Fortunes of War (43 page)

“Where?” Cassidy asked.

“Right now they're just south of Khabarovsk. The White House wants us to intercept them and shoot them down.”

“The White House?” Cassidy asked when the shock of hearing the word
nuke
wore off a bit.

“You won't believe this, Skipper, but the voice sounded like President Hood's to me.”

That had been an hour ago. Now, Cassidy, Scheer, Dixie Elitch, and
one other pilot, a man named Smith, were on their way eastward.

Before Cassidy manned up, he vomited on the concrete. Jiro was out there—Cassidy knew it. He
knew
it for a certainty.

He was living a nightmare.

“Are you okay, sir?” the crew chief asked.

“Must be something I ate,” Cassidy mumbled.

 

When Yan Chernov leveled off a few hundred feet above the ground, doing Mach 2, he looked over his shoulder. He was only human.

Nothing to the right, nothing to the left, nothing behind. The sky appeared empty. Where the other Russian fighters might be, he didn't know.

He scanned the terrain ahead, then the sky behind.

Nothing. ECM silent.

Fuel? The warning light on the instrument panel was lit. A thousand pounds remaining, perhaps.

He was in a valley headed north, with mountains to the east and west. The land below was covered with pines. There were no roads in sight, just an endless sea of green trees with the mountains in the distance.

He pulled the power to idle and pulled the nose up, zoom-climbing.

At five thousand feet, he saw the wandering scar of a dirt road through the forest.

He advanced the throttle to a cruise setting and picked the nose up to a level-flight attitude. He was doing less than five hundred knots now.

He should just jump out and be done with it. Wander in the forest until he starved or broke a leg.

He had his left hand on the ejection handle on the left side of the seat pan, but he didn't pull it.

Four hundred pounds of gas.

The road was beneath him now, running northwest toward the distant mountains. He turned to follow it.

A road would lead somewhere—to a place where there were people.

He didn't think consciously about any of this, but it was in the back of his mind.

The gauge for the main fuel cell still read a few hundred pounds above empty when the engines died.

Chernov let the plane slow to its best glide speed.

He straightened himself to the seat, put his head back in the rest, and pulled the ejection handle.

The flight of four F-22s leveled off at 38,000 feet, conning in the dust-laden sky. Bob Cassidy wasn't worried about the white ice crystals streaming behind the engines—visibility was so bad the Japanese wouldn't see the contrails.

He played with the satellite data down-link and adjusted his tac display. The screen was blank. That worried him. With the dust and the thermals, maybe the satellites weren't picking up the Zeros.

He looked longingly at the on-off switch for the radar. He badly wanted to turn it on, sweep the sky.

If the Americans missed the Zeros in this crud, everyone at Chita was going to be cremated alive. Assuming the brass in the White House war room knew what they were talking about.

This whole thing was insane. Nuclear weapons? In this day and age?

He was fretting, examining miserable options, when he realized he wasn't strapped to his ejection seat. Oh, he had armed the seat all right, just before takeoff. Unfortunately, he had forgotten to strap himself to it, so if he ejected he was going to be flying without wings or parachute. Even an angel needs wings, he thought.

He engaged the autopilot and began snapping Koch fittings, pulling straps tight. There.

Amazing how a man could forget that. Or maybe not. He had too much on his mind.

“Hey, Taco! Any word from Washington?”

Taco Rodriguez was the duty officer, sitting by the satellite telephone in Chita. The encrypted radio buzzed, then Cassidy heard Taco's voice.

“They rounded the corner at Khabarovsk, Hoppy, and left the tanker. Four of them, they say. About five hundred miles ahead of you. Call you back in a bit.”

“Thanks, Taco.”

The F-22s were making Mach 1.4, better than a thousand knots over the ground. Presumably, the Zeros were also supercruising. Five hundred miles—the flights would meet in about fifteen minutes.

A quarter of an hour. Not much. Just a whole lifetime.

He had just four F-22s to intercept the Zeros. Cassidy would have brought more along if he had had them. His only other planes, exactly two, were being swarmed over by mechanics. Several more planes were inbound from Germany, but this morning he had just four flyable fighters.

The ground crewmen had been pretty blasé about the whole gig when the pilots manned up, Cassidy thought. The word went around the base like wildfire:
The Japs are on their way to nuke us!
Still, the men did their jobs, slapped the pilots on the backs, grinned at them, and sent them on their way.

Just before the canopy closed, the crew chief had said to Cassidy, “Go get 'em, sir.” Like it was a ball game or something. Like his ass wasn't also on the line.

Good-looking kid, the crew chief. Not Asian, of course, but he did look a bit like Jiro. About the same age and height, with jet black hair cut short.

Jiro wouldn't be out here in this dirty sky with a nuclear weapon strapped to his plane. Naw. He was probably back in Japan someplace, maybe even home with Shizuko. Sure.

