The perfect Air Force mission, people in blue uniforms liked to say, was run by a mere captain. This one was commanded locally by a special-operations colonel, but at least he was a man who'd been recently passed over for general's rank, a fact that endeared him to his subordinates, who knew why he'd failed to screen for flag rank. People in spec-ops just didn't fit in with the button-down ideal of senior leadership. They were too…eccentric for that.

The final mission brief evolved from data sent by real-time link from Fort Meade, Maryland, to Verino, and the Americans still cringed at the knowledge that Russians were learning all sorts of things about America's ability to gather and analyze electronic data via satellite and other means—after all, the capability had been developed for use against them. The exact positions of two operating E-767's were precisely plotted. Visual satellite data had counted fighter aircraft—at least those not in protective shelters—and the orbiting KH-12's last pass had counted airborne aircraft and their positions.

The colonel commanding the detachment went over the penetration course that he had personally worked out with the flight crew, and while there were worries, the two young captains who would fly the C-17A transport chewed their gum and nodded final approval. One of them even joked about how it was time a "trash-hauler" got a little respect.

The Russians had their part to play, too. From Vuzhno-Sakalinsk South on the Kamchatka Peninsula, eight MiG-31 interceptors lifted off for an air-defense exercise, accompanied by an IL-86 Mainstay airborne-early-warning aircraft. Four Sukhoi fighters took off ten minutes later from Sokol to act as aggressors. The Sukhois with long-range fuel tanks headed southeast, remaining well outside Japanese airspace. The controllers in both Japanese E-767's recognized it for what it was: a fairly typical and stylized Russian training exercise. Nevertheless, it did involve warplanes, and merited their close attention, all the more so that it was astride the most logical approach route for American aircraft like the B-1s that had so recently "tickled" their own defenses. It had the effect of drawing the E-767's both north and east somewhat, and with them their fighter escorts. The reserve AWACS aircraft was almost ordered aloft, hut the ground-based air-defense commander decided sensibly merely to increase his alert state a bit.

The C-17A Globemaster-III was the newest and most expensive air-transport aircraft ever to force its way through the Pentagon's procurement system. Anyone familiar with that procedural nightmare would have preferred flak, because at least bombing missions were designed to succeed, whereas the procurement system seemed most often designed to fail. That it didn't was a tribute of sorts to the ingenuity of the people dedicated to confounding it. No expense had been spared, and a few new ones located for use, but what had resulted was a "trash-hauler" (the term most often used by fighter pilots) with pretensions of the wild life.