by Tom Clancy
The last warning was far too late for counteraction. Just five miles out, the two missiles switched on their own homing radars. They were coming in at Mach-3+, driven by solid-fuel rocket motors toward a huge radar target, and the AIM-120 AMRAAM, known to its users as the Slammer, was one of the new generation of brilliant weapons. The pilot finally got the word, listening in to the countermeasures channel. He rolled his aircraft left, attempting a nearly impossible split-S dive that he knew was a waste of effort because at the last second he saw the yellow glow of rocket exhaust.
“Kill,” Lightning Lead whispered to himself. “Lightning Flight, this is lead. North Guy is down.”
“Lead, this is Three, South Guy is down,” he heard next.
nd now, the Colonel thought, using a particularly cruel Air Force euphemism, it was time to kill some baby seals. The four Lightnings were between the Japanese coast and eight F-15J Eagle interceptors. To seaward of them, the F-15E Strike Eagles would be turning back in, lighting off their own radars and loosing their own AMRAAMs. Some would make kills, and the Japanese fighters that survived them would run for home, right into his flight of four.
The ground-control radars couldn’t see the aerial combat taking place. It was too far out and below the radar horizon. They did see one aircraft racing for their coast, one of theirs by the transponder code. Then it stopped cold in the air, and the transponder went off. In the air-defense headquarters, data downloaded from the three dead AEW aircraft gave no clues, except for one fact—the war their country had started was now very real and had taken an unexpected turn.
43
Dancing to the Tune
“I know you’re not Russians,” Koga said, sitting in the back of the car with Chavez while Clark did the driving.
“Why would you think that?” John asked innocently.
“Because Yamata thinks that I have been in contact with Americans. You two are the only gaijin with whom I have spoken since this madness began. What is going on here?” the politician demanded.
“Sir, what is going on right now is that we rescued you from people who wanted you dead.”
“Yamata would not be so foolish as that,” Koga retorted, not yet recovered from the shock of seeing violence uncontained by the borders of a TV cabinet.
“He has started a war, Koga-san. What is your death against that?” the man in the driver’s seat inquired delicately.
“So you are Americans,” he persisted.
Oh, what the hell, Clark thought. “Yes, sir, we are.”
“Spies?”
“Intelligence officers,” Chavez preferred. “The man who was in the room with you—”
“The one you killed, you mean? Kaneda?”
“Yes, sir. He murdered an American citizen, a girl named Kimberly Norton, and I am actually rather happy that I took him down.”
“Who was she?”
“She was Goto’s mistress,” Clark explained. “And when she became a political threat to your new Prime Minister, Raizo Yamata decided to have her eliminated. We came to your country just to get her home. That was all,” Clark went on, telling what was partially a lie.
“None of this is necessary,” Koga said discordantly. “If your Congress had just given me a chance to—”
“Sir, maybe that’s right. I don’t know if it is or not, but maybe it is,” Chavez said. “That doesn’t much matter now, does it?”
“Tell me, then, what does matter?”
“Ending this goddamned thing before too many people get hurt,” Clark suggested. “I’ve fought in wars and they are not fun. Lots of young kids get to die before they have the chance to get married and have kids of their own, and that’s bad, okay?” Clark paused before going on. “It’s bad for my country, and for damned sure it’s going to be worse for yours.”
“Yamata thinks—”
“Yamata is a businessman,” Chavez said. “Sir, you’d better understand this. He doesn’t know what he’s started.”
“Yes, you Americans are very good at killing. I saw that myself fifteen minutes ago.”
“In that case, Mr. Koga, you also saw that we left one man alive.”
Clark’s angry reply stopped conversation cold for several seconds. Koga was slow to realize that it was true. The one outside the door had been alive when they’d walked over his body, moaning and shuddering as though from electric shocks, but definitely alive.
“Why didn’t you ... ?”
“There was no reason to kill him,” Chavez said. “I’m not going to apologize for that Kaneda bastard. He had it coming, and when I came into the room, he was reaching for a weapon, and that’s tough cookies, sir. But this isn’t a movie. We don’t kill people for amusement, and we came in to rescue you because somebody has to end this goddamned war—okay?”
“Even then—even then, what your Congress did ... how can my country survive economically—”
“Will it be better for anybody if the war goes on?” Clark asked. “If Japan and China kick off against Russia, what happens to you then? Who do you suppose will really pay the price for that mistake? China? I don’t think so.”
The first word in Washington came via satellite. One of NSA’s orbiting “hitchhiker” ELINT birds happened to be overhead to record the termination of signal—that was the NSA term for it—from three AEW aircraft. Other NSA listening posts recorded radio chatter that lasted for several minutes before ending. Analysts were trying to make sense of it now, the report in Ryan’s hands told him.
