Fortunes of War

20

Puffy clouds floating in a calm summer sky greeted the Japanese pilots as they climbed out of Khabarovsk headed for their tanker rendezvous. There were sixteen Zeros divided into two gaggles of eight. Colonel Handa led the eight planes of the high echelon. He had allowed his senior commanders to choose where they wished to fly, and they all wished to fly high, with him. The glory was in shooting down enemy planes in combat, not strafing hangars and barracks.

Still, the commanders put their very best subordinates in the eight airplanes that were going to strike the base.

Colonel Handa had intended to exhort his pilots at the briefing to do their best for the honor of Japan and the Zero pilot corps, but then he thought better of it. I have watched too many American movies, he told himself.

“They’re coming,” Lee Foy shouted as he slammed down the telephone. “Headed this way. Over a dozen. Took off ten minutes ago.”

The American pilots went into the dispersal shack — an old hen coop that they had commandeered, cleaned, and moved to the parking mat — for their final briefing. Everyone was checking his watch. The pilots managed to avoid one another’s eyes.

Bob Cassidy was glad the Japanese were on their way. The suspense was over. He had known the Japanese would attack eventually; he just hadn’t known it would come so soon.

His people were ready. He had just six planes available, so he divided them into three flights. He would take Paul Scheer north of the base and wait until the Sentinel missiles had forced the Zero pilots to shut off their radars. Then he and Scheer would go in among them.

Dixie and Aaron Hudek were going out to the northwest of the base, Preacher Fain and Lee Foy to the southwest. They would come in when Cassidy called them.

Each plane carried eight Sidewinders and a full load of ammo for the gun. Cassidy had ordered the AMRAAMS left behind. He was betting that the Sky Eye data link would work. If it didn’t, this fight was going to be a disaster. He was also betting that the Japanese would avoid Chinese airspace and come in from the east, the most direct route from Khabarovsk after avoiding China. If the Zeros circled and came in from another direction, they might find a pair of F-22’s with their radar and drop them both. Every choice involves risks. Life involves risk. Breathing is a risk, Cassidy thought. He and his pilots needed some luck. If they got a little of the sweet stuff, they could smash the Zeros right here, today, once and for all. And if luck ran the wrong way…, well, you only had to die once. Cassidy stood in front of the blackboard. He already had all the freqs, altitudes, and call signs written there from the planning session. “Okay, people. They are on their way. They’ll hit the tankers and motor over our way, we hope. Let’s go over the whole thing one more time, then suit up. We’ll man up an hour and a half before they are expected, and take off an hour prior.”

No one asked a single question. Eyes kept straying to wrist watches. When the brief was over, Cassidy walked outside, went around behind the shack, and peed in the grass. Finally, he suited up, taking his time. He was standing outside the shack, looking at the airplanes, thinking about Sweet Sabrina and little Robbie and Jiro Kimura when he heard the satellite phone ring. Lee Foy answered. Fifteen seconds went by; then Foy shouted, “Sixteen Zeros. They’ve finished tanking and are on their way here. ETA is an hour and twenty-eight minutes from right now.”

“Let’s do it!”

“Let’s go.”

They grabbed gear and helmets and began jogging for their planes.

When the planes were level at altitude after tanking, Jiro Kimura slid away from the other flight of four Zeros that was assigned to the ground attack mission. He was wearing the night-vision helmet that he had borrowed from the helo pilots, but he didn’t have it turned on. He wanted to try that now. First, he checked his three charges, Ota, Miura, and Sasai. They were precisely in position, as if he had welded them there. They were good pilots, great comrades. Satisfied, Jiro engaged the autopilot and began fiddling with the helmet. Before takeoff-he had turned the gain setting to its lowest reading, as the helo pilot had advised. Now he lowered the hinged goggles down over his eyes. The battery was on, so the goggles were working, or should be. His eyes slowly adjusted to the reduced light levels. Oh yes, there was the other flight, out there to the right. He turned his head from side to side, taking in the view. The view to both sides was limited, and he couldn’t read the instruments on his panel, but in combat, he wouldn’t need to: he could find every dial and switch blindfolded. The real disadvantage to the helmet was weight. In a helicopter a twelve-pound helmet on a healthy man was no big deal if he didn’t have to wear it too long, but in a fighter, pulling G’s, the story would be much different. At five G’s, the darn thing would weigh sixty pounds, which would be a nice test of Jiro’s neck muscles. Ten G’s might be enough to snap his neck like a twig. It just stood to reason that if the Americans had figured out a way to cancel visible light waves, their airplanes still might be visible in the infrared portion of the spectrum. Giro’s oxygen mask was lying in his lap. The helo helmet had no fittings to accept the mask. The Zero’s cockpit was partially pressurized with a maximum three psi differential, so even though the plane was at 25,000 feet, the cockpit was only at 9,000. If the canopy was damaged or lost, Jiro would have to hold the mask to his face with his left hand while he flew with the other.

The F-22’s took off in pairs, Cassidy and Scheer first, then Dixie and Hudek, then Fain and Foy. The enlisted troops stood on the ramp watching the planes get airborne, basking in the thunder of the engines. As the wheels came into the wells, the pilots turned on their aircrafts’ smart skin. The noise of the engines continued to rumble for minutes after the planes disappeared from view. After the noise had faded, the senior NCO told the troops to get in the trenches, freshly dug by a backhoe that was sitting near the dispersal shack. They could safely stay out of the trenches for a while but the NCO was too keyed up to wait. Better safe than sorry.

The Zero symbols appeared on Bob Cassidy’s tactical display at a range of two hundred miles. He was fifty miles north of the base at twenty thousand feet, cruising at max conserve airspeed, about.72 Mach. Scheer was on his left wing, out about a hundred yards. The symbols were so bunched together, Cassidy couldn’t tell exactly how many bogeys were there.

The main problem with Sky Eye was that at long ranges the symbols were grossly compressed, and at short ranges they were unreliable. The gadget seemed to give the best presentation when the bogeys were from five to fifty miles away. Inside five miles, he would be forced to rely upon the F-22’s’ infrared sensors; the data from all the F-22’s was shared, so the computers could arrive at a fairly complete tactical picture.

At least he had dodged the first bullet today: the Zeros were coming in from the east, right up the threat axis.

Cassidy checked the position of the other two flights of F-22’s. He thought Preacher Fain was too close to the base.

“Preacher, this is Hoppy. A few more miles south, please.”

Preacher acknowledged.

Cassidy checked everything: the intensity of the HUD displays, master armament switch on, the proper displays on the proper MFDS, cabin altitude, engine gauges … He was ready.

