Debt of Honor

by Tom Clancy

  Mehta nodded and went off without a word to express his building rage. It was to be expected. He was the fleet-operations officer, and his was the task of divining a plan to defeat the American fleet, should that necessity present itself. That such a task was virtually impossible did not relieve Mehta of the duty to carry it out, and it was hardly surprising that the man was showing the strain of his position. Chandraskatta set his cup down, watching the Harriers leap off the ski-jump deck and into the air.

  “How are the pilots bearing up?” the Admiral asked his air officer.

  “They grow frustrated, but performance thus far is excellent.” The answer was delivered with pride, as well it might be. His pilots were superb. The Admiral ate with them often, drawing courage from the proud faces in the ready rooms. They were fine young men, the equal, man for man, of any fighter pilots in all the world. More to the point, they were eager to show it.

  But the entire Indian Navy had only forty-three Harrier FRS 51 fighters. He had but thirty at sea on both Viraat and Vikrant, and that did not equal the numbers or capability aboard a single American carrier. All because they had entered the race first, won it, and then declared the games closed, Chandraskatta told himself, listening to the chatter of his airmen over an open-voice channel. It simply wasn’t fair.

  “So, what are you telling me?” Jack asked.

  “It was a scam,” Robby answered. “Those birds were maintenance-intensive. Guess what? The maintenance hasn’t been done in the past couple of years. Andy Malcolm called in on his satellite brick this evening. There was water at the bottom of the hole he looked at today.”

  “And?”

  “I keep forgetting you’re a city boy.” Robby grinned sheepishly, or rather like the wolf under a fleece coat. “You make a hole in the ground, sooner or later it fills with water, okay? If you have something valuable in the hole, you better keep it pumped out. Water in the bottom of the silo means that they weren’t always doing that. It means water vapor, humidity in the hole. And corrosion.”

  The light bulb went off. “You telling me the birds—”

  “Probably wouldn’t fly even if they wanted them to. Corrosion is like that. Probably dead birds, because fixing them once they’re broke is a very iffy proposition. Anyway” —Jackson tossed the thin file folder at Ryan’s desk—“that’s the J-3 assessment.”

  “What about J-2?” Jack asked, referring to the intelligence directorate of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “They never believed it, but I expect they will now if we open enough holes and see the same thing. Me?” Admiral Jackson shrugged. “I figure if Ivan let us see it in number one, we’ll find pretty much the same thing everywhere else. They just don’t give a good fuck anymore.”

  Intelligence information comes from many sources, and an “operator” like Jackson was often the best source of all. Unlike intelligence officers whose job it was to evaluate the capabilities of the other side, almost always in a theoretical sense, Jackson was a man whose interest in weapons was making them work, and he’d learned from hard experience that using them was far more demanding than looking at them.

  “Remember when we thought they were ten feet tall?”

  “I never did, but a little bastard with a gun can still ruin your whole day,” Robby reminded his friend. “So how much money have they hustled out of us?”

  “Five big ones.”

  “Good deal, our federal tax money at work. We just paid the Russkies five thousand million dollars to ‘deactivate’ missiles that couldn’t leave the silos unless they set the nukes off first. Fabulous call, Dr. Ryan.”

  “They need the money, Rob.”

  “So do I, man. Hey, boy, I’m scratching the bottom to get enough JP to keep our planes in the air.” It was not often understood that every ship in the fleet and every battalion of tanks in the Army had to live on a budget. Though the commanding officers didn’t keep a checkbook per se, each drew on a fixed supply of consumable stores—fuel, weapons, spare parts, even food in the case of warships—that had to last a whole year. It was by no means unknown for a man-of-war to sit several weeks alongside her pier at the end of the fiscal year because there was nothing left to make her run. Such an event meant that somewhere a job was not getting done, a crew was not being trained. The Pentagon was fairly unique as a federal agency, in that it was expected to live on a fixed, often diminishing budget.

  “How much thinner do you expect us to be spread?”

