On Glorious Wings

by Stephen Coonts

  “Ruby minus two,” the copilot said. “That’s Karaganda up ahead, on the far horizon.”

  “Sierra five-five, this is Sierra one-three, over,” Heifetz called Taylor.

  The old man had been off the radio set for a few minutes, but now his voice responded immediately.

  “This is Five-five. Go ahead, One-three. Over.”

  “Objective area visual now. All systems green. Jammers active. No friendly losses en route.”

  “Good job, One-three. Give ’em hell.”

  Heifetz almost terminated the communication. Taylor’s voice had seemed to carry a tone of finality and haste, of no more time to spend on words. Spread over a breadth of a thousand nautical miles, the regiment was moving to battle, shifting its support base, entering the unknown. Taylor had a thousand worries.

  But the colonel was not quite finished speaking to Heifetz. Just before the operations officer could acknowledge and sign off, Taylor’s voice returned:

  “Good luck, Dave.”

  The tone of the small mechanical voice in his headset somehow managed to convey a depth of unashamed, honest emotion of which Heifetz would not have been capable. The three syllables reached into him, making human contact, telling Heifetz that he mattered, that he should have a future, not merely a past. That at least one man in the world cared for him. That he, too, mattered on a personal level.

  Damn him, Heifetz said to himself, meaning just the opposite, as he fought down a wave of emotion.

  “And good luck to you,” Heifetz said. His voice sounded stilted and insufficient to him. Suddenly, he wished that he had made the effort to sit down and speak honestly to Taylor at least once, to explain everything, about Mira, about his son, about the loss of beauty, the loss of the best part of himself along with his family and his country. Just once, they should have spoken of such things. Taylor would have understood. Why had he been so proud? Why couldn’t men reach out to one another?

  “Ruby minus one minute,” the copilot said.

  “Unlock weapons suite.”

  “Shooters to full green.”

  No sooner had the copilot touched the forward controls than Heifetz felt a slight pulsing in the M-100. The high-velocity gun had already found its priority targets. The feel under Heifetz’s rump was of blood pulsing from an artery. The stabilization system on the M-100 was superb, but the force of the supergun was such that it could not all be absorbed. Slowly, after hundreds of shots, it would lose accuracy and need to be recalibrated.

  But that was in the future. Right now, the gun was automatically attacking distant targets that remained well beyond the reach of the human eye.

  The visual display blinked here and there where targets had already been stricken. Dozens of successful strikes registered simply from the fires of the company with which Heifetz was riding.

  “Ruby now, Ruby now,” the copilot cried. “Look at that. The sonofabitching thing works.”

  Heifetz glanced down at the master kill tally that registered how many effective strikes the squadron had managed. Barely a minute into the action, the number—constantly increasing—was approaching two hundred kills. His own system had taken out fourteen, no, fifteen—sixteen enemy systems.

  Lieutenant Colonel Tercus’s voice came ringing over the command net, rallying all the members of his squadron, yelling down the centuries:

  “Charge, you bastards, charge!”

  One of his subordinates answered with a Rebel yell.

  The elation was unmistakable. Almost uncontrollable. Even Heifetz wanted to leap from his seat.

  He recalled something an Israeli general officer had told him many years before. When he had been young. And invincible.

  “Only the soldier who has fought his way back from defeat,” General Lan had confided, “really understands the joy of victory.”

  The counter showed that the brilliant machine in which Heifetz was galloping through the sky had already destroyed thirty-seven high-priority enemy combat systems.

  Make that thirty-eight.

  For the first time in years, David Heifetz found himself grinning like a child.

  Senior Technical Sergeant Ali Toorani was very disappointed in the machine the Japanese had given him. They had fooled him, and the thought of his gullibility filled him with anger. The Japanese had been alternately falsely polite and unforgivably superior at the training school on the outskirts of Teheran, but he had been told that they would give the Faithful infallible weapons, weapons far more perfect than those of the devils in the north and to the west. He had believed, and he had struggled to learn, while the Japanese had been inhuman in their expectations of how much a man could study.

  He had been proud of his mastery of the radar system, and he had possessed great faith in his abilities and in the machine. He had learned how to read all of the data, to comprehend what the displays foretold. He had acquired great skill. And he had even attempted to perform the maintenance tasks the Japanese demanded, although such menial labors were far below the station of a senior technical sergeant. Usually, he performed the maintenance when no one was around to see him. And the methods seemed to work. Even when the other machines broke down, his continued to function. He had done great things with his radar machine in this war.

  But, in the end, the Japanese devils had lied like all of the other devils before them. Even when you humbled yourself to work like the lowest of laborers to care for the machine, it failed you.

  Ali looked at the screen in despair and rising anger. The night had been quiet. There were no Russian airplanes or helicopters in the sky. There had been fewer and fewer of them over the past weeks, and now the skies belonged entirely to his own kind.

  But, without warning, the screen set into his console had washed with light. According to the Japanese instructors, such an aberration was impossible. Now the treacherous screen registered thousands of elusive images, each one of which purported to be an enemy aircraft of some sort. Such a thing was impossible. No sky could ever be so crowded. Anyway, the Russians had few aircraft left. The machine was simply lying.

