Arctic Storm Rising

Buffeted by the storm howling down from the Arctic Ocean, the PAK-DA stealth bomber streaked onward through a swirling torrent of wind-driven snow and ice. Colonel Alexei Petrov fought to keep his heavy aircraft under control, reacting almost instinctively to powerful gusts and unexpected pockets of severe turbulence that tugged and tore at the edges of its wing. Through his canopy, he caught only fleeting glimpses of the rugged, mountainous maze he was navigating. Sheer limestone cliffs and steep, boulder-strewn slopes towered above him on all sides, rising higher and higher until they vanished in a thick, gray layer of low-hanging cloud.

The steering cue on his HUD slid sharply to the right. Immediately, he yanked his stick in that direction. The bomber banked sharply, narrowly avoiding a cliff face that appeared suddenly out of the darkness and then just as abruptly disappeared astern, cloaked by falling snow.

Petrov felt his left eye twitch. Beneath his oxygen mask, his facial muscles were locked in a manic grin. He’d plotted this low-altitude flight path weeks ago, using a combination of satellite photos and detailed topographic maps. But what had looked practical in the quiet, well-lit confines of his quarters was proving infinitely more difficult at night, in the middle of a raging storm. The course he’d chosen followed a series of narrow river valleys that writhed and twisted and wound their way deeper into this vast labyrinth of barren, snow-covered mountains and ridges. If he misjudged a single turn or lost control for even a fraction of a second, his stealth bomber would slam head-on into a mountainside or clip the edge of a precipice — disappearing forever in an enormous fireball that would briefly light up a few desolate peaks and gorges… and leave nothing but fragments of scorched wreckage as a monument. A quick death to be sure, he thought bleakly, but a singularly meaningless one.

Faintly, over the wailing sound of the wind and the roar of the PAK-DA’s jet engines, he heard a groan from the seat next to him. It was echoed from farther back in the cockpit. Bunin and Mavrichev were starting to stir, slowly and painfully clawing their way back toward consciousness. After several hours, the fentanyl derivative he’d used to drug them was finally wearing off.

Petrov rolled the bomber back to the left, following the trace of an ice-covered river below as it curved back toward the southeast. Distances counted down on his HUD. He was very close to the Brooks Range divide, a geological boundary separating the rivers and streams that ran north out of the mountains toward the Arctic Ocean from those that meandered south, deeper into Alaska and Canada’s Yukon Territory.

Now! His navigation cue spiked upward and he yanked back on the stick — pulling into a near-vertical climb. His left hand shoved the throttles forward, going to full military power. The PAK-DA skimmed just above the slope of an east — west razor-backed ridge that cut straight across his flight path. He cleared the top with only meters to spare and plunged into a wall of cloud. Ice pellets rattled off the cockpit canopy like machine-gun fire. Seconds later, his brightly lit steering indicator dipped toward the bottom of the HUD. He pushed forward, diving back out of the cloud and down into another gorge.