Preacher Fain tightened his shoulder harness and ensured the inertial take-up reel was locked, so that he would not be thrown about the cockpit. He adjusted his oxygen mask, wiped a gloved hand across his dark helmet visor, and checked the armament panel.

Fain glanced at his tac display: Lee Foy was right where Fain wanted him, about five hundred feet out and completely behind his leader. With Foy well aft and off to one side, Fain was free to maneuver left, right, whatever, without worrying about a midair collision. And the wingman was free to follow the fight and keep the bad guys off Fain’s tail while the leader engaged.

The high Zeros were only forty miles from the base. The low ones were thirty miles out. Eight in each flight. Fain eyeballed the rate of progress of the top group and tightened his turn radius. He wanted to come slicing in behind them just after they got into the Sentinel zone, when they were certain to have their radars off. He wanted to knock as many down as possible in the first pass, then dive to engage the lower ones. The Zeros down low were going to be juicy, pinned against the deck as the invisible F-22’s came down on them from above. Oh boy!

The heart of the Sentinel missile system was its computer, which contained a sophisticated program designed to prevent an enemy from causing all the missiles in the battery to be launched by merely sweeping his radar once, shutting down, then repeating the cycle. The program required that the target radar sweep repeatedly and be progressing into the missile’s performance envelope at a rate of speed sufficient to enable it to get into range by the time the missile arrived. If these parameters were met, the computer would fire two missiles, one after the other, then sit inactive for a brief period of time before the system would again listen for the proper signals.

The guidance system in the missiles was more sophisticated than the computer in the battery. As the missile flew toward its target, the computer memorized the target’s relative position, course, and speed, so in the event the target radar ceased radiating, the computer could still issue guidance signals to the missile. Of course, the probability of a hit decreased dramatically the longer the target radar was off the air. If the target radiated again while the missile was still in flight, the computer would update the target’s trajectory and refine its directives to the guidance system.

The system worked best when the missile was fired at an airplane that was flying directly at the Sentinel battery. Due to the geometry of the problem and the speeds of the target and missile, the missile’s performance became degraded if it wound up in a tail chase.

As Colonel Handa flew toward the Chita Air Base, he was flipping his radar from standby to transmit, then back again, over and over. He had instructed all the other pilots to leave their radars in the standby position — which meant the radar had power but was not transmitting — but he was scanning with his to see if he could detect any enemy planes aloft, or induce the Americans to fire one of their antiradiation missiles. Handa didn’t know that the missiles were fired from automated batteries; indeed, the possibility had never even occurred to him.

The eight strike airplanes had left the upper formation a hundred miles back. They were down on the deck now, five hundred feet above the treetops, flying at a bit over Mach 1.

Handa kept waiting for his ECM warning devices to indicate that he was being looked at by enemy radar, but the devices didn’t peep. There seemed to be no enemy radar on the air. Or, thought Handa ominously, no radar that his ECM devices could detect. Perhaps the Americans had taken another technological leap of faith and were using frequencies that this device could not receive. Or perhaps their radars were in a receive-only mode, merely picking up the beacon of his radar when it was on the air. If only he … He dropped that line of thought when the first Sentinel missile shot by his aircraft at a distance of no more than one hundred feet. The brilliant plume of the rocket motor made a streak on the retina of his eye. Handa’s heart went into overdrive.

As he scanned the sky for more missiles — the visibility was excel-lent — he forgot to flip the switch of his radar back to standby. That was when another Sentinel missile, launched automatically almost sixty seconds before, slammed into the nose cone of his fighter.

The thirty-pound missile was traveling at Mach 3 when it pierced the nose cone and target radar in a perfect bull’s-eye. Handa’s plane was traveling at Mach 1.28 in almost the opposite direction. The combined energy of the impact ripped the Zero fighter into something in excess of two million tiny pieces. The expanding cloud of pieces hit the wall as each individual fragment of metal, plastic, flesh, cloth, and shoe leather tried to penetrate its own shock wave, and failed.

The other Zeros continued on toward the Chita Air Base as the pieces of Handa’s fighter began to fall earthward at different rates, depending on their shape. The fuel droplets fell like rain in the cool summer sky, but the motes of metal and flesh behaved more like dust, or heavy snow.

After Colonel Handa’s Zero disintegrated, the other seven planes in his flight continued straight ahead. Several seconds elapsed before the remaining pilots realized what had happened. During that time, the planes traversed almost a mile of sky.

Without their radars, the pilots were essentially blind. At these speeds, they couldn’t see far enough with their eyes. At that very moment, Bob Cassidy and Paul Scheer were ten miles away, at two o’clock, on a collision course at Mach 2.15. The two American fighters were two hundred yards apart, abreast of each other, with Scheer on the left.

“We’ll shoot two each, Paul, then yo-yo high and come down behind them.”

“Gotcha, Hoppy.”

The seekers in Sidewinders had come a long way in the forty years the missile had been in service. The primary advantage of the missile was its passive nature: it didn’t radiate, so it didn’t advertise its presence. The short range of the weapon was more than compensated for by its head-on capability.

At five miles, Bob Cassidy got a growl and let the first missile go. He still had not acquired the Zeros visually, and of course the Zero pilots had not seen him. He fired the second missile two seconds later, at a range of three miles. With both missiles gone, Bob Cassidy pulled the nose of his fighter into an eighty-degree climb, half-rolled and came out of burner, then pulled the nose down hard as the plane decelerated. He finally saw the Zeros below him, going in the opposite direction, toward the base.

Scheer had fired two Sidewinders almost simultaneously and was also soaring toward heaven and pulling the nose around.

One of the American missiles missed its target due to the rapidly changing aspect angle. It passed the target aircraft too far away to trigger the proximity fuse.

The other three missiles were hits. One went down the left intake of a Zero and detonated in the compressor section of the engine, ripping the plane to bits. Another missed the target aircraft by six inches; its proximity fuse exploded adjacent to the cockpit and killed the pilot instantly.

The warhead of the fourth missile detonated above the left wing of the Zero it was homing on, puncturing the wing with a hundred small holes. Fuel boiled out into the atmosphere.

The pilot felt the strike, saw his flight leader’s airplane dissolving into a metal cloud, then saw fuel erupting from his own wing. He had not glimpsed an enemy aircraft and already two Zeros were destroyed, one was falling out of control, and he was badly damaged. He began a hard left turn to clear the area.

Cassidy saw this plane turning and shoved forward on his stick, which, since he was inverted, stopped his nose from coming down. He rolled right ninety degrees onto knife edge and let the nose fall.

The Zero below him continued its turn.

This was going to work out nicely — Cassidy was going to drop right onto the enemy pilot’s tail. Cassidy would use the gun.

