Fortunes of War (17 page)

Jiro retarded his throttles and began his letdown eighty miles from Khabarovsk. The four war planes drifted apart into a combat spread. Jiro and his wingman, Sasai, were ahead and to the right, Ota and Miura behind and to the left. Ota dropped farther back so that he could swing right and follow the first flight if the ground topography required it.

The shadows on the ground were still dark, impenetrable. Jiro looked at his watch. In eight minutes they would arrive at the target, come out of the rising sun. It would be a splendid tactic, if the sun rose on schedule.

He swung farther east to give God another minute or two with the sun.

“Blue Leader, this is Control.” The radio was scrambled, of course, and gave a beep before and after the words.

Jiro pushed his mike button, waited for the beep, then said, “Control, Blue Leader, go ahead.”

“We believe a plane has just taken off from your target. It is headed three zero zero degrees, ten miles northwest, climbing. Please intercept.”

“Wilco.”

Jiro looked around at Sasai. He pointed toward Ota, then jerked his thumb. Sasai nodded vigorously, then slipped aft and away.

Jiro turned left, advanced his throttles, and pulled his machine into a slight climb. He settled on a course of 275, which should allow him
to intercept. Now he pushed buttons on the computer display in front of him. When he was satisfied, he tickled the radar. It swept once.

There was the plane. Thirty-four nautical miles away, interception course 278 degrees. He turned to that heading and reset his armament panel. He had been set up to strafe, then shoot rockets. Now he armed the two heat-seeking Sidewinder missiles that the Zero always carried, one on each wingtip.

He tripped the radar sweep again. Thirty-one miles.

The enemy plane was accelerating nicely, headed almost straight away from Jiro, who was now committed to a stern-quarter approach. He eyed his fuel gauges, then pushed the throttle farther forward. The Zero slid through the sonic barrier without a buffet or bump.

With the throttles all the way forward, but without using his afterburners, the Zero quickly accelerated to Mach 1.3.

Jiro decided to risk another sweep. Twenty-four miles.

He was at ten thousand feet now, so he leveled there. He wanted the other plane above him, against the dark background of the western sky. Far below, out to the left, he could see a faint ribbon of light wandering off to the northwest. That would be the Amur River, flowing southeast to Khabarovsk. On the far side was Manchuria. From Khabarovsk, the river flowed northeast to the Sea of Okhotsk. It was always frozen solid in winter.

He was still fifteen miles from the bogey when he first saw it, a spot of silver reflecting the rising sun, against the dark of the fading night.

It's a big plane, he thought. A transport!

He checked his ECM panel as the implications of that fact sunk in. The panel was dark.

Because you never really trust an electronic device, Jiro turned in his seat and looked carefully about him, concentrating on the rear quadrants.

Empty sky, everywhere.

A transport—defenseless.

He heard Ota tell Control that he was attacking the primary target, and he heard Control acknowledge.

Jiro closed quickly on the transport from dead astern. When it was no more than four miles ahead, Jiro retarded his throttles. The gap between the planes continued to close as he coasted up on it.

The bogey was a four-engine transport, very similar to an old Boeing 707, with the engines in pods on the wings, climbing at full power. Just now it was passing through fifteen thousand feet.

Jiro stabilized a few hundred yards aft, directly behind, well below the transport's wash.

He sat looking at it for what seemed like a long, long time, unsure of what to do. Actually the time was less than a minute, but it seemed longer to Jiro. He slid out to the right, so he could see the side of the plane and the tail, illuminated by the rising sun. Then he dropped back into trail.

Finally he keyed the mike. After the beep, he spoke. The hoarseness of his voice surprised him.

“Control, Blue Leader.”

“Go ahead, Blue Leader.”

“This bogey you wanted investigated. It's an airliner—four-engines, silver. Lots of windows. Aeroflot markings.”

“Wait.”

Silence, broken only by Jiro sucking on his oxygen, with the background hum of the engines. He eased up and under the transport; the roar of the Russian's engines became audible. He could just feel a bit of the rumble of the air disturbed by the big plane's passage, its wash.

He dropped down a bit; the ride smoothed and the Russian's engine noise faded.

“Ah, Blue Leader,” Control said. “Destroy the bogey and RTB.”

Jiro sat looking at the airliner. They were climbing through twenty thousand feet now.

