decision in a few hours. Maybe he should ask about after the war. If he survived, could he get back into the Air Force?
Would he want back in?
F-22’s versus Zeros. Jiro Kimura was flying a Zero. My God, he might end up shooting at Jiro. He finally dozed off in the chair. The flying dream didn’t return. In the new dream, he was young again, just a boy in Kansas, watching clouds adrift on a summer wind in an infinite blue sky. He awoke for good at 3:00 A.m. It was hopeless. There was no more sleep in him. He took a shower and put on a uniform. Could the F-22 survive against the Zero? The Raptor was very stealthy, but with Athena, the Zero was invisible, or so Jiro said. How do you fight a supersonic enemy that you cannot locate on radar?
“Taking a squadron of F-22’s to Siberia will be a challenge, General,” Bob Cassidy told Stanford Tuck the next morning. The general was sitting behind his desk in his shirtsleeves, drinking coffee. His jacket hung on a hook near the door. “Logistics will make or break the operation,” Cassidy continued. He sketched out the problems he saw with basing, logistics, early warning, and keeping his people healthy and flying. “Even the food will have to come from the States.”
“Siberia,” the general muttered, just to hear the sound of the word. “The logistics problem would be easier if we were taking a squadron to Antarctica.”
The general punched a button on the telephone. In seconds, a door opened and the general’s aide appeared. “This is Colonel Eatherly. I want you to go over everything you’ve talked about in greater detail with him. He’ll take notes and brief me on what he thinks. The president wants to make a powerful political statement against armed aggression. He doesn’t want to embroil the United States in World War Three. Yet if we commit a dozen planes to combat in Russia, they must have at least a fighting chance of accomplishing their mission. If the Japanese sweep them from the sky — for whatever reason — we will be worse off than if we did nothing. Offering hors d’oeuvres to a hungry lion is bad policy.”
Tuck loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves. Bob Cassidy took a deep breath. He appreciated the stakes involved, but he knew what trained pilots could do with the F-22. “Subject to the qualifiers we discussed, sir, I think a Raptor squadron could go toe-to-toe with the new Zero. With the right pilots, we can give them a hell of a fight.”
“A dozen planes is all we can give you,” Stanford Tuck said, “so you are going to be outnumbered by a bunch.” He laid both hands flat on his desk. “You may as well hear all of it,” the general said. “We cannot give you the new, long-range missiles. The politicians refused. You can take AMRAAMS and Sidewinders, but nothing that has technology we don’t want the Japanese or Russians to see.” AMRAAM stood for advanced medium-range anti- aircraft missile; it was also known as the AIM-12 °C. “Sky Eye?”
“No. The thinking is that if foreign powers learn how good Sky Eye is, they will target our satellites in any future conflict.”
“Our satellites are already targets.”
“Low-priority targets.”
“But—” Tuck raised a hand. “I’m not here to argue. I didn’t make that decision. We have to live with it.”
“Why the hell buy it if we can’t use it?” Cassidy asked with some irritation. “This country’s future isn’t on the come line just now,” Tuck said with his eyes half-closed. He seemed to be trying to measure Cassidy. “You and I are on the same side.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean—“
“Go talk to Eatherly.”
As Eatherly led Cassidy from the room, he stuck out his hand. “My friends call me John. Did you get along okay with the old man?”
“I think so.”
In his office, Eatherly pulled a chair around for Cassidy and got out a legal pad. “Does the general really think an F-22 squadron in Siberia has a chance?”
Eatherly looked surprised. “What are you saying?”
Cassidy frowned. “Or does he want me to give him reasons to say I can’t?
“I believe he was hoping you could show him how this proposal could be made to work,” Eatherly replied thoughtfully. “If you think it can.”
Cassidy rubbed his face hard. “I—“
“You are going to be leading this parade, Colonel. The tender, quivering ass on the plate this time is yours.”
Bob Cassidy sat lost in thought for a long moment. Then he said, “My source in Japan says the Zeros are invisible to radar. He says the Japanese acquired — stole — an American project called Athena.”
Eatherly nodded. “There was a black American project with that name. I checked when I saw your report on the Zero. The American project died years ago.”
“How did it work?”
“It was active ECM. When the signal from an enemy radar was detected, the raw data was put through a superconductive computer, which then used other antennas buried in the aircraft’s skin to emit an out-of-sync wave that effectively canceled the enemy radar signal.”
“But what about scatter effect? Radar A transmits a signal, but B receives it?”
“The computer knows the scatter characteristics of the airplane it is protecting, so it emits the proper amount of energy in all directions. That was the heart of it.”
“Why didn’t we develop it?”
Eatherly shrugged. “Ran out of money.”
“Terrific.”
“The F-22 is very stealthy,” Eatherly mused. “With your radar off, you might escape detection until you are into visual range.”
“It isn’t that stealthy,” Bob Cassidy replied. “And the human eyeball isn’t that good. What we’re going to need is Sky Eye. The satellites are going to have to find these guys and tell us where they are.”
I’ll talk to the National Security people.”
“And we’re going to need something to protect our bases. We won’t have the planes to stay airborne around the clock. We need an equalizer.”
“Sentinel,” John said, and wrote the word on his legal pad. “Explain.”
“Sentinel is an automated weapon — highly classified, of course. You deliver it to a site, turn it on, and leave it. When it detects electromagnetic energy on a preset frequency, it launches a small, solid-fuel, antiradiation missile that seeks out the emitter. The missiles have some memory capability, so they can track targets that cease emissions — the capability of these new computer chips is really amazing. Anyway, as I recall, Sentinel has a magazine capacity of forty-eight missiles. The missiles have a range of about sixteen miles.”
“Electrical power will be a big problem in Siberia.”
“Sentinel has rechargable solar cells. All you have to do is reload the magazine occasionally.”
“So Zero pilots are going to be down to their Mach I, Mod Zero eyeballs.”
“Sentinel will definitely encourage them to leave their radars turned off.” “Nasty.” Cassidy grinned. “Doesn’t the F-22 have the new camouflage skin that changes colors based on the background?” Eatherly asked after they discussed logistics for several minutes. “The newest ones do,” Cassidy told him. “Active skin camouflage, or smart skin. The skin has to be installed on the assembly line.”
“How good is it?”
“It really works. Against any kind of neutral background, such as clouds or ocean or haze, the plane is extremely difficult to locate visually when it’s more than a couple hundred yards away. Some people can pick it up with their peripheral vision, sometimes. Occasionally you see movement out of the corner of your eye, you know it’s there, and yet when you look directly at it, you can’t pick it up. It’s scary.”
Eatherly made a note. “Talk to me about maintenance. How many people, how many spares?”
After a morning of this, John Eatherly and Cassidy went back into the chairman’s office for lunch. As they ate bean soup and corn bread, Eatherly briefed the general. He ran through proposed solutions to every major problem: personnel, logistics, maintenance, weapons and fuel supply, early warning. “So what is your recommendation?” the general asked Cassidy when Eatherly was finished. “Isn’t there any way to prevent this war from happening, sir?” Cassidy was staring into the bean soup. He had no appetite. “The politicos say no.” Stanford Tuck shrugged. “War
