Debt Of Honor (1994)

by Tom - Jack Ryan 06 Clancy

  Her eyes came up to meet his. They were moist and desperate. "I'm coming apart, Dan."

  "No, Barb, you're not," Murray lied. "You're one tough, smart, brave lady. You're going to come through this. He's the one who's going to come apart." Daniel E. Murray, Deputy Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, reached his hand across the table. Barbara Linders took it, squeezing it as a child might with her father, forcing herself to believe and to trust, and it shamed him that she was paying such a price because the President of the United States had to subordinate a criminal case to a question of politics. Perhaps it made sense in the great scheme of things, but for a cop the great scheme of things usually came down to one crime and one victim.

  16

  Payloads

  The final step in arming the H-11/SS-19 missiles necessarily had to await official word from the nation's Prime Minister. In some ways the final payoff was something of a disappointment. They had originally hoped to affix a full complement of warheads, at least six each, to the nose of each bird, but to do that would have meant actually testing the trans-stage bus in flight, and that was just a little too dangerous. The covert nature of the project was far more important than the actual number of warheads, those in authority had decided. And they could always correct it at a later date. They'd deliberately left the top end of the Russian design intact for that very reason, and for the moment a total of 10 one-megaton warheads would have to do.

  One by one, the individual silos were opened by the support crew, and one by one the oversized RVs were lifted off the flatcar, set in place, then covered with their aerodynamic shrouds. Again the Russian design served their purposes very well indeed. Each such operation took just over an hour, which allowed the entire procedure to be accomplished in a single night by the crew of twenty. The silos were resealed, and it was done; their country was now a nuclear power.

  "Amazing," Goto observed.

  "Actually very simple," Yamata replied. "The government funded the fabrication and testing of the 'boosters' as part of our space program. The plutonium came from the Monju reactor complex. Designing and building the warheads was child's play. If some Arabs can do a crude warhead in a cave in Lebanon, how hard can it be for our technicians?" In fact, everything but the warhead-fabrication process had been government funded in one way or another, and Yamata was sure that the informal consortium that had done the latter would be compensated as well. Had they not done it all for their country? "We will immediately commence training for the Self-Defense Force personnel to take over from our own people--once you assign them to us for that purpose, Goto-san."

  "But the Americans and the Russians ... ?"

  Yamata snorted. "They are down to one missile each, and those will be officially blown up this week, as we will all see on television. As you know, their missile submarines have been deactivated. Their Trident missiles are already all gone, and the submarines are lined up awaiting dismantlement. A mere ten working ICBMs give us a marked strategic advantage."

  "But what if they try to build more?"

  "They can't--not very easily," Yamata corrected himself. "The production lines have been closed down, and in accordance with the treaty, the tooling has all been destroyed under international inspection. To start over would take months, and we would find out very quickly. Our next important step is to launch a major naval-construction program" --for which Yamata's yards were ready--"so that our supremacy in the Western Pacific will be unassailable. For the moment, with luck and the help of our friends, we will have enough to see us through. Before they will be able to challenge us, our strategic position will have improved to the point where they will have to accept our position and then treat us as equals."

  "So I must now give the order?"

  "Yes, Prime Minister," Yamata replied, again explaining to the man his job function.

  Goto rubbed his hands together for a moment and looked down at the ornate desk so newly his. Ever the weak man, he temporized. "It is true, my Kimba was a drug addict?"

  Yamata nodded soberly, inwardly enraged at the remark. "Very sad, is it not? My own chief of security, Kaneda, found her dead and called the police. It seems that she was very careful about it, but not careful enough."

  Goto sighed quietly. "Foolish child. Her father is a policeman, you know. A very stern man, she said. He didn't understand her. I did," Goto said. "She was a kind, gentle spirit. She would have made a fine geisha."

  It was amazing how people transformed in death, Yamata thought coldly. That foolish, shameless girl had defied her parents and tried to make her own way in the world, only to find that the world was not tolerant of the unprepared. But because she'd had the ability to give Goto the illusion that he was a man, now she was a kind and gentle spirit.

  "Goto-san, can we allow the fate of our nation to be decided by people like that?"

  "No." The new Prime Minister lifted his phone. He had to consult a sheet on his desk for the proper number. "Climb Mount Niitaka," he said when the connection was made, repeating an order that had been given more than fifty years earlier.

  In many ways the plane was singular, but in others quite ordinary. The VC-25B was in fact the Air Force's version of the venerable Boeing 747 airliner. A craft with fully thirty years of history in its design, and still in serial production at the plant outside Seattle, it was painted in colors that had been chosen by a politically selected decorator to give the proper impression to foreign countries, whatever that was. Sitting alone on the concrete ramp, it was surrounded by uniformed security personnel "with authorization," in the dry Pentagonese, to use their M 16 rifles far more readily than uniformed guards at most other federal installations. It was a more polite way of saying, "Shoot first and ask questions later."

  There was no jetway. People had to climb stairs into the aircraft, just as in the 1950s, but there was still a metal detector, and you still had to check your baggage--this time to Air Force and Secret Service personnel who X-rayed everything and opened much of it for visual inspection.

