“God saves Russia, Mr. President,” Stolypin replied. “He even saved Russia from the Communists, although He took his time with the Reds. Let us pray that He can save Russia one more time.”
Several minutes later Kalugin asked, “Are you a believer?”
“I believe in Russia, sir. So does God.”
“You are in charge. Fight them. Give me some victories.”
“I will use what we have,” Stolypin said sourly, “which is very little. If you expect a furious battle that can be filmed for a television spectacle, you had better get someone else, someone who can make an army from street rabble with a snap of his fingers.”
Kalugin was thinking about nuclear weapons. When he came out of his reverie, he heard Stolypin saying, “Political posturing is not part of a soldier’s job.”
Kalugin handed the old marshal an envelope. “Your appointment as chief of staff is in here. I signed it before you arrived. Go to headquarters and take charge. Mobilize our resources, fill the ranks, requisition the guns, clothes, food, fuel, all of it. Do whatever you have to do. Any decrees that you need, draft them and send them to me. Together, we are going to save Russia.”
Stolypin reached for the envelope and opened it.
“It is a tragedy that Samsonov is not here,” the old soldier said gravely as he read the papers. “He was the most brilliant soldier Russia has produced since Georgi Zhukov.”
“I am placing the details in your capable hands, Marshal Stolypin.”
“I have given you the same advice that Samsonov would. I wish to God he were here now.”
“We will feel his loss keenly,” said Kalugin as he walked with Sto-lypin toward the door.
The sky was growing light in the northeast as Jiro Kimura and three wingmen climbed to 34,000 feet on their way to bomb and strafe the airfield at Khabarovsk, at the great bend of the Amur River. Khabarovsk was a rail, highway, and electrical power nerve center, the strategic key to the far eastern sector. When they held Khabarovsk, the Japanese would own the Russian far east, and not before. The troops were within forty miles now, coming up the railroad and highways from Vladivostok.
For the past two days, Jiro and his squadron mates had flown close air support for the advancing troops, bombing, rocketing, and strafing knots of Russian troops that were preparing positions to delay the Japanese advance. This morning, however, the general had sent this flight to Khabarovsk.
It was going to be a perfect morning. Not a cloud anywhere. To the northeast the rising sun revealed the pure deep blue of the sky and the va/s of the endless green Siberian landscape. From 34,000 feet none of man’s engineering projects were visible as the low-angle sunlight flooded the land in starkly contrasting light and shadow. When the sun got a little higher, all one would see from horizon to horizon would be green land under an endless blue sky.
Jiro was flying three or four flights a day, every day. The previous afternoon his plane had needed unexpected maintenance, and he had fallen asleep in the briefing room, after lying down on the floor with his flight gear as a pillow. He was constantly exhausted and always on the verge of sleep.
Some of his comrades were disappointed that the Russians had suddenly withdrawn their airplanes. Jiro had eleven kills when the Russians vanished from the sky, ceding air superiority. One still had to stay alert for possible enemy aircraft, of course, but they just weren’t there.
Although the Russians on the ground felt free to shoot like wild men with everything they had, they rarely hit anyone. The Japanese planes stayed out of the light AAA envelope except when actually delivering ordnance. Rear-quarter heat-seekers would also have been a problem if they stayed near the ground for very long, so they didn’t.
The Japanese had lost only two Zeroes at this stage of the war. One pilot crashed and died while making an approach to Vladivostok as evening fog rolled in. Another had a total electrical failure and lost his wingmen while he busied himself in the cockpit pulling circuit breakers and trying to reset alternators. He and his flight had been on their way to Nikolayevsk, at the mouth of the Amur, when the failure occurred. The luckless pilot never found the city or the base. He crashed in the boondocks a hundred miles northwest of Nikolayevsk when his fuel was exhausted. Fortunately a satellite picked up the plane’s battery-powered emergency beeper after the pilot ejected, and a helicopter rescued him the next day.
Jiro retarded his throttles and began his letdown eighty miles from Khabarovsk. The four war planes drifted apart into a combat spread. Jiro and his wingman, Sasai, were ahead and to the right, Ota and Miura behind and to the left. Ota dropped farther back so that he could swing right and follow the first flight if the ground topography required it.
The shadows on the ground were still dark, impenetrable. Jiro looked at his watch. In eight minutes they would arrive at the target, come out of the rising sun. It would be a splendid tactic, if the sun rose on schedule.
He swung farther east to give God another minute or two with the sun.
