Fortunes of War

11

Another clear, hot day. Plumes of diesel exhaust and dust rose into the warm, dry air behind the Japanese army trucks — all forty-seven of them — and gently tailed off to the east. The convoy was on a paved road beside the Amur River — a paved road with a lot of windblown dirt on it — rolling northwest at about twenty miles per hour. They were a day northwest of Khabarovsk, in a wide river valley defined by low hills or mountains to the northeast and southwest. The river, a mile to the left, formed the border with China, but no fences or guard towers marked it. Forty of the trucks carried supplies for Japanese forces a hundred miles ahead. Eight of the vehicles held soldiers, and the fuel, food, water, and cooking supplies necessary to keep the convoy rolling. The road wasn’t much — just a crowned two-laned paved road in a wide, treeless valley. It followed the natural contours of the land in a serpentine way along the path of least resistance. Although there were no signposts to proclaim it, the road was merely an improvement of an ancient trail. There were some culverts, occasionally a bridge, but in many places water routinely washed over the road. Dry now, many of the low places would be impassable in winter. From the road one could occasionally see sheep or goats cropping the sparse grass, here and there a shack or yurt, once in a great while a rattletrap civilian truck going somewhere or other, trailing its own dust plume. Occasionally, a dirt road led off from the main road. A few of these led to open pit mines in the hills, where manganese or some other ore was extracted from the earth with obsolete, well-worn equipment, sweat, and a lot of hard work. There were few people in this land. The natives shrank instinctively from the Japanese soldiers, who ignored them. Children in the doors of shacks watched the trucks approach, then retreated to the dark interior as the lead vehicle, a truck with a antiaircraft gun mounted on the flatbed, drew near. The Japanese ate dust and watched the sky. Some of them were wishing the Russian soldiers hadn’t destroyed the railroad trestles and bridges as they retreated. If the railroad had remained intact, these soldiers would be riding a train west instead of jolting around in trucks. The shimmering, brassy sky seemed to reflect the earth’s heat back to it. High and far to the west a thin layer of cirrus clouds would diffuse the sun this afternoon, but that was many hours away. The brilliant sun was hard to look at. When the curves of the road allowed, the older drivers looked anyway, almost against their will, holding up a hand or thumb to block the burning rays and searching the sky while they fought the wheel to keep their trucks on the highly crowned road. The eagles didn’t come from the sun’s direction. They came from the northwest, straight down the valley, over this road, swiftly and silently, just a few hundred feet above the ground. The driver of the lead truck saw them first, less than a mile away, two Sukhoi-27’s, streaking in like guided missiles. He cranked the wheel over and swung the truck on two wheels off the road. The men in back, the gun crew, almost fell out. He was just quick enough to save their lives. The cannon shells impacted on the road behind the lead truck and walked straight into the next vehicle, where they lingered for a fraction of a second as the pilot of the lead plane dipped his nose expertly. This truck exploded under the hammering. As the fireball blossomed, the pilot was already shooting at another truck halfway down the convoy. The truck did not explode; it merely disintegrated as a dozen 30-mm cannon shells impacted in two brief seconds. The pilot released the trigger and selected a third target, toward the end of the column. Still racing along at five hundred knots, he squirted a burst at that truck but missed. He glanced left to ensure his wingman was where he should be, then dropped the right wing for a hard turn. After ninety degrees of heading change, he rolled left into a sixty-degree angle of bank. After 270 degrees of turn, he rolled out heading northwest, back toward the column of trucks. His wingman was still with him, out to the left. Both pilots selected targets as they raced once again toward the trucks, whose drivers were frantically trying to get them off the road on either side. Not that it mattered. With just the gentlest nudges of their rudders and caresses of their sticks, the pilots pointed their planes at targets chosen at random and squirted bursts from their internal GSH-30-1 guns. Four trucks exploded on that pass. One, which contained artillery ammunition, detonated with an earsplitting crash. The gun crew in the lead truck was still trying to get the restraining straps off the antiaircraft gun so they could point it when the Su-27’s swept overhead and disappeared into the brassy sky in the direction from whence they had come, northwest. It took the convoy commander an hour to get the undamaged trucks back on the road and rolling. Nine trucks had been destroyed or damaged too badly to continue. One of the nine had not been touched by the strafing aircraft; the panic-stricken driver had tried to drive over several large rocks, which shattered the transmission and tore the rear axle loose from the truck’s frame. Fourteen men were dead, ten wounded. One of the wounded was horribly burned; a sergeant shot him to put him out of his misery. The soldiers placed the dead men in a row near the road, amid the burned-out trucks. Someone else would have to bury them later. The officer in charge had his orders. The soldiers got back in the trucks and resumed their journey northwest.

