Fortunes of War (32 page)

Saratov didn't bother to reply.

“I have a recommendation from Revel, a leading geologist in Moscow, who studies these sorts of things with international groups,” Esenin continued. “He thinks the most unstable fault is this one, at the entrance to Tokyo Bay. It has not moved in at least three hundred years, and it is very ready.

“Our task is to place our four weapons in a row atop this fault, two miles apart. When the weapons detonate, the concussion should break the eastern plate free, causing it to rise significantly.”

“How significantly?” Pavel Saratov couldn't take his eyes from the chart.

“The geologist thinks the potential is there for a movement on the order of ten feet. Of course, explosions of this magnitude will vaporize an extraordinary amount of water, so the sea will rush in to fill the void. Movement of the plate will merely speed the water along.”

“I see.”

“The tidal wave should be quite extraordinary. A tsunami, I believe the Japanese call it. If the professor's calculations are correct, the tidal wave should be two hundred feet high when it washes over Tokyo.”

“Only four warheads?”

“We will explode two simultaneously. The second set will be timed to blow exactly three minutes later. Professor Revel believes the earth should be moving down at that moment, on a long oscillation cycle, so the second set of explosions should reinforce that movement. True, we constructed the scenario hurriedly, but we have great faith in Professor Revel's computer models. It should work. It
will
work.”

“All we have to do,” Saratov said heavily, “is get over the fault, toss off the weapons, and sail away.”

“I leave it in your capable hands, Captain.”

“I will do all I can, General. Alas, any chance of success lies in the hands of the Japanese. They will be hunting us, and the odds are on their side.”

Puffy clouds floating in a calm summer sky greeted the Japanese pilots as they climbed out of Khabarovsk headed for their tanker rendezvous. There were sixteen Zeros divided into two gaggles of eight. Colonel Handa led the eight planes of the high echelon. He had allowed his senior commanders to choose where they wished to fly, and they all wished to fly high, with him. The glory was in shooting down enemy planes in combat, not strafing hangars and barracks.

Still, the commanders put their very best subordinates in the eight airplanes that were going to strike the base.

Colonel Handa had intended to exhort his pilots at the briefing to do their best for the honor of Japan and the Zero pilot corps, but then he thought better of it. I have watched too many American movies, he told himself.

 

“They're coming,” Lee Foy shouted as he slammed down the telephone. “Headed this way. Over a dozen. Took off ten minutes ago.”

The American pilots went into the dispersal shack—an old hen coop that they had commandeered, cleaned, and moved to the parking mat—for their final briefing. Everyone was checking his watch. The pilots managed to avoid one another's eyes.

Bob Cassidy was glad the Japanese were on their way. The suspense was over. He had known the Japanese would attack eventually; he just hadn't known it would come so soon.

His people were ready. He had just six planes available, so he divided them into three flights. He would take Paul Scheer north of the base and wait until the Sentinel missiles had forced the Zero pilots to shut off their radars. Then he and Scheer would go in among them.

Dixie and Aaron Hudek were going out to the northwest of the base, Preacher Fain and Lee Foy to the southwest. They would come in when Cassidy called them.

Each plane carried eight Sidewinders and a full load of ammo for the gun. Cassidy had ordered the AMRAAMs left behind. He was betting that the Sky Eye data link would work. If it didn't, this fight was going to be a disaster.

He was also betting that the Japanese would avoid Chinese airspace and come in from the east, the most direct route from Khabarovsk after avoiding China. If the Zeros circled and came in from another direction, they might find a pair of F-22s with their radar and drop them both.

Every choice involves risks. Life involves risk. Breathing is a risk, Cassidy thought.

He and his pilots needed some luck. If they got a little of the sweet stuff, they could smash the Zeros right here, today, once and for all. And if luck ran the wrong way…well, you only had to die once.

Cassidy stood in front of the blackboard. He already had all the freqs, altitudes, and call signs written there from the planning session. “Okay, people. They are on their way. They'll hit the tankers and motor over our way, we hope. Let's go over the whole thing one more time, then suit up. We'll man up an hour and a half before they are expected, and take off an hour prior.”

No one asked a single question. Eyes kept straying to wrist watches. When the brief was over, Cassidy walked outside, went around behind the shack, and peed in the grass. Finally, he suited up, taking his time.

