The faith of these fools!
Saratov turned back to the chart. After studying it for a moment, he pointed with a finger. “XO, let’s head eastward at slow speed. After dark, we’ll surface and recharge the batteries.”
“Yes, sir.” Askold reached for the parallel ruler. “Sonar, I want you to listen carefully this afternoon. Listen for destroyers, patrol boats, anything that isn’t a freighter or fishing smack. Let’s see what tonight brings.”
He looked at his watch. Two in the afternoon. “At three, I want to see all officers in the wardroom.”
The army truck came along the paved highway at a good rate of speed. There wasn’t much traffic, only a few trucks, and almost all of them going west to escape the invaders. Yan Chernov sat on a rock beside the highway, watching the trucks come and go. He had been bleeding from a cut on his arm, but he had torn a strip off his undershirt and bound it up, and now the bleeding seemed to have stopped. Somehow he had also strained his right shoulder in the ejection, although nothing seemed to be broken or ripped. The shoulder ached fiercely; he moved it anyway, trying to work out the soreness. God, he was tired. He was tempted to stretch out beside the road and sleep. A bleak landscape. The breeze from the west carried clouds. The clouds obscured the sun now and the air was cool. He was walking around to keep warm when one of the trucks flying by slammed on its brakes and stopped a hundred meters beyond him. Yan Chernov picked up his helmet and survival vest and walked toward the truck. His senior warrant officer got down from the cab, trotted toward Chernov. He stopped, saluted, then pounded Chernov on the back.
13
“Gentlemen, there is no Russian-held territory for us to return to,” Pavel Saratov said to his department heads. “There may be a few fishing villages too small for the Japanese to bother with,” the youngest one said. He was no more than twenty-three or twenty-four. “We could abandon the boat and swim ashore.”
“You wish to fish, do you, Krasin?”
The others pretended to chuckle. They were tightly crammed in around the small wardroom table. Captain Saratov continued: “Tokyo Bay is the largest port in Asia, perhaps in the world. We have ten torpedoes, four RPG’- GS, and a hundred kilos of plastique. I propose to enter the bay, reconnoiter, then hit them where it hurts the most.”
“Captain, why don’t we just sink three or four ships out here and be done with it?”
Saratov looked from face to face. Finally he said, “The question is, What can we do that will hurt them the most?”
“Sir,” the engineer began, “I don’t think it is reasonable to ask the men to risk their lives to kick the Japanese. The fact is, Russia is in no position to oppose Japan. We no longer have the military capability to fight a war in the Moscow suburbs, much less in the western Pacific. The men know all this. What will we gain?”
Pavel Saratov stared at the young officer, stunned. He had never heard such a comment from a junior officer. In the old days when political officers rode the ships, such a comment would have meant the immediate termination of a naval career. He tried to keep his face under control. Finally he said, “I am not asking the men to do anything. I give orders and they obey.” They said nothing to that. The execution was too fresh. “XO?”
“You make the decision, Captain. I am with you wherever you go.”
That was an old, old joke. No one laughed. Askold had a weakness for terrible jokes.
“Thank you for that thought, XO. Should we go in? Your candid opinion, please.”
Askold took out a pack of cigarettes, offered them around the table. Even Saratov took one. When they were smoking, the XO said, “We can hurt them worse inside. Sinking a big tanker in the harbor at Yokohama will have political implications in Japan that we can’t begin to calculate. They’ll probably get us before too long, no matter what we do. Let’s kick them in the balls while we have a leg to swing.”
“What about afterward?” the engineer asked. Pavel Saratov didn’t answer. The young officer reddened. “I don’t know,” the captain said finally. “There probably won’t be an afterward,” one of them said crossly to the offender. “Do you wanted it written out and signed?”
No one else had anything to say. “Back to your duties,” the captain said. “Sir, what should I put into the evening report to Moscow?” the com officer asked. “Nothing. There will be no evening report. There will be no radio transmissions at all unless I give a direct order.”
“But, sir, we didn’t make an evening report last night or the night before. Moscow may think we’re dead.”
“The Japanese may think that, too. Let’s hope so.”
Bogrov lingered after the others left. He was from Moscow, a naval academy graduate. When he and Saratov were alone, he said, “You didn’t have to shoot Svechin.”
“Oh, you precious little bastard, you think not, do you?”
Bogrov came to attention to deliver the riposte. He must have been thinking about it all day. “I think that —“
“Shut up! Fool! They must understand — all of them. I am master of this vessel. I swore an oath, and that oath means something to me. I will fight this boat. Every man will do his duty. I will execute any man who doesn’t. No one has a choice — not me, not you, not any of them.” Bogrov said nothing. “Everyone whines about conditions at home.” The captain made a gesture of irritation. “None of that is relevant.”
Pavel Saratov crossed his hands on the table in front of him and lowered his eyes to them. His voice was very low. “If you say one negative or disrespectful word in front of the men, Bogrov, just one, I will put a bullet into that putrefying mass of gray shit you use for brains. You will obey orders to your last breath, your last drop of blood, or I’ll personally stuff your corpse into a torpedo tube.”
Cassidy and his pilots quickly settled into a routine at Rhein-Main Air Force Base in Germany. Every day each pilot spent at least two hours in one of the simulators running intercepts, dog-fighting, handling emergencies. Another two hours were spent at the instructor’s station watching a comrade fly the box, as the simulator was known. The rest of the working day they studied the manual on the aircraft and took written tests designed to reinforce what they already knew and to find any areas that needed refreshing.
The second evening in Germany, Bob Cassidy got them together as a group in a classroom near the simulator.
“I’ve been told that some of you want to post mail on the net. Is that right?”
“Yes, sir,” three or four of them muttered.
“Okay, you may do so, but each letter must be censored by another officer. Pick your own censor. Any disputes that can’t be resolved amicably by the writer and censor go to Preacher Fain for resolution. All the letters must be encrypted before posting.”
Nods and smiles all around. Four or five of them looked around the room, obviously considering whom they might ask to censor their mail. Bob Cassidy continued:
“Everything we discuss in this room for the rest of the evening is classified. Everything.”
All the faces were directed toward him again.
“We are going to Russia this weekend. We’re going to be here for four more days, and we’ll fly each of those days. We’ll go in flights of four, with myself or Dick Guelich leading. We’ll keep doing the simulators, but we want to see each of you in the air, see how you handle the plane.
“Sunday, we will fly the planes to Chita Air Base in Siberia. Tankers will escort us there, refuel us enroute. We’ll go armed, ready to fight our way in.
“The F-22 squadron commanders here in Germany have been more than cooperative. The enlisted technicians that we must have to maintain the planes have volunteered en masse. So have the maintenance and staff officers. I was in the unique position of having more volunteers than we could use, so, after consulting with the squadron COS, I took the very best people available. The Air Force will lift these folks and their equipment to Chita tomorrow.
“As we speak, Sentinel missile batteries are on their way to Russia. The new Russian chief of staff, Marshal Stolypin, has agreed to place these batteries in the positions where the American technicians believe they will be the most effective.
“The Russians view this squadron and the Sentinel missile batteries as tangible proof that America is willing