Only one kill, the Colonel told himself. Well, he’d have to be content with that. His wingman had bagged the last of the -15Js. The southern element had gotten three, and the Strike Eagles had gotten the other four when their support had been cut off, leaving them suddenly and unexpectedly vulnerable. Presumably the ZORRO team had gotten the third E-767. On the whole, not a bad night’s work, but a long one, he thought, forming his flight of four back up for the rendezvous with the tanker and the three hours back to Shemya. The hardest part was the enforced radio silence. Some of his people had to be counting coup in a big way, full of themselves in the way of fighter pilots who had done the job and lived to tell the tale, and wanting to talk through it. That would change shortly, he thought, the enforced silence forcing him to think about his first-ever air-to-air kill. Thirty people on the aircraft. Damn, he was supposed to feel good about a kill, wasn’t he? So why didn’t he?
Something interesting had just happened, Dutch Claggett thought. They were still catching bits and pieces of the SSK in their area, but whoever it was, it had turned north and away from them, allowing Tennessee to remain on station. In the way of submarines on patrol, he’d come close enough to the surface to put up his ESM antenna and track the Japanese radar aircraft for the past day or so, learning what he could for possible forwarding to others. Electronic-intelligence gathering had been a submarine mission since before his application to Annapolis, and his crew included two electronics techs who showed a real aptitude for it. But they’d had two on the monitoring systems that had just gone—poof! Then they’d caught some radio chatter, excited by the sound of it, and one by one those voices had gone off the air, somewhere to his north.
“You suppose we just got up on the scoreboard, Cap’n?” Lieutenant Shaw asked, expecting the Captain to know, because captains were supposed to know everything, even though they didn’t.
“Seems that way.”
“Conn, sonar.”
“Conn, aye.”
“Our friend is snorting again, bearing zero-zero-nine, probable CZ contact,” the sonar chief thought.
“I’ll start the track,” Shaw said, heading aft for the plotting table.
“So what happened?” Durling asked.
“We killed three of their radar aircraft, and the strike force annihilated their fighter patrol.” This was not a time, however, for gloating.
“This is the twitchiest part?”
Ryan nodded. “Yes, sir. We need them confused for a while longer, but for now
they know something is happening. They know—”
“They know it might be a real war after all. Any word on Koga?”
“Not yet.”
It was four in the morning and all three men were showing it. Koga was over the stress period, for the moment, trying to use his head instead of his emotions while his two hosts— that was how he thought of them, rather to his surprise—drove him around and wondered how smart it was to have left the one guard alive outside Yamata’s condo. He would be up and moving by now? Would he call the police? Someone else? What would result from the night’s adventure?
“How do I know that I can trust you?” Koga asked after a lengthy silence.
Clark’s hands squeezed the wheel hard enough to leave fingerprints in the plastic. It was the movies and TV that caused dumbass questions like that. In those media, spies did all manner of complicated things in the hope of outsmarting the equally brilliant adversaries against whom they were pitted. Reality was different. You kept operations as simple as you could because even the simplest things could blow up on you, and if the other guy was so goddamned brilliant, you wouldn’t even know who the hell he was; and tricking people into doing the things you wanted them to do was something that only worked if you arranged a single option for the other guy, and even then he’d often as not do something unexpected anyway.
“Sir, we just put our lives at risk for you, but, okay, don’t trust us at all. I’m not dumb enough to tell you what to do. I don’t know your politics well enough for that. What I’m telling you is very simple. We will be doing things—what all of them are, I do not know anyway, so I can’t tell you. We want to end this war with a minimum of violence, but there will be violence. You also want the war to end, right?”
“Of course I want it to end,” Koga said, his manners not helped by his fatigue.
“Well, sir, you do whatever you think is best, okay? You see, Mr. Koga, you don’t have to trust us, but we sure as hell have to trust you to do what’s best for your country and for ours.” Clark’s comment, exasperated as it was, turned out to be the best thing he could have said.
“Oh.” The politician thought that one over. “Yes. That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Where can we drop you off?”
“Kimura’s home,” Koga said at once.
“Fine.” Clark dredged up the location and turned the car onto Route 122 to head for it. Then he reminded himself that he’d learned one highly important thing this night, and that after getting this guy to a place of relative safety, his top priority was getting that information to Washington. The empty streets helped, and though he wished for coffee to keep himself alert, it was a mere forty minutes to the crowded neighborhood of diminutive tract homes where the MITI official lived. The lights were already on when they pulled up to the house, and they just let Koga out to walk to the door. Isamu Kimura answered the door and took his guest inside with a mouth almost as wide as the entrance to his home.
Who ever said these people didn’t show emotion? Clark asked himself.
“Who do you suppose the leaker is?” Ding asked, still in the backseat.
“Good boy—you caught that, too.”
“Hey, I’m the only college graduate in the car, Mr. C.” Ding opened the computer to draft the dispatch to Langley, again via Moscow.
“They did what?” Yamata snarled into the phone.
“This is serious.” It was General Arima, and he’d just gotten the word from Tokyo himself. “They smashed our air defenses and just went away afterwards.”
“How?” the industrialist demanded. Hadn’t they told him that the Kami aircraft were invincible?
