lows, and the female voice was telling him that he’d been detected, but in
this case he knew better than the computer did, Richter thought, and it was
nice to know that the goddamned things didn’t quite get everything right.
Just the flying part was hard enough, and though the Apache might have
had the agility for the mission, it was better to be in the RAH-66. His body
displayed no obvious tension. Years of practice allowed him to sit comfort-
ably in the armored seat, his right forearm resting on the space provided
while his hand worked the sidestick controller. His head traced regularly
around the sky, and his eyes automatically compared the real horizon with
the one generated by the sensing gear located in the aircraft’s nose. The
Tokyo skyline was just perfect for what he was doing. The various buildings
had to be generating all manner of confusing signals for the radar aircraft he
was closing on, and the best of computer systems could not defeat this sort of
clutter. Better yet, he had the time to do it right.
The river Tone would take him most of the way he needed to go, and on
the south side of the river was a rail line, and on the rail line was a train that
would go all the way to Choshi. The train was cruising at over a hundred
knots, and he took position right over it, one eye on the train below while
another kept track of a moving indicator on his threat-receiver display. He
held one hundred feet over the tops of the catenary towers, pacing the train
exactly, just over the last car in the “consist.”
“That’s funny.” The operator on Kami-Two noticed a blip, enhanced by the
computer systems, closing in on the position of his aircraft. He keyed the
intercom for the senior controller. “Possible low-level inbound,” he re-
ported, highlighting the contact and crossloading it for the crew commander.
‘ ‘It’s a train,” the man replied at once, comparing the location with a map
overlay. The problem with flying these damned things too close to land. The
standard discrimination software, originally purchased from the Americans,
had been modified, but not in all details. The airborne radar could track any-
thing that moved, but there wasn’t enough computer power in all the world
to classify and display all the contacts that would develop from cars and
trucks moving on the highways under the aircraft. To de-clutter the screens,
nothing going slower than one hundred fifty kilometers per hour was passed
through the computer-filtering system, but over land even that was not good
enough, not over the country with the world’s finest trains. Just to be sure,
the senior officer watched the blip for a few seconds. Yes, it was following
the mainline from Tokyo to Choshi. It couldn’t possibly be a jet aircraft. A
helicopter, theoretically, could do something like this, but from the weak
character of the signal, it was probably just scatter off the metal roof of the
train, and probably reflection off the catenary towers.
‘ ‘Adjust your MTI-discriminator to two hundred,” he ordered his people.
It took three seconds for all of them to do that, and sure enough, that moving
blip by the Tone and two other more obvious ground contacts disappeared.
They had more interesting things to do, since -Two was crossloading the
“take” from Kamis Four and Six and then downloading it to the Air De-
fense HQ just outside Tokyo. The Americans were probing their defenses
again, and probably, again, with their advanced F-22S, trying to see if they
could defeat the Kamis. Well, this time the reception wouldn’t be quite so
friendly. Eight F-I5 Eagle interceptors were now up, four under the control
of each £-767. If the American fighters came closer, they’d be made lo pay
for it.
He had to risk one open transmission, and even over an encrypted burst-
channel it made the Colonel nervous, but the business entailed risks under
the best of circumstances.
“l.illlilning Ix-uil lo flight. Separate in five-tour-three-two-one-
,\V/««iru/r'”
He pulled hack on the stick, jerking his fighter up and away from the
Strike tingle ihut had spent the last half hour in his jetwash. At the same
inMunl Im right hand flipped off the radar transponder that he’d had on to
boost (he return signal the Japanese AEW aircraft had been taking off his
aircraft Mchnul and below, the F-isE and its female flight crew would be
diving slightly and turning left. The Lightning climbed rapidly, in the pro-
cess losing almost all of its forward velocity. The Colonel punched burners
for rapid acceleration and used the thrust-vector capability of the aircraft to
initiulc a radical maneuver in the opposite direction, greatly speeding the
separation.
The Japanese radar might or might not have gotten some sort of return off
his fighter, the Colonel knew, but he knew how the radar system was work-
ing now: It was operating at high power and getting all sorts of spurious
returns as a result, which the computer system had to classify before present-
ing them to the system controllers. In essence it did a job no different from
that of human operator, albeit more quickly and efficiently, but it was not
perfect, as he and the other three Lightnings were about to prove.
“Turning south,” the controller reported-unnecessarily, as four separate
people were now monitoring the progress of the inbounds. Neither he nor his
fellows could know that the computer had noted a few ghostly returns turn-
ing north, but these had been weaker than other returns that were not moving
rapidly enough to be classified as aircraft. Nor did they mimic the probable
flight paths of aircraft. Then things got harder.
“Getting jamming from the inbounds.”
The lead Lightning was now in a nearly vertical climb. There was danger in
this, since the flight profile offered the £-767 the least stealthy aspect of the
aircraft, but it was also offered no lateral motion to speak of, and so could
well appear to be a ghost return, especially in the electronic clutter being
generated by the powerful jammers on the Strike Eagles. In less than thirty
seconds, the Lightnings tipped over to level flight at an altitude of fifty-five
thousand feet. The Colonel was paying very close attention to his threat sys-
tems now. If the Japanese had him, they would show it by using their elec-
tronic scanning to hammer his fighter with radar energy … but they weren’t.
The stealthy nature of his fighter was enough that he was lost amid the trash-
returns. The system caught side lobes now. The £-767 had shifted to its
high-frequency fire-control mode, and was not targeted on him. Okay. He
boosted power to supercruise, and his Lightning accelerated to a thousand
miles per hour as the pilot selected fire-control mode for his HUD system.
“One o’clock high. I have him, Sandy,” the backseater reported. “He even
has his a/c lights on.”
The train had stopped at a suburban station, and the Comanche had left it
behind, cruising now at one hundred twenty knots toward the coastal town.
Richter flexed his fingers one last time, looked up, and saw the aircraft’s
strobe lights far overhead. He was almost under it now, and good as its radar
might be, it wouldn’t be able to look straight down through the body of the
airframe itself. .. yes, the center of his threat screen was black now.
“Here we go,” he said over the intercom. He jammed his throttles to
the firewall, deliberately overspooling the engines as he pulled back
sharply in the sidestick. The Comanche leaped upwards in a spiraling
climb. The only real worry here was his engine temperature. They were
designed to take abuse, but this would take it to the very limit. A warning
indicator appeared in his helmet display, a vertical bar that started growing
in height and changing color almost as rapidly as the numbers changed on
the altitude display.
“Whoa,” the backseater breathed, then he looked down and selected the
weapons display for his screens, the better to utilize his time before going
back to scanning outside. ‘ ‘Negative traffic.”
Which figured, Richter thought. They wouldn’t want people cluttering up
the air around something as valuable as this target. That was fine. He could
see it now, as his helicopter shot through ten thousand feet, climbing like the
fighter plane it really was, rotor-driven or not.
He could see it in his targeting display now, still too far away to shoot, but
there, a blip in a little box in the center of the head-up display. Time for a
check. He activated his missile illumination systems. The F-22 had an I.PI
radar, meaning that there was a low probability of interception at the other
end. That proved optimistic.
“We just took a hit,” the countermeasures officer said. “We just look a
high-frequency hit, bearing unknown,” he went on, looking at his instru-