by Tom Clancy
If wishes were horses, he told himself as the aircraft taxied to a stop. The flight attendant opened the door and tossed Jackson’s one bag out to another Air Force sergeant, who walked the Admiral to a helicopter for his next flight, this one to CINCPAC, Admiral Dave Seaton. It was time to don his professional personality. Misused or not, Robby Jackson was a warrior about to assume command of others. He’d examined his doubts and questions, and now it was time to put them away.
“We’re going to owe them big-time for this,” Durling noted, flipping off the TV with his remote.
The technology had been developed for advertising during baseball games, of all things. An adaptation of the blue-screen systems used in the production of movies, advanced computer systems allowed it to be used in real-time, and thus the background behind the batter at the plate could be made to appear to be an advertisement for a local bank or car dealer when in fact it was just the usual green used at ballparks. In this case, a reporter could make his or her live feed from Pearl Harbor—outside the naval base, of course—and the background was that of two carrier profiles, with birds flying past and the antlike shapes of yard workers moving in the distance, and it looked as real as anything else on the TV screen which, after all, was just a collection of multicolored dots.
“They’re Americans,” Jack said. And besides, he was the one who’d bullied them into it, again insulating the President from the politically dangerous task. “They’re supposed to be on our side. We just had to remind them of that.”
“Will it work?” That was the harder question.
“Not for long, but maybe for long enough. It’s a good plan we have in place. We need a few breaks, but we’ve gotten two in the bag already. The important thing is, we’re showing them what they expect to see. They expect both carriers to be there, and they expect the media to tell the whole world about it. Intelligence people are no different from anybody else, sir. They have preconceptions, and when they see them in real life, it just reinforces how brilliant they think they are.”
“How many people do we have to kill?” the President wanted to know next.
“Enough. We don’t know how big the number is, and we’re going to try an’ keep it as low as possible—but, sir, the mission is—”
“I know. I know about missions, remember?” Durling closed his eyes, remembering Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, half a lifetime before. The mission comes first. It was the only way a lieutenant could think, and now for the first time he realized that a president had to think the same way. It hardly seemed fair.
They didn’t see much sun this far north at this time of year, and that suited Colonel Zacharias. The flight from Whiteman to Elmendorf had taken a mere five hours, all of it in darkness because the B-2A flew only in daylight to show itself to people, which was not something for which the aircraft had been conceived. It flew very well indeed, belated proof that Jack Northrop’s idea dating back to the 1930s had been correct: an aircraft consisting exclusively of wing surfaces was the most efficient possible aerodynamic shape. It was just that the flight-control systems required for such an aircraft needed computerized flight controls for proper stability, something that had not been available until just before the engineer’s death. At least he’d seen the model, if not the actual aircraft itself.
Almost everything about it was efficient. Its shape allowed easy storage—three could fit in a hangar designed for one conventional aircraft. It climbed rather like an elevator, and, able to cruise at high altitude, it drank its fuel in cups rather than gallons, or so the wing commander liked to say.
The shot-up B-1B was about ready to fly back to Elmendorf. It would do so on three engines, not a major problem as the aircraft would be carrying nothing more than fuel and its crew as a payload. There were other aircraft based at Shemya now. Two E-3B AWACS birds dispatched from Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma maintained a partial airborne-alert patrol, though this island had power radars of its own, the largest of which was the powerful Cobra Dane missile-detection system built in the 1970s. There was the theoretical possibility that the Japanese could, using tankers, manage a strike against the island, duplicating in length an Israeli mission against the PLO headquarters in North Africa, and though the possibility was remote, it did have to be considered.
Defending against that were the Air Force’s only four F-22A Rapier fighters, the world’s first true stealth fighter aircraft, taken from advanced testing at Nellis Air Force Base and dispatched with four senior pilots and their support crews to this base at the edge of the known universe. But the Rapier—known to the pilots by the name the manufacturer, Lockheed, had initially preferred, “Lightning-II”—hadn’t been designed for defense, and now, with the sun back down after its brief and fitful appearance, it was time for the original purpose. As always the tanker lifted off first, even before the fighter pilots walked from the briefing hut to their aircraft shelters for the start of the night’s work.
“If he flew out yesterday, why are there lights on?” Chavez asked, looking up at the penthouse apartment.
“Timer on the lights to scare burglars away?” John wondered lightly.
“This ain’t L.A., man.”
“Then I suppose there’s people there, Yevgeniy Pavlovich.” He turned the car onto another street.
Okay, we know that Koga wasn’t arrested by the local police. We know that Yamata is running this whole show. We know that his security chief, Kaneda, probably killed Kimberly Norton. We know that Yamata is out of town. And we know that his apartment has lights on....
Clark found a place to park the car. Then he and Chavez went walking, first of all circling the block, looking around for patterns and opportunities in a process called reconnaissance that started at the ground level and seemed more patient than it really was.
“A lot we don’t know, man,” Chavez breathed.
“I thought you wanted to see somebody’s eyes, Domingo,” John reminded his partner.
