Petra's interrogation revealed a wing of eight MiG 31 interceptors, flying in formation at twenty-five thousand feet and closing. At Mach 2.4.
"Ya ponemaiyu," Colonel-General Gregori Edmundovich Mochanov said into the secure phone, the pride of Dolinsk's Command Central. "I ordered a wing of the Fifteenth Squadron scrambled at 0938 hours. Fortunately we were planning an exercise this morning."
He paused for the party at the other end, General Valentin Sokolov on a microwave link from the Hokkaido facility.
"Da, if Androv maintains his altitude below six hundred meters, then he will probably have to keep her near Mach 2. The vehicle, as I understand it, is not designed for that operating regime. So with the MiG 31s on full afterburner, we can make up the distance. But we need his vector."
He paused and listened. "Yes, they are fully armed. AA-9s. A kill perimeter of—" He listened again. "Of course, active homing radar and infrared, on the underfuselage—" He was impatiently gripping the receiver. "Da, but I can't work miracles. I must have a vector." He paused again. "Da, but I don't want to accidentally shoot down another KAL 747. I must have a confirmed target. I'm not going to order them to fire without it."
He listened a second longer, then said, "Good," and slammed down the phone.
Guess we'd better start playing hide-and-seek in earnest," Vance observed.
"Stealth, my American friend," Androv replied. "The hostile radar signature of this fuselage is almost nothing. And we can defeat their infrared by taking her back on the deck, so the engines are masked from their look-down IR. Back we go. We'll pull out at five hundred meters, but it'll mean about three negative G's — blood to the brain, a redout. Very dangerous. Be ready."
Then he shoved the sidestick forward and Daedalus plunged into a Mach 3 power dive. The infrared cameras showed the sea plunging toward them. The dive took even less time than the climb, with the altimeter scrolling. Suddenly the voice of Petra sounded.
“Pull up. Warning. Pull up. Pilot must acknowledge or auto-override will commence.”
A ton of empty space slammed into them as Petra automatically righted the vehicle, pulling out of the dive at an altitude of four hundred meters.
Vance looked over and saw Yuri Andreevich Androv's bandaged arm lying limp on the sidestick, lightly hemorrhaging. He'd passed out from the upward rush of blood.
"He has disappeared from the Katsura radar again, Mino-sama. I think he has taken the vehicle back on the deck." Ikeda's face was ashen as he typed in the computer AI override command one last time, still hoping. The Flight Control operations screen above him was reading "System Malfunction," while the engineers standing behind were exchanging worried glances. Who was going to be held responsible? The master screen above, the one with the Katsura radar, no longer showed the Daedalus. Androv had taken it to thirty thousand feet, then down again. He was playing games.
Tanzan Mino was not wasting time marveling at the plane's performance specs. He turned and nodded to General Sokolov, who was holding a red phone in his hand. The MiG 31 wing wasn't flying military power; it was full afterburners, which was pushing them to Mach 2.4. If Daedalus stayed on the deck, they might still intercept.
"We have no choice," he said in Russian. "Order them to give him a chance to turn back, and tell him if he refuses, they will shoot him down. Maybe the threat will be enough."
Sokolov nodded gravely. But what if Androv was as insane as every indication suggested he was? What if he disobeyed the commands from the Sakhalin interceptors? What then? Who was going to give the command that unleashed AAMs to bring down the most magnificient airplane — make that spacecraft — the world had ever seen. The MiG 31, with its long-range Acrid AA-9 missiles, had a stand-off kill capability that matched the American F-14 Tomcat and its deadly AIM-54 Phoenix. Since the AA-9 had its own guidance system, the pilot need not even see his target. One of those could easily bring down an unarmed behemoth like the Daedalus as long as it was still in the supersonic mode, which it would have to be at that low altitude.
A pall of sadness entered his voice as he issued the command. Androv, of all people, knew the look-down shoot-down capabilities of the MiG 31. Maybe there was still a chance to reason with him. The Daedalus had no pilot-ejection capability. His choice was to obey or die.
Reports from the hangar said he'd taken some automatic-weapons fire from the CEO's bodyguards. How badly wounded was he?
Hard to tell, but he'd got Daedalus off the runway, then done an Immelmann to take her to ten thousand meters, followed by a power dive back to the deck. He was frolicking like a drunken dolphin. Pure Androv. How much longer could he last?
Sokolov glanced at the screen in front of him. The computer was extrapolating, telling him that a due-east heading by Daedalus would soon take her over international waters. If Androv kept that vector, at least there'd be no messy questions about violating foreign airspace.
"How long before they can intercept?" Tanzan Mino asked, not taking his eyes from the screens. Now the Soviet interceptors were on the Katsura radar, speeding toward Daedalus' last known vector coordinates. It should only be a matter of time.
"In five minutes they will be within air-to-air range," Sokolov replied. He paused, then asked the question weighing on his mind. "If he refuses to turn back, do you really want that vehicle blown from the skies?"
Now Tanzan Mino was thinking about the Stealth capabilities of the Daedalus. Was the design good enough to defeat the MiG-31s' pulse-Doppler radar? He suddenly found himself wishing the plane hadn't been so well designed. The stupid Soviets, of course, had no idea — yet— that it could just disappear.
"He could be headed for Alaskan air space. That's what the computer is projecting. You understand the ramifications if this vehicle falls into the hands of the Americans."
The Soviet nodded gravely. That was, of course, unthinkable. There would be no going home again.
"Yuri!" Eva was up like a shot. "Lean back. Breathe." She was pushing the button that raised the huge flight helmet. As she watched, his open eyes gradually resumed their focus. Then he snapped his head and looked around.
"Shto… what happened?"
"I don't think you can handle heavy G-loads. You're weak from the wound, the tourniquet."
He straightened up, then glanced again at the altimeter. They were cruising at three hundred meters, smooth as silk. And they were burning six hundred pounds of JP-7 a second.
"Nothing has gone the way I planned." He rubbed at his temples, trying to clear the blood from his brain. "We're just buying a little breathing space now by staying down here. I think the radar noise of the choppy sea, together with all our Stealth capability, will keep us safe. But at this low altitude we're using fuel almost as though we were dumping it. If we continue to hold on the deck, we've got maybe half an hour's flying time left."
"If we gained altitude," Vance wondered, "could we stretch it enough to make Alaska?"
"Probably," Androv replied. "If we took her above fifty thousand feet, we might have a chance."
"Then we've got no choice. The only solid ground between here and the U.S. is the Kurile Islands, and they're Soviet territory."
"But if we did reach U.S. airspace, then what?" Eva asked. "We'd have to identify ourselves. Who's going to believe our story? Nobody even knows this monster exists."