Fortunes of War

by Stephen Coonts

  He was low and slow, trapped against the sea. He did the only thing he could — pulled the nose of the Mig straight up and lit the afterburner. The missile went through the left wing, snapping it cleanly in two. With his plane rolling out of control, the pilot of Tail-end Charlie ejected. His parachute opened normally and he rode it down into the black ocean.

  After floating in his life jacket for two hours, he died of hypothermia and exhaustion. During that time his only consolation was the fact that he had fired a missile at a transport before the unseen enemy got him. He never knew that his missile failed to guide.

  White Three — Jiro Kimura — watched the spots of flame that were the afterburner exhausts of White One and Two accelerate away into the darkness. They receded more slowly than missile engines, but they did resemble missiles, or wandering stars, points of light growing smaller and smaller as the night swallowed them. Jiro glanced at his wingman, then turned back toward Vladivostok. He kept his turn shallow, less than a ten-degree angle of bank, so he would not present the belly of the plane to an enemy radar to use as a reflecting surface. He watched the tactical situation develop on his multifunction tac display. He saw the transports, saw the Migs go for them, and saw White One and Two dash to cut them off. The missiles that were fired were not displayed, but the disappearance of the Migs from the screen one by one spoke volumes. We are winning. That thought has sustained fighting men for thousands of years. It helped Jiro now, gave him a sense of confidence that no amount of exhortation could. He was eying his fuel gauges nervously and toying with the idea of breaking radio silence when the tactical display presented a target coming down from the northeast, from the direction of Khabarovsk. A Sukhoi. Now two. Where is Yellow Flight?

  Jiro leveled his wings heading toward Vlad. The Sukhois were about a mile apart, heading southwest. If everyone maintained heading, the Sukhois would pass White Three and Four several miles to the left. “Three, this is Four. My gadget has overheated. I’m turning it off.”

  This unexpected transmission on the plane-to-plane digital laser system shook Jiro. He had just been basking in the glow of Athena’s excellence, and now his wingman’s unit had failed. It was high time to be out of here. Where is Yellow Flight?

  Without Athena to cancel incoming waves of electromagnetic energy enemy radar, Four was now plainly visible on the screen of every radar looking. Apparently, several of them were looking with interest. Jiro’s electronic countermeasures panel lit up — someone was tracking them in high PRF, the firing mode of an antiaircraft missile radar. Actually they were tracking the wingman, but Jiro was close enough to the targeted aircraft to receive the indications on his equipment. “Break away, Four. RTB.” This meant return to base. “I’ll be right along.”

  “My fuel is bingo,” Four said, trying to cushion the embarrassment of his Athena failure. Jiro’s fuel was also getting desperate. But if he didn’t cover Four’s withdrawal, Four was in for a very bad time. “RTB,” Jiro repeated. “Now!”

  The other Zero turned away hard. Jiro watched the tactical display and ensured the wingman steadied up as he headed toward Hokkaido. The Sukhois from Vlad turned fifteen degrees to the left and launched a missile. Two. Four was too far away for the discrete laser com. Jiro keyed the radio, which was scrambled, of course. Still, he was radiating. “Two missiles in the air, White Four. Sixty-three miles behind you.” Four should have the missiles on his tactical display, if he had the proper display punched in. Jiro was taking no chances. The Sukhois were too far away for Jiro to shoot. The Russian missiles had more range than the Japanese. Perhaps the Sukhois could be diverted with another target. Jiro turned off his Athena device. The visibility was too poor to see the Russian missiles’ exhaust. They were out there, though, thundering along at almost Mach 4, covering two miles every three seconds. The missiles had been fired at nearly maximum range, so White Four was trying to outrun them. He was accelerating too, dumping fuel into his exhaust in exchange for speed. That was not a wise maneuver for a man without fuel to spare, but he was trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea. Four was accelerating through Mach 2. Well, he was safe. The missiles would never catch him in a stern chase before they exhausted their fuel. “Three, this is Four. I’m changing freqs, calling for a tanker. I need fuel to get home.”

  “Roger.”

  Jiro devoted his attention to the Sukhois, which had turned in his direction. He checked his fuel gauges. He didn’t have any to spare on speed dashes, either. Missile launch. One … two from the Sukhois. Where in hell is Yellow Flight?

  “Yellow Leader, White Three. State your position and expected time to arrive on station, please.”

  Jiro and the Sukhois were closing head-on at a combined speed of Mach 2.5. The missiles were coming at Mach 4. Closure speed with the missiles, 1.2 miles per second. He was going to be in range for his missiles in five seconds. They were armed and ready to fire. He had only to punch the fire button on the stick. Four … three…, two … one … the in-range symbol appeared on the scope. If he waited for a few seconds, he would have a better chance of scoring hits. But the fuel … Jiro pressed the fire button and held it. One potato…, and a missile left in a gout of flame. He released the button, waited for the ready symbol on the HUD, then fired again. With his left hand, he reached for the Athena switch. He turned it from the standby to the on position. The yellow light stayed illuminated. Damnation I He cycled the switch to off, then back to standby. Now to the on position. There was a ten-second warm-up delay built into the circuitry, so that many seconds had to pass before the gear began to radiate, canceling incoming radar waves. Meanwhile, he dumped the nose and turned hard to the southeast. Nose well down, gravity helping him accelerate. The incoming missile warning was flashing, showing twenty-one seconds to impact. He was tempted to engage the afterburners; he eyed the fuel gauge again. No, he didn’t have enough. If he did the burner trick, he might ” end up trying to swim to Japan. Going down hard. He pushed the stick forward another smidgen, his dive. Fifteen seconds to impact. He looked outside, tried to see the oncoming missiles. There!