On the third mission of the day, Major Yan Chernov led his wingman, Major Vasily Pervushin, back to the truck convoy on the river road from Khabarovsk. Chernov was the commander of the 556th Fighter Squadron based at Zeya. He and his wingman were flying the only two operational aircraft. The enlisted men had been laboring for days to drain the water from the fuel-storage tanks, then transfer the remaining fuel by hand into the planes. There was no electricity at the base, so the job was herculean, involving hand pumps, fifty-five-gallon drums, and lots of muscle. Chernov did not think there were any cluster bombs on the base, but while he was airborne on the first strike, his ordnance NCO found some in an ammo bunker that was supposed to be empty. The bombs were at least twenty years old. Still, they were all the Russians had for ground attack, so they were loaded on the planes. Just now, he and Pervushin, his second in command, raced southeast a hundred feet or so above the ground. Chernov was watching for vehicles off to the left, along the river road. The two Sukhois were indicating 525 knots, 85 Mach, which was about as fast as it was safe to carry the bombs — they were not supersonic shapes. The treeless plain raced under the Sukhois, almost as if the fighters were motionless in space and the earth was spinning madly beneath them. The illusion was very pleasant. There, at ten o’clock, on the horizon: a plume of dust. This morning they had made two passes over the target convoy, the first from the northwest, the second from the southeast. This time Chernov and Pervushin had planned to approach from the southeast and drop the bombs on the first pass. Since they had the ammo in the guns, they wanted to make a second pass, quickly, and the quickest way was a hard turn, then back down the trucks from the northwest to the southeast. Chernov pointed to the dust, made sure Pervushin nodded his understanding. This convoy was farther northwest than the one they had attacked that morning. The ECM gear was silent. Not a peep of an enemy radar. These Japanese, running truck convoys without air cover … There could be air cover, of course, running high with their radars off. Chernov glanced up into the afternoon haze, looking for tiny black spots against the high cloud. Nothing. Not seeing them didn’t mean they weren’t there. It simply meant you hadn’t seen them. The dust was passing behind his left wing when he motioned for Pervushin to drift out farther. Satisfied, he began a shallow turn. He wanted to be wings-level over the road for several miles before he reached the convoy to give himself and Pervushin time to pick out targets. Turn, watch the ground racing by just beneath the plane, keep the wings at no more than ten degrees of bank, and glance up occasionally, look for enemy fighters. Watch the nose attitude, Chernov! Don’t fly into the ground. He reached for the armament panel. Bombs selected. Fusing set. Interval set. Master armament switch on. Wings level, Pervushin was well out to the right, dropping aft. He would follow Chernov in a loose trail formation. Five hundred twenty-five knots … Chernov let his plane drift up until he was about three hundred feet above the ground. After the clamshell fuselage of the cluster bomb opened, the bomblets needed to fall far enough to disperse properly.

Trucks. A row of them. They appeared to be racing toward him, but he was the one in flight. As Tail-end Charlie disappeared under the nose, Chernov mashed the pickle button on the stick. He could feel the thumps as the bombs were kicked off, all six of them in about a second and a half. Chernov held the heading for another three seconds, then rolled into an eighty-degree angle of bank with G on and held it for ninety degrees of heading change. Now he rolled the other way and turned for 270 degrees. He watched the gyro swing, concentrated on keeping the nose above the horizon. With his left hand, he flipped switches on the armament panel, enabling the gun. Wings level again, the Russian pilot was almost lined up on the trucks, four of which were obviously on fire. He stabbed the rudder and jammed the stick forward, pointing the nose, then eased the stick back ever so slightly. Squeeze the trigger, squint against the muzzle flashes as the vibration reaches him through the seat and stick, walk the shells through the target truck. Then another. In four seconds his shooting pass was done, enough time to aim at two trucks; then Chernov was pulling G to get the nose above the horizon and rolling hard right to avoid ricochets. With a positive rate of climb, in a right turn, he raised the nose a smidgen more, twisted in his seat and glanced back over his right shoulder. Horror swept over him. A gun, on a truck, shooting, a death ray of tracers … Pervushin, on fire, rolling hard left, nose dropping … A tremendous explosion of yellow fire as Pervushin’s Sukhoi fighter flew into the ground. No parachute visible. Yan Chernov tore his eyes away and checked his nose attitude. He was still climbing. Damnation!

