Debt of Honor

  Jackson turned from his place at the lectern. “Yes, sir, that’s exactly what war is, but this way we’re not killing some poor nineteen-year-old son of a bitch who joined up because he liked the uniform. We’re going to kill the bastard who sent him out to die and doesn’t even know his name. With all due respect, sir, I have killed people, and I know exactly what it feels like. Just once, just one time, I’d like a crack at the people who give the orders instead of the poor dumb bastards who’re stuck with carrying them out.”

  Durling almost smiled at that, remembering all the fantasies, and even a TV commercial once, about how different it might be if the president and prime ministers and other senior officials who ordered men off to the field of battle instead met and slugged it out personally.

  “You’re still going to have to kill a lot of kids,” the President said. Admiral Jackson drew back from his angry demeanor before answering.

  “I know that, sir, but with luck, a lot less.”

  “When do you have to know?”

  “The pieces are largely in place now. We can initiate the operation in less than five hours. After that, we’re daylight limited. Twenty-four-hour intervals after that.”

  “Thank you, Admiral Jackson. Could you all excuse me for a few minutes?” The men filed out until Durling had another thought. “Jack? Could you stay a minute?” Ryan turned and sat back down.

  “It had to be done, sir. One way or another, if we’re going to take those nukes out—”

  “I know.” The President looked down at his desk. All the briefing papers and maps and charts were spread out. All the order-of-battle documents. At least he’d been spared the casualty estimates, probably at Ryan’s direction. After a second they heard the door close.

  Ryan spoke first. “Sir, there’s one other thing. Former Prime Minister Koga has been arrested—excuse me, we only know that he’s kinda disappeared.”

  “What does that mean? Why didn’t you bring that up before?”

  “The arrest happened less than twenty-four hours after I told Scott Adler that Koga had been contacted. I didn’t even tell him whom he’d been in contact with. Now, that could be a coincidence. Goto and his master just might not want him making political noise while they carry out their operation. It could also mean that there’s a leak somewhere.”

  “Who on our side knows?”

  “Ed and Mary Pat at CIA. Me. You. Scott Adler and whomever Scott told.”

  “But we don’t know for sure that there’s a leak.”

  “No, sir, we don’t. But it is extremely likely.”

  “Set it aside for now. What if we don’t do anything?”

  “Sir, we have to. If we don’t, then sometime in the future you can expect a war between Russia on one hand and Japan and China on the other, with us doing God knows what. CIA is still trying to do its estimate, but I don’t see how the war can fail to go nuclear. ZORRO may not be the prettiest thing we’ve ever tried to do, but it’s the best chance we have. The diplomatic issues are not important,” Ryan went on. “We’re playing for much higher stakes now. But if we can kill off the guys who initiated this mess, then we can cause Goto’s government to fall. And then we can get things back under some sort of control.”

  The odd part, Durling realized, was the trade-off concerning which side was pitching which sort of moderation. Hanson and SecDef took the classical diplomatic line—they wanted to take the time to be sure there was no other option to resolve the crisis through peaceful means, but if diplomacy failed, then the door was opened for a much wider and bloodier conflict. Ryan and Jackson wanted to apply violence at once in the hope of avoiding a wider war later. The hell of it was, either side could be right or wrong, and the only way to know for sure was to read the history books twenty years from now.

  “If the plan doesn’t work ...”

  “Then we’ve killed some of our people for nothing,” Jack said honestly. “You will pay a fairly high price yourself, sir.”

  “What about the fleet commander—I mean the guy commanding the carrier group. What about him?”

  “If he chokes, the whole thing comes apart.”

  “Replace him,” the President said. “The mission is approved.” There was one other item to be discussed. Ryan walked the President through that one, too, before leaving the room and making his phone calls.

  The perfect Air Force mission, people in blue uniforms liked to say, was run by a mere captain. This one was commanded locally by a special-operations colonel, but at least he was a man who’d been recently passed over for general’s rank, a fact that endeared him to his subordinates, who knew why he’d failed to screen for flag rank. People in spec-ops just didn’t fit in with the button-down ideal of senior leadership. They were too ... eccentric for that.

