engine noise faded. “Ah, Blue Leader,” Control said. “Destroy the bogey and RTB.”
Jiro sat looking at the airliner. They were climbing through twenty thousand feet now. “Blue Leader, this is Control. Did you copy? Destroy the bogey and return to base.” The mission controller was in Japan, in a basement at the defense ministry probably, staring at his computer screens. The reason his voice sounded so clear and strong on the radio was because the radio signal was directed at a satellite, which rebroadcast it. Jiro’s eyes flicked around the cockpit, taking in the various displays and switches. He took off his oxygen mask and rubbed his face furiously, then put the mask back on. “Blue Leader, Control …”
Well, there was nothing to be gained by prolonging this. “Control, Blue Leader.”
“Did you copy, Blue Leader?”
“Understand you want me to destroy this airliner and return to base.”
“Destroy the bogey, Blue Leader. Report bogey destroyed.”
“Control, this thing’s an airliner. Tell me that you understand that this bogey is an Aeroflot airliner.”
Silence. He was being grossly insubordinate. He could just imagine the clenched jaws of the senior officers. Well, hell, if they didn’t like it, they could cashier him, send him back to Japan. “Blue Leader, Control. We understand the bogey has Aeroflot markings. You are hereby ordered to destroy it. Acknowledge.”
“I copy.”
He retarded the throttle, let the airliner pull ahead. The distance began to grow: five hundred yards, a thousand, fifteen hundred. Jiro flicked a switch on the throttle to select the left Sidewinder. He pulled the nose up, put the dot in the center of the HUD directly on the airliner. The Sidewinder growled: It had locked on one of the big plane’s engines. Jiro squeezed the trigger on the stick. The Sidewinder leapt off the rail and shot forward. Straight as a bullet it flew across the gap toward the four-engined monster. A puff of smoke. A hit: the inboard left engine. He sat there watching as the airliner’s engine began trailing smoke. Now the big silver plane began to move back toward him, which was an optical illusion. Actually, it was slowing and he was creeping up on it. He retarded his throttles, cracked the speed brakes. “Fuck.” Jiro said the word in English. “Fuck? Now he screamed it. Furious, he selected the right Sidewinder, got the tone, then squeezed it off. It impacted one of the transport’s right engines: another little flash. The huge silver plane wasn’t climbing anymore. Its left wing came down, twenty…, now thirty degrees; the nose dropped. It began a turn back toward Khabarovsk. “Fall, you Russian bastard,” Jiro whispered. He opened his speed brakes to the stops and dropped his left wing, cutting across the turn, closing the distance. He was out to the left now, in plain view of the pilots if they only took the time to look this way. The airliner’s left engine was visibly on fire. No, the wing was burning. Shrapnel from the missile’s warhead must have punctured the wing tank, and jet fuel was burning in the slipstream. The big silver plane’s angle of bank was at least sixty degrees now, its nose down ten degrees.
It was then that Jiro realized that the big plane was out of control. Perhaps the controls had been damaged by the missile shrapnel or the fire. He pulled away, got his nose level, and watched the silver plane spiral down into the early-morning gloom. Down, down, down … miles to fall … Time seemed to stand still. The airliner got smaller and smaller. The Russian plane was just a tiny silver dot, almost lost from view, when its flight ended in a flash, a tiny smear of fire amid the morning shadows. That was all. A splash of fire, and they were gone. Jiro pointed the nose of his plane south, toward Vladivostok. He pushed the throttles forward and let the nose rise into a climb. “Control, Blue Leader …”
“Blue Leader, Control, go ahead with your report.”
After an evening of cogitation, Aleksandr Kalugin decided to deliver an ultimatum to Japan threatening nuclear holocaust. Since he had bombs and Japan didn’t, he could see no good reason why he should not put the bombs in play. He was not committing himself to any specific course of action, merely threatening one. He called in Danilov, the foreign minister, and had him draft the ultimatum. Two hours later, he looked the document over carefully as Danilov sat on the edge of his seat, his hands folded in his lap. Danilov was nearly seventy years old. He had spent his adult life as a professional diplomat. Never had he seen a Soviet or Russian government seriously weigh the use of nuclear weapons. Now, to his horror, Kalugin was threatening their use without even discussing the matter with his ministers. Is this where perestroika and democracy lead? To nuclear war?
