Fortunes of War

7

Other soviet NAVY was always something of a floating oxymoron, the seagoing service of the world’s largest land power. It never received the prestige, money, or priority accorded to the Soviet army. The NAVY’s hour of glory came after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when capable blue-water combatants were built in sufficient numbers to form a credible threat to the U.s. NAVY and America’s global interests. These sleek, heavily armed gray ships sailed the seven seas in packs, proudly waved the red flag, and never fired a shot. When the bankrupt Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the surviving republics divided up the NAVY’s ships. Russia received the majority, a dubious honor, for she lacked the money to sail or repair them. There wasn’t even money to pay the sailors or buy them food. Some of the ships were sold to Third World nations for badly needed foreign exchange, but most were left to rust at their piers. About half of the Russian far eastern fleet was tied to piers at the three naval bases near Vladivostok when squadrons of four destroyers each steamed into the harbor of each base. The Japanese NAVY opened fire from less than a mile away with 127-mm 54-caliber deck guns. Not a single Russian ship fired back. Most of the Russian ships had no crews, and even the ones that did have sailors aboard were in no condition to get under way, much less fight. At the two bases east of Vlad, all the ships were cold iron, without steam up. In Vlad, only two ships were receiving electrical power from the shore. These were tied to the westernmost pier in Golden Horn Bay. The rest looked, by day anyway, like exactly what they were, rust buckets abandoned to their fate. It wasn’t as if the nation or the NAVY didn’t care about these ships, which had been purchased at an enormous cost, but they could never reach a decision about what to do with them. Every choice had enormous emotional and political implications. So they did nothing. Most of these vessels were now so far gone that they would be useful only if salvaged for scrap.

The Japanese ships steamed slowly in trail, one behind the other, acquired their targets as if this were an exercise, and banged away mercilessly. The explosive shells shredded the upper decks of the Russian ships and punched holes in unarmored hulls. Here and there minor fires broke out, but the ships contained no fuel, no explosive fluids, nothing that would readily burn. All those materials had been stripped off the ships years ago by naval yard workers and sold on the black market. The two ships that had power and lights received special attention from the Japanese destroyers. Ironically, neither was a combatant. One was a fifty-year-old icebreaker, the other a large oceangoing tug. Both sank at their piers under the Japanese hammering. Finally, after thirty minutes of shelling, the Japanese were satisfied. Still in trail, keeping to the channel, the four destroyers of each squadron turned smartly and steamed for the entrance of the bay.

The naval base five hundred miles northeast, at Gavan, received a similar treatment, quick, surgical, and vicious. Alas, this base was almost a mirror image of the bases at Vladivostok, a place to moor abandoned ships, but here and there were a few active units, ships that had received some modicum of attention through the years and still had a crew. One of those craft was a low-freeboard monitor used by the border guard to patrol the Amur River when it was free of ice. The crew, directed by a very junior officer who had the night watch, managed to get one of the vessel’s two 115-mm antitank guns unlimbered and loaded. Their first shot missed, but the second punched a nice hole through the hull of a Japanese destroyer, starting a hot fire. The Japanese turned the fire of their flotilla upon this one gunboat. The gunners in the armored turret of the 115-mm gun got off two more rounds, both of which missed, before Japanese shells severed all electrical power to the turret. Later, as the destroyers steamed away, on their way to shell Alek-sandrovsk on Sakhalin Island, then Nikolayevsk, at the mouth of the Amur River, the flag officer in charge of the flotilla pondered about that gun crew. Against overwhelming odds, they had fought back bravely. Conquering the Russians, he mused, might not be as easy as wardroom gossip predicted.