“Sir, where’s Major Pervushin?” the NCO asked Yan Chernov after he raised the canopy and shut down his engines at the Zeya Air Base. “Dead.”

“Fighters?”

“A gun. One gun. On a truck.”

“Could he have …”

“His wife is at Dispersal, sir. The trucks carrying the families won’t leave for a while, so she came here to wait for him.”

Chernov sat in the cockpit letting the wind dry his face and hair. He was exhausted. Finally he made himself look in the direction of the dispersal shack, a large one-room wooden-frame building on the edge of the concrete. She was standing outside, shading her eyes against the sun, looking this way. The wind was whipping at her dress. Chernov couldn’t do it. It was his duty, but he couldn’t. “Sergeant.”

“Yes, Major.”

“Go tell her.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Zero pulled hard to bring his nose around, setting up a head-on pass. Dixie Elitch horsed her airplane to meet him head-on, trying to minimize the separation and give her opponent as small an angle advantage as possible. Alas, the Japanese pilot’s nose lit up; cannon shells reached for her in a stream, as if they were squirted from a garden hose.

“These guys got fangs and will bite you good if you let them,” said the male voice in her earphones. That was Joe Malan, who was back there with the simulator operator, no doubt enjoying himself immensely.

Dixie put on the G to escape the shells. She fully intended to pull right into the vertical, but Malan read her mind. “If this guy follows you up, you’re going to give him another shot. You really don’t want to be out in front of one of these people. Are you suicidal?”

By the time he finished speaking, she had unloaded the plane and rolled it 270 degrees. Now she laid the G on. Smoothly back on the stick, right up to nine G’s on the HUD. In a real F-22, her full-body G suit would be fully inflated, but the simulator didn’t pull Go’s. It did roll and pitch in a sickeningly realistic manner, however, so the cockpit smelled faintly of stale vomit. So did real cockpits.

She came around hard, turning at thirty-two degrees per second with the help of vectored thrust. No other plane in the world could turn like that, even the Zero.

Unfortunately the Zero had not been standing still or plodding along straight while he waited for her to finish her turn. She craned her head, looking for it.

“No, damn it,” Malan said in her headphones. “Look at your displays. The infrared sensors are keeping track of this guy. What does your computer tell you?”

“He’s high and right. I’m in his left-rear quarter.”

“Pull up and shoot.”

Dixie kept the nose coming. The missile-capability circle came into view on the HUD. As the red dot centered in the circle, she heard a tone, almost a buzz, indicating the heat-seeking Sidewinder missile had locked on. She squeezed off the missile, which roared away from her right wingtip. A flash. “Got “im.”

She relaxed the G. “Okay, let’s go back to base, shoot an instrument approach. Remember, in combat you must let the computer help you. The computer is your edge. The computer will keep you alive.”

She wiped the sweat from her face and grunted.

“The computer is the brain of the plane. You’re just the loose nut on the stick.”

“Yeah.”

When the session was over and she was standing on the floor under the simulator, Joe Malan replayed her mission on a videotape. He had just started the tape when Bob Cassidy came in, stood behind Dixie, and watched silently.

“He came in so fast from the front I couldn’t get a missile shot.”

“He was inside the envelope,” Malan said. “Did you try to switch to the gun?”

“Never occurred to me,” she admitted.

“I don’t think you could have gotten the nose over quickly enough for a shot. You had only about three-quarters of a second, maybe a second. You must ensure you don’t cross his nose, give him a shot at you. That is critical.”

“Yes, sir,” Dixie Elitch said.

“Even in a no-radar environment, this guy is making a lot of heat. Your IR sensors will pick him up; the computer will identify him, track him, show you his position at all times. Don’t go lollygagging, cranking your head around to try to track him visually. Keep focused on those displays, keep flying, and take a shot when you get one. While you’re engaged with this guy, somebody else might be sneaking up to put a knife into you, so kill him as quickly as possible.”

“Okay.”

“Go get some rest. See you back here at eleven tonight. Tonight, we’ll do two bogeys at a time.”

“Terrific.”