  Ali stood up in disgust and turned away from the useless piece of devilry. He stepped through the gangway into the next cell, where his friends Hassan and Nafik were also working the late shift.

  “God is great,” Ali said, greeting his friends. “My machine doesn’t work tonight.”

  “Truly, God is great,” Hassan responded. “You can see that our Japanese machines do not work properly, either. The headphones merely make a painful noise.”

  “The Japanese are devils,” Nafik muttered.

  Captain Murawa’s day was long and bitter, and his sleep was deep and hard. Until now his life had given him no cause to question the wisdom of his superiors. To be Japanese was to feel oneself part of the dominant political and economic power on earth, and to be a Japanese officer was to be part of a military whose abilities—if not actual forces—whose technological might, had humbled the great powers of the previous century. First, the United States, a flabby, self-indulgent giant, had received its lesson in Africa, where Japanese technology had savaged the ignorant Americans. And now it was the turn of the Russians, who had yet to put up any resistance worthy of the name. Yes, to be a Japanese officer, especially one of the new elite of electronic engineering officers, was a very fine thing. The entire world respected you.

  It was a terrible feeling for Murawa to suddenly discover doubt in himself.

  He hated the Iranians. He hated their indolence and filth, their inability to deal with reality as he knew it and their assumption that all things were theirs by due. Their criminal neglect of expensive military equipment was bad enough, what with their passive resistance to the accomplishment of basic maintenance chores, the neglect of a desert people to perform a task as fundamental as changing sand and dust filters, and their reluctance even to check fluid levels. But their social behavior was far worse. Murawa’s image of the Iranians was of spoiled, bloodthirsty children. When their expensive toy
s broke—invariably through their own fault—the children threw temper tantrums, blaming the toymaker’s deceit and bad faith—or lack of skill, an accusation Murawa found especially cutting and unjustified. The Japanese equipment that had been provided to the Iranians was the best in the world—the most effective and most reliable. Easy to operate and maintain, it required willful misuse to degrade its performance. It was, in fact, so simple to operate most of the combat systems that even the Iranians had been able to employ them effectively in combat.

  The colossal repair effort had long since overrun its estimated costs. For want of a bit of lubrication or simple cleaning, major automotive and electronic assemblies were destroyed. Outrageously expensive components required complete replacement rather than the anticipated repairs. And the Iranians merely jeered: You have sold us goods of poor quality. You have broken your promise. You have broken faith. Murawa was sick of hearing it, and he did not know how much longer he would be able to control his temper. His military and civilian-contract repair crews were exhausted. And the effect of seeing their hard work result only in less and less care on the part of the Iranians and ever greater numbers of fine Japanese systems showing up ruined in the Karaganda repair yard—some for the second or third time—well, it was very bad for morale. Instead of being rewarded, their labor only turned them into fools.

  Today, a barbarous crew of Iranians had turned in a kinetic-energy tank whose prime mechanisms had been hopelessly fouled by dirt. The vehicle would have been merely one out of hundreds—but the savages had played a trick. Struggling to contain their laughter, they had loitered in the reception and diagnostic motor pool. No one paid much attention, assuming they were simply typical badly disciplined Iranian troops, loath to return to duty. But, when a Japanese technician began climbing into their tank, they stopped laughing and watched with rapt attention. Only when the technician clambered madly out of the vehicle, screaming at a volume that tore the throat, did the Iranians resume their gaiety. They laughed like delighted children.

  The Iranians had released a poisonous snake inside the crew compartment. Now a critical member of Murawa’s team lay in the sickbay, delirious and possibly dying. And all the Iranians had offered in leaving was the comment that:

  “God is great.”

  Murawa had wanted to shout at them, “If your god is so great, let him fix your damned tank.” But it would have been unacceptable. Un-Japanese.

  The incident had released a torrent of doubts that he had long been suppressing. He doubted that the wise, high men who led Japan truly understood all of this. He doubted that the Iranians would ever be faithful allies to anyone. Hadn’t the Americans learned the hard way, almost half a century before? The Iranians were all too convinced of their own bizarre superiority. The world owed them everything. They understood neither contractual relations nor civilized friendship. What elusive concept of honor they had was little more than vanity soaked in blood. They could not even tell the truth about simple matters, as though honest speech were biologically impossible for them. Why on earth had Tokyo backed them? What would happen when the Iranians and the rest of the Islamic world turned again? Murawa could not believe that he was the only person to see the truth.

  He wished he were home in Kyoto. At least for one night. Murawa felt lucky to have been born in that most precious, most Japanese of cities, so unlike Tokyo with its compromises with Western degeneracy. There was nothing more beautiful than the gardens of Kyoto in the autumn. Unless it was the Kyoto girls, with their peculiar, disarming combination of delicacy and young strength. Certainly, they were unlike the gruesome women of Central Asia in their dirty, eerie costumes, with their gibbering voices. Those with plague scars—obviously untreated in this primitive environment—were only grimmer than the rest by a matter of degree. There was no romance in Central Asia for Murawa. Only ugly deserts interrupted with excavation scars and cities erected madly in the middle of nowhere, choking with half-dead industries whose principal product seemed to be bad air. It was like taking an unpleasant journey back through a number of bygone centuries, collecting the worst features of each as you went along. Central Asia made Murawa feel sick in spirit, and he was grateful for each new day that his body did not sicken, as well.

