by Tom Clancy
“Somebody just set off some mongo jammers to the northeast.”
“Good, right on time,” Richter replied. A quick look at the threat screen showed that he was within minutes of entering a yellow area. He felt the need to rub his face, but both his hands were busy now. A check of the fuel gauges showed that his pylon-mounted tanks were about empty. “Punching off the wings.”
“Roger—that’ll help.”
Richter flipped the safety cover off the jettison switch. It was a late addition to the Comanche design, but it had finally occurred to someone that if the chopper was supposed to be stealthy, then it might be a good idea to be able to eliminate the unstealthy features in flight. Richter slowed the aircraft briefly and flipped the toggle that ignited explosive bolts, dumping the wings and their tanks into the Sea of Japan.
“Good separation,” the backseater confirmed. The threat screen changed as soon as the items were gone. The computer kept careful track of how stealthy the aircraft was. The Comanche’s nose dipped again, and the aircraft accelerated back to its cruising speed.
“They’re predictable, aren’t they?” the Japanese controller observed to his chief subordinate.
“I think you just proved that. Even better, you just proved to them what we can do.” The two officers traded a look. Both had been worried about the capabilities of the American Rapier fighter, and now both thought they could relax about it. A formidable aircraft, and one their Eagle drivers needed to treat with respect, but not invisible.
“Predictable response,” the American controller said. “And they just showed us something. Call it ten seconds?”
“Thin, but long enough. It’ll work,” the colonel from Langley said, reaching for a coffee. “Now, let’s reinforce that idea.” On the main screen, the F-22s turned back north, and at the edge of the AWACS detection radius, the F-15Js did the same, covering the American maneuver like sail-boats in a tacking duel, striving to stay between the American fighters and their priceless E-767s, which the dreadful accidents of a few days before had made even more precious.
Landfall was very welcome indeed. Far more agile than the transport had been the previous night, the Comanche selected a spot completely devoid of human habitation and then started flying down cracks in the mountainous ground, shielded from the distant air-surveillance aircraft by solid rock that even their powerful systems could not penetrate.
“Feet dry,” Richter’s backseater said gratefully. “Forty minutes of fuel remaining.”
“You good at flapping your arms?” the pilot inquired, also relaxed, just a little, to be over dry land. If something went wrong, well, eating rice wasn’t all that bad, was it? His helmet display showed the ground in green shadows, and there were no lights about from streetlights or cars or houses, and the worst part of the flight in was over. The actual mission was something he’d managed to set aside. He preferred to worry about only one thing at a time. You lived longer that way.
The final ridgeline appeared just as programmed. Richter slowed the aircraft, circling to figure out the winds as he looked down for the people he’d been briefed to expect. There. Somebody tossed out a green chem-light, and in his low-light vision systems it looked as bright as a full moon.
“ZORRO Lead calling ZORRO Base, over.”
“Lead, this is Base. Authentication Golf Mike Zulu, over,” the voice replied, giving the okay-code he’d been briefed to expect. Richter hoped the voice didn’t have a gun to its head.
“Copy. Out.” He spiraled down quickly, flaring his Comanche and settling on what appeared to be an almost-flat spot close to the treeline. As soon as the aircraft touched down, three men appeared from the trees. They were dressed like U.S. Army soldiers, and Richter allowed himself a chance to breathe as he cooled off the engines prior to shutdown. The rotor had not yet completed its final revolution before a hose came out to the aircraft’s fuel connection.
“Welcome to Japan. I’m Captain Checa.”
“Sandy Richter,” the pilot said, climbing out.
“Any problems coming in?”
“Not anymore.” Hell, I got here, didn’t I? he wanted to say, still tense from the three-hour marathon to invade the country. Invade? Eleven Rangers and six aviators. Hey, he thought, you’re all under arrest!
“There’s number two ...” Checa observed. “Quiet babies, aren’t they?”
“We don’t want to advertise, sir.” It was perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Comanche. The Sikorsky engineers had long known that most of the noise generated by a helicopter came from the tail rotor’s conflict with the main. The one on the RAH-66 was shrouded, and the main rotor had five fairly thick composite blades, resulting in a helicopter with less than a third of the acoustical signature of any other rotary-wing aircraft yet built. And the area wouldn’t hurt, Richter thought, looking around. All the trees, the thin mountain air. Not a bad place for the mission, he concluded as the second Comanche settled down on its landing pad, fifty meters away. The men who had fueled his aircraft were already stringing camouflage netting over it, using poles cut from the pine forest.
“Come on, let’s get some food in you.”
“Real food or MREs?” the chief warrant officer asked.
“You can’t have everything, Mr. Richter,” Checa told him.
