Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

Debt Of Honor

Prologue

Sunset, Sunrise

In retrospect, it would seem an odd way to start a war. Only one of the

participants knew what was really happening, and even that was a coinci-

dence. The property settlement had been moved up on the calendar due to a

death in the attorney’s family, and so the attorney was scheduled for a red-

eye flight, two hours from now, to Hawaii.

It was Mr. Yamata’s first property closing on American soil. Though he

owned many properties in the continental United States, the actual title

transfer had always been handled by other attorneys, invariably American

citizens, who had done precisely what they had been paid to do, generally

with oversight by one of Mr. Yamata’s employees. But not this time.

There were several reasons for it. One was that the purchase was personal

and not corporate. Another was that it was close, only two hours by private

jet from his home. Mr. Yamata had told the settlement attorney that the

property would be used for a weekend getaway house. With the astronomi-

cal price of real estate in Tokyo, he could buy several hundred acres for

the price of a modestly large penthouse apartment in his city of residence.

The view from the house he planned to build on the promontory would be

breathtaking, a vista of the blue Pacific, other islands of the Marianas Ar-

chipelago in the distance, air as clean as any on the face of the earth. For

all those reasons Mr. Yamata had offered a princely fee, and done so with

a charming smile.

And for one reason more.

The various documents slid clockwise around the circular table, stopping

at each chair so that signatures could be affixed at the proper place, marked

I OM