Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12

by Tom Clancy

  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 had 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 matériel 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 fly
ing 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.

  Durling appeared on TV again at nine in the evening, Eastern Time. There were already rumbles out. The TV anchors had followed their stories about developments on Wall Street with confused references to the carrier accident the previous week and to urgent negotiations between Japan and the United States over the Mariana Islands, where, they noted, communications were out following a storm that might never have happened. It was very discomforting for them to say what they didn’t know. By this time Washington correspondents were trading information and sources, amazed at having missed something of this magnitude. That amazement translated itself into rage at their own government for concealing something of this dimension. Background briefings that had begun at eight helped to assuage them somewhat. Yes, Wall Street was the big news. Yes, it was more vital to the overall American well-being than some islands that not a few of their number had to be shown on a map. But, no, damn it, the government didn’t have the right not to tell the media what was going on. Some of them, though, realized that the First Amendment guaranteed their freedom to find things out, not to demand information from others. Others realized that the Administration was trying to end the affair without bloodshed, which went part of the way to calming them down. But not all of the way.

  “My fellow Americans,” Durling began for the second time in the day, and it was immediately apparent that, as pleasing as the events of the afternoon had been, the news this evening would be bad. And so it was.

  There is something about inevitability that offends human nature. Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed. But man is also a creature prone to error, and sometimes that makes inevitable the things that he so often seeks to avoid.

  The four B-1B Lancer bombers were five hundred miles offshore now, again spread on a line centered due east of Tokyo. This time they turned directly in, took an exact westerly heading of two-seven-zero degrees, and dropped down to a low-penetration altitude. The electronic-warfare officers aboard each of the aircraft now knew more than they had two nights earlier. Now at least they could ask the right questions. Additional satellite information had fixed the location of every air-defense radar site in the country, and they knew they could beat those. The important part of this night’s mission was to get a feel for the capabilities of the E-767s, and that demanded more circumspection.

  The B-1B had been reworked many times since the 1970s. It had actually become slower rather than faster, but it had also become stealthy. Especially from nose-on, the Lancer had the radar cross section—the RCS—of a large bird, as opposed to the B-2A, which had the RCS of a sparrow attempting to hide from a hawk. It also had blazing speed at low-level, always the best way to avoid engagement if attacked, which the crews hoped to avoid. The mission for tonight was to “tickle” the orbiting early-warning aircraft, wait for them to react electronically, and then turn and run back to Elmendorf with better data than what they had already developed, from which a real attack plan could be formulated. The flight crews had forgotten only one thing. The air temperature was 31 degrees Fahrenheit on part of their aircraft and 35 on another.

  Kami-Two was flying one hundred miles east of Choshi, following a precise north-south line at four hundred knots. Every fifteen minutes the aircraft reversed course. It had been up on patrol for seven hours, and was due to be relieved at dawn. The crew was tired but alert, not yet quite settled into the numbing routine of their mission.

  The real problem was technical, which affected the operators badly. Their radar, sophisticated as it was, did them fewer favors than one might imagine. Designed to make the detection of stealthy aircraft possible, it had achieved its goal, perhaps—they didn’t really know yet—through a number of incremental improvements in performance. The radar itself was immensely powerful, and being of solid-state construction, both highly reliable and precise in its operation. Internal improvements included reception gear cooled with liquid nitrogen to boost sensitivity by a factor of four, and signal-processing software that missed little. That was really the problem. The radar displays were
TV tubes that showed a computer-generated picture called a raster-scan, rather than the rotating-analog readout known since the invention of radar in the 1930s. The software was tuned to find anything that generated a return, and at the power and sensitivity settings being used now, it was showing things that weren’t really there. Migratory birds, for example. The software engineers had programmed in a speed gate to ignore anything slower than one hundred thirty kilometers per hour, else they would have been tracking cars on the highways to their west, but the software took every return signal before deciding whether to show it to the operator, and if anything lay on or beyond that ring a few seconds later, it was plotted as a possible moving aircraft contact. In that way, two albatrosses a few thousand meters apart became a moving aircraft in the mind of the onboard computer. It was driving the operators mad, and along with them the pilots of the two Eagle fighters that flew thirty kilometers outboard of the surveillance aircraft. The result of the software problem was irritation that had already transformed itself into poor judgment. In addition, with the current sensitivity of the overall system, the still-active streams of commercial aircraft looked for all the world like fleets of bombers, and the only good news was that Kami-One to their north was dealing with them, classifying and handing them off.

  “Contact, one-zero-one, four hundred kilometers,” a captain on one of the boards said into the intercom. “Altitude three thousand meters ... descending. Speed five hundred knots.”

  “Another bird?” the colonel commanding the mission asked crossly.

  “Not this one ... contact is firming up.”

  Another aviator with the rank of colonel eased his stick down to take his bomber lower. The autopilot was off now. In and out, he told himself, scanning the sky ahead of him.