“Blue Leader, this is Control.” The radio was scrambled, of course, and gave a beep before and after the words.
Jiro pushed his mike button, waited for the beep, then said, “Control, Blue Leader, go ahead.”
“We believe a plane has just taken off from your target. It is headed three zero zero degrees, ten miles northwest, climbing. Please intercept.”
“Wilco.”
Jiro looked around at Sasai. He pointed toward Ota, then jerked his thumb. Sasai nodded vigorously, then slipped aft and away.
Jiro turned left, advanced his throttles, and pulled his machine into a slight climb. He settled on a course of 275, which should allow him to intercept. Now he pushed buttons on the computer display in front of him. When he was satisfied, he tickled the radar. It swept once. There was the plane. Thirty-four nautical miles away, interception course 278 degrees. He turned to that heading and reset his armament panel. He had been set up to strafe, then shoot rockets. Now he armed the two heat-seeking Sidewinder missiles that the Zero always carried, one on each wingtip. He tripped the radar sweep again. Thirty-one miles. The enemy plane was accelerating nicely, headed almost straight away from Jiro, who was now committed to a stern-quarter approach. He eyed his fuel gauges, then pushed the throttle farther forward. The Zero slid through the sonic barrier without a buffet or bump. With the throttles all the way forward, but without using his afterburners, the Zero quickly accelerated to Mach 1.3. Jiro decided to risk another sweep. Twenty-four miles. He was at ten thousand feet now, so he leveled there. He wanted the other plane above him, against the dark background of the western sky. Far below, out to the left, he could see a faint ribbon of light wandering off to the northwest. That would be the Amur River, flowing southeast to Khabarovsk. On the far side was Manchuria. From Khabarovsk, the river flowed northeast to the Sea of Okhotsk. It was always frozen solid in winter. He was still fifteen miles from the bogey when he first saw it, a spot of silver reflecting the rising sun, against the dark of the fading night. It’s a big plane, he thought. A transport!
He checked his ECM panel as the implications of that fact sunk in. The panel was dark. Because you never really trust an electronic device, Jiro turned in his seat and looked carefully about him, concentrating on the rear quadrants. Empty sky, everywhere. A transport — defenseless. He heard Ota tell Control that he was attacking the primary target, and he heard Control acknowledge. Jiro closed quickly on the transport from dead astern. When it was no more than four miles ahead, Jiro retarded his throttles. The gap between the planes continued to close as he coasted up on it. The bogey was a four-engine transport, very similar to an old Boeing 707, with the engines in pods on the wings, climbing at full power, just now it was passing through fifteen thousand feet.
Jiro stabilized a few hundred yards aft, directly behind, well below the transport’s wash. He sat looking at it for what seemed like a long, long time, unsure of what to do. Actually the time was less than a minute, but it seemed longer to Jiro. He slid out
to the right, so he could see the side of the plane and the tail, illuminated by the rising sun. Then he dropped back into trail. Finally he keyed the mike. After the beep, he spoke. The hoarseness of his voice surprised him. “Control, Blue Leader.”
“Go ahead, Blue Leader.”
“This bogey you wanted investigated. It’s an airliner — four-engines, silver. Lots of windows. Aeroflot markings.”
“Wait.”
Silence, broken only by Jiro sucking on his oxygen, with the background hum of the engines. He eased up and under the transport; the roar of the Russian’s engines became audible. He could just feel a bit of the rumble of the air disturbed by the big plane’s passage, its wash. He dropped down a bit; the ride smoothed and the Russian’s engine noise faded. “Ah, Blue Leader,” Control said. “Destroy the bogey and RTB.”
Jiro sat looking at the airliner. They were climbing through twenty thousand feet now. “Blue Leader, this is Control. Did you copy? Destroy the bogey and return to base.” The mission controller was in Japan, in a basement at the defense ministry probably, staring at his computer screens. The reason his voice sounded so clear and strong on the radio was because the radio signal was directed at a satellite, which rebroadcast it. Jiro’s eyes flicked around the cockpit, taking in the various displays and switches. He took off his oxygen mask and rubbed his face furiously, then put the mask back on. “Blue Leader, Control …”
Well, there was nothing to be gained by prolonging this. “Control, Blue Leader.”
“Did you copy, Blue Leader?”
“Understand you want me to destroy this airliner and return to base.”
“Destroy the bogey, Blue Leader. Report bogey destroyed.”
