for which he'd graciously thanked the man and gone on his way, following the River Taki—more a nice brook than a river—up into the mountains. After the first hour, and about seven miles, he reckoned, he'd switched off the motor, pulled out his earplugs, and just listened.
Nothing. He hadn't seen a track in the mud and gravel path alongside the cascading stream, nor any sign of occupancy in the handful of rustic summer homes he'd passed along the way, and now, listening, he heard nothing at all but for the wind. There was a ford on his map, two more miles up, and sure enough it was both marked and usable, and allowed him to go east toward Shiraishi-san. Like most mountains, it had sides sculpted by time and water into numerous dead-end valleys, and Mount Shiraishi had a particularly nice valley, as yet unmarred by house or cabin. Perhaps Boy Scouts came here in summer to camp and commune with the nature the rest of their country had worked so hard to extinguish. More likely it was just a spot with no minerals valuable enough to justify a road or rail line. It was also one hundred air miles from Tokyo, and for all practical purposes might as easily have been in Antarctica.
Nomuri turned south, and climbed a smooth part of the slope to the crest of the southern ridge. He wanted a further look and listen, and, while he spotted a single hall-built dwelling a few miles below, he saw no column of smoke from a wood fire, nor the rising steam from someone's hot tub, and he heard nothing at all that was not of nature. Nomuri spent thirty minutes scanning the area with a pair of compact binoculars, taking his time and making sure, then turned to look north and west, finding the same remarkable absence of human presence. Finally satisfied, he headed back down to the Taki, following the path back to the town.
'We never see anyone now,' the rental agent said when Nomuri finally got back, just after sunset. 'May I offer you some tea?'
'Dozo,' the CIA officer said. He took his tea with a friendly nod. 'It's wonderful here.'
'You were wise to come this time of year.' The man wanted conversation more than anything else. 'In the summer the trees are full and beautiful, but the noise from these things'—he gestured at the ranks of cycles—'well, it ruins the peace of the mountain. But it supports me well,' the man allowed.
'I must come back again. Things are so hectic at my office. To come here and feel the silence.'
'Perhaps you will tell some friends,' the man suggested. Clearly he needed the money to sustain him in the off-season.
'Yes, I will certainly do that,' Nomuri assured him. A friendly bow sent him on his way, and the CIA officer started his car for the three-hour drive back to Tokyo, still wondering why the Agency had given him an assignment calculated to make him feel better about his mission.
'Are you guys really comfortable with this?' Jackson asked the people from SOCOM.
'Funny time for second thoughts, Robby,' the senior officer observed.
'If they're dumb enough to let American civilians roam around their country, well, let's take advantage of it.'
'The insertion still worries me,' the Air Force representative noted, looking by turns at the air-navigation charts and the satellite photos. 'We have a good IP—hell, the navigational references are pretty good—but somebody's gotta take care of those AWACS birds for this to work.'
'It's covered,' the colonel from Air Combat Command assured him. 'We're going to light up the sky for them, and you do have that gap to use.'
He tapped his pointer on the third chart. 'The helo crews?' Robby asked next.
'They're working on their sims now. If they're lucky they'll get to sleep on the flight over.'
The mission planning simulator was real enough to fool Sandy Richter's inner ears. The device was halfway between his youngest son's new Nintendo VR System and a full-up aircraft simulator, the oversized helmet he wore identical with the one he used in his Comanche, but infinitely more sophisticated. What had begun with a monocle display on the AH-64 Apache was now like an I-MAX-theater view of the world that you wore on your head. It needed to be more sophisticated yet, but it did give him a view of the computer-generated terrain along with all his flight information, and his hands were on the stick and throttle of another virtual-helicopter as he navigated across the water toward approaching bluffs.
'Coming right for the notch,' he told his backseater, who was actually sitting beside him, because the simulator didn't require that sort of fidelity. In this artificial world, they saw what they saw regardless of where they were, though the backseater sitting next to him had two additional instruments.
What they saw was the product of six hours of supercomputer time. A set of satellite photographs taken over the last three days had been analyzed, folded, spindled, and mutilated into a three-dimensional display that looked like a somewhat grainy video.
'Population center to the left.'
'Roger, I see it.' What he saw was a patch of fluorescent blue which in reality would have been yellow-orange quartz lighting, and out of deference to it he increased altitude from the fifty feet he'd followed for the past two hours. He eased the sidestick over, and the others in the darkened room, who were observing the flight crew, were struck by the way both bodies tilted to deal with the g-forces of a turn that existed only in the computer running the simulation. They might have laughed except that Sandy Richter was not somebody you laughed at.
From the moment he crossed the virtual coast, he climbed up to a crest and ran along it. That was Richter's idea. There were roads and houses in the river valleys that ended at the Sea of Japan. Better, the pilot thought, to stay acoustically covert as much as possible and take his chances with the look-down capability. In a just world he'd be able to deal with that threat on the inbound leg, but this was not exactly a just world.
'Fighters overhead,' a female voice warned, just as it would on the real mission.
'Coming down some,' Richter replied to the computer voice, slipping down below the ridgeline to the right. 'If you can find me fifty feet off the ground, then I lose, honey.'
'I hope this stealth shit really works.' The initial intelligence reports were very concerned with the radar in the Japanese F-15's. Somehow it had taken down one B-1 and crippled another, and nobody was quite sure how it had happened.
'We're gonna find that one out.' What else could the pilot say? In this case the computer decided that the stealth shit really did work. The last hour of the virtual flight was routine terrain-dodging, but strenuous enough that when he landed his Comanche, Richter needed a shower which, he was sure, would not be available where they were going. Though a pair of skis might be useful.
'What if the other guys—'
'Then I suppose we learn to like rice.'
'Successful insertion,' the major grading the exercise decided. 'You gents ready for a little trip?'
Richter picked up a glass of ice water from the table in the back of the room. 'You know, I never really thought I'd drive a snake that far.'
'What about the rest of the stuff?' his weapons-operator wanted to know.
'It'll be uploaded when you get there.'
'And the way out?' Richter asked. It would have been better had they briefed him in on that one.
'You have a choice of two. Maybe three. We haven't decided that one yet. It's being looked at,' the SOCOM officer assured them.
The good news was that they all seemed to have penthouse apartments. That was to be expected, Chavez thought. Rich dudes like these bastards would have the whole top floor of whatever building they picked. It made people like that feel big, he supposed, to be able to look down on everyone else, like people in the L.A. high-rises had looked down on the barrios of his youth.
None of them had ever been soldiers, though. You never wanted to skyline yourself that way. Better to be down in the weeds with the mice and the peons. Well, everybody had their limitations, Ding told himself.
It was just a matter, then, of finding a tall spot. That proved easy. Again the pacific nature of the city worked in their favor. They merely picked the proper building, walked in, took the elevator to the top floor, and from there walked to the roof. Chavez set up his camera on a tripod, selected his longest lens, and started shooting. Even doing it all in daylight was no hardship, the instructions had told them, and the weather gods cooperated, giving them a gray, overcast afternoon. He shot ten frames of each building, rewinding and ejecting the film cassettes, which went back into their boxes for labeling.
The entire operation took half an hour.
'You get used to trusting the guy?' Chavez asked after they made the pass.
