Free Arctic Gold by Stephen Coonts

incoming signals from the aircraft sophisticated radar systems.
Right now, he was getting squat from the radarboth the AN/ALR-94 passive receivers and the AN/APG-77 AESA, or Active Electronically Scanned Array. His navigational systems had crashed as well, leaving him as in the dark as he’d been that afternoon over the central Pacific.
The one electronic system that appeared to be working was his SAS, or Signature Assessment System, which threw up warning indicators when wear and tear on the aircraft had degraded its low radar signature to something the enemy could detect. Of course, the warning indicators might themselves be a glitch in his failing electronics but he didn’t want to count on that. Something
was thumping hard against the side of the aircraft aft, like the monotonous beat of a flat tire on pavement.
The aircraft shuddered, the thump growing savagely more severe. The aircraft was completely fly- by- wire, with three flight- data computers that actually flew the aircraft. All his stick and rudder controls did was make inputs to the computers. They were doing all right just now, but if the structural damage exceeded the computers’ ability to
cope, or the control throw available, he was going to tumble out of the night sky.
He was down to four thousand feet now and still descending. Where were those MiGs? His gadgets were silentwhich probably meant they were damagedalthough it might mean the Russian jocks had headed home for the night.
Delallo searched the darkness behind him as he keyed his radio. Haunted House, Haunted House, Ghost Blue, he called.
No response. If a data stream was still going out, it wasn’t registering on his almost nonexistent instrumentation.
Well, at least he was going in the right direction, west. Waypoint Tango Bravo was inside Finnish waters, a few miles south of Kotko. A support vessel was there. If necessary, he could bail out and hope for a pickup.
That, however, was an option he didn’t want to have to use. Those black waters, patchy with streamers of fog, were frigid even in late spring. Not even his flight suit would keep him alive for long, and with his navigation systems out, finding the support vessel would require outrageous luck.
Still looking aft, he saw a flash high and behind him, at four o’clock.
The northern sky flamed and shimmered with the cold glow of aurora. His eyes searched the deep twilight. Now he saw it, a streak of fire in the night.
A missile contrail, a thin white thread arcing around to intercept him.
Oh, shit!
There was no way his crippled Raptor could manage the maneuvers necessary to evade an incoming air- to- air missile.
He grabbed the lanyard for his ejection seat and yanked up hard.
St. Petersburg 2
Waterfront, St. Petersburg
0230 hours
Lia was exhausted. She’d been at it for an hour and a half, with no results yet. She was ready to pack it in.
Anything, Lia? Rubens’ voice said in her ear.
She leaned back in her chair and looked around the stateroom, a fairly luxurious suite booked under the name Stevens but occupied by Llewellyn. It was the communications center only by virtue of the laptop computer set up on a desk in the corner.
A cable ran from the back of the laptop to a suitcasesized unit beside the desk, the hardware necessary to link Lia computer to a satellite dish above the cruise ship bridge. A black- box encryption device guaranteed her that her connection to the NSA computer center back at Fort Meade was secure.
The laptop was open. Prominently displayed on the flat 19-inch screen were front and profile views of a bearded, rumpled- looking man with watery eyes. He might have been a thief or, just possibly, an unshaven accountant. A third photo showed a candid surveillance shot of the same person, taken in a crowd on a city street.
No.
Nothing so far, she said. She was alone in the room. Llewellyn was off somewhere with his cleanup team, while Akulinin had gone to his stateroom to get showered and shaved.
She pressed the enter