by Tom Clancy
“Uh, Captain, there’s an airborne radar bearing three-five-one.”
“Strength?”
“Low but increasing. Probably a P-3, sir.”
“Very well.”
It was too much for the Army officer. “We just sit still?”
“That’s right.”
Sato brought the 747 in largely from memory. There were no runway lights, but he had enough from the moon to see what he was doing, and once again his copilot marveled at the man’s skill as the aircraft’s landing lights caught reflections from lights on the ground. The landing was slightly to the right of the centerline, but Sato managed a straight run to the end, this time without his usual look over at the junior officer. He was bringing the aircraft right onto the taxiway when there was a flash in the distance.
Major Sato’s was the first Eagle back to Kobler, actually having passed two damaged aircraft on his way in. There was activity on the ground, but the only radio chatter was incoherent. He had little choice in any case. His fighter was running on vapors and memory now, all the fuel gauges showing almost nothing. Also without lights, the aviator chose the proper glide-slope and touched down in exactly the right spot. He didn’t see the softball-size submunition that his nosegear hit. The fighter’s nose collapsed, and the Eagle slid, pinwheeling off the end of the runway. There was just enough vapor in the tanks to start a fire, then an explosion to scatter parts over the Kobler runway. A second Eagle, half a mile behind Sato’s, found another bomblet and exploded. The twenty remaining fighters angled away, calling on their radios for instructions. Six of them turned for the commercial field. The rest looked for and approached the large twin runways on Tinian, not knowing that they, too, had been sprinkled with cluster munitions from a series of Tomahawk missiles. Roughly half survived the landing without hitting anything.
Admiral Chandraskatta was in his control room, watching the radar display. He’d have to recall his fighters soon. He didn’t like risking his pilots in night operations, but the Americans were up in strength, doing another of their shows of force. And surely they could attack and destroy his fleet if they wished, but now? With a war against Japan under way, would America choose to initiate another combat action? No. His amphibious force was now at sea, and in two days, at sunset, the time would come.
The B-1s were lower than the flight crews had ever driven them. These were reservists, mostly airline pilots, assigned by a particularly beneficent Pentagon (with the advice of a few senior members of Congress) to a real combat aircraft for the first time in years. For practice bombing missions over land, they had a standard penetration altitude of no less than two hundred feet, more usually three hundred, because even Kansas farms had windmills and people erected radio towers in the damnedest places—but not at sea. Here they were down to fifty feet, and smokin’, one pilot observed, nervously entrusting his aircraft to the terrain-avoidance system. His group of eight was heading due south, having turned over Dondra Head. The other four were heading northwest after using a different navigational marker. There was lots of electronic activity ahead, enough to make him nervous, though none of it was on him yet, and he allowed himself the sheer exhilaration of the moment, flying over Mach-1, and doing it so low that his bomber was trailing a different sort of vapor trail, more like an unlimited-class racing boat, and maybe cooking some fish along the way ...
There.
“Low-level contacts from the north!”
“What?” The Admiral looked up. “Range?”
“Less than twenty kilometers, coming in very fast!”
“Are they missiles?”
“Unknown, Admiral!”
Chandraskatta looked down at his plot. There they were, the opposite direction from the American carrier aircraft. His fighters were not in a position to—
“Inbound aircraft!” a lookout called next.
“Engage?” Captain Mehta asked.
“Shoot first without orders?” Chandraskatta ran for the door, emerging onto the flight deck just in time to see the white lines in the water even before the aircraft causing them.
“Coming up now,” the pilot said, aiming himself just at the carrier’s bridge. He pulled back on the stick, and when it vanished under his nose, checked his altitude indicator.
“Pull up!” the voice-warning system told him in the usual sexy voice.
“I already did, Marilyn.” It sounded like a Marilyn to the TWA pilot. Next he checked his speed. Just under nine hundred knots. Wow. The noise this big mother would make ...
The sonic boom generated by the huge aircraft was more like a bomb blast, knocking the Admiral off his feet and shattering glass on the wheelhouse well over his head and wrecking other topside gear. Another followed seconds later, and then he heard more still as the massive aircraft buzzed over his fleet. He was slightly disoriented as he stood, and there were glass fragments on the flight deck as he made his way back under cover. Somehow he knew his place was on the bridge.
“Two radars are out,” he heard a petty officer say. “Rajput reports her SAMs are down.”
“Admiral,” a communications lieutenant called, holding up a growler phone.
“Who is this?” Chandraskatta asked.
“This is Mike Dubro. The next time we won’t be playing. I am authorized to tell you that the U.S. Ambassador is now meeting with your Prime Minister ...”
“It is in everyone’s best interest that your fleet should terminate its operations,” the former Governor of Pennsylvania said after the usual introductory pleasantries.
“You may not order us about, you know.”