Dropping in, rolling the wings level, he pushed the thumb button as the enemy plane slid into the gunsight. The plane vibrated, muzzle flashes appearing in front of the windscreen, and the Zero was on fire, with the left horizontal stabilator separating from the aircraft. Now Cassidy rolled into a ninety-degree bank and pulled smoothly right up to nine Go’s. He wanted to get around in a hurry to rejoin the fight. For the first time, he took a second to check his tac display for the position of the other five F-22’s. Only he and Scheer were still upstairs. The other two sections were descending in a curving arc.

Dixie Elitch and Aaron Hudek each fired a Sidewinder as they came roaring down on the flight of four Zeros from the northwest. The missiles tracked nicely. Dixie squeezed off another, and a third. Her first missile converted the target Zero to a fireball, and the second went into the fireball and exploded. Her third missile took out another Zero, just as the pilot flying the third plane, the one struck by Hudek’s first missile, ejected. She was less than two miles from the last Zero and trying to get a missile lock-on tone when Hudek sliced in front, his tailpipes just beyond her windscreen. Dixie pulled power and popped her boards to prevent a collision. Hudek didn’t bother with a missile. He intended to use his gun. He closed relentlessly on the sole remaining Zero of the flight of four.

Preacher Fain led Lee Foy down on Jiro Kimura’s flight. They squeezed off two Sidewinders, one each, and both missiles tracked. Still wearing the night-vision helmet, Kimura was craning his neck, trying to see what was happening. The Zeros exploding on his right certainly got his attention. He half-turned in his seat, using the handhold on the canopy bow to turn himself around. And he saw the F-22’s, coming down on the Zeros from behind at a thirty-degree angle. “Break left,” he screamed into his oxygen mask. He was holding the mask with his left hand. Now he dropped the mask and used that hand to hold the helmet steady as he used his right to slam the stick over and pull hard.

Fain’s missile couldn’t hack the turn. It went streaking into the ground. Miura wasn’t quick enough. Foy Sauce’s “winder went up his right tailpipe and exploded against the turbine section of that engine. Pieces of the engine were flung off as the compressorstturbine, now badly out of balance, continued to rotate at maximum rpm. Miura felt the explosion, saw the right engine temp gauge swing toward the peg, and knew he was in big trouble. He pulled both engines to idle cutoff as the right engine fire light illuminated and honked on five G’s to help slow down. As the plane dropped below five hundred knots, he pulled the ejection handle. Three seconds later the parachute opened, just as his jet exploded. At this point, the fight was one minute old.

Holding the heavy night-vision helmet and goggles with his left hand, Jiro Kimura turned a square corner. Only he, of all the Japanese pilots, could see the American fighters descending upon them. At one point the G meter recorded eight G’s, and Kimura was not wearing a full-body G suit, as the Americans were. He was flexed to the max, screaming against the G to stay conscious, as he honked his mount around. It was then that Lee Foy made a fatal mistake. Perhaps he didn’t see Jiro turning, perhaps he had fixated on his intended next victim, Sasai, or perhaps he was checking the position of his wingman on his tac display. In any event, he didn’t react quickly enough to Jiro’s turn in his direction, and once Jiro triggered a Sidewinder at point-blank range, he had no more time. The American-designed, Japanese-made missile punctured the F-22’s fuselage just behind the cockpit and exploded in the main fuel cell, rupturing it by forcing fuel outward under tremendous pressure. When the fuel met oxygen, it ignited explosively. Lee Foy had just enough time to inhale deeply and scream into his radio microphone before he was cremated alive. Aaron Hudek saw the explosion out of the corner of his eye as he was dispatching the last of the Blue Flight Zeros with his cannon. He recognized Foy’s voice on the radio. “Sauce?”

Every F-22 pilot heard Hudek’s call. Jiro Kimura had already fired a second missile. While the first one was in the air, he got a growl on an F-22 four miles away, one turning hard after a Zero. He squeezed it off. Then he turned ten degrees toward an F-22 in burner that was coming at him head-on. This was Fur Ball Hudek. The F-22 was shooting. A river of fire, almost like a searchlight, was vomiting from the nose of the American fighter. The finger of God reached for him. just how he avoided it, Jiro could never explain. He slammed the stick over and smashed on the rudder and his plane slewed sideways, almost out of control. At that moment, he mashed his thumb down on the gun button. The shells poured from the cannon in his right wing root. He wiggled the rudder just as Hudek flashed through the steel stream with his gun still blazing. Aaron Hudek felt the hammer blows. His left engine fire light went on, the temp went into the red, and the rpm started dropping. He glanced in the rearview mirror and saw fire streaming along the side of the plane. He started to reach for the ejection handle, but there was another Zero in front of him, this one flown by Jiro’s wingman, ta. At these speeds there was no time to think, but even if there had been, perhaps Aaron Hudek’s decision would have been the same. With a flick of his wrist he brought the two fighters together almost head-on.

Jiro’s second Sidewinder sprayed the belly of Dixie Elitch’s fighter with shrapnel. The plane continued to respond to the controls and the engines seemed okay, but horrible pounding and ripping noises reached Dixie in the cockpit. It sounded as if the slipstream was ripping pieces off. Automatically, she retarded her throttles, deployed her speed brakes, and pulled the nose skyward to convert airspeed into altitude.

After Cassidy and Scheer fired the last of their Sidewinders, only two of the eight high Zeroes were still under their pilots” control. Still in loose formation, these two nosed down steeply and went to full afterburner. They didn’t turn or weave, just kept descending until they were within thirty feet of the valley floor. Their sonic shock waves raised a dust cloud behind them.

Cassidy leveled at ten thousand feet and came out of burner. He didn’t want to use all his fuel chasing these two. “Can you get “em, Paul?”

“I think so.”

Scheer was gaining on the fleeing pair when Cassidy turned back toward the low fight, which was still being waged near the base.

Preacher Fain was ninety degrees off Jiro’s heading and a mile behind him when the Japanese pilot saw him with the infrared goggles. Jiro knew most of his comrades were dead, and if he continued to fight he soon would be, but to ignore this F-22 in his rear quarter would be suicide. Kimura pitched up hard and rolled toward Fain. Fain was surprised. This was the only Zero that engaged the F-22’s. This guy must see me, he thought. Perhaps the chameleon gear is not working He too pitched up, committing himself to a vertical scissors. Corkscrewing around each other, the two fighters went straight up, each trying for an angular advantage and each failing to get it. Jiro was beside himself. He was 950 miles from home base, surrounded by enemies, and time was running out. Time was on his opponent’s side. He had to end this quickly. He pulled the throttles to idle, popped the speed brakes. Going straight up, the Zero slowed as if it had hit a wall. Preacher Fain squirted out in front. Jiro rammed the throttles forward and thumbed in the boards as he pushed the nose toward Fain. Sensing his danger, Fain pulled back on the stick with all his strength. The F-22 came over on its back and dipped its nose toward the earth as bursts of cannon shells squirted past. The shells were going by his belly. Fain continued to pull. Then he realized the ground was rushing toward him. He was descending inverted, seventy degrees nose-down, in burner, passing eight thousand feet. Preacher Fain flicked the F-22 upright and pulled until he thought the wings would come off. The G meter read twelve G’s when his fighter struck the earth at Mach 1.2.