As Dixie went through the classroom area, Aaron Hudek passed her on his way to the simulator. “Stick around, babe,” he said, “and see how it’s done.”

“Watching people get zapped in that thing nauseates me,” she shot back.

At the instructor’s console of the simulator, Bob Cassidy asked Joe Malan, “How is she doing?”

“Pretty good. Picks it up quick. All these kids do. The speed with which they absorb this stuff amazes me.”

“Video games. A lifetime of video games.”

“All life is a video game to this generation. Hudek is next, then you.”

Aaron Hudek was standing beside them. “Make yourself comfortable, Colonel. I’ll show you how it’s done.” The humble one grinned. Cassidy snorted. “I can talk it and walk it, Colonel.”

“I hope.”

“Just watch.” Hudek went up the ladder toward the cockpit, which stood almost ten feet off the floor on massive hydraulically actuated arms. “I like Fur Ball’s brass,” Malan muttered. “I’ll like it too, if he can fly.”

Hudek could. Malan started with in-flight emergencies and Hudek handled them expeditiously, by the book. Interceptions were no problem, nor were dogfights where he bounced his opponent. After three of those, he was bounced by a single opponent. He quickly went from defensive to offensive and shot the opponent down. The second opponent was wiser, more wily, but Hudek was patient, working his plane, taking what the opponent gave him, waiting for his enemy to make a mistake. “He’s damned good,” Malan told Bob Cassidy, who was watching Hudek’s cockpit displays on the control panel in front of Malan. “Maybe the best we have.”

A simulator was not a real airplane, nor were the scenarios very realistic. They were merely designed to sharpen the pilots” skills. “The problem,” Cassidy told Malan, “is going to be getting close enough to the Zero to have a chance at it. In close, with smart skin and infrared sensors, the F-22 has the edge. Getting there is going to be the trick.”

“I thought you said the F-22’s electronic countermeasures would allow us to detect the Zero before it could see us on radar?”

“Theoretically, yes. Say it works — you know the enemy is there, but his Athena protects him from your radar. You can’t shoot an AMRAAM— it won’t guide. How do you get in to Sidewinder range?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’d better figure that out or we’ll be ducks in a shooting gallery.”

The following day was even more frustrating for Yan Chernov than the previous one. Everything that could go wrong did. Electricity to the base was off; fueling had to be done by hand; only three airplanes were flyable — three out of thirty-six. The others had mechanical problems that the men were trying to fix, or had been scavenged for parts to keep the other planes flying. One of the three was fueled and armed. Chernov intended to use it to give the Japanese some grief. The 30-mm cartridges for the cannon were so old that some of them had swelled; these defective cartridges would jam the gun when they were chambered, so all the cartridges had to be checked by hand with a micrometer, the defective ones thrown away, then the good ones loaded by hand into the linkages that made them into a belt. At last, the belt went into Chernov’s plane. After all that, four AA-10 missiles were loaded onto the missile racks. Chernov suited up, strapped in, then tried to start the engines. The left engine wouldn’t crank. Another hour was wasted while mechanics changed the starter drive. Chernov went back to the dispersal shack and tried once again to call regional military headquarters. At least the telephones worked. But no one answered the ringing phone at regional HQ. The phone just refused to ring at the GCI site in this sector. Maybe the lines were down somewhere…, or perhaps the Japanese had fired a beam-rider antiradiation missile at the radar to knock it off the air.

Chernov went out onto the concrete ramp and sat down in the shade of a wing so he could watch the mechanics work. He had a lot of things on his mind: antiradiation missiles, telephones that didn’t work, Japanese soldiers, and a dead pilot. To resist a Japanese attack on the base with a few dozen men would be suicidal. He had ordered the base personnel to leave, taking all the military families with them. In the absence of orders from higher authority, the responsibility was his. Oh well, he would probably be dead in about an hour, so what did it matter what the Moscow bureaucrats thought when they got around to wondering why the antiaircraft guns at the Zeya Air Base were not manned. He was nervous. Maybe a little scared. He had never been in combat before yesterday. The action then hadn’t taken the edge off. His stomach was nervous, his hands sweaty. He was having trouble sitting still. Today, he knew, there would be Zeros. There should have been Zeros yesterday. He could do it, though. He told himself that over and over. He was a professional. He had a good airplane; he knew how to use it. The odds were against him. One plane against…, how many? An air force. Their ECM gear would pick up his radar … He would leave it off, he decided. Eyeball-to-eyeball would be his best chance. Maybe his only chance. “Major, what if the Japanese attack?”

