Fortunes of War

18

Working in shifts around the clock, the men of Admiral Kolchak took three days to ship a new periscope and radar antenna. They also took on a full load of torpedoes and diesel fuel, provisioned the ship with canned vegetables and meat, refilled the freshwater tanks, washed their clothes, and took baths. The cracked batteries took more time. There was no way to replace the missing anechoic tiles on the boat’s hull, so they didn’t try. It was in the shower that the XO, Askold, approached Pavel Saratov, who was standing in the hot water with his eyes closed, letting it massage his back and head. “Captain, we’ve found four missiles for the sail.”

“Are you sure they are the right ones?”

“Twenty years old if they are a day, but I’ve already loaded one. It fits.”

“Very good, Askold.”

“Sir, where does General Esenin want us to go?”

“Back to Tokyo Bay,” Saratov said after a bit. No doubt Askold picked the shower for his questions because with all this water noise a microphone couldn’t overhear their conversation. “The men are very unhappy.”

“Umm.” Saratov opened his eyes and reached for the soap. “They’ll be ready for us this time.”

“He has written orders, signed by President Kalugin. We don’t have any choice.”

Askold concentrated on scrubbing. “Look at the provisions,” Saratov said. “Food, torpedoes, diesel fuel — they must have flown this stuff in here over the Pole. Somebody somewhere gave these people a hell of a priority.”

“It’s crazy. A dieselstelectric boat? A few torpedoes? We can win the war for Russia?”

“Russia’s only operational submarine in the Pacific is Admiral Kolchak. Our other three were sunk attacking the Japs off Vladivostok.”

“So what are we going to do in Tokyo Bay?”

“Esenin has a mission. He just hasn’t bothered to tell us serfs what it is.”

“Captain, the men—“

“XO, the officers and michmen and enlisted men of Admiral are going to obey orders. They are going to do as they are told. They swore an oath to obey, and by all that’s holy, they will.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Esenin will shoot anyone who fails to obey orders. If he doesn’t, I will. You’d better tell them.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“This is bigger than all of us, Askold. We have no choice. None at all.”

“I understand, Captain.”

That was the way he put the fear in Askold, who refused to look at him. When the executive officer left the locker room, still buttoning his shirt, Saratov sat heavily on the bench. He found himself fingering the scar on his forehead, He should have died in Tokyo Bay. Askold gave his life, and Saratov almost wished he hadn’t.

“He intends to nuke Japan,” Yanos Ilin told Marshal Stolypin. The old man stared at him stonily, which unnerved Ilin a little. One could never tell what the old bastard was thinking, or if he was. Talking to him was like talking to a portrait. “He isn’t that stupid,” Stolypin said finally. “He is that stupid. Believe me. He thinks if he nukes Tokyo, Japan will collapse and he will be the new czar of Russia. His position will be unassailable.”

Stolypin shook his head from side to side like an old bear. “We can win without nukes. We are bleeding them with hit-and-run raids. The Americans are in position to fight the Zeros toe-to-toe. This winter, we will unleash an army of half a million men against them. We can win, on the battlefield.”

“Kalugin will not wait. lie wants to save Russia now.”

“When I saved those weapons, I was thinking of possible conflicts with former Soviet states. Ahh … The Japanese have earned their doom.”

“No doubt,” Janos Ilin said crisply, “but while the Japanese government is collapsing, the military might retaliate with their own nuclear weapons. They have warheads for their satellite-launch missiles, developed in secret. They might launch them at Russia.”

Stolypin goggled. “Those are the first words I have ever heard about Japanese nuclear weapons. How good is your information?”

“Absolutely reliable. In fact, Kalugin knows the Japanese have nuclear warheads mounted on missiles. He sent them an ultimatum, which they rejected. Prime Minister Abe told him that if he uses nuclear weapons on the Japanese, they will retaliate.”

“I know of no ultimatum.”

“Obviously, Kalugin doesn’t believe Prime Minister Abe. And he’s willing to bet Russia that Abe is lying.”