“Control, this thing’s an airliner. Tell me that you understand that this bogey is an Aeroflot airliner.”
Silence. He was being grossly insubordinate. He could just imagine the clenched jaws of the senior officers. Well, hell, if they didn’t like it, they could cashier him, send him back to Japan. “Blue Leader, Control. We understand the bogey has Aeroflot markings. You are hereby ordered to destroy it. Acknowledge.”
“I copy.”
He retarded the throttle, let the airliner pull ahead. The distance began to grow: five hundred yards, a thousand, fifteen hundred. Jiro flicked a switch on the throttle to select the left Sidewinder. He pulled the nose up, put the dot in the center of the HUD directly on the airliner. The Sidewinder growled: It had locked on one of the big plane’s engines. Jiro squeezed the trigger on the stick. The Sidewinder leapt off the rail and shot forward. Straight as a bullet it flew across the gap toward the four-engined monster. A puff of smoke. A hit: the inboard left engine. He sat there watching as the airliner’s engine began trailing smoke. Now the big silver plane began to move back toward him, which was an optical illusion. Actually, it was slowing and he was creeping up on it. He retarded his throttles, cracked the speed brakes. “Fuck.” Jiro said the word in English. “Fuck? Now he screamed it. Furious, he selected the right Sidewinder, got the tone, then squeezed it off. It impacted one of the transport’s right engines: another little flash. The huge silver plane wasn’t climbing anymore. Its left wing came down, twenty…, now thirty degrees; the nose dropped. It began a turn back toward Khabarovsk. “Fall, you Russian bastard,” Jiro whispered. He opened his speed brakes to the stops and dropped his left wing, cutting across the turn, closing the distance. He was out to the left now, in plain view of the pilots if they only took the time to look this way. The airliner’s left engine was visibly on fire. No, the wing was burning. Shrapnel from the missile’s warhead must have punctured the wing tank, and jet fuel was burning in the slipstream. The big silver plane’s angle of bank was at least sixty degrees now, its nose down ten degrees.
It was then that Jiro realized that the big plane was out of control. Perhaps the controls had been damaged by the missile shrapnel or the fire. He pulled away, got his nose level, and watched the silver plane spiral down into the early-morning gloom. Down, down, down … miles to fall … Time seemed to stand still. The airliner got smaller and smaller. The Russian plane was just a tiny silver dot, almost lost from view, when its flight ended in a flash, a tiny smear of fire amid the morning shadows. That was all. A splash of fire, and they were gone. Jiro pointed the nose of his plane south, toward Vladivostok. He pushed the throttles forward and let the nose rise into a climb. “Control, Blue Leader …”
“Blue Leader, Control, go ahead with your report.”
After an evening of cogitation, Aleksandr Kalugin decided to deliver an ultimatum to Japan threatening nuclear holocaust. Since he had bombs and Japan didn’t, he could see no good reason why he should not put the bombs in play. He was not committing himself to any specific course of action, merely threatening one. He called in Danilov, the foreign minister, and had him draft the ultimatum. Two hours later, he looked the document over carefully as Danilov sat on the edge of his seat, his hands folded in his lap. Danilov was nearly seventy years old. He had spent his adult life as a professional diplomat. Never had he seen a Soviet or Russian government seriously weigh the use of nuclear weapons. Now, to his horror, Kalugin was threatening their use without even discussing the matter with his ministers. Is this where perestroika and democracy lead? To nuclear war?
“Sir, Japan may not withdraw from Siberia.”
Kalugin finished the paragraph he was reading before he looked at Danilov. “They might not.”
“They may not believe this ultimatum.”
“What is your point?”
“We have repeatedly assured the world that our nuclear weapons were destroyed. Now, by implication, we are admitting that those statements were not true.” Kalugin said nothing. He merely stared at the foreign minister, who felt his skin crawl. “Japan may believe that we do not have any weapons remaining,” the minister observed, “in which case they will disregard this ultimatum.” Kalugin went back to the draft document. A sunbeam peeped into the room between the drapes on the high window behind the president, who sat reading, his head lowered. He might nuke the Japanese, Danilov thought, suddenly sure that the ultimatum was not an idle threat. If they don’t pull out of Siberia, Kalugin might really do it.
