Chapter Five: SOS

Air Force Master Sgt. Sean Ericsson was at his console on the RC-135 reconnaissance plane circling just outside Soviet airspace near the Kamchatka Peninsula at 35,000 feet. The modified Boeing 707 was nearly eight hours into its mission and was due to depart its orbit any minute. Over the past two weeks, there had been a dramatic increase in the amount of radio chatter emanating from this region, so Ericsson's crew had been spending more time in the area.

Trained in the Russian language, Ericsson's job was to eavesdrop on transmissions originating in the Soviet Union and translate them into English, even though the signal traffic was being recorded by the RC-135's on-board equipment. The recordings were sent to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, for analysis, so Ericsson's job was mainly to listen for key words or phrases that might be indicators of something of an urgent nature. These transmissions he would pass immediately to the shift officer in charge.

This shift had been quieter than the past few nights, so Ericsson was scanning some of the maritime bands to break up the monotony. Pausing briefly to reach for his coffee mug, his secondary radio automatically returned to monitoring the standard distress frequency. He was startled by a voice on the radio that was definitely not Russian. Listening closer, it sounded like the same phrase, repeated several times. There was a four or five second pause, then a response that sounded like Japanese. He then heard a microphone being keyed, followed by several very loud noises sounding like hammer blows. Then silence.

"Japanese?" Ericsson wondered out loud. "What the hell?"

They weren't very far from Japanese territorial waters, so Ericsson checked his instruments to try and pinpoint the location of the signals' origin.

Expecting it to be somewhere near northern Japan, Ericsson double- and triple-checked his readings to confirm that they had actually come from a near-coastal spot in the sea of Okhotsk.

"Captain, I've got something a little weird here," Ericsson said turning to his officer-in-charge, Capt. Melissa Greenlaw.

"It sounded like Japanese, but I'm not sure. It came up on the distress freq" -- he pronounced the word freak. "What's strange is that it came from right off the Russian coast, but it definitely wasn't Russian. It sounded like a distress call, and there was a response from a ship off of northern Japan. Then when the guy keys his mike to answer back, there are a few loud bangs, then nothing. The second guy's been trying to get him back, but there's no response. Tape's been running on the secondary, so we've got the whole thing."

A good officer always knows to listen to her senior NCOs, and Greenlaw felt she was a good officer. She sat down in an empty seat next to Ericsson and plugged her headphones into a spare jack.

"There's nothing now," she said.

"Yeah, the guy near Japan gave up about ten seconds ago." He reached across and hit a switch. "Here's the tape."

Greenlaw listened intently for a few moments, then called across the cabin. "Steve, come listen to this."

Staff Sgt. Stephen Watanabe was born in southern California to a WASP mother and first-generation Japanese father. His dad had spoken Japanese with him as much as possible when Steve was younger, so he was better in Japanese than most Americans are in English. In what would be a surprise to Americans who considered Japan a friendly nation, Watanabe was doing the same thing to the Japanese that Ericsson was doing to the Russians.

Listening to the tape, Watanabe said, "That's a distress call, all right. First talker says, 'Help, I'm being shot at -- four or five times -- and the second talker asks for the nature of the emergency. Can you believe that? Anyway, it sounds like the shooter hit his target."

"Damn," Greenlaw muttered under her breath. The duty officers had been briefed by the intel folks on some potentially provocative readiness postures being taken by their Soviet counterparts. This one would have to go straight to analysis.

"Sean, since it's in Japanese, give this to Steve to package up. Steve, this needs to go out on the data link with immediate precedence."

She walked back to her station and picked up her secure radiophone to the operations center. "Sir, stand by for immediate traffic. Given the current situation, I thought I'd better give you a heads-up on it."

Chapter Six