“They don’t know how yet, but I’m telling you this is very serious. They have the ability to raid the Home Islands now.”
Think, Yamata told himself, shaking his head to clear the cobwebs. “General, they still cannot invade our islands, can they? They can sting us, but they cannot really hurt us, and as long as we have nuclear weapons ...”
“Unless they try something else. The Americans are not acting as we have been given to expect.”
That remark stung the next Governor of Saipan. Today was supposed to have been the day on which he’d begin his campaign. Well, yes, he’d overestimated the effect his action would have on the American financial markets, but they had crippled the American fleet, and they had occupied the islands, and America did not have the ability to storm even one of the Marianas, and America did not have the political will to launch a nuclear attack on his country. Therefore they were still ahead of the game. Was it to be expected that America would not fight back somewhat? Of course not. Yamata lifted his TV controller and switched it on, catching the beginning of a CNN Headline News broadcast, and there was the American correspondent, standing right on the edge of some dock or other, and there behind her were two American carriers, still in their docks, still unable to do anything.
“What does intelligence tell us about the Indian Ocean?” he asked the General.
“The two American carriers are still there,” Arima assured him. “They were seen both visually and on radar yesterday, within four hundred kilometers of Sri Lanka.”
“Then they cannot really hurt us, can they?”
“Well, no, really they cannot,” the General admitted. “But we must make other arrangements.”
“Then I suggest you make them, Arima-san,” Yamata replied in a voice so polite as to constitute a stinging insult.
The worst part was not knowing what had happened. The data links from the three dead Kami aircraft had ended with the elimination of -Two. All the rest of their information was inferred rather than actually known. Ground-based monitoring stations had copied the emissions of -Four and -Six and then seen those emissions stop within the same minute. There had been no obvious alarm for any of the three radar aircraft. They’d just stopped transmitting, leaving nothing more behind than floating debris on the rolling ocean. The fighters—well, they did have tapes of the radio conversations. It had taken less than four minutes for that. First the confident, professionally laconic comments of fighter pilots closing on targets, then a series of What?s, followed by hurried calls to go active with their radars, more calls that they’d been illuminated. One pilot had reported a hit, then immediately gone off the air—but a hit from what? How could the same aircraft that killed the Kamis have gotten the fighters, too? The Americans had only four of their expensive new F-22s. And the Kamis had been tracking those. What evil magic had ... ? But that was the problem. They didn’t know.
The air-defense specialists, and the engineers who had developed the world’s finest airborne radar systems, shook their heads, looking down, feeling immense personal disgrace and not knowing why. Of the ten such aircraft built, five were destroyed, and only four others available for service, and all they knew for sure was that they couldn’t risk them over water anymore. Orders were also issued to deploy the standby E-2C aircraft that the E-767s had replaced, but those were less capable American designs, and the officers had to accept the fact that somehow the air defenses of their country had been severely compromised.
It was seven in the evening, and Ryan was about to leave for home when the secure fax machine started buzzing. His phone started ringing even before paper appeared.
“Can’t you people ever keep secrets?” an accented voice demanded angrily.
“Sergey? What’s the problem?”
“Koga is our best chance for terminating hostilities, and someone on your side told the Japanese that he’s in contact with you!” Golovko nearly shouted from his home, where it was three in the morning. “Do you want to kill the man?”
“Sergey Nikolay’ch, will you for Christ’s sake settle the hell down?” Jack sat back down in his chair, and by this time he had the page to read. It had come directly from the U.S. Embassy communications people in Moscow, doubtless on orders of a sort from the RVS. “Oh, shit.” Pause. “Okay, we got him out of trouble, didn’t we?”
“You’re penetrate
d at a high level, Ivan Emmetovich.”
“Well, you should know how easy it is to do that.”
“We’re working to find out who it is, I assure you.” The voice was still angry.
Wouldn’t that be great? Jack thought behind painfully closed eyes. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service testifies in Federal District Court.
“Not many people know this. I’ll get back to you.”
“I am so pleased to hear that you restrict sensitive information to such trustworthy people, Jack.” The line went dead. Ryan depressed the switch and punched up another number from memory.
“Murray.”
“Ryan. Dan, I need you here in a hurry.” Jack’s next call was to Scott Adler. Then he walked off again toward the President’s office. The positive news he had to report, Ryan supposed, was that the other side had used important information clumsily. Yamata again, he was sure, acting like a businessman rather than a professional spook. He hadn’t even troubled himself to disguise the information he had, not caring that it would also reveal its source. The man didn’t know his limitations. Sooner or later he’d pay dearly for that weakness.
Jackson’s last set of orders before heading off to the Pacific had involved ordering twelve B-1B bombers of the 384th Bomb Wing to fly east from their base in southern Kansas, first to Lajes in the Azores, staging on from there toward Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The flight of ten thousand miles took more than a day, and when the aircraft arrived at the base farthest from America of any, the crews were thoroughly exhausted. The three KC-10s that brought along ground crewmen and support equipment landed soon thereafter, and the entire assembly of people was soon asleep.