Debt of Honor

by Tom Clancy

  “Okay, I’ll pass that one along. Otherwise keep the same line?” Adler asked.

  “Don’t give them anything of substance. Can you dance some?”

  “I think so.” Adler checked his watch. “It’s at our place today. 1 have to sit down with Brett before it starts.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “Will do,” Adler promised.

  It was still before dawn at Groom Lake. A pair of C-5B transports taxied to the end of the runway and lifted off. The load was light, only three helicopters each and other equipment, not much for aircraft designed to carry two tanks. But it would be a long flight for one of them, over five thousand miles, and adverse winds would require two midair refuelings, in turn necessitating a full relief crew for each transport. The additional flight crewmen relegated the passengers to the space aft of the wing box, where the seats were less comfortable.

  Richter removed the dividers from the three-seat set and put his earplugs in. As soon as the aircraft lifted off, his hand moved automatically for the pocket of his flight suit where he kept his cigarettes—or had until he’d quit a few months earlier. Damn. How could you go into combat without a smoke? he asked himself, then leaned against a pillow and faded off to sleep. He didn’t even feel the buffet of the aircraft as it climbed into the jetstream over the Nevada mountains.

  Forward, the flight crew turned north. The sky was dark and would remain so for almost all of the flight. Their most important task would be to stay alert and awake. Automated equipment would handle the navigation, and the hour was such that the red-eye commercial flights were already out of the way and the regular day’s business hops had hardly begun. The sky was theirs, such as it was, with broken clouds and bitterly cold air outside the aluminum skin of the aircraft, on their way to the goddamnedest destination the reserve crew had ever considered. The second Galaxy’s crew was luckier. It turned southwest, and in less than an hour was over the Pacific Ocean for their shorter flight to Hickam Air Force Base.

  USS Tennessee entered Pearl Harbor an hour early and proceeded under her own power to an outlying berth, dispensing with the harbor pilot and depending on a single Navy tugboat to bring her alongside. There were no lights, and the evolution was accomplished by the glow of the other lit-up piers of the harbor. The one surprising thing was the presence of a large fuel truck on the quay. The official car and the admiral standing next to it were to be expected, Commander Claggett thought. The gangway was rigged quickly, and ComSubPac hustled across even before the ensign was rigged on the after part of the sail. He saluted that way anyway.

  “Welcome aboard, Admiral,” the CO called from his control station, then headed down the ladder to meet Admiral Mancuso in his own cabin.

  “Dutch, I’m glad you managed to get her under way,” Mancuso said with a smile tempered by the situation.

  “Glad I finally got to dance with the girl,” Claggett allowed. “I have all the diesel I need, sir,” he added.

  “We have to pump out one of your tanks.” Large as she was, Tennessee had more than one fuel bunker for her auxiliary diesel.

  “What for, sir?”

  “Some JP-5.” Mancuso opened his briefcase and pulled out the mission orders. The ink was hardly dry on them. “You’re going to start off in the special-ops business.” The automatic tendency was for Claggett to ask Why me? but he restrained himself. Instead he flipped over the cover page of the orders and started checking his programmed position.

  “I might get a little business there, sir,” the Captain observed.

  “The idea is to stay covert, but the usual rule applies.” The usual rule meant that Claggett would always be free to exercise his command judgment.

  “Now hear this,” the 1-MC announcing system told everyone. “The smoking lamp is out throughout the ship. The smoking lamp is out throughout the ship.”

  “You let people smoke aboard?” ComSubPac asked. Quite a few of his skippers did not.

  “Command judgment, remember?”

  Thirty feet away, Ron Jones was in the sonar room, pulling a computer disk out of his pocket.

  “We’ve had the upgrade,” the chief told him.

  “This one’s brand-new.” The contractor slipped it into the slot on the backup computer. “I got a hit on you first night out when you ran over the Oregon SOSUS array. Something loose aft?”

