And now Whack Macomber’s CID was down too, destroyed by the same brutally effective Russian ambush. The lump in his throat grew larger, threatening to choke him. Not for the first time lately, he wished he weren’t too old to cry.
He stared out the cockpit windows. Outside, across the clearing, Ian Schofield and his commandos humped their gear and weapons back toward the XCV-62. Once they were aboard in a couple of minutes, he could take off — beginning the long, risky flight out of Russia with the news of their failure.
“Brad,” Nadia said suddenly, sitting bolt upright. She’d been scanning through radio frequencies, using the Ranger’s sophisticated computers, in an effort to figure out more of what the Russians were up to. “Listen!”
She switched the channel she’d been monitoring to his headset. Someone gabbling frantically in Russian sounded in his ears. He frowned. It sounded like a very excited junior officer making a report, but otherwise it was gibberish to him. He shrugged helplessly. “Sorry, I can’t make it out.”
“Major Macomber is alive!” Nadia said. Her eyes were almost completely closed while she translated on the fly. “This lieutenant is telling his colonel that they’ve taken a prisoner from the second mercenary robot they destroyed.”
For a split second, Brad experienced a surge of hope. But then it faded, replaced by a horrible feeling of dread and helplessness. Alive as a prisoner of the Russians, Whack was probably worse off than if he’d been killed outright. Gryzlov had tagged the Iron Wolf Squadron as terrorists, even though they fought in uniform and for a recognized nation-state. The cold-blooded Russian leader would have no qualms about ordering Whack tortured for information about CID and other advanced Scion weapons technology and tactics. And after they’d squeezed him dry, they’d put a bullet in the back of his skull and dump his body in an unmarked grave.
Flying at three thousand meters above the forests of northern Russia, two Russian Air Force Su-50 stealth fighters in dark and light blue camouflage raced northeast. Seen from a distance in daylight, their deceptive “Shark” paint scheme made them appear much smaller than they actually were. At night, they were almost invisible to the naked eye.
Colonel Ruslan Baryshev spoke into his mic. “Perun Security Command, this is Prividenye Lead. I am five minutes out from your position. Request situation update.”
“Specter Lead, this is Security Command,” an agitated voice acknowledged. “We have defeated the enemy ground assault, destroying two of their combat machines. But our casualties are extremely heavy — as is the damage to our special complex.”
Baryshev grimaced. The quick briefing he’d received from Colonel General Maksimov before his fighters took off had indicated the extraordinarily high value President Gryzlov placed on this top-secret facility. Heads were likely to roll in the aftermath of this Iron Wolf attack — he only hoped his would not be one of them. He keyed his mic again. “What about the enemy transport aircraft? Have your radars or scouts pinpointed its location?”
“Negative, Specter,” the other man reported. “Our radars were destroyed in the initial assault, along with our fixed air defenses. And unfortunately, we have no ground- or helicopter-based reconnaissance units currently available to search the surrounding area.”
Better and better, Baryshev thought acidly. The situation on the ground sounded like a total clusterfuck — which meant it was up to him to find the surviving American mercenaries before they escaped.
So far, his Su-50’s radar showed no unidentified contacts in the skies ahead. That wasn’t surprising. To have penetrated this far inside Russia without being detected, any enemy aircraft would have to be fairly stealthy and able to fly safely at extremely low altitude. If so, he couldn’t expect to pick up anything until they were much closer.
The other possibility, of course, was that the Iron Wolf aircraft was still parked somewhere on the ground, somewhere relatively close to the Perun’s Aerie complex. He radioed his wingman. “We’re going hunting, Oleg. Let’s maximize our coverage. Deploy in line abreast. Five-kilometer spacing. I’m switching my radar to air-to-ground mode. You keep an eye on the sky, understand?”
“Two,” the other pilot, Captain Oleg Imrekov, replied. Even over the radio, he sounded dubious. “It’s going to be a bitch spotting anything in all that clutter up ahead.”
Baryshev understood his wingman’s skepticism. They were approaching the Urals at high speed. The brand-new N036 AESA radars equipping their Su-50s were marvels of Russian technology, but no fighter-size airborne radar in the world could hope to see through mountains. “Don’t worry, Captain,” he said. “Wherever these mercenaries are hiding, they’ll have to come up into the open air sooner or later. And if they don’t, we’ll fly search patterns until we nail them on the ground.”
“Caution, two unidentified airborne X-band search radars detected,” the Ranger’s SPEAR threat-warning system announced abruptly, shockingly loud in the gloom-filled silence of the cockpit.
Jolted out of his funk, Brad muttered, “Hell.” The Russians finally had aircraft up looking for them. Which meant they had to get out, and get out fast. Stealth characteristics or not, they were bound to be detected eventually — and on the ground, the XCV-62 was a sitting duck. He leaned forward, rapidly punching through takeoff checklist menus on his two MFDs. “I’m going for a fast engine start.”
“Identify those radars,” Nadia ordered.
“Negative identification,” the computer told her. “Probable agile frequency signal. Stand by.”
Her fingers flew across the virtual keyboard on one of her displays as she searched for possible matches. If those enemy radars were hopping frequencies too fast for the SPEAR system to identify, they were probably active electronically scanned array types. And those rapid frequency changes made it almost impossible to get a bearing and range to the emitter, let alone positively identify it from its signals alone.
On the other hand, she thought, there were only so many known X-band airborne radars in the Russian inventory. And there were even fewer AESA-types. Her finger stabbed at one of the screens on her MFDs — the N036 radars manufactured by Russia’s Tikhomirov Scientific Institute of Instrument Design, or NIIP. That had to be it. Her eyes widened slightly as she realized those radars were only fitted to one type of combat aircraft. Alarmed, she turned back to Brad. “We are being hunted by Russian Su-50 stealth fighters.”
“Swell,” he said under his breath. “Nice of them to bring out the first team.” He opened a channel to the Ranger’s troop compartment. “Captain Schofield?”
“We’re aboard,” the Canadian-born commando officer said, sounding a bit breathless. Running through deep snow was hard work, no matter how physically fit you were.
“Good,” Brad said. He tapped a control on his display. “Then I’m sealing the ramp.” A high-pitched hydraulic whine penetrated the cockpit. “Strap in tight. We have company coming and this is going to get hairy real fast.”
He entered more commands. Outside the windows, their four turbofan engines started spooling up. “All compressors are in the green. Engine temps look good,” he said, studying the readouts.
Beside him, Nadia was running through her own checklists. “Preparing defensive systems. SPEAR is ready. Flares are set for K-74M2 heat-seekers. Chaff is configured for K-77M radar-guided missiles. Spinning up inertial navigation systems on both MALDs. GPS receivers are initialized.”