"Sandy Richter," the pilot said, climbing out.

"Any problems coming in?"

"Not anymore." Hell, I got here, didn't I? he wanted to say, still tense from the three-hour marathon to invade the country. Invade? Eleven Rangers and six aviators. Hey, he thought, you're all under arrest!

"There's number two…" Checa observed. "Quiet babies, aren't they?"

"We don't want to advertise, sir." It was perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Comanehe. The Sikorsky engineers had long known that most of the noise generated by a helicopter came from the tail rotor's conflict with the main. The one on the RAH-66 was shrouded, and the main rotor had five fairly thick composite blades, resulting in a helicopter with less than a third of the acoustical signature of any other rotary-wing aircraft yet built. And the area wouldn't hurt, Richter thought, looking around. All the trees, the thin mountain air. Not a bad place for the mission, he concluded as the second Comanche settled down on its landing pad, fitly meters away. The men who had fueled his aircraft were already stringing camouflage netting over it, using poles cut from the pine forest.

"Come on, let's get some food in you."

"Real food or MRHs?" the chief warrant officer asked.

"You can't have everything, Mr. Richter," Checa told him.

The aviator remembered when Army C-Rations had also included cigarettes. No longer, what with the new healthy Army, and there wasn't much sense in asking a Ranger for a smoke. Damned athletes.

The Rapiers turned away an hour later, convinced, the Japanese air-defense people were sure, that they could not penetrate the Kami-Eagle line that guarded the northeast approaches to the home islands. Even the best American aircraft and best systems could not defeat what they had to face, and that was good. On their screens they watched the contacts fade off, and soon the emissions from the E-3B's faded as well, heading back to Shemya to report their failure to their masters.

The Americans were realists. Courageous warriors, to be sure—the officers in the E-767's would not make the mistake as their forebears had of thinking that Americans lacked the ardor for real combat operations. That error had been a costly one. But war was a technical exercise, and they had allowed their strength to fall below a line from which recovery was not technically possible. And that was too bad for them.

The Rapiers had to tank on the way back, and didn't use their supercruise ability, because wasting fuel was not purposeful. The weather was again crummy at Shemya, and the fighters rode down under positive ground-control to their safe landings, then taxied off to their hangars, which were more crowded now with the arrival of four F-15E Strike Eagles from Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. They also regarded the mission as a success.

42—Lightning Strikes

"Are you mad?" Scherenko asked.