  “Toolbox. It’s gone now. We ran over two more later,” the chief pointed out.

  “How fast?” Jones asked.

  “The second one was just under flank, and we curlicued overtop the thing.”

  “I got a twitch, nothing more, and that one had the same software I just uploaded for you. You got a quiet boat here, Chief. Walk down?”

  “Yeah, the Cap’n tore a few strips off, but there ain’t no loose gear aboard now.” He paused. “Less’n you count the ends on the toilet-paper rolls.”

  Jones settled into one of the chairs, and looked around the crowded working space. This was his place. He’d only had a hint of the ship’s mission orders—Mancuso had asked his opinion of water conditions and worried if the Japanese might have taken the U.S. Navy’s SOSUS station on Honshu intact, and that had been enough, really. She was sure as hell going in harm’s way, perhaps the first PacFlt sub to do so. God, and a boomer, too, he thought. Big and slow. One hand reached out and touched the workstation.

  “I know who you are, Dr. Jones,” the chief said, reading the man’s thoughts. “I know my job, too, okay?”

  “The other guy’s boats, when they snort—”

  “The thousand-hertz line. We have the dash-five tail and all the upgrades. Including yours, I guess.” The chief reached for his coffee, and on reflection, poured a mug for his visitor.

  “Thank you.”

  “Asheville and Charlotte?”

  Jones nodded, looking down at his coffee. “You know Frenchy Laval?”

  “He was one of the instructors in my A-School, long time back.”

  “Frenchy was my chief on Dallas, working for Admiral Mancuso. His son was aboard Asheville. I knew him. It’s personal.”

  “Gotcha.” It was all the chief had to say.

  “The United States of America does not accept the current situation, Mr. Ambassador. I thought that I’d made that clear,” Adler said two hours into the current session. In fact he’d made it clear at least eight times every day since the negotiations had begun.

  “Mr. Adler, unless your country wishes to continue this war, which will profit no one at all, all you need do is abide by the elections which we plan to stage—with full international supervision.”

  Somewhere in California, Adler remembered, was a radio station that for weeks had played every known recorded version of “Louie Louie.” Perhaps the State Department could pipe that into the building instead of Muzak. It would have been superb training for this. The Japanese Ambassador was waiting for an American response to his country’s gracious offer of returning Guam—as though it had not been taken by force in the first place—and was now showing exasperation that Adler wasn’t conceding anything in return for the friendly gesture. Did he have another card to play? If so, he wouldn’t set it down until Adler showed him something.

  “We are gratified, of course, that your country will agree to international scrutiny of the elections, and pleased also at your pledge to abide by the results, but that does not change the fact that we are talking about sovereign national territory with a population which has already freely chosen political association with the United States. Unfortunately, our ability to accept that pledge at face value is degraded by the situation which prompts it.”

  The Ambassador raised his hands, distressed at the diplomatic version of being called a liar. “How could we make it more clear?”

  “By evacuating the islands now, of course,” Adler responded. But he’d already made a concession of sorts. By saying that America was not entirely displeased by Japan’s promise of elections, he’d given the Ambassador something back. Not much, certai
nly not as much as he’d wanted—ac—ceptance of the idea of elections to determine the fate of the islands—but something. Mutual positions were restated one more time each before the morning recess allowed a chance for everyone to stretch.

  The terrace was cold and windy, and as before, Adler and the Ambassador withdrew to opposite sides of the top-floor deck which in summer was an outdoor dining area, while their staff members mingled to explore options with which the respective chief negotiators could not appear to be directly involved.

  “Not much of a concession,” Nagumo observed, sipping his tea.

  “You’re lucky to get that much, but then, we know that not everyone in your government supports the action you’ve taken.”

  “Yes,” Seiji replied. “I told you that.”

  Chris Cook fought the urge to look around for eaves-droppers. It would have been far too theatrical. Instead he sipped at his cup, looking southwest toward the Kennedy Center. “There have been informal contacts.”