Bob Cassidy wiped his eyes with a gloved hand and tried to concentrate.

The tac display was still blank.

How good was that info the brass in Washington passed to Taco Rodriguez? Could Cassidy rely on it? There were two hundred Americans and several thousand Russian lives on the pass line at Chita. Just how many souls should you bet on that Washington techno-shit, Colonel Cassidy, sir?

Bob Cassidy lifted his left wrist and peeled back the Nomex flap to get a squint at his watch.

Fourteen minutes. He had fourteen minutes left in this life.

 

Dixie Elitch lifted the visor on her helmet and swabbed her face with her glove.

The dirty sky irritated her. Dirt at these altitudes was obscene, a crime against nature.

The Japs infuriated her. Nukes.

She checked her master armament switch, frowned at the blank tac display, and flicked her eyes around the empty yellow sky.

Maybe I should have stayed in California, found a decent man, she thought. God, there must be at least one in California.

“If I live through this experience, I am going back to California, going to find that man.” She told herself this aloud, talking into her oxygen mask over the drone of the engines reaching her through the airframe.

Well, Dixie, baby, that's a goddamn big if.

 

Paul Scheer was the calmest of the F-22 pilots. When he'd been diagnosed with a fatal disease three years ago, he had worked his way through the gamut of emotions one by one: denial, rage, lethargy, acceptance.

The comment that had struck him with the most impact during those days of shock and pain was a quote he had seen in a magazine in a waiting room: “We are all voyagers between two eternities.”

Out of one eternity and into another. That's right. That's the truth of it.

Scheer sat relaxed, his eyes roaming the instrument panel.

 

Layton Robert Smith III, riding Scheer's wing, was an unhappy man. He shouldn't be here. He had been in the
United States
Air Force for nine years, nine peaceful, delightful years, cruising without sweat or strain toward the magic twenty. Eleven years from now he planned to retire from the blue suits and get a job flying corporate moguls in biz jets. Weekends in Aspen, nights in New York and San Fran, occasional hops to the Bahamas, he could handle it. Fly the plane when the paycheck man wanted to go, then kick back.

His mistake had been volunteering to fly an F-22 from Germany to these idiots at Chita. Praise God, if he lived through this he was going to get
NEVER VOLUNTEER
tattooed on his ass. In Chita, that damned Cassidy had shanghaied him, called Germany, said he needed Smith III “on his team.”

And Colonel Blimp in Germany had said yes!

Layton Robert Smith III was scared, angry, and very much a fish out of water. He stared at his master armament switch, which was on.

Holy shit!

The Japanese were going to try to kill Smith III. The prospect made his blood feel like ice water pulsing through his temples.

He should have told Cassidy to stick it up his ass sideways.
Now
he knew that. What would Cassidy have done? Court-martial him for refusing to join the
Russian
air force? Hell, there was nothing Cassidy could do, Smith told himself now as he lawyered the case, then wondered why he hadn't thought of that two hours ago.

Maybe he should just turn around, boogie on back to Chita.

Look at this dust, would you! You don't see shit like this floating over the good ol' US of A. Or even in Germany. What the hell kind of country is this where you fly through dirt?

Smith III told himself he should quit worrying about the injustice of it all and concentrate on staying alive.

 

Jiro Kimura adjusted his infrared goggles. They were attached to his helmet above his oxygen mask, and they were too heavy. He would have to hold the helmet in place with his left hand while he pulled G's, or helmet, goggles and all, would pull his head down to his chest.

Maybe he wouldn't have to pull any G's. Perhaps the colonel was right about the radar. At least he had a plan.

Jiro looked at his watch. Shizuko was teaching at the kindergarten this morning. She was there now, telling stories to the children, singing songs, comforting the ones who needed a hug.

He had been so very lucky in his marriage. Shizuko was the perfect woman, without fault. She was the female half of him.

He loved her and missed her terribly.

With the goggles on, Jiro Kimura scanned the dusty sky. He suspected he would have only seconds to see the Americans and react—and not many seconds at that.

The forecasters had been wrong about this dust. There seemed to be no end to it.

He checked his watch again. Yes, it was time. Jiro gave a hand signal to his wingman, then pulled the power back and began a descent.

 

“Call the Japanese and Russian ambassadors,” President David Herbert Hood told the national security adviser, Jack Innes. “Ask them to come to the White House again as soon as possible.” It was one o'clock in the morning in Washington.

Innes didn't ask questions. He got up from the table and went to a telephone in the back of the White House war room.

Hood turned to General Tuck, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. “It's time for us to get in the middle. Congress has been loath to get involved. Things have changed. We've got to step between these people before they trigger something no one can stop.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I want to get on television later this morning, when the sun comes up, talk to the nation and to the Japanese and Russian leadership.”

