Debt of Honor

  “If they take the first shot, we’re going to get hurt,” Commander Harrison observed after announcing that their dawn patrol had shown up right on schedule.

  “If they put an Exocet into us, we’ll pipe ‘Sweepers, man your brooms,’ Ed.” It was a lame attempt at humor, but Dubro didn’t feel very humorous at the moment.

  “Not if they get lucky and catch a JP bunker.” Now his operations officer was turning pessimistic. Not good, the battle-force commander thought.

  “Show ‘em we care,” Dubro ordered.

  A few moments later the screening ships lit off their fire-control radars and locked on to the Indian intruders. Through his binoculars Dubro could see that the nearest Aegis cruiser had white missiles sitting in her launch rails, and then they trained out, as did the target-illumination radars. The message was clear: Keep away.

  He could have ordered another wrathful dispatch to Pearl Harbor, but Dave Seaton had enough on his plate, and the real decisions were being made in Washington by people who didn’t understand the problem.

  “Is it worth doing?”

  “Yes, sir,” Ryan replied, having come to his own conclusion on the walk to the President’s office. It meant putting two friends at additional risk, but that was their job, and making the decision was his—partly anyway. It was easy to say such things, even knowing that because of them he’d sleep badly if at all. “The reasons are obvious.”

  “And if it fails?”

  “Two of our people are in grave danger, but—”

  “But that’s what they’re for?” Durling asked, not entirely kindly.

  “They’re both friends of mine, Mr. President. If you think I like the idea of—”

  “Settle down,” the President said. “We have a lot of people at risk, and you know what? Not knowing who they are makes it harder instead of easier. I’ve learned that one the hard way.” Roger Durling looked down at his desk, at all the administrative briefing papers and other matters that didn’t have the first connection to the crisis in the Pacific but had to be handled nonetheless. The government of the United States of America was a huge business, and he couldn’t ignore any of it, no matter how important some area might have suddenly become. Did Ryan understand that?

  Jack saw the papers, too. He didn’t have to know what they were, exactly. None had classified cover sheets on them. They were the ordinary day-to-day crap that the man had to deal with. The Boss had to time-share his brain with so many tasks. It hardly seemed fair, especially for someone who hadn’t exactly gone looking for the job. But that was destiny at work, and Durling had voluntarily undertaken the Vice President’s office because his character required service to others, as, indeed, did Ryan’s. They really were two of a kind, Jack thought.

  “Mr. President, I’m sorry I said that. Yes, sir, I have considered the risks, but also, yes, that is their job. Moreover, it’s John’s recommendation. His idea, I mean. He’s a good field officer, and he knows both the risks and the potential rewards. Mary Pat and Ed agree, and also recommend a Go on this one. The decision necessarily is yours to make, but those are the recommendations.”

  “Are we grasping at straws?” Durling wanted to know.

  “Not a straw, sir. Potentially a very strong branch.”

  “I hope they’re careful about it.”

  “Oh, this is just great,” Chavez observed. The Russian PSM automatic pistol was of .215 caliber, smaller in diameter even than the .22 rimfire that American kids—at least the politically incorrect ones—learned to shoot at Boy Scout camps. It was also the standard sidearm of the Russian military and police forces, which perhaps explained why the Russian criminal element had such contempt for the local cops.

  “Well, we do have our secret weapon out in the car,” Clark said, hefting the gun in his hand. At least the silencer improved its balance somewhat. It was renewed proof of something he’d thought for years. Europeans didn’t know beans about handguns.

  “We’re going to need it, too.” The Russian Embassy did have a pistol range for its security officers. Chavez clipped a target to the rack and cranked it downrange.

  “Take the suppressor off,” John said.

  “Why?” Ding asked.

  “Look at it.” Chavez did, and saw that the Russian version was filled with steel wool. “It’s only good for five or six shots.”

  The range did have ear protectors, at least. Clark filled a magazine with eight of the bottle-necked rounds, pointed downrange, and fired off three shots. The gun was quite noisy, its high-powered cartridge driving a tiny bullet at warp speed. He longed for a suppressed .22 automatic. Well, at least it was accurate.

  Scherenko watched in silence, angered at the Americans’ distaste for his country’s weapons and embarrassed because they might well be right. He’d learned to shoot years before, and hadn’t shown much aptitude for it. It was a skill rarely used by an intelligence officer, Hollywood movies notwithstanding. But it was clearly not true of the Americans, both of whom were hitting the bull’s-eye, five meters away, firing pairs of shots called “double-taps” in the business. Finished, Clark cleared his weapon, reloaded a magazine, and took another, which he filled and slid into a back pocket. Chavez did the same.

  “If you ever come to Washington,” Ding observed, “we’ll show you what we use.”

  “And the ’secret weapon’ you mentioned?” Scherenko asked the senior man.

  “It’s a secret.” Clark headed for the door, with Chavez in his wake. They had all day to wait for their chance, if that was what it was, and get their nerves even more frayed.