“That was not an order, Madame Prime Minister. It was an observation. I am also authorized to tell you that my government has requested an emergency session of the U.N. Security Council to discuss your apparent intentions to invade Sri Lanka. We will offer to the Security Council the service of the U.S. Navy to safeguard the sovereignty of that country. Please forgive me for speaking bluntly, but my country does not intend to see the sovereignty of that country violated by anyone. As I said, it is in everyone’s interest to prevent a clash of arms.”
“We have no such intentions,” the Prime Minister insisted, taken very aback by the directness of this message after the earlier one she’d ignored.
“Then we are agreed,” Ambassador Williams said pleasantly. “I will communicate that to my government at once.”
It took nearly forever, in this case just over half an hour, before the first, then the second torpedo stopped circling, then stopped pinging. Neither found the MOSS a large-enough target to engage, but neither found anything else, either.
“Strength on that P-3 radar?” Claggett asked.
“Approaching detection values, sir.”
“Take her down, Mr. Shaw. Let’s get below the layer and tool on out of here.”
“Aye, Cap’n.” Shaw gave the necessary orders. Two minutes later, USS Tennessee was underwater, and five minutes after that at six hundred feet, turning southeast at a speed of ten knots. Soon thereafter they heard splashes aft, probably sonobuoys, but it took a long time for a P-3 to generate enough data to launch an attack, and Tennessee wasn’t going to linger about.
47
Brooms
“Not with a bang but a whimper?” the President asked.
“That’s the idea,” Ryan said, setting the phone down. Satellite imagery showed that whatever the losses had been in the air battle, the Japanese had lost another fourteen aircraft due to cluster munitions on their airfields. Their principal search radars were gone, and they’d shot off a lot of SAMs. The next obvious step was to isolate the islands entirely from air and sea traffic, and that could be done before the end of the week. The press release was already being prepared if the necessity presented itself.
“We’ve won,” the National Security Advisor said. “It’s just a matter of convincing the other side.”
“You’ve done well, Jack,” Durling said.
“Sir, if I’d managed to get the job done properly, it never wo
uld have started in the first place,” Ryan replied after a second’s pause. He remembered getting things started along those lines ... about a week too late to matter. Damn.
“Well, we seem to have done that with India, according to what Dave Williams just cabled in.” The President paused. “And what about this?”
“First we worry about concluding hostilities.”
“And then?”
“We offer them an honorable way out.” Upon elaboration, Jack was pleased to see that the Boss agreed with him.
There would be one more thing, Durling didn’t say, but he needed just a little more thinking about it. For the moment it was enough that America looked to be winning this war, and with it he’d won reelection for saving the economy and safeguarding the rights of American citizens. It had been quite an interesting month, the President thought, looking at the other man in the room and wondering what might have come to pass without him. After Ryan left, he placed a telephone call to the Hill.
One other advantage of airborne-radar aircraft was that they made counting coup a lot easier. They could not always show which missile killed which aircraft, but they did show them dropping off the screen.
“Port Royal reports recovery complete,” a talker said.
“Thank you,” Jackson said. He hoped the Army aviators weren’t too disappointed to have landed on a cruiser instead of Johnnie Reb, but he needed his deck space.
“I count twenty-seven kills,” Sanchez said. Three of his own fighters had fallen, with only one of the pilots rescued. The casualties were lighter than expected, though that fact didn’t make the letter-writing any easier for the CAG.
“Well, it’s not exactly like the Turkey Shoot, but it wasn’t bad. Tack on fourteen more from the Tomahawks. That’s about half their fighter strength—most of their F-15s—and they only have the one Hummer left. They’re on the short end from now on.” The battle-force commander went over the other data. A destroyer gone and the rest of their Aegis ships in the wrong place to interfere with the combat action. Eight submarines definitely destroyed. The overall operational concept had been to detach the arms from the body first, just as had been done in the Persian Gulf, and it had proved to be even easier over water than over land. “Bud, if you were commanding the other side, what would you try next?”
“We still can’t invade.” Sanchez paused. “It’s a losing game any way you cut it, but the last time we had to come this way ...” He looked at his commander.
“There is that. Bud, get a Tom ready for a flight with me in the back.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Sanchez made his way off.
“You thinking what I—” Stennis’s captain asked with a raised eyebrow.
“What do we got to lose, Phil?”
“A pretty good admiral, Rob,” he replied quietly.
“Where do you keep your radios in this barge?” Jackson asked with a wink.
“Where have you been?” Goto asked in surprise.
“In hiding, after your patron kidnapped me.” Koga walked in without so much as an announcement, took a seat without being bidden, and generally displayed the total lack of manners that proclaimed his renewed power. “What do you have to say for yourself?” the former Prime Minister demanded of his successor.
“You cannot talk to me that way.” But even these words were weak.
“How marvelous. You lead our nation to ruin, but you insist on deference from someone whom your master almost killed. With your knowledge?” Koga asked lightly.
“Certainly not—and who murdered the—”
“Who murdered the criminals? Not I,” Koga assured him. “There is a more important question: what are you going to do?”
“Why, I haven’t decided that yet.” This attempt at a strong statement fell short on several counts.
