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:
His wingman snorted over the radio. “Yes, Papa Bear. I’ll be good.”
“Then follow me!” Kuryokhin ordered. He yanked back on his stick and went to afterburner. His Su-35 streaked upward, climbing vertically at more than a thousand kilometers per hour. He broke out of the lower layer seconds later and spotted his chosen target, the lead F-22, almost directly above him, flying through a valley of clearer air between two towering masses of cumulonimbus storm clouds. The American stealth fighter grew larger in his canopy with astonishing speed. He thumbed his radar to air combat mode.
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.
“Holy crap!” McFadden blurted, startled by the rapid-fire sequence of high-pitched tones pulsing through his headset. His Raptor was being painted by an enemy radar at close range. Madly, he scanned the sky in all directions. Where the hell—
Suddenly, a blur of white and gray flashed past his canopy just ahead of him and kept on climbing. Jesus, that was an Su-35, he realized, noting the other aircraft’s twin tails and sleek, swept-back wings in a split second. And then the Russian fighter’s wake slammed into him, rattling the F-22 from end to end.
Shaking off the stunning impact, McFadden pulled into a hard, climbing turn toward the Su-35 that had just bounced him. G-forces slammed him back into his seat and his vision grayed out a little. Straining against the g’s, he spotted Cat Parilla’s Raptor rolling away as she dodged a second Su-35 spearing up at them out of the clouds. Her rapid evasive maneuver carried her straight into a column of cloud and she disappeared from sight.
Above him, the first Russian fighter came out of its own turn and then abruptly banked tightly in the opposite direction — maneuvering with incredible speed and agility. It vanished into another cloud.
“Anvil, this is Casino Lead,” McFadden grunted, reporting in to the E-3 AWACS while he reversed back after the Su-35. Everything outside his cockpit turned dark as he entered the clouds himself. He locked his radar onto the Russian. A new diamond blinked onto his HUD, sliding fast down and back to the right again. He slammed his stick hard in that direction, rolling inverted to dive after the still-invisible enemy fighter. “Two bandits just jumped us,” he forced out against the strain of continual tight turns. “No missiles in the air. Maybe these guys want to play, not fight.”
“Copy that, Casino,” the radar controller aboard the distant E-3 Sentry acknowledged. “Sure looks like a tight furball from here.”
For “furball,” read “fucking mess,” McFadden thought fuzzily, as he tightened his next turn even more, now pulling eight g’s and using his F-22’s thrust-vectoring engine nozzles to pull the aircraft’s nose around even faster. He couldn’t see shit in all of these clouds. And he’d lost track of Parilla. Sure, their data link threw a steering cue to her fighter onto his HUD, but it was jinking all over the place as they each maneuvered wildly, trying to pick up an advantage over the two Su-35s that had just bushwhacked them… or to break away from trouble if the bad guys gained a favorable position on them.
He leaned forward, trying hard to see something, anything, through the swirling gray haze ahead of his Raptor. His radar said an Su-35 was out there ahead of him, no more than a few hundred yards away. But he couldn’t make out anything, not even a quick, fleeting glimpse of a camouflaged wingtip or tail fins or a clear canopy. His teeth clenched hard. Chasing these Russian fighters around this storm front was like playing blindman’s bluff with everybody blindfolded, not just whoever was “it”… and stuck at the same time inside one of those whirligig carnival rides that spun unpredictably in every direction.
Inside the Tu-142 reconnaissance aircraft’s forward cabin, Captain Yuri Bashalachev peered intently at his hooded scope. As the plane’s bombardier-navigator, he had primary control over its powerful Korshun-KN-N search radar. Ever since Colonel Zinchuk ordered their sensors to activate, he’d been using the system to scan the terrain below them. From this altitude, the Korshun had a search radius of more than 250 kilometers, even through the intervening haze of obscuring cloud and wind-driven snow and ice. Around and around, the radar’s rotating beam swept hypnotically — turning up nothing but a seemingly endless jumble of mountain peaks and low-lying valleys.
And then something flashed briefly on the screen. Something that didn’t look at all natural.
Suddenly excited, Bashalachev pressed his face even harder against the radar display’s hood. His fingers raced across his controls, tweaking them to focus in on what appeared to be a wider valley on the southern fringe of this vast range of higher peaks and lower ridges and hills. And then he saw it again, near one end of the valley. He froze the image, staring hard at what he saw.
Those straight and angled shapes, partial and oddly blurred though they were, were definitely not natural, the bombardier-navigator decided instantly. He checked the coordinates against the map pinned up next to his station. Just as he’d thought, this entire region was supposed to be nothing but uninhabited wilderness. Excitedly, he toggled his intercom mike. “Colonel, radar here! Contact, contact, contact! Probable man-made structure. I think it might be what we’ve been looking for!”
“Where?” the Tu-142 commander pilot demanded.
Bashalachev peered down again at his scope. “At our nine o’clock now,” he reported. “About twenty kilometers to the east.”
“Nice work, Yuri! We’re coming around to make another pass over the target,” Zinchuk told him.
Immediately, the huge plane banked sharply to the left, turning steeply to circle back toward what its radar had picked up. Over the intercom, Bashalachev heard the colonel on the radio to Moscow. “Operations Control, this is Prospector. Silver Lode. Repeat, Silver Lode.”
“Silver Lode” was the short code phrase indicating the possible — but not certain — discovery of the stolen PAK-DA stealth bomber on the ground.
At that same moment, Captain Connor “Doc” McFadden saw one of the Su-35s emerge out of the murk — headed straight at him. Desperately, he yanked his stick hard right, hurling the F-22 into another brutal, high-g, diving turn to avoid a possible collision. The Russian fighter roared past no more than a few yards above him and then disappeared as suddenly as it had come.
McFadden craned his neck around hard against the enormous forces pinning him against his seat, desperately searching for any sign of the enemy aircraft that might already be swinging around to slot in right behind him. But there was nothing. Just a churning cauldron of dark gray cloud.
Halfway through its tight, diving turn, his Raptor burst back out into the open air. Alarms blared through the cockpit. Alerted too late, McFadden whipped his head back around to the front… just in time to see the huge, propeller-driven Tu-142 directly ahead. “Oh, shit—”
Moving at more than five hundred knots, the F-22 slammed into the Russian reconnaissance plane’s right wing and sheared it off. McFadden was dimly aware of a tremendous, shattering impact that seemed to go on forever, but that could really only have lasted for milliseconds at most. Thrown forward against his straps with rib-smashing force, he saw a mass of blurred red caution and warning lights ripple across the cockpit.
Horrified, he looked up through his canopy and saw the Tu-142 tumbling out of control. Slowly, the huge aircraft rolled over on its left side, trailing debris and burning fuel from the jagged stub of its missing wing. Time to go, he thought groggily. Moving in what felt like slow motion, he reached down between his legs, gripped the ejection seat handle, and yanked hard.