  "1 hope you left your Victoria's Secret stuff at home," Jack observed with a chuckle as he hoisted the last bag on the counter.

  "You'll find out when we get to Moscow," Professor Ryan replied with an impish wink. It was her first state trip, and everything at Andrews Air Force Base was new for her.

  "Hello, Dr. Ryan! We finally meet." Helen D'Agustino came over and extended her hand.

  "Cathy, this is the world's prettiest bodyguard," Jack said, introducing the Secret Service agent to his wife.

  "I couldn't make the last state dinner," Cathy explained. "There was a seminar up at Harvard."

  "Well, this trip ought to be pretty exciting," the Secret Service agent said, taking her leave smoothly to continue her duties.

  Not as exciting as my last one, Jack thought, remembering another story that he couldn't relate to anyone.

  "Where's she keep her gun?" Cathy asked.

  "I've never searched her for it, honey," Jack said with a wink of his own.

  "Do we go aboard now?"

  "I can go aboard whenever I want," her husband replied. "Color me important." So much the better to board early and show her around, he decided, heading her toward the door. Designed to carry upwards of three hundred passengers in its civilian incarnation, the President's personal 747 (there was another backup aircraft, of course) was outfitted to hold a third of that number in stately comfort. Jack first showed his wife where they would be sitting, explaining that the pecking order was very clear. The closer you were to the front of the aircraft, the more important you were. The President's accommodations were in the nose, where two couches could convert into beds. The Ryans and the van Damms would be in the next area, twenty feet or so aft in a space that could seat eight, but only five in this case. Joining them would be the President's Director of Communications, a harried and usually frantic former TV executive named Tish Brown, recently divorced. Lesser staff members were sorted aft in diminishing importance until you go
t to the media, deemed less important still.

  "This is the kitchen?" Cathy asked.

  "Galley," Jack corrected. It was impressive, as were the meals prepared here, actually cooked from fresh ingredients and not reheated as was the way on airliners.

  "It's bigger than ours!" she observed, to the amused pleasure of the chief cook, an Air Force master sergeant.

  "Not quite, but the chef's better, aren't you, Sarge?"

  "I'll turn my back now. You can slug him, ma'am. I won't tell."

  Cathy merely laughed at the jibe. "Why isn't he upstairs in the lounge?"

  "That's almost all communications gear. The President likes to wander up there to talk to the crew, but the guys who live there are mainly cryppies."

  "Cryppies?"

  "Communications guys," Jack explained, leading his wife back to their seats. The seats were beige leather, extra wide and extra soft, with recently added swing-up TV screens, personal phones, and other features which Cathy started to catalog, down to the presidential seal on the belt-buckles.

  "Now I know what first-class really means."

  "It's still an eleven-hour flight, babe," Jack observed, settling in while others boarded. With luck he'd be able to sleep most of the way.

  The President's televised departure statement followed its own pattern. The microphone was always set up so that Air Force One loomed in the background, to remind everyone of who he was and to prove it by showing his personal plane. Roy Newton watched more for timing than anything else. Statements like this never amounted to much, and only C-SPAN carried them at all, though the network newsies were always there with cameras in case the airplane blew up on takeoff. Concluding his remarks, Durling took his wife, Anne, by the arm and walked to the stairs, where a sergeant saluted. At the door of the aircraft, the President and the First Lady turned to give a final wave as though already on the campaign trail--in a very real way this trip was part of that almost-continuous process--then went inside. C-SPAN switched back to the floor of the House, where various junior members were giving brief speeches under special orders. The President would be in the air for eleven hours, Newton knew, more time than he needed.

  It was time to go to work.

  The ancient adage was true enough, he thought, arranging his notes. If more than one person knew it, it wasn't a secret at all. Even less so if you both knew part of it and also knew who knew the rest, because then you could sit down over dinner and let on that you knew, and the other person would think that you knew it all, and would then tell you the parts you hadn't learned quite yet. The right smiles, nods, grunts, and a few carefully selected words would keep your source going until it was all there in plain sight. Newton supposed it was not terribly different for spies. Perhaps he would have been a good one, but it didn't pay any better than his stint in Congress--not even as well, in fact--and he'd long since decided to apply his talent to something that could make him a decent living,

  The rest of the game was a lot easier. You had to select the right person to give the information to, and that choice was made merely by reading the local papers carefully. Every reporter had a hot-button item, something for which he or she had a genuinely passionate interest, and for that reason reporters were no different from anyone else. If you knew what buttons to push, you could manipulate anyone. What a pity it hadn't quite worked with the people in his district, Newton thought, lifting the phone and punching the buttons.

  "Libby Holtzman."

  "Hi, Libby, this is Roy. How are things?"

  "A little slow," she allowed, wondering if her husband, Bob, would get anything good on the Moscow trip with the presidential party.

  "How about dinner?" He knew that her husband was away.

  "What about?" she asked. She knew it wasn't a tryst or something similarly foolish. Newton was a player, and usually had something interesting to tell.

  "It'll be worth your time," he promised. "Jockey Club, seven-thirty?"

  "I'll be there."

