Fortunes of War (42 page)

“We need something to break into this, to cut the circuits.”

“The knife in Esenin,” Martos said. “Get it.”

Saratov moved the three steps and pulled the knife from the tangled man. He handed it to Martos, who raised it in the air with his right hand and jabbed it into the electronic box with all his strength. The knife went in about three inches. Martos pried with the blade.

“Captain!”

The call came from the water. Saratov looked in that direction. Askold was calling. Now he pointed. “Water…the engine-room hatch. The boat is flooding.”

Now he could feel the deck shifting. The bow was rising.

“Quickly,” he said to Martos.

“I—” Martos passed him the knife and ripped at the top of the
control box that he had pried loose. It gave. He bent it, trying to enlarge the opening. The deck was shifting, rising from the sea and tilting.

“Help me,” Martos gasped.

Saratov grabbed the Spetsnaz fighter with his left hand and used his right to slash the exposed wires.

“Keep me from falling and give me the knife,” Martos gasped. Saratov handed over the knife and grabbed Martos with both hands.

Martos sawed with the blade against the wires. Several parted. He sawed some more.

The bow was completely out of the water. Nearby, sailors in life-jackets were shouting.

Saratov looked up. A Japanese destroyer was coasting to a stop less than fifty meters away. Faces lined the rail. Someone on the bridge was using a bullhorn, shouting and waving an arm. Beside him were men with rifles.

“The boat is going to go under, Captain,” Martos said.

“Cut the last of the wires.”

“The suction will take us down.”

“Perhaps. Cut the damned wires.”

“I am trying.”

The bow rose higher and higher into the air. Saratov heard a bulkhead inside the submarine tear loose with a bang.

When the angle of the deck got to about sixty degrees, Saratov lost his grip on Martos, who was still holding the clock part of the mechanism. He dropped the knife and grabbed the clock with both hands.

Then the wires holding the clock mechanism tore away and Martos slid down the deck into the sea.

Holding on precariously, Saratov checked the mechanism. The clock was gone, all the lights off.

Then he could hold on no longer. He started to slide down the deck, then kicked away with his feet and fell into the water.

As the boat loomed above him, he stroked for Martos.

Towing the diver by his oxygen hose, Saratov turned his back on the boat and paddled away as hard as he could.

He hadn't gone far when he heard shouting. He looked.
Admiral Kolchak
was going under.

As the boat went into the depths for the last time, Esenin was conscious, trying to free himself from the steel cable that held him trapped.

With a huge sigh as the last of the air rushed from the boat's interior, the bow of
Admiral Kolchak
disappeared into the sea.

The swirling undertow dragged Saratov under. He held on to Martos's oxygen hose with a death grip.

When he thought his lungs would burst, he opened his eyes.

He was still underwater, rising toward the surface.

Gagging, he sucked the air, then pulled Martos up and got his head above water. “Breathe, damn it! Breathe.”

Martos coughed, gagged, spit water, then sucked in air.

“Don't die on me, Martos.”

“Yes, Captain,” Martos said, and passed out, still in Saratov's grasp.

 

The Sukhois and MiGs were thirty minutes away from the second tanker rendezvous when Major Yan Chernov flipped his radar switch to the transmit position. He and the other Sukhoi pilots had been listening passively for radar transmissions by Japanese Zeros and not radiating themselves. So far, they had heard nothing.

Now he adjusted the sensitivity and gain on the scope, ran the range out to maximum, and watched the sweep go back and forth, back and forth.

The scope was empty, of course, just like the dusty sky. The dust in the atmosphere diffused the sunlight and limited visibility. Maybe six miles visibility here, he decided, but worse to the south.

Perhaps the damned tankers would not show up. Screwups of this order were an everyday occurrence in Russian life. That the first set of tankers had showed up in the proper place, on time, was a minor military miracle, worthy of comment wherever uniformed professionals gathered. A similar miracle two hours later was too much to expect.

So Chernov's thoughts went. He turned his head and looked for all his charges, the bombers and the escorts. When he squinted against the glare, he could just see the second section of Sukhois, about four miles away to the south, at this altitude.