“Blue Leader, this is Control. Did you copy? Destroy the bogey and return to base.” The mission controller was in Japan, in a basement at the defense ministry probably, staring at his computer screens. The reason his voice sounded so clear and strong on the radio was because the radio signal was directed at a satellite, which rebroadcast it.

Jiro's eyes flicked around the cockpit, taking in the various displays and switches.

He took off his oxygen mask and rubbed his face furiously, then put the mask back on.

“Blue Leader, Control…”

Well, there was nothing to be gained by prolonging this. “Control, Blue Leader.”

“Did you copy, Blue Leader?”

“Understand you want me to destroy this airliner and return to base.”

“Destroy the bogey, Blue Leader. Report bogey destroyed.”

“Control, this thing's an airliner. Tell me that you understand that this bogey is an Aeroflot airliner.”

Silence. He was being grossly insubordinate. He could just imagine the clenched jaws of the senior officers.

Well, hell, if they didn't like it, they could cashier him, send him back to Japan.

“Blue Leader, Control. We understand the bogey has Aeroflot markings. You are hereby ordered to destroy it. Acknowledge.”

“I copy.”

He retarded the throttle, let the airliner pull ahead. The distance began to grow: five hundred yards, a thousand, fifteen hundred.

Jiro flicked a switch on the throttle to select the left Sidewinder. He pulled the nose up, put the dot in the center of the HUD directly on the airliner. The Sidewinder growled: It had locked on one of the big plane's engines.

Jiro squeezed the trigger on the stick. The Sidewinder leapt off the rail and shot forward. Straight as a bullet it flew across the gap toward the four-engined monster.

A puff of smoke. A hit: the inboard left engine.

He sat there watching as the airliner's engine began trailing smoke. Now the big silver plane began to move back toward him, which was an optical illusion. Actually, it was slowing and he was creeping up on it. He retarded his throttles, cracked the speed brakes.

“Fuck.” Jiro said the word in English.

“
Fuck!
” Now he screamed it.

Furious, he selected the right Sidewinder, got the tone, then squeezed it off.

It impacted one of the transport's right engines: another little flash.

The huge silver plane wasn't climbing anymore. Its left wing came down, twenty…now thirty degrees; the nose dropped. It began a turn back toward Khabarovsk.

“Fall, you Russian bastard,” Jiro whispered. He opened his speed brakes to the stops and dropped his left wing, cutting across the turn, closing the distance. He was out to the left now, in plain view of the pilots if they only took the time to look this way.

The airliner's left engine was visibly on fire. No, the wing was burning. Shrapnel from the missile's warhead must have punctured the wing tank, and jet fuel was burning in the slipstream.

The big silver plane's angle of bank was at least sixty degrees now, its nose down ten degrees.

It was then that Jiro realized that the big plane was out of control.

Perhaps the controls had been damaged by the missile shrapnel or the fire.

He pulled away, got his nose level, and watched the silver plane spiral down into the early-morning gloom.

Down, down, down…miles to fall…

Time seemed to stand still. The airliner got smaller and smaller.

The Russian plane was just a tiny silver dot, almost lost from view, when its flight ended in a flash, a tiny smear of fire amid the morning shadows.

That was all. A splash of fire, and they were gone.

Jiro pointed the nose of his plane south, toward Vladivostok. He pushed the throttles forward and let the nose rise into a climb.

“Control, Blue Leader…”

“Blue Leader, Control, go ahead with your report.”

 

After an evening of cogitation, Aleksandr Kalugin decided to deliver an ultimatum to Japan threatening nuclear holocaust. Since he had bombs and Japan didn't, he could see no good reason why he should not put the bombs in play. He was not committing himself to any specific course of action, merely threatening one.

He called in Danilov, the foreign minister, and had him draft the ultimatum. Two hours later, he looked the document over carefully as Danilov sat on the edge of his seat, his hands folded in his lap.

Danilov was nearly seventy years old. He had spent his adult life as a professional diplomat. Never had he seen a Soviet or Russian government seriously weigh the use of nuclear weapons. Now, to his horror, Kalugin was threatening their use without even discussing the matter with his ministers. Is this where perestroika and democracy lead? To nuclear war?

“Sir, Japan may not withdraw from Siberia.”