He was standing outside the shack, looking at the airplanes, thinking about Sweet Sabrina and little Robbie and Jiro Kimura when he heard the satellite phone ring. Lee Foy answered. Fifteen seconds went by; then Foy shouted, “Sixteen Zeros. They've finished tanking and are on their way here. ETA is an hour and twenty-eight minutes from right now.”

“Let's do it!”

“Let's go.”

They grabbed gear and helmets and began jogging for their planes.

 

When the planes were level at altitude after tanking, Jiro Kimura slid away from the other flight of four Zeros that was assigned to the ground attack mission. He was wearing the night-vision helmet that he had borrowed from the helo pilots, but he didn't have it turned on. He wanted to try that now.

First, he checked his three charges, Ota, Miura, and Sasai. They
were precisely in position, as if he had welded them there. They were good pilots, great comrades.

Satisfied, Jiro engaged the autopilot and began fiddling with the helmet. Before takeoff he had turned the gain setting to its lowest reading, as the helo pilot had advised. Now he lowered the hinged goggles down over his eyes. The battery was on, so the goggles were working, or should be.

His eyes slowly adjusted to the reduced light levels. Oh yes, there was the other flight, out there to the right.

He turned his head from side to side, taking in the view. The view to both sides was limited, and he couldn't read the instruments on his panel, but in combat, he wouldn't need to: he could find every dial and switch blindfolded.

The real disadvantage to the helmet was weight. In a helicopter a twelve-pound helmet on a healthy man was no big deal if he didn't have to wear it too long, but in a fighter, pulling G's, the story would be much different. At five G's, the darn thing would weigh sixty pounds, which would be a nice test of Jiro's neck muscles. Ten G's might be enough to snap his neck like a twig.

It just stood to reason that if the Americans had figured out a way to cancel visible light waves, their airplanes still might be visible in the infrared portion of the spectrum.

Jiro's oxygen mask was lying in his lap. The helo helmet had no fittings to accept the mask. The Zero's cockpit was partially pressurized with a maximum three psi differential, so even though the plane was at 25,000 feet, the cockpit was only at 9,000. If the canopy was damaged or lost, Jiro would have to hold the mask to his face with his left hand while he flew with the other.

 

The F-22s took off in pairs, Cassidy and Scheer first, then Dixie and Hudek, then Fain and Foy. The enlisted troops stood on the ramp watching the planes get airborne, basking in the thunder of the engines. As the wheels came into the wells, the pilots turned on their aircrafts' smart skin. The noise of the engines continued to rumble for minutes after the planes disappeared from view.

After the noise had faded, the senior NCO told the troops to get in the trenches, freshly dug by a backhoe that was sitting near the dispersal shack. They could safely stay out of the trenches for a while but the NCO was too keyed up to wait. Better safe than sorry.

The Zero symbols appeared on Bob Cassidy's tactical display at a range of two hundred miles. He was fifty miles north of the base at twenty thousand feet, cruising at max conserve airspeed, about .72 Mach. Scheer was on his left wing, out about a hundred yards. The symbols were so bunched together, Cassidy couldn't tell exactly how many bogeys were there.

The main problem with Sky Eye was that at long ranges the symbols were grossly compressed, and at short ranges they were unreliable. The gadget seemed to give the best presentation when the bogeys were from five to fifty miles away. Inside five miles, he would be forced to rely upon the F-22s' infrared sensors; the data from all the F-22s was shared, so the computers could arrive at a fairly complete tactical picture.

At least he had dodged the first bullet today: the Zeros were coming in from the east, right up the threat axis.

Cassidy checked the position of the other two flights of F-22s. He thought Preacher Fain was too close to the base.

“Preacher, this is Hoppy. A few more miles south, please.”

Preacher acknowledged.

Cassidy checked everything: the intensity of the HUD displays, master armament switch on, the proper displays on the proper MFDs, cabin altitude, engine gauges…. He was ready.

 

Preacher Fain tightened his shoulder harness and ensured the inertial take-up reel was locked, so that he would not be thrown about the cockpit. He adjusted his oxygen mask, wiped a gloved hand across his dark helmet visor, and checked the armament panel.

Fain glanced at his tac display: Lee Foy was right where Fain wanted him, about five hundred feet out and completely behind his leader. With Foy well aft and off to one side, Fain was free to maneuver left, right, whatever, without worrying about a midair collision. And the wingman was free to follow the fight and keep the bad guys off Fain's tail while the leader engaged.