  “With whom?”

  “Koga,” Cook said quietly. If Adler couldn’t play the game properly, then at least he could.

  “Ah. Yes, that is the logical person to speak with.”

  “Seiji, if we play this right, we can both come out of this heroes.” Which would be the ideal solution for everyone, wouldn’t it?

  “What sort of contacts?” Nagumo asked.

  “All I know is that it’s very irregular. Now, I need to ask you, is Koga leading the opposition you’re reporting to?”

  “He is one of them, of course,” Nagumo replied. It really was the perfect bit of information. The Americans were conceding very little, and now the reason was clear: they hoped that Goto’s fragile parliamentary coalition would collapse in the combination of time and uncertainty. And all he had to do was to break the Americans’ spirits and thus win his country’s position ... yes, that was elegant. And Chris’s prediction on the heroic end-game would be half-right, wouldn’t it?

  “Are there others?” Cook asked. The reply was predictable and automatic.

  “Of course there are, but I don’t dare to reveal their names to you.” Nagumo was thinking the scenario through now. If the Americans were banking on the political subversion of his country, then it had to mean that their military options were weak. What splendid news that was.

  The first KC-10 tanker staged out of Elmendorf, linking up with the C-5 just east of Nome. It required a few minutes to find air smooth enough for the evolution, and even then it was tricky performing what had to be the most unnatural act known to man, a pair of multi-hundred-ton aircraft linking in midair like mayflies. It was all the more dangerous in that the C-5 pilot couldn’t actually see much more than the nose of the tanker and had to fly in close formation for twenty-five minutes. Worst of all, the tail-mounted engine of the three-engine KC-10 threw its jet exhaust directly on the T-shaped tail of the Galaxy, creating a strong and continuous buffet that required constant control corrections. That, the pilot thought, sweating inside his flight suit, is why they pay us so much. Finally the tanks were topped off and the planes broke free, the Galaxy taking a shallow dive while the tanker turned right. Aboard the transport, stomachs settled back down as the flight path took them west across the Bering Strait. Another tanker would soon lift off from Shemya and would also enter Russian air space. Unknown to them, another American aircraft had already done so, leading the secret procession to a place marked on American air-navigation charts as Verino, a town on the Trans-Siberian Railroad that dated back to the turn of the century.

  The new tailshaft was finally in place after what seemed to the skipper the longest and most tedious mechanical repair job he’d ever experienced. Inside the ship’s hull, bearings were reseated and seals reinstalled throughout the shaft alley. A hundred men and women were working on that detail. The engineering crew had been working on twenty-hour days, scarcely longer than the shifts that had been demanded and gotten from the civilian yard workers who manned the heavy equipment around the enormous concrete box. The last task would soon be under way. Already the immense traveling gantry started to move a shiny new screw back toward the far end of the shaft. Thirty feet across and precisely balanced, in another two hours it would be fully attached to what would soon be the world’s most expensive twin-screw ship.

  The CNN report coincided with the local dawn. The shot, Ryan saw, was from across the harbor, with the female reporter holding up her microphone, and a “Live” caption in the lower-right corner of the screen. There was nothing new to report in Pearl Harbor, she said.

  “As you can see behind me, USS Enterprise and John Stennis remain in dry dock. Two of the most expensive warships ever made now depend on an army of workers to make them whole again, an effort that will require ...”

  “Months,” Ryan said, completing the statement. “Keep telling them that.”

  The other network news shows would soon give out the same information, but it was CNN that he was depending on. The source of record for the whole world.

  Tennessee was just diving, having passed the sea buoy a few minutes earlier. Two ASW helicopters had followed her out, and a Spruance-class destroyer was also in view, conducting hurried workups and requesting by blinker light that the submarine pass her close aboard for a quick tracking exercise.

