Brad smiled. “Maybe on the way back.” He glanced down at the fueling status indicator shown on one of his MFDs. “We should be gassed up and back in the air in about fifteen minutes or so.”
Beside him, Nadia finished typing a short message on her left-hand display. She hit the send button. “I have informed Powidz of our arrival here and estimated time of departure,” she reported. Seconds later, her MFD pinged, signaling the receipt of a new transmission via satellite downlink. Her fingers flew over the virtual keyboard, ordering their computer to decode the incoming signal. “It’s an intelligence update from Martindale,” she said. “So far, the Russians are sticking precisely to their announced schedule of air-defense exercises.”
“That’s mighty generous of them,” Brad said with a quick, slashing grin. While he bet Gryzlov hadn’t intended this sudden round of SAM and radar drills as anything but a bit of saber rattling, it had certainly made their mission planning a little easier. When they crossed into enemy airspace about ten minutes after takeoff from Kemijärvi, Russia’s Aerospace Forces would be focused on testing their defenses around St. Petersburg — more than 350 nautical miles south. “Anything else?” he asked.
“There are no signs yet of any higher alert level anywhere along our planned flight path or in the region around their Perun’s Aerie complex,” Nadia read. “Also, Colonel Kasperek’s covering force is completing its movement to the forward air base. His fighters will be fueled, armed, and on ready alert in sixty minutes.”
Brad nodded. With luck, they would never need to call on Pawel Kasperek’s F-16s for help. First, because that would mean things had gone really wrong. The whole point of this mission was to hit the Russian cyberwar complex by surprise, blow it to hell, and then get out while Moscow was still trying to pick up its drawers. And second, because there probably wasn’t a lot the Polish fighter pilots could do except die gallantly if they were thrown into battle against Russia’s S-300 and S-400 SAMs, Su-27s, and other advanced combat aircraft.
If it were up to him, he would have vetoed the idea of putting Kasperek’s squadron on standby. But both President Wilk and Kevin Martindale had insisted — labeling it a last-ditch contingency option.
“Wolf Six-Two, you’re fully fueled and good to go,” the Finnish ramp manager said, less than twenty minutes after engine shutdown. “As the Scion maintenance team requested, the tower has cleared you for departure without further communication. No other flights are inbound or outbound. Good luck and Godspeed.”
“Roger that, Kemijärvi Ground,” Brad acknowledged. “Thank you for your assistance.” Scion’s close working and financial relationship with the Finns meant they could take off again without risking the routine aircraft-to-control-tower transmissions that could be intercepted by Russian SIGINT posts just across the nearby border. He glanced at Nadia. “All set?” She nodded tightly. “Okay, let’s run through the takeoff checklists and get this beast airborne, pronto.” He opened the intercom channel to the troop compartment again. “Right, guys. This is it. Strap in tight. The ride’s likely to get a little bumpy.”
Colonel Pawel Kasperek watched the last of his squadron’s F-16C Vipers taxi into one of the camouflaged aircraft shelters built along the airfield’s northern side. He felt himself relax. Not much. Just a bit. Whatever happened, at least his fighters were in position.
Ämari was an old Soviet-era air base, once home to a Russian naval aviation regiment flying Su-24s. Upgraded to NATO standards several years ago, the base was just a little over three hundred kilometers west of St. Petersburg — thirty minutes’ flight time at the F-16’s cruise speed. That put them practically on Russia’s doorstep, at least by combat standards. Best of all, as far as he could tell, they’d managed this emergency operational movement without the Russians picking up so much as a whiff that something odd was happening.
His squadron’s F-16s had been taking off in pairs from Minsk Mazowiecke at varied intervals over the past several hours. In and of itself, that was nothing out of the ordinary: fighter patrols over Warsaw had become a regular sight ever since the Kalmar Airlines crash. What was different was that each pair of Vipers, instead of climbing to orbit the Polish capital, had flown north at extremely low altitude — flying out into the Baltic and then turning northeast to Estonia along several different, precleared air corridors. That had kept them off Russian radar and held radio transmissions to an absolute minimum.
Bomb-handling trailers loaded with thousand-pound AGM-154A Joint Standoff Weapons, or JSOWs, and AIM-9X Sidewinder and AIM-120 AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, were already in motion — heading for the aircraft shelters. The ground crews flown in earlier on Poland’s American-made C-130s were inside waiting to arm their planes with a mix of air-to-ground and air-to-air ordnance.
Kasperek turned to his Estonian counterpart, Lieutenant Colonel Inar Tamm. “So now we wait, Colonel.”
“Jah. Yes,” the other man said simply. Then he smiled thinly. “And perhaps we should pray too, eh?”
Kasperek nodded fervently. Ordinarily he wasn’t much for prayer, but there were moments when you wanted to make sure you covered every possible angle. This was definitely one of them.
One hundred and twenty nautical miles and sixteen minutes after crossing the Russian frontier, the Iron Wolf stealth aircraft streaked low over a landscape of dense snow-cloaked forests and ice-covered lakes. Thousands of stars shimmered high overhead, only partially obscured by thin wisps of cloud.
Brad McLanahan pulled his stick a bit to the right, banking onto a course that took the XCV-62 between two low tree-covered hills and then back out over a dully gleaming expanse of ice. Cameras set to cover the rear arc of their aircraft showed roiling vortices of loose snow swirling in their wake — ripped off the earth by the sheer speed of their low-altitude passage. He frowned. By rights, he ought to gain more altitude. If some eagle-eyed Russian fighter pilot were on the prowl in the skies above them, he might spot the glittering snow-crystal trail they were tearing across an otherwise darkened countryside. If that happened, they were screwed.
Unfortunately, there were other, even more compelling reasons for him to keep this bird right down on the deck.
“S-band search radar at eleven o’clock. Estimated range is one hundred fifty miles,” the Ranger’s computer reported. “Detection probability at this altitude nil.”
“It’s a 96L6E ‘Cheese Board’ system,” Nadia said, checking the signal characteristics shown on her threat warning display. “Probably operating with the S-300 regiment deployed to cover the submarine construction and repair yards at Severodvinsk.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Brad agreed absently. He was almost entirely focused on following the HUD cues provided by their navigation and digital terrain-following systems. He pulled back on the stick a tiny bit as they left the ice lake behind — climbing slightly to clear the tops of the trees by just a couple of hundred feet. To avoid losing airspeed in the climb, he inched the throttles forward, feeding just a scooch more power to the Ranger’s four turbofan engines.
“New S-band search radar at two o’clock. Range is one hundred sixty-five miles,” the computer said suddenly.
“It’s the same radar type,” Nadia told him.
Brad nodded, keeping his eyes fixed on his HUD. “That’ll be the radar around Petrozavodsk, guarding the interceptor air base there.” He forced a tight grin. “This is what we call threading the needle.”