by Tom Clancy
“Those are two sick ships,” Oreza observed tersely. Each one represented more than the aggregate tonnage of the entire U.S. Coast Guard, and the Navy, clever people that they were, had let both of them take a shot in the ass. The retired master chief felt his blood pressure increase.
“How long to get them well?” Burroughs asked.
“Months. Long time. Six months ... puts us into typhoon season,” Portagee realized to his further discomfort. It got worse with additional consideration. He didn’t exactly relish the idea of being on an island assaulted by Marines, either. Here he was, on high ground, within sight of a surface-to-air missile battery that was sure to draw fire. Maybe selling out for a million bucks wasn’t so bad an idea after all. With that sort of money he could buy another boat, another house, and do his fishing out of the Florida Keys. “You know, you can fly out of here if you want.”
“Oh, what’s the hurry?”
Election posters were already being printed and posted. The public-access channel on the island’s cable system updated notices every few hours about the plans for Saipan. If anything, the island was even more relaxed now. Japanese tourists were unusually polite, and for the most part the soldiers were unarmed now. Military vehicles were being used for roadwork. Soldiers were visiting schools for friendly introductions. Two new baseball fields had been created, virtually overnight, and a new league started up. There was talk that a couple of Japanese major-league teams would commence spring training on Saipan, for which a stadium would have to be constructed, and maybe, it was whispered now, Saipan would have its own team. Which made sense, Oreza supposed. The island was closer to Tokyo than Kansas City was to New York. It wasn’t that the residents were happy with the occupation. It was just that they did not see any salvation, and so like most people in such a spot they learned to live with it. The Japanese were going far out of their way to make it as comfortable a process as possible.
For the first week there had been daily protests. But the Japanese commander, General Arima, had come out to meet every such group, TV cameras all around, and invited the leaders into his office for a chat, often televised live. Then came the more sophisticated responses. Government civilians and businessmen held a lengthy press conference, documenting how much money they had invested in the island, showing in graphic form the difference they’d made for the local economy, and promising to do more. It wasn’t so much that they had eliminated resentment as shown tolerance of it, promising at every turn to abide by the results of the elections soon to be held. We live here, too, they kept saying. We live here, too.
There had to be hope. Two weeks tomorrow, Oreza thought, and all they heard were reports on goddamned negotiations. Since when had America ever negotiated something like this? Maybe that was it. Maybe it was just his country’s obvious sign of weakness that gave him a sense of hopelessness. Nobody was fighting back. Tell us that the government is doing something, he wanted to say to the Admiral at the other end of the satellite phone....
“Well, what the hell.” Oreza walked into the living room, put the batteries back in the phone, slid the antenna into the bottom of the mixing bowl, and dialed the number.
“Admiral Jackson,” he heard.
“Oreza here.”
“Anything new to report?”
“Yeah, Admiral. How the elections are going to go.”
“I don’t understand, Master Chief.”
“I see CNN telling us we got two carriers with their legs cut off and people saying we can’t do shit, sir. Jesus, Admiral, even when the Argentineans took the goddamned Falklands the Brits said they were coming back. I ain’t hearing that. What the hell are we supposed to think?”
Jackson weighed his reply for a few seconds. “I don’t need to tell you the rules on talking about operational stuff. Your job’s to give me information, remember?”
“All we keep hearing is how they’re going to hold elections, okay? The missile site east of us is camouflaged now—”
“I know that. And the search radar on top of Mount Takpochao is operating, and there’s about forty fighter aircraft based at the airport and Kobler. We count sixty more at Andersen on Guam. There are eight ’cans cruising east of you, and an oiler group approaching them for an unrep. Anything else you want to know?” Even if Oreza was “compromised,” a polite term for being under arrest, which Jackson doubted, this was nothing secret. Everyone knew America had reconnaissance satellites. On the other hand, Oreza needed to know that Jackson was up-to-date and, more importantly, interested. He was slightly ashamed of what he had to say next. “Master Chief, I expected better from a guy like you.” The reply made him feel better, though.
“That’s what I needed to hear, Admiral.”
“Anything new happens, you tell us about it.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Jackson broke the connection and lifted a recently arrived report on Johnnie Reb.
“Soon, Master Chief,” he whispered. Then it was time to meet with the people from MacDill Air Force Base, who were, perversely, all wearing Army green. He didn’t know that they would remind him of something he’d seen a few months earlier.
The men all had to be Spanish speakers, and look Spanish. Fortunately that wasn’t hard. A documents expert flew from Langley to Fort Stewart, Georgia, complete with all the gear he needed, including ten blank passports. For purposes of simplicity, they’d use their real names. First Sergeant Julio Vega sat down in front of the camera, wearing his best suit.
“Don’t smile,” the CIA technician told him. “Europeans don’t smile for passports.”
“Yes, sir.” His service nickname was Oso, “bear,” but only his peers called him that now. To the rest of the Rangers in Foxtrot Company, Second Battalion, 175th Ranger Regiment, his only name was “First Sergeant,” and they knew him as an experienced NCO who would back up his captain on the mission for which he’d just volunteered.
