“No, we don’t. I need a plan, Rob.”
“We’ll get one for you,” the Deputy J-3 promised.
Durling appeared on TV again at nine in the evening, Eastern Time. There
were already rumbles out. The TV anchors had followed their stories about
developments on Wall Street with confused references to the carrier accident
the previous week and to urgent negotiations between Japan and the United
States over the Mariana Islands, where, they noted, communications were
out following a storm that might never have happened. It was very discom-
forting for them to say what they didn’t know. By this time Washington cor-
respondents were trading information and sources, amazed at having missed
something of this magnitude. That amazement translated itself into rage ill
their own government for concealing something of this dimension. Back-
ground briefings that had begun at eight helped to assuage them somewhat.
Yes, Wall Street was the big news. Yes, it was more vital to the overall
American well-being than some islands that not a few of their number had lo
be shown on a map. But, no, damn it, the government didn’t have the right
not to tell the media what was going on. Some of them, though, reali/ed thai
the First Amendment guaranteed their freedom to find things out, not to tie-
niaiul information from others. Others reali/cd that the Administration was
trying to end the affair without bloodshed, which went part of the way to
calming them down. But not all of the way.
“My fellow Americans,” Durling began for the second time in the day,
and it was immediately apparent that, as pleasing as the events of the after-
noon had been, the news this evening would be bad. And so it was.
There is something about inevitability that offends human nature. Man is a
creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things can-
not be changed. But man is also a creature prone to error, and sometimes that
makes inevitable the things that he so often seeks to avoid.
The four B-iB Lancer bombers were five hundred miles offshore now,
again spread on a line centered due east of Tokyo. This time they turned
directly in, took an exact westerly heading of two-seven-zero degrees, and
dropped down to a low-penetration altitude. The electronic-warfare officers
aboard each of the aircraft now knew more than they had two nights earlier.
Now at least they could ask the right questions. Additional satellite informa-
tion had fixed the location of every air-defense radar site in the country, and
they knew they could beat those. The important part of this night’s mission
was to get a feel for the capabilities of the £-7675, and that demanded more
circumspection.
The B-iB had been reworked many times since the 19705. It had actually
become slower rather than faster, but it had also become stealthy. Especially
from nose-on, the Lancer had the radar cross section-the RCS-of a large
bird, as opposed to the B-2A, which had the RCS of a sparrow attempting to
hide from a hawk. It also had blazing speed at low-level, always the best way
to avoid engagement if attacked, which the crews hoped to avoid. The mis-
sion for tonight was to “tickle” the orbiting early-warning aircraft, wait for
them to react electronically, and then turn and run back to Elmendorf with
better data than what they had already developed, from which a real attack
plan could be formulated. The flight crews had forgotten only one thing. The
air temperature was 31 degrees Fahrenheit on part of their aircraft and 35 on
another.
Kami-Two was flying one hundred miles east of Choshi, following a precise
north-south line at four hundred knots. Every fifteen minutes the aircraft re-
versed course. It had been up on patrol for seven hours, and was due to be
relieved at dawn. The crew was tired but alert, not yet quite settled into the
numbing routine of their mission.
The real problem was technical, which affected the operators badly. Their
radar, sophisticated as it was, did them fewer favors than one might imagine.
Designed to make the detection of stealthy aircraft possible, it had achieved
Us goal, perhaps they didn’t really know yet-through a number of incre-
mental improvements in performance. The radar itself was immensely pow-
erful, and being of solid-stale construction, both highly reliable and precise
in its operation. Internal improvements included reception gear cooled with
liquid nitrogen to boost sensitivity by a factor of four, and signal-processing
software that missed little. That was really the problem. The radar displays
were TV tubes that showed a computer-generated picture called a raster-
scan, rather than the rotating-analog readout known since the invention of
radar in the 19305. The software was tuned to find anything that generated a
return, and at the power and sensitivity settings being used now, it was
showing things that weren’t really there. Migratory birds, for example. The
software engineers had programmed in a speed gate to ignore anything
slower than one hundred thirty kilometers per hour, else they would have
been tracking cars on the highways to their west, but the software took every
return signal before deciding whether to show it to the operator, and if any-
thing lay on or beyond that ring a few seconds later, it was plotted as a possi-
ble moving aircraft contact. In that way, two albatrosses a few thousand
meters apart became a moving aircraft in the mind of the onboard computer.
It was driving the operators mad, and along with them the pilots of the two
Hagle fighters that flew thirty kilometers outboard of the surveillance air-
craft. The result of the software problem was irritation that had already
transformed itself into poor judgment. In addition, with the current sensitiv-
ity of the overall system, the still-active streams of commercial aircraft
looked for all the world like fleets of bombers, and the only good news was
that Kami-One to their north was dealing with them, classifying and handing
them off.
“Contact, one-zero-one, four hundred kilometers,” a captain on one of
the boards said into the intercom. “Altitude three thousand meters . . . de-
scending. Speed five hundred knots.”
“Another bird?” the colonel commanding the mission asked crossly.
“Not this one . . . contact is firming up.”
Another aviator with the rank of colonel eased his stick down to take his
bomber lower. The autopilot was off now. In and out, he told himself, scan-
ning the sky ahead of him.
“There’s our friend,” one of the EWOs said. “Bearing two-eight-one.”
Automatically, both pilot and copilot looked to their right. Unsurpris
ingly, they saw nothing. The copilot looked back in. At night you wanted to
keep an eye on instruments. The lack of good external references meant you
ran the risk of vertigo, the loss of spatial orientation, which all aviators
feared. They seemed to be approaching some layered clouds. Mis eyes
checked the external temperature gauges. Thirty-five, and that was good.
Two or three degrees lower and you ran the risk of icing, and the H-1, like
most military am. nil I. duln’1 have deicing equipment. Well, llic mission was
electronic, nol visual, and clouds didn’t mean much to radar transmission or
reception.
But clouds did mean moisture, and the copilot allowed himself to forget
that the temperature gauge was in the nose, and the tail was quite a bit
higher. The temperature there was thirty-one, and ice started forming on the
bomber’s tailfin. It wasn’t even enough to cause any degradation in the con-
trols. But it was enough to make a subtle change in the shape of the aircraft,
whose radar cross section depended on millimeter tolerances.
“That’s a hard contact,” the Captain said on Kami-Two. He worked his
controls to lock on it, transmitting the contact to the Colonel’s own display.
‘ ‘Maybe another one now.”
‘ ‘I have it.” The contact, he saw, was leveling out and heading straight for
Tokyo. It could not possibly be an airliner. No transponder. The base course
was wrong. The altitude was wrong. The penetration speed was wrong. It
had to be an enemy. With that knowledge, he told his two fighters to head
for it.
“I think I can start interrogating it more-”
“No,” the Colonel replied over the 1C phones.
The two F-I5J fighters had just topped off their tanks and were well sited
for the interception. The alpha-numeric symbols on the Kami’s screens
showed them close, and aboard the fighters the pilots could see the same
display and didn’t have to light off their own targeting radars. With their
outbound speed of five hundred knots, and a corresponding speed on the
inbound track, it wouldn’t be long.
At the same time a report was downlinked to the regional air-defense
headquarters, and soon many people were watching the electronic drama.
There were now three inbound aircraft plotted, spaced out as though to de-
liver an attack. If they were B-i bombers, everyone knew, they could be