-air missile attack, so Luger designed Tuman to protect itself and still pack a significant offensive wallop.
No one, not even David Luger himself, realized that Dr. Ozerov developed that concept from an American bomber called the EB-52 Megafortress. Just as Viktor Gabovich of the KGB hoped, Luger had dredged up vital technical memories of his years in the United States Air Force and had applied his knowledge to a Soviet design — and the aircraft he remembered the most was the Old Dog. With the help of Viktor Gabovich’s extensive brainwashing and personality-reprogramming procedures, Luger had unconsciously duplicated the Old Dog’s weapons fit on the Tuman Fi-170, and in doing so made it a much more formidable aircraft.
Although it was a stealth aircraft, Tuman had three hardpoints on each Wing for external stores, the philosophy being that all external stores would be jettisoned, and its stealth characteristics restored, long before it got within hostile radar range. On its two outboard wing hardpoints, Tuman carried two 1,500-dekaliter fuel tanks, which had already been jettisoned (on this mission, both tanks were empty and fitted with parachutes so they could be recovered and reused). On each center hardpoint, Tuman carried four long-range AS-17 rocket-powered antiradar cruise missiles, developed at Fisikous and designed to destroy coastal early- warning and fighter-intercept radars before the bomber got within the enemy radar’s effective range. The AS-17, which had a range of nearly two hundred kilometers, used inertial guidance to get close to the radar; it would then activate a seeker that would home in on the radar emissions and destroy the radar. On each inboard hardpoint, Tuman carried four AA-9 radar-guided air-to-air missiles for long-range bomber self-defense.
Tuman had two bomb bays along its centerline, each four meters wide and seven meters long, capable of carrying nine thousand kilograms of ordnance each. It would eventually be adapted to carry every air-launched weapon in the Soviet inventory — or whoever’s inventory Tuman would eventually be in, although that was not a concern of the scientists at Fisikous. For this test-bombing mission, however, it carried four huge 500-kilo gravity bombs in the aft bomb bay and two AS-l 1 laser-guided missiles in the forward bomb bay.
Internally, Tuman was something of a throwback; it served to highlight the Soviets’ deficiencies in advanced electronics. Tuman did have an electronic flight-control system and fly-by-wire technology, but it was a relatively low-tech analog system instead of a high-speed digital suite. The navigation system was a simple Doppler flight computer, operated by “Strike” sitting in the copilot’s seat, with intermittent position and velocity updates provided by the Commonwealth of Independent States’ GLOSNASS satellite navigation system or by ground-mapping radar. The low-level navigation system was a standard ground-mapping radar, set into a cavernous nose bay that destroyed the plane’s nose-on stealth characteristics, with a terrain-avoidance system spliced on top of it, similar to the G-model B-52-it simply painted a profile view of the terrain ahead. It provided no inputs whatsoever to the flight-control system, nor would it keep a pilot from flying into the hills.
Although stealth aircraft usually did not require a terrain-following system, Luger was sure this system was not developed for Tuman simply because the pilots would not trust it, and that definitely seemed to be the case now. “Listen, Comrades,” Luger said in pidgin Russian over inter-phone, “flying around at eight hundred meters with the autopilot on is crazy for any strike aircraft unless you’re in the vicinity of significant antiaircraft artillery units that can get a lucky shot off at you. Take it down and let ‘er unwind, all right?”