Debt Of Honor (1994)

by Tom - Jack Ryan 06 Clancy

  "Look, Ryan, I can't--"

  "Sure you can. You've done it before." Jack noted that the President sat there and listened, saying nothing. That was partly to distance himself from Ryan's maneuvering, but another part, perhaps, liked what he saw. And Holtzman was playing along.

  "So what does all this mean?" Goto asked.

  "It means that they will bluster," Yamata told him. It means that our country needs leadership, he couldn't say. "They cannot take the islands back. They lack the resources to attack us. They may have patched up their financial markets for now, but Europe and America cannot survive without us indefinitely, and by the time they realize that, we will not need them as we do now. Don't you see? This has always been about independence for us! When we achieve that, everything will change."

  "And for now?"

  "Nothing changes. The new American trade laws would have the same effect as hostilities. At least this way we get something for it, and we will have the chance of ruling our own house."

  That's what it really came down to, the one thing that nobody but he ever quite saw. His country could make products and sell them, but so long as his country needed markets more than the markets needed his country, trade laws could cripple Japan, and his country would have no recourse at all. Always the Americans. It was always them, forcing an early end to the Russo-Japanese War, denying their imperial ambitions, allowing them to build up their economy, then cutting the legs out from under them, three times now, the same people who'd killed his family. Didn't they see? Now Japan had struck back, and timidity still prevented people from seeing reality. It was all Yamata could manage to rein in his anger at this small and foolish man. But he needed Goto, even though the Prime Minister was too stupid to realize that there was no going back.

  "You're sure that they cannot ... respond to our actions?" Goto asked after a minute or so of contemplation.

  "Hiroshi, it is as I have been telling you for months. We cannot fail to win--unless we fail to try."

  "Damn, I wish we could use these things to do our surveys." The real magic of overhead imagery lay not in individual photographs, but rather in pairs of photographs, generally taken a few seconds apart from the same camera, then transmitted down to the ground stations at Sunnyvale and Fort Belvoir. Real-time viewing was all well and good to excite the imagination of congressmen privy to such things or to count items in a hurry. For real work, you used prints, set in pairs and viewed through a stereoscope, which worked better than the human eyes for giving precise three-dimensionality to the photos. It was almost as good as flying over in a helicopter. Maybe even better, the AMTRAK official thought, because you could go backwards as well as forwards.

  "The satellites cost a lot of money," Betsy Fleming observed.

  "Yeah, like our whole budget for a year. This one's interesting." A team of professional photo-interpretation experts was analyzing every frame, of course, but the plain truth of the matter was that CIA and NRO had stopped being interested in the technical aspects of railroad-building decades ago. Tracking individual trains loaded with tanks or missiles was one thing. This was something else.

  "How so?"

  "The Shin-Kansen line is a revenue maker. This spur isn't going to make much money for them. Maybe they can cut a tunnel up here," he went on, manipulating the photos. "Maybe they can make it into that city--but me, I'd come the other way and save the money on engineering. Of course it could just be a shunt to use for servicing the mainline."

  "Huh?"

  He didn't even lift his eyes from the stereo-viewer. "A place to stash work cars, snowblowers, that sort of thing. It is well sited for that purpose. Except that there's no such cars there."

  The resolution on the photos was just fantastic. They'd been taken close to noon local time, and you could see the sun's glint on the rails of the mainline, and the spur as well. He figured that the width of the rails was about the resolution limit of the cameras, an interesting fact that he couldn't relay to anyone else. The ties were concrete, like the rest of the Bullet Train line, and the quality of the engineering was, well, something he'd envied for a long time. The official looked up reluctantly.

  "No way it's a revenue line. The turns are all wrong. You couldn't do thirty miles per hour through there, and the train sets on that line cruise over a hundred. Funny, though, it just disappears."

  "Oh?" Betsy asked.

