Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (119 page)

“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 course, 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, but 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.

nd 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-15E 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 four.

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 realize 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.

Only one kill,
the Colonel told himself. Well, he’d have to be content with that. His wingman had bagged the last of the -15Js. The southern element had gotten three, and the Strike Eagles had gotten the other four when their support had been cut off, leaving them suddenly and unexpectedly vulnerable. Presumably the ZORRO team had gotten the third E-767. On the whole, not a bad night’s work, but a long one, he thought, forming his flight of four back up for the rendezvous with the tanker and the three hours back to Shemya. The hardest part was the enforced radio silence. Some of his people had to be counting coup in a big way, full of themselves in the way of fighter pilots who had done the job and lived to tell the tale, and wanting to talk through it. That would change shortly, he thought, the enforced silence forcing him to think about his first-ever air-to-air kill. Thirty people on the aircraft. Damn, he was supposed to feel good about a kill, wasn’t he? So why didn’t he?

Something interesting had just happened, Dutch Claggett thought. They were still catching bits and pieces of the SSK in their area, but whoever it was, it had turned north and away from them, allowing
Tennessee
to remain on station. In the way of submarines on patrol, he’d come close enough to the surface to put up his ESM antenna and track the Japanese radar aircraft for the past day or so, learning what he could for possible forwarding to others. Electronic-intelligence gathering had been a submarine mission since before his application to Annapolis, and his crew included two electronics techs who showed a real aptitude for it. But they’d had two on the monitoring systems that had just gone—poof! Then they’d caught some radio chatter, excited by the sound of it, and one by one those voices had gone off the air, somewhere to his north.

“You suppose we just got up on the scoreboard, Cap’n?” Lieutenant Shaw asked, expecting the Captain to know, because captains were supposed to know everything, even though they didn’t.

“Seems that way.”

“Conn, sonar.”

“Conn, aye.”

“Our friend is snorting again, bearing zero-zero-nine, probable CZ contact,” the sonar chief thought.

“I’ll start the track,” Shaw said, heading aft for the plotting table.

“So what happened?” Durling asked.

“We killed three of their radar aircraft, and the strike force annihilated their fighter patrol.” This was not a time, however, for gloating.

“This is the twitchiest part?”

Ryan nodded. “Yes, sir. We need them confused for a while longer, but for now they know something is happening. They know—”

“They know it might be a real war after all. Any word on Koga?”

“Not yet.”

It was four in the morning and all three men were showing it. Koga was over the stress period, for the moment, trying to use his head instead of his emotions while his two hosts— that was how he thought of them, rather to his surprise—drove him around and wondered how smart it was to have left the one guard alive outside Yamata’s condo. He would be up and moving by now? Would he call the police? Someone else? What would result from the night’s adventure?

“How do I know that I can trust you?” Koga asked after a lengthy silence.

Clark’s hands squeezed the wheel hard enough to leave fingerprints in the plastic. It was the movies and TV that caused dumbass questions like that. In those media, spies did all manner of complicated things in the hope of outsmarting the equally brilliant adversaries against whom they were pitted. Reality was different. You kept operations as simple as you could because even the simplest things could blow up on you, and if the other guy was so goddamned brilliant, you wouldn’t even know who the hell he was; and tricking people into doing the things you wanted them to do was something that only worked if you arranged a single option for the other guy, and even then he’d often as not do something unexpected anyway.