  “I’ll tell him, Rob, okay? The Chairman—”

  “Just between you and me, the Chairman thinks operations are something that surgeons do in hospitals. And if you quote me on that, no more golf lessons.”

  “What is it worth to have the Russians out of the game?” Jack asked, wondering if Robby would calm down a little.

  “Not as much as we’ve lost in cuts. In case you haven’t noticed, my Navy is still stretched from hell to breakfast, and we’re doing business with forty percent less ships. The ocean didn’t get any smaller, okay? The Army’s better off, I grant that, but the Air Force isn’t, and the Marines are still sucking hind tit, and they’re still our primary response team for the next time the boys and girls at Foggy Bottom fuck up.”

  “Preaching to the choir, Rob.”

  “More to it than just that, Jack. We’re stretching the people, too. The fewer the ships, the longer they have to stay out. The longer they stay out, the worse the maintenance bills. It’s like the bad old days in the late seventies. We’re starting to lose people. Hard to make a man stay away from his wife and kids that long. In flying, we call it the coffin corner. When you lose experienced people, your training bills go up. You lose combat effectiveness no matter which way you go,” Robby went on, talking like an admiral now.

  “Look, Rob, I gave the same speech a while back on the other side of the building. I’m doing my best for you,” Jack replied, talking like a senior government official. At that point both old friends shared a look.

  “We’re both old farts.”

  “It’s a long time since we were on the faculty of Canoe U,” Ryan allowed. His voice went on almost in a whisper. “Me teaching history, and you prostrating yourself to God every night to heal your leg.”

  “I should’ve done more of that. Arthritis in the knee,” Robby said. “I have a flight physical in nine months. Guess what?”

  “Down-check?”

  “The big one.” Jackson nodded matter-of-factly. Ryan knew what it really meant. To a man who’d flown fighter planes off carriers for over twenty years, it was the hard realization that age had come. He couldn’t play with the boys anymore. You could explain away gray in the hair by citing adverse genes, but a down-check would mean taking off the flight suit, hanging up the helmet, and admitting that he was no longer good enough to do the one thing he’d yearned for since the age of ten, and at which he’d excelled for nearly all of his adult life. The bitterest part would be the memories of the things he’d said as a lieutenant, j.g., about the older pilots of his youth, the hidden smirks, the knowing looks shared with his fellow youngsters, none of whom had ever expected it would come to them.

  “Rob, a lot of good guys never get the chance to screen for command of a squadron. They take the twenty-year out at commander’s rank and end up flying the night shift for Federal Express.”

  “And make good money at it, too.”

  “Have you picked out the casket yet?” That broke the mood. Jackson looked up and grinned.

  “Shit. If I can’t dance, I can still watch. I’m telling you, pal, you want us to run all these pretty operations we plan in my cubicle, we need help from this side of the river. Mike Dubro is doing a great job hanging paper with one hand, but he and his troops have limits, y’dig?”

  “Well, Admiral, I promise you this: when the time comes for you to get your battle group, there will be one for you to drive.” It wasn’t much of a pledge, but both men knew it was the best he could offer.

  She was number five. The remarkable
part was—hell, Murray thought in the office six blocks from the White House, it was all remarkable. It was the profile of the investigation that was the most disquieting. He and his team had interviewed several women who had admitted, some shame-facedly, some without overt emotional involvement, and some with pride and humor, at having bedded Ed Kealty, but there were five for whom the act had not been entirely voluntary. With this woman, the latest, drugs had been an additional factor, and she felt the lonely personal shame, the sense that she alone had fallen into the trap.

  “So?” Bill Shaw asked after what had been a long day for him, too.

  “So it’s a solid case. We now have five known victims, four of whom are living. Two would stand up as rapes in any courtroom I’ve ever been in. That does not count Lisa Beringer. The other two demonstrate the use of drugs on federal property. Those two are virtually word-for-word, they identify the label on the brandy bottle, the effects, everything.”

  “Good witnesses?” the FBI Director asked.