  "See for yourself." The executive stood to stretch, giving Mrs. Fleming a place at the viewer. He picked up a large-scale map of the valley and looked to see where things went. "You know, when Hill and Stevens built the Great Northern ..."

  Betsy wasn't interested. "Chris, take a look at this."

  Their visitor looked up from the map. "Oh. The truck? I don't know what color they paint their--"

  "Not green."

  Time usually worked in favor of diplomacy, but not in this case, Adler thought as he entered the White House. He knew the way, and had a Secret Service agent to conduct him in case he got lost. The Deputy Secretary of State was surprised to see a reporter in the Oval Office, even more so when he was allowed to stay.

  "You can talk," Ryan told him. Scott Adler took a deep breath and started his report.

  "They're not backing down on anything. The Ambassador isn't very comfortable with the situation, and it shows. I don't think he's getting much by way of instructions out of Tokyo, and that worries me. Chris Cook thinks they're willing to let us have Guam back in a demilitarized condition, but they want to keep the rest of the islands. I dangled the TRA at them, but no substantive response." He paused before going on. "It's not going to work. We can keep at it for a week or a month, but it's just not going to happen. Fundamentally they don't know what they're into. They see a continuum of engagement between the military and economic sides. They don't see the firebreak between the two. They don't see that they've crossed over a line, and they don't see the need to cross back."

  "You're saying there's a war happening," Holtzman observed, to make things clear. It made him feel foolish to ask the question. He didn't notice the same aura of unreality surrounding everyone else in the room.

  Adler nodded. "I'm afraid so."

  "So what are we going to do about it?"

  "What do you suppose?" President Durling asked.

  Commander Dutch Claggett had never expected to be in this situation. A fast-track officer since his graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy twenty-three years earlier, his career had come to a screeching halt aboard USS Maine, when as executive officer he'd been present for the only loss of an American fleet-ballistic-missile submarine. The irony was that his life's ambition had been command of a nuclear submarine, but command of Tennessee meant nothing at all now. It was just an entry on his first resume when he entered the civilian job market. Her designed mission was to carry Trident-II sea-launched ballistic missiles, but the missiles were gone and the only reason that she still existed at all was because the local environmental movement had protested her dismantlement to Federal District Court, and the judge, a lifelong member of the Sierra Club, had agreed to the arguments, which were again on their way back to the United States Court of Appeals. Claggett had been in command of Tennessee for nine months now, but the only time he'd been under way had been to move from one side of the pier to another. Not exactly what he'd had in mind for his career. It could be worse, he told himself in the privacy of his cabin. He could have been dead, along with so many of the others from USS Maine.

  But Tennessee was still all his----he didn't even share her with a second CO--and he was still a naval officer in command of a man-o'-war, technically speaking, and his reduced crew of eighty-five drilled every day because that was the life of the sea, even tied alongside a pier. His reactor plant, known to its operators as Tennessee Power and Light Company, was lit up at least once per week. The sonarmen played acquisition-and-tracking games against audiotapes, and the rest of those aboard operated every shipboard system, down to tinkering with the single Mark 48 torpedo aboard. It ha
d to be this way. The rest of the crew wasn't being SERB'd, after all, and it was his duty to them to maintain their professional standing should they get the transfers they all wanted to a submarine that actually went to sea.

  "Message from SubPac, sir," a yeoman said, handing over a clipboard. Claggett took the board and signed first for receipt.

  Report earliest date ready to put to sea.

  "What the hell?" Commander Claggett asked the bulkhead. Then he realized that the message ought to have come through Group at least, not straight from Pearl. He lifted his phone and dialed SubPac from memory. "Admiral Mancuso, please. Tennessee calling."

  "Dutch? What's your materiel condition?" Bart Mancuso asked without preamble.

  "Everything works, sir. We even had our ORSE two weeks ago, and we maxed it." Claggett referred to the Operational Reactor Safeguards Examination, still the Holy Grail of the Nuclear Navy, even for razor-blade fodder.

