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:
Above McFadden, the F-22’s canopy blew off and spun away to one side. And then the ejection seat’s rocket motor fired. It hurled him up and out of the stricken Raptor — directly into the path of the razor-edged shards of metal spiraling down from the stricken Russian turboprop. Several fragments ripped through the ejection seat’s parachute before it could fully deploy. Others tore into the seat itself and killed him instantly.
A thousand meters higher, Major Vadim Kuryokhin’s Su-35 raced out of one of the towering columns of cloud — still hunting for the highly maneuverable American stealth fighter he’d been tangling with over the past few minutes. To his horror, he saw the Tu-142 spinning toward the ground, wreathed in flames from nose to tail as it fell. “My God, Ilya,” he shouted over the radio. “Those bastards just shot down our recon plane!”
“Two copies. Arming missiles,” his wingman replied coldly. Moments later, Troitsky called out, “Target locked. Missiles fired!”
“Shit-shit-shit-shit,” Lieutenant Allison “Cat” Parilla snarled, seeing the two heat-seeking missiles fall away from under the wings of the Su-35 that had just swung in a couple of miles behind her. Their motors ignited in bursts of flame. Trailing smoke, they streaked across the intervening sky, moving at more than two and a half times the speed of sound.
Immediately, she broke hard left, spiraling upward in a tight, climbing turn. Her thumb stroked the countermeasures button. Dozens of white-hot flares streamed out behind the F-22, each a miniature sun against the glowering mass of dark storm clouds on all sides. Seduced by the flares, both Russian missiles veered away and detonated harmlessly.
Parilla reversed her evasive turn and rolled into the clouds again. She’d seen the steering cue for McFadden’s Raptor vanish suddenly off her HUD. Now she knew why. The Russians had decided, for reasons of their own, to turn this cold air war hot. The green diamond identifying the Su-35 that had just tried to kill her slid into view, pulling out ahead of her aircraft as the other pilot desperately turned in an effort to bring her back into his sights.
“Too late, asshole,” she snapped, squeezing the trigger on her stick. One AIM-120 AMRAAM and then a second dropped out of her main weapons bay. They flashed away into the gray haze at Mach Four, already guided by their own internal active radar seekers, since the range was so short, essentially point-blank for missiles designed to reach out and kill at more than eighty nautical miles.
A dazzling orange flash lit the clouds. In that same moment, the target diamond blinked off her HUD, signaling the destruction of the enemy aircraft. But before she could fully savor the kill, shrill, chirping tones through her headset warned that the second Su-35 had locked on.
Reacting fast, Cat Parilla dove for the deck. More flares rippled out behind her violently maneuvering Raptor. One of the two missiles closing in on her chose a decoy instead and went off harmlessly in her curving wake. She never saw the second, which arrowed on through the spreading cloud of tiny suns and detonated just above her cockpit.
Major Vadim Kuryokhin saw the American F-22 stagger when his missile exploded. Slowly at first, and then faster, the Raptor rolled over and fell away, spewing smoke and fire. Eager to confirm his kill, he followed the stricken aircraft down into the clouds, tracking it by the red-tinged glow. Abruptly, it flashed brightly, spraying glittering sparks outward through the concealing gray mists.
Had that dying F-22 just blown up? he wondered. Deciding he’d seen enough, the Russian Su-35 pilot started to turn away — and slammed head-on into a jagged mountain peak shrouded in cloud. His fighter disintegrated in a ball of fire.
Some kilometers away, Alexei Petrov came outside into the blizzard’s unnatural darkness and freezing winds. Bondarovich’s men finally had the necessary repairs to their aircraft shelter in hand, freeing him to head back to camp for a short rest. He straightened up to his full height to stretch aching muscles… and then he stopped dead, staring off to the west.
A bright white glow lit the sky there, slowly falling through the darkness and thick clouds. Then, suddenly, it vanished with a blinding flash, followed by a dull red gleam in the distance that slowly faded away.
“What was that?” one of the exhausted mercenaries who’d followed him out of the shelter asked in astonishment. “Some sort of weird lightning from the storm?”
Petrov shook his head in dismay. “No,” he ground out slowly. “I think that was trouble for us. Very serious trouble.”
Twenty-Nine
For several seconds, a shocked silence pervaded the crowded operations center. One moment, they’d been observing five aircraft — two American and three Russian — on the radar feed relayed from the E-3 Sentry AWACS plane over Fairbanks. And the next, all five aircraft were gone, wiped off the display as quickly as if some unseen giant’s hand had swatted them out of the sky with one mighty stroke.
Colonel Leonard Huber, Third Wing’s commander, shook his head in disbelief and then turned to his assembled officers. “Can anyone tell me what the hell just happened up there?”
Helplessly, they all shrugged. “Whatever it was, it went down awfully fast,” one of them said at last. “The RC-135 ELINT plane picked up a few fragmentary transmissions from the two Russian Su-35s, but they’re encrypted and unreadable. We didn’t get anything from our own aircraft.”
Huber nodded gloomily. That was not a good sign. At least one of the F-22 pilots, McFadden or Parilla, should have been able to call out a warning, even if their mock dogfight with the Su-35s had suddenly turned hot for some weird reason. He sighed. “Well, one thing’s clear, anyway. A bunch of different aircraft, ours and theirs, just crashed in the middle of a god-awful wilderness.”
“And during a blizzard,” his operations officer pointed out quietly. “One of the worst in years.”
“Yeah, that, too,” Huber agreed tersely. A screen depicting the most recent meteorology reports for the Brooks Range showed the entire area socked in, with strong winds, near-zero visibility thanks to blowing snow, and subzero temperatures. “Mounting a combat search-and-rescue operation up there is going to be a bitch,” he said thoughtfully.
“Yes, sir.”
Huber’s eyes sought out his liaison with the Alaska Air National Guard. The ANG’s 176th Wing ran the ARCC, the Alaska Rescue Coordination Center, which managed all the various military and civil aviation resources needed for search-and-rescue operations. “Major King, what kind of CSAR assets can your people rustle up fast?”
The major looked up from the computer link she’d been intently studying. “Colonel, the ARCC says we can have a pararescue team and a pair of HH-60G Pave Hawks from the 210th Rescue Squadron ready for takeoff in ninety minutes.”
“But your helicopters can’t make it out that far unrefueled, can they?”
“No, sir,” King agreed. “The area where those planes went down is more than a hundred miles beyond our birds’ maximum range. Ordinarily, they’d tank on the way, but the blizzard is moving south fast across the whole state. Midair refueling would be far too hazardous in these conditions. So our helicopters will have to stage through Fairbanks and then Fort Yukon, stopping to refuel on the ground at both places.”
Huber nodded again. Those refueling stops would make slow going, further adding to the time it would take the pararescue team to reach any crash sites. On the other hand, recent forecasts predicted some minor improvement in the weather over the mountains later on today. So, assuming ANG’s Pave Hawk helicopters could somehow fight their way through the storm in the first place, those hoped-for lower winds and better visibility should significantly aid any recovery operations. “All right, Major,” he said to King. “Activate your search-and-rescue units and get them in the air as quickly as possible.”