ments for additional data.
“Probably a scatter from us,” the senior controller said, busy now with
vectoring his fighters onto the still-inbound contacts.
“No, no, frequency wasn’t right for that.” The officer ran imuilier instru-
ment check, but there was nothing else to support the ixld feeling that had
just turned his arms cold.
I t) M
“Hngine-heat warning. Engine-heat warning,” the voice was telling him be-
cause he’d ignored the visual display rather blatantly, the onboard computer
thought.
“I know, honey,” Richter replied.
Over the Nevada desert, he’d managed a zoom-climb to twenty-one thou-
sand feet, so far beyond the normal flight envelope of a helicopter that it had
actually frightened him, Richter remembered, but that had been in relatively
warm air, and it was colder here. He blazed through twenty thousand feet,
still with a respectable climb rate, just as the target changed course, turning
away from him. It seemed to be orbiting at about three hundred knots, proba-
bly using one engine for propulsion and the other to generate power for its
radar. He hadn’t been briefed on it, but it seemed reasonable enough. What
mattered was that he had seconds to get within range, but the huge turbofan
engines on the converted airliner were inviting targets for his Stingers.
“Just in range, Sandy.”
“Roger.” His left hand selected missiles from his weapons panel. The
side doors on the aircraft snapped open. Attached to each of them were three
Stinger missiles. With his last vestige of control, he slued the aircraft around,
flipped the cover off the trigger switch, and squeezed six times. All of the
missiles blazed off their rails, arcing upwards toward the aircraft two miles
away. With that, Richter eased way back on the throttles and nosed over,
diving and cooling his abused engines, watching the ground while his back-
seater followed the progress of the missiles.
The first Stinger burned out and fell short. The remaining five did better,
and though two of them lost power before reaching the target, four of them
found it, three to the right engine and one to the left.
“Hits, multiple hits.”
The £-707, at low speed, didn’t have much of a chance. The Stingers had
small warheads, hut the civilian-spec engines on the aircraft were poorly de-
signed to deal with damage. Both immediately lost power, and the one that
had actually been powering the aircraft came apart first. Fragments of tur-
bine blades exploded through the safety casing and ripped into the right
wing, severing the flight controls and destroying aerodynamic performance.
The converted airliner rolled immediately right, and did not recover, its
flight crew surprised at the unannounced disaster and quite unable to deal
with it. Half of the starboard wing separated from the aircraft almost at once,
and on the ground, radar operators saw the alpha-numeric display marking
the position of Kami-Two flip to the emergency setting of 7711 and then
simply disappear.
“That’s a hard kill, Sandy.”
“Roger.” The Comanche was falling rapidly now, heading toward the
clutter of the coast. Engine temps were back to normal, and Richter hoped he
hadn’t done them permanent harm. As for the rest, he’d killed people before.
” Kami-Two just dropped off the air,” the communications officer reported.
“What?” the senior controller asked, distracted by his intercept mission.
“Garbled call, explosion, something like that, then the data links just
dropped off.”
“Stand by, I have to vector my Eagles in.”
It had to be getting twitchy for the 15-Echoes, the Colonel knew. Their job
tor the moment was to be bait, to draw the Japanese Eagles out farther over
I he water while the Lightnings went in behind them to chop down their
AKW support and spring the trap. The good news for the moment was that
I lie third £-767 had just gone off the air. So the other side of the mission had
happened as planned. That was nice for a change. And so, for the rest. ..
“Two, this is lead, executing, now!” The Colonel flipped his illumination
radars on, twenty miles from the orbiting AEW aircraft. Next he opened the
weapons-bay doors to give the AMRAAM missiles a chance to see their
cjuarry. Both One and Two had acquisition, and he triggered both off. “Fox-
Two, Fox-Two on the North Guy with two Slammers!”
The opening of the weapons bay instantly made the Lightnings about as
stealthy as a tall building. Blips appeared on five different screens, along
with additional warnings as to the speed and heading of the newly discov-
ered aircraft. The additional word from the countermeasures officer was the
final voice of doom.