  "I know. How soon?" Mancuso asked. The bluntness of the question was like something from the past.

  "I need to load food and torps, and I need thirty people."

  "Where are you weak?"

  Claggett thought for a moment. His officers were on the young side, but he didn't mind that, and he had a good collection of senior chiefs. "Nowhere, really. I'm working these people hard."

  "Okay, good. Dutch, I'm cutting orders to get you ready to sail ASAP. Group is getting into gear now. I want you moving just as fast as you can. Mission orders are on the way. Be prepared to stay at sea for ninety days."

  "Aye aye, sir." Claggett heard the line go dead. A moment later he lifted his phone and called for his department heads and chiefs to meet in the wardroom. The meeting had not yet started when the phone rang again. It was a call from Group asking for Claggett's precise manpower needs.

  "Your house has a fine view. Is it for sale?"

  Oreza shook his head. "No, it's not," he told the man at the door.

  "Perhaps you would think about it. You are a fisherman, yes?"

  "Yes, sir, I am. I have a charter boat--"

  "Yes, I know." The man looked around, clearly admiring the size and location of what was really a fairly ordinary tract house by American standards. Manuel and Isabel Oreza had bought it five years earlier, just barely beating the real-estate boom on Saipan. "I would pay much for this," the man said.

  "But then where would I live?" Portagee asked.

  "Over a million American dollars," the man persisted.

  Strangely enough, Oreza felt a flash of anger at the offer. He still had a mortgage, after all, and paid the bill every month--actually his wife did, but that was beside the point. The typical American monthly ritual of pulling the ticket out of the book, filling out the check, tucking both in the preprinted envelope, and dropping it in the mail on the first day of the month--the entire procedure was proof to them that they did indeed own their first house after thirty-plus years of being government-service tumbleweeds. The house was theirs.

  "Sir, this house is mine, okay? I live here. I like it here."

  The man was as friendly and polite as he could be, in addition to being a pushy son of a bitch. He handed over a card. "I know. Please excuse my intrusion. I would like to hear from you after you have had a chance to consider my offer." And with that he walked to the next house in the development.

  "What the hell?" Oreza whispered, closing the door.

  "What was that all about?" Pete Burroughs asked.

  "He wants to pay me a million bucks for the house."

  "Nice view," Burroughs observed. "On the California coast this would go for a nice price. But not that much. You wouldn't believe what Japanese real-estate prices are."

  "A million bucks?" And that was just his opening offer, Oreza reminded himself. The man had his Toyota Land Cruiser parked in the cul-de-sac, and was clearly walking from one house to another, seeing what he could buy.

  "Oh, he'd turn it over for a lot more, or maybe if he was smart, just rent it."

  "But then where would we live?"

  "You wouldn't," Burroughs replied. "How much you want to bet they give you a first-class ticket stateside at the settlement. Think about it," the engineer suggested.

  "Well, that's interesting," Robby Jackson thought. "Anything else happening?"

  "The 'cans we saw before are gone now. Things are settling back down to--hell, they are normal now except for all the soldiers around."

  "Any trouble?"

  "No, sir, nothing. Same food ships coming in, same tankers, same everything. Air traffic has slowed down a lot. The soldiers are sort of dug in, but they're being careful how they do it. Not much visible anymore. There's still a lot of bush country on the island. I guess they're all hid in there. I ain't been goin' lookin', y'know?" Jackson heard him say.

  "That's fine. Just stay cool, Master Chief. Good report. Let me get back to work."

  "Okay, Admiral."

  Jackson made his notes. He really should have turned this stuff over to somebody else, but Chief Oreza would want a familiar voice on the other end of the circuit, and everything was taped for the intelligence guys anyway.