11
Another clear, hot day. Plumes of diesel exhaust and dust rose into the warm, dry air behind the Japanese army trucks — all forty-seven of them — and gently tailed off to the east. The convoy was on a paved road beside the Amur River — a paved road with a lot of windblown dirt on it — rolling northwest at about twenty miles per hour. They were a day northwest of Khabarovsk, in a wide river valley defined by low hills or mountains to the northeast and southwest. The river, a mile to the left, formed the border with China, but no fences or guard towers marked it. Forty of the trucks carried supplies for Japanese forces a hundred miles ahead. Eight of the vehicles held soldiers, and the fuel, food, water, and cooking supplies necessary to keep the convoy rolling. The road wasn’t much — just a crowned two-laned paved road in a wide, treeless valley. It followed the natural contours of the land in a serpentine way along the path of least resistance. Although there were no signposts to proclaim it, the road was merely an improvement of an ancient trail. There were some culverts, occasionally a bridge, but in many places water routinely washed over the road. Dry now, many of the low places would be impassable in winter. From the road one could occasionally see sheep or goats cropping the sparse grass, here and there a shack or yurt, once in a great while a rattletrap civilian truck going somewhere or other, trailing its own dust plume. Occasionally, a dirt road led off from the main road. A few of these led to open pit mines in the hills, where manganese or some other ore was extracted from the earth with obsolete, well-worn equipment, sweat, and a lot of hard work. There were few people in this land. The natives shrank instinctively from the Japanese soldiers, who ignored them. Children in the doors of shacks watched the trucks approach, then retreated to the dark interior as the lead vehicle, a truck with a antiaircraft gun mounted on the flatbed
, drew near. The Japanese ate dust and watched the sky. Some of them were wishing the Russian soldiers hadn’t destroyed the railroad trestles and bridges as they retreated. If the railroad had remained intact, these soldiers would be riding a train west instead of jolting around in trucks. The shimmering, brassy sky seemed to reflect the earth’s heat back to it. High and far to the west a thin layer of cirrus clouds would diffuse the sun this afternoon, but that was many hours away. The brilliant sun was hard to look at. When the curves of the road allowed, the older drivers looked anyway, almost against their will, holding up a hand or thumb to block the burning rays and searching the sky while they fought the wheel to keep their trucks on the highly crowned road. The eagles didn’t come from the sun’s direction. They came from the northwest, straight down the valley, over this road, swiftly and silently, just a few hundred feet above the ground. The driver of the lead truck saw them first, less than a mile away, two Sukhoi-27’s, streaking in like guided missiles. He cranked the wheel over and swung the truck on two wheels off the road. The men in back, the gun crew, almost fell out. He was just quick enough to save their lives. The cannon shells impacted on the road behind the lead truck and walked straight into the next vehicle, where they lingered for a fraction of a second as the pilot of the lead plane dipped his nose expertly. This truck exploded under the hammering. As the fireball blossomed, the pilot was already shooting at another truck halfway down the convoy. The truck did not explode; it merely disintegrated as a dozen 30-mm cannon shells impacted in two brief seconds. The pilot released the trigger and selected a third target, toward the end of the column. Still racing along at five hundred knots, he squirted a burst at that truck but missed. He glanced left to ensure his wingman was where he should be, then dropped the right wing for a hard turn. After ninety degrees of heading change, he rolled left into a sixty-degree angle of bank. After 270 degrees of turn, he rolled out heading northwest, back toward the column of trucks. His wingman was still with him, out to the left. Both pilots selected targets as they raced once again toward the trucks, whose drivers were frantically trying to get them off the road on either side. Not that it mattered. With just the gentlest nudges of their rudders and caresses of their sticks, the pilots pointed their planes at targets chosen at random and squirted bursts from their internal GSH-30-1 guns. Four trucks exploded on that pass. One, which contained artillery ammunition, detonated with an earsplitting crash. The gun crew in the lead truck was still trying to get the restraining straps off the antiaircraft gun so they could point it when the Su-27’s swept overhead and disappeared into the brassy sky in the direction from whence they had come, northwest. It took the convoy commander an hour to get the undamaged trucks back on the road and rolling. Nine trucks had been destroyed or damaged too badly to continue. One of the nine had not been touched by the strafing aircraft; the panic-stricken driver had tried to drive over several large rocks, which shattered the transmission and tore the rear axle loose from the truck’s frame. Fourteen men were dead, ten wounded. One of the wounded was horribly burned; a sergeant shot him to put him out of his misery. The soldiers placed the dead men in a row near the road, amid the burned-out trucks. Someone else would have to bury them later. The officer in charge had his orders. The soldiers got back in the trucks and resumed their journey northwest.
Fortunes of War Page 16