Captain Second Rank Pavel Saratov was the skipper of Admiral Kolchak, a Russian dieselstelectric attack submarine cruising between the southernmost of the Kuril Islands and the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Normally, in accordance with NAVY doctrine, Saratov would be well out of sight of land while he ran on the surface charging his batteries, but to irritate the Japanese Moscow had ordered him to cruise for the last three days back and forth just outside the Japanese twelve-mile limit, often near the Japanese port of Nemuro. The boat left its base at Petropavlosk, on the eastern coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, two weeks ago. Her first task had been to deliver two NAVY divers to a shipwreck blocking the channel into Okhotsk, a tiny port on the northern shore of the Sea of Okhotsk that had given the sea its name. Normally, maritime demolition jobs were assigned to the Border Security Forces, but for reasons known only to a bureaucrat buried in Moscow the NAVY got this one. Saratov couldn’t find the wreck. He went ashore and was told by the port manager that the wreck he sought had blocked the channel for ten years, until last winter, when the badly rusted superstructure was destroyed by pack ice, which closed the port annually from December through May. There was nothing left to demolish. An hour before dawn this rainy, misty morning, Saratov was on the bridge of his boat, the cockpit on top of the sail, or conning tower, pondering his fate. He had once commanded an Alfa-class nuclear-powered attack submarine, but the nuke boats were all laid up several years ago when Russia agreed to disable their reactors in return for foreign bank credits. Saratov had not complained — the reactors were sloppily built, old, and dangerous. They had never been properly maintained. Actually, he had been relieved that his days of absorbing unknown quantities of leaking radiation were over. Many of his fellow submarine officers left the NAVY then, but Saratov had decided to stay. The entire nation was in economic meltdown; he had no civilian skills or job prospects. He opted to use his seniority to get command of a diesel-powered sub, one that could actually get under way. Not that there was much money for diesel fuel. Twice he had traded torpedo fuel for food and diesel fuel so he could take his boat to sea. Four and a half years later, here he was, off the coast of Japan, still in command, still eating occasionally. His crew consisted of twenty officers and twenty-five warrants, or michmen. Only five of the crew were common enlisted. The Soviet NAVY’s enlisted men had all been draftees, few of whom had the skills or desire to stay past the end of their required service. Those few willing to stay for a career had been promoted to michmen. After the collapse of communism the new Russian NAVY was forced to use the same system since there was no money to attract volunteers. The officers and michmen on board, and the five volunteer recruits, were 25 percent of the survivors of the Soviet far eastern submarine fleet. Three other conventional dieselstelectric subs were similarly manned — just four boats in all. It was enough to make a grown man cry. Admiral Kolchak was a good old boat. She had once been known as Vladimirsky Komsomolets, commemorating a municipal organization of Communist youth, but after the collapse of communism she was re-named — for an anti-Communist hero. She had her problems, of course, but they were repairable problems that came with age and use, not design defects. The crew always managed to get her back to the surface, where her diesel engines could usually be coaxed into life. And none of the sailors had come down with radiation sickness. Two years ago the Libyans almost bought her, then elected to take a boat from the Black Sea fleet instead. That had been a close call. The communications officer interrupted Saratov’s reverie with a radio dispatch from Moscow. It was highly classified and marked with the highest urgency classification, so it had been decoded immediately and brought to him. He read the paper by the light of the red flashlight he carried. A Japanese attack on Vladivostok?

He went below and read the message again under the good light in the control room. The message directed him to take his boat to Vladivostok and attack any Japanese ships he encountered. First priority, according to the message, were warships; second, troop transports. Presumably, the troops would be on deck waving Rising Sun flags, which would be visible in the periscope, so he wouldn’t waste a torpedo on a ship laden with bags of cement or rubber monster toys. The navigator was at his station in the control room. Saratov handed the message to him to read as he examined the chart on the navigator’s table. The navigator started whispering excitedly with the officer of the deck.

Saratov was measuring distances when he heard the michman of the watch say in a normal tone of voice, “P-3 radar signals.” This would be the fourth P-3 flyover in the last three days. “Where?” Saratov asked sharply. “Bearing one one five, estimated range fifteen.”

“Dive, dive, dive! Emergency dive!” Pavel Saratov shouted, and personally pushed the dive alarm.

The P-3 Orion was a large four-engine turboprop airplane with a crew of twelve. Made by Lockheed for the U.s. NAVY and periodically updated as electronic technology evolved, P-3’s were military versions of the old Electra airframe. They were a much bigger success as anti-submarine patrol planes than they ever were as airliners. The Japanese Self-Defense Force had operated them for decades. The crew of the P-3 that found Admiral Kolchak knew that the submarine had been operating on the surface near the port of Nemuro. Tonight they had been overflying radar contacts and positively identifying them with their 100-million-candlepower searchlight. Then one of the contacts ahead began to fade. The radar operator sang out enthusiastically, “Sinker, sinker, sinker. Thirteen miles, bearing three five zero relative.”

