Debt of Honor

  At one of the nondescript metal-working shops, the bundles of not-quite-galvanized steel were unwrapped, and the individual sheets fed by hand to cutting machines. There the square sheets were mechanically sliced, and the edges trimmed—the surplus material was gathered and returned to the steel mill for recycling—so that each piece matched the size determined by the design, invariably to tolerances less than a millimeter, even for this fairly crude component which the owner’s eyes would probably never behold. The larger cut pieces moved on to another machine for heating and bending, then were welded into an oval cylinder. Immediately thereafter the oval-cut end pieces were matched up and welded into place as well, by a machine process that required only one workman to supervise. Pre-cut holes in one side were matched up with the pipe that would terminate at the filler cap—there was another in the bottom for the line leading to the engine. Before leaving the jobber, the tanks were spray-coated with a wax-and-epoxy-based formula that would protect the steel against rust. The formula was supposed to bond with the steel, creating a firm union of disparate materials that would forever protect the gas tank against corrosion and resultant fuel leakage. An elegant and fairly typical piece of superb Japanese engineering, only in this case it didn’t work because of the bad electrical cable at the steel plant. The coating never really attached itself to the steel, though it had sufficient internal stiffness to hold its shape long enough for visual inspection to be performed, and immediately afterwards the gas tanks proceeded by roller-conveyor to the boxing shop at the end of the small-parts plant. There the tanks were tucked into cardboard boxes fabricated by yet another jobber and sent by truck to a warehouse where half of the tanks were placed aboard other trucks for delivery to the assembly plant, and the other half went into identically sized cargo containers which were loaded aboard a ship for transport to the United States. There the tanks would be attached to a nearly identical automobile at a plant owned by the same international conglomerate, though this plant was located in the hills of Kentucky, not the Kwanto Plain outside of Tokyo.

  All this had taken place months before the item had come onto the agenda of the Domestic Content Negotiations. Thousands of automobiles had been assembled and shipped with defective fuel tanks, and all had slipped through the usually excellent quality-assurance procedures at the assembly plants separated by six thousand miles of land and sea. In the case of those assembled in Japan, the cars had been loaded aboard some of the ugliest ships ever made, slab-sided auto-carriers which had the riding characteristics of barges as they plodded through the autumnal storms of the North Pacific Ocean. The sea-salt in the air reached through the ships’ ventilation systems to the autos. That wasn’t too bad until one of the ships drove through a front, and cold air changed rapidly to warm, and the instant change in relative humidity interacted with that of the air within various fuel tanks, causing salt-heavy moisture to form on the exterior of the steel, inside the defective coating. There the salt immediately started working on the unprotected mild steel of the tank, rusting and weakening the thin metal that contained 92-octane gasoline.

  Whatever his other faults, Corp met his death with dignity, Ryan saw. He had just finished watching a tape segment that CNN had judged unsuitable for its regular news broadcast. After a speech whose translation Ryan had on two sheets of paper in his lap, the noose was placed over his head and the trap was sprung. The CNN camera crew focused in on the body as it jerked to a stop, closing an entry on his country’s ledger. Mohammed Abdul Corp. Bully, killer, drug-runner. Dead.

  “I just hope we haven’t created a martyr,” Brett Hanson said, breaking the silence in Ryan’s office.

  “Mr. Secretary,” Ryan said, turning his head to see his guest reading through a translation of Corp’s last words. “Martyrs all share a single characteristic.”

  “What’s that, Ryan?”

  “They’re all dead.” Jack paused for effect. “This guy didn’t die for God or his country. He died for committing crimes. They didn’t hang him for killing Americans. They hanged him for killing his own people and for selling narcotics. That’s not the stuff martyrs are made of. Case closed,” Jack concluded, sticking the unread sheets of paper in his out basket. “Now, what have we learned about India?”

  “Diplomatically speaking, nothing.”

  “Mary Pat?” Jack asked the CIA representative.