He had singularly lifeless eyes, Koga thought, not like a human at all. They were dark and large, but seemingly dry, and they just looked at him—or perhaps they just pointed in his direction and lingered there, the former Prime Minister wondered. Whatever they were, they gave no clue as to what lay behind them. He’d heard about Kiyoshi Kaneda, and the term most often used to describe him was ronin, a historical reference to samurai warriors who’d lost their master and couldn’t find another, which was deemed a great disgrace in the culture of the time. Such men had turned into bandits, or worse, after they’d lost contact with the bushido code that had for a thousand years sustained the elements of the Japanese population entitled to carry and use weapons. Such men, once they found a new master to serve, became fanatics, Koga remembered, so fearful of returning to their former status that they would do nearly anything to avoid that fate.
It was a foolish reverie, he knew, looking at the man’s back as he watched TV. The age of the samurai was past, and along with it the feudal lords who had ruled them, but there the man was, watching a samurai drama on NHK, sipping his tea and taking in every scene. He didn’t react at all, as though hypnotized by the highly stylized tale, which was really the Japanese version of American Westerns from the 1950s, highly simplified melodramas of good and evil, except that the heroic figure, always laconic, always invincible, always mysterious, used a sword instead of a six-gun. And this fool Kaneda was devoted to such stories, he’d learned over the past day and a half.
Koga stood and started moving back to the bookcase, and that was all he had to do for the man’s head to turn and look. Watchdog, Koga thought without looking back as he selected another book to read. And a formidable one, especially with four others about, two sleeping now, one in the kitchen, and one outside the door. He hadn’t a chance of escaping, the politician knew. Perhaps a fool, but the sort that a careful man feared.
Who was Kaneda, really? he wondered. A former Yakuza, probably. He didn’t show any of the grotesque tattoos that people in that subcultu
re affected, deliberately making themselves different in a culture that demanded conformity—but at the same time demonstrating conformity in a society of outcasts. On the other hand, he just sat there wearing a business suit whose only concession to comfort was the unbuttoned jacket. Even the ronin’s posture was rigid as he sat there erect, Koga saw, himself sitting back down with a book but looking over it at his captor. He knew he couldn’t fight the man and win—Koga had never troubled himself to learn any of the martial arts that his country had helped develop, and the man was physically formidable. And he was not alone.
He was a watchdog. Seemingly impassive, seemingly at rest, he was in fact more like a coiled spring, ready to leap and strike, and civilized only so long as those around him acted in such a way as not to arouse him, and so obvious about it that you just knew that it was madness to offend him. It shamed the politician that he was so easily cowed, but cowed he was, because he was a bright and thoughtful man, unwilling to squander his one chance, if he had that much, in a foolish gesture.
Many of the industrialists had men like this one. Some of them even carried handguns, which was almost unthinkable in Japan, but the right person could make the right sort of approach to the right official, and a very special permit could be issued, and that possibility didn’t so much frighten Koga as revolt him. The sword of a ronin was bad enough, and in this context would merely have been theatrical, but a gun for Koga was pure evil, something that didn’t belong in his culture, a coward’s weapon. That was what he was dealing with, really. Kaneda was undoubtedly a coward, unable to master his own life, able even to break the law only on orders from others, but with those orders he could do anything. What a dreadful commentary on his country. People like this were used by their masters to strong-arm unions and business competitors. People like Kaneda had assaulted demonstrators, sometimes even in the open, and gotten away with it because the police had looked the other way or managed not to be present, even though reporters and photographers had come to find the scene of the day’s interest. People like this and their masters held his country back from true democracy, and the realization was all the more bitter for Koga because he’d known it for years, dedicated his life to changing it, and failed; and so here he was in Yamata’s penthouse apartment, under guard, probably to be released someday as the political irrelevance he already was or would soon become, then to watch his country fall totally under the control of a new kind of master—or an old one, he told himself. And not a thing he could do about it, which was why he sat with a book in his hands while Kaneda sat in front of a TV watching some actor perform in a drama whose beginning, middle, and end were all foretold a thousand times, pretending that it was both real and new, when it was neither.
Battles like this one had been fought only in simulation, or perhaps in the Roman arenas of a different age. At both ends were the AEW aircraft, E-767s on the Japanese side and E-3Bs on the American, so far apart that neither really “saw” the other even on the numerous radar screens that both carried, though both monitored the signals of the other on different instruments. In between were the gladiators, because for the third time the Americans were testing the air defenses of Japan, and, again, failing.
The American AWACS aircraft were six hundred miles off Hokkaido, with the F-22A fighters a hundred miles in front of them, “trolling,” as the flight leader put it, and the Japanese F-15s were coming out as well, entering the radar coverage of the American surveillance aircraft but not leaving the coverage of their own.
On command, the American fighters split into two elements of two aircraft each. The lead element darted due south, using their ability to supercruise at over nine hundred miles per hour, closing obliquely with the Japanese picket line.
