Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [323]
Scott changed slides again. "How well do you know their railroads?"
"I've been over there often enough. That's why they let you draft me."
"Well, tell me what you think of this one." Scott pointed at the screen.
"That's some bitchin' radar," a technician observed. The trailer had been flown up to Elmendorf to support the B-1 mission. The bomber crews were sleeping now, and radar experts, officer- and enlisted-rank, were going over the taped records of the snooper flight.
"Airborne phased array?" a major asked.
"Sure looks that way. Sure as hell isn't the APY-1 we sold them ten years back. We're talking over two million watts, and the way the signal strength jumps. Know what they've got here? It's a rotating dome, probably a single planar array," the master sergeant said. "So it's rotating, okay. But they can steer it electronically, too."
"Track and scan?"
"Why not? It's frequency-agile. Damn, I wish we had one of these, sir."
The sergeant picked up a photo of the aircraft. "This thing is going to be a problem for us. All that power—makes you wonder if they might get a hit. Makes me wonder if they were tracking the is, sir."
"From that far out?" The B-1B was not strictly speaking a stealthy aircraft. From nose—on it did have a reduced radar signature. From abeam the radar cross section was considerably larger, though still smaller than any conventional airplane of similar physical dimensions.
"Yes, sir. I need to play with the tapes some."
"What will you look for?"
"The rotodome probably turns at about six rpm. The pulses we're recording ought to be at about that interval. Anything else, and they were steering the beam at us."
"Good one, Sarge. Run it down."
34—All Aboard
Yamata was annoyed to be back in Tokyo. His pattern of operation in thirty years of business had been to provide command guidance, then let a team of subordinates work out the details while he moved on to other strategic issues, and he'd fully expected it to go easier in this case rather than harder.
After all, the twenty most senior zaibatsu were his staff now. Not that they thought of themselves that way. Yamata-san smiled to himself. It was a heady thought. Getting the government to dance to his tune had been child's play. Getting these men onboard had taken years of cajolery. But they were dancing to his tune, and they just needed the bandmaster around from time to time. And so he'd flown back on a nearly empty airliner to steady down their nerves.
"It's not possible," he told them.
"But he said—"
"Kozo, President Durling can say anything he wishes. I'm telling you that it is not possible for them to rebuild their records in anything less than several weeks. If they attempt to reopen their markets today all that will result is chaos. And chaos," he reminded them, "works in our favor."
"And the Europeans?" Tanzan Itagake asked.
"They will wake up at the end of next week and discover that we have bought their continent," Yamata told them all. "In five years America will be our grocer and Europe will be our boutique. By that time the yen will be the world's most powerful currency. By that time we will have a fully integrated national economy and a powerful continental ally. Both of us will be self-sufficient in all our resource needs. We will no longer have a population that needs to abort its babies to keep