  It was a characteristically stormy day at Shemya. Sleet driven by a fifty-knot gale pelted the base’s single runway and the noise threatened to disturb the sleep of the fighter pilots. Inside the hangars, the eight fighter aircraft were crammed together to protect them from the elements. It was especially necessary for the F-22s, as no one had yet fully determined what damage the elements could do to their smooth surfaces, and thus the radar cross section. This was not the time to find out. The storm’s precipitation should pass in a few hours, the weather weenies said, though the gale-force winds could well last another month. Outside, the ground crews worried about the tie-downs on the tanker and AWACS birds, and struggled around in bulky cold-weather gear to make certain everything was secure.

  The other aspects of base-security were handled at the Cobra Dane array. Though it looked like the screen from an old drive-in theater, it was in fact a massive version of the solid-state radar array used by the Japanese E-767s, or for that matter the Aegis cruisers and destroyers in both contending navies. Originally emplaced to monitor Soviet missile tests and later to do SDI research, it was powerful enough to scan thousands of miles into space, and hundreds in the atmosphere. Its electronic probes swept constantly now, searching for intruders, but so far finding only commercial airliners—but those were watched very closely indeed. An F-15E Strike Eagle loaded with air-to-air missiles could be sent aloft in ten minutes if one of them looked the least bit dangerous.

  The dreary routine continued through the day. For a brief few hours there was enough gray illumination through the clouds to suggest that the sun might be up, in a theoretical sense, but by the time the pilots were roused, the view out the windows of their quarters might as well have been painted black, for even the runway lights were out, lest they give some unwelcome visitor a visual aid in finding the base through the gloom.

  “Questions?”

  The operation had been planned rapidly but carefully, and the four lead pilots had taken a hand in it, then tested it the night before, and while there were risks, well, hell, there always were.

  “You Eagle jocks think you can handle this?” the most senior Rapier driver asked. He was a lieutenant colonel, which didn’t protect him from the reply.

  “Don’t worry, sir,” a major said. “It’s such a nice ass to look at.” Then she blew a kiss.

  The Colonel, actually an engineering test pilot pulled away from develop
mental work under way on the F-22 with the 57th Weapons Wing at Nellis Air Force Base, knew the “old” Air Force only from the movies and stories he’d heard when he’d been a youngster coming up the line, but he took the insult in the spirit in which it had been offered. The Strike Eagles might not be stealthy, but they were pretty damned mean. They were about to engage in a combat mission, and rank didn’t matter as much as competence and confidence.

  “Okay, people”—once he would have just said men— “we’re time-critical on this one. Let’s get it on.”

  The tanker crews chuckled to themselves about the fighter-jock mentality, and how the women in the Air Force had really bought into it. The Major was a dish, one of them thought. Maybe when she grew up she could come and fly United, he observed to the captain who’d be right-seating for him.

  “A man could do worse,” the Southwest Airlines first officer noted. The tankers got off twenty minutes later, followed by one of the E-3Bs.

  The fighters, typically, went off last. The crews all wore their cold-weather nomex flight-suits and made the proper gestures about survival gear, which was really a joke over the North Pacific this time of year, but rules were rules. G-suits went on last of all, uncomfortable and restrictive as they were. One by one, the Rapier drivers walked to their birds, the Eagle crews two-by-two. The colonel who’d lead the mission ostentatiously tore off the Velcro RAPIER patch and replaced it with the counterculture one Lockheed employees had made up, the silhouette of the original P-38 Lightning overlaid with the graceful profile of the company’s newest steed, and further decorated with a white-yellow thunderbolt. Tradition, after all, the Colonel thought, even though he hadn’t been born until the last of the twin-boom -38s had been sold to the strippers. He did remember building models of the first American long-range fighter, used only one time for their actual designed purpose, for which a driver named Tex Lamphier had won a little immortality. This one would not be terribly different from that day over the northern Solomons.

  The fighters had to be towed out into the open, and even before they started engines, every crew member could feel the wind buffeting the fighters. It was the time when the fingers tingle on the controls and the pilots shift around a little in the seats to make everything just so. Then, one by one, the fighters lit off and taxied down to the runway’s edge. The lights came back on, blue parallel lines stretching off into the gloom, and the fighters lifted off singly, a minute apart, because paired takeoffs in these weather conditions were too dangerous, and this wasn’t a night for unnecessary mistakes. Three minutes later, the two flights of four formed up over the top of the clouds, where the weather was clear, with bright stars and the multicolored aurora to their right, curtains of changing colors, greens and purples as the stellar wind affected charged particles in the upper atmosphere. The curtain effect was both lovely and symbolic to the Lightning pilots.

  The first hour was routine, the two quartets of aircraft cruising southwest, their anticollision lights blinking away to give visual warning of the close proximity. Systems checks were performed, instruments monitored, and stomachs settled as they approached the tanker aircraft.

  The tanker crews, all reservists who flew airliners in civilian life, had taken care to locate smooth-weather areas, which the fighter drivers appreciated even though they deemed everyone else second best. It took more than forty minutes to top off everyone’s fuel tanks, and then the tankers resumed their orbit, probably so that their crews could catch up on their Wall Street Journals, the fighter pilots all thought, heading southwest again.