“You haven’t spoken to Yamata yet, you mean.”
“I decide things for myself!”
“Excellent. Do so now.”
“You cannot order me about.”
“And why not? I will soon be back in that seat. You have a choice. Either you will resign your position this morning or this afternoon I will speak in the Diet and request a vote of no-confidence. It is a vote you will not survive. In either case you are finished.” Koga stood and started to leave. “I suggest you do so honorably.”
People were lined up in the terminal, standing in line at the counters to get tickets home, Captain Sato saw, as he walked past with a military escort. He was only a young lieutenant, a paratrooper still apparently eager to fight, which was more than could be said for the others in the building. The waiting jeep raced away, heading for the military airfield. The natives were out now, unlike before, carrying signs urging the “Japs” to leave. Some of them ought to be shot for their insolence, Sato thought, still coming to terms with his grief. Ten minutes later, he entered one of Kobler’s hangars. Fighters were circling overhead, probably afraid to stray offshore, he thought.
“In here, please,” the Lieutenant said.
He walked into the building with consummate dignity, his uniform cap tucked inside his left arm, his back erect, hardly looking at anything, his eyes fixed on the distant wall of the building until the Lieutenant stopped and pulled the rubber sheet off the body.
“Yes, that is my son.” He tried not to look, and blessedly the face was not grossly disfigured, possibly protected by the flight helmet while the rest of the body had burned as he sat trapped in his wrecked fighter. But when he closed his eyes he could see his only child writhing in the cockpit, less than an hour after his brother had drowned. Could destiny be so cruel as this? And how was it that those who had served his country had to die, while a mere transporter of civilians was allowed to pass through the American fighters with contempt?
“The squadron command believes that he shot down an American fighter before coming back,” the Lieutenant offered. He’d just made that up, but he had to say something, didn’t he?
“Thank you, Lieutenant. I have to return to my aircraft now.” No more words were passed on the way back to the airport. The army officer left the man with his grief and his dignity.
Sato was on his flight deck twenty minutes later, the 747 already preflighted, and, he was sure, completely filled with people returning home under the promise of safe passage by the Americans. The ground tractor pushed the Boeing away from the jetway. It was driven by a native, and the gesture he flashed to the cockpit on decoupling from their aircraft was not exactly a friendly one. But the final insult came as he waited for clearance to take off. A fighter came in to land, not a blue Eagle, it was a haze-gray aircraft with NAVY painted on the engine nacelles.
“Nice touch, Bud. Grease job,” Jackson said as the canopy came up.
“We aim to please, sir,” Sanchez replied nervously. As he taxied off to the right, the welcoming committee, such as it was, all wore green fatigues and carried rifles. When the aircraft stopped, an aluminum extension ladder was laid alongside the aircraft. Jackson climbed out first, and at the bottom of the ladder a field-grade officer saluted him correctly.
“That’s a Tomcat,” Oreza said, handing over the binoculars. “And that officer ain’t no Jap.”
“Sure as hell,” Clark confirmed, watching the black officer get into a jeep. What effect would this have on his tentative orders? Attractive as it might be to put the arm on Raizo Yamata, even getting close enough to evaluate the possibility—his current instructions—was not a promising undertaking. He had also reported on conditions on Saipan, and that word, he thought, was good. The Japanese troops he’d seen earlier in the day were not the least bit jaunty, though some officers, especially the junior ones, seemed very enthusiastic about their mission, whatever that was right now. It was about what you expected of lieutenants in any army.
The Governor’s house, set on the local Capitol Hill next to the convention center, seemed a pleasant enough structure. Jackson was sweating now. The tropical sun was hot enough, and his nomex flight suit was just too good an in
sulator. Here a colonel saluted him and led him inside.
Robby knew General Arima on sight, remembering the intelligence file he’d seen in the Pentagon. They were of about the same height and build, he saw. The General saluted. Jackson, bareheaded and under cover, was not allowed to do so under naval regulations. It seemed the proper response not to, anyway. He nodded his head politely, and left it at that.
“General, can we speak in private?”
Arima nodded and led Jackson into what looked like a combination den/office. Robby took a seat, and his host was kind enough to hand over a glass of ice water.
“Your position is ... ?”
“I am Commander Task Force Seventy-Seven. I gather you are the commander of Japanese forces on Saipan.” Robby drank the water down. It annoyed him greatly to be sweating, but there was no helping that.
“Correct.”
“In that case, sir, I am here to request your surrender.” He hoped the General knew the semantic difference between “request” and “demand,” the customary verb for the occasion.
“I am not authorized to do that.”
“General, what I’m about to say to you is the position of my government. You may leave the islands in peace. You may take your light weapons with you. Your heavy equipment and aircraft will remain behind for later determination of status. For the moment we require that all Japanese citizens leave the island, pending the restoration of normal relations between our countries.”
“I am not authorized to—”
“I’ll be saying the same thing on Guam in two hours, and the American Ambassador in Tokyo is now requesting a meeting with your government.”