“Estimated course and speed?” That was the TACCO, the tactical coordinator, exasperated that the radar operator had to be asked. “About zero nine zero magnetic, speed six knots. He’s definitely a submarine, going down, down, down.”

The operator was brimming with excitement. This was war. After all those years of training, this was the real thing. Ahead was a Russian submarine, diving for the thermal layer; the crew of this airplane, which most certainly included the radar operator, was going to destroy it. The TACCO, Koki Hirota, was working hard. The submarine had undoubtedly detected the P-3’s radar, then dived for safety. Hokkaido was eight miles south; the sub had been cruising eastward on the surface. Once submerged, the submarine would probably turn to complicate the tactical problem. Which direction was it likely that the skipper would pick? Certainly not south, or a course that would take him back into the restricted waters of the strait. But then again … No, no, no. No shortcuts tonight. Let’s do it by the book, get this submarine. We’ll start a general search, pull the net tighter and tighter, then kill him with a Mk-46 homing torpedo.

The pilot, Masataka Yonai, had finished restarting the number one and four engines. He had been cruising on just two engines as they conducted a general search. With all engines running, he put the plane into a gentle descent. He leveled at two hundred feet above the water and engaged the autopilot. Doctrine called for night searches to be carried out at five hundred feet, day searches at two hundred, but the magnetic anomaly detector, or MAD gear, was slightly more sensitive at the lower altitude. Yonai had his share of the samurai spirit: he wanted this submarine, so the book be damned — he would fly at two hundred feet. Tension was high in the aircraft as the crew laid a general search pattern of sonobuoys. Some were set to listen above the thermal layer, which should be about 350 feet deep here, and others were set to listen below. It would take several minutes for the deep listeners to get their microphones down. The northernmost shallow sonobuoy picked up faint screw noises. “Contact, contact,” the operator sang out. Koki Hirota flipped switches so he, too, could listen. He concentrated very hard. Yes, he could just hear it: a sub. Thank heavens this is a Russian boat, Koki Hirota thought. If it had been an American submarine — the quietest kind — one plane would have a poor chance of pinning it. In his ten years in patrol planes, Hirota had only found one American boat, and that time, he freely admitted, he had been very lucky. Russian or not, if this skipper down under us is any good, we’ll need luck to get him, too. Hirota ordered a four-thousand-yard barrier pattern to the north of the northernmost sonobuoy. Yonai complied immediately. He had complete confidence in Hirota, whom he believed to be the best TACCO alive. Yonai now had the airplane thundering along at two hundred knots indicated airspeed, two hundred feet above the water. He and his copilot concentrated fiercely on the flight instruments. There was no margin for error, not at two hundred feet. The P-3 was a big plane; they were flying it right against the surface of the sea. The sonobuoys went out of the bay with split-second precision. Hir-ota selected the ones he wanted from among the sixty-four buoys in the bay and the order in which he wanted them dropped; then the computer spit them out. Forty of the buoys were the cheap LOFAR, or low-frequency, buoys. Eighteen were DIFAR, or directional, buoys used in tight search patterns. And six were the new doppler-ranging buoys that had been developed in secret by Japanese industry. Should the crew need them, more buoys were stowed in the plane and could be dropped manually by the ordnance technician. The crew had good tools, which they knew how to use. They spent their professional lives practicing. A murmur went through the plane each time a sonobuoy was dropped. The tension on a contact always racheted to violin-string tautness, which was why most of these men did this for a living. Hunting submarines was the ultimate team sport. With the string down, the operators pressed their headphones against their ears and listened intently for the slightest stirring in the ocean below, the tiniest hint of screws pushing a man-made leviathan. “I have it,” shrieked the number-one sensor operator. “Third and fourth buoys. He’s still above the layer.”