“This changes everything,” Stolypin mumbled, and leaned back in his chair. The old soldier looked out the window, then played with the letter opener on his desk. That and a pen were the only items visible. Stolypin’s bureaucratic tidiness bothered Ilin. It was his experience that neatniks were neurotic. “All these years,” Stolypin muttered, “the balance of nuclear terror kept anyone from pulling the trigger. Until now … How do I know you are telling me the truth?”

“I would make this up? For what reason?”

“You come to me with a tale. The president is a madman bent on pulling the nuclear trigger. Perhaps he sent you here to see if I was loyal.”

“Spoken like a true peasant. Your paranoia becomes you, Marshal.”

“If you want to sneer at me, Ilin, do it somewhere else,” the marshal said, his face as calm as a clear summer sky. “I don’t have time for it.”

“I have only the whispered words of men I trust.”

“Whispered words of men I don’t know will not move me, Ilin. I want proof. Bring me proof or don’t come back.”

Janos Ilin rose from his seat and left the room.

The four F-22’s topped the cloud layer in a spread formation. None of the F-22’s were transmitting with their radar. Today Aaron Hudek was Cassidy’s wingman, flying five miles out to the leader’s left. Dixie Elitch led the second section; she was five miles away to the right, and Clay Lacy was five miles beyond her. Their heading was slightly north of east. The late afternoon sun shone over their left shoulders. The clouds below were thickening and the gaps looked ragged and gloomy. To the north, east, and south Cassidy could see massive thunderstorms, which were growing out of the turbulent clouds below. The ECM was silent. Cassidy still didn’t completely trust all this high-tech gadgetry, so he pushed the ECM self-test button. The lights on the ECM panel flashed in a test pattern and the audio beeped and honked. The concert and light show lasted sixty seconds, by which time Cassidy heartily wished he hadn’t played with the darn thing. He had tested it on the ground an hour ago. The autopilot flew the plane nicely. Sitting in the generous cockpit, Cassidy thought the fighter rode like a 747 crossing the Pacific. Not a hint of turbulence. Solid, tight, smooth as silk. Where was the stew with the drinks?

Idly, Cassidy mused about the strange twists of fortune that had brought him here, to a foreign war where the only person on earth who might be considered one of his family was flying a fighter on the other side. Life is bizarre at times, he decided. Totally unpredictable. Dixie was a little too far away, but Cassidy didn’t want to break radio silence to tell her to tighten up. Two hundred miles to Zeya. The F-22’s would be there in fifteen minutes. Cassidy twiddled his computer cursor, told the magic box to attack the target he had programmed while still on the ground. The National Security Agency selected the targets by studying satellite reconnaissance photos. They converted latitude and longitude coordinates into code by use of map overlays, then passed the coded coordinates by scrambled satellite data link. The coded coordinates were plotted on maps brought from the States and reconverted to latitude and longitude; the resulting latstlong numbers were handed to the pilots to be programmed into the aircraft’s attack computer. The pilots were given only coordinates: They didn’t know what they were bombing. It was a curious disconnect — if you didn’t know, you wouldn’t feel guilty. I’m not responsible — the people in Washington told me to push the button and I pushed it.

Hanging in Cassidy’s small internal weapons bay were two one-thousand-pound green bombs. On the nose of each bomb was a GPS receiver, a computer, and a set of four small movable canards, or wings. The target coordinates were fed to the bomb’s computer by the aircraft’s computer, which also determined where the bomb should be dropped based on the known wind at altitude. As the unpowered bomb fell, the GPS receiver located the bomb in three-dimensional space and fed that data to the computer, which calculated a course to get the bomb where it was supposed to go and positioned the canards to steer it there. The accuracy of the system was phenomenal. Half the bombs dropped from above thirty thousand feet would hit within three meters — about ten feet — of the center of the programmed latstlong bull’s-eye. Today as Cassidy flew toward the Zeya airfield at 34,000 feet at Mach 1.3, the computer figured an attack solution and presented steering commands to the pilot. The plane’s autopilot followed the commands with no input from the pilot. Everything is automated, he thought. The machine does everything for you but die. Due to the fact that the weapons could steer themselves, at this altitude the window into which they must be dropped was a large oval, or basket. Any bomb put into the basket would have the energy to steer itself to the desired target, if, of course, the computer and GPS receiver in the nose functioned properly. Just in case, the approved procedure was to drop two bombs on each target. The symbology in the HUD was alive, moving predictably and gracefully as Bob Cassidy threaded his way between thunderstorms to make his supersonic bomb run five miles above the earth. When he was within the basket, he released the first weapon by pushing once on the pickle on the joystick. He felt just the slightest jolt as the first bomb was jettisoned from the weapons bay. Another push sent the second bomb after the first. Behind Cassidy, bombs were falling from the other planes, each of which was running its own attack.