  Things changed now. It was time for business. Their kind.

  Sandy Richter drew the mission, of course, because it had been his idea from the start, months before at Nellis Air Force Base. It had worked there, and all he had to figure out was whether it would work here as well. On that he was probably betting his life.

  Richter had been in that business since he was seventeen—when he’d lied about his age and gotten away with it, being large and tough. Along the way, he’d corrected his official package, but he was still in his twenty-ninth year of service and soon to retire to a quieter life. All that time, Richter had driven snakes and only snakes. If a helicopter didn’t carry weapons, then he wasn’t interested. Starting with the AH-1 Huey Cobra, he had in time graduated to the AH-64 Apache and driven it into his second, briefer war in the skies over the Arabian Peninsula. Now with the last bird he would ever fly, he started the engines on the Comanche and began his 6,751st hour of flight, according to the log book.

  The twin turboshaft engines spun up normally and the rotor began its rotation. The ersatz ground crew of Rangers were hamming it up with the one fire extinguisher they had. It was about large enough to put out a cigarette, Richter thought crossly as he increased power and lifted off. The thin mountain air had a negative effect on performance, but not that much, and he’d soon be down at sea level anyway. The pilot gave his head the usual shake to make sure the helmet was securely in place and headed eastward, tracing up the wooded slopes of Shiraishi-san.

  “There they are,” the lead -22 pilot said to himself. The first sign was chirping in his headset, immediately followed by information on his threat receiver: AIR DEFENSE RADAR, AIRBORNE, TYPE J, BEARING 213. Next came data linked over from the E-3B, which had been in place long enough to plot its location. The Sentry wasn’t using its radar at all tonight. After all, the Japanese had taught the Americans a lesson the night before, and they needed time to absorb such lessons ... RANGE TO TARGET 1 456 MILES. Still well under the horizon from the Japanese aircraft, he gave his first vocal command of the mission.

  “Lightning Lead to Flight. Split into elements, now!”

  Instantly, the two sets of four aircraft divided into pairs, separated by two thousand yards. In both cases the F-22s held the lead, and in both cases the trailing F-15Es tucked in dangerously close to create a radar overlap. The colonel in command flew as straight and level as his practiced skills allowed, and he smiled to himself at the memory of the major’s remark. Nice ass, eh? She was the first woman to fly with the Thunderbirds. Strobe lights went off, and he hoped that the low-light gear she was wearing was working properly. The northern E-767 was now four hundred miles away. The fighters cruised in at five hundred knots, altitude thirty-five thousand feet for fuel economy.

  The work schedule typical of Japanese executives made the entry less obvious than would have been the case in America. A man was in the lobby, but he was watching TV, and Clark and Chavez walked through as though they knew where they were going, and crime was not a problem in Tokyo anyway. Breathing a little rapidly, they got into an elevator and punched a button, trading a relieved look that soon changed to renewed apprehension. Ding was carrying his briefcase. Clark was not, and both were dressed in their best suits and ties and white shirts, looking for all the world like businesspeople coming in for a late night’s conference on something or other. The elevator stopped five floors from the top, a level selected because of the lack of lights in the windows. Clark stuck his head out, knowing that it looked vaguely criminal to do so, but the corridor was empty.

  They moved quickly and quietly around the central bearing core of the building, found the fire stairs, and started to climb. They looked for security cameras, and again, thankfully, there were none on this level. Clark checked up and down. No one else was in the stairwell. He continued to head up, looking and listening before every movement.

  “Our friends are back,” one of the airborne controllers announced over the intercom. “Bearing zero-three-three, range four-two-zero kilometers. One—no, two contacts, close formation, military aircraft inbound, speed five hundred knots,” he concluded the announcement rapidly.

  “Very well,” the senior controller responded evenly, selecting the display for his screen as he switched channels on his command phones. “Any radar activity to the northeast?”

  “None,” the electronic-countermeasures officer replied at once. “He could be out there monitoring u
s, of course.”

  “Wakarémas.”

  The next order of business was to release the two fighters orbiting east of the Kami aircraft. Both F-15Js had recently arrived on station, and had nearly full fuel tanks. An additional call ordered two more up from Chitose Air Base. They would need about fifteen minutes to get on station, but that was fine, the senior controller thought. He had the time.

  “Lock on to them,” he ordered the operator.

  “Got us already, do you?” the Colonel asked himself. “Good.” He held course and speed, wanting them to get a good feel for his location and activities. The rest was mainly a matter of arithmetic. Figure the Eagles were now about two hundred miles away, closing speed about a thousand. Six minutes to separation. He checked his clock and commanded his eyes to sweep the skies for something a little too bright to be a star.

  There was a camera on the top level of the stairs. So Yamata was a little paranoid. But even paranoids had enemies, Clark thought, noticing that the body of the camera appeared to be pointed at the next landing. Ten steps to the landing, and ten more to the next, where the door was. He decided to take a moment to think about that. Chavez turned the knob on the door to his right. It didn’t appear to be locked. Probably fire codes, Clark thought, acknowledging the information with a nod but getting out his burglar tools anyway.