“They’re fast,” a Japanese controller observed. It was hard to hold the contact. The American aircraft was somewhat stealthy, but the size and power of the Kami aircraft’s antenna defeated the low-observable technology again, and the controller started vectoring his Eagles south to cover the probe. Just to make sure that the Americans knew they were being tracked, he selected the appropriate blips with his electronic pointer and ordered the radar to steer its beams on them every few seconds and hold them there. They had to know that they were being followed through every move, that their supposedly radar-defeating technology was not good enough for something new and radical. Just to make it a little more interesting, he switched the frequency of his transmitter to fire-control mode. They were much too far away actually to guide a missile at this range, but even so, it would be one more proof to them that they could be lit up brightly enough for a kill, and that would teach them a lesson of its own. The signal faded a bit at first, almost dropping off entirely, but then the software picked them out of the clutter and firmed up the blip as he jacked up the power down the two azimuths to the American fighters, as fighters they had to be. The B-1, though fast, was not so agile. Yes, this was the best card the Americans had to play, and it was not good enough, and maybe if they learned that, diplomacy would change things once and for all, and the North Pacific Ocean would again be at peace.
“See how their Eagles move to cover,” the senior American controller observed at his supervisory screen.
“Like they’re tied to the 7s with a string,” his companion noted. He was a fighter pilot just arrived from Langley Air Force Base, headquarters of Air Combat Command, where his job was to develop fighter tactics.
Another plotting board showed that three of the E-767s were up. Two were on advanced picket duty while the third was orbiting in close, just off the coast of Honshu. That was not unexpected. It was, in fact, the predictable thing to do because it was also the smart thing to do, and all three surveillance aircraft had their instruments dialed up to what had to be maximum power, as they had to do to detect stealthy aircraft.
“Now we know why they hit both the Lancers,” the man from Virginia observed. “They can jump to high freqs and illuminate for the Eagles. Our guys never thought they were being shot at. Cute,” he thought.
“Would be nice to have some of those radars,” the senior controller agreed.
“But we know how to beat it now.” The officer from Langley thought he saw it. The controller wasn’t so sure.
“We’ll know that in another few hours.”
Sandy Richter was even lower than the C-17 had dared to go. He was also slower, at a mere one hundred fifty knots, and already tired from the curious mixture of tension and boredom on the overwater flight. The previous night he and the other two aircraft in his flight had staged to Petrovka West, yet another mothballed MiG base near Vladivostok. There they’d gotten what would surely be their last decent sleep for the next few days, and lifted off at 2200 hours to begin their part in Operation ZORRO. Each aircraft now had wing sponsons attached, and on each were two extra fuel tanks, and while they were needed for the range of this flight, they were decidedly unstealthy even though the tanks themselves had been made out of radar-transparent fiberglass in an effort to improve things a little bit. The pilot was wearing his normal flight gear plus an inflatable life jacket. It was a concession to regulations about flying over water rather than as anything really useful. The water fifty feet below was too cold for long survival. He put the thought aside as best he could, settled into his seat, and concentrated on the flying while the gunner in back handled the instruments.
“Still okay, Sandy.” The threat screen was still more black than anything else as they turned east toward Honshu.
“Rog.” Behind them at ten-mile intervals, two more Comanches were heading in.
Though small and a mere helicopter, the RAH-66A was in some ways the most sophisticated aircraft in the world. It carried in its composite airframe the two most powerful computers ever taken aloft, and one of them was merely a backup in case the first should break. Their principal task for the moment was to plot the radar coverage that they had to penetrate to compute the relative radar cross-section of their airframe against the known or estimated capa
bilities of the electronic eyes now sweeping the area. The closer they got to the Japanese mainland, the larger grew the yellow areas of maybe-detect and the red areas of definite-detect.
“Phase Two,” the man from Air Combat Command said quietly aboard the AWACS.
The F-22 fighters all carried jamming gear, the better to accentuate their stealth capabilities, and on command these were switched on.
“Not smart,” the Japanese controller thought. Good. They must know that we can track them. His screen was suddenly littered with spots and spokes and flashes as the electronic noise generated by the American fighters muddled his picture. He had two ways of dealing with that. First he increased his power further; that would burn through much of what the Americans were attempting. Next he told the radar to start flipping through frequencies at random. The first measure was more effective than the second, he saw, since the American jammers were also frequency-agile. It was an imperfect measure, but still a troublesome one. The computer software that was doing the actual tracking was based on assumptions. It started with known or estimated positions of the American aircraft, and, knowing their speed range, sought returns that matched their base courses and speeds, just as had happened with the bombers that had once probed his defense line. The problem was that at this power output, he was again detecting birds and air currents, and picking the actual contacts out was becoming increasingly difficult until he punched yet another button that tracked the jamming emissions that were more powerful than the actual returning signals. With that additional check, he reestablished a firm track on both pairs of targets. It had required only ten seconds, and that was fast enough. Just to show the Americans he hadn’t been fooled, he maxed-out his power, flipped briefly to fire-control mode, and zapped all four of the American fighters hard enough that if their electronic systems were not properly shielded, the incoming radar signals would burn some of them out. That would be an interesting kill, he thought, and he remembered how a pair of German Tornado fighters had once been destroyed by flying too close to an FM radio tower. To his disappointment, the Americans simply turned away.