  Newton smiled. It was all fair play, wasn't it? He'd lost his congressional seat on the strength of an accusation about influence-peddling. It hadn't been strong enough to have merited prosecution (someone else had influenced that), but it had been enough, barely, to persuade 50.7 percent of the voters in that off-year election that someone else should have the chance to represent them. In a presidential-election year, Newton thought, he would almost certainly have eked out a win, but congressional seats once lost are almost never regained.

  It could have been much worse. This life wasn't so bad, was it? He'd kept the same house, kept his kids in the same school, then moved them on to good colleges, kept his membership in the same country club. He just had a different constituency now, no ethics laws to trouble his mind about--not that they ever had, really--and it sure as hell paid a lot better, didn't it?

  DATELINE PARTNERS was being run out via computer-satellite relay--three of them, in fact. The Japanese Navy was linking all of its data to its fleet-operations center in Yokohama. The U.S. Navy did the same into Fleet-Ops at Pearl Harbor. Both headquarters offices used a third link to swap their own pictures. The umpires who scored the exercise in both locations thus had access to everything, but the individual fleet commanders did not. The purpose of the game was to give both sides realistic battle training, for which reason cheating was not encouraged--"cheating" was a concept by turns foreign and integral with the fighting of wars, of course.

  Pacific Fleet's type commanders, the admirals in charge of the surface, air, submarine, and service forces, respectively, watched from their chairs as the game unfolded, each wondering how his underlings would perform.

  "Sato's no dummy, is he?" Commander Chambers noted.

  "The boy's got some beautiful moves," Dr. Jones opined. A senior contractor with his own "special-access" clearance, he'd been allowed into the center on Mancuso's parole. "But it isn't going to help him up north."

  "Oh?" SubPac turned and smiled. "You know something I don't?"

  "The sonar departments on Charlotte and Asheville are damned good, Skipper. My people worked with them to set up the new tracking software, remember?"

  "The CO's aren't bad either," Mancuso pointed out.

  Jones nodded agreement. "You bet, sir. They know how to listen, just like you did."

  "God," Chambers breathed, looking down at the new four-ring shoulder boards and imagining he could feel the added weight. "Admiral, you ever wonder how we would have made it without Jonesy here?"

  "We had Chief Laval with us, remember?" Mancuso said.

  "Frenchy's son is the lead sonarman on Asheville, Mr. Chambers." For Jones, Mancuso would always be "skipper" and Chambers would always be a lieutenant. Neither officer objected. It was one of the rules of the naval service that bonded officers and (in this case, former) enlisted personnel.

  "I didn't know that," SubPac admitted.

  "Just joined up with her. He was on Tennessee before. Very sharp kid, made first-class three years out of his A-school."

  "That's faster than you did it," Chambers observed. "Is he that good?"

  "Sure as hell. I'm trying to recruit him for my business. He got married last year, has a kid on the way. It shouldn't be too hard to bribe him out into civilian life."

  "Thanks a lot, Jonesy," Mancuso growled. "I oughta kick your ass outa here."

  "Oh, come on, Skipper. When's the last time we got together for some real fun?" In addition to which, Jones's new whale-hunting software had been incorporated in what was left of the Pacific SOSUS system. "About time for an update."

  The fact that both sides had observers in the other's headquarters was something of a complication, largely because there were assets and capabilities in both cases that were not strictly speaking shared. In this case, SOSUS-GENERATED traces that might or might not be the Japanese submarine force northwest of Kure were actually better than what appeared on the main plotting board. The real traces were given to Mancuso and Chambers. Each side had two submarines. Neither Amer
ican boat showed up on the traces, but the Japanese boats were conventionally powered, and had to go periodically to snorkeling depth in order to run their diesels and recharge their batteries. Though the Japanese submarines had their own version of the American Prairie-Masker systems, Jones's new software had gone a long way to defeat that countermeasure. Mancuso and the rest retired to the SubPac plotting room to examine the newest data.

  "Okay, Jonesy, tell me what you see," Mancuso ordered, looking at the paper printouts from the underwater hydrophones that littered the bottom of the Pacific.

  The data was displayed both electronically on TV-type displays and on fan-fold paper of the sort once used for computer printouts for more detailed analysis. For work like this, the latter was preferred, and there were two sets. One of them had already been marked up by the oceanographic technicians of the local SOSUS detachment. To make this a double-blind analysis, and to see if Jones still knew how, Mancuso kept separate the set already analyzed by his people.

  Still short of forty, Jones had gray already in his thick dark hair, though he chewed gum now instead of smoking. The intensity was still there, Mancuso saw. Dr. Ron Jones flipped pages like an accountant on the trail of embezzlement, his finger tracing down the vertical lines on which frequencies were recorded.

  "We assume that they'll snort every eight hours or so?" he asked.

  "That's the smart thing, to keep their batteries fully charged," Chambers agreed with a nod.

  "What time are they operating on?" Jones asked. Typically, American submarines at sea adjusted their clocks to Greenwich Mean Time--recently changed to "Universal Time" with the diminution of the Royal Navy, whose power had once allowed the prime meridian to be defined by the British.