by Tom Clancy
The river Tone would take him most of the way he needed to go, and on the south side of the river was a rail line, and on the rail line was a train that would go all the way to Choshi. The train was cruising at over a hundred knots, and he took position right over it, one eye on the train below while another kept track of a moving indicator on his threat-receiver display. He held one hundred feet over the tops of the catenary towers, pacing the train exactly, just over the last car in the "consist."
"That's funny." The operator on Kami-Two noticed a blip, enhanced by the computer systems, closing in on the position of his aircraft. He keyed the intercom for the senior controller. "Possible low-level inbound," he reported, highlighting the contact and crossloading it for the crew commander. "It's a train," the man replied at once, comparing the location with a map overlay. The problem with flying these damned things too close to land. The standard discrimination software, originally purchased from the Americans, had been modified, but not in all details. The airborne radar could track anything that moved, but there wasn't enough computer power in all the world to classify and display all the contacts that would develop from cars and trucks moving on the highways under the aircraft. To de-clutter the screens, nothing going slower than one hundred fifty kilometers per hour was passed through the computer-filtering system, but over land even that was not good enough, not over the country with the world's finest trains. Just to be sure, the senior officer watched the blip for a few seconds. Yes, it was following the mainline from Tokyo to Choshi. It couldn't possibly be a jet aircraft. A helicopter, theoretically, could do something like this, but from the weak character of the signal, it was probably just scatter off the metal roof of the train, and probably reflection off the catenary towers.
"Adjust your MTI-discriminator to two hundred," he ordered his people. It took three seconds for all of them to do that, and sure enough, that moving blip by the Tone and two other more obvious ground contacts disappeared. They had more interesting things to do, since -Two was crossloading the "take" from Kamis Four and Six and then downloading it to the Air Defense HQ just outside Tokyo. The Americans were probing their defenses again, and probably, again, with their advanced F-22's, trying to see if they could defeat the Kamis. Well, this time the reception wouldn't be quite so friendly. Eight F-I5 Eagle interceptors were now up, four under the control of each E-767. If the American fighters came closer, they'd be made to pay for it.
He had to risk one open transmission, and even over an encrypted burst-channel it made the Colonel nervous, but the business entailed risks under the best of circumstances.
"Lightning Lead to flight. Separate in five-tour-three-two-one-Separate!"
He pulled back on the stick, jerking his fighter up and away from the Strike Eagle that had spent the last half hour in his jetwash. At the same time his right hand flipped off the radar transponder that he'd had on to boost the return signal the Japanese AEW aircraft had been taking off his aircraft. Behind and below, the F-isE and its female flight crew would be diving slightly and turning left. The Lightning climbed rapidly, in the process losing almost all of its forward velocity. The Colonel punched burners for rapid acceleration and used the thrust-vector capability of the aircraft to initiate a radical maneuver in the opposite direction, greatly speeding the separation.
The Japanese radar might or might not have gotten some sort of return off his fighter, the Colonel knew, but he knew how the radar system was working now: It was operating at high power and getting all sorts of spurious returns as a result, which the computer system had to classify before presenting them to the system controllers. In essence it did a job no different from that of human operator, albeit more quickly and efficiently, but it was not perfect, as he and the other three Lightnings were about to prove.
"Turning south," the controller reported—unnecessarily, as four separate people were now monitoring the progress of the inbounds. Neither he nor his fellows could know that the computer had noted a few ghostly returns turning north, but these had been weaker than other returns that were not moving rapidly enough to be classified as aircraft. Nor did they mimic the probable flight paths of aircraft. Then things got harder.
"Getting jamming from the inbounds."
The lead Lightning was now in a nearly vertical climb. There was danger in this, since the flight profile offered the E-767 the least stealthy aspect of the aircraft, but it was also offered no lateral motion to speak of, and so could well appear to be a ghost return, especially in the electronic clutter being generated by the powerful jammers on the Strike Eagles. In less than thirty seconds, the Lightnings tipped over to level flight at an altitude of fifty-five thousand feet. The Colonel was paying very close attention to his threat systems now. If the Japanese had him, they would show it by using their electronic scanning to hammer his fighter with radar energy…but they weren't.
The stealthy nature of his fighter was enough that he was lost amid the trashreturns. The system caught side lobes now. The E-767 had shifted to its high-frequency fire-control mode, and was not targeted on him. Okay. He boosted power to supercruise, and his Lightning accelerated to a thousand miles per hour as the pilot selected fire-control mode for his HUD system.
"One o'clock high. I have him, Sandy," the backseater reported. "He even has his a/c lights on."
The train had stopped at a suburban station, and the Comanche had left it behind, cruising now at one hundred twenty knots toward the coastal town.
Richter flexed his fingers one last time, looked up, and saw the aircraft's strobe lights far overhead. He was almost under it now, and good as its radar might be, it wouldn't be able to look straight down through the body of the airframe itself…yes, the center of his threat screen was black now.
"Here we go," he said over the intercom. He jammed his throttles to the firewall, deliberately overspooling the engines as he pulled back sharply in the sidestick. The Comanche leaped upwards in a spiraling climb. The only real worry here was his engine temperature. They were designed to take abuse, but this would take it to the very limit. A warning indicator appeared in his helmet display, a vertical bar that started growing in height and changing color almost as rapidly as the numbers changed on the altitude display.