The aviator remembered when Army C-Rations had also included cigarettes. No longer, what with the new healthy Army, and there wasn’t much sense in asking a Ranger for a smoke. Damned athletes.
The Rapiers turned away an hour later, convinced, the Japanese air-defense people were sure, that they could not penetrate the Kami-Eagle line that guarded the northeast approaches to the home islands. Even the best American aircraft and best systems could not defeat what they had to face, and that was good. On their screens they watched the contacts fade off, and soon the emissions from the E-3Bs faded as well, heading back to Shemya to report their failure to their masters.
The Americans were realists. Courageous warriors, to be sure—the officers in the E-767s would not make the mistake as their forebears had of thinking that Americans lacked the ardor for real combat operations. That error had been a costly one. But war was a technical exercise, and they had allowed their strength to fall below a line from which recovery was not technically possible. And that was too bad for them.
The Rapiers had to tank on the way back, and didn’t use their supercruise ability, because wasting fuel was not purposeful. The weather was again crummy at Shemya, and the fighters rode down under positive ground-control to their safe landings, then taxied off to their hangars, which were more crowded now with the arrival of four F-15E Strike Eagles from Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. They also regarded the mission as a success.
42
Lightning Strikes
“Are you mad?” Scherenko asked.
“Think about it,” Clark said, again back in the Russian Embassy. “We want a political solution to this, don’t we? Then Koga’s our best chance. You told us the government didn’t put him in the bag. Who does that leave? He’s probably right there.” You could even see the building out Scherenko’s window, as luck would have it.
“Is it possible?” the Russian asked, worried that the Americans would ask for assistance that he was quite unsuited to provide.
“There’s a risk, but it’s unlikely he has an army up there. He wouldn’t be keeping the guy there unless he wanted to be covert about it. Figure five or six people, max.”
“And two of you!” Scherenko insisted.
“Like the man said,” Ding offered with a very showy smile, “no big deal.”
So the old KGB file was true. Clark was not a real intelligence officer, but a paramilitary type, and the same was true of his arrogant young partner who mostly just sat there, looking out the window.
“I can offer you nothing by way of assistance.”
“How about weapons?” Clark asked. “You going to tell me you don’t have anything here we can use? What kind of rezidentura is
this?” Clark knew that the Russian would have to temporize. Too bad that these people weren’t trained to take much initiative.
“I need permission before I can do any of that.”
Clark nodded, congratulating himself on making a good guess. He opened his laptop computer. “So do we. You get yours. I’ll get mine.”
Jones stubbed out his cigarette in the Navy-style aluminum ashtray. The pack had been stuck away in a desk drawer, perhaps in anticipation of just such an occasion as this. When a war started, the peacetime rules went out the window. Old habits, especially bad ones, were easy to fall back into—but then that’s what war was, too, wasn’t it? He could also see that Admiral Mancuso was wavering on the edge of bumming one, and so he made sure the butt was all the way out.
“What do you have, Ron?”
“You take the time to work this gear and you get results. Boomer and me have been tweaking the data all week. We started on the surface ships.” Jones walked to the wall chart. “We’ve been plotting the position of the ’cans—”
“All the way from—” Captain Chambers interrupted, only to be cut off.
“Yes, sir, all the way from mid-Pac. I’ve been playing broadband and narrow-band, and checking weather, and I’ve plotted them.” Jones pointed at the silhouettes pinned to the map.
“That’s fine, Ron, but we have satellite overheads for that,” ComSubPac pointed out.
“So am I right?” the civilian asked.
“Pretty close,” Mancuso admitted. Then he pointed to the other shapes pinned to the wall.
“Yeah, that’s right, Bart. Once I figured how to track the ’cans, then we started working on the submarines. And guess what? I can still bag the fuckers when they snort. Here’s your picket line. We get them about a third of the time by my reckoning, and the bearings are fairly constant.”
The wall chart showed six firm contacts. Those silhouettes were within circles between twenty and thirty miles in diameter. Two more were overlaid with question marks.
“That still leaves a few unaccounted for,” Chambers noted.
Jones nodded. “True. But I got six for sure, maybe eight. We can’t get good cuts off the Japanese coast. Just too far. I’m plotting merchantmen shuttling back and forth to the islands, but that’s all,” he admitted. “I’m also tracking a big two-screw contact heading west toward the Marshalls, and I kinda noticed that there’s an empty dry dock across the way this morning.”
“That’s secret,” Mancuso pointed out with a quiet smile.
“Well, if I were you guys, I’d tell Stennis to watch out for this line of SSKs, gentlemen. You might want to let the subs head into the briarpatch first, to clean things out, like.”
“We can do that, but I’m worried about the others,” Chambers admitted.
“Conn, sonar.”