Koki Hirota flipped switches and listened intently. He closed his eyes, concentrating with all the power of his being. The TACCO got just the subtlest of hints, the most exquisite nuance amid the cacophony of the noisy ocean. There was the noise of sea life, rhythmic surf sounds from Hokkaido, and the hum of at least ten ships. Amid all that noise, the submarine was there, definitely there. The sound seemed to be part screw noise, part deck-plate gurgle, maybe a hint of a loose bearing. The submarine was fading now, perhaps slipping down below the thermal layer, trying to hide. Hirota switched to the deeper buoys. Yes, he was quite audible on this buoy. Hirota checked another. Louder still. Hirota’s fingers danced on the computer keys in front of him, and a blip appeared amid the search pattern on the screen. The submarine skipper was turning, coming back to an easterly heading. Still, he was moving very slowly to minimize his noise signature, maybe three knots. Four at the most. Should he drop a two-thousand-yard pattern, or a thousand-yard one? Hirota had only a limited number of sonobuoys, so he couldn’t afford to dither. He was chewing a fingernail on his left hand as he flipped back and forth between the channels, listening alternately on different buoys. He checked the computer, which agreed with his assessment. There was,the track, turning back to the east.

They had caught this Ivan in shallow water, and he was trying for deeper. The TACCO lined the pilot up for another buoy run — keyed the computer for a tight string, a thousand yards between buoys, a bit north of east. He elected to put a DIFAR at each end of the string and a doppler buoy in the middle. He wanted to wait, to drop the string after the sub steadied out on a new heading, but that was not going to be possible since the sub was fading from buoys already in the water. Hirota thought the sub skipper’s most probable new course would be about 090. The shortest route to deep water was in this direction. Still, Hirota was merely making an educated guess. Or perhaps he sensed the Russian captain’s thoughts. Masataka Yonai turned the P-3 using the autopilot heading selector. Level on the new heading, he corrected his altitude — the autopilot had lost twenty feet in the turn — and reengaged the thing. When he was a new aircraft commander he had insisted on flying all these patterns manually; and he had stopped that nonsense only after Hirota convinced him the autopilot could do the job better than any human could. “Be alert, men. We are tightening the net,” Yonai said over the intercom. The tension was palpable. Out went the sonobuoys, like the ticking of a clock. The last two buoys in the string were still in the airplane when the operator screamed over the intercom, “I’ve got him.”

Hirota checked. Yes. The computer was plotting There Heading 085, speed four knots. “Yonai, do a slow two-hundred-seventy-degree turn to the left and roll out heading zero eight five degrees for a MAD run. I will direct your turn. We will fly right up his wake.”

Yonai twisted the autopilot heading selector as the flight engineer ‘nudged the throttles forward a smidgen. The extra power would help hold airspeed in the turn. The airplane’s altitude was down to 150 feet above the sea. Yonai disconnected the autopilot, concentrated fiercely on the instruments as he coaxed the airplane back to two hundred feet, still in the turn. When the plane rolled level out of the turn, he reen-gaged the autopilot. Every man in the plane was concentrating intently on the displays before him. The men listening to the sonobuoys could hear the screws, urgent, insistent.

“He’s turning again. We will have to drop a short pattern. Come right ninety degrees and stand by for another heading.”

Hirota stared at the computer display. He was trying to read the mind of the Russian submarine commander. “He is turning back north,” Hirota declared. “He knows we’re onto him. He may climb back above the layer. Let’s put this pattern a thousand yards apart. New heading three six zero, pilot; then I’ll call a right turn.”

Silence on the intercom. Everyone was concentrating on doing his job to perfection. Yet even as the new sonobuoy pattern went into the water, the computer lost the track of the submarine. The sub was there, and then it wasn’t. Hirota listened intently on each channel, as did his enlisted specialists. Nothing. The sea was as quiet as the grave. He must have stopped his engines, Hirota decided, or be moving very slowly, just maintaining steerage. “He’s probably very deep by now,” someone offered. Hirota triggered an active ping by one of his middle sonobuoys in the new pattern, then waited for the others to pick up the echo. Even before he heard the echo, he heard the thrashing of the submarine’s screws. It was a thunder, quite loud. “He’s going to full power,” the number one sensor operator said. “And I think he’s going deeper.”