Kalugin finished the paragraph he was reading before he looked at Danilov. “They might not.”

“They may not believe this ultimatum.”

“What is your point?”

“We have repeatedly assured the world that our nuclear weapons were destroyed. Now, by implication, we are admitting that those statements were not true.”

Kalugin said nothing. He merely stared at the foreign minister, who felt his skin crawl.

“Japan may believe that we do not have any weapons remaining,” the minister observed, “in which case they will disregard this ultimatum.”

Kalugin went back to the draft document. A sunbeam peeped into the room between the drapes on the high window behind the president, who sat reading, his head lowered.

He might nuke the Japanese, Danilov thought, suddenly sure that the ultimatum was not an idle threat. If they don't pull out of Siberia, Kalugin might really do it.

Another clear, hot day. Plumes of diesel exhaust and dust rose into the warm, dry air behind the Japanese army trucks—all forty-seven of them—and gently tailed off to the east. The convoy was on a paved road beside the Amur River—a paved road with a lot of windblown dirt on it—rolling northwest at about twenty miles per hour. They were a day northwest of Khabarovsk, in a wide river valley defined by low hills or mountains to the northeast and southwest. The river, a mile to the left, formed the border with China, but no fences or guard towers marked it.

Forty of the trucks carried supplies for Japanese forces a hundred miles ahead. Eight of the vehicles held soldiers, and the fuel, food, water, and cooking supplies necessary to keep the convoy rolling.

The road wasn't much—just a crowned two-laned paved road in a wide, treeless valley. It followed the natural contours of the land in a serpentine way along the path of least resistance. Although there were no signposts to proclaim it, the road was merely an improvement of an ancient trail. There were some culverts, occasionally a bridge, but in many places water routinely washed over the road. Dry now, many of the low places would be impassable in winter.

From the road one could occasionally see sheep or goats cropping the sparse grass, here and there a shack or yurt, once in a great while a rattletrap civilian truck going somewhere or other, trailing its own dust plume. Occasionally, a dirt road led off from the main road. A few of these led to open pit mines in the hills, where manganese or some other ore was extracted from the earth with obsolete, well-worn equipment, sweat, and a lot of hard work.

There were few people in this land. The natives shrank instinctively from the Japanese soldiers, who ignored them. Children in the doors of shacks watched the trucks approach, then retreated to the dark interior as the lead vehicle, a truck with a multibarreled antiaircraft gun mounted on the flatbed, drew near.

The Japanese ate dust and watched the sky. Some of them were
wishing the Russian soldiers hadn't destroyed the railroad trestles and bridges as they retreated. If the railroad had remained intact, these soldiers would be riding a train west instead of jolting around in trucks.

The shimmering, brassy sky seemed to reflect the earth's heat back to it. High and far to the west a thin layer of cirrus clouds would diffuse the sun this afternoon, but that was many hours away.

The brilliant sun was hard to look at. When the curves of the road allowed, the older drivers looked anyway, almost against their will, holding up a hand or thumb to block the burning rays and searching the sky while they fought the wheel to keep their trucks on the highly crowned road.

The eagles didn't come from the sun's direction. They came from the northwest, straight down the valley, over this road, swiftly and silently, just a few hundred feet above the ground.

The driver of the lead truck saw them first, less than a mile away, two Sukhoi-27s, streaking in like guided missiles.

He cranked the wheel over and swung the truck on two wheels off the road. The men in back, the gun crew, almost fell out.

He was just quick enough to save their lives.

The cannon shells impacted on the road behind the lead truck and walked straight into the next vehicle, where they lingered for a fraction of a second as the pilot of the lead plane dipped his nose expertly. This truck exploded under the hammering.

As the fireball blossomed, the pilot was already shooting at another truck halfway down the convoy. The truck did not explode; it merely disintegrated as a dozen 30-mm cannon shells impacted in two brief seconds.

The pilot released the trigger and selected a third target, toward the end of the column. Still racing along at five hundred knots, he squirted a burst at that truck but missed.

He glanced left to ensure his wingman was where he should be, then dropped the right wing for a hard turn. After ninety degrees of heading change, he rolled left into a sixty-degree angle of bank. After 270 degrees of turn, he rolled out heading northwest, back toward the column of trucks. His wingman was still with him, out to the left.