  And he went into the top of the stratus cloud deck.

  That was stupid. If he had kept the missiles in sight, he would have had a better chance to outmaneuver them, if Athena refused to work. Stupid. A stupid mistake. You are fast running out of options, Jiro, options to save your silly butt. At twelve seconds to impact, the green light appeared on the Athena panel. The missiles were still coming. He watched them close on the tactical display. were they tracking him?

  One way to find out. He slapped the stick sideways and turned hard into the missiles. Six Go’s. Inadvertently, a groan escaped him. The missiles didn’t follow. They passed harmlessly behind and to his left. Jiro got his nose up, started climbing, and lowered a wing to turn back to the southeast. He needed to get up to at least forty thousand feet for the trip to the tanker at Station Alpha. He was climbing when he saw his missiles and the Sukhois merge on his tactical display. Target merger, and the Sukhois were gone. He lived; the Russians died. Just like that. Jiro wiped the sweat from his eyes.

  7

  Other soviet NAVY was always something of a floating oxymoron, the seagoing service of the world’s largest land power. It never received the prestige, money, or priority accorded to the Soviet army. The NAVY’s hour of glory came after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when capable blue-water combatants were built in sufficient numbers to form a credible threat to the U.s. NAVY and America’s global interests. These sleek, heavily armed gray ships sailed the seven seas in packs, proudly waved the red flag, and never fired a shot. When the bankrupt Soviet Union imploded in 1991, the surviving republics divided up the NAVY’s ships. Russia received the majority, a dubious honor, for she lacked the money to sail or repair them. There wasn’t even money to pay the sailors or buy them food. Some of the ships were sold to Third World nations for badly needed foreign exchange, but most were left to rust at their piers. About half of the Russian far eastern fleet was tie
d to piers at the three naval bases near Vladivostok when squadrons of four destroyers each steamed into the harbor of each base. The Japanese NAVY opened fire from less than a mile away with 127-mm 54-caliber deck guns. Not a single Russian ship fired back. Most of the Russian ships had no crews, and even the ones that did have sailors aboard were in no condition to get under way, much less fight. At the two bases east of Vlad, all the ships were cold iron, without steam up. In Vlad, only two ships were receiving electrical power from the shore. These were tied to the westernmost pier in Golden Horn Bay. The rest looked, by day anyway, like exactly what they were, rust buckets abandoned to their fate. It wasn’t as if the nation or the NAVY didn’t care about these ships, which had been purchased at an enormous cost, but they could never reach a decision about what to do with them. Every choice had enormous emotional and political implications. So they did nothing. Most of these vessels were now so far gone that they would be useful only if salvaged for scrap.

  The Japanese ships steamed slowly in trail, one behind the other, acquired their targets as if this were an exercise, and banged away mercilessly. The explosive shells shredded the upper decks of the Russian ships and punched holes in unarmored hulls. Here and there minor fires broke out, but the ships contained no fuel, no explosive fluids, nothing that would readily burn. All those materials had been stripped off the ships years ago by naval yard workers and sold on the black market. The two ships that had power and lights received special attention from the Japanese destroyers. Ironically, neither was a combatant. One was a fifty-year-old icebreaker, the other a large oceangoing tug. Both sank at their piers under the Japanese hammering. Finally, after thirty minutes of shelling, the Japanese were satisfied. Still in trail, keeping to the channel, the four destroyers of each squadron turned smartly and steamed for the entrance of the bay.

  The naval base five hundred miles northeast, at Gavan, received a similar treatment, quick, surgical, and vicious. Alas, this base was almost a mirror image of the bases at Vladivostok, a place to moor abandoned ships, but here and there were a few active units, ships that had received some modicum of attention through the years and still had a crew. One of those craft was a low-freeboard monitor used by the border guard to patrol the Amur River when it was free of ice. The crew, directed by a very junior officer who had the night watch, managed to get one of the vessel’s two 115-mm antitank guns unlimbered and loaded. Their first shot missed, but the second punched a nice hole through the hull of a Japanese destroyer, starting a hot fire. The Japanese turned the fire of their flotilla upon this one gunboat. The gunners in the armored turret of the 115-mm gun got off two more rounds, both of which missed, before Japanese shells severed all electrical power to the turret. Later, as the destroyers steamed away, on their way to shell Alek-sandrovsk on Sakhalin Island, then Nikolayevsk, at the mouth of the Amur River, the flag officer in charge of the flotilla pondered about that gun crew. Against overwhelming odds, they had fought back bravely. Conquering the Russians, he mused, might not be as easy as wardroom gossip predicted.

