"My fellow Americans," Durling began for the second time in the day, and it was immediately apparent that, as pleasing as the events of the afternoon had been, the news this evening would be bad. And so it was.

There is something about inevitability that offends human nature. Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed. But man is also a creature prone to error, and sometimes that makes inevitable the things that he so often seeks to avoid.

The four B-1B Lancer bombers were five hundred miles offshore now, again spread on a line centered due east of Tokyo. This time they turned directly in, took an exact westerly heading of two-seven-zero degrees, and dropped down to a low-penetration altitude. The electronic-warfare officers aboard each of the aircraft now knew more than they had two nights earlier.

Now at least they could ask the right questions. Additional satellite information had fixed the location of every air-defense radar site in the country, and they knew they could beat those. The important part of this night's mission was to get a feel for the capabilities of the E-767's, and that demanded more circumspection.

The B-1B had been reworked many times since the 1970's. It had actually become slower rather than faster, but it had also become stealthy. Especially from nose-on, the Lancer had the radar cross section—the RCS—of a large bird, as opposed to the B-2A, which had the RCS of a sparrow attempting to hide from a hawk. It also had blazing speed at low-level, always the best way to avoid engagement if attacked, which the crews hoped to avoid. The mission for tonight was to "tickle" the orbiting early-warning aircraft, wait for them to react electronically, and then turn and run back to Elmendorf with better data than what they had already developed, from which a real attack plan could be formulated. The flight crews had forgotten only one thing. The air temperature was 31 degrees Fahrenheit on part of their aircraft and 35 on another.

Kami-Two was flying one hundred miles east of Choshi, following a precise north-south line at four hundred knots. Every fifteen minutes the aircraft reversed course. It had been up on patrol for seven hours, and was due to be relieved at dawn. The crew was tired but alert, not yet quite settled into the numbing routine of their mission.