Yes. Full power. In just a few minutes, the sub would be doing in excess of twenty knots. Maybe twenty-five. If that was a nuclear boat, the speed might be as high as forty-five knots. Hirota’s one American sub two years ago had disappeared over the horizon at fifty-two knots. The computer began a plot. “I have him,” Hirota told the others, his voice tight with excitement. “We will do a MAD run. Yonai, come right to zero four five.”

Yonai laid the plane into a forty-degree banking turn. Hirota could feel the increased go. We are going to nail this sub “On around to zero nine zero degrees…, steady…, steady … We are closing, coming up his wake.”

The damned submarine was still accelerating, making over twenty knots now. “MAD, MAD, MAD!” shouted the radar operator, who also ran the MAD gear. The needle pegged as the plane flew over the magnetic field of the submarine.

A short, fervent cheer on the ICS. These were disciplined men, but this was a life-or-death game. Yonai positively encouraged enthusiasm in his crew; in the past he had canned people who didn’t demonstrate fighting spirit. Now Yonai laid the big P-3 into another forty-degree-bank right turn. He needed to turn for 270 degrees and come across the submarine again from the beam. If the MAD operator sang out and the TACCO gave his okay, Yonai would drop a Mk-46 homing torpedo. The torpedo would go out of the bomb bay. When it hit the water, it would turn right and begin a passive sonar search for its target, which, if the P-3 crew had done its work properly, should be within five hundred yards. Once the torpedo detected the sub, the torpedo’s seeker would switch to active pinging and home on the submarine. In American movies, submarines outturned and outran torpedoes, but Yo-nai knew that was pure fiction: the pinging of a Mk-46 torpedo zeroing in was the last thing the submarine crew would ever hear. Masataka Yonai had the plane over hard, turning tightly. “Open bomb-bay doors,” he ordered. “They will not open,” the copilot reported. Yonai looked at the indicator. Still closed. Damnation!

“Check the circuit breaker. Quick.”

This was intended for the flight engineer, because the armament panel circuit breakers were aft of him, beside his right elbow. The autopilot, which had lost altitude in the turns earlier in the search, was doing it again. Just now the plane was passing a hundred feet above the water, descending gently, but no one noticed. “Sir, the circuit breakers are all in.” All the flight engineer had to do to establish this was run his hand over the panel and ensure none was sticking out. “Well, cycle it.” Yonai wanted the engineer to pull the bomb-bay breaker out, then push it in again. “I can’t find it,” the engineer confessed, his voice frantic. Matasaka Yonai was beside himself. They were almost to weapons release, and then this! “You idiot! It’s on the armament panel.”

The copilot turned around, pointed the beam of a flashlight at the panel. “Right there,” he said. “It’s right there.”

Yonai felt the plane slew as the right wingtip kissed the crest of a wave. He slammed down the autopilot disconnect button and twisted the yoke to the left as he pulled it toward him.

Too late! The right wing buried itself in the next swell. The drag of the wingtip through the water yawed the nose right, hard, toward the sea. That dug the wingtip deeper into the water. The plane cartwheeled. The uncontrollable yaw threw the ball in the turn-and-bank indicator as far left as it would go. Yonai felt the yaw and instinctively mashed in full left rudder as his eyes shot to the turn-and-bank indicator. It was the last thing he would ever do. The cockpit struck the water first. All three of the cockpit crewmen died instantly. The men in back were flung forward, then crushed as equipment and seats broke free and smashed forward. Then the left wing hit the sea and the fuselage of the airplane came apart. The splash was stupendous, and almost a minute passed before the roiling waters became calm. The remains of the P-3 and the men who flew it began the long descent to the seafloor.

In the control room of Admiral Kolchak, Captain Pavel Saratov heard the splash. He was wearing headphones so that he could also listen to the sonar as the sonarman called out bearings to sonobuoy splashes. The navigator was plotting the bearings based on range estimates supplied by the captain. Saratov decided where to take his boat based on the picture developing on the chart before him. The chart was crude, the method long abandoned in better-equipped navies, but this was all Saratov had. The huge splash surprised him, baffled him. It was far too large to be a sonobuoy or torpedo. He closed his eyes and listened intently as rivulets of perspiration coursed down his face and dripped off his chin. The sonarman spoke first. “The engine noise is gone.”