  Captain Second Rank Pavel Saratov was the skipper of Admiral Kolchak, a Russian dieselstelectric attack submarine cruising between the southernmost of the Kuril Islands and the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Normally, in accordance with NAVY doctrine, Saratov would be well out of sight of land while he ran on the surface charging his batteries, but to irritate the Japanese Moscow had ordered him to cruise for the last three days back and forth just outside the Japanese twelve-mile limit, often near the Japanese port of Nemuro. The boat left its base at Petropavlosk, on the eastern coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula, two weeks ago. Her first task had been to deliver two NAVY divers to a shipwreck blocking the channel into Okhotsk, a tiny port on the northern shore of the Sea of Okhotsk that had given the sea its name. Normally, maritime demolition jobs were assigned to the Border Security Forces, but for reasons known only to a bureaucrat buried in Moscow the NAVY got this one. Saratov couldn’t find the wreck. He went ashore and was told by the port manager that the wreck he sought had blocked the channel for ten years, until last winter, when the badly rusted superstructure was destroyed by pack ice, which closed the port annually from December through May. There was nothing left to demolish. An hour before dawn this rainy, misty morning, Saratov was on the bridge of his boat, the cockpit on top of the sail, or conning tower, pondering his fate. He had once commanded an Alfa-class nuclear-powered attack submarine, but the nuke boats were all laid up several years ago when Russia agreed to disable their reactors in return for foreign bank credits. Saratov had not complained — the reactors were sloppily built, old, and dangerous. They had never been properly maintained. Actually, he had been relieved that his days of absorbing unknown quantities of leaking radiation were over. Many of his fellow submarine officers left the NAVY then, but Saratov had decided to stay. The entire nation was in economic meltdown; he had no civilian skills or job prospects. He opted to use his seniority to get command of a diesel-powered sub, one that could actually get under way. Not that there was much money for diesel fuel. Twice he had traded torpedo fuel for food and diesel fuel so he could take his boat to sea. Four and a half years later, here he was, off the coast of Japan, still in command, still eating occasionally. His crew consisted of twenty officers and twenty-five warrants, or michmen. Only five of the crew were common enlisted. The Soviet NAVY’s enlisted men had all been draftees, few of whom had the skills or desire to stay past the end of their required service. Those few willing to stay for a career had been promoted to michmen. After the collapse of communism the new Russian NAVY was forced to use the same system since there was no money to attract volunteers. The officers and michmen on board, and the five volunteer recruits, were 25 percent of the survivors of the Soviet far eastern submarine fleet. Three other conventional dieselstelectric subs were similarly manned — just four boats in all. It was enough to make a grown man cry. Admiral Kolchak was a good old boat. She had once been known as Vladimirsky Komsomolets, commemorating a municipal organization of Communist youth, but after the collapse of communism she was re-named — for an anti-Communist hero. She had her problems, of course, but they were repairable problems that came with age and use, not design defects. The crew always managed to get her back to the surface, where her diesel engines could usually be coaxed into life. And none of the sailors had come down with radiation sickness. Two years ago the Libyans almost bought her, then elected to take a boat from the Black Sea fleet instead. That had been a close call. The communications officer interrupted Saratov’s reverie with a radio dispatch from Moscow. It was highly classified and marked with the highest urgency classification, so it had been decoded immediately and brought to him. He read the paper by the light of the red flashlight he carried. A Japanese attack on Vladivostok?

  He went below and read the message again under the good light in the control room. The message directed him to take his boat to Vladivostok and attack any Japanese ships he encountered. First priority, according to the message, were warships; second, troop transports. Presumably, the troops would be on deck waving Rising Sun flags, which would be visible in the periscope, so he wouldn’t waste a torpedo on a ship laden with bags of cement or rubber monster toys. The navigator was at his station in the control room. Saratov handed the message to him to read as he examined the chart on the navigator’s table. The navigator started whispering excitedly with the officer of the deck.

  Saratov was measuring distances when he heard the michman of the watch say in a normal tone of voice, “P-3 radar signals.” This would be the fourth P-3 flyover in the last three days. “Where?” Saratov asked sharply. “Bearing one one five, estimated range fifteen.”

  “Dive, dive, dive! Emergency dive!” Pavel Saratov shouted, and personally pushed the dive alarm.

  The P-3 Orion was a large four-engine turboprop airplane with a crew of twelve. Made by Lockheed for the U.s. NAVY and periodically updated as electronic technology evolved, P-3’s were military versions of the old Electra airframe. T
hey were a much bigger success as anti-submarine patrol planes than they ever were as airliners. The Japanese Self-Defense Force had operated them for decades. The crew of the P-3 that found Admiral Kolchak knew that the submarine had been operating on the surface near the port of Nemuro. Tonight they had been overflying radar contacts and positively identifying them with their 100-million-candlepower searchlight. Then one of the contacts ahead began to fade. The radar operator sang out enthusiastically, “Sinker, sinker, sinker. Thirteen miles, bearing three five zero relative.”