Debt of Honor

  But not now. Now there were Japanese fighters circling over the island, and now six men in fatigues and pistol belts were walking toward him and his charter. It was like something from a movie, he thought, one of those crazy TV mini-things from when the Russians were real.

  “Hello, how was the fishing?” the man asked. He had O-3 rank, Oreza saw, and a parachutist’s badge on the left breast pocket. Smiling, just as pleasant and friendly as he could be.

  “I bagged one hell of an albacore tuna,” Pete Burroughs said, his pride amplified by the four beers he’d drunk on the way in.

  A wider smile. “Ah! Can I see it?”

  “Sure!” Burroughs reversed his path and led them back to the dock, where the fish was still hanging head-down from the hoist.

  “This is your boat, Captain Oreza?” the soldier asked. Only one other man had followed their captain down. The others stayed behind, watching closely, as though under orders not to be too... something, Portagee thought. He also took note of the fact that this officer had troubled himself to learn his name.

  “That’s right, sir. Interested in a little fishing?” he asked with an innocent smile.

  “My grandfather was a fisherman,” the ishii told them.

  Portagee nodded and smiled. “So was mine. Family tradition.”

  “Long tradition?”

  Oreza nodded as they got to Springer. “More than a hundred years.”

  “Ah, a fine boat you have. May I look at it?”

  “Sure, jump aboard.” Portagee went first and waved him over. The sergeant who’d walked down with his captain, he saw, stayed on the dock with Mr. Burroughs, keeping about six feet away from him. There was a pistol in the man’s holster, a SIG P220, the standard sidearm of the Japanese military. By this time all kinds of alarm were lighting off in Oreza’s brain.

  “What does ‘Springer’ denote?”

  “It’s a kind of hunting dog.”

  “Ah, yes, very good.” The officer looked around. “What sort of radios do you need for a boat like this. Expensive?”

  “I’ll show you.” Oreza led him into the salon. “Your people make it, sir, NEC, a standard marine VHF and a backup. Here’s my GPS nav system, depth finder, fish-finder, radar.” He tapped each instrument. They were in fact all Japanese-made, high quality, reasonably priced, and reliable as hell.

  “You have guns aboard?”

  Click. “Guns? What for?”

  “Don’t many islanders own guns?”

  “Not that I know of.” Oreza shook his head. “Anyway, I’ve never been attacked by a fish. No, I don’t have any, even at home.”

  Clearly the officer was pleased by that news. “Oreza, what sort of name is that?” It sounded native to the Ishii.

  “Originally, you mean? Way back, my people come from Portugal.”

  “Your family here a long time?”

  Oreza nodded. “You bet.” Five years was a long time, wasn’t it? A husband and wife constituted a family, didn’t they?

  “The radios, VHF you say, short-range?” The man looked around for other instruments, but clearly there were none.

  “Mainly line-of-sight, yes, sir.”

  The captain nodded. “Very good. Thank you. Beautiful boat. You take great pride in it, yes?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “Thank you for showing me around. You can go now,” the man said finally, not quite knowing how discordant the final sentence was. Oreza escorted him to the dock and watched him leave, rejoining his men without another word.

  “What was—”

  “Pete, you want to button it for a minute?” The command was delivered in his Master Chief’s voice, and had the desired effect. They walked off to Oreza’s car, letting the others pull away, marching as soldiers did to a precise one hundred twenty paces per minute, the sergeant a step to his captain’s left and half a pace behind, walking exactly in step. By the time the fisherman got to his car it was clear that yet another Toyota Land Cruiser was at the entrance to the marina parking lot, not really doing anything but sitting there, with three men inside, all in uniform.

  “Some kind of exercise? War games? What gives?” Burroughs asked once they were in Oreza’s car.

  “Beats the shit out of me, Pete.” He started up and headed out of the lot, turning right to go south on Beach Road. In a few minutes they passed by the commercial docks. Portagee took his time, obeying all rules and limits, and blessing his luck that he had the same model car and color the soldiers used.

