lives.”
The thought occurred to Bob Cassidy that Stolypin must play a hell of a game of poker. “This winter, your army will attack?”
“This winter,” said Marshal Stolypin, “we will kill every Japanese soldier in Siberia. Every last one.”
When the aerial wagon train arrived at the air base in Chita, the C-5 transports landed first. The base consisted of two runways, almost parallel, about seven thousand feet long. There wasn’t much room for error. The transports landed and taxied off the runway into the parking area while Col. Bob Cassidy kept his flight of six F-22’s high overhead. Two other airports, each with two runways, lay a few miles to the southwest. These were old military bases and had not been maintained, so the concrete was crumbling. An emergency landing there would probably ruin right-brace et engines. Cassidy was keeping a close eye on his tac display. A Washington colonel, Evan Register, had given Cassidy and the pilots accompanying him to Chita a brief last night, before the beer bust. “The Athena device in the new Zeros will keep them hidden from your radar. And shooting an AMRAAM at a Zero is a waste of a good missile — Athena will never let the darn thing find its target. Leave your radar off. Radiating will make you a beacon for the Zeros — they will come like a moth to light. “Sky Eye is your edge. The radars in the satellites have doppler capability. While they cannot see the Zeros, they can see the wakes they make in the air, especially when they are supersonic. A supersonic shock wave is quite distinctive.”
“Wait a minute,” one of the junior pilots said, wanting to believe but not quite ready to. “What’s the catch?”
In the back of the room, Cassidy tilted his chair back and grinned. Stanford Tuck had not let him down. “Well, of course there are some technical limitations,” the Washington wizard admitted. “This is cutting-edge technology. Detecting aircraft wakes with doppler works best in calm air. Summer turbulence, thunderstorms, rain, hail — all such conditions degrade the capability. The computer can sort it out to some extent, but remember the satellites are whizzing along, so the picture is constantly changing, and there is a lot of computing involved. We’ve been watching the wakes of Zeros for several weeks now. As long as the weather doesn’t change, we’ll be okay.”
Cassidy looked at his troops and shrugged. What could you do?
At 25,000 feet over Chita, Bob Cassidy wondered how effective Sky Eye was today. The air at this altitude seemed smooth enough. The sun was diffused by a high, thin layer of cirrus, which cut the glare somewhat. The land below looked uninviting. Chita was a small town on the upper reaches of the Amur River, backed up against a snow-covered mountain range, with another to the south. The arid land reminded Cassidy of Nevada or central Oregon. The runways below looked like bright strips on the yellow-brown earth. From this altitude the aircraft parking mats and a few buildings, probably hangars, were also visible. Fifteen hundred miles from the sea, the Amur River was a seasonal stream now carrying water from melting snow. Two bridges crossed the river, one for the Trans-Siberian Railroad and one for trucks. Just before the snows came, the river would cease to flow. Any water trapped in it would freeze solid. Khabarovsk lay a thousand miles downstream. From there, the river flowed northwest another five hundred miles to the Sea of Okhotsk. The tac display showed empty sky around the F-22 formation. He punched the display to take in all the territory between Chita and Zeya, five hundred nautical miles east. Five hundred nautical miles, the distance between Boston and Detroit. The distances in Siberia were going to take some getting used to. The land was vast beyond imagination. Man had barely made an imprint here. Cassidy wondered about Jiro Kimura. Was he still alive? And if so, where was he?
