Automatically, both pilot and copilot looked to their right. Unsurprisingly, they saw nothing. The copilot looked back in. At night you wanted to keep an eye on instruments. The lack of good external references meant you ran the risk of vertigo, the loss of spatial orientation, which all aviators feared. They seemed to be approaching some layered clouds. His eyes checked the external temperature gauges. Thirty-five, and that was good. Two or three degrees lower and you ran the risk of icing, and the B-1B, like most military airceaft, didn't have deicing equipment. Well, the mission was electronic, not visual, and clouds didn't mean much to radar transmission or reception.

But clouds did mean moisture, and the copilot allowed himself to forget that the temperature gauge was in the nose, and the tail was quite a bit higher. The temperature there was thirty-one, and ice started forming on the bomber's tailfin. It wasn't even enough to cause any degradation in the controls. But it was enough to make a subtle change in the shape of the aircraft, whose radar cross section depended on millimeter tolerances.

"That's a hard contact," the Captain said on Kami-Two. He worked his controls to lock on it, transmitting the contact to the Colonel's own display.

"Maybe another one now."

"I have it." The contact, he saw, was leveling out and heading straight for Tokyo. It could not possibly be an airliner. No transponder. The base course was wrong. The altitude was wrong. The penetration speed was wrong. It had to be an enemy. With that knowledge, he told his two fighters to head for it.

"I think I can start interrogating it more—"

"No," the Colonel replied over the 1C phones.

The two F-I5J fighters had just topped off their tanks and were well sited for the interception. The alpha-numeric symbols on the Kami's screens showed them close, and aboard the fighters the pilots could see the same display and didn't have to light off their own targeting radars. With their outbound speed of five hundred knots, and a corresponding speed on the inbound track, it wouldn't be long.

At the same time a report was downlinked to the regional air-defense headquarters, and soon many people were watching the electronic drama. There were now three inbound aircraft plotted, spaced out as though to deliver an attack. If they were B-1 bombers, everyone knew, they could be carrying real bombs or cruise missiles, and they were well within the launch radius for the latter. That created a problem for the air-defense commander, and the time of day did not make it better. His precise instructions were not yet precise enough, and there was no command guidance he could depend on in Tokyo. But the inbounds were within the Air Defense Identification Zone, and they were probably bombers, and—what? the General asked himself.