Arctic Storm Rising Dale Brown (literature books to read TXT) 📖

His eyes swept the upper edge of his HUD. Two icons were visible, one for each of the oncoming F-22 Raptors. They were accompaniedby rapidly changing numbers showing the estimated range and altitude of the American jets computed by his IRST system. Betweentheir powered-up radars, radio transmissions, and external fuel tanks, neither Raptor was especially stealthy at the moment.But they were getting very, very close, and pretty soon their radars would spot the two Russian Su-35s twisting and turningdown among these sharp-edged mountains and icy gorges.

A predatory grin flashed across Kuryokhin’s face. Better to act now, he thought, before the Americans figured things out andhad time to react. “Lead to Bodyguard Two,” he radioed. “You take the high man. I’ll take the low.”

“Two,” Ilya Troitsky said immediately.

“Make them piss their flight suits, but no shooting!” Kuryokhin warned again. “Remember, we’re here to keep them off Prospector’sback, not to start World War Three.”

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, climbingvertically at more than a thousand kilometers per hour. He broke out of the lower layer seconds later and spotted his chosentarget, the lead F-22, almost directly above him, flying through a valley of clearer air between two towering masses of cumulonimbusstorm clouds. The American stealth fighter grew larger in his canopy with astonishing speed. He thumbed his radar to air combatmode.

BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.

“Holy crap!” McFadden blurted, startled by the rapid-fire sequence of high-pitched tones pulsing through his headset. His Raptor wasbeing 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’swake 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-forcesslammed him back into his seat and his vision grayed out a little. Straining against the g’s, he spotted Cat Parilla’s Raptorrolling away as she dodged a second Su-35 spearing up at them out of the clouds. Her rapid evasive maneuver carried her straightinto 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—maneuveringwith 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-vectoringengine nozzles to pull the aircraft’s nose around even faster. He couldn’t see shit in all of these clouds. And he’d losttrack of Parilla. Sure, their data link threw a steering cue to her fighter onto his HUD, but it was jinking all over theplace 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 saidan 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 aquick, fleeting glimpse of a camouflaged wingtip or tail fins or a clear canopy. His teeth clenched hard. Chasing these Russianfighters 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 thatspun 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 hiscontrols, tweaking them to focus in on what appeared to be a wider valley on the southern fringe of this vast range of higherpeaks and lower ridges and hills. And then he saw it again, near one end of the valley. He froze the image, staring hard atwhat 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 hisintercom mike. “Colonel, radar here! Contact, contact, contact! Probable man-made structure. I think it might be what we’vebeen