left, heading slightly away. He looked through the gunsight. There! At eleven o’clock. A transport! Parachutes in the air! Paratroops. The Japanese were taking the field. All that registered in Chernov’s mind without conscious thought. He was concentrating on the transport. He was going to get a deflection shot. He was doing Mach 1.4; the other plane, probably two hundred knots max. He jabbed at the rudder, adjusted the stick with both hands to get the nose where he wanted it. He squeezed the trigger, and the gun erupted, hosing fire. It was over in two seconds. The stream of white-hot lead was in front of the enemy transport, then, with the gentlest touch on the right rudder, stitched it from nose to tail. The four engine turboprop blew up and Chernov shot just behind the expanding fireball, still accelerating. Mach 1.7 now, all the Sukhoi would give him in this thick air. His eyes registered the sight of more parachutes, but he was busy flying. The enemy radars were emitting in his rear quadrant now. He let the nose sag in order to get down against the earth.
As the seconds ticked by, he felt his shoulder blades tighten. Sure enough, the Missile light under the gunsight began to flash. Level thirty meters above the ground, Chernov punched out chaff, rolled the plane ninety degrees to the left, and pulled the stick into his gut until the meter read 7 Go’s. Sweat stung his eyes. The horizon was right there, a line through his gunsight. He fought the temptation to look over his left shoulder, concentrated instead on keeping the horizon below the dot in the gunsight that represented his flight path. If that dot dropped below the horizon, he would be into the ground in seconds, and very, very dead. A missile went over his right shoulder, exploded harmlessly after it was by. The next one went off just under the plane, a sickening thud that slammed the plane hard. He rolled right, through level, into a right turn. Less G now, because the Missile light was off. So was the ECM panel. It shouldn’t be. The Japanese were still back there, perhaps trying to catch him. If he could keep his speed up, they never would. He needed to extend out. For the first time, he glanced at his system gauges, the gauges that told him of his steed’s health. Uh-oh. Hydraulic pressure was dropping; he had three yellow warning lights and a red. The red was a generator. Oh, God! The ECM panel was silent because it lost power when one of the generators dropped off the line. Just then another missile exploded above him: a flash, a pop, followed by a rattle of shrapnel against the fuselage. He leveled the wings. Despite the low altitude, he risked a look aft. Nothing visible behind. Still Mach 1.6 on the airspeed indicator. Fuel trailing away behind the right wing. He could just see the fuel boiling off the wing in the rearview mirror. A glance at the gauge for fuel in the right wing. Almost empty. Another gentle left turn. He consulted the GPS. Fifteen miles from the base, going northeast. Yan Chernov kept the left wing down about ten degrees, let the nose slowly come toward the north, then the northwest. It seemed as if the wing was almost in the grass of the steppe. The sensation of speed was overpowering, sublime; he was orbiting the planet at a distance of five meters. He watched intently ahead, focused with all his being, tugging the plane over rises and rolling hills. If the wing kissed the earth now, he would never know it: He would be dead before the sensation registered. He leveled the wings, heading west. Are the Zeros chasing? They must not have the fuel to chase. Oil pressure to the right engine was dropping quickly. Chernov came out of burner. When he did, the right rpm began dropping. He pulled the throttle to idle cutoff, secured the fuel flow. He still had one engine, one generator. At fifty miles from the base, he took off his oxygen mask and swabbed the sweat from his eyes and face. He checked the fuel again. Must be another leak somewhere. He had enough for thirty more minutes of flight, if he didn’t have any fuel leaks. With leaks, less. But he was alive.
Pavel Saratov walked the periscope around slowly. The attack scope protruded just inches above the surface of the sea, which fortunately was calm today. Still, a wave occasionally washed over the glass. When it did he paused until he could see again, then continued his sweep. Visibility was about ten miles, he estimated. There were three ships in view, two going into Tokyo Bay, one leaving. Container ships, one about thirty thousand tons, the other two larger. Not a warship in sight. Not even a patrol boat. He flipped the handle so that he could scan the sky. Overcast in all directions. No airplanes. Back to the ships. Two going northeast, up the channel into the Uraga Strait entrance to Tokyo Bay, one coming out. The ship nearest the land was too far away and opening the distance, but if he hurried, he could probably get firing solutions on the other two and send them to the bottom. Now. He had ten torpedoes. He should have had a dozen, which would have been a full load, but there had been only eleven fueled torpedoes in the naval armory, and he had drained the fuel from one to sell for food. These were not new, modern torpedoes — they were the old 53–65 antiship, wake-homing torpedoes, the first of the Soviet wake-homers. Saratov had loaded the ten torpedoes aboard Admiral Kolchak because naval regulations required that the boat be armed whenever it went to sea. Not that anyone gave a damn. Saratov loaded the torpedoes anyway. It seemed to him that if he didn’t obey naval regulations, he had no right to demand obedience from the men. He had always feared the implications if he and the men one day just chose not to obey. Would they then be merely a bunch of burns looking for a meal…, seagoing burns? Pirates?
