Reconnaissance Office took immediate note of the two smoldering fires and
the aircraft parts that littered the area around them. Two £-7675 had bitten
the dust, they saw with no small degree of satisfaction. They were mainly
Air Force personnel and, distant from the human carnage of the scene, all
they saw was two dead targets. The imagery was real-timed to several desti-
nations. In the J-3 area of the Pentagon, it was decided that Operation
ZORRO’S first act had gone about as they had planned. They would have said
as hoped, but that might have spoiled the luck. Well, they thought, CIA
wasn’t quite entirely useless.
It was dark at Pearl Harbor. Flooding the dry dock had required ten hours,
which had rushed the time up to and a little beyond what was really safe, but
war had different rules on safety. With the gate out of the way, and with the
help of two large harbor tugs, John Stennis drove out of the dock and, turn-
ing, left Enterprise behind. The harbor pilot nervously got the ship out in
record time, then to be ferried back to shore by helicopter, and before mid-
night, Johnnie Reb was in deep water and away from normal shipping chan-
nels, heading west.
The accident-investigation team showed up almost at once from their head-
quarters in Tokyo. A mixed group consisting of military and civilian person-
nel, it was the latter element that owned the greater expertise because this
was really a civil aircraft modified for military use. The “black box” (actu-
ally painted Day-Glo orange) flight recorder from Kami-Five was recovered
within a few lucky minutes, though the one from Kami-Three proved harder
to find. It was taken back to the Tokyo lab for analysis. The problem for the
Japanese military was rather more difficult. Two of their precious ten £-7675
were now gone, and another was in its service hangar for overhaul and up-
grade of its radar systems. That left seven, and keeping three on constant
duty would be impossible. It was simple arithmetic. Each aircraft had to be
serviced, and the crews had to rest. Even with nine operational aircraft,
keeping three up all the time, with three more down and the other three in
standby, was murderously destructive to the men and equipment. There was
also the question of aircraft safety. A member of the investigation team dis-
covered the Airworthiness Directive on the 767 and determined that it ap-
plied to the model the Japanese had converted to AEW use. Immediately, the
autolanding systems were deactivated, and the natural first conclusion from
the civilian investigators was that the flight crews, perhaps weary from their
long patrol (lights, luid engaged it for their approaches. The senior uni-
formed officer was tempted to accept it, except for one thing: lew airmen
liked automatic-landing systems, and military airmen were the least likely of
all to turn their aircraft over to something which operated on microchips and
software to safeguard their lives. And yet the body of-Three’s pilot had been
found with his hand on the throttle controls. It made little sense, but the evi-
dence pointed that way. A software conflict, perhaps, somewhere in sys-
tem-a foolish and enraging reason for the loss of two priceless aircraft,
even though it was not without precedent in the age of computer-controlled
flight. For the moment, the reality of the situation was that they could only
maintain a two-aircraft constant patrol, albeit with a third always ready to lift
off at an instant’s notice.
()verflying ELINT satellites noted the continued patrol of three £-7675 for
the moment, and nervous technicians at Air Force Intelligence and the Na-
tional Security Agency wondered if the Japanese Air Force would try to defy
the rules of aircraft operation. They checked their clocks and realized that
another six hours would tell the tale, while satellite passes continued to re-
cord and plot the electronic emissions.
Jackson now concerned himself with other satellite information. There were
forty-eight fighters believed based on Saipan, and another sixty-four at
(iuam’s former Andersen Air Force Base, whose two wide runways and
huge underground fuel-storage tanks had accommodated the arriving air-
craft very comfortably indeed. The two islands were about one hundred
twenty miles apart. He also had to consider the dispersal facilities that SAC
had constructed in the islands during the Cold War. The closed Northwest
(iuam airfield had two parallel runways, both usable, and there was Agana
International in the middle of the island. There was also a commercial air-
field on Rota, another abandoned base on Tinian, and Kobler on Saipan in
addition to the operating airport. Strangely, the Japanese had ignored all of
the secondary facilities except for Kobler Field. In fact, satellite information
showed that Tinian was not occupied at all-at least the overhead photos
showed no heavy military vehicles. There had to be some light forces there,
he reasoned, probably supported by helicopter from Saipan -the islands
were separated by only a narrow channel.
One hundred twelve fighters was Admiral Jackson’s main consideration.
There would be support from E-2 AEW aircraft, plus the usual helicopters
that armies took wherever they went. F-I5S and F-3S, supported further hy
SAMs and triple-A. It was a big job for one carrier, even with Hud Sanche/.’s
idea for making the carrier more formidable. The key to it, however, wasn’t
fighting the enemy’s arms. It was to attack his mind, a constant fact of war
(hut people alternately perceived uiul forgot over the centuries. He hoped he
was getting it right. Even then, something else came first.
The police never came back, somewhat to Clark’s surprise. Perhaps they’d
found the photos useful, but more probably not. In any case, they didn’t hang
around to find out. Back in their rental car, they took a last look at the
charred spot beyond the end of the runway just as the first of three AEW
aircraft landed at the base, quite normally to everyone’s relief. An hour ear-
lier, he’d noted, two rather than the regular three £-7675 had taken off, in-
dicating, he hoped, that their grisly mission had borne fruit of a sort. That
fact had already been confirmed by satellite, giving the green light for yet
another mission about which neither CIA officer knew anything.
The hard part still was believing it all. The English-language paper they’d
bought in the hotel lobby at breakfast had news on its front page not terribly
different than they’d read on their first day in Japan. There were two stories
from the Marianas and two items from Washington, but the rest of the front
page was mainly economic news, along with an editorial about how the res-
toration of normal relations with America was to be desired, even at the
price of reasonable concessions at the negotiations table. Perhaps the reality
of the situation was just too bizarre for people to accept, though a large part
of it was the close control of the news. There was still no word, for example,
of the nuclear missiles squirreled away somewhere. Somebody was being
either very clever or very foolish-or possibly both, depending on how
things turned out. John and Ding both came back to the proposition that none
of this made the least bit of sense, but that observation would be of little
consolation for the families of the people killed on both sides. Even in the
madly passionate war over the Falkland Islands, there had been inflamma-
tory rhetoric to excite the masses, but in this case it was as though Clause-
witz had been rewritten to say that war was an extension of economics rather
than politics, and business, while cutthroat in its way, was still a more civi-
lized form of activity than that engaged in on the political stage. But the truth
of the madness was before him. The roads were crowded with people doing
their daily routine, albeit with a few stares at the wreckage on the air base,
and in the face of a world that seemed to be turning upside down, the ordi-
nary citizen clung to what reality he knew, relegating the part he didn’t un-
derstand to others, who in turn wondered why nobody else noticed.
Here he was, Clark told himself, a foreign spy, covered with an identity
from yet a third country, doing things in contravention of the Geneva proto-
cols of civilized war-that was an arcane concept in and of itself. He’d help
kill fifty people not twelve hours before, and yet he was driving a rental car
back into the enemy capital, and his only immediate worry was to remember
to drive on the left side of the road and avoid collision with all the commut-
ers who thought anything more than a ten-tool tpmo with the car ahead
meant that you weren’t keeping up with the How.
All that changed three blocks from their hotel, whrn Ding spotted a car
parked the wrong way with the passenger-side visor turned down. It was a