“Well, that sucks,” Brad muttered, drawing Nadia’s attention to the display. “Someone out there just decided to bar the barn door before the horse gets out.”
“Is there a problem?” Cartwright asked from behind them.
“Yes, a bit of a problem,” Nadia told him. Her voice was cool, almost completely unruffled. “The Russians now have at least four Su-27 fighters patrolling across our planned flight path.”
“Can we sneak past them?”
“Not a chance,” Brad said, glancing back into the crowded cabin. “Those Su-27s are equipped with upgraded radars that can detect us pretty far out, even with all the stealth features our guys added to this helicopter.”
“So how about flying around them, then?” Sam asked.
This time, Nadia answered. “I am afraid that is not possible either. We do not have enough fuel for any detour that would evade both those fighters and the SAM units stationed at Rostov and in the Crimea.”
Brad nodded. Off-the-shelf SW-4s had a maximum range of nearly five hundred nautical miles. And while the Scion techs who’d worked on this one had squeezed in some extra fuel capacity, it was just enough to offset the added weight of its stealth coating and new electronics. Toss in the fact that penetrating Russian air defenses required flying long distances at extremely low altitude, which significantly increased fuel consumption, and the reality was that they were already dancing right on the ragged edge of their available fuel. As it was, safely reaching their planned refueling point, a covert Scion airstrip in unoccupied western Ukraine, was going to test Nadia’s piloting skills to the limit.
Sam looked more irritated than scared. “So we’re basically screwed?”
“Not if the contingency plan Captain McLanahan developed for this mission works,” Nadia assured her.
“What kind of contingency plan?”
“Sometimes the mountain comes to Mohammed,” Brad said as he brought up a com window on his display and typed in a short message. The system beeped once as it compressed, encrypted, and then sent his message as a single, millisecond-long burst via satellite uplink. “But other times we have to persuade Mohammed to fly off to the mountain.”
Two Polish F-16C Vipers circled low over the sea, only a couple of hundred meters above wave height. Their mottled light and dark gray camouflage made them difficult to spot visually and their current altitude rendered them effectively invisible to the Russian radars painting the night sky along the Crimean and Caucasus coasts.
“Talon Lead, this is Air Operations Center South,” a Romanian-accented voice said through Colonel Pawel Kasperek’s headset. “Execute WRIGGLE ONE. Repeat, execute WRIGGLE ONE.”
He clicked his mike. “Acknowledged, Center. Executing WRIGGLE ONE.” Briefly, he glanced down at the cockpit map display set to show the current position of the MQ-55 Coyote drone data-linked with his F-16. He smiled under his oxygen mask. The stealthy unmanned aircraft was right where it should be — orbiting very low above the sea about two hundred kilometers south of the Crimean Peninsula.
Just about the size of a small business jet, the Sky Masters — built Coyote had a flying-wing configuration, twin wing-buried turbofan engines, stealth coating, and just enough avionics to allow a ground- or air-based pilot to fly it remotely or to follow simple, preprogrammed flight plans. Originally designed as a missile truck, a low-cost platform capable of carrying up to ten AIM-120 advanced medium-range air-to-air missiles in its internal weapons bay, this MQ-55 was intended to play a very different role tonight.
“Time to strut your stuff, little bird,” Kasperek murmured. He activated the data link and punched in the command needed to trigger a new flight plan buried in the Coyote’s tiny onboard computer.
Four hundred kilometers east of where the Polish F-16s were stationed, the MQ-55 drone broke out of the slow, lazy circle it had been tracing over the Black Sea and headed due west. Its turbofan engines whined louder, powering up as the Coyote climbed steadily into the cloud-speckled night sky.
“I have intermittent contact with an unidentified aircraft approximately two hundred kilometers south of our position,” one of the battalion’s radar operators reported suddenly. His voice cracked with mingled excitement and frustration. “But I can’t lock it up for very long. The target keeps fading in and out on my screen.”
Colonel Ivan Zaitev spun toward the boyish-looking lieutenant. His eyes narrowed. “Intermittent contact? Are we being jammed?”
“No, sir.”
“What is the estimated course and speed of this contact?” Zaitev asked.
“Direction of flight is roughly two-six-five degrees. Speed is more than six hundred kilometers an hour.”
“Altitude?”
“Perhaps one thousand meters,” the lieutenant said hesitantly.
“That certainly sounds like a stealth aircraft of some kind,” Zaitev’s executive officer commented from his station.
The colonel nodded. His lips thinned. “So it does.” His fingers drummed on a console in time with his speeding thoughts. “And if it is, now we know right where those spies the whole Southern Military District is hunting have got to.”
“Should we fire now?” his XO asked. He sounded uncertain. “At that speed, they’ll be out of our effective engagement range in less than ten minutes. I know we haven’t got a tight lock on this bastard, but maybe if we put enough missiles in the air—”
“Fire? Without confirming we have a valid target? Christ, no!” Zaitev snapped. The sky over the Black Sea was full of commercial airliners crisscrossing to and from Europe, Turkey, and the rest of the Middle East. Lobbing effectively unguided missiles into that tangle would be insane. The diplomatic repercussions if his battalion accidentally blew a passenger jet out of the air would be horrific. Just imagining the Kremlin’s likely reaction to such a disastrous mistake was enough to make his skin crawl.
“Then what can we do?”
“We make the flyboys earn their pay for once,” Zaitev said, coming to a decision. He stabbed at the button that opened his direct secure link to the headquarters of the Southern Military District. “This is Colonel Zaitev. I need to speak to Colonel General Nikitin immediately!”
While he waited for Nikitin to come on the line, his executive officer frowned. “But what can those Su-27 pilots do that we can’t? Our radar is better than theirs… and if we can’t lock up this contact, how will they?”
“The old-fashioned way, Yevgeni,” Zaitev said with a lopsided smile. “With their own eyes. After all, we’re getting enough data off this unidentified contact to vector them into the right sector. And then, if this really is one of those damned Iron Wolf stealth planes, our fighters should be able to shoot it down without too much trouble.”
Peering down at his display, Brad saw the icons representing the Russian Su-27s suddenly break out of the racetrack patrol pattern they’d been flying and head southeast at high speed. He whistled. “I’ll be damned. My cockeyed idea actually worked.”