precipitously; then the nose went down. Chernov didn’t have time to watch it fall. He had already locked up the middle tanker with the radar, and now he launched a missile at it. Four seconds later, the third missile left the rail, aimed at the lead tanker. That missile, the third one, struck the first of the Mig-25’s joining on the lead tanker to get fuel. The fighter exploded. “Zeros,” Chernov shouted into the radio. “Six Zeros.”
The Russian fighters scattered like flushed quail. Chernov took his time. He doubled-checked the radar lock- on, ensured the last missile was slaved to it, then carefully squeezed the thing off. It left with a flash, trailing a wisp of smoke, then turned toward Mother Earth seven miles below and disappeared into the haze at Mach 3. Chernov switched back to “Gun.” He was out of missiles. Throttles forward, burners lit to close the distance quickly…, at a half mile, he had the HUD crosshairs on the tail of the large, defenseless four-engine tanker. At a quarter of a mile he pulled the trigger. Like a laser beam, the streak of flame from the gun reached out and touched the tanker’s fuselage. Chernov held the trigger down for a long burst.
Fire! A lick of fire from the fuselage, still absorbing fifty cannon shells a second. The tanker’s right wing dropped. Chernov was out of burner now, still closing, only a hundred meters aft. He pulled the crosshairs out to a wing, touched the trigger, then watched as the cannon shells cut it in half. He released the trigger and slammed the stick left, trying to roll out of the doomed tanker’s slipstream. As he did a stream of tracers went over his head, just a few feet above the cockpit. Yan Chernov didn’t want to kill any more Russians. He rolled onto his back and pulled the nose straight down. Several miles below, he saw a tanker — this must be the second one— descending in a circle and trailing a stream of fuel that stretched for a mile or so behind. He yanked his nose over and pulled the power back, deployed the speed brakes. He had to be sure. If one of the tankers survived to give fuel to a Mig-25, all this pain and blood would be for naught. Even as he pulled the nose toward the tanker, the stream of fuel pouring from the injured tanker caught fire. Two seconds later the big four-engined airplane exploded with a dazzling flash. Yan Chernov plummeted earthward. Somewhere above him, one of members of the second section might be coming down behind, angling for a shot. Chernov didn’t look back.
When the call came from the White House on the satellite telephone, the duty officer took it. He handed it to Paul Scheer, who listened carefully, jotted some info on the duty officer’s desk tablet, then said, “Yes, sir” three times before he put the instrument back in its cradle. “Four Zeros are on the way, all of them carrying nuclear weapons. They plan to nuke this base.”
“Where?” Cassidy asked. “Right now they’re just south of Khabarovsk. The White House wants us to intercept them and shoot them down.”
“The White House?” Cassidy asked when the shock of hearing the word nuke wore off a bit. “You won’t believe this, Skipper, but the voice sounded like President Hood’s to me.”
That had been an hour ago. Now, Cassidy, Scheer, Dixie Elitch, and one other pilot, a man named Smith, were on their way eastward. Before Cassidy manned up, he vomited on the concrete. Jiro was out there — Cassidy knew it. Hestnew it for a certainty. He was living a nightmare. “Are you okay, sir?” the crew chief asked. “Must be something I ate,” Cassidy mumbled.
When Yan Chernov leveled off a few hundred feet above the ground, doing Mach 2, he looked over his shoulder. He was only human. Nothing to the right, nothing to the left, nothing behind. The sky appeared empty. Where the other Russian fighters might be, he didn’t know. He scanned the terrain ahead, then the sky behind. Nothing. ECM silent. Fuel? The warning light on the instrument panel was lit. A thousand pounds remaining, perhaps. He was in a valley headed north, with mountains to the east and west. The land below was covered with pines. There were no roads in sight, just an endless sea of green trees with the mountains in the distance. He pulled the power to idle and pulled the nose up, zoom-climbing. At five thousand feet, he saw the wandering scar of a dirt road through the forest. He advanced the throttle to a cruise setting and picked the nose up to a level-flight attitude. He was doing less than five hundred knots now. He should just jump out and be done with it. Wander in the forest until he starved or broke a leg. He had his left hand on the ejection handle on the left side of the seat pan, but he didn’t pull it. Four hundred pounds of gas. The road was beneath him now, running northwest toward the distant mountains. He turned to follow it. A road would lead somewhere — to a place where there were people. He didn’t think consciously about any of this, but it was in the back of his mind. The gauge for the main fuel cell still read a few hundred pounds above empty when the engines died. Chernov let the plane slow to its best glide speed. He straightened himself in the seat, put his head back in the rest, and pulled the ejection handle.