  “There’s a heavy mechanized brigade doing intensive training down south. We have overheads from two days ago. They seem to be exercising as a unit.”

  “Humint?”

  “No assets in place,” Mrs. Foley admitted, delivering what had become a CIA mantra. “Sorry, Jack. It’ll be years before we can field people everywhere we want.”

  Ryan grumbled silently. Satellite photos were fine for what they were, but they were merely photographs. Photos only gave you shapes, not thoughts. Ryan needed thoughts. Mary Pat was doing her best to fix that, he remembered.

  “According to the Navy, their fleet is very busy, and their pattern of operations suggests a barrier mission.” The satellites did show that the Indian Navy’s collection of amphibious-warfare ships was assembled in two squadrons. One was at sea, roughly two hundred miles from its base, exercising together as a group. The other was alongside at the same naval base undergoing maintenance, also as a group. The base was distant from the brigade undergoing its own exercises, but there was a rail line from the army base to the naval one. Analysts were now checking the rail yards at both facilities on a daily basis. The satellites were good for that, at least.

  “Nothing at all, Brett? We have a pretty good ambassador over there as I recall.”

  “1 don’t want him to press too hard. It could damage what influence and access we have,” SecState announced. Mrs. Foley tried not to roll her eyes.

  “Mr. Secretary,” Ryan said patiently, “in view of the fact that we have neither information nor influence at the moment, anything he might develop will be useful. Do you want me to make the call or will you?”

  “He works for me, Ryan.” Jack waited a few beats before responding to the prod. He hated territorial fights, though they were seemingly the favorite sport in the executive branch of the government.

  “He works for the United States of America. Ultimately he works for the President. My job is to tell the President what’s going on over there, and I need information. Please turn him loose. He’s got a CIA chief working for him. He has three uniformed attaches. I want them all turned loose. The object of the exercise is to classify what looks to the Navy and to me like preparations for a possible invasion of a sovereign country. We want to prevent that.”

  “I can’t believe that India would really do such a thing,” Brett Hanson said somewhat archly. “I’ve had dinner with their Foreign Minister several times, and he never gave me the slightest indication—”

  “Okay.” Ryan interrupted quietly to ease the pain he was about to inflict. “Fine, Brett. But intentions change, and they did give us the indicator that they want our fleet to go away. I want the information. 1 am requesting that you turn Ambassador Williams loose to rattle a few bushes. He’s smart and 1 trust his judgment. That’s a request on my part. I can ask the President to make it an order. Your call, Mr. Secretary.”

  Hanson weighed his options, and nodded agreement with as much dignity as he could summon. Ryan had just cleared up a situation in Africa that had gnawed at Roger Durling for two years, and so was the prettiest kid on the block, for the moment. It wasn’t every day that a government employee increased the chances for a President to get himself reelected. The suspicion that CIA had apprehended Corp had already made its way in the media, and was being only mildly denied in the White House pressroom. It was no way to conduct foreign policy, but that issue would be fought on another battlefield.

  “Russia,” Ryan said next, ending one discussion and beginning another.

  The engineer at the Yoshinobu space-launch complex knew he was not the first man to remark on the beauty of evil. Certainly
not in his country, where the national mania for craftsmanship had probably begun with the loving attention given to swords, the meter-long katana of the samurai. There, the steel was hammered, bent over, hammered again, and bent over again twenty times in a lamination process that resulted in over a million layers of steel made from a single original casting. Such a process required an immense amount of patience from the prospective owner, who would wait patiently even so, displaying a degree of downward-manners for which that period of his country was not famous. Yet so it had been, for the samurai needed his sword, and only a master craftsman could fabricate it.

  But not today. Today’s samurai—if you could call him that—used the telephone and demanded instant results. Well, he would still have to wait, the engineer thought, as he gazed at the object before him.