  Apparently, it was not only the Iranians who were a problem. At the maintenance councils back at headquarters, Murawa had spoken with fellow officers who served with the Arab Islamic Union forces. Their tales made it plain that there was little to choose between their charges and Murawa’s.

  Despite unprecedented successes, the front was beginning to bog down. There was no military reason not to press on now. The Russians were clearly beaten. But each new local breakthrough proved harder to support and sustain logistically. The Iranians and the Arabs had gone through so many combat systems that they had too little left for the final blow. Their leaders barked that Japan was obliged to replace their losses. But even Murawa, a mere captain, knew that the additional systems did not exist. Japanese industry had gone all out to provide the vast forces already deployed. And, even if additional systems had been available, it would have been impossible to transport them all from Japan to the depths of Central Asia overnight. The prewar buildup had taken years.

  The Iranians refused to understand. Murawa worked his crews until the men literally could no longer function without sleep. He sought desperately to do his duty, to return enough combat systems to the fighting forces to flesh out the skeletal units pointed northward. And all he heard were complaints that had increasingly begun to sound like threats.

  Now all he wanted to do was sleep. It had been a hard day, a bad day. Sleep was his only respite and reward.

  The explosions woke him.

  Murawa had been dreaming of red leaves and old temple bells. Until suddenly the bells began to ring with a ferocity that hurled him out of his repose. He spent a long moment sitting with his hands clapped over his ears in a state of thorough disorientation.

  The noise was of bells loud as thunder. Louder than thunder. The walls and floor wobbled, as though the earth had gotten drunk. Earthquake, he thought. Then a nearby explosion shattered all of the glass remaining in the window of his room and an orange-rose light illuminated the spartar quarters.

  My God, he realized, we’re under attack.

  He grabbed wildly for his trousers. He was accustomed to seeing the mechanical results of combat. But he had never felt its immediate effects before. Once, he had seen an old Russian jet knocked out of the sky at some distance. But nothing like this.

  The huge noise of the bells would not stop. It hurt his ears badly, making his head throb. The noise was so great that it had physical force. The big sound of explosions made sense to him. But not the bells.

  The sound of human shouting was puny, barely audible, amid the crazy concert of the bells.

  He pulled on his boots over bare feet and ran out of his room, stumbling down the dark corridor toward the entrance of the barracks building. The Iranian military policeman on guard duty huddled in the corner of the foyer, chanting out loud.

  “What’s going on?” Murawa demanded in Japanese. But he was not really addressing the cowering Iranian. He hurried out past the blown-in door, tramping over glass and grit.

  Outside, heavy snowflakes sailed down from the dark heavens. The white carpet on the ground lay in total incongruity with the array of bonfires spread across the near horizon.

  The motor park. His repair yards.

  He watched, stunned, as a heavy tank flashed silver-white-gold as if it had been electrified, then jerked backward like a kicked dog. Nearby, another vehicle seemed to crouch into the earth, a beaten animal—until it jumped up and began to blaze.

  With each new flash, the enormous bell sound rolled across the landscape.

  The bells. His tanks. His precious vehicles. His treasures.

  What in-the-name-of-God was going on? What kind of weapons were the Russians using? Where had they come from?

  Another huge tolling nois
e throbbed through his skull, and he briefly considered that the Iranians might have turned on them. But that was impossible. It was premature. And the Iranians could never have managed anything like this.

  He pointed himself toward the communications center, feet unsure in the snow. He brushed against an Iranian soldier whose eyes were mad with fear, and it occurred to Murawa belatedly that he had come out unarmed. The realization made him feel even more helpless, although a sidearm was unlikely to be very effective against whatever was out there playing God in the darkness.

  He ran along the accustomed route—the shortest way—without thinking about the need for cover. The air around him hissed. At the periphery of his field of vision, dark figures moved through the shadows or silhouetted briefly against a local inferno. He was still far too excited to seriously analyze the situation. His immediate ambition was limited to reaching the communications center. Someone there might have answers. And there were communications means. Other Japanese officers and NCOs. The comms center called him both as a place of duty and of refuge.

  He almost made it. He was running the last gauntlet, slipping across the open space between the devastated motor parks and the administration area, when a force like a hot ocean wave lifted him from the earth and hurled him back down. The action happened with irresistible speed, yet, within it, there was time to sense his complete loss of orientation as the shock wave rolled him over in the air exactly as a child tumbles when caught unexpectedly by the sea. For an instant gravity disappeared, and time stretched out long enough for him to feel astonishment then elemental fear before the sky slammed him back against the earth. In the last bad sliver of time, he thrust out a hand to protect himself. It hit the ground ahead of his body, at a bad angle, and his arm snapped like a dry biscuit.