"Major, you—" Mino began.
"Copy this, you bastard. Fuck you. Repeat. Fuck you. I've disabled your fucking AI module."
"You disabled it?"
"That's a roger. Do you read me, you murdering son-of-a-bitch? FUCK YOU!" He clicked off his mike
Vance was moving slowly across the cockpit, headed back to his own G-seat. As he settled himself and reached for the straps, he glanced up at the screens to check their flight data—altitude, speed, vector, G-force, fuel consumption. They were still on the deck, with an airspeed just under a thousand knots, about eleven hundred miles per hour. Not quite Mach 2, but already it was risky. And their vector was 085, with coordinates of 46 degrees latitude, 143 degrees longitude.
What now? Daedalus had all the active radar systems known to modern avionics. Looking at the screens he saw forward-looking radar, sideways-looking radar, a four-beam multimode pulse-Doppler look-down radar, terrain-following radar, radar altimeter, mapping and navigational radar, and a host of high-powered ECM jammers. The problem was, they all emitted EM, electromagnetic radiation. Switch on any of those and they'd become a flying radio beacon, broadcasting their position.
The next row of screens, however, provided readouts of their passive, non-emitting receivers and analyzers. That clearly was what they would have to use to monitor the threat from Sakhalin, scooping up any EM for lightning-fast computer processing. Surely Petra could spit out a fingerprint of everything in the skies. To begin with, there were the basic Radar Warning Receivers (RWRs) located aft, on the tailplanes, as well as infrared warning receivers (IRWRs) positioned high on the outboard stabilizers. The screens showed she could analyze basic frequency, operating mode, pulse repetition frequency, amplitude of pulse, time of arrival, direction of arrival—the full menu.
"If it's true they've scrambled the base at Dolinsk, it probably means the new MiG 31s." Androv was now busy switching on all the passive systems, just the way Vance figured he would. "We have to decide what to do. But first I want to take her up and do a quick recon. Buckle in."
"The latest Foxhound has a multimode pulse-Doppler look-down, shoot-down capability that's as good as any in the world," Vance heard himself saying. "We're the biggest target in the skies, and we're unarmed. We'd be a sitting duck for one of their AA-9 active homing missiles. They're launch-and-leave."
"Let's check it out before we get too worried," Androv replied. "But this has to be fast. You're about to see a Mach 3 Immelmann. Don't try this in a 747." He laughed, then began lowering his high-tech helmet. "I hope I can still manage it."