"Exactly. The underside of this vehicle has an almost
nonexistent radar signature. Probably about like a medium-sized bird. All you'd have to do is darken it some more and it's gone. Now what the hell's the purpose?"
The elder Androv didn't respond immediately. He was still puzzling over the staff meeting. He'd never seen the project director so upset. Admittedly Yuri had violated procedures and violated them egregiously, but still . . . Ikeda's flare of anger was a side of the man not previously witnessed by anybody on the Soviet team.
Also, he continued to wonder at their sudden rush to a hypersonic test flight. Pushing it ahead by months had created a lot of fast-track problems. Why was Mino Industries suddenly in such a hurry? And now, this mystery. Yuri was right. An air-breathing orbital platform for near-space research didn't need to evade radar. The world would be cheering it, not shooting at it. Very puzzling. And troubling.
"Yuri, you've got a point. None of this makes any sense."
"Damned right it doesn't. And there's more. You should see the ECM equipment on this thing, the electronic countermeasures for defeating hostile surveillance and defense systems. It's all state of the art."
Andrei Androv's dark eyes clouded. "Why wasn't I informed of any of this?"
"Your propulsion team, your aeronautics specialists, all your technical people have been given green eyeshades and assigned neat little compartments. Nobody's getting the whole picture. Besides, I don't know anybody here who's really on top of the latest classified Stealth technology."
"Well, the truth is none of us has had time to think about it." The old man had never seemed older.
"Let me tell you a secret." Yuri lowered his voice to something approaching a whisper. "Lemontov has thought about it. Our little project kurirovat, that CPSU hack, thinks he's going to take this plane back home and copy the design to build a fleet of hypersonic—whatever you want to call these—invisible death machines, maybe. He hinted as much to me about four nights ago."