One of the mechanics was standing in front of him, holding a wrench, examining his face with searching eyes. “You’re sitting under the biggest target on the base, the only armed fighter.”

“All these planes look good from the air,” he replied, gesturing toward rows of Sukhois and Migs parked in revetments. The mechanic rejoined the others. Chernov stretched out, using his survival vest for a pillow, and watched the sky. The sun was shining through a high cirrus layer. There were scattered clouds at the middle altitudes. The clouds subdued the light, made the sky look soft, gauzy. Yan Chernov took a deep breath, tried to force himself to relax. Finally the mechanics came to him. “We’re finished, sir.”

“Good. Very good.”

“It should work.”

“Yes,” he said. “What do you want to do, Major?” the crew chief asked.

“Help me strap in. Have the men work on getting another plane fueled. Arm it. Check the ammo, load four missiles. If there is time this evening, I will take it up.” If he was alive this evening, that is. “Some of the other pilots want to fly.”

Chernov had no orders to launch strikes on the Japanese. He had already lost one man. Russia might need these men later. No sense wasting them. This time the left engine started, as did the right. When the ordnance men and mechanics were satisfied, Chernov gave the signal for the linesmen to pull the chocks. They did so, and he taxied. He made no radio calls. He didn’t turn on the radar or the radio. The ECM panel received careful attention, however, and he tuned the volume so he could hear the sound of any enemy radar the black boxes detected. He taxied onto the runway, stopped, and quickly ran through his preflight checks. Satisfied, he released the brakes as he smoothly advanced the throttles to the stops, then lit the afterburners. The heavy Sukhoi accelerated quickly. Just seconds after the plane broke ground, Chernov came out of burner to save fuel. Airborne, with the gear up and flaps in, Yan Chernov pointed the fighter southeast, down the Amur valley. He leveled at twenty thousand feet and retarded the throttles to cruise at.8 Mach. The afternoon was getting late. The rolling plain below looked golden in the summer haze, like something from a fairy tale. Here and there were clumps of trees, pioneers from the boreal forest to the north, trying to make it in low places on the prairie. Occasionally a road could be discerned through the haze, but no villages or towns. The haze hid them. Chernov turned on his handheld GPS, a battery-powered Bendix-King unit made in America and sold there for use in light civilian airplanes. Within seconds, his position came up on the unit. He keyed in the lat-long coordinates of the Svobodny airfield and waited for a direction and distance. There!

One hundred and twenty miles from Svobodny, Chernov’s ECM picked up the chirp of a Japanese search radar. He was probably too far out for the operator to receive an echo, which was good. Chernov turned ninety degrees to the left and began flying a circle with a 120-mile radius, with Svobodny at the center. The GPS made it easy.

Yan Chernov concentrated on searching the afternoon sky and listening intently to the ECM. Not another aircraft in sight. That was certainly not surprising. Acquiring another aircraft visually was difficult at best beyond a few miles. At the speeds at which modern aircraft flew, when you finally saw it, you might not even have enough time to avoid it. And in combat, the performance envelope of air-to-air missiles was so large that if you saw the enemy, either you or the other pilot had made a serious mistake, perhaps a fatal one. Still, Chernov kept his eyes moving back and forth, searching the sky in sectors, level with the horizon, above it, and below it. He was alone, which was not the way modern fighters are designed to fight. The radar that his GCI controller normally used was off the air. Perhaps it had been damaged by a Japanese beam-riding missile. Perhaps the power company had turned off the electricity. Maybe the GCI people had piled into trucks and fled west to escape the Japanese. No one was answering the telephone there, so who knew? Perhaps it didn’t matter much one way or the other. And this was an old plane, an obsolete fighter. Once, not many years ago, the Sukhoi-27 had been the best fighter in the world, bar none. But after the collapse of communism in ‘91, development of new fighters in the new Russia dried up from lack of money. The nation couldn’t even afford to buy fuel for the fighters it had; everything was tired, worn, not properly cared for. Amazingly, Japan had plenty of planes that performed equal to or better than this one. As Russia rusted, the Japanese built a highly capable aircraft industry. And here Chernov was, in an obsolete, worn-out plane that hadn’t flown — according to the logbook — in nine months and three days, hunting Japanese planes with his naked eyes. Out here asking for some Japanese fighter pilot to kill him quick. Begging for it. Kill me, kill me, kill me … According to an intel officer hiding in the city of Svobodny whom he had spoken to on the telephone that morning, the Japanese were flying supplies in from Khabarovsk and bases in Japan. He thought he saw a plane, and he changed his heading to check. No. Dirt on the canopy. He checked his fuel, checked the GPS … He wasn’t going to be able to stay out here for very long, not if he expected to get back to base flying this airplane.

