.is a nonlethal weapon, the bulb was shielded for ultraviolet light, which
i mild do permanent damage to the human retina. The thought passed
through Ding’s mind when he triggered the light. Nonlethal. Sure.
lhe intensity of the blue-white light seared the pilot’s eyes. It was like look-
ing directly at the sun, but worse, and the pain made his hands come off the
i ontrols to his face, and he screamed into the intercom phones. The copilot
had been looking off-axis to the flash, but the human eye is drawn to light,
especially in darkness, and his mind didn’t have time to warn him off from
the entirely normal reaction. Both airmen were blinded and in pain, with
their aircraft eight hundred feet off the ground and a mile from the landing
threshold. Both were highly trained men, and highly skilled as well. His eyes
still shut from the pain, the pilot’s hands reached down to find the yoke and
tried to steady it. The copilot did exactly the same thing, but their control
movements were not quite the same, and in an instant they were fighting
each other rather than the aircraft. They were both also entirely without vi-
sual references, and the viciously instant disorientation caused vertigo in
both men that was necessarily different. One airman thought their aircraft
was veering in one direction, and the other tried to yank the controls to cor-
rect a different movement, and with only eight hundred feet of air under
them, there wasn’t time to decide who was right and the fighting on the yoke
only meant that when the stronger of the two got control, his efforts doomed
them all. The £-767 rolled ninety degrees to the right, veering north toward
empty manufacturing buildings, falling rapidly as it did so. The tower con-
trollers shouted into the radio, but the aviators didn’t even hear the warnings.
The pilot’s last action was to reach for the go-around button on the throttle in
a despairing attempt to get his bird safely back in the sky. His hand had
hardly found it when his senses told him, a second early, that his life was
over. His last thought was that a nuclear bomb had gone off over his country
again.
“Jesucristo,” Chavez whispered. Just a second, not even that. The nose of
the aircraft flared in the dusky sky as though from some sort of explosion,
and then the thing had just veered off to the north like a dying bird. He forced
himself to look away from the impact area. He just didn’t want to see or
know where it hit. Not that it mattered. The towering fireball lit up the area
as though from a lightning strike. It hit Ding like a punch in the stomach to
realize what he’d done, and there came the sudden urge to vomit.
Kiiini l;ivr saw it, ten miles out, the sickening Hare of yellow on the ground
short uiul light of the airfield that could only mean one thing. Aviators are
disciplined jx-oplc. For the pilot and copilot of the next £-767 there also
mine 11 sudden emptiness in the stomach, a tightening of muscles. They won-
dered which of their squadron mates had just smeared themselves into the
ground, which families would receive unwanted visitors, which faces they
would no longer see, which voices they would no longer hear, and punished
themselves for not paying closer attention to the radio, as though it would
have mattered. Instinctively both men checked their cockpit for irregulari-
ties. Engines okay. Electronics okay. Hydraulics okay. Whatever had hap-
pened to the other one, their aircraft was fine.
“Tower, Five, what happened, over?”
“Five, Tower, Three just went in. We do not know why. Runway is
clear.”
“Five, roger, continuing approach, runway in sight.” He took his hand
off the radio button before he could say something else. The two aviators
traded a look. Kami-three. Good friends. Gone. Enemy action would have
been easier to accept than the ignominy of something as pedestrian as a land-
ing crash, whatever the cause. But for now their heads turned back to the
flight path. They had a mission to finish, and twenty-five fellow crewmen aft
to deliver safely home despite their sorrow.
“Want me to take it?” John asked.
‘ ‘My job, man.” Ding checked the capacitor charge again, then wiped his
face. He clenched his fists to stop the slight trembling he noticed, both
ashamed and relieved that he had it. The widely spaced landing lights told
him that this was another target, and he was in the service of his country, as
they were in the service of theirs, and that was that. But better to do it with a
proper weapon, he thought. Perhaps, his mind wandered, the guys who pre-
ferred swords had thought the same thing when faced with the advent of
muskets. Chavez shook his head one last time to clear it, and aimed his light
through the open window, working his way back from the opening as he
lined up on the approaching aircraft. There was a shroud on the front to pre-
vent people outside the room from seeing the flash, but he didn’t want to
take any more chances than he had to …
. .. right about. ..
… now …
He punched the button again, and again the silvery aluminum skin around
the aircraft’s cockpit flared brightly, for just a second or so. Off to the left he
could hear the warbling shriek of fire engines, doubtless heading to the site
of the first crash. Not like the fire sirens at home, he thought irrelevantly.
The £-767 didn’t do anything at first, and he wondered for a second if he’d
done it right. Then the angle of the nose light changed downward, but the
airplane didn’t Him al all. It just increased its rale of descent. Maybe it would
hil them in the hotel room, (‘have/, thought. It was too late to run away, and
maybe God would punish him for killing fifty people. He shook his head and
dismantled the lighl, waiting, finding comfort in concentrating on a mechan-
ical task.
Clark saw it, too, and also knew that there was no purpose in darting from
the room. The airplane should be flaring now . . . perhaps the pilot thought
so, too. The nose came up, and the Boeing product roared perhaps thirty feet
over the roof of the building. John moved to the side windows and saw the
wingtip pass over, rotating as it did so. The aircraft started to climb, or at-
tempt to, probably for a go-around, but without enough power, and it stalled
halfway down the runway, perhaps five hundred feet in the air, falling off on
I he port wing and spiraling in for yet another fireball. Neither he nor Ding
thanked God for a deliverance that they might not have deserved in any case.
“Pack the light and get your camera,” Clark ordered.
“Why?”
“We’re reporters, remember?” he said, this time in Russian.
Ding’s hands were shaking enough that he had trouble disassembling the
light, but John didn’t move to help him. Everyone needed time to deal with
feelings like this. They hadn’t killed bad men deserving of death, after all.
They had erased the lives of people not unlike themselves, doomed by their
oaths of service to someone who didn’t merit their loyalty. Chavez finally
got a camera out, selected a hundred-millimeter lens for the Nikon F5 body,
and followed his boss out the door. The hotel’s small lobby was already
filled with people, almost all of them Japanese. “Klerk” and “Chekov”
walked right through them, running across the highway to the airport’s
perimeter fence, where the latter started taking pictures. Things were suffi-
ciently confused that it was ten minutes before a policeman came over.
‘ ‘What are you doing!” Not so much a question as an accusation.
“We are reporters,” “Klerk” replied, handing over his credentials.
“Stop what you are doing!” the cop ordered next.
“Have we broken a law? We were in the hotel across the road when this
happened.” Ivan Sergeyevich turned, looking down at the policeman. Me
paused. “Oh! Have the Americans attacked you? Do you want our film’.'”
“Yes!” the officer said with a sudden realization. He held oul his hand,
gratified at their instant cooperative response to his official authority.
“Yevgeniy, give the man your film right now.”
“Chekov” rewound the roll and ejected it, handing it over.
“Please return to the hotel. We will come for you if we need you.”
/ bet you will. “Room four-sixteen,” Clark told him. “This is a ternhle
thing. Did anyone survive?”
“I don’t know. Please go now,” the policeman said, waving iheni across
the road.
“God have mercy on them,” Chavez said in English, meaning it.
Two hours later a KH-i I overflew the area, its infrared cameras scanning
the entire Tokyo area, among others. The photorecon experts at the National