Dixie Elitch ejected when her airspeed dropped to 250 knots. The airplane was burning by then. She had shut down the left engine when the Left Fire warning light came on, but now the flames were visible in the mirror behind her.

“Dixie’s bailing out,” she said over the radio.

She took a deep breath and pulled the handle between her legs with both hands.

The fight had lasted just two minutes.

The maintenance troops at the base saw someone descending in a parachute, but they had no idea it was Dixie. Four of them went after her in a Humvee. The hardest part was finding her, a mile out in the forest from the nearest road. She was hung up in a tree. It took them twenty minutes to get her down, which they accomplished by chopping down the tree. Although shaken, she was none the worse for wear. An hour and a half after her ejection, Dixie and her rescuers walked out of the woods.

Jiro Kimura taxied into the revetment at Khabarovsk, opened the canopy, and shut down. The plane captain installed the ladder while Jiro unstrapped, then scampered up. “Sir, where are the others?”

“Dead. Or out in the forest. I don’t know.”

The plane captain couldn’t believe it. He thought Jiro was joking. As he walked across the ramp with the night-vision helmet and his flight bag, Jiro met his squadron executive officer. “Where are they, Kimura?”

“They were shot down, sir. All of them. I am the only one left.”

“Including the wing commander?”

“He died first, I think. My flight was well below him then, but I think his aircraft was struck by a missile and disintegrated. Then the Americans jumped us. It was over quickly.”

“F-22’s?”

“They never saw them, Colonel. Their airplanes are invisible. Without radar, the others had no chance. I had this.” Jiro held up the helmet. “I borrowed it from the helicopter squadron. I could see them only in infrared, not regular light.”

“Fifteen aircraft!” The colonel was incredulous.

“Yes, sir.”

“How many enemy aircraft were there?”

“Six or eight. I am not sure. No more than eight, I think.”

The exec reeled. He caught himself. “Did we get any of them?”

“I got one, I think, sir. Another F-22 flew into the ground trying to evade me. If anyone else scored, I do not know about it.”

“I want a complete written report, Kimura, as soon as possible. I will send it to Tokyo.” The colonel turned his back so that Jiro couldn’t see his face.

Jiro walked on toward the dispersal shack.

They couldn’t all be dead. Surely some of them had ejected safely. Sasai, Ota, Miura … As he walked, Jiro Kimura wiped away tears.

When Cassidy and Elitch got back to the squadron, Paul Scheer was sitting with his feet up on the duty desk, smoking a cigar. He gave them a beatific smile.

“Hear anything from the others?” Cassidy snapped.

“Nope. I watched the discs from your plane and mine. I’m pretty sure they’re dead.”

“You look awful damned crushed about it.”

Scheer refused to be flustered. He puffed on the cigar a few times, then took a long drag and exhaled.

“Colonel, it’s like this: If I were dead and Fur Ball were sitting here instead of me, I would want him to have a cigar. I would want him to savor this sublime moment. If I could, I would light the cigar for him.”

Scheer stretched out his arms and yawned. “Best goddamned two minutes of my life. The very best.” He sighed. “The sad thing is that it’s all downhill from here. What could possibly equal that?”

Scheer slowly got to his feet. As cigar smoke swirled around his head, he hitched up his gun belt, reached into his unzipped G suit and scratched, then helped himself to a swallow of water from a small bottle. Opening the desk drawer, he extracted two cigars and held them out.

“One each. This was our stash, Hudek’s and mine. When you smoke them, think of Fur Ball and Foy Sauce and the Preacher. Three damned good men.”

Cassidy and Elitch each took the offered cigars.

Paul Scheer strolled out of the room, trailing smoke.

When he was lying in his bunk that evening, Jiro Kimura could not sleep. The morning fight kept swirling through his mind. After a while, he got out his flashlight, pulled the blanket over his head, and wrote a letter to his wife.

Dear Shizuko, Today we had a big fight with the American fighters, the American Squadron that you have been hearing about. Bob Cassidy is their commanding officer!

Ota, Miura, and Sasai are missing in action and presumed dead. By the time you receive this letter, their families will have been notified. As you know, I have been very concerned about meeting Cassidy in the sky. Today I must have done so. He was probably there. Beloved wife, you will be proud to know that I did not hesitate to do my duty. I did my very best, which is the only reason I am still alive. Still, I have worried so about the possibility of shooting at Cassidy that I now feel guilty that my comrades are dead. Strange how even secret sins return to haunt you. That is a very un-Japanese thought, but the Americans always assured me it was so. Secret sins are the worst, they said. I have promised myself to think no more of Bob Cassidy. I will be cold-blooded about this murderous business. I will fight with a tiger’s resolve. I write of these things to you because I may not see you again in this life. It is probable that I shall soon join my friends in death, which is not a prospect I fear, as you know. Still, the thought of my death fills me with despair that you will be left to go on alone, that we will not live long lives together, which was, we always believed, our destiny. If I die before you, I will be waiting for you in whatever comes after this life. When you are old and full of years, you will rejoin the husband of your youth, who will be waiting with a heart full of love. Know that in the days to come. Jiro THE TRAIN WAS barely an hour north of Vladivostok when it derailed. Isamu Iwakuro felt the engine and cars lurch. He had spent his adult life working as a locomotive repair specialist, and he knew. The car he was in, the second behind the last locomotive, went over on its side and the lights went out. The car skidded for what seemed to be a long time before it came to rest. Inside the car, civilians and soldiers and their baggage were hopelessly jumbled. Someone was screaming. Iwakuro managed to get upright and clamber over several seats toward the door, all the while shouting for everyone to remain quiet and not panic. Then the explosions began. Steel and smoke ripped through the shattered railroad car. Antitank grenades!

The explosions popped like firecrackers. All up and down the train, he could hear the hammering of the grenades. And he could hear machine guns, long, ripping bursts. Something smashed into his shoulder and he went down. Another explosion near his head knocked him unconscious. When Iwakuro came to, he could see nothing. Night had fallen, although he didn’t know it. At first, he thought he was blind. His shoulder was bleeding and hurt horribly, so he knew he was alive. He felt his way over bodies, searching for a way out of the railroad car. He saw a bit of light, finally, just a glimmer from a distant fire. Somehow, he managed to crawl through a hole in the floor of the railroad car, which was still on its side. To his right, away from the engine, he saw that one of the freight cars was burning. Iwakuro crawled directly away from the train. When he had gone at least fifty meters, he sat and tried to bind his coat around his shoulder.