He was coming up on the Bureya River when he saw it, a speck running high and conning. The guy must be 36,000 or 38,000 feet, headed northwest. Chernov turned to let the other plane pass off his right wing on a reciprocal heading. If it was a Japanese transport — and all the planes in these skies just now were Japanese — it must be going to Svobodny. Right heading, right altitude … If it was a transport going to Svobodny, there were fighters. The Russian major glanced at his ECM, listened intently. Not a peep, not a chirp or click. Well, damnit, there must be fighters, not using their radars. They must be below the transport, below the conning layer, and too small to be visible at this distance. Thank God he had his radar off, or they would have picked up the emissions and be setting a trap right this minute. His heart was pounding. Sweat stung his eyes, ran down his neck … He checked his switches — missiles selected, stations armed, master arm on. The transport was still eight or ten miles away when it went by Chernov’s right wingtip. He laid the Sukhoi into a sixty-degree angle of bank and stuffed the nose down while he lit the afterburners, shoved the throttles on through to stage four. The heavy jet slid through the sonic barrier and accelerated quickly: Mach 1.5, 1.7 … 1.9. Passing Mach 2 he raised the nose into a climb, kept the turn in. The AA-10 was a fire-and-forget missile with active radar homing. When its radar came on, the Japanese were going to get a heady surprise. So was Chernov if the Japanese had a couple of fighters fifteen miles in trail behind the transport. He looked left, then right, scanning the sky hurriedly. The sky looked empty. Which meant nothing. They could be there. The transport was just a dot, a flyspeck in the great va/s, still well above him and conning beautifully. About ten miles, he figured, but he couldn’t afford to turn on the radar to verify that. He was closing from fifteen degrees right of dead astern. He centered the dot in the gunsight, squeezed off a missile. It shot forward off the rail trailing smoke. He lowered the nose, aimed a little left, and fired a second missile. A hard right turn, fifteen degrees of heading change, and a third missile was in the air. Total elapsed time, about six seconds. If there were Japanese fighters there, the missiles would find them. The third missile had just disappeared into the haze when the ECM squealed in his ears. The AA light was flashing, and a red light on the instrument panel just below his gunsight: “Missile!”

Yan Chernov slammed the stick sideways and pulled. The plane flicked over on its side and he laid the G on. A target decoy was automatically kicked out by the countermeasures gear. Five … six…, seven G. A missile flashed over his right wing and detonated. A miss. The Missile warning light went out, but the ECM continued to chirp and flash direction lights. The Japanese were on the air now. Ten years ago nothing on the planet could turn with a Su-27. It could still out-turn missiles, so Yan Chernov was still alive. He came out of burner, retarded the throttles as quickly as he dared — he certainly didn’t want to flame out just now — and let the G bleed off his airspeed. He got the nose up to the horizon. A Japanese fighter overshot above him. There might be two of them … His skin felt like ice as he slammed the stick right and rolled hard to reverse his turn. The ECM was singing. The Japanese pilot was turning left, beginning to roll back upright. Chernov pulled with all his might to raise the nose. As the enemy fighter streaked across from right to left, Chernov had his thumb on the 30-mm cannon, which vomited out a river of fire. The finger of God. The flaming river of shells passed through the wing of the Japanese fighter. Chernov rolled upside down, pulled as he lit his burners. There had to be someone else out there: the ECM was chirping madly. The earth filled the windscreen. Going straight down, accelerating … Only 23,000 feet, fool. He rolled the plane and scanned quickly. Nothing. Now the ECM was silent. He began to pull. Pull pull pull at seven G’s, fight to stay conscious. … The sweat stung his eyes, and his vision began to gray. He was screaming now, watching the yellow earth rushing up at him, trying to stay conscious. He was going to make it. Yes!