“Conn, aye.” Lieutenant Ken Shaw had the midwatch.
“Possible sonar contact bearing zero-six-zero ... probably a submerged contact ... very faint, sir,” the sonar chief reported.
The drill was automatic after all the practice they’d undergone on the trips from Bremerton and Pearl. The fire-control-tracking party immediately started a plot. A tech on the ray-path analyzer took data directly from the sonar instruments and from that tried to determine the probable range to the target. The computer required only a second.
“That’s a direct-path signal, sir. Range is under twenty thousand yards.”
Dutch Claggett hadn’t really been asleep. In the way of captains, he’d been lying in his bunk, eyes closed, even dreaming something meaningless and confusing about a day fishing on the beach with the fish behind him on the sand and creeping closer to his back, when the call had gone out from sonar. Somehow he’d come completely awake, and was now in the attack center, standing barefoot in his underwear. He checked the room to determine depth, course, and speed, then headed into sonar to get his own look at the instruments.
“Talk to me, Chief.”
“Right here on the sixty-hertz line.” The chief tapped the screen with his grease pencil. It came and went and came and went, but kept coming back, just a series of dots trickling down the screen, all on the same frequency line. The bearing was changing slowly right to left.
“They’ve been at sea for more than three weeks ...” Claggett thought aloud.
“Long time for a diesel boat,” the chief agreed. “Maybe heading back in for refueling?”
Claggett leaned in closer, as though proximity to the screen would make a difference. “Could be. Or maybe he’s just changing position. Makes sense that they’d have a patrol line offshore. Keep me posted.”
“Aye, Cap’n.”
“Well?” Claggett asked the tracking party.
“First cut on range is fourteen thousand yards, base course is westerly, speed about six knots.”
The contact was easily within range of his ADCAP torpedoes, Claggett saw. But the mission didn’t allow him to do anything about it. Wasn’t that just great?
“Let’s get two weapons warmed up,” the Captain said. “When we have a good track on our friend, we evade to the south. If he closes on us, we try to keep out of his way, and we can shoot only if there’s no choice.” He didn’t even have to look around to know what his crewmen thought of that. He could hear the change in how they breathed.
“What do you think?” Mary Pat Foley asked.
“Interesting,” Jack said after a moment’s contemplation of the fax from Langley.
“It’s a long-ball opportunity.” This was the voice of Ed Foley. “But it’s one hell of a gamble.”
“They’re not even sure he’s there,” Ryan said, rereading the signal. It bore all the marks of something from John Clark. Honest. Decisive. Positive. The man knew how to think on his feet, and though often a guy at the bottom of the food chain, he tended to see the big picture very clearly from down there. “I have to go upstairs with this one, guys.”
“Don’t trip on the way,” MP advised with a smile he could almost hear. She was still a cowgirl on field operations. “I recommend a Go-Mission on this one.”
“And you, Ed?” Jack asked.
“It’s a risk, but sometimes you go with what the guy in the field says. If we want a political resolution for this situation, well, then we have to have a tame political figure to lean on. We need the guy, and this might be our only way to get him out alive.” The National Security Advisor could hear the gritted teeth on the other end of the STU-6 circuit. Both the Foleys were true to form. More importantly, they were in agreement.
“I’ll be back to you in twenty minutes.” Ryan switched over to his regular phone. “I need to see the Boss right now,” he told the President’s executive secretary.
The sun was rising for yet another hot, windless day. Admiral Dubro realized that he was losing weight. The waistband on his khaki trousers was looser than usual, and he had to reef in his belt a little more. His two carriers were now in regular contact with the Indians. Sometimes they came close enough for a visual, though more often some Harrier’s look-down radar just took a snapshot from fifty or so miles away. Worse, his orders were to let them see his ships. Why the hell wasn’t he heading east for the Straits of Malacca? There was a real war to fight. He’d come to regard the possible Indian invasion of Sri Lanka as a personal insult, but Sri Lanka wasn’t U.S. territory, and the Marianas were, and his were the only carriers Dave Seaton had.
Okay, so the approach wouldn’t exactly be covert. He had to pass through one of several straits to reenter the Pacific Ocean, all of them about as busy as Times Square at noon. There was even the off-chance of a sub there, but he had ASW ships, and he could pounce on any submarine that tried to hinder his passage. But his orders were to remain in the IO, and to be seen doing so.
The word was out among the crew, of course. He hadn’t made even a token effort to keep things quiet. It would never have worked in any case, and his people had a right to know what was going on, in anticipation of entering the fray. They needed
to know, to get their backs up, to generate an extra determination before shifting from a peacetime mentality to that of a shooting war——but once you were ready, you had to do it. And they weren’t.