"Shto . . . what happened?"
"I don't think you can handle heavy G-loads. You're weak from the wound, the tourniquet."
He straightened up, then glanced again at the altimeter. They were cruising at three hundred meters, smooth as silk. And they were burning six hundred pounds of JP-7 a second.
"Nothing has gone the way I planned." He rubbed at his temples, trying to clear the blood from his brain. "We're just buying a little breathing space now by staying down here. I think the radar noise of the choppy sea, together with all our Stealth capability, will keep us safe. But at this low altitude we're using fuel almost as though we were dumping it. If we continue to hold on the deck, we've got maybe half an hour's flying time left."
"If we gained altitude," Vance wondered, "could we stretch it enough to make Alaska?"
"Probably," Androv replied. "If we took her above fifty thousand feet, we might have a chance."
"Then we've got no choice. The only solid ground between here and the U.S. is the Kurile Islands, and they're Soviet territory."
"But if we did reach U.S. airspace, then what?" Eva asked. "We'd have to identify ourselves. Who's going to believe our story? Nobody even knows this monster exists."
"Right," he laughed. "A top-secret Soviet hypersonic bomber comes cruising across the Bering Strait at sixty thousand feet and into the USAF's airspace. One hint of this thing and they'd roll out the SAMs."
"Maybe we couid talk our way down."