  In fact, the thing before his eyes was an elaborate lie, but it was the cleverness of the lie, and its sheer engineering beauty that excited his self-admiration. The plug connections on the side of it were fake, but only six people here knew that, and the engineer was the last of them as he headed down the ladder from the top portion of the gantry tower to the next-lower level. From there, they would ride the elevator to the concrete pad, where a bus waited to carry them to the control bunker. Inside the bus, the engineer removed his white-plastic hard-hat and started to relax. Ten minutes later, he was in a comfortable swivel chair, sipping tea. His presence here and on the pad hadn’t been necessary, but when you built something, you wanted to see it all the way through, and besides, Yamata-san would have insisted.

  The H-11 booster was new. This was only the second test-firing. It was actually based on Soviet technology, one of the last major ICBM designs the Russians had built before their country had come apart, and Yamata-san had purchased the rights to the design for a song (albeit written in hard currency), then turned all the drawings and data over to his own people for modification and improvement. It hadn’t been hard. Improved steel for the casing and better electronics for the guidance system had saved fully 1,200 kilograms of weight, and further improvements in the liquid fuels had taken the performance of the rocket forward by a theoretical 17 percent. It had been a bravura performance by the design team, enough to attract the interest of NASA engineers from America, three of whom were in the bunker to observe. And wasn’t that a fine joke?

  The countdown proceeded according to plan. The gantry came back on its rails. Floodlights bathed the rocket, which sat atop the pad like a monument—but not the kind of monument the Americans thought.

  “Hell of a heavy instrument package,” a NASA observer noted.

  “We want to certify our ability to orbit a heavy payload,” one of the missile engineers replied simply.

  “Well, here we go....”

  The rocket-motor ignition caused the TV screens to flare briefly, until they compensated electronically for the brilliant power of the white flame. The H-11 booster positively leaped upward atop a column of flame and a trail of smoke.

  “What did you do with the fuel?” the NASA man asked quietly.

  “Better chemistry,” his Japanese counterpart replied, watching not the screen but a bank of instruments. “Better quality control, purity of the oxidizer, mainly.”

  “They never were very good at that,” the American agreed.

  He just doesn’t see what he sees, both engineers told themselves. Yamata-san was correct. It was amazing.

  Radar-guided cameras followed the rocket upward into the clear sky. The H-11 climbed vertically for the first thousand feet or so, then curved over in a slow, graceful way, its visual signature diminishing to a white-yellow disk. The flight path became more and more horizontal until the accelerating rocket body was heading almost directly away from the tracking cameras.

  “BECO,” the NASA man breathed, just at the proper moment. BECO meant booster-engine cutoff, because he was thinking in terms of a space launcher. “And separation ... and second-stage ignition ...” He got those terms right. One camera tracked the falling first stage, still glowing from residual fuel burnoff as it fell into the sea.

  “Going to recover it?” the American asked.

  “No.”

  All heads shifted to telemetric readouts when visual contact was lost. The rocket was still accelerating, exactly on its nominal performance curve, heading southeast. Various electronic displays showed the H-11’s progress both numerically and graphically.

  “Trajectory’s a little high, isn’t it?”

  “We want a high-low orbit,” the project manager explained. “Once we establish that we can orbit the weight, and we can certify the accuracy of the insertion, the payload will deorbit in a few weeks. We don’t wish to add more junk up there.”

  “Good for you. All the stuff up there, it’s becoming a concern for our manned missions.” The NASA man paused, then decided to ask a sensitive question. “What’s your max payload?”

  “Five metric tons, ultimately.”

  He whistled. “You think you can get that much performance off this bird?” Ten thousand pounds was the magic number. If you could put that much into low-earth-orbit, you could then orbit geosynchronous communications satellites. Ten thousand pounds would allow for the satellite itself and the additional rocket motor required to attain the higher altitude. “Your trans-stage must be pretty hot.”

  The reply was, at first, a smile. “That is a trade secret.”