He was sitting in the grass, moaning ever so slightly, when someone shot him in the back.

Rough hands rolled him over. A flashlight shown on his face. Now someone grabbed him by the hair and rammed a knife into his neck. Isamu Iwakuro filled his lungs to scream, but he was dead before the sound came out.

The man who had shot Iwakuro finished cutting off his head. He dropped it into a bag with six others. His orders were to decapitate every body he found.

Two hundred miles east of Honshu Admiral Kolchak was at periscope depth, running at six knots on a course of 195 degrees magnetic. Through the main scope Pavel Saratov could see an empty, wind-whipped sea and sky.

After a careful, 360-degree transit with the scope, Saratov ordered it lowered. The navigator was bent over the chart table when Saratov joined him.

“How fast do you want to go, Captain?” As was usual aboard Admiral Kolchak, the navigator asked the question in a low, subdued voice.

“I want to keep a good charge on the batteries at all times,” Saratov answered, automatically making his voice match the navigator’s. “We must be able to go deep and stay there to have any chance against the Jap patrols.”

“We are in the Japanese current, bucking it. We would make better time if we got out of it to the southeast, then headed southwest.”

“Stay in it, right in the middle. We’re in no hurry.”

“Do you really think they are looking for us?”

“You can bet your life on it.”

Askold leaned over the table. “How do you plan to go in, Captain?”

“I have no plans. We must see what develops.”

“Getting out?”

“God knows. We will see.”

“What will you see, Saratov?” The voice boomed in the little room. Esenin was right behind them. As usual, he was wearing the box, a gray metal box about three inches wide, five inches long, and an inch deep. It hung on a strap around his neck. Since the boat had submerged at Trojan Island, he had never been without the box.

“We will see if we can get out of Japanese waters alive,” Saratov said.

“Don’t be such a pessimist. This is an opportunity of a lifetime to do something important for your country.”

“For you, General, perhaps. These men have already struck a stupendous blow for Russia.”

“Don’t be insubordinate,” Esenin snapped. “You are in a leadership position.”

“I’m in command of this vessel, and I won’t forget it.”

Esenin looked into the faces of the men in the control room. Then he turned to Saratov and whispered, “Don’t push me.”

A P-3 came that night. The sonar operator heard it first. The watch officer called Saratov, who was lying down in his stateroom, trying to sleep.

The plane went by about two miles to the south, flying east. “He’s flying a search pattern,” the navigator said.

“Probably,” Saratov said, “but the question is, Are we inside the pattern or outside of it?”

The sound of the plane disappeared. After a few minutes the watch team relaxed, smiled at one another, and went back to checking gauges, filling out logs, reading, and scratching themselves. Esenin had stationed one of his armed naval infantrymen in the control room. The man was trying to stay out of the way, but in a compartment that crowded, it was impossible. He had to move whenever anyone else moved.

Saratov eyed the man. He was in his mid-twenties, said almost nothing, obviously understood little of what went on around him. Was he a real naval infantryman? Or was he something else? Apparently, he had never before been to sea, or had he?

The P-3 returned. It went behind the submarine a mile or so to the north, headed west.

“We’re in his pattern,” the navigator said.

“Hold this heading. In about ten minutes, we’ll cross his original flight path. He’ll search behind us.”

That was the way it worked out. Still, the XO and the navigator looked worried.

At midnight, when the captain gave the order to snorkel, the XO wanted to discuss it. “Sir, the P-3’s can pick up the snorkel head on radar.”

“We must charge the batteries, Askold. If we cannot do it here, we will never get into the mouth of the bay and back out.”

Askold bit his lip, then repeated the snorkel order to the chief. As luck would have it, within thirty minutes the sub entered a line of squalls. Heavy swells and rain in sheets hid the snorkel head. The rocking motion of the boat, just under the surface, made the sailors smile. They knew how rough it was up there. Saratov drank a cup of tea in the wardroom while Esenin and his number two, the major, silently watched. Then Saratov went to his cabin and stretched out on the bunk. He couldn’t sleep. In his mind’s eye he saw airplanes and destroyers hunting, searching, back and forth, back and forth … The sonar operator called the P-3 sixty seconds before it went directly over the submarine. The duty officer immediately ordered snorkeling stopped and the electric motors started. The plane went by, fifteen seconds passed, then it began a turn. “He’s got us,” the watch officer said. “Call the captain.”

Saratov heard that order as he came along the passageway. “Take it down to a forty meters,” Pavel Saratov said after the chief reported the diesel engines secured. “Left full rudder to one zero zero degrees.”

“Left full rudder, aye. New course one zero zero.”

Esenin came to the control room. A moment later the major arrived, just in time to hear the sonar operator call, “Sonobuoys in the water.”

He began calling the bearings and estimated ranges of the splashes as the navigator plotted them. “Let’s get the boat as quiet as we can, Chief.”

“Aye, Captain. Slow speed?”

“Three knots. No more. And go deeper. Seventy meters.”

“Down on the bow planes. Up on the stern planes,” the chief ordered. The michman on the planes complied. Saratov looked at his watch. The time was a bit after 0300. “P-3 is coming in for another run, Captain. He sounds like he’s going to go right over us.”

“Keep me advised.”

“Steady on new course one zero zero.”

“Keep going down, Chief. One hundred meters. Somebody watch the water-temp gauge. Let me know if we hit an inversion.”

“There should be an inversion,” the duty officer muttered, more to himself that anyone else. “This is the Japanese current.”

“P-3’s going right over our heads.”

“Come left to new course zero four five.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Saratov noted Esenin’s facial expression, which was tense. The major, standing beside Esenin, looked worried. “One hundred meters, Captain.”

“Make it a hundred and fifty.”

“One fifty, aye.”

“How deep is the water here?” the major asked the navigator, who didn’t even check the chart before he answered. “Six miles. We’re over the Japanese trench.”

“So what happens if we can’t lose this airplane?”

“He puts a homing torpedo in the water.” The navigator looked at the major and grinned. “Then we die.”

“Two hundred meters, Chief,” the captain said. Passing through 170 meters, the temperature of the water began to rise. The duty officer saw it and sang out. “Just how deep can this boat go?” the major asked the XO. “Two hundred meters is our design depth.”