  Or almost. The vehicles off-loading from Orchid Ace now were mainly olive-green. A steady cab-rank of airport buses off-loaded people in uniforms of the same color. They appeared to be going to a central point, then dispersing either to the parked military vehicles or to the ship, perhaps to off-load their assigned units.

  “What are those big boxy things?”

  “It’s called MLRS, Multiple-Launch Rocket System.” There were six of them now, Oreza saw.

  “What’s it for?” Burroughs asked.

  “Killing people,” Portagee replied tersely. As they drove by the access road to the docks, a soldier waved them on vigorously. More trucks, deuce-and-a-halfs. More soldiers, maybe five or six hundred. Oreza continued south. Every major intersection had a Land Cruiser in place, and no less than three soldiers, some with pistol belts, occasionally one with a slung rifle. It took a few minutes to realize that there wasn’t a single police car in evidence. He turned left onto Wallace Highway.

  “My hotel?”

  “How about dinner at my place tonight?” Oreza headed up the hill, past the hospital, finally turning left into his development. Though a man of the sea, he preferred a house on high ground. It also afforded a fine view of the southern part of the island. His was a home of modest size with lots of windows. His wife, Isabel, was an administrator at the hospital, and the home was close enough that she could walk to work if the mood suited her. The mood this evening was not a happy one. As soon as he pulled into the driveway, his wife was out the door.

  “Manni, what’s going on?” Her ancestry was like his. Short, round, and dark-complected, now her swarthy skin was pale.

  “Let’s go inside, okay? Honey, this is Pete Burroughs. We went fishing today.” His voice was calm, but his eyes swept around. The landing lights of four aircraft were visible to the east, lined up a few miles apart, approaching the island’s two large runways. When the three of them were inside, and the doors shut, the talking could start.

  “The phones are out. I tried to call Rachel and I got a recording. The overseas lines are down. When I went to the mall—”

  “Soldiers?” Portagee asked his wife.

  “Lots of ’em, and they’re all—”

  “Japs.” Master Chief Quartermaster Manuel Oreza, United States Coast Guard, retired, completed the thought.

  “Hey, that’s not the polite way to—”

  “Neither’s an invasion, Mr. Burroughs.”

  “What?”

  Oreza lifted the kitchen phone and hit the speed-dial button for his daughter’s house in Massachusetts.

  “We’re sorry, but a cable problem has temporarily interrupted Trans-Pacific service. Our people are working on the problem. Thank you for your patience—”

  “My ass!” Oreza told the recording. “Cable, hell, what about the satellite dishes?”

  “Can’t call out?” Burroughs was slow to catch on, but at least this was something he knew about.

  “No, doesn’t seem that way.”

  “Try this.” The computer engineer reached into his pocket and pulled out his cellular phone.

  “I have one,” Isabel said. “It doesn’t work either. I mean it’s fine for local calls, but—”

  “What number?”

  “Area code 617,” Portagee said, giving the rest of the number.

  “Wait, I need the USA prefix.”

  “It’s not going to work,” Mrs. Oreza insisted.

  “You don’t have satellite phones here yet, eh?” Burroug
hs smiled. “My company just got us all these things. I can download on my laptop, send faxes with it, all that stuff. Here.” He handed the phone over. “It’s ringing.”

  The entire system was new, and the first such phone had not yet been sold in the islands yet, a fact that the Japanese military had troubled itself to learn in the past week, but the service was global, even if the local marketing people hadn’t started selling the things here. The signal from the small device went to one of thirty-five satellites in a low-orbit constellation to the nearest ground station. Manila was the closest, beating Tokyo by a mere thirty miles, though even one mile would have been enough for the executive programming that ran the system. The Luzon ground station had been in operation for only eight weeks, and immediately relayed the call to another satellite, this one a Hughes bird in geosynchronous orbit over the Pacific, back down to a ground station in California, and from there via fiberoptic to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  “Hello?” the voice said, somewhat crossly, since it was 5:00 A.M. in America’s Eastern Time Zone.

  “Rachel?”

  “Daddy?”

  “Yeah, honey.”