Relax the stick, drop to a hundred feet or two, just above the earth, and let the old girl accelerate. The ECM stayed silent. He twisted his head, looked behind. Right. Left. Nothing. Two planes falling way off the right. On fire — one of them large enough to appear as a black dot against the yellow cirrus layer.

When Yan Chernov taxied into the hard stand at Zeya, his flight suit and gear were soaked. The sweat was still running off him in rivulets, even though he had the canopy open. On the instrument panel, the needle on the G meter that recorded the maximum G pulled that flight rested on 9. Nine G’s with only a stomach-and-legs G suit. The wings might have come off under that much overstress. He would have to have the mechanics carefully inspect the plane. Chernov waited until the linemen had the chocks in place, then secured the engines. “Water,” he said. The senior NCO passed up a bottle. “How did it go, Major?” one of the junior pilots asked after he finished drinking. There were four of them standing there, gazing at the empty missile racks and the gun port with the tape shot away. “I got two, I think. Maybe three. One of them almost took my scalp.”

“Very good.”

“Luck. Pure luck. They just happened to come along, and I just happened to see them before they saw me.” He shook his head, filled with wonder that he was still alive. “They are good?”

“Good enough.” He tossed his helmet down, then climbed down from the cockpit. When he was on the ground, he drank more of the water. “Do you have another plane ready?”

“Yes, Major,” said the senior NCO. “Two?”

“Just one, sir. We hope to get three more flyable tonight by cannibalizing parts from the down birds. And the fueling takes forever.”

“Any word from Moscow?”

“No, sir. They haven’t called.”

“We will fly the planes west in the morning, as many as we have fuel for. As many as we can get started.”

Damn Moscow. With almost no fuel, no spare parts, little food, one-third of the mechanics the squadron was supposed to have, and an inoperative GCI site, he couldn’t do much more, even if Kalugin wrote the order in blood. He was being realistic. He had flown a stupid solo mission, almost gotten killed, affected the course of the war not at all, and now it was time to face facts: Russia was defenseless. “I’ll bet Zambia has a better air force than we have,” one of the junior officers muttered. Chernov took off his flight gear and sat down by a main tire with the water bottle and waved them away. “Let me rest awhile.”

His mind was still going a thousand miles an hour, replaying the missile shots and the Japanese fighter slashing across in front of his gun. The emotional highs and lows — amazing! He would never have believed that he could feel so much elation, then, five seconds later, so much terror. He was wrung out, like a sponge squeezed to millimeter thickness in a hydraulic press. Five minutes later one of the NCOS came for him from the dispersal shack. “Sir, Moscow is on the line. Someone very senior.”

“How senior?”

“He says he’s a general, sir. I never heard of him.”

Chernov walked across the ramp and entered the dispersal building, a single room with a naked bulb in the ceiling — not burning, of course; the only light came from the dirty windows. A large potbellied wood-stove stood in the center of the room. The four or five enlisted men in the room fell silent when Chernov walked in and reached for the phone. “Major Chernov, sir.”

“Major, this is General Kokovtsov, aide to Marshal Stolypin.”

“In Moscow?”

“Headquarters.”

“I’ve been trying to telephone regional headquarters and Moscow since the Japanese invaded. You arc the first senior officer I’ve spoken to.”

The desk soldier had other things on his mind. “I asked to speak to the commanding officer. Are you in command of the base?”

“Apparently so, General.”

“A fighter base should have a brigadier general in command.”

“Our general retired four years ago and was never replaced. Two of our squadrons were transferred three years ago and took their airplanes with them. The other squadron was decommissioned: The people left, but the airplanes stayed, parked in revetments. My squadron, the Five hundred fifty-sixth, is the last.”

“And you are a ma right-brace or?”

“That is correct, sir. Major Chernov. We used to have a colonel. This spring, he and some of the other officers took several vehicles and left. We haven’t seen them since. They said they were going to Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal. To find work. The colonel had relatives in Moscow, I believe. He talked of the city often, so he may have gone there.”

“He had orders?”

“He deserted!”

“Call it what you like.”

“Desertion.”

“The colonel drove out of here in broad daylight. The others too. They were owed over eighteen months’ pay. They hadn’t seen a ruble in six months.”

Silence from Moscow. Finally, the general said, “Why are you still there?”

“My wife left me five years ago, General. I’m alone. This place is as good as any other.”

“You are loyal.”

