In less than two hours, Hunter had traversed some twelve hundred miles straight through the heart of Russian airspace without being detected. The feat, though on the face of it fairly incredible, was actually the result of the close video teamwork between himself and the three officers back in the mission control center of the USS Ohio. To help him fly safely at that altitude, Wa had been typically alert, calling out terrain features in his path that were detected by the guidance system. Once warned, Hunter was able on most occasions to manually compensate for the plane’s automatic tendency to pitch up several hundred feet to avoid ground obstacles. And by keeping the big bomber as low as possible, they had already avoided a few Soviet ground-based SAM sites and even a couple of transport planes lumbering across the desolate skies. Toomey had been silent, except to relay information from his screen about the potential threats. Whenever possible, Hunter had simply diverted the plane’s flight path around the missile sites’ effective radar range, not wanting to give away the bomber’s presence by forcing Toomey to remotely switch on the high-powered jammers of the defensive system.