Both pilots selected targets as they raced once again toward the trucks, whose drivers were frantically trying to get them off the road on either side. Not that it mattered.

With just the gentlest nudges of their rudders and caresses of their sticks, the pilots pointed their planes at targets chosen at random and
squirted bursts from their internal GSh-30-1 guns. Four trucks exploded on that pass. One, which contained artillery ammunition, detonated with an earsplitting crash.

The gun crew in the lead truck was still trying to get the restraining straps off the antiaircraft gun so they could point it when the Su-27s swept overhead and disappeared into the brassy sky in the direction from whence they had come, northwest.

It took the convoy commander an hour to get the undamaged trucks back on the road and rolling. Nine trucks had been destroyed or damaged too badly to continue. One of the nine had not been touched by the strafing aircraft; the panic-stricken driver had tried to drive over several large rocks, which shattered the transmission and tore the rear axle loose from the truck's frame.

Fourteen men were dead, ten wounded. One of the wounded was horribly burned; a sergeant shot him to put him out of his misery.

The soldiers placed the dead men in a row near the road, amid the burned-out trucks. Someone else would have to bury them later. The officer in charge had his orders.

The soldiers got back in the trucks and resumed their journey northwest.

 

On the third mission of the day, Major Yan Chernov led his wingman, Major Vasily Pervushin, back to the truck convoy on the river road from Khabarovsk. Chernov was the commander of the 556th Fighter Squadron based at Zeya. He and his wingman were flying the only two operational aircraft. The enlisted men had been laboring for days to drain the water from the fuel-storage tanks, then transfer the remaining fuel by hand into the planes. There was no electricity at the base, so the job was herculean, involving hand pumps, fifty-five-gallon drums, and lots of muscle.

Chernov did not think there were any cluster bombs on the base, but while he was airborne on the first strike, his ordnance NCO found some in an ammo bunker that was supposed to be empty. The bombs were at least twenty years old. Still, they were all the Russians had for ground attack, so they were loaded on the planes.

Just now, he and Pervushin, his second in command, raced southeast a hundred feet or so above the ground. Chernov was watching for vehicles off to the left, along the river road.

The two Sukhois were indicating 525 knots, .85 Mach, which was
about as fast as it was safe to carry the bombs—they were not supersonic shapes. The treeless plain raced under the Sukhois, almost as if the fighters were motionless in space and the earth was spinning madly beneath them. The illusion was very pleasant.

There, at ten o'clock, on the horizon: a plume of dust.

This morning they had made two passes over the target convoy, the first from the northwest, the second from the southeast. This time Chernov and Pervushin had planned to approach from the southeast and drop the bombs on the first pass. Since they had the ammo in the guns, they wanted to make a second pass, quickly, and the quickest way was a hard turn, then back down the trucks from the northwest to the southeast.

Chernov pointed to the dust, made sure Pervushin nodded his understanding. This convoy was farther northwest than the one they had attacked that morning.

The ECM gear was silent. Not a peep of an enemy radar.

These Japanese, running truck convoys without air cover…

There
could
be air cover, of course, running high with their radars off. Chernov glanced up into the afternoon haze, looking for tiny black spots against the high cloud.

Nothing.

Not seeing them didn't mean they weren't there. It simply meant you hadn't seen them.

The dust was passing behind his left wing when he motioned for Pervushin to drift out farther.

Satisfied, he began a shallow turn. He wanted to be wings-level over the road for several miles before he reached the convoy to give himself and Pervushin time to pick out targets.

Turn, watch the ground racing by just beneath the plane, keep the wings at no more than ten degrees of bank, and glance up occasionally, look for enemy fighters.
Watch the nose attitude, Chernov! Don't fly into the ground
.

He reached for the armament panel. Bombs selected. Fusing set. Interval set. Master armament switch on.

Wings level, Pervushin was well out to the right, dropping aft. He would follow Chernov in a loose trail formation.

Five hundred twenty-five knots…Chernov let his plane drift up until he was about three hundred feet above the ground. After the clamshell fuselage of the cluster bomb opened, the bomblets needed to fall far enough to disperse properly.

Trucks. A row of them. They appeared to be racing toward him, but he was the one in flight. As Tail-end Charlie disappeared under the nose, Chernov mashed the pickle button on the stick. He could feel the thumps as the bombs were kicked off, all six of them in about a second and a half.