The captain missed this exchange. He was wearing a set of sonar headphones, listening with his eyes shut. At this depth the boat creaked a bit, probably from the temperature change, or the pressure. Saratov heard none of it. He was concentrating with all his being on the hisses and gurgles of the living sea. Ah yes…, there was the beat of the plane’s props. He opened his eyes, glanced at the sonar indicator, which was pointing in the direction of the largest regular, man-made sound. The enemy airplane was almost overhead … now passing … Splash! A sonobuoy. Or a torpedo. “Deeper, Chief. Down another fifty meters.”

“Aye, Captain.”

More sonobuoys. Going away. Well, at least the P-3 didn’t have the sub bracketed. The crew was searching for something they had, then lost. “I think they have lost us, Chief. Now they’ll try to find us again. Hold this depth, heading, and speed.”

A wave of visible relief swept through the men in the control room. Saratov took off one of the sonar earphones and asked Esenin, “Those shells we welded to the deck — how much pressure are they built to withstand?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll find out, eh,” said Pavel Saratov. “You can tell them when you get home,” he added, and rearranged the earphones.

Atsuko Abe read the message from Agent Ju and snorted in disbelief. “How can we believe this?”

“We cannot afford to ignore it,” said Cho, the foreign minister, speaking carefully. “If there is one chance in a thousand that Ju is correct, that is an unacceptable risk.”

“Don’t talk to me of unacceptable risk,” Abe snarled. Cho had been one of the most vocal proponents of taking the Siberian oil fields. Today they were in the prime minister’s office off the main floor of the Diet. He normally used this office to confer with members of his party. Abe shook the paper with the message on it at Cho. “We lost fifteen Zeros to the American Squadron two days ago. The generals believe we will be able to hold our own from now on, but that is probably just wishful thinking. The essential military precondition to the invasion of Siberia was local air supremacy. It has been taken from us.” Cho said nothing. “Last night two hundred civilians and thirty soldiers were killed in a railroad ambush a mere fifty kilometers north of Vladivostok. Guerillas murdered a whole trainload of people in an area that is supposed to be secure, an area that is practically in our backyard.”

Abe straightened his tie and jacket. “This morning in Vladivostok, the heads were dumped on the street in front of Japanese military headquarters.”

Abe looked Cho straight in the eye. “I can prevent the news being published, but I cannot stop whispers. Corporate executives know their employees are being slaughtered. No Japanese is safe anywhere in Siberia. The executives are demanding that we do something, prevent future occurrences.”

Cho gave a perfunctory bow. “The United Nations is moving by fits and starts to condemn Japanese aggression. When that fails to deter us, someone will suggest an economic boycott. The Russians are very active in the UN — THEY are shaking hands and smiling and preparing to nuke us. They are willing to do whatever it takes to win. I ask you, Cho, are you willing? Cho?”

“Mr. Prime Minister, I advocated invasion. I firmly believe that possession of Siberia’s oil fields will allow this people to survive and flourish in the centuries to come. That oil is our lifeblood. It is worth more to us than it is to any other nation.”

Atsuko Abe placed his hands flat on his desk. “Without air supremacy we will be unable to resupply our people in Siberia this winter. Air supremacy is absolutely critical. Everything flows from that.”

“I see that, Mr. Prime Minister.” Cho’s head bobbed. “The American Squadron at Chita must be eliminated. The generals tell me there is only one way to ensure that all the planes, people, equipment, and spare parts are neutralized: we must strike with a nuclear weapon.”

Cho blanched. “This is the crisis,” Abe roared. “We are committed! We must conquer or die. There is no other way out. We have bet everything— everything — our government, our nation, our lives. Do you have the courage to see it through?”

“This course will be completely unacceptable to the Japanese public,” Cho sputtered. “Damn the public.” Abe slapped his hands on the desk. “The public wants the benefits of owning Siberia. A prize this rich cannot be had on the cheap. We must pay for it. Nuking Chita is the price. We cannot get Siberia for one yen less.”

“The Japanese people will not pay that price.”

Abe waved Ju’s message. “I am not suggesting that we nuke Moscow!

Open your eyes, man. The Russians are trying to nuke us!”

“It is the use of nuclear weapons that is the evil, Mr. Prime Minister. You know that as well as I. Once we attack Chita, we may be forced to launch missiles at other targets, including Moscow. Once it starts, where will it stop, Mr. Prime Minister?”

Abe brushed aside Cho’s words, pretended that he hadn’t heard. “Military necessity requires the destruction of the American Squadron. The squadron is Russia’s responsibility; Russia must bear the consequences.”

“With respect, the decision is not that easy.” Cho groped for words. “In 1945 the Americans used the atomic bomb on Japan and blamed Japan for making it necessary. You have just agreed that the Americans were correct all those years ago.”

“I am not going to argue metaphysics, Cho. If Tokyo goes up in a mushroom cloud, will you be willing to use nuclear weapons then?”

“No! Never. The Japanese people will never be willing to use nuclear weapons on anyone. Mr. Prime Minister, you were the one who demanded that the development of these weapons be kept a state secret, that the public never be informed.”

“Who will tell them that we used them?”

Silence followed this question. Abe busied himself rearranging items on his desk. Finally, he said: “A small bomb, eight or ten kilotons, should do the job nicely. We will attack with airplanes, so the rocket people will know nothing. The American Squadron at Chita will be wiped off the face of the earth. The Russians will see that further resistance is hopeless. Siberia will be ours. The United Nations will be forced to recognize a fait accompli. No more Japanese soldiers will die; oil will go to Japanese refineries; natural resources will supply our industries. Our nation, our people, will flourish.”

“I tell you now that it will not be so easy.”

“This is the only choice we have,” Abe thundered. “We must have that oil!”

Cho refused to yield. “Japan will never forgive us,” he said obstinately. Atsuko Abe forced himself to relax in his padded armchair. “Victors write the history books,” he said when he had recovered his composure. “The Russians are about to have a nuclear accident at Chita. They’ve had such accidents before, at other places. According to Ju, they have hidden nuclear weapons from international arms-control commissions, thus violating treaties they willingly signed — they are plotting to use these weapons on Japan. These are truths waiting to be discovered by anyone who asks enough questions in the right places.”

Abe pointed at Cho. “You know that we tried— repeatedly — to settle this matter diplomatically. Kalugin refused to enter discussions. Categorically refused. The Russians are gloating over the Tokyo Bay incident, applauding the catastrophic loss of innocent life, rejoicing at our embarrassment, and the Japanese people are furious.”

He used a finger to nudge the message from Ju lying on the desk in front of him. “The time has come to give the bastards a taste of their own medicine.”

“What airplane will deliver the weapon?”

“Zeros.”

“The Zeros haven’t been doing very well lately. That is the whole problem. What if they fail to get through?”