And of course his eyes dropped to his fuel gauges. He had enough to get to the tanker rendezvous and fly for another fifteen minutes. That was it.

No doubt the other fighters and bombers were in a similar condition.

Without fuel from the tankers, the three MiG-25 bombers and their Sukhoi escorts would flat run out of gas. The Tateyama strike would suffer a similar fate.

Chernov looked at the chart of this area that he had folded on his lap.
The rendezvous position was plainly marked. Unfortunately, there were no runways within range if Chernov and his charges didn't get fuel.

Watching the radar sweep was mesmerizing. With the plane on autopilot, Chernov had time to study the scope, twiddle the knobs, search the vast sky visually, look at his chart.

Finally he saw it, a dot on the scope, well left of course, 140 miles away. It was moving slowly across the scope toward the extended centerline of Chernov's airplane.

This blip was the tanker formation, of course. Right on time. Right where they should be. And not a Zero in sight.

At a hundred miles, the tankers turned toward the oncoming fighters. They were now in their racetrack pattern. They would spend five minutes on their present heading, then do a 180-degree turn to their right to the reciprocal heading, where they would do another five-minute leg. The fighters would rendezvous on them.

The distance to the tankers was only twenty miles when they began their 180-degree right turn. What had been one blip on Chernov's radar was now three separate, distinct targets.

 

Jiro Kimura had been awake for thirty hours. The night before, he had lain down but sleep was impossible. He thought of his wife, Shizuko, of Bob Cassidy, of duty, honor, and country and tried to decide what all of it meant, if anything.

He was trapped, like a fly in amber. He had too many loyalties to too many things. There was no way to resolve the conflicts.

The sun fell softly from the dust-filled lemon sky. Windstorms in Manchuria had lifted dust high into the atmosphere, limiting visibility. Here between Vlad and Khabarovsk, the dust was particularly thick. The forecasters said that the dust would thin when the flight rounded the corner of Chinese airspace at Khabarovsk and headed west for Chita.

Three miles ahead and a mile to the right, cruising several thousand feet below, was the converted Boeing 747 tanker that would pass fuel to the four Chita-bound fighters after Khabarovsk was passed. Jiro could just make it out in the yellowish haze. He and his wingman were stationed in the tanker's left-rear quadrant to guard against American or Russian fighters lining up for a gun or Sidewinder shot. The flight leader, Colonel Nishimura, had also stationed himself and his wingman behind the tanker, on the right side, in the quadrant that he felt it most likely the F-22s would attack from. That the F-22s would attack the
four bomb-carrying Zeros before they began their bombing run on Chita, the colonel regarded as a fact barely worth discussion. Of course the Americans would attack!

Jiro also thought an attack highly probable. At the brief the colonel had made the classic Japanese warrior's mistake—he underestimated his Western opponent. He seemed to think that Bob Cassidy and company were going to be easy kills, even made a half-joking, disparaging reference to them.

Jiro hoped that somewhere his old friends killed by F-22s were having a good laugh at Nishimura's naïveté. Or stupidity. Whichever.

When Cassidy came slashing in, Nishimura was going to get a quick education. He would probably die before he realized his folly.

Jiro had recommended that the Zeros use their radars until they were fifty miles from Chita. “Only at Chita have we encountered antiradiation missiles, which must be ground-based. We must use our radars to find the F-22s before they find us.”

Nishimura refused. “Athena will prevent them from seeing us. If we leave our radars off there is no way they can detect us.”

“Sir, I respectfully disagree. We must rely on Athena for our protection, and use our radar to detect and kill the F-22s before they get within Sidewinder range.”

Nishimura refused to listen. He knew better.

Jiro looked down and left, at the tip of the bomb just visible under his left wing. The weapon was a white, supersonic shape.

 

At seven miles, Yan Chernov located the Russian tankers visually. They were in a trail formation, each plane a mile behind the others and stepped up a thousand feet. The lead tanker was the designated donor for the Tokyo strike.

Instead of swinging in behind the lead tanker, Chernov climbed several thousand feet and lined up a mile or so astern of the third tanker in line, Tail-end Charlie, the spare.