The sonic booms arrived at the Zeya airfield before the bombs did. Four of them in less than a second, like an incoming artillery barrage. The bombs startled Jiro Kimura, who scanned the cloudy sky. He had been walking toward the headquarters building to report to the base commander, but upon hearing the booms, he spent two seconds looking for enemy airplanes. Then he remembered the Zeros he and his wingman had flown in just an hour ago from Khabarovsk, and he started running back toward the parking mat. Now he heard the roar of the engines, quite audible five miles under the speeding planes. Jiro looked up again. He was searching the cloud-studded sky when the first bomb hit the ammunition storage depot on the edge of the base, two miles away. The resulting explosion leveled trees in every direction for a thousand yards. The explosion was so large that the detonation of the second bomb in the middle of the mess went completely unnoticed. Jiro was facedown in the weed-studded dirt before the concussion of that explosion reached him. A nearby hangar being used to store rations took two bombs in two seconds, those dropped by Aaron Hudek. After the bombs detonated, the hanger roof rose fifty feet in the air before it began falling. The walls of the building collapsed outward. The pair of bombs dropped by Dixie Elitch fell on the fuel farm, two miles away from headquarters on the other side of the base. These bombs ignited two fuel fires, which quickly sent enormous columns of black smoke into the darkening evening clouds. The last set of bombs, those dropped by Clay Lacy, was targeted on the headquarters building behind Jiro. The first bomb hit the northwest corner of the building, causing a fourth of the building to collapse in a pile of rubble. The second missed the building on the east side by ten feet; the explosion fired the brick masonry of the wall like shrapnel through the remaining structure. The concussion of the two bombs pummeled Jiro Kimura as he lay facedown in the dirt a hundred feet away. Miraculously, the flying debris caused by the two bombs only dusted him with mortar and powdered brick. When the air cleared, he picked himself up, wiped the dust and dirt from his eyes, and brushed the worst of it from the front of his uniform. His thoughts began to clear. The people inside the building … Jiro jerked open the door of the headquarters building and rushed inside. The dust in the air was so thick he could barely see. The electric lights were off. He groped his way down the hall and into the war room. The air was opaque. Holding a handkerchief in front of his mouth and nose so that he could breathe, Jiro groped his way into the room. Something hit his legs. He bent down, blinking furiously, trying to see. It was a body. Half a body — from the waist down.

The floor was covered with thousands of pieces of bricks.

The air was clearing.

More bodies, and pieces of bodies, arms at odd angles, severed heads … He looked up. As the swirling dust cleared, he could see patches of dark clouds through the gaping hole where the northwest corner of the building had stood. And he could hear the roar of jet engines.

The Americans had just released their bombs when Zero fighters surprised them. Suddenly, the ECM was wailing and the displays showed yellow fighter symbols, Zeros, out to the left and closing rapidly. Then one of the Zeros put a missile into the air and all hell broke loose.

The Americans slammed their throttles into full afterburner and broke hard to avoid the oncoming missile. Cassidy turned into the missile at eight G’s, the massive titanium nozzle behind the afterburners tilting the fire cones up to help the jet turn faster. His full-body G suit automatically inflated to keep him from passing out.