  The final mission brief evolved from data sent by real-time link from Fort Meade, Maryland, to Verino, and the Americans still cringed at the knowledge that Russians were learning all sorts of things about America’s ability to gather and analyze electronic data via satellite and other means—after all, the capability had been developed for use against them. The exact positions of two operating E-767s were precisely plotted. Visual satellite data had counted fighter aircraft—at least those not in protective shelters—and the orbiting KH-12’s last pass had counted airborne aircraft and their positions. The colonel commanding the detachment went over the penetration course that he had personally worked out with the flight crew, and while there were worries, the two young captains who would fly the C-17A transport chewed their gum and nodded final approval. One of them even joked about how it was time a “trash-hauler” got a little respect.

  The Russians had their part to play, too. From Vuzhno-Sakalinsk South on the Kamchatka Peninsula, eight MiG-31 interceptors lifted off for an air-defense exercise, accompanied by an IL-86 Mainstay airborne-early-warning aircraft. Four Sukhoi fighters took off ten minutes later from Sokol to act as aggressors. The Sukhois with long-range fuel tanks headed southeast, remaining well outside Japanese airspace. The controllers in both Japanese E-767s recognized it for what it was: a fairly typical and stylized Russian training exercise. Nevertheless, it did involve warplanes, and merited their close attention, all the more so that it was astride the most logical approach route for American aircraft like the B-1s that had so recently “tickled” their air defenses. It had the effect of drawing the E-767s both north and east somewhat, and with them their fighter escorts. The reserve AWACS aircraft was almost ordered aloft, but the ground-based air-defense commander decided sensibly merely to increase his alert state a bit.

  The C-17A Globemaster-III was the newest and most expensive air-transport aircraft ever to force its way through the Pentagon’s procurement system. Anyone familiar with that procedural nightmare would have preferred flak, because at least bombing missions were designed to succeed, whereas the procurement system seemed most often designed to fail. That it didn’t was a tribute of sorts to the ingenuity of the people dedicated to confounding it. No expense had been spared, and a few new ones located for use, but what had resulted was a “trash-hauler” (the term most often used by fighter pilots) with pretensions of the wild life.

  This one took off just after local midnight, heading south-southwest as though it were a civil flight to Vladivostok. Just short of that city it took fuel from a KC-135 tanker—the Russian midair refueling system was not compatible with American arrangements—and departed the Asian mainland, now heading due south exactly on the 132nd Meridian.

  The Globemaster was the first-ever cargo aircraft designed with special-operations in mind. The normal flight crew of only two was supplemented with two “observer” positions for which modular instrument packages were provided. In this case, both were electronics-warfare officers now keeping tabs on the numerous air-defense radar sites that littered the Russian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese coasts, and directing the flight crew to thread their way through as many null areas as was possible. That soon required a rapid descent and a turn eas
t.

  “Don’t you just love this?” First Sergeant Vega asked his commander. The Rangers were sitting on fold-down seats in the cargo area, dressed in combat gear that had made them waddle like ducks aboard the aircraft an hour earlier under the watchful eyes of the loadmaster. It was widely believed within the Army’s airborne community that the Air Force awarded points to its flight crews for making their passengers barf, but in this case there would be no complaints. The most dangerous part of the mission was right now, despite their parachutes, something the Air Force crewmen, significantly, didn’t bother with. They would be of little use in any case should a stray fighter happen upon their transport at almost any time up to the programmed jump.

  Captain Checa just nodded, mainly wishing he were on the ground, where an infantryman belonged, instead of sitting as helpless as an unborn child in the womb of a woman addicted to disco dancing.