His wingman, Malakov, was on his right wing, of course, but much closer than he should be. Now less than a hundred feet separated them. When Chernov looked over, Malakov was signaling madly with his hands. No doubt in the next few seconds Malakov would break radio silence.

Chernov patted his head, then pointed at Malakov, the hand signal for passing the lead. Malakov patted his own head, confirming the lead change.

Now Malakov added throttle and his plane moved out in front of
Chernov, who flipped his armament selector switch to “Gun.” He didn't waste time. With Malakov moving away, Chernov eased the stick ever so gently to the right to turn in behind him. As the crosshair in the heads-up display approached the cockpit area of Malakov's fighter, Chernov squeezed the trigger on the stick. A river of fire vomited from the cannon at the rate of fifty 30-mm shells a second. Chernov didn't waste shells—at this point-blank range, a quarter-second burst was quite enough.

He released the trigger and pulled up abruptly.

Malakov's Sukhoi nosed over in a gentle parabola toward the earth 42,000 feet below.

A wave of fear and horror and self-loathing swept over Yan Chernov.

By an exercise of iron will, he forced himself back to the business at hand.

Armament selector switch to “Missile,” green lights on all four missiles, radar lock on Tail-end Charlie, squeeze the trigger on the stick and wait one second.

Whoosh—
the missile on the outboard station was away. It shot across the mile of sky separating the tanker from Chernov's fighter, then exploded in the area of the tail. The left wing of the tanker dropped precipitously; then the nose went down.

Chernov didn't have time to watch it fall. He had already locked up the middle tanker with the radar, and now he launched a missile at it. Four seconds later, the third missile left the rail, aimed at the lead tanker.

That missile, the third one, struck the first of the MiG-25s joining on the lead tanker to get fuel. The fighter exploded.

“Zeros,” Chernov shouted into the radio. “Six Zeros.”

The Russian fighters scattered like flushed quail.

Chernov took his time. He doubled-checked the radar lock-on, ensured the last missile was slaved to it, then carefully squeezed the thing off.

It left with a flash, trailing a wisp of smoke, then turned toward Mother Earth seven miles below and disappeared into the haze at Mach 3.

Chernov switched back to “Gun.” He was out of missiles.

Throttles forward, burners lit to close the distance quickly…at a half mile, he had the HUD crosshairs on the tail of the large, defenseless four-engine tanker.

At a quarter of a mile he pulled the trigger. Like a laser beam, the streak of flame from the gun reached out and touched the tanker's fuselage. Chernov held the trigger down for a long burst.

Fire! A lick of fire from the fuselage, still absorbing fifty cannon shells a second.

The tanker's right wing dropped. Chernov was out of burner now, still closing, only a hundred meters aft. He pulled the crosshairs out to a wing, touched the trigger, then watched as the cannon shells cut it in half.

He released the trigger and slammed the stick left, trying to roll out of the doomed tanker's slipstream.

As he did a stream of tracers went over his head, just a few feet above the cockpit.

Yan Chernov didn't want to kill any more Russians. He rolled onto his back and pulled the nose straight down.

Several miles below, he saw a tanker—this must be the second one—descending in a circle and trailing a stream of fuel that stretched for a mile or so behind. He yanked his nose over and pulled the power back, deployed the speed brakes. He had to be sure. If one of the tankers survived to give fuel to a MiG-25, all this pain and blood would be for naught.

Even as he pulled the nose toward the tanker, the stream of fuel pouring from the injured tanker caught fire. Two seconds later the big four-engined airplane exploded with a dazzling flash.

Yan Chernov plummeted earthward. Somewhere above him, one of members of the second section might be coming down behind, angling for a shot.

Chernov didn't look back.

 

When the call came from the White House on the satellite telephone, the duty officer took it. He handed it to Paul Scheer, who listened carefully, jotted some info on the duty officer's desk tablet, then said, “Yes, sir” three times before he put the instrument back in its cradle.

“Four Zeros are on the way, all of them carrying nuclear weapons. They plan to nuke this base.”