“You need better clothes, too.”
“Who’s buyin’?” Vega asked, grinning now, though the picture would show the dour face he usually reserved for soldiers who failed to meet his standards of behavior. That would not be the case here, he thought. Eight men, all jump-qualified (as all Rangers were), all people who’d seen combat action in one place or another—and unusually for members of the 175th, all men who hadn’t shaved their heads down to stubbly Mohawks. Vega remembered another group like this one, and his grin stopped. Not all of them had come out of Colombia alive.
Spanish speakers, he thought as he left the room. Spanish was probably the language in the Marianas. Like most senior Army noncommissioned officers, he had gotten his bachelor’s degree in night school, having majored in military history—it had just seemed the right thing to do for one of his profession, and besides, the Army had paid for it. If Spanish were the language on those rocks, then it gave him an additional reason to think in positive terms about the mission. The name of the operation, which he’d overheard in a brief conversation with Captain Diego Checa, also seemed auspicious. It was called Operation ZORRO, which had amused the Captain enough to allow him to confide in his first sergeant. The “real” Zorro had been named Don Diego, hadn’t he? He had forgotten the bandit’s surname, but his senior NCO had not. With a name like Vega, how can I turn down a mission like this? Oso asked himself.
It was a good thing he was in shape, Nomuri thought. Just breathing here was hard enough. Most Western visitors to Japan stayed in the major cities and never realized that the country was every bit as mountainous as Colorado. Tochimoto was a small hill settlement that languished in the winter and expanded in summer as local citizens who grew tired of the crowded sameness of the cities moved into the country to explore. The hamlet, at the end of National Route 140, had essentially pulled in its sidewalks, but Chet was able to find a place to rent a small four-wheel all-terrain cycle, and had told the owner that he just needed a few hours to get away. In return for his money and a set of keys he’d received a stern warning, albeit polite, about f
ollowing the trail and being careful, for which he’d graciously thanked the man and gone on his way, following the River Taki—more a nice brook than a river—up into the mountains. After the first hour, and about seven miles, he reckoned, he’d switched off the motor, pulled out his earplugs, and just listened.
Nothing. He hadn’t seen a track in the mud and gravel path alongside the cascading stream, nor any sign of occupancy in the handful of rustic summer homes he’d passed along the way, and now, listening, he heard nothing at all but for the wind. There was a ford on his map, two more miles up, and sure enough it was both marked and usable, and allowed him to go east toward Shiraishi-san. Like most mountains, it had sides sculpted by time and water into numerous dead-end valleys, and Mount Shiraishi had a particularly nice valley, as yet unmarred by house or cabin. Perhaps Boy Scouts came here in summer to camp and commune with the nature the rest of their country had worked so hard to extinguish. More likely it was just a spot with no minerals valuable enough to justify a road or rail line. It was also one hundred air miles from Tokyo, and for all practical purposes might as easily have been in Antarctica.
Nomuri turned south, and climbed a smooth part of the slope to the crest of the southern ridge. He wanted a further look and listen, and, while he spotted a single half-built dwelling a few miles below, he saw no column of smoke from a wood fire, nor the rising steam from someone’s hot tub, and he heard nothing at all that was not of nature. Nomuri spent thirty minutes scanning the area with a pair of compact binoculars, taking his time and making sure, then turned to look north and west, finding the same remarkable absence of human presence. Finally satisfied, he headed back down to the Taki, following the path back to the town.
“We never see anyone now,” the rental agent said when Nomuri finally got back, just after sunset. “May I offer you some tea?”
“Dozo,” the CIA officer said. He took his tea with a friendly nod. “It’s wonderful here.”
“You were wise to come this time of year.” The man wanted conversation more than anything else. “In the summer the trees are full and beautiful, but the noise from these things”—he gestured at the ranks of cycles—“well, it ruins the peace of the mountain. But it supports me well,” the man allowed.
“I must come back again. Things are so hectic at my office. To come here and feel the silence.”
“Perhaps you will tell some friends,” the man suggested. Clearly he needed the money to sustain him in the off-season.
“Yes, I will certainly do that,” Nomuri assured him. A friendly bow sent him on his way, and the CIA officer started his car for the three-hour drive back to Tokyo, still wondering why the Agency had given him an assignment calculated to make him feel better about his mission.
“Are you guys really comfortable with this?” Jackson asked the people from SOCOM.
“Funny time for second thoughts, Robby,” the senior officer observed. “If they’re dumb enough to let American civilians roam around their country, well, let’s take advantage of it.”
“The insertion still worries me,” the Air Force representative noted, looking by turns at the air-navigation charts and the satellite photos. “We have a good IP—hell, the navigational references are pretty good—but somebody’s gotta take care of those AWACS birds for this to work.”
“It’s covered,” the colonel from Air Combat Command assured him. “We’re going to light up the sky for them, and you do have that gap to use.” He tapped his pointer on the third chart.