  Forward, the EWO displays were coloring up. The rectangular TV-type tube displayed a computer memory of every known radar installation on Japan’s western coast. It hadn’t been hard to input the information, as most of them had been established a generation or two earlier by Americans, back when Japan had been a massive island base for use against the Soviet Union and liable to Russian attack for that reason. The radars had been upgraded along the way, but any picket line had its imperfections, and these had been mostly known to the Americans beforehand, and then reevaluated by ELINT satellites in the last week. The aircraft was heading southeast now, leveling out two hundred feet over the water and tooling along at its maximum low-level speed of three hundred fifty knots. It made for a very bumpy ride, which the flight crew didn’t notice, though everyone else did. The pilot wore low-light goggles, and swept his head around the sky while the copilot concentrated on the instruments. The latter crewman was also provided with a head-up display just like that on a fighter. It displayed compass heading, altitude, airspeed, and also gave him a thin green line to indicate the horizon, which he could sometimes see depending on the state of the moon and clouds.

  “I have strobes very high at ten o’clock,” the pilot reported. Those would be airliners on a standard commercial routing. “Nothing else.”

  The copilot gave her screen another look. The radar plot was exactly as programmed, with their flight path following a very narrow corridor of black amid radial spikes of red and yellow, which indicated areas covered by defense and air-control radars. The lower they flew, the wider was the black-safe zone, but they were already as low as they could safely fly.

  “Fifty miles off the coast.”

  “Roger,” the pilot acknowledged. “How’re you doing?” he asked a second later. Low-level penetrations were stressful on everyone, even with a computer-controlled autopilot handling the stick work.

  “No prob,” she replied. It wasn’t exactly true, but it was the thing she was supposed to say. The most dangerous part was right here, passing the elevated radar site at Aikawa. The weakest part of Japan’s low-level defense perimeter, it was a gap between a peninsula and an island. Radars on both beams almost covered the seventy-mile gap, but they were old ones, dating back to the 1970s, and had not been upgraded with the demise of the Communist regime in North Korea. “Easing down,” she said next, adjusting the altitude control on the autopilot to seventy feet. Theoretically they could fly safely at fifty over a flat surface, but their aircraft was riding heavy, and now her hand was on the sidestick control, itself another illusion that this was actually a fighter plane. If she saw so much as a fishing boat, she’d have to yank the aircraft to higher altitude for fear of a collision with somebody’s masthead.

  “Coast in five,” one of the electronic-warfare officers announced. “Recommend come right to one-six-five.”

  “Coming right.” The aircraft banked slightly.

  There were only a few windows in the cargo area. First Sergeant Vega had one and looked out to see the wingtip of the aircraft dip toward a barely perceived black surface dotted with the occasional whitecap. The sight made him turn back in. He couldn’t help things anyway, and if they hit and cartwheeled in, he’d have no time at all to comprehend it. Or so he’d been told once.

  “I got the coast,” the pilot said, catching the glow of lights first through his goggles. It was time to switch them off and help fly the aircraft. “My airplane.”

  “Pilot’s airplane,” the copilot acknowledged, flexing her hand and allowing herself a deep breath.

  They crossed the coast between Omi and Ichifuri. As soon as land was visible, the pilot started climbing the aircraft. The automated terrain-avoidance system had three settings. He selected the one labeled Hard, which was rough on the airplane and rougher on the passengers, but ultimately safer for all concerned. “What about their AWACS?” he asked the EWOs.

  “I’ve got emissions on one, nine o’clock, very weak. If you keep us in the weeds, we’ll be okay.”

  “Get out the barf bags, guys.” To the loadmaster: “Ten minutes.”

  “Ten minutes,” the Air Force sergeant announced in the back. Just then the aircraft lurched up and to the right, dodging around the first coastal mountain. Then it dropped down rapidly again, like a particularly unpleasant amusement-park ride, and Julio Vega remembered once swearing that he’d never subject himself to anything like this again. It was a promise that had been broken many times, but this time, again, there were people on the ground with guns. And they weren’t Colombian druggies this time, but a trained professional army.

  “Jesus, I hope they give us two minutes of easy ride to walk to the door,” he said between gulps.

  “Don’t count on it,” Captain Checa said, just before he used his barf bag. It started a series of such events among the other Rangers.