He was correct. The background vibration from the four aircraft propellers was no longer audible. Saratov could hear something grinding. Perhaps the fuselage being crushed?

Could it be? No engine noise, a gigantic splash? were they miraculously delivered?

Pavel Saratov opened his eyes. Every eye in the control room was on him. “He crashed,” the captain said.

His listeners couldn’t take it in. “He crashed,” Saratov repeated. “He hit the water.”

Cheers. Screams. They laughed so hard that tears ran down their cheeks. Ah, life was sweet.

Jack Innes stood in the doorway of the Oval Office and watched President Hood finish with a group of Eagle Scouts. The photographers snapped away; the president shook hands, smiled, pretended he didn’t see Innes. One of his skills was the ability to concentrate totally on the people in front of him, make them feel that during their moment they were his sole concern. The aide ushered the Scouts and their leader from the office right on the tick of the clock. They had had their five minutes. As the president seated himself behind his desk, Innes said, “Japanese forces are invading Siberia. They began around midnight there, which is about an hour ago. The news just came in.”

“I wondered how long Abe would wait.”

“The Russians arrested the leader of the Siberian independence movement eighteen hours ago. Abe went on television at midnight. The native people of Siberia have suffered enough from Russian oppression, he said. The Japanese, their blood brothers, are taking up the standard of their kinsmen.”

Innes continued, telling Hood everything he knew. The president swiveled his chair, looked out the window while he listened. He swiveled back around, glanced at his schedule. When Innes finished, he asked a few questions. “Okay,” Hood said. “You know the drill. Get the National Security Council over here, the majority and minority leaders of both houses, all the usual suspects. We’ll see what the consensus is.”

“Yes, sir.”

“They’ll dither and wring their hands and advise doing nothing.”

“Surely they’ll condemn Japanese aggression?”

“Words. Just words. You watch. They won’t want to actually do anything.”

“You are going to try to make them take action, aren’t you?”

“Sooner or later, Jack, we are going to have to screw up the courage to start doing the right thing.”

“The difficulty is knowing what the right thing is.”

“No, sir. It is not. Overeducated quacks and New Age gurus can never see the right thing, but to people with a modicum of common sense the right thing is usually obvious. What everyone wants to avoid is the cost of doing the right thing. Take Bosnia, for example, in the early nineties: the Serbs began murdering Muslims, committing genocide, killing every person who might exert an erg of leadership in the new Serbian utopia. They wanted to make the Muslims a slave people. This was a conscious choice, a policy choice of the Serb leadership because they thought they could get away with it. For three years, they did. For three years the American leaders wrung their hands, dithered, refused to use force against the Serbs. Genocide! Mass murder! Adolf Hitler’s final solution one more time. We condoned it by refusing to lead the effort to stop it, by refusing to pay the price.”

“Bosnia might become another Vietnam, the liberals said.”

Hood took a deep breath, sighed deeply. “When you refuse to lift a hand to stop evil, you become a part of it. That’s as true today as it was two thousand years ago. You watch, Jack. Tonight these people will argue about the dangers — the cost — of standing up to Japan. They will argue that Russia is a corrupt, misruled den of thieves with no one to blame but themselves for the fix they are in. The newspapers lately have been full of it. They will argue that we can’t afford to get involved in someone else’s fight. They will argue that this mess isn’t our problem, that the United States is not the world’s policeman. They will refuse to confront evil. Just watch.”

“People don’t believe in evil anymore,” Innes reflected. “It’s obsolete.”

“Oh no,” the president said with conviction. “Evil is alive and well in our time. The problem is that too many people have made their peace with it.”

The first real resistance to the Japanese occupation of Vladivostok came from squad- and platoon-sized groups of young troops led by junior officers. Without orders or coordination, they blocked streets and started shooting. These pockets of resistance were easily surrounded and wiped out. Still, Japanese troops attempting to link up and form a front across the peninsula were delayed. They called for tanks and armored cars to help mop up points of resistance. All of this cost time. Two hours after dawn, several thousand Russian infantry were actively engaged. The belch of machine guns and the pop of grenades was widespread in the northern parts of the city. Smoke from burning buildings and cars wafted over the city and the bay. There was no resistance on Russian Island and in the area of the city around Golden Horn Bay because there were no Russian troops there. The police, outnumbered and grossly outgunned, surrendered without a shot. The unarmed civilian population had no choice; they merely watched and tried to stay out of the way. By 7:00 A.m., a squadron of Zero fighters was on the ground at Vladivostok airport, being refueled and rearmed with missiles and munition helicoptered in from a supply ship anchored a half mile out. A dozen helicopter gunships came ashore from another ship, and soon they were attacking Russian positions in the northern areas of the city. Rain continued to mist down.