The HUD showed targets everywhere. Unfortunately, the computer displayed the targets” positions in real time, not where they would be after Cassidy pointed his plane so that the targets were within the missile’s performance envelope when he managed to get a firing solution. Solving that four-dimensional problem by looking at the computer displays while in danger of losing your life was the art of the supersonic dogfight. Some pilots could do it; others flew transports and helicopters.

Cassidy flipped the weapons selector to “Missiles” while in an eighty-degree bank pulling four Go’s. A Zero was almost head-on when the aircraft vector dot came rapidly into the missile-capable circle, so he pulled the trigger. An AMRAAM missile roared away in a gout of fire.

The AMP, AAM didn’t guidest Of course not, stupid! It can’t see the Athena-protected Zero.

Cassidy didn’t have time to fret his mistake. Another missile streaked across his nose, not a hundred feet away, from left to right.

He had a target down and to his right, so he rolled hard and pulled toward it. The plane was turning away, so if he could outturn it, he could get a high-percentage stern shot. The G’s pressed down on him and he felt the G suit squeezing viciously. He fought to inhale against the massive weight on his chest.

Now he had Sidewinders selected on the MFD. The enemy fighter was close, almost too close, but when he got a locked-on tone from the missile, Cassidy fired. Two seconds later he saw an explosion out of the corner of his eye. Did I get him?

He was diving now toward the earth, pulling three Go’s. He relaxed the G, leveled his wings, reapplied G. Nose coming up, more G, lower the left wing because a Zero was behind and left and high and the missile light on the instrument panel was flashing as the ECM wailed … Pull, pull, pull!

Another explosion off to the right.

A plane flashed in front, a Zero, and Cassidy slammed the wing down to follow.

Clay Lacy saw the missile that killed him. It was fired by a Zero just two miles away at his four o’clock low, and tracked toward him straight as a laser. Lacy’s computer was displaying two possible targets in front of him, recommending the one to the right, when out of the corner of his eye he saw the missile coming. To his surprise, he now realized the Missile warning light was flashing and the aural warning tone wailing at full cry. The missile was less that a second from impact when he saw it, and Clay Lacy knew he had had the stroke.

“Shit,” he said, and pulled into a nine-G grunt.

It wasn’t enough. The missile went off just under the belly of the aircraft, blasting shrapnel into the wing fuel tanks and shredding the airplane’s belly. Shrapnel coming through the floor of the cockpit killed Clay Lacy less than a second before the aircraft blew up. As the fireball expanded, fed by the aircraft’s fuel, two long cylinders— the aircraft’s engines — shot out of the explosion and fell in a ballistic trajectory toward the earth five miles below.

The disappearance of one of the three other friendly green fighter symbols from his tac display registered on Bob Cassidy. He was too busy to wonder who had been hit.

He was solidly in the clouds, flying as if he were in the simulator back in Germany.

He rocketed down, doing almost Mach 2, checking the tac display for enemies who might be locking him up for a missile shot. He came out of burner and cracked his speed brakes a few inches to help him SLOW. Uh-oh, ten miles off to the right — another Zero, shifting to a high radar PRF (pulse repetition frequency) for a shot. Now it was on the display — why hadn’t Sky Eye seen the Zeroes when the F-22’s were inbound to the base?

He racked the F-22 into a hard right turn, nine G’s, over twenty degrees heading change per second at this speed. He saw the streak on the MFD as the enemy fighter launched a missile. Cassidy flipped his fighter over on its back, pulled the nose thirty degrees down, and lit the afterburners. His plane was automatically pumping out chaff and decoys — they would save him or they wouldn’t. He elected to go under the enemy fighter, too fast for the Zero to get his nose down for another shot. That was the way it worked out. The enemy’s missile didn’t guide. Cassidy came out of burner and pulled up to turn in behind the Zero, which was also turning hard to get on his tail, a fatal mistake. Nothing in the sky could turn with a Raptor. Cassidy selected his gun. He was going to get a shot, a blind, in-the-cloud shot. He was outturning the Zero. He kept the G on, fought against it as he tried to pull the aircraft vector dot through the target symbol on the HUD so that the two dots would cross at less than a mile. Now!