  The trick was to keep mountaintops between them and the radar transmitters. That meant flying in valleys. The Globemaster was slower now, barely two hundred thirty knots of indicated airspeed, and even with flaps and slats extended, and even with a computer-aided flight-control system, it made for a ride that wallowed on one hand and jerked on the other, something that changed from one second to the next. The head-up display now showed the mountainous corridor they were flying, with red warning messages appearing before the eyes of the pilots that the autopilot handled quite well, thank you, but not without leading the two drivers in their front seats to genuine fear. Aviators never really trusted the things, and now two hands were on their stick controllers, almost flinching and taking control away from the computer, but not quite, in what was almost a highly sophisticated game of chicken, with the computer trying in its way to outgut the trained aviators who had to trust the microchips to do things their own reflexes were unable to match. They watched green jagged lines that represented real mountains, ranks of them, fuzzy on the edges from the trees that grew to the tops of most, and for the most part the lines were well above the flight level of their aircraft until the last second, when the nose would jerk upwards and their stomachs would struggle to catch up, and then the aircraft would dive again.

  “There’s the IP. Five minutes,” the pilot called aft.

  “Stand up!” the loadmaster yelled at his passengers. The aircraft was going down again, and one of the Rangers almost came off the floor of the aircraft when he stood. They moved aft toward the portside passenger door, which was now opened. As they hooked up their static lines, the rear cargo hatch dropped down, and two Air Force enlisted men removed the safety hooks from the palletized cargo that occupied the middle of the sixty-five-foot cargo bay. The Globemaster leveled out one last time, and out the door, Checa and Vega could see the shadowy valley below their aircraft, and a towering mountain to the left of them.

  “Five hundred feet,” the pilot said over intercom. “Let’s get it done.”

  “Winds look good,” the copilot announced, checking the computer that controlled drops. “One minute.”

  The green light by the passenger door turned on. The loadmaster had a safety belt attached to his waist, standing by the door, bl
ocking the way of the Rangers. He gave them a sideways look.

  “You guys be careful down there, y’hear?”

  “Sorry about the mess,” Captain Checa said. The loadmaster grinned.

  “I’ve cleaned up worse.” Besides, he had a private to do that. He gave the area a final check. The Rangers were safely in their places, and nobody was in the way of the cargo’s roller-path. The first drop would be done from the front office. “All clear aft,” he said over his intercom circuit. The loadmaster stepped away from the door, allowing Checa to take his place, one hand on either side, and his left foot just over the edge.

  “Ten seconds,” the copilot said forward.

  “Roger, ten seconds.” The pilot reached for the release switch, flipping off the safety cover and resting his thumb on the toggle.

  “Five.”

  “Five.”

  “Three—two—one—now!”

  “Cargo away.” The pilot had already flipped it at the proper moment.

  Aft, the Rangers saw the pallets slide out through the cavernous door. The aircraft took a major dip at the tail, then snapped back level. A second after that, the green light at the door started blinking.

  “Go go go!” the loadmaster screamed over the noise.

  Captain Diego Checa, U.S. Army Rangers, became the first American to invade the Japanese mainland when he took his step out the door and fell into the darkness. A second later the static line yanked his chute open, and the black nylon umbrella came to full blossom a bare three hundred feet from the ground. The stiff and often hurtful opening shock came as a considerable relief. Jumping at five hundred feet made the use of a backup chute a useless extravagance. He first looked up and to his right to see that the others were all out, their chutes opening as his had just done. The next order of business was to look down and around. There was the clearing, and he was sure he’d hit it, though he pulled on one riser to spill air from his parachute in the hope of hitting the middle of it and increasing the safety margin that was as much theoretical as real for a night drop. Last of all he released his pack, which fell fifteen feet to the end of a safety line. Its sixty pounds of gear would hit the ground first, lessening his landing shock so long as he didn’t land right on the damned thing and break something in the process. Aside from that he barely had time to think before the barely visible valley raced up to greet him. Feet together, knees bent, back straight, roll when you hit, the sudden lung-emptying shock of striking the ground, and then he was on his face, trying to decide if all his bones were intact or not. Seconds later he heard the muted thuds and oofs of the rest of the detail as they also made it to earth. Checa allowed himself a full three seconds to decide that he was more or less in one piece before standing, unclipping his back, and racing to collapse his chute. That task done, he came back, donned his low-light goggles, and assembled his people.