SEA OF JAPAN ALTITUDE 20,000 METERS

The cockpit shuddered as the ramjet engine shut down, fired its explosive bolts and detached, the pilot’s flickering display showing the propulsion module tumbling into the sea below.

“Phase two,” the pilot murmured in Japanese into his boom microphone. “Aircraft stable in full glide. Descending on glide path at nineteen thousand meters.”

There was no need to maintain radio silence — the electronics saved the voice data, video camera images and avionics telemetry into a magnetic bubble memory and transmitted a compressed burst once every five to ten minutes on a constantly changing frequency with time-varying encryption codes aimed in a beam to randomly selected Galaxy multipurpose satellites. The communications suite was frontier technology, Japanese technology, the most advanced in the world. Maj. Sushima Namuru would continue to transmit despite the fact that this was the most secret human intelligence operation ever taken on by the Japanese Self Defense Force.

The cockpit hummed from the instruments and the gyro. Namuru half closed his eyes, at one with the airplane, which moments before had been a high-speed jet and was now gliding silently, its polymer airframe and fabric skin making it invisible to radar, its lack of an engine making it invisible to infrared scanners, its lifting surface shape eliminating much of the wingtip vortex swirl making the flight whisper quiet. The plane was a prototype, named Shadowstar by Namuru, the name resonant with meaning to him. For a moment he saw images of the morning, his goodbye to his wife and young son, the send-off party with his squadron of Divine Wind flyers, his time alone in the shrine, feeling his ancestors surround him, giving their approval.

He glanced at the tiny camera eye set in the overhead, the one that monitored him and his reactions, hoping that someday his son would see the video and have pride in his father.

Namuru’s reverie ended two seconds after it had begun, his attention now taken up in his display” screen, its three-dimensional display of glide slope superimposed over the terrain model so real that despite working with it for years, Namuru was still tempted to reach out and touch the objects in the display. The screen was all Namuru needed to fly the plane — there were no windows to the world outside. The only thing the display was unable to do was allow a windowless landing approach; for that a pilot still needed a real view. But on, this mission, Namuru’s Shadowstar would not be landing. The aircraft passed over the line marking Greater Manchuria’s territorial waters, then soon flew over Greater’manchuria’s coastline. Namuru shook his head slightly, amazed at how close this new barbarian nation was to Japan, just across the Sea of Japan, the state once divided between Russia and China, but now a united threat merely 300 kilometers from Japan at its closest point, the distance between Tokyo and the Greater Manchurian capital of Changashan only 1050 kilometers, well inside the range of the old Russian SS-34 nucleartipped missiles. The missiles were supposedly destroyed under the United Nations ban on nuclear devices years before Greater Manchuria’s formation, but if they were, Namuru’s mission would not have been ordered. The intelligence brief, held an hour before his takeoff, detailed the satellite data that pointed to a nuclear-weapons storage depot in the sleepy railhead town of Tamga 200 kilometers northeast of Port Artom, the city the Russians had called Vladivostok.

The evidence was frightening. That a ketojin, a savage, like Len Pei Poom could form a nation of barbarians so close to Japan could not be permitted. Especially if they were in possession of nuclear missiles. Namuru almost longed for decades past when the Soviet Union and China and America were too busy threatening each other to be a danger to Japan. But now that Japan was alone it would be up to him, Namuru himself, to give his commanders the intelligence they would require before taking action against this threat. Namuru watched the glide path on the display. The glider had floated silently to an altitude of 5000 meters, completely undetected, now within twenty kilometers of Tamga.

The computer flashed up the countdown to aircraft destruct. Scarcely a minute now. Namuru glanced at the pilot-monitor camera as he spoke.

“Phase three. Two minutes to aircraft destruct. As yet no sign of detection.”

YOKOSUKA, JAPAN, TWENTY-FIVE KILOMETERS SOUTH OF TOKYO

YOKOSUKA CENTER