The high Zeros were only forty miles from the base. The low ones were thirty miles out. Eight in each flight. Fain eyeballed the rate of progress of the top group and tightened his turn radius. He wanted to come slicing in behind them just after they got into the Sentinel zone, when they were certain to have their radars off. He wanted to knock
as many down as possible in the first pass, then dive to engage the lower ones. The Zeros down low were going to be juicy, pinned against the deck as the invisible F-22s came down on them from above. Oh boy!

 

The heart of the Sentinel missile system was its computer, which contained a sophisticated program designed to prevent an enemy from causing all the missiles in the battery to be launched by merely sweeping his radar once, shutting down, then repeating the cycle. The program required that the target radar sweep repeatedly and be progressing into the missile's performance envelope at a rate of speed sufficient to enable it to get into range by the time the missile arrived. If these parameters were met, the computer would fire two missiles, one after the other, then sit inactive for a brief period of time before the system would again listen for the proper signals.

The guidance system in the missiles was more sophisticated than the computer in the battery. As the missile flew toward its target, the computer memorized the target's relative position, course, and speed, so in the event the target radar ceased radiating, the computer could still issue guidance signals to the missile. Of course, the probability of a hit decreased dramatically the longer the target radar was off the air. If the target radiated again while the missile was still in flight, the computer would update the target's trajectory and refine its directives to the guidance system.

The system worked best when the missile was fired at an airplane that was flying directly at the Sentinel battery. Due to the geometry of the problem and the speeds of the target and missile, the missile's performance became degraded if it wound up in a tail chase.

As Colonel Handa flew toward the Chita Air Base, he was flipping his radar from standby to transmit, then back again, over and over. He had instructed all the other pilots to leave their radars in the standby position—which meant the radar had power but was not transmitting—but he was scanning with his to see if he could detect any enemy planes aloft, or induce the Americans to fire one of their antiradiation missiles. Handa didn't know that the missiles were fired from automated batteries; indeed, the possibility had never even occurred to him.

The eight strike airplanes had left the upper formation a hundred miles back. They were down on the deck now, five hundred feet above the treetops, flying at a bit over Mach 1.

Handa kept waiting for his ECM warning devices to indicate that he was being looked at by enemy radar, but the devices didn't peep. There seemed to be no enemy radar on the air. Or, thought Handa ominously, no radar that his ECM devices could detect. Perhaps the Americans had taken another technological leap of faith and were using frequencies that this device could not receive. Or perhaps their radars were in a receive-only mode, merely picking up the beacon of his radar when it was on the air. If only he…

He dropped that line of thought when the first Sentinel missile shot by his aircraft at a distance of no more than one hundred feet. The brilliant plume of the rocket motor made a streak on the retina of his eye. Handa's heart went into overdrive.

As he scanned the sky for more missiles—the visibility was excellent—he forgot to flip the switch of his radar back to standby. That was when another Sentinel missile, launched automatically almost sixty seconds before, slammed into the nose cone of his fighter.

The thirty-pound missile was traveling at Mach 3 when it pierced the nose cone and target radar in a perfect bull's-eye. Handa's plane was traveling at Mach 1.28 in almost the opposite direction. The combined energy of the impact ripped the Zero fighter into something in excess of two million tiny pieces. The expanding cloud of pieces hit the wall as each individual fragment of metal, plastic, flesh, cloth, and shoe leather tried to penetrate its own shock wave, and failed.

The other Zeros continued on toward the Chita Air Base as the pieces of Handa's fighter began to fall earthward at different rates, depending on their shape. The fuel droplets fell like rain in the cool summer sky, but the motes of metal and flesh behaved more like dust, or heavy snow.

 

After Colonel Handa's Zero disintegrated, the other seven planes in his flight continued straight ahead. Several seconds elapsed before the remaining pilots realized what had happened. During that time, the planes traversed almost a mile of sky.

Without their radars, the pilots were essentially blind. At these speeds, they couldn't see far enough with their eyes. At that very moment, Bob Cassidy and Paul Scheer were ten miles away, at two o'clock, on a collision course at Mach 2.15. The two American fighters were two hundred yards apart, abreast of each other, with Scheer on the left.