Chernov held the heading for another three seconds, then rolled into an eighty-degree angle of bank with G on and held it for ninety degrees of heading change. Now he rolled the other way and turned for 270 degrees.

He watched the gyro swing, concentrated on keeping the nose above the horizon. With his left hand, he flipped switches on the armament panel, enabling the gun.

Wings level again, the Russian pilot was almost lined up on the trucks, four of which were obviously on fire. He stabbed the rudder and jammed the stick forward, pointing the nose, then eased the stick back ever so slightly.

Squeeze the trigger, squint against the muzzle flashes as the vibration reaches him through the seat and stick, walk the shells through the target truck. Then another.

In four seconds his shooting pass was done, enough time to aim at two trucks; then Chernov was pulling G to get the nose above the horizon and rolling hard right to avoid ricochets. With a positive rate of climb, in a right turn, he raised the nose a smidgen more, twisted in his seat and glanced back over his right shoulder.

Horror swept over him.

A gun, on a truck, shooting, a death ray of tracers…Pervushin, on fire, rolling hard left, nose dropping…

A tremendous explosion of yellow fire as Pervushin's Sukhoi fighter flew into the ground.

No parachute visible.

Yan Chernov tore his eyes away and checked his nose attitude. He was still climbing.

Damnation!

 

“Sir, where's Major Pervushin?” the NCO asked Yan Chernov after he raised the canopy and shut down his engines at the Zeya Air Base.

“Dead.”

“Fighters?”

“A gun. One gun. On a truck.”

“Could he have…”

“No.”

“His wife is at Dispersal, sir. The trucks carrying the families won't leave for a while, so she came here to wait for him.”

Chernov sat in the cockpit letting the wind dry his face and hair. He was exhausted. Finally he made himself look in the direction of the dispersal shack, a large one-room wooden-frame building on the edge of the concrete. She was standing outside, shading her eyes against the sun, looking this way. The wind was whipping at her dress.

Chernov couldn't do it. It was his duty, but he couldn't.

“Sergeant.”

“Yes, Major.”

“Go tell her.”

“Yes, sir.”

 

The Zero pulled hard to bring his nose around, setting up a head-on pass. Dixie Elitch horsed her airplane to meet him head-on, trying to minimize the separation and give her opponent as small an angle advantage as possible. Alas, the Japanese pilot's nose lit up; cannon shells reached for her in a stream, as if they were squirted from a garden hose.

“These guys got fangs and will bite you good if you let them,” said the male voice in her earphones. That was Joe Malan, who was back there with the simulator operator, no doubt enjoying himself immensely.

Dixie put on the G to escape the shells. She fully intended to pull right into the vertical, but Malan read her mind. “If this guy follows you up, you're going to give him another shot. You really don't want to be out in front of one of these people. Are you suicidal?”

By the time he finished speaking, she had unloaded the plane and rolled it 270 degrees. Now she laid the G on. Smoothly back on the stick, right up to nine G's on the HUD. In a real F-22, her full-body G suit would be fully inflated, but the simulator didn't pull G's. It did roll and pitch in a sickeningly realistic manner, however, so the cockpit smelled faintly of stale vomit. So did real cockpits.

She came around hard, turning at thirty-two degrees per second with the help of vectored thrust. No other plane in the world could turn like that, even the Zero.

Unfortunately the Zero had not been standing still or plodding along
straight while he waited for her to finish her turn. She craned her head, looking for it.

“No, damn it,” Malan said in her headphones. “Look at your displays. The infrared sensors are keeping track of this guy. What does your computer tell you?”

“He's high and right. I'm in his left-rear quarter.”

“Pull up and shoot.”

Dixie kept the nose coming. The missile-capability circle came into view on the HUD. As the red dot centered in the circle, she heard a tone, almost a buzz, indicating the heat-seeking Sidewinder missile had locked on. She squeezed off the missile, which roared away from her right wingtip.

A flash.

“Got 'im.”

She relaxed the G.

“Okay, let's go back to base, shoot an instrument approach. Remember, in combat you
must
let the computer help you. The computer is your edge. The computer will keep you alive.”

She wiped the sweat from her face and grunted.