"Whoa," the backseater breathed, then he looked down and selected the weapons display for his screens, the better to utilize his time before going back to scanning outside. "Negative traffic."
Which figured, Richter thought. They wouldn't want people cluttering up the air around something as valuable as this target. That was fine. He could see it now, as his helicopter shot through ten thousand feet, climbing like the fighter plane it really was, rotor-driven or not. He could see it in his targeting display now, still too far away to shoot, but there, a blip in a little box in the center of the head-up display. Time for a check. He activated his missile illumination systems. The F-22 had an LPI radar, meaning that there was a low probability of interception at the other end. That proved optimistic.
"We just took a hit," the countermeasures officer said. "We just look a high-frequency hit, bearing unknown," he went on, looking at his instruments for additional data.
"Probably a scatter from us," the senior controller said, busy now with vectoring his fighters onto the still-inbound contacts.
"No, no, frequency wasn't right for that." The officer ran another instrument check, but there was nothing else to support the bad feeling that had just turned his arms cold.
"Engine-heat warning. Engine-heat warning," the voice was telling him because he'd ignored the visual display rather blatantly, the onboard computer thought.
"I know, honey," Richter replied.
Over the Nevada desert, he'd managed a zoom-climb to twenty-one thousand feet, so far beyond the normal flight envelope of a helicopter that it had actually frightened him, Richter remembered, but that had been in relatively warm air, and it was colder here. He blazed through twenty thousand feet, still with a respectable climb rate, just as the target changed cour
se, turning away from him. It seemed to be orbiting at about three hundred knots, probably using one engine for propulsion and the other to generate power for its radar. He hadn't been briefed on it, but it seemed reasonable enough. What mattered was that he had seconds to get within range, but the huge turbofan engines on the converted airliner were inviting targets for his Stingers.
"Just in range, Sandy."
"Roger." His left hand selected missiles from his weapons panel. The side doors on the aircraft snapped open. Attached to each of them were three Stinger missiles. With his last vestige of control, he slued the aircraft around, flipped the cover off the trigger switch, and squeezed six times. All of the missiles blazed off their rails, arcing upwards toward the aircraft two miles away. With that, Richter eased way back on the throttles and nosed over, diving and cooling his abused engines, watching the ground while his backseater followed the progress of the missiles.
The first Stinger burned out and fell short. The remaining five did better, and though two of them lost power before reaching the target, four of them found it, three to the right engine and one to the left.
"Hits, multiple hits."
The E-767, at low speed, didn't have much of a chance. The Stingers had small warheads, hut the civilian-spec engines on the aircraft were poorly designed to deal with damage. Both immediately lost power, and the one that had actually been powering the aircraft came apart first. Fragments of turbine blades exploded through the safety casing and ripped into the right wing, severing the flight controls and destroying aerodynamic performance.
The converted airliner rolled immediately right, and did not recover, its flight crew surprised at the unannounced disaster and quite unable to deal with it. Half of the starboard wing separated from the aircraft almost at once, and on the ground, radar operators saw the alpha-numeric display marking the position of Kami-Two flip to the emergency setting of 7711 and then simply disappear.
"That's a hard kill, Sandy."
"Roger." The Comanche was falling rapidly now, heading toward the clutter of the coast. Engine temps were back to normal, and Richter hoped he hadn't done them permanent harm. As for the rest, he'd killed people before.
"Kami-Two just dropped off the air," the communications officer reported.
"What?" the senior controller asked, distracted by his intercept mission.
"Garbled call, explosion, something like that, then the data links just dropped off."
"Stand by, I have to vector my Eagles in."
It had to be getting twitchy for the 15-Echoes, the Colonel knew. Their job for the moment was to be bait, to draw the Japanese Eagles out farther over the water while the Lightnings went in behind them to chop down their AEW support and spring the trap. The good news for the moment was that the third E-767 had just gone off the air. So the other side of the mission had happened as planned. That was nice for a change. And so, for the rest…
"Two, this is lead, executing, now!" The Colonel flipped his illumination radars on, twenty miles from the orbiting AEW aircraft. Next he opened the weapons-bay doors to give the AMRAAM missiles a chance to see their quarry. Both One and Two had acquisition, and he triggered both off. "Fox-Two, Fox-Two on the North Guy with two Slammers!"
The opening of the weapons bay instantly made the Lightnings about as stealthy as a tall building. Blips appeared on five different screens, along with additional warnings as to the speed and heading of the newly discovered aircraft. The additional word from the countermeasures officer was the final voice of doom.
"We're being illuminated at very close range, bearing zero-two-seven!"
"What? Who is that?" He had problems of his own, with his Eagles about to launch missiles at the incoming Americans. Kami-Six had just switched to fire-control mode, to allow the interceptors to fire in the blind-launch mode, as they'd done with the B-1 bombers. He couldn't stop that now, the senior officer told himself.
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.
And 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-15C 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 F-22's.
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 r
ealize 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.