  But he had others things to do, too. The Air Force would be running another probe of Japanese air defenses tonight. The SSN patrol line would move west another hundred miles, and people would gather a lot of intelligence information, mainly from satellites. Enterprise would make Pearl Harbor today. There were two complete carrier air wings at Barbers Point Naval Air Station, but no carriers to put them on. The Army's 25th Infantry Division (Light) was still based at Schofield Barracks a few miles away, but there were no ships to put them on, either. The same was true of the First Marine Division at Camp Pendleton, California. The last time America had struck at the Mariana Islands, Operation FORAGER, 15 June 1944, he'd troubled himself to find out, there had been 535 ships, 127,571 troops. The combined ships of the entire U.S. Navy and every merchant ship flying the Stars and Stripes did not begin to approach the first number; the Army and Marines combined would have been hard pressed to find enough light-infantry troops to meet the second. Admiral Ray Spruance's Fifth Fleet--which no longer existed--had consisted of no less than fifteen fast carriers. PacFlt now had none. Five divisions had been tasked to the mission of retaking the islands, supported by over a thousand tactical aircraft, battleships, cruisers, destroyers....

  And you're the lucky son of a bitch who has to come up with a plan to take the Marianas back. With what?

  We can't deal with them force-on-force, Jackson told himself. They did hold the islands, and their weapons, mainly American-designed, were formidable. The worst complication was the quantity of civilians. The "natives"--all of them American citizens--numbered almost fifty thousand, most of whom lived on Saipan, and any plan that took many of those lives in the name of liberation would be a weight his conscience was unready to bear. It was a whole new kind of war, with a whole new set of rules, few of which he had figured out yet. But the central issues were the same. The enemy has taken something of ours, and we have to take it back or America was no longer a great power. Jackson hadn't spent his entire adult life in uniform so that he could be around when that bit of history got written. Besides, what would he say to Master Chief Manuel Oreza?

  We can't do it force-on-force. America no longer had the ability to move a large army except from one base to another. There was really no large army to move, and no large navy to move it. There were no useful advance bases to support an invasion. Or were there? America still owned most of the islands in the Western Pacific, and every one had an airstrip of one kind or other. Airplanes flew farther now, and could refuel in midair. Ships could stay at sea almost indefinitely, a skill invented by the U.S. Navy eighty years earlier and made more convenient still by the advent of nuclear power. Most importantly, weapons technology had improved. You didn't need a bludgeon anymore. There were rapiers now. And overhead imagery. Saipan. That's where the issue would be decided. Saipan was the key to the island chain. Jackson lifted his phone.


  "Ryan."

  "Robby. Jack, how free a hand do we have?"

  "We can't kill many people. It's not 1945 anymore," the National Security Advisor told him. "And they have nuclear missiles."

  "Yeah, well, we're looking for those, so they tell me, and I know that's our first target if we can find them. What if we can't?"

  "We have to," Ryan replied. Have to? he wondered. His best intelligence estimate was that the command-and-control over those missiles was in the hands of Hiroshi Goto, a man of limited intelligence and genuine antipathy to America. A more fundamental issue was that he had no confidence at all in America's ability to predict the man's actions. What might seem irrational to Ryan could seem reasonable to Goto--and to whoever else he depended upon for advice, probably Raizo Yamata, who had begun the entire business and whose personal motivations were simply unknown. "Robby, we have to take them out of play, and to do that, yeah, you have a free hand. I'll clear that with NCA," he added, meaning National Command Authority, the dry Pentagon term for the President.

  "Nukes?" Jackson asked. It was his profession to think in such terms, Ryan knew, however horrid the word and its implications were.

  "Rob, we don't want to do that unless there's no choice at all, but you are authorized to consider and plan for the possibility."

  "I just had a call from our friend on Saipan. It seems somebody wants to pay top dollar for his house."

  "We think they may try to stage elections--a referendum on sovereignty. If they can move people off the island, then, well, it makes them some points, doesn't it?"

  "We don't want that to happen, do we?"

  "No, we don't. I need a plan, Rob."

  "We'll get one for you," the Deputy J-3 promised.