“Then we will try again with something else. We will do what must be done.”

At the morning briefing, Jack Innes told President David Herbert Hood about a note that had been handed to one of the CIA operatives the day before in Moscow by a street sweeper, one of the old women who swept trash and dirt from public places with a long twig broom. Then he handed Hood a translation of the note.

The Russian government has ordered nuclear attacks on Japan. A submarine is presently attempting to deliver four high-yield nuclear weapons to the sea floor near Tokyo, where they will be detonated to create an earthquake and tidal wave. If for any reason the submarine attack fails, Kalugin is prepared to launch a nuclear attack via air against Tokyo.

“Is this credible?” the president asked. “We believe so, Mr. President. As you will recall, several senior Russian specialists insisted that Russia had not destroyed all their nuclear weapons.”

“I never thought they would, either,” Hood admitted. “But even if they cheated, every weapon destroyed was one less.”

“The note implies that the submarine is at sea now, so last night we tried to find it with satellite imagery.” Innes flicked off the lights and displayed a large image on the screen behind him. “This is a computer-generated image of a section of the northern Pacific created from radar and infrared inputs.” Innes used a small flashlight to put a red dot on the screen. “Here, we believe, is the signature of a snorkeling dieselst electric submarine.”

“Surely the Russians would use a nuclear-powered sub for a mission like that.”

“If they had one, sir, I’m sure they would. The Tokyo Bay attack was carried out with a conventional dieselstelectric boat.”

“Where is that sub?” Hood gestured toward the screen. “When this was put together last night, the boat was about one hundred and eighty miles off Honshu, heading southwest. It’s very near the main shipping lanes.”

“Is that the only submarine out there?” the president asked. “No, sir. The Japanese have two currently at sea. At least we believe they are Japanese.” Innes flipped to a map display and used the pointer. “One is patrolling in Sagami Bay, the other near the northern entrance to the Inland Sea. All Japan’s submarines are dieselstelectric boats.”

“Where are our boats?”

Innes projected an overlay on the screen. “Here, Mr. President.”

Hood massaged his forehead for a moment. Finally, he said, “Normally I’d want some more confirmation before we did anything. This is very tenuous. And yet, Kalugin is capable of this. He would push the button.”

“Remember the report we received last week from the U.s. military attache in Moscow? He had an interview with Marshal Stolypin. The marshal said the Russians were just trying to get into the fight.”

“A negotiated settlement with the Japanese would not wash in Russia just now,” Hood agreed. “Still, the evidence for nuclear escalation is damned thin.”

The president smacked the table with his fist. “That asshole Abe!

Nuclear war. Well, we’d better tell the Japanese about all this. Maybe they can sink that sub.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then get the Japanese and Russian ambassadors over here. Today. At the same time. Demand that they come. I’d better have another chat with those two. And notify the Joint Chiefs — see if they have any ideas.”

“Are you considering military cooperation with the Japanese to thwart any attacks?”

“I am. In the interim, I want to see what the Space Command people can make those satellites do. See if they can come up with some independent verification of that note.”

Hood stood, then took another look at the satellite view of the Russian submarine’s snorkel signature, which Innes had returned to the wall screen. “I have a really bad feeling about helping the Japanese,” Hood said. “They have sown the wind and now the hurricane is almost upon them. Yet I don’t see any other way. If the nuclear genie pops out of the bottle, I don’t know what the world will look like afterward. Neither does anyone else. And I don’t want to find out.”

At Chita, Yan Chernov, with translator in tow, went looking for Bob Cassidy. He found him in the ready room poring over satellite photos that had been encrypted and transmitted via radio from Colorado. Chernov glanced at the photos, labeled “SECRET NOFORN” then turned his attention to the American. “Colonel Cassidy, I wish to thank you for feeding me and my men.”

“You are leaving?”

“Yes. We have been ordered to shift bases to Irkutsk, on Lake Baikal. We are flying the planes there today. The ground troops will leave tomorrow.”

“We enjoyed having you in the mess.”

“Americans eat better than anyone on earth, except, of course, the French. For years I refused to believe that. Now I am convinced.”

Cassidy laughed. They talked for several minutes of inconsequential things, then bid each other good-bye. With a feeling of genuine regret, Cassidy watched the Russian leave. Major Chernov, he thought, would be a credit to any air force. As he sat back down to study the satellite photos, he wondered why the Sukhoi squadron was being withdrawn. True, the Zero was more than a match for the Su-27, but with F-22’s to keep the Zeros occupied, the Sukhois would be useful in the ground-attack role. Well, no one had asked his opinion. He should probably tend to his end of the war. His end involved an attack on the Zero base at Khabarovsk this evening, in the twilight hour before dark. He went back to plotting run-in lines.

Janos Ilin took two of his men with him when he visited the gadget room, or, as some called it, “the James Bond room,” in the old KGB headquarters on Dzerzhinsky Square in Moscow. Here the instruments of espionage were stored, issued, and returned after use. Of course, the man who ran it was known as Q. Unlike the suave British civil servant of the movies, this Q was fat, waddled when he walked, and spent most of his time poring over his records. Dust rested in every corner of the place, undisturbed from year to year. Q had settled into this sinecure years ago. Like many Russian peasants, a little place to call his own was all Q wanted from life, and this was it. Today he scowled at Ilin and the two men following him as they walked between benches covered with listening devices and tape recorders to the little corner desk where Q did business. “Good morning, Q,” Janos Ilin said, pleasantly enough. “Sir.” Q was sullen. “Some information. You know of the assassination attempt on the president?”

Q looked surprised. “I had absolutely nothing to do with it, sir. You can’t seriously think—“

“We don’t think anything. We are here to ask some questions. Where are the records of equipment issues for the last six months?”

“Why, right here. In this book.” Q almost wagged his tail trying to be helpful. He displayed the book, opened it to a random page. “You see, my method of record keeping is simplicity itself. I put the item in this column— was

“Where are your keys?”

“You can’t have the keys. I suppose I could show you anything you want to see, but you can’t—“

“The keys.” Ilin held out his hand. He kept his face deadpan. The men behind him moved out to each side, where they could see Q and he could see them.

Q opened a desk drawer. It contained a handful of key rings, each with several dozen keys.

“The inventory, please.”

“What inventory?”

“Don’t play the fool with me, man,” Ilin snarled. He could really snarl when aroused. “I haven’t the time or temper for it. I’ll ask you again: Where is the inventory of the equipment you have in this department?”

“But … The inventory is old, sir. It’s not completely up-to-date. It’s—“

“Surely you have an inventory, Q, because regulations require you to have one. I checked. If you don’t, I’m afraid I shall have to place you under arrest.”