“The helo crews?” Robby asked next.
“They’re working on their sims now. If they’re lucky they’ll get to sleep on the flight over.”
The mission-planning simulator was real enough to fool Sandy Richter’s inner ears. The device was halfway between his youngest son’s new Nintendo VR System and a full-up aircraft simulator, the oversized helmet he wore identical with the one he used in his Comanche, but infinitely more sophisticated. What had begun with a monocle display on the AH-64 Apache was now like an I-MAX-theater view of the world that you wore on your head. It needed to be more sophisticated yet, but it did give him a view of the computer-generated terrain along with all his flight information, and his hands were on the stick and throttle of another virtual-helicopter as he navigated across the water toward approaching bluffs.
“Coming right for the notch,” he told his backseater, who was actually sitting beside him, because the simulator didn’t require that sort of fidelity. In this artificial world, they saw what they saw regardless of where they were, though the backseater sitting next to him had two additional instruments.
What they saw was the product of six hours of supercomputer time. A set of satellite photographs taken over the last three days had been analyzed, folded, spindled, and mutilated into a three-dimensional display that looked like a somewhat grainy video.
“Population center to the left.”
“Roger, I see it.” What he saw was a patch of fluorescent blue which in reality would have been yellow-orange quartz lighting, and out of deference to it he increased altitude from the fifty feet he’d followed for the past two hours. He eased the sidestick over, and the others in the darkened room, who were observing the flight crew, were struck by the way both bodies tilted to deal with the g-forces of a turn that existed only in the computer running the simulation. They might have laughed except that Sandy Richter was not somebody you laughed at.
From the moment he crossed the virtual coast, he climbed up to a crest and ran along it. That was Richter’s idea. There were roads and houses in the river valleys that ended at the Sea of Japan. Better, the pilot thought, to stay acoustically covert as much as possible and take his chances with the look-down capability. In a just world he’d be able to deal with that threat on the inbound leg, but this was not exactly a just world.
“Fighters overhead,” a female voice warned, just as it would on the real mission.
“Coming down some,” Richter replied to the computer voice, slipping down below the ridgeline to the right. “If you can find me fifty feet off the ground, then I lose, honey.”
“I hope this stealth shit really works.” The initial intelligence reports were very concerned with the radar in the Japanese F-15s. Somehow it had taken down one B-1 and crippled another, and nobody was quite sure how it had happened.
“We’re gonna find that one out.” What else could the pilot say? In this case the computer decided that the stealth shit really did work. The last hour of the virtual flight was routine terrain-dodging, but strenuous enough that when he landed his Comanche, Richter needed a shower which, he was sure, would not be available where they were going. Though a pair of skis might be useful.
“What if the other guys—”
“Then I suppose we learn to like rice.” You couldn’t worry about everything. The lights came on, the helmets came off, and Richter found himself sitting in a medium-sized room.
“Successful insertion,” the major grading the exercise decided. “You gents ready for a little trip?”
Richter picked up a glass of ice water from the table in the back of the room. “You know, I never really thought I’d drive a snake that far.”
“What about the rest of the stuff?” his weapons-operator wanted to know.
“It’ll be uploaded when you get there.”
“And the way out?” Richter asked. It would have been better had they briefed him in on that one.
“You have a choice of two. Maybe three. We haven’t decided that one yet. It’s being looked at,” the SOCOM officer assured them.
The good news was that they all seemed to have penthouse apartments. That was to be expected, Chavez thought. Rich dudes like these bastards would have the whole top floor of whatever building they picked. It made people like that feel big, he supposed, to be able to look down on everyone else, like people in the L.A. high-rises had looked down on the barrios of his youth. None of them had ever been soldiers, though. You never wanted to skyline yourself that way. Bette
r to be down in the weeds with the mice and the peons. Well, everybody had their limitations, Ding told himself.
It was just a matter, then, of finding a tall spot. That proved easy. Again the pacific nature of the city worked in their favor. They merely picked the proper building, walked in, took the elevator to the top floor, and from there walked to the roof. Chavez set up his camera on a tripod, selected his longest lens, and started shooting. Even doing it all in daylight was no hardship, the instructions had told them, and the weather gods cooperated, giving them a gray, overcast afternoon. He shot ten frames of each building, rewinding and ejecting the film cassettes, which went back into their boxes for labeling. The entire operation took half an hour.
“You get used to trusting the guy?” Chavez asked after they made the pass.
“Ding, I just got used to trusting you,” Clark replied quietly, easing the tension of the moment.
38
The River Rubicon
“So?”
Ryan took his time considering the answer. Adler deserved to know something. There was supposed to be honor in negotiations. You never really told the whole truth, but you weren’t supposed to lie either.
“So continue as before,” the National Security Advisor said.
“We’re doing something.” It was not a question.
“We’re not sitting on our hands, Scott. They’re not going to cave in, are they?”
Adler shook his head. “Probably not.”
“Encourage them to rethink their position,” Jack suggested. It wasn’t very helpful, but it was something to say.