“We’re being illuminated at very close range, bearing zero-two-seven!”
“What? Who is that?” He had problems of his own, with his Eagles about
to launch missiles at the incoming Americans. Kami-Six had just switched
to fire-control mode, to allow the interceptors to fire in the blind-launch
mode, as they’d done with the B-i bombers. He couldn’t stop that now, the
senior officer told himself.
The last warning was far too late for counteraction. Just five miles out, the
two missiles switched on their own homing radars. They were coming in at
Mach-3+, driven by solid-fuel rocket motors toward a huge radar target, and
the AIM-I2O AMRAAM, known to its users as the Slammer, was one of the
new generation of brilliant weapons. The pilot finally got the word, listening
in to the countermeasures channel. He rolled his aircraft left, attempting a
nearly impossible split-S dive that he knew was a waste of effort because at
the last second he saw the yellow glow of rocket exhaust.
“Kill,” I ighlmng Lead whispered lo himself. “Lightning Flight, this is
lend Ninth (iuy is down.”
“I mil, this is Three, South Guy is down,” he heard next.
Ami now, the (‘olonel thought, using a particularly cruel Air Force euphe-
iniiiMt, it was time lo kill some baby seals. The four Lightnings were between
Ihc Japanese i oast and eight F-isJ Eagle interceptors. To seaward of them,
ll»c I i-si Sirikc liagles would be turning back in, lighting off their own
imlrtii ntiil loosmn their own AMRAAMs. Some would make kills, and the
JII|>UIICM- lighters that survived them would run for home, right into his flight
ol IIMII
The ground• control radars couldn’t see the aerial combat taking place. It was
too far out and below the radar hori/on. They did see one aircraft racing for
their coast, one ol theirs by the transponder code. Then it stopped cold in the
air, and the transponder went off. In the air-defense headquarters, data
downloaded from the three dead AEW aircraft gave no clues, except for one
fact-the war their country had started was now very real and had taken an
unexpected turn.
Dancing to the Tune
“I know you’re not Russians,” Koga said, sitting in the back of the car with
Chavez while Clark did the driving.
“Why would you think that?” John asked innocently.
“Because Yamata thinks that I have been in contact with Americans. You
two are the only gaijin with whom I have spoken since this madness began.
What is going on here?” the politician demanded.
“Sir, what is going on right now is that we rescued you from people who
wanted you dead.”
“Yamata would not be so foolish as that,” Koga retorted, not yet recov-
ered from the shock of seeing violence uncontained by the borders of a TV
cabinet.
“He has started a war, Koga-san. What is your death against that?” the
man in the driver’s seat inquired delicately.
“So you are Americans,” he persisted.
Oh, what the hell, Clark thought. “Yes, sir, we are.”
“Spies?”
“Intelligence officers,” Chavez preferred. “The man who was in the
room with you-”
“The one you killed, you mean? Kaneda?”
“Yes, sir. He murdered an American citizen, a girl named Kimberly Nor-
ton, and I am actually rather happy that I took him down.”
“Who was she?”
“She was Goto’s mistress,” Clark explained. “And when she became a
political threat to your new Prime Minister, Raizo Yamata decided to have
lici rlimmiiled. We came to your country just to get her home. That was all,”
(‘lurk went on, lolling what was partially a lie.
“None of ihis is necessary,” Koga said discordantly. “If your Congress
had just given me a chance to-”
“Sir, maybe that’s right. I don’t know if it is or not, but maybe it is,”
(‘have/, said. ”That doesn’t much matter now, does it?”
1 ‘Tell me, then, what does matter?”
“Ending this goddamned thing before too many people get hurt,” Clark
suggested. ‘ ‘I’ve fought in wars and they are not fun. Lots of young kids get
to die before they have the chance to get married and have kids of their own,
and that’s bad, okay?” Clark paused before going on. “It’s bad for my coun-
try, and for damned sure it’s going to be worse for yours.”
” Yamata thinks-”
“Yamata is a businessman,” Chavez said. “Sir, you’d better understand