  Five U.S. Army personnel had come aboard just before sailing. They were assigned space according to rank. The officer, a first lieutenant, got a berth that would have belonged to a missile officer, had the boomer carried any of those. The senior NCO, being an E-7, was titularly a chief petty officer and was given a space in the goat locker. The rest were berthed with the enlisted crewmen. The first order of business was to give them all new shoes with rubber soles along with a briefing on the importance of being quiet.

  “Why? What’s the big deal?” the senior NCO asked, looking at his bunk in the chiefs’ spaces and wondering if a coffin would be any more comfortable if he lived long enough for one.

  Ba-Wah!

  “That’s why,” a chief electrician’s mate replied. He didn’t quite shiver, but added, “I never have gotten used to that sound.”

  “Jesus! What the hell was that?”

  “That’s an SQS-53 sonar on a tin can. And if you hear it that loud, it means that they know we’re here. The Japs have ’em, too, Sarge.”

  “Just ignore it,” the sonar chief said, forward at his duty station. He stood behind a new sonarman, looking at the display. Sure enough, the new software upgrade made Prairie /Masker a lot easier to pick up, especially if you knew there was a blue sky overhead and no reason to suspect a rainstorm pelting the surface.

  “He’s got us cold, Chief.”

  “Only ’cause the Cap’n said it was okay for him to track us for a little while. An’ we ain’t giving out any more freebies.”

  Verino was just one more former MiG base in an area with scores of them. Exactly whom the Russians had been worried about was up for grabs. From this place they could have struck at Japan or China, or defended against attacks from either place, depending on who was paranoid and who was pissed at any particular political moment, the pilot thought. He’d never been anywhere close to here before, and even with the changes in relations between the two countries hadn’t expected to do much more than maybe make a friendly visit to European Russia, as the U.S. Air Force did periodically. Now there was a Sukhoi-27 interceptor a thousand yards to his two o’clock, with real missiles hanging on the airframe, and probably a whimsical thought or two in the mind of the driver. My, what a huge target. The two disparate aircraft had linked up an hour before because there hadn’t been time to get a Russian-speaking officer on the mission, and they didn’t want to risk English chatter on the air-control frequency. So the transport followed the fighter rather like a sheepdog obediently trailing a terrier.

  “Runway in view,” the copilot said tiredly. There was the usual low-altitude buffet, increased as the flaps and gear went down, spoiling the airflow. For all that the landing was routi
ne, until just before touchdown the pilot noticed a pair of C-17s on the ramp. So he wasn’t the first American aircraft to visit this place. Maybe the two other crews could tell him where to go for some crew-rest.

  The JAL 747 lifted off with all its seats full, heading west into the prevailing winds over the Pacific and leaving Canada behind. Captain Sato wasn’t quite sure how to feel about everything. He was pleased, as always, to bring so many of his countrymen back home, but he also felt that in a way they were running away from America, and he wasn’t so sure he liked that. His son had gotten word to him of the B-1 kills, and if his country could cripple two American aircraft carriers, destroy two of their supposedly invincible submarines, and then also take out one or two of their vaunted strategic bombers, well, then, what did they have to fear from these people? It was just a matter of waiting them out now, he thought. To his right he saw the shape of another 747, this one in the livery of Northwest/KLM, inbound from Japan, doubtless full of American businessmen who were running away. It wasn’t that they had anything to fear. Perhaps it was shame, he thought. The idea pleased him, and Sato smiled. The rest of the routing was easy. Four thousand six hundred nautical miles, a flight time of nine and a half hours if he’d read the weather predictions correctly, and his load of three hundred sixty-six passengers would be home to a reborn country, guarded by his son and his brother. They’d come back to North America in due course, standing a little straighter and looking a little prouder, as would befit people representing his nation, Sato told himself. He regretted that he was no longer part of the military that would cause that renewed pride of place, but he’d made his mistake too long ago to correct it now. So he’d do his small part in the great change in history’s shape, driving his bus as skillfully as he could.