  “You okay out there?” his daughter asked urgently.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I tried to call Mom, but the recording said you had a big storm and the lines were down.”

  “There wasn’t any storm, Rach,” Oreza said without much thought on the matter.

  “What’s the matter, then?”

  Jesus, where do I start? Portagee asked himself. What if nobody... was that possible?

  “Uh, Portagee,” Burroughs said.

  “What is it?” Oreza asked.

  “What’s what, Daddy?” his daughter asked also, of course.

  “Wait a minute, honey. What is it, Pete?” He put his hand over the receiver.

  “You mean like, invasion, like war, taking over, all that stuff?”

  Portagee nodded. “Yes, sir, that’s what it looks like.”

  “Turn the phone off, now!” The urgency in his voice was unmistakable. Nobody had thought any of this through yet, and both were coming to terms with it from different directions and at different speeds.

  “Honey, I’ll be back, okay? We’re fine. ’Bye.” Oreza thumbed the CLEAR button. “What’s the problem, Pete?”

  “This isn’t some joke, right? You’re not doing a number to mess with my head, tourist games and all that stuff, are you?”

  “Jesus, I need a beer.” Oreza opened the refrigerator and took one out. That it was a Japanese brand did not for the moment matter. He tossed one to his guest. “Pete, this ain’t no play-acting, okay? In case you didn’t notice, we seen at least a battalion of troops, mechanized vehicles, fighters. And that asshole on the dock was real interested in the radio on my boat.”

  “Okay.” Burroughs opened his beer and took a long pull. “Let’s say this is a no-shitter. You can DF one of those things.”

  “Dee-eff? What do you mean?” A pause while he dusted off some long-unused memories. “Oh ... yeah.”

  It was busy at the headquarters of Commander-in-Chief Pacific. CINCPAC was a Navy command, a tradition that dated back to Admiral Chester Nimitz. At the moment people were scurrying about. They were almost all in uniform. The civilian employees were rarely in on weekends, and with a few exceptions it was too late for them anyway. Mancuso saw the collective mood as he came through security, people looking down with harried frowns, moving quickly the better to avoid the heavy atmosphere of an office in considerable turmoil. Nobody wanted to be caught in the storm.

  “Where’s Admiral Seaton?” ComSubPac asked the nearest yeoman. The petty officer just pointed to the office suite. Mancuso led the other two in that direction.

  “Where the hell have you been?” CINCPAC demanded as they came into his inner office.

  “SOSUS, sir. Admiral, you know Captain Chambers, my operations officer. This is Dr. Ron Jones—”

  “The sonarman you used to brag on?” Admiral David Seaton allowed himself a pleasant moment. It was brief enough.

  “That’s right, sir. We were just over at SOSUS checking the data on—”

  “No survivors, Bart. Sorry, but the S-3 crew says—”

  “Sir, they were killed,” Jones interrupted, tired of the preliminaries. His statement stopped everything cold.

  “What do you mean, Dr. Jones?” CINCPAC asked after perhaps as much as a second.

  “I mean Asheville and Charlotte were torpedoed and sunk by Japanese submarines, sir.”

  “Now wait a minute, son. You mean Charlotte, too?” Seaton’s head turned. “Bart, what is this?” SubPac didn’t get a chance to answer.

  “I can prove it, sir.” Jones held up the sheaf of papers under his arm. “I need a table with a light over it.”

  Mancuso’s face was pretty grim. “Sir, Jonesy appears to be right. These were not accidents.”

  “Gentlemen, I have fifteen Japanese officers in the operations room right now trying to explain how the fire control on their ’cans works and—”

  “You have Marines, don’t you?” Jones asked coldly. “They carry guns, don’t they?”

  “Show me what you have.” Dave Seaton gestured at his desk.

  Jones walked CINCPAC through the printouts, and if Seaton wasn’t exactly a perfect audience, he surely was a quiet one. On further examination, the SOSUS traces even showed the surface ships and the Mark 50 antisub torpedoes that had crippled half of PacFlt’s carriers. The new array off Kure was really something, Jones thought.