Q almost fainted. “Those black binders on the shelf.” He pointed. “I don’t let people browse through them, you understand. The equipment the service owns is a state secret.”

“I understand completely. Now, if you will go with these gentlemen. They have some questions to ask you.”

Q’s panic returned. He was really quite pathetic. “What if someone comes with a requisition while I am away?”

“This office is closed until you return. Go on.” One of the men reached out and put his hand on Q’s arm.

When they were out of the room, Ilin locked the door behind them. Ilin had, of course, been in this room from time to time over the years, but he had never really looked through the place. He didn’t know what Q had here, much less where he kept it. Ilin sat down at the desk with the inventories. As he suspected, they were worthless. They hadn’t been updated in twenty years. Still, there was a match between some of the letters and numbers in the inventory list and the numbers in Q’s logbook.

Each item in the logbook had a one- or two-word description, a letter and a number, followed by signatures, times, dates, et cetera.

Ilin studied the descriptions. He examined the keys. Ah, the keys were arranged by letter. Here was the A ring, the B ring, and so on.

Ilin began looking around. Q had most of this end of a floor for his collection, eleven rooms filled with cabinets and cases and closets — all locked. The place was almost like a museum’s basement, a place to store all the artifacts not on display upstairs.

Ilin inspected the bins and cabinets as he walked from room to room with the logbook in hand. Q had never inventoried this material because he didn’t want anyone else to know what was here. He was the indispensable man.

Weapons filled two rooms. So did listening devices. Who would have believed that so many types of bugs existed?

It took Janos Ilin an hour to find what he wanted. There were six of them in a little drawer in an antique highboy from the early Romanov era. The polished wood was three hundred years old if it was a day.

He checked the logbook. None of these items were listed. Ilin examined the half dozen. They had tags on them bearing dates. He selected the one with the latest date. It would have to do.

Back at Q’s desk, he put the logbook back on the shelf and returned all the keys to the desk drawer. He stirred them around so that none were in their original position.

Could he safely leave Q alive?

That was a serious question and he regarded it seriously. If the man talked to the wrong people … Perhaps the thing to do was just arrest him. Hundreds of people were in the cells now. One more would make no difference. When this was over Q could go back to his job none the worse for wear, as, one prays, would all the others. There was a risk, of course, but it seemed small, and Ilin would not have any more blood on his hands. The blood was becoming harder and harder to wash off.

How much blood is Kalugin worth?

Ilin left the lames Bond department, turning the lights out and locking the door behind him. He rode the elevator up to his floor, then went into a suite of offices adjacent to his. His men were there with Q. “put him in the cells. Hold for questioning.”

Q collapsed. One of the agents tossed the last inch of a glass of water into his face.

When Ilin left the room, the man was sobbing.

It was one of those rare summer evenings when the clouds boil higher and higher and yet don’t become thunderstorms. Hanging just above the western horizon, the sun fired the cloudy towers and buttes with reds, oranges, pinks, and yellows as the land below grew dark.

Bob Cassidy led his flight of four F-22’s south, up the Amur valley, toward the Japanese air base at Khabarovsk. They were low, about a thousand feet above the river, flying at just over the speed of sound. To the east and west, gloomy purple mountains crowned with clouds were just visible in the gathering darkness.

Two F-22’s carrying antiradiation missiles to shoot at any radar that came on the air were approaching Khabarovsk from the west. Farther behind were two more F-22’s. Joe Malan was leading this flight, which was charged with finding and attacking airborne enemy airplanes.

Earlier that evening Cassidy had vomited so violently he didn’t think he could fly. He had started thinking about Jiro and Sweet Sabrina again, and gotten physically ill. The doctor had given him something to settle his stomach. “I think your problem is psychological,” the doctor had remarked, which brought forth a nasty reply from Cassidy, one he instantly regretted. He apologized, put his clothes on, and went to fly.

The mission had gone like clockwork. Two tankers flying from Adak, in the Aleutians, rendezvoused with the fighters precisely on time a hundred miles north of Zeya. If all went well, they would be at the same rendezvous in sixty-four minutes, when the eight strike airplanes needed fuel to make Chita. If they weren’t, well, eight fighter pilots were going to have a long walk home.

As usual, Cassidy was keyed up. He was as ready as a man can be. The wingmen were in position, the data link from the satellite was presenting the tactical picture, and the plane was flying well, smart skin on, master armament switch on, all warning lights extinguished.

And there wasn’t a single enemy airplane in the sky. Not one. The satellite downlink must be screwed up. Again.

“Keep your eyes peeled, people,” Cassidy said over the encrypted radio circuit. Perhaps he shouldn’t have, but he needed to.

Should he use his radar? Take a peek? If the enemy still didn’t know he was coming, they would certainly get the message when his radar energy lit up their countermeasures equipment.

Twenty-five miles. The planes in his flight spread out, angling for their assigned run-in lines. The targets this evening were the enemy aircraft and their fueling facilities: the trucks, bladders, and pumping units.

Where were the Japanese?

Had they caught them on the ground?

His fighter was bumping in mild chop as Bob Cassidy came rocketing toward the air base at 650 knots, almost eleven miles per minute. His targets were a row of Zeros that two days ago had been parked in front of the one large hangar on the base.

There was the hangar! He slammed the stick over, corrected his heading a few degrees. His finger tightened around the trigger, but in vain: The Zeros weren’t there.

The ramp was empty when he roared across it five hundred feet in the air, still doing 650 knots.

“There are no Zeros,” somebody said over the air.

Was this an ambush? were the Zeros lurking nearby to bounce the F-22’s? Perhaps the Zeros were on their way to Chita — right now!

“Shoot up the hangars and fueling facilities,” Cassidy told the other members of his flight. “Watch for flak and SAMS.”

He made a wide looping turn and headed for the city of Khabarovsk.

The railroad tracks pointed like arrows toward the railroad station. Train in the station!

Squeeze the trigger…, walk the stream of shells the length of it.

God, there are people, soldiers in uniform, running, scattering, the engine vomiting fire and oily black smoke … He made another wide loop, still searching nervously for flak, and came down the river. He found another train, this time heading south toward Vladivostok. He attacked it from the rear, slamming shells into every car.

The entire plane vibrated — in the gloomy evening half-light the beam of fire from the gun flicked out like a searchlight. Flashes twinkled amid a cloud of dust and debris as the shells slammed into the train, fifty a second. Then he was off the trigger and zooming up and around for another pass.

With the throttle back, the airspeed down to less than three hundred, he emptied the gun at the train. He watched with satisfaction as two of the cars exploded and one of the engines derailed.

Climbing over the town, he called on the radio for his wingmen to join for the trip back to Chita.

Where are the Zeros?