There was a surge of acceleration as he shoved forward the throttles, then yanked back on the sidestick. The Daedalus seemed to kick straight up. And up. And up. The instruments showed they were traveling skyward in a thin arc, as though sliding up the curve of an archer's bow. Now the altimeter was spinning, and in eighteen seconds they had already reached twenty thousand feet. But still Androv kept the stick in, and during the next five seconds, as Daedalus continued tracing the archer's curve, they almost began to fly upside down.
At the last moment he performed an aileron half-roll and righted them. The Immelmann had, in effect, taken them straight up and headed their powerful forward-looking IR detectors and radar in the direction of Sakhalin. Vance glanced at the screens and realized they'd climbed thirty thousand feet in twenty-seven seconds. They'd just waxed the standing forty-eight-second time-to-climb record of the USAF F-15 Eagle, and Daedalus wasn't even breathing hard. Even though Androv had now chopped the power, they still were cruising at Mach 2. Effortlessly.
No wonder he loves this bird.
The only downside was, the fuel reading showed they'd burned twenty-three thousand pounds of JP-7 during the climb out.
"Petra," Androv said into his helmet mike, "take VSD to standby and give me infrared laser."
Petra's interrogation revealed a wing of eight MiG 31 interceptors, flying in formation at twenty-five thousand feet and closing. At Mach 2.4.
"Ya ponemaiyu," Colonel-General Gregori Edmundovich Mochanov said into the secure phone, the pride of Dolinsk's Command Central. "I ordered a wing of the Fifteenth Squadron scrambled at 0938 hours. Fortunately we were planning an exercise this morning."
He paused for the party at the other end, General Valentin Sokolov on a microwave link from the Hokkaido facility.