The sky was a clean, washed-out blue, with patches of long, thin, streaky clouds down below. On the horizon, the distant Rocky Mountains were blue and purple. Against this background, Bob Cassidy was looking hard for airplanes. There were two smart-skinned F-22’s out there, he knew, and they were joining on him. The damn things are like chameleons, he told himself, marveling that he couldn’t sec planes less than a mile away. “Two, do you see me?”

“Got you, Hoppy Leader. I’m at your three o’clock, level. I’m heading three zero five degrees.”

“Lead’s three one zero degrees, looking.”

He was looking in vain. The sky appeared empty. “Three’s at your nine o’clock, Hoppy. Level, joining heading three one five.”

Cassidy glanced left, caught something out of the corner of his eye. When he tried to focus on it, it wasn’t there. He glanced at his tactical display in the center of his instrument panel. Yep, a wingman on each side, closing the distance, joining up. He saw the man up-sun at about three hundred yards. He first appeared as a dark place in the sky, then gradually took the shape of an aircraft. He didn’t see the down-sun man until he was about two hundred yards away. He was there, then he wasn’t, and then he was, almost shimmering.

“This chameleon gear is flat terrific,” he told his wingmen over the scrambled radio channel. The three fighters entered the break at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada, and landed in order, one, two, three. The chameleon gear was oft of course. They taxied to the ramp and shut down. The hot, dry summer wind was like a caress on Cassidy’s damp head when he removed his helmet. He waited until the ground crew got the ladder in place, then unstrapped and climbed slowly down. He took a deep breath, removed his flight glove from his right hand. With his bare skin, he touched the skin of the airplane. It felt cool, smooth, hard. An officer in blues came walking over. He saluted. “Colonel, we had a call for you from Washington, a Colonel Eatherly. Japan has attacked Vladivostok. They want you back in Washington immediately. They are sending a plane to pick you up. And he wants you to call as soon as possible.”

“Thanks.”

So it was really true. The shooting has started. Bob Cassidy walked slowly around the F-22, inspecting it with unseeing eyes while he thought of the Japanese officers he knew and the Americans in Japan. He found himself standing in front of the wing root, staring at the little door that hid the mouth of the 20-mm Gatling gun. He turned and walked quickly toward the maintenance shops. They would have a telephone he could use.

The late-evening meeting at the White House went about as the president expected. The evening had been long, filled with depressing news. The Japanese were overrunning the Russian Far East. National Security Council staffers used maps and computer presentations to brief the group. When they finished, the mood was gloomy. The consensus of the group was voiced by the Speaker of the House: “America must stay neutral: this is not our fight. We must do what we can as a neutral to stop the bloodshed.”

The president didn’t say anything. Jack Innes argued the president’s position in an impassioned plea. “This is our fight. Every American will be affected by today’s events.

Every American has a stake in world peace. Every minute we delay merely increases the cost of the final reckoning. This is our moment. We must seize the initiative now, while we are able.”

Alas, his audience refused to listen. On the way out of the meeting, the Senate leadership paused for a quiet conversation with the president. “Mr. President, we hear that you are putting very severe pressure on the United Nations to censure right-brace apart, to pass some binding security resolutions.”

“We are talking with other nations at the UN, certainly,” the president said suavely. The Senate majority leader spoke carefully. “In my opinion, sir, it would be a major foreign policy mistake to maneuver the UN into the position of advocating the use of armed forces against Japan. My sense of the mood of the Senate is that my colleagues will not support such a policy. You might find yourself dangling from a very thin limb, sir, with no visible means of support. That would be embarrassing, to say the least.”

“Most embarrassing,” the president agreed. There was no smile on his face when he said it.