“To what? What I am is stupid. The government owes me almost two years’ pay. I haven’t been paid anything since the colonel was, nine months ago. Neither have these enlisted men. We’re selling small arms and ammunition on the black market to get money for food. When we don’t have any money, we ask for credit. When we can’t get credit, we steal. But enough of this social chitchat — what did you call me to talk about?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Believe me, so am I.”

“Marshal Stolypin wants you to harass the Japanese. Just that. Launch a few sections a day, try to shoot down a transport or two, force them to maximum effort to protect their resources.”

“I thought Stolypin retired years ago. Samsonov is—“

“Samsonov is dead. Stolypin has come out of retirement to lead us against the Japanese.”

“Maybe he can work a miracle.”

“Don’t be insubordinate, Major.”

“I’m trying, sir.”

“So what have you done, if anything, to fight the war?”

“I went up awhile ago. One plane. They shot at me; I shot at them.”

“One sortie?” he asked, disbelief apparent in his voice. “Three today. We flew six yesterday, four the day before.”

“Only thirteen?”

The jerk! Chernov had dealt with asshole superiors all his adult life. He kept his voice absolutely calm, without even a trace of emotion. “We can launch one more sortie this evening. We have fuel for perhaps eight more; then we’re done.”

“We’ll have fuel delivered.”

“The electricity has been off here for a month. No one has paid the power company, so they shut it off. We have to pump the fuel from the tanks to the planes by hand, which takes a lot of time and effort.”

“President Kalugin has signed a decree. The electricity will be turned back on.”

“Terrific. War by decree.” Yan Chernov couldn’t help himself. He was losing his composure. Maybe it was adrenaline aftershock. “We want you to launch some sections to harass the enemy,” the general said from the safety of Moscow. “Don’t be too aggressive, you understand. Inflict just enough pain to annoy them. That is the order of Marshal Stolypin.”

Chernov lost it completely. “You fool! We worked for four days to get six sorties out yesterday. Two sorties a day on a sustained basis is all we could possibly launch, even if World War Three is declared. My executive officer was killed this morning. We have no food, no fuel, no electricity, no spare parts, no GCI site, no intelligence support, no staff. … We have nothing! Have I made it clear? Do you comprehend?”

“I am a general, Major. Watch your tongue.”

“Get your head out of your ass, General. We can’t defend this base. We should be flying these planes west to save them. It’s just a matter of time before the Japanese attack. It’s a miracle they haven’t already. I can only assume you and Stolypin want the Japanese to attack us, because you are taking no steps to prevent it. When we’re dead, you idiots in Moscow won’t have to ever feed us or pay us or—” The headquarters general hung up before the major completed the last sentence. When Chernov realized the line was dead, he quit talking and slammed down the telephone. Everyone in the room was staring at him.

“Everything that can fly goes west at dawn,” Chernov shouted, spit the flying from his lips. “Work everyone all night.”

“Yes, sir.”

Chernov turned to face the junior officers who had trickled in while he was on the telephone. “Get the trucks we have left. Fuel them. Have the men load the tools and all the food we have. They may take their clothes. Nothing else. No furniture or televisions or any of that other crap.”

He was roaring at the top of his lungs, unable to help himself. “We will drive west, all the way to Moscow. If we get there before the Japanese, we will drag the generals from their comfortable offices and hang them by the balls.”

Yan Chernov stomped out to pee in the grass.

Delivery of the Russian ultimatum to the Japanese was a chore that fell to Ambassador Stanley P. Hanratty. The Russian diplomats had all left Tokyo the day after the invasion, turning out the lights and locking the door of the embassy as they left. The U.s. government offered to assist the Russians diplomatically in the Japanese capital until relations were restored, an offer that Kalugin seized upon. Delivery of the ultimatum was Ambassador Hanratty’s first chore for the Russians. Of course, he and the U.s. government were privy to the contents of the note. Hanratty returned the following morning to the Japanese foreign ministry to receive the Japanese reply. “We find it difficult to believe, in this day and age,” the Japanese foreign minister said as he handed over the written reply, “that any government on the planet would threaten another with nuclear war. Still, in anticipation of just such an event, Japan has developed its own nuclear arsenal. Should Russia attempt to launch a first strike upon Japan, the Japanese government will, with profound regret, order a massive retaliatory strike upon Russia.”

It was late in the day in Moscow when Kalugin received the Japanese answer from Danilov. He read the reply carefully, then handed the paper back without a word.