  “As good as can be expected in this sort of case. It’s time to move with it,” Murray added. Shaw nodded in understanding. Word would soon begin to leak out. You simply couldn’t run a covert investigation for very long, even under the best of circumstances. Some of the people you interviewed would be loyal to the target of the inquiry, and no matter how carefully you phrased the opening questions, they would make the not overly great leap of imagination required to discern the nature of the probe, often because they suspected it themselves. Then those non-witnesses would worry about getting back to the target to warn him, whether from conviction in his innocence or hope of deriving a personal profit. Criminal or not, the Vice President was a man with considerable political power, still able to dole out large and powerful tokens to those who won his favor. In another age, the Bureau might not have gotten this far. The President himself, or even the Attorney General, would have conveyed a quiet warning, and senior staff members would themselves have sought out the victims and offered to make amends of one sort or another, and in many cases it would have worked. The only reason they’d gotten this far, after all, was that the FBI had the permission of the President, the cooperation of the AG, and a different legal and moral climate in which to work.

  “As soon as you go to talk to the Chairman ...”

  Murray nodded. “Yeah, might as well have a press conference and lay out our evidence in an organized way.” But they couldn’t do that, of course. Once the substance of their evidence was given over to political figures—in this case the chairman and ranking minority member of the House Committee on the Judiciary—it would leak immediately. The only real control Murray and his team would possess would be in selecting the time of day. Late enough, and the news would miss the morning papers, incurring the wrath of the editors of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The Bureau had to play strictly by the rules. It couldn’t leak anything because this was a criminal proceeding and the rights of the target had to be guarded as closely as—actually even closer than—those of the victims, lest the eventual trial be tainted.

  “We’ll do it here, Dan,” Shaw said, reaching his decision. “I’ll have the AG make the phone call and set the meet. Maybe that’ll put the information on close-hold for a little while. What exactly did the President say the other day?”

  “He’s a standup guy,” the Deputy Assistant Director reported, using a form of praise popular in the FBI. “He said, ‘A crime’s a crime.’ ” The President had also said to handle the affair in as “black” a way as possible, but that was to be expected.

  “Fair enough. I’ll let him know what we’re doing personally.”

  Typically, Nomuri went right to work. It was his regular night at this bathhouse with this group of salarymen—he probably had the cleanest job in the Agency. It was also one of the slickest ways of getting information he’d ever stumbled across, and he made it slicker still by standing for a large bottle of sake that now sat, half empty, on the edge of the wooden tub.

  “I wish you hadn’t told me about that round-eye,” Nomuri said with his own eyes closed, sitting in his usual corner and allowing his body to take in the enveloping heat of the water. At one hundred eight degrees, it was hot enough to lower blood pressure and induce euphoria. Added to it was the effect of the alcohol. Many Japanese have a genetic abnormality called “Oriental Flush” in the West, or with greater ethnic sensitivity, “pathological intoxication.” It is actually an enzyme disorder, and means that for a relatively low quantity of alcoholic intake, there is a high degree of result. It was, fortunately, a trait which Nomuri’s family did not share.

  “Why is that?” Kazuo Taoka asked from the opposite corner.

  “Because now I cannot get the gaijin witch out of my mind!” Nomuri replied good-naturedly. One of the other effects of the bathhouse was an intimate bonhomie. The man next to the CIA officer rubbed his head roughly and laughed, as did the rest of the group.

  “Ah, and now you want to hear more, is it?” Nomuri didn’t have to look. The man whose body rubbed on his leaned forward. Surely the rest would do it as well. “You were right, you know. Their feet are too big, and their bosoms also, but their manners ... well, that they can learn after a fashion.”

  “You make us wait?” another member of the group asked, feigning a blustery anger.

  “Do you not appreciate drama?” There was a merry chorus of laughs. “Well, yes, it is true that her bosoms are too big for real beauty, but there are sacrifices we all must make in life, and truly I have seen worse deformities ...”

