Arctic Storm Rising
- Автор: Браун Дейл
- Серия: Nick Flynn #1
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- ISBN: 9780063015050
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «Arctic Storm Rising». Краткое содержание книги:
Zinchuk watched his altimeter very, very closely as it spun down, hoping like hell that the meteorology reports he’d been given were halfway accurate. If these clouds went all the way down to the ocean, he’d have to abort this mission — which would definitely not endear him to anyone in Moscow.
Then, at a little over five hundred meters, they came back out of the storm clouds into a faded, murky half-light. Through driving flurries of snow, the Tu-142’s command pilot caught glimpses of a desolate, windswept vista stretching away in all directions. Ridges of rafted sea ice unrolled below the reconnaissance aircraft’s enormous wings, growing larger as they lost still more altitude. Tight-lipped, he took his aircraft down even more before leveling off only two hundred meters above the barren ice cap.
This was a form of madness, Zinchuk knew. For all its many virtues — sheer endurance, payload, and powerful, long-range sensors among them — his mammoth turboprop was not at all designed to make low-level penetrating flights through enemy air defenses. Without any form of terrain-following radar or computer navigation, the slightest lapse in his concentration or control could lead to utter disaster.
But coming in practically right on the deck was the only way the Tu-142 could possibly hope to escape detection by the chain of American radars lining Alaska’s northern coast. Behind him, the two Su-35s reappeared, emerging out of the cloud layer again. Smoothly, the twin-tailed fighters slid forward into their assigned slots, one to his right, the other to his left.
“I’m picking up weak signals from an airborne radar!” Captain Sukachov, the Tu-142’s defense systems operator, abruptly reported over the intercom. With all of their active sensor systems still on standby to avoid prematurely revealing their presence, Sukachov’s radar warning receivers were their primary means of figuring out what the Americans ahead of them might be doing. “It’s a pulse Doppler system. Our computer evaluates it as an AN/APY-2 type.”
“What’s your assessment?” Zinchuk demanded.
“It’s an American E-3 Sentry AWACS aircraft,” Sukachov told him. “From the bearing and signal strength, I’d estimate that it’s orbiting somewhere over western Alaska, probably near Nome.”
Based on prior experience, Zinchuk judged that was likely to be true. Any U.S. Air Force early-warning plane operating in that area was perfectly positioned to pick up Russian reconnaissance probes coming east from the Chukchi Peninsula, Asia’s easternmost point — one only a little over a hundred kilometers from American territory. “Can that E-3 spot us?” he asked.
“No, sir,” Sukachov said with complete assurance. “We’re well outside its radar’s effective range and much too low. As far as that enemy AWACS plane is concerned, we might as well be on the far side of the moon.”
Eighty nautical miles west of Fairbanks, a large four-engine Boeing-designed aircraft orbited at high altitude. Antennas studded its exterior, allowing it to sift the airwaves for even the faintest electronic signal. Inside the RC-135V’s electronic-equipment-crammed aft cabin, Captain Amanda Jaffe knelt down next to Technical Sergeant Philip Kijac, one of the fourteen cryptologic language analysts aboard Exult One-Five. As the information integration officer aboard this flight, it was her job to fit together all the disparate fragments of intelligence its specialists gathered and somehow use them to develop a coherent picture. All too often that was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces were gray and half of them were missing.
“What have you got for me, Kij?” she asked.
In answer, he brought up a recording of the weak radio transmissions several of their antennas had picked up a few minutes earlier. Jaffe plugged her headset into his console and listened along to the series of hissing crackles, squeaks, and pops. “Encrypted voice transmissions?” she guessed.
Kijac nodded. “Yes, ma’am, that’s my read.”
“Coming from where?”
He opened a map on his computer screen. “Those signals originated somewhere along a bearing of roughly zero-zero-five degrees from our current position. Triangulating backward and judging by the signal strength when we picked them up, I’d estimate those transmissions were coming from around… here.” With a stylus, he tapped a point near the top of his digital map. It was far north of their RC-135V, well out over the ocean.
Jaffe frowned. “That’s what? Nearly three hundred nautical miles off our coast?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Kijac agreed. “Which also puts them outside the range of any of our North Warning System sites.”
Reflexively, she tapped a finger against her lips, thinking things through. “Could that have been one of those big Russian recon aircraft reporting back to its home base?”
The specialist shook his head. “I don’t think so. A signal like that would have been a lot more powerful and much easier for us to pick up. No, ma’am, this sounds more to me like multiple aircraft talking to each other, using a real low-powered tactical frequency.”
Jaffe nodded, seeing his point. “Can you match those transmissions with anything else in our databases?” she asked.
Radio transmissions and other electronic signals recorded by RC-135V Rivet Joint ELINT flights all went into giant computer data archives for later analysis and comparison against other intelligence. Transmissions that could be definitively paired with types of aircraft performing distinct activities — things like landings and takeoffs, bombing runs, simulated dogfights and missile launches, and air reconnaissance reports, for example — were especially valuable, since they could be matched against new signals to speed up the process of figuring out what they meant. The system was similar to that used by the U.S. Navy to identify other submarines from passive sonar recordings of their unique acoustic signatures.
“I think so,” Kijac said. “I’ve got the computer running a comparison screen now.” As he spoke, a series of lights lit up along the side of his display. Rapidly, his fingers tapped the touch screen, opening a series of graphs that showed the signal characteristics of the transmissions they’d just detected matched against earlier recordings. He expanded one. “There we go. That’s a match, all right, with a ninety-plus percent certainty.”
Jaffe eyed the computer’s assessment with interest. “So it thinks the signals we picked up were from Russian multirole combat aircraft, either Su-27s or Su-35s, carrying out some kind of air-to-air refueling exercise?” The specialist nodded.
She frowned. Why were the Russians sending frontline fighters so far out from their usual bases? She checked the meteorology plot and her frown grew even deeper. Those faint radio signals had come from right in the middle of a developing storm front. Air-to-air refueling was never a trivial maneuver, even in good weather. And in bad weather, even at high altitude, the aircraft involved would have been contending with high winds and significant turbulence. She shook her head. Whatever was going on out there, this was no routine training mission. Not even the Russians were crazy enough to try a risky refueling op so far from any friendly base, not when a failure would likely doom both the fighter itself and its pilot. Not without a really pressing reason.
Making a decision, Jaffe picked up one of the RC-135’s secure communications handsets. “Air Operations Center, this is the IIO aboard Exult One-Five. We’ve just picked up indications of at least three and possibly more Russian aircraft operating three hundred and fifty — plus nautical miles due north of Umiat. Be advised that we believe these aircraft include at least one air refueling tanker and two multirole combat fighters, probably Su-27s or Su-35s.”