Night of the Hawk [antikvár]

= PROLOGUE = ANADYR FAR EAST FIGHTER-INTERCEPTOR BASE RUSSIAN SOVIET FEDERATIVE SOCIALIST REPUBLIC DECEMBER 1988 This was not the way the flight of the Old Dog was supposed to be ending, First Lieutenant David Luger, United States Air Force, thought grimly. Not at all. And yet here they were, in the very northeastern tip of the Soviet Union, forced to land at this snowy, bitterly cold enemy backwater base to steal fuel because their B-52 (I) Megafortress was running on fumes. Holding a gun to the head of the base chiefs custodian, they had commandeered one of his fuel trucks and put whatever they could into the plane. The custodian had escaped and obviously put in a frantic call to the regional militia. Luger shook his head. During the course of this mission—one of the most highly classified in the annals of American military warfare— they'd successfully penetrated restricted Soviet airspace, fought off" waves upon waves of surface-to-air missiles, swarms of deadly MiG fighters, and, with a Striker glide-bomb, knocked out the most sophisticated weapon the USSR had ever developed. The mission should have been a success, but now they were going to be captured by the fucking Red Army. Luger was sure of it. Even in a backwater, the Red Army was going to protect the Motherland—at all costs. The tall, lean, twenty-six-year-old Texas-born crew navigator was alone in the bitterly cold belowdecks section of the crew compartment aboard the Megafortress, an experi-