  “Look at the time, sir. All of this happened over a period of what? Twenty minutes or so. You have two hundred fifty dead sailors out there, and it wasn’t any accident.”

  Seaton shook his head like a horse shedding troublesome insects. “Wait a minute, I haven’t had any word—I mean, the threat board is blank. There aren’t any indications at all that—”

  “There are now, sir.” Jones wasn’t letting up at all.

  “But—”

  “Goddamn it, Admiral!” Jones swore. “Here it is, black and white, okay? There are other copies of this back at the SOSUS building, there’s a tape record, and I can show it to you on a fucking TV screen. You want your own experts to go over there, well, shit, they’re right here, ain’t they?” The contractor pointed to Mancuso and Chambers. “We have been attacked, sir.”

  “What are the chances that this is some sort of mistake?” Seaton asked. His face was as ghostly pale as the cloth of his undress-white uniform shirt.

  “Just about zero. 1 suppose you could wait for them to take an ad out in The New York Times if you want additional confirmation.” Diplomacy had never been Jones’s strongest suit, and he was too angry to consider it anyway.

  “Listen, mister—” Seaton began, but then he bit off his words, and instead looked up at his type commander. “Bart?”

  “I can’t argue with the data, sir. If there were a way to dispute it, Wally or I would have found it. The people at SOSUS concur. It’s hard for me to believe, too,” Mancuso conceded. “Charlotte has failed to check in and—”

  “Why didn’t her beacon go off?” CINCPAC asked.

  “The gadget is located on the sail, aft corner. Some of my skippers weld them down. The fast-attack guys resisted putting them aboard last year, remember? Anyway, the fish could have destroyed the BST or for some reason it didn’t deploy properly. We have that noise indicator at Charlotte’s approximate location, and she has failed to respond to an emergency order to communicate with us. There is no reason, sir, to assume that she’s still alive.” And now that Mancuso had said it, it was official. There was one more thing that needed to be said.

  “You’re telling me we’re at war.” The statement was delivered in an eerily quiet voice. ComSubPac nodded.

  “Yes, sir, I am.”

  “I didn’t have any warning at all,” Seaton objected.

  “Yeah, you have to admire their sense of tradition, don’t you?” Jones observed, forgetting that th
e last time there had been ample warning, all of it unheeded.

  Pete Burroughs didn’t finish his fifth beer of the day. The night had not brought peace. Though the sky was clear and full of stars, brighter lights continued to approach Saipan from the east, taking advantage of the trade winds to ease their approach into the island’s two American-built runways. Each jumbo jet had to be carrying at least two hundred soldiers, probably closer to three. They could see the two airfields. Oreza’s binoculars were more than adequate to pick out the aircraft and the fuel trucks that scurried about to fill up the arriving jets so that they could rapidly go home to make another shuttle run. It didn’t occur to anyone to keep a count until it was a few hours too late.

  “Car coming in,” Burroughs warned, alerted by the glow of turning lights. Oreza and he retreated to the side of the house, hoping to be invisible in the shadows. The car was another Toyota Land Cruiser, which drove down the lane, reversed direction at the end of the cul-de-sac, and headed back out after having done not very much of anything but look around and perhaps count the cars in the various drive-ways—more likely to see if people were gathered in an inopportune way. “You have any idea what to do?” he asked Oreza when it was gone.

  “Hey, I was Coast Guard, remember? This is Navy shit. No, more like Marine shit.”

  “It sure is deep shit, man. You suppose anybody knows?”

  “They gotta. Somebody’s gotta,” Portagee said, lowering the glasses and heading back into the house. “We can watch from inside our bedroom. We always leave the windows open anyway.” The cool evenings here, always fresh and comfortable from the ocean breezes, were yet another reason for his decision to move to Saipan. “What exactly do you do, Pete?”

  “Computer industry, several things really. I have a masters in EE. My real specialty area is communications, how computers talk to each other. I’ve done a little government work. My company does plenty, but mostly on another side of the house.” Burroughs looked around the kitchen. Mrs. Oreza had prepared a light dinner, a good one, it appeared, though it was growing cold.