He squeezed the trigger and held it down. Fire poured from his Gatling gun.

In the Zero, the Japanese pilot had lost the American on his tactical display. He was turning hard, trying to reacquire the F-22 on radar so that he could fire another missile. He never knew what killed him. The first of the cannon shells from the F-22 passed behind the Zero and he never saw them. Then the river of high explosive swept across his plane. Several of the shells passed through the left horizontal stabilator; then four shells smashed the left engine to bits. Five shells shredded the main fuel cell behind the cockpit. Three of the shells struck the pilot, killing him instantly. Another two shells went through the nose of the aircraft, smashing the radar. The damage was done in a third of a second; then the stream of shells passed on ahead of the aircraft. The Zero flew on for three more seconds before fuel hit the hot engine parts and the aircraft exploded.

“Yankees check in.”

“Two’s up.” That was Hudek. “Three.” Dixie. Four should have sung out here, but he didn’t. “Four, are you there?” Cassidy asked. He was at full throttle, racing west from Zeya. No answer from Lacy. “Yankees, stay with me. Lacy, where are you, son?”

“I think he bit the big one, skipper.” That was Hudek. “Lacy, you flaky bastard, answer me, son. Where are you?”

When they landed back at Chita, night had fallen. The three fighters taxied to their respective revetments and shut down. In the office they used as a ready room, they put the video discs into the postcombat computer and played the mission again. The computer took the information from all three of the surviving planes, merged it, and presented it as a three-dimensional holograph. They saw the American aircraft and the Zeros, the maneuvering, the missiles flying — all of it was right there for everyone to watch. Every brilliant maneuver and every mistake was there for all to see. “We fired fifteen missiles and killed six Zeros. One gun kill. We lost a plane and pilot.”

“Too bad about Lacy.”

“God, that’s tough.”

“You wasted that AMRAAM when you squirted it at that Zero, Colonel. That Athena gear they have really works.”

“We never picked them up on the ECM. They didn’t turn on their radars until we were on top of them.”

“That was their mistake.”

“The satellite never saw these guys until they were on us.”

“Late-afternoon build-ups, lots of thermals …”

“Cost us a man.”

“Lacy screwed up, skipper,” Fur Ball Hudek said flatly. “Look at this sequence.” He pointed at two planes in the holographic display. “This villain passes behind Flake at a right angle, turns hard into him to get a firing solution. Flake is busy chasing these two over here. See that? Flake had target fixation; he lost the bubble. Clay Lacy’s dead because he fucked up.”

That was the nub of it. In this business errors were fatal. “Okay, let’s recap. The Zeros got into us before we knew they were around. Lacy screwed up and got hammered. But the Japs screwed up too. If they had sat fifty miles out squirting missiles at us, we couldn’t have touched them. They’ll learn from this. Just you watch.”

Cassidy got on the satellite telephone to Washington. He wound up with Colonel Eatherly at home. After Cassidy finished explaining the mission, Eatherly said, “We have satellites over that area most of the time. Sometimes they can see airplanes. I can’t say more than that. I’ll talk to General Tuck tomorrow. Maybe he’ll eat some ass. But I can tell you right now, Space Command is doing all they can with the technology.”

“I understand.”

“Sorry about your pilot.”

“If the wizards know Zeros are airborne, maybe they could call us on the sat phone. Back up all this techno-crap. Our duty officer could call out traffic over the base radio.”

“We’ll do it.”

Cassidy was exhausted. He had no appetite. He wandered off to the lower bunk he called home. He lay there staring at the ceiling. He had pulled the trigger repeatedly today. What if one of those Japanese pilots had been Jiro?

What would Sabrina say?

If he had killed Jiro … A wave of revulsion washed over him. He was too tired to sit up, yet he couldn’t sleep. He lay in the bunk with his eyes open, staring into the darkness.