“I can’t, Annie,” was all Luger could say. “I … I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
“Can’t … or won’t?”
He had no answer, no more words for her the rest of the evening. He was silent as he walked her to her apartment door, then as she kissed his cheek and squeezed his hand good-bye.
Metyor Aerospace Center IIG headquarters,
Zhukovsky Air Bass, Moscow, Russian Federation
“Thank you for coming, Comrade Kazakov,” Pyotr Fursenko said, extending a hand in greeting. “Welcome to your facility.” Pavel Kazakov had arrived at the Metyor Aerospace Center facility very late in the evening, after the swing shift had gone home and the factory and administration building maintenance workers had finished. He was accompanied by two aides and three bodyguards, all with long sealskin coats. When they set off the metal detectors built into the doorway in the rear of the administration facility, but kept right on walking alongside Kazakov, Fursenko knew they were heavily armed. Kazakov himself was dressed casually, as if he had left his home for a walk around his estate — he resembled many of the swing-shift engineers or middle managers at the plant, working late in the office.
“So, what is so important that you needed me to come at this hour, eenzhenyer?” Kazakov asked. His voice was stem, but in fact he was nervous with anticipation.
“I thought very long and hard about the things we spoke about when we met, Comrade,” Fursenko said. “Someone needs to punish the butchers who killed your father and my son in Prizren.”
Kazakov looked around the first hangar they entered. The huge forty-thousand-square-foot hangar, its ceiling over fifty feet high, was in immaculate condition, clean, well-lit, and freshly painted-and completely empty. The young financier was visibly disappointed, growing angry. “You, Doctor?” Kazakov asked. “With this? What do you intend to do? Invite them all here for a game of volleyball?”
“Crush them,” Fursenko said. “Destroy them, exactly the same way they destroyed our family members — swiftly, silently, in one night.”
“With what, Doctor? I see a bucket and a mop in that corner and a lamp on that security desk. Or do those things transform themselves into weapons at your command?”
“With this, Comrade,” Fursenko said proudly. He walked to the back of the hangar. The back wall was actually a separate hangar door, dividing the massive building into a semi-secure and secure area. He swiped a security card, entered a code into a keypad, and pressed a button to open the second set of hangar doors.
What was inside made Pavel Kazakov gasp in surprise.
In truth, it was actually hard to see, because the aircraft was so thin. Its wing span was over one hundred and forty feet, but its fuselage and wings were so thin that it appeared to be floating in midair. The wings actually swept forward—the wingtips were in line with the very nose of the aircraft. The wings swept back gracefully to a broad, flat tail, where the engine exhausts for the four afterburning jet engines were flat and razor-thin, like the rest of the aircraft. The aircraft stood tall on long, seemingly fragile tricycle landing gear. There were no vertical control surfaces — the tail area swept to a point and simply ended, with no visible flight control surfaces whatsoever.
“What … is … this thing?” Kazakov breathed.
“We call it Tyenee—’Shadow,’” Fursenko said proudly. “It was officially the Fisikous-179 stealth bomber that we built here at Metyor from plans, jigs, and molds we recovered before Fisikous was closed. Over the years we added many different enhancements to it to try to modernize it.”
“‘Modernize it’?” Kazakov asked incredulously. “You don’t call this ‘modem’?”
“This aircraft is almost twenty years old, Comrade,” Fursenko said. “It was one of my first designs. But back then, I simply did not have enough technical knowledge about stealth design versus aerodynamic requirements — I couldn’t make it fly and be stealthy at the same time. I worked on it for almost ten years. Then Ivan Ozerov came along and made it fly in six months.”
Kazakov stepped closer to the aircraft and examined it closely. “Where are the flight control surfaces?” he asked. “Don’t airplanes need things on the wings to make them turn?”
“Not this aircraft,” Fursenko explained. “It uses microhydraulic actuators all over its surface to make tiny, imperceptible changes to the airflow across the fuselage, which create or reduce lift and drag wherever it’s needed for whatever maneuver it is commanded to perform. We found we didn’t need to hang spoilers or flaps or rudders into the slipstream to make it turn, climb, or fly in coordinated flight-all we needed to do was slightly alter the shape of a portion of the fuselage. The result: no need for any flight control surfaces in normal flight. That increases its stealthiness a hundredfold.”
Pavel continued his walkaround of the incredible aircraft, eventually coming to the bomb bay. There were two very small bomb bays — they looked big enough for only a few large weapons. “These seem very small.”
“Tyenee was just a technology demonstrator aircraft, so it was never really designed to have weapons bays at all — the bays were used for instrumentation, cameras, and telemetry equipment,” Fursenko said. “But we eventually turned them back into weapons bays. They are large enough for just four two-thousand-pound-class weapons on each side, about sixteen thousand pounds total. There are external hardpoints under the wings for standoff weapons as well, which would be used before the aircraft got within enemy radar range. Tyenee also carries defensive weapons, built into the wing leading edges itself to reduce radar cross-section: four R-60MK heat-seeking air-to-air missiles, specifically designed for this aircraft.” Kazakov looked, but he could not see the missile muzzles — they were that well-concealed.
They climbed a ladder up the side of the nose to the crew compartment. Despite the size of the aircraft, there were only two tandem ejection seats inside, and it was extremely cramped. Power had already been applied, and the thick bubble canopy had been slid back to its retracted position. The main flight, navigation, and aircraft systems readouts were on three large flat-panel monitors on the forward instrument panel, with a few tape-style analog gauges on each side. Kazakov immediately sat in the pilot’s seat in front.
Fursenko knelt beside him on the canopy sill, explaining the various displays and controls. “The aircraft is electronically controlled by a side-stick controller on the right, with a single throttle control on the left instrument panel,” Fursenko said. “Those four switches below it act as emergency backup throttles.”
“It seems as if there are no controls to this plane,” Kazakov commented. “No switches, no buttons?”
“Most all commands are entered either by voice, by eye-pointing devices in the flight helmets where you choose items on the monitors, or by touching the monitors,” Fursenko explained. “Most normal flight conditions are preprogrammed into the computer — the initial flight plan, all the targets, all the weapon ballistics. The pilot just has to follow the computer’s directions, or simply let the autopilot fly the flight plan.
“The defensive and offensive systems are mostly automatic,” he went on. “The aircraft will fly itself to the target, open the bomb doors, and release the correct weapon automatically. The bombardier in back normally uses satellite navigation, with inertial navigation as a backup, all controlled by computer. In the target area, he can use laser designators or imaging infrared sensors to locate the target and guide his weapons. The defensive weapons can be manually or computer-controlled. The bombardier also has electronic flight controls in the rear, although the aircraft does not require two pilots to operate successfully.”