  “Well, I guess we’ll see in about ninety seconds.” The American turned in his chair to watch the digital telemetry. Was it possible they knew something he and his people didn’t? He didn’t think so, but just to make sure, NASA had an observation camera watching the H-11. The Japanese didn’t know that, of course. NASA had tracking facilities all over the world to monitor U.S. space activity, and since they often had nothing to do, they kept track of all manner of things. The ones on Johnston Island and Kwajalein Atoll had originally been set up for SDI testing, and the tracking of Soviet missile launches.

  The tracking camera on Johnston Island was called Amber Ball, and its crew of six picked up the H-11, having been cued on the launch by a Defense Support Program satellite, which had also been designed and orbited to give notice of Soviet launches. Something from another age, they all told themselves.

  “Sure looks like a -19,” the senior technician observed to general agreement.

  “So does the trajectory,” another said after a check of range and flight path.

  “Second stage cutoff and separation, trans-stage and payload are loose now... getting a small adjustment burn—whoa!”

  The screen went white.

  “Signal lost, telemetry signal lost!” a voice called in launch control.

  The senior Japanese engineer growled something that sounded like a curse to the NASA representative, whose eyes tracked down to the graphic-display screen. Signal lost just a few seconds after the trans-stage ignition. That could mean only one thing.

  “That’s happened to us more than once,” the American said sympathetically. The problem was that rocket fuels, especially the liquid fuels always used for the final stage of a space launch, were essentially high explosives. What could go wrong? NASA and the U.S. military had spent over forty years discovering every possible mishap.

  The weapons engineer didn’t lose his temper as the flight-control officer had, and the American sitting close to him put it down to professionalism, which it was. And the American didn’t know that he was a weapons engineer, anyway. In fact, to this point everything had gone exactly according to plan. The trans-stage fuel containers had been loaded with high explosives and had detonated immediately after the separation of the payload package.

  The payload was a conical object, one hundred eighty centimeters wide at the base and two hundred six in length. It was made of uranium-238, which would have been surprising and unsettling to the NASA representative. A dense and very hard metal, it also had excellent refractory qualities, meaning that it resisted heat quite well. The same material was used in the p
ayloads of many American space vehicles, but none of them was owned by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Rather, objects of very similar shapes and sizes sat atop the few remaining nuclear-tipped strategic weapons which the United States was dismantling in accordance with a treaty with Russia. More than thirty years earlier, an engineer at AVCO had pointed out that since U238 was both an excellent material for withstanding the heat of a ballistic reentry and made up the third stage of a thermonuclear device, why not make the body of the RV part of the bomb? That sort of thing had always appealed to an engineer, and the idea had been tested, certified, and since the 1960s become a standard part of the U.S. strategic arsenal.

  The payload so recently part of the H-11 booster was an exact engineering mockup of a nuclear warhead, and while Amber Ball and other tracking devices were watching the remains of the trans-stage, this cone of uranium fell back to earth. It was not a matter of interest to American cameras, since it was, after all, just an orbit-test payload that had failed to achieve the velocity necessary to circle the earth.

  Nor did the Americans know that MV Takuyo, sitting halfway between Easter Island and the coast of Peru, was not doing the fishery-research work it was supposed to be doing. Two kilometers to the east of Takuyo was a rubber raft, on which sat a GPS locator and a radio. The ship was not equipped with a radar capable of tracking an inbound ballistic target, but the descending RV gave its own announcement in the pre-dawn darkness; glowing white-hot from its reentry friction, it came down like a meteor, trailing a path of fire right on time and startling the extra lookouts on the flying bridge, who’d been told what to expect but were impressed nonetheless. Heads turned rapidly to follow it down, and the splash was a mere two hundred meters from the raft. Calculations would later determine that the impact point had been exactly two hundred sixty meters from the programmed impact point. It wasn’t perfect, and, to the disappointment of some, was fully an order of magnitude worse than that of the Americans’ newest missiles, but for the purposes of the test, it was quite sufficient. And better yet, the test had been carried out in front of the whole world and still not been seen. Moments later, the warhead released an inflated balloon to keep it close to the surface. A boat launched from Takuyo was already on the way to snag the line so that the RV could be recovered and its instrumented data analyzed.