  Such a good raconteur, Nomuri thought. He did have a gift for it. In a moment he heard the sound of a cork being pulled, as another man refilled the little cups. Drink was actually prohibited in the bathhouse for health reasons, but, rarely for this country, it was a rule largely ignored. Nomuri reached for his cup, his eyes still closed, and made a great show of forming a mental picture masked by a blissful smile, as additional details slid across the steaming surface of the water. The description became more specific, fitting ever closer to the photograph and to other details he’d been passed on his early-morning train. It was hardly conclusive yet. Any of thousands of girls could fit the description, and Nomuri wasn’t particularly outraged by the event. She’d taken her chances one way or another, but she was an American citizen, and if it were possible to help her, then he would. It seemed a trivial sidebar to his overall assignment, but if nothing else it had caused him to ask a question that would make him appear even more a member of this group of men. It made it more likely, therefore, to get important information out of them at a later date.

  “We have no choice,” a man said in another, similar bathhouse, not so far away. “We need your help.”

  It wasn’t unexpected, the other five men thought. It was just a matter of who would hit the wall first. Fate had made it this man and his company. That did not lessen his personal disgrace at being forced to ask for help, and the other men felt his pain while outwardly displaying only dispassionate good manners. Indeed, those men who listened felt something else as well: fear. Now that it had happened once, it would be far easier for it to happen again. Who would be next?

  Generally there could be no safer form of investment than real estate, real fixed property with physical reality, something you could touch and feel, build, and live on, that others could see and measure. Although there were continuing efforts in Japan to make new fill land, to build new airports, for example, the general rule was as true here as it was elsewhere: it made sense to buy land because the supply of real land was fixed, and because of that the price was not going to drop.

  But in Japan that truth had been distorted by unique local conditions. Land-use policy in the country was skewed by the inordinate power of the small holders of farmland, and it was not unusual to see a small patch of land in the midst of a suburban setting allocated to the growing of a quarter hectare of vegetables. Small already—the entire nation was about the size of California, and populated with roughly
half the people of the United States—their country was further crowded by the fact that little of the land was arable, and since arable land also tended to be land on which people could more easily live, the major part of the population was further concentrated into a handful of large, dense cities, where real-estate prices became more precious still. The remarkable result of these seemingly ordinary facts was that the commercial real estate in the city of Tokyo alone had a higher “book” value than that of all the land in America’s forty-eight contiguous states. More remarkably still, this absurd fiction was accepted by everyone as though it made sense, when in fact it was every bit as madly artificial as the Dutch Tulip Mania of the seventeenth century.

  But as with America, what was a national economy, after all, but a collective belief? Or so everyone had thought for a generation. The frugal Japanese citizens saved a high proportion of their earnings. Those savings went into banks, in such vast quantities that the supply of capital for lending was similarly huge, as a result of which the interest rates for those loans were correspondingly low, which allowed businesses to purchase land and build on it despite prices that anywhere else in the world would have been somewhere between ruinous and impossible. As with any artificial boom, the process had dangerous corollaries. The inflated book value of owned real estate was used as collateral for other loans, and as security for stock portfolios bought on margin, and in the process supposedly intelligent and far-seeing businessmen had in fact constructed an elaborate house of cards whose foundation was the belief that metropolitan Tokyo had more intrinsic value than all of America between Bangor and San Diego. (An additional consequence of this was a view of real-estate value that more than any other factor had persuaded Japanese businessmen that American real-estate, which, after all, looked pretty much the same as that in their own country, had to be worth more than what the foolish Americans charged for it.) By the early 1990s had come disquieting thoughts. The precipitous decline of the Japanese stock market had threatened to put calls on the large margin accounts, and made some businessmen think about selling their land holdings to cover their exposures. With that had come the stunning but unsurprising realization that nobody wanted to pay book value for a parcel of land; that although everyone accepted book value in the abstract, actually paying the assumed price was, well, not terribly realistic. The result was that the single card supporting the rest of the house had been quietly removed from the bottom of the structure and awaited only a puff of breeze to cause the entire edifice to collapse—a possibility studiously ignored in the discourse between senior executives.