He pulled his head back from the scope. The members of the attack team were looking at him expectantly, waiting for him to call ranges and bearings that they could put into the attack computer. “No warships,” he told Askold, the executive officer. Askold was from the Ukraine, but he had chosen the Russian NAVY seventeen years ago, when the union collapsed. The Ukrainian NAVY looked like a good place to starve. He grinned at Saratov now. “Let’s blast away and get the hell out.”
“There should be warships,” Saratov said, turning his attention back to the periscope. “The entrance to Tokyo Bay, for God’s sake.”
“Are you sure there are no submarines about?” Askold asked the sonar operator, who shook his head no. He looked insulted. If he had heard anything that might be a submarine amid the cacophony of screw noises around the entrance to this bay, he would have said so. “Give me another few turns on the motors, Chief,” Saratov ordered. The boat was going so slowly that the bow and stern planes were ineffective, which caused the submarine to bob up and down, making the scope rise too far out of the water and then dip under. “Aye aye, sir.”
After one more complete look around, Saratov ordered the scope lowered. He turned to the chart on the table. “There should be patrol boats, destroyers, an airplane, something.”
Had he lucked into an interlude when the pickets guarding the entrance to the bay were off watch? If so, he should strike quickly and make his escape. Askold stood beside him, staring at the chart. “Ten torpedoes … What are we going to do afterward?” He asked the question softly, actually in a whisper. “I don’t know,” Saratov murmured. “Assuming we survive the afterward.”
“They’ve left Tokyo Bay unguarded.”
Askold pinched his nose. “There must be an antisubmarine net across the entrance. That at the very least.”
“There are no picket boats to open and close it. Two freighters are going in now, one coming out. It’s wide open.”
“How arrogant are these people?”
“We had four dieselstelectric boats at sea in the Pacific when the war started. All the nuke boats are junk. If you were Japanese, wouldn’t you put your antisubmarine forces around your invasion fleet?”
“Hmm, the invasion fleet. That is the target we were assigned,” Askold said, pretending to be thinking aloud. “I wonder if headquarters assigned all four of our boats to Vlad?”
“Perhaps,” Askold said slowly. “Do you think—“
“I only know that there are no antisubmarine forces here,” Saratov interrupted. “Not even a rowboat.”
Saratov motioned for the periscope. When it was up, he made another complete sweep, then turned so that he was looking at the entrance to Tokyo Bay. The entrance was several miles wide. The bay was huge, over a hundred square miles. One thing was certain: The Japanese would never expect a Russian sub to go in there. Hell, they weren’t even expecting an enemy sub here at the entrance. There was a huge refinery on the west side of the bay at Yokosuka, near the naval base. North, up the west coast of the bay, was Yokohama, the commercial shipping port. The main anchorage at Yokohama would be full of tankers, bulk freighters, container ships. Ten torpedoes — six were in the tubes, all of which were in the bow. This class of boat had no stern tubes. He also had four shoulder-fired RPG-9 antitank rockets that he had obtained in a trade a few years back. The rockets had two-kilo warheads, which would punch a hole in any tank on earth, but they weren’t ship killers. The boat had no deck gun, of course. There hadn’t been a deck gun on a Soviet submarine since the last one was removed in the early 1950’s. Deck guns made too much noise when the submarine was submerged and were of limited utility when surfaced. Still, in a crowded anchorage, with the sailors taking their time, aiming at big, well-lit, stationary targets at point- blank range, a gun certainly would be nice. This boat was equipped with tubes to launch four surface-to-air missiles. The tubes were in the sail, and they were empty. Saratov hadn’t seen a missile in years. The two demolition experts and their plastique — he had forgotten about them. “Down scope.”
The captain surveyed the expectant faces…, so eager, so trusting!