The secretary of state asked, “Sir, shouldn't we get the congressional leadership over here first, get their input?”

“They can stand behind me when I talk to the nation. Putting out fires is my job, not theirs. And let's raise U.S. forces to Defense Condition One.”

“Whom are we going to fight?” General Tuck asked.

“Anybody who doesn't like the gospel I'm going to read to them.”

 

Bob Cassidy was breathing faster now, although he didn't notice it. As the minutes ticked by, he was sorely tempted to use the radar. What if the satellites couldn't pick the Zeros out of this goo? Maybe the Zeros' Athena gear wouldn't work.

“Taco, talk to me.”

“Hoppy, Washington says they are at your twelve-thirty, three hundred miles. Space Command is having some difficulty, they say…but they won't say precisely what.”

Cassidy growled into his mask, shook his head to keep the sweat from his eyes.

He checked his watch again. If the Zeros were transmitting with their radars, he should pick up the emissions. Maybe the Sentinel batteries had educated them. Perhaps the Zeros were running silent, as were the F-22s. In that case, the advantage would go to the side with outside help. The satellites were Cassidy's outside help, and just now they didn't seem all that reliable.

He played with the tac display, trying to coax a blip to appear on its screen. Nothing.

“Two-fifty miles, Hoppy.”

“Can the satellites see us?”

“Wait one.”

If the satellites could see the F-22s, Cassidy could safely divide his flight into sections, secure in the knowledge that the other three F-22s would remain on his tac display even though the dust blocked out the la
ser data link between planes. Of course, the question remained: If the satellites could see the Zeros, why weren't they appearing on the tactical displays?

And if the satellites were blind, the F-22s had to stay together to ensure they didn't shoot down one another.

Was it or wasn't it?

A minute passed, then another.

The tension was excruciating. Unable to stand it any longer, Cassidy was about to fire a verbal rocket at Taco when he got a bogey symbol on his scope, way out there, 260 miles away. He put the icon on the symbol and clicked with the mouse.

Zero. Quantity one plus. One thousand seventy-nine knots over the ground. Heading 244 degrees magnetic. Altitude four hundred, which meant forty thousand feet. Distance 257 miles…256…255…The numbers flipped over every 1.8 seconds.

“Stick with me, gang,” he said into the radio, and turned left thirty degrees. He would go out to the north, then turn and come in from the side, shooting at optimum range as the F-22s flew into the Zeros' right-stern quarter.

When he was ten miles or so to the north of the Zeros' track, Cassidy turned back to his original course. The two formations rocketed toward each other.

Please, God. We need to kill these guys. It's a hell of a thing to ask you for other men's deaths, but these guys are carrying nukes. If even one gets through, they could kill everyone at Chita
.

His formation was where it should be, spread out but not too much so—everyone in sight in the little six-mile visibility bowl.

Cassidy wondered what his wingmen were thinking. Perhaps it was better that he didn't know.

Still only one plus on the quantity of Zeros.
Damn the wizards and techno-fools!

Fifty miles…forty…thirty…At twenty, Cassidy spoke into the radio: “Okay, gang, get ready for a right turn-in behind these guys. Try for a Sidewinder lock. On my word, we will each fire one missile. Then we will continue to close and kill survivors.”

“Two, roger,” replied Dixie.

“Three's got it,” said Scheer.

“Four,” Smith answered.

Cassidy would not have brought Smith if Taco hadn't been trying to get over a case of diarrhea; the idiot drank some water from the shower
spigot. Joe Malan was fighting a sinus infection, the others were exhausted: Cassidy had kept planes in the air over the base every minute he could these past few weeks.

Smith had no combat experience, none whatever. Still, he was the only person Cassidy had to put in a cockpit, so he had to fly. Life isn't fair.

“Turn…now!”

Cassidy laid his fighter into the turn. The Zeros continued on their 244-degree heading. After ninety degrees of turn, the Zeros were dead on his nose, ninety degrees off, five miles ahead, and two thousand feet above him, according to the tac display. Cassidy looked through the heads-up display and got a glimpse of one, then lost it.

Damn this dust!

He got a rattle from his Sidewinder. It had locked on a heat source. Cassidy kept the turn in. His flight was sweeping in behind the Zeros.

Through his HUD, he saw specks. Zeros. Two.

Two?

Were there other Zeros? Where were they?

“Let 'em have it, gang.” Cassidy touched off a 'winder. “There's only two Japs in front of us. They've mousetrapped us.”

 

“Red Three, the Americans are behind us. I have them in sight.” Colonel Nishimura made this broadcast over his encrypted radio, and fifteen miles behind him, twenty thousand feet below, Jiro Kimura heard his words.

Jiro and his wingman turned their radars to transmit.