Jiro was on his mind a lot lately, just when he should be thinking of something else, concentrating on the job at hand. Cassidy growled at himself and tried to think of other things. Not a single bogey on the tac display, neither toward Khabarovsk nor Nikolayevsk. That bothered Cassidy. It would be nice if the satellite saw one or two…, but it didn’t. Apparently. Subject, of course, to the inevitable high-tech glitches. Cassidy glanced down at the transports on the airfield. They were quite plain at this altitude. If all was going as planned, the crews were unloading the Sentinel batteries, which were mounted on trailers. The aircraft also brought four Humvees, which would pull the trailers. A Sentinel unit was being spotted on each side of the runway and turned on. The others would be towed away from the base that afternoon and evening, set up in a pattern on local roads in the area. As soon as the units were off-loaded, the two C-5’s would take off and head back over the pole toward Alaska. Tankers were supposed to meet them several hours out. Tankers had been crucial to the success of this operation, moving airplanes and equipment a third of the way around the globe and arriving ready to fight. Finding a tanker in the va/s of the sky had always been a challenge, a real tightrope act when one was low on fuel. GPS now made the rendezvous phase routine, which was fine by everyone. Now Cassidy eyed his fuel gauges. The fighters had tanked an hour ago, so they were fat, but Cassidy didn’t know how much longer he could remain strapped to this ejection seat. He’d been sitting in this cockpit over six hours. He itched and ached. He squirmed in the seat, trying to give his numb butt some relief. Another half hour passed. One of the C-5’s taxied to the end of the runway, sat there for five minutes, then began to roll. The other was taxiing as the first one lifted off. Cassidy waited until the C-5’s were ten minutes north, then pulled the throttles back and started down.
The first problem the Americans faced was parking their planes. The base was beyond the tactical range of Zeros flying from Khabarovsk, which was cold comfort since the Japanese now had planes at Zeya. And if they used a tanker, they could strike this base anytime they wished from almost anywhere, including Japan. With that in mind, the F-22’s were dispersed all over the field. The revetments were full of obviously abandoned fighters, some of them old Mig-19’s and Mig-21’s. Some of these antiques had flat tires, oil leaks, sand and bird’s nests in the intakes. The Americans pushed and pulled the Russian iron out of the revetments and put the F-22’s in. Then they rigged camouflage nets. Some of the best spots, concrete revetments completely hidden by large trees, were already taken by Sukhoi-27’s, which looked ready to fly. The Sukhois were attended by grubby, skinny Russians who smelled bad and didn’t speak English. The Americans passed out candy bars and soon made friends. While the candy was eaten eagerly, the Russians really wanted cigarettes, which the Americans didn’t have. Now that he was on the ground, Cassidy thought the Chita area was a bit like Colorado. The base and the small town huddled around the railroad station a few miles away were in a basin, surrounded by snow-covered mountains to the north, west, and south. The air was crystal-clear: From here, it was a long way to anywhere. At least the communications were first-rate: The Americans had brought their own com gear, portable radios that bounced their signals off a satellite, which meant that the operators could talk to anyone on the planet. Cassidy got on the horn immediately. He used the cryptological en-coder, set it up based on the date and time in Greenwich, then waited until it phased in. When he got a dial tone, he called the Air Force command center in the Cheyenne Mountain bunker in Colorado Springs. “All quiet, Colonel. They haven’t stirred much today.”
Bob Cassidy breathed a sigh of relief. By the following morning, the defenses here would be ready, but not quite yet. Everything was a problem, from berthing to bathrooms. The pilots got an empty ramshackle barracks and the enlisted got two. The bathrooms were appalling. Each building had one solitary toilet without a seat to serve the needs of the eighty people who would be bunked in that building.
“If my mother saw this, she’d faint dead away. She always wanted me to join the NAVY, live like a gentleman,” Bob Cassidy told a little knot of junior officers he found staring into a dark, filthy barracks bathroom. “Why didn’t you?”
“I used to get seasick taking a bath.”
“You’ve certainly come to the right place, Colonel. You won’t have to take baths here.”
“Fur Ball, you and Foy Sauce go dig a hole for an outhouse. Scheer, you take these others and tear down that old shack across the road for wood. Get some tools from the mechanics and watch out for rusty nails. And build one for the enlisted troops, too.”
When Cassidy disappeared, Hudek said disgustedly, “Outhouses!
We’ve come halfway around the world to build outhouses.”
“Glamour,” Foy Sauce muttered. “High adventure, fame … I am so goddamn underwhelmed, I could cry.”
That evening everyone ate in an abandoned mess hall. The stoves used wood from the nearby forest. The doctor who had accompanied the group from Germany refused to allow anyone to drink the water from the taps, so bottled water was served with the MRES— meals, ready to eat. The’ MRES were opened, warmed somewhat on the stoves, and served. Later that evening, Maj. Yan Chernov came looking for the commanding officer. He had a translator in tow. After the introductions, he told Cassidy, “My men need food. We came here from Zeya two weeks ago. The base people have no extra food.”
“How many of you are there?”
“Sixty-five.”