“Sir, Japan may not withdraw from Siberia.”
Kalugin finished the paragraph he was reading before he looked at Danilov. “They might not.”
“They may not believe this ultimatum.”
“What is your point?”
“We have repeatedly assured the world that our nuclear weapons were destroyed. Now, by implication, we are admitting that those statements were not true.” Kalugin said nothing. He merely stared at the foreign minister, who felt his skin crawl. “Japan may believe that we do not have any weapons remaining,” the minister observed, “in which case they will disregard this ultimatum.” Kalugin went back to the draft document. A sunbeam peeped into the room between the drapes on the high window behind the president, who sat reading, his head lowered. He might nuke the Japanese, Danilov thought, suddenly sure that the ultimatum was not an idle threat. If they don’t pull out of Siberia, Kalugin might really do it.
11
Another clear, hot day. Plumes of diesel exhaust and dust rose into the warm, dry air behind the Japanese army trucks — all forty-seven of them — and gently tailed off to the east. The convoy was on a paved road beside the Amur River — a paved road with a lot of windblown dirt on it — rolling northwest at about twenty miles per hour. They were a day northwest of Khabarovsk, in a wide river valley defined by low hills or mountains to the northeast and southwest. The river, a mile to the left, formed the border with China, but no fences or guard towers marked it. Forty of the trucks carried supplies for Japanese forces a hundred miles ahead. Eight of the vehicles held soldiers, and the fuel, food, water, and cooking supplies necessary to keep the convoy rolling. The road wasn’t much — just a crowned two-laned paved road in a wide, treeless valley. It followed the natural contours of the land in a serpentine way along the path of least resistance. Although there were no signposts to proclaim it, the road was merely an improvement of an ancient trail. There were some culverts, occasionally a bridge, but in many places water routinely washed over the road. Dry now, many of the low places would be impassable in winter. From the road one could occasionally see sheep or goats cropping the sparse grass, here and there a shack or yurt, once in a great while a rattletrap civilian truck going somewhere or other, trailing its own dust plume. Occasionally, a dirt road led off from the main road. A few of these led to open pit mines in the hills, where manganese or some other ore was extracted from the earth with obsolete, well-worn equipment, sweat, and a lot of hard work. There were few people in this land. The natives shrank instinctively from the Japanese soldiers, who ignored them. Children in the doors of shacks watched the trucks approach, then retreated to the dark interior as the lead vehicle, a truck with a antiaircraft gun mounted on the flatbed, drew near. The Japanese ate dust and watched the sky. Some of them were wishing the Russian soldiers hadn’t destroyed the railroad trestles and bridges as they retreated. If the railroad had remained intact, these soldiers would be riding a train west instead of jolting around in trucks. The shimmering, brassy sky seemed to reflect the earth’s heat back to it. High and far to the west a thin layer of cirrus clouds would diffuse the sun this afternoon, but that was many hours away. The brilliant sun was hard to look at. When the curves of the road allowed, the older drivers looked anyway, almost against their will, holding up a hand or thumb to block the burning rays and searching the sky while they fought the wheel to keep their trucks on the highly crowned road. The eagles didn’t come from the sun’s direction. They came from the northwest, straight down the valley, over this road, swiftly and silently, just a few hundred feet above the ground. The driver of the lead truck saw them first, less than a mile away, two Sukhoi-27’s, streaking in like guided missiles. He cranked the wheel over and swung the truck on two wheels off the road. The men in back, the gun crew, almost fell out. He was just quick enough to save their lives. The cannon shells impacted on the road behind the lead truck and walked straight into the next vehicle, where they lingered for a fraction of a second as the pilot of the lead plane dipped his nose expertly. This truck exploded under the hammering. As the fireball blossomed, the pilot was already shooting at another truck halfway down the convoy. The truck did not explode; it merely disintegrated as a dozen 30-mm cannon shells impacted in two brief seconds. The pilot released the trigger and selected a third target, toward the end of the column. Still racing along at five hundred knots, he squirted a burst at that truck but missed. He glanced left to ensure his wingman was where he should be, then dropped the right wing for a hard turn. After ninety