25
Other flight of four F-22’s leveled off at 38,000 feet, conning in the dust-laden sky. Bob Cassidy wasn’t worried about the white ice crystals streaming behind the engines — visibility was so bad the Japanese wouldn’t see the contrails. He played with the satellite data down-link and adjusted his tac display. The screen was blank. That worried him. With the dust and the thermals, maybe the satellites weren’t picking up the Zeros. He looked longingly at the on-off switch for the radar. He badly wanted to turn it on, sweep the sky. If the Americans missed the Zeros in this crud, everyone at Chita was going to be cremated alive. Assuming the brass in the White House war room knew what they were talking about. This whole thing was insane. Nuclear weapons? In this day and age?
He was fretting, examining miserable options, when he realized he wasn’t strapped to his ejection seat. Oh, he had armed the seat all right, just before takeoff. Unfortunately, he had forgotten to strap himself to it, so if he ejected he was going to be flying without wings or parachute. Even an angel needs wings, he thought. He engaged the autopilot and began snapping Koch fittings, pulling straps tight. There. Amazing how a man could forget that. Or maybe not. He had too much on his mind. “Hey, Taco! Any word from Washington?”
Taco Rodriguez was the duty officer, sitting by the satellite telephone in Chita. The encrypted radio buzzed, then Cassidy heard Taco’s voice. “They rounded the corner at Khabarovsk, Hoppy, and left the tanker. Four of them, they say. About five hundred miles ahead of you. Call you back in a bit.”
“Thanks, Taco.”
The F-22’s were making Mach 1.4, better than a thousand knots over the ground. Presumably, the Zeros were also supercruising. Five hundred miles — the flights would meet in about fifteen minutes.
A quarter of an hour. Not much. Just a whole lifetime. He had just four F-22’s to intercept the Zeros. Cassidy would have brought more along if he had had them. His only other planes, exactly two, were being swarmed over by mechanics. Several more planes were inbound from Germany, but this morning he had just four flyable fighters. The ground crewmen had been pretty blase about the whole gig when the pilots manned up, Cassidy thought. The word went around the base like wildfire: The Japs are on their way to nuke us! Still, the men did their jobs, slapped the pilots on the backs, grinned at them, and sent them on their way. Just before the canopy closed, the crew chief had said to Cassidy, “Go get “em, sir.” Like it was a ball game or something. Like his ass wasn’t also on the line. Good- looking kid, the crew chief. Not Asian, of course, but he did look a bit like Jiro. About the same age and height, with jet black hair cut short. Jiro wouldn’t be out here in this dirty sky with a nuclear weapon strapped to his plane. Naw. He was probably back in Japan someplace, maybe even home with Shizuko. Sure. Bob Cassidy wiped his eyes with a gloved hand and tried to concentrate. The tac display was still blank. How good was that info the brass in Washington passed to Taco Rodriguez? Could Cassidy rely on it? There were two hundred Americans and several thousand Russian lives on the pass line at Chita. Just how many souls should you bet on that Washington techno- shit, Colonel Cassidy, sir?
Bob Cassidy lifted his left wrist and peeled back the Nomex flap to get a squint at his watch. Fourteen minutes. He had fourteen minutes left in this life.
Dixie Elitch lifted the visor on her helmet and swabbed her face with her glove. The dirty sky irritated her. Dirt at these altitudes was obscene, a crime against nature. The Japs infuriated her. Nukes. She checked her master armament switch, frowned at the blank tac display, and flicked her eyes around the empty yellow sky.
Maybe I should have stayed in California, found a decent man, she thought. God, there must be at least one in California. “If i live through this experience, I am going back to California, going to find that man.” She told herself this aloud, talking into her oxygen mask over the drone of the engines reaching her through the airframe. Well, Dixie, baby, that’s a goddamn big if.
Paul Scheer was the calmest of the F-22 pilots. When he’d been diagnosed with a fatal disease three years ago, he had worked his way through the gamut of emotions one by one: denial, rage, lethargy, acceptance. The
