Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

“Dear God.” Not since Scorpion had the U.S. Navy lost a sub, and he’d

been in high school then. Mancuso shook his head clear. There was work to

be done. “Those two carriers are probably out of business, mister.”

“Oh?” Oddly enough, Lieutenant Copps hadn’t heard that yet.

“Call the P-3s. I have work to do.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Mancuso didn’t have to look at anything. The water in that part of the

Pacific Ocean was three miles deep, and no fleet submarine ever made could

survive at a third of that depth. If there were an emergency, and if there were

any survivors, any rescue would have to happen within hours, else the cold

surface water would kill them.

‘ ‘Ron, we just got a signal. Asheville might be down.”

”Down?” That word was not one any submariner wanted to hear, even if

it was a gentler expression than sunk. “Frenchy’s kid . . .”

“And a hundred twenty others.”

“What can I do, Skipper?”

“Head over to SOSUS and look at the data.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Jones hustled out the door while SubPac lifted his phone

and started punching buttons. He already knew that it was an exercise in

futility. All PacFlt submarines now carried the AN/BST-3 emergency trans-

mitters aboard, set to detach from their ships if they passed through crush

depth or if the quartermaster of the watch neglected to wind the unit’s clock-

work mechanism. The latter possibility, however, was unlikely. Before the

explosive bolts went, the BST made the most godawful noise to chide the

neglectful enlisted man . . . Asheville was almost certainly dead, and yet he

had to follow through in the hope of a miracle. Maybe a few crewmen had

gotten off.

Despite Mancuso’s advice, the carrier group did get the call. A frigate, USS

Gary, went at once to maximum sustainable speed and sprinted north toward

the area of the beacon, responding as required by the laws of man and the

sea. In ninety minutes she’d be able to launch her own helicopter for a sur-

face search and further serve as a base for other helos to continue the rescue

operation if necessary. John Stennis turned slowly into the wind and

managed to launch a single 8-3 Viking ASW aircraft, whose onboard instru-

ments were likely to be useful for a surface search. The Viking was overhead

in less than an hour. There was nothing to be seen on radar except for a

Japanese coast-guard cutter, heading in for the beacon, ahout ten miles out.

Contact was established, and the white cutter verified its notice ol the emer-

gency radio and intentions to search for survivors. The Viking circled the

transmitter. There was a slick of diesel oil to mark the ship’s grave, and a

few bits of floating debris, but repeated low passes and four sets ol eyes

failed to spot anything to be rescued.

The “Navy Blue” prefix on a signal denoted information that would be of

interest to the entire fleet, perhaps sensitive in nature, less often highly clas-

sified; in this case it was something too big to be kept a secret. Two of

Pacific Fleet’s four aircraft carriers were out of business for a long time. The

other two, Eisenhower and Lincoln, were in the IO, and were likely to re-

main there. Ships know few secrets, and even before Admiral Dubro got his

copy of the dispatch, word was already filtering through his flagship. No

chief swore more vilely than the battle-force commander, who already had

enough to worry about. The same response greeted the signals personnel

who informed the senior naval officers on Pentagon duty.

Like most intelligence officers in a foreign land in time of danger, Clark and

Chavez didn’t have a clue. If they had, they would probably have caught the

first plane anywhere. Spies have never been popular with anyone, and the

Geneva Protocols merely affirmed a rule for time of war, mandating their

death as soon after apprehension as was convenient, usually by firing squad.

Peacetime rules were a little more civilized, but generally with the same

end result. It wasn’t something CIA emphasized in its recruiting interviews.

The international rules of espionage allowed for this unhappy fact by giving

as many field intelligence officers as possible diplomatic covers, along with

which came immunity from harm. Those were called “legal” agents, pro-

tected by international treaty as though they really were the diplomats their

passports said they were. Clark and Chavez were “illegals,” and not so pro-

tected-in fact, John Clark had never once been given a “legal” cover. The

importance of this became clear when they left their cheap hotel for a meet-

ing with Isamu Kimura.

It was a pleasant afternoon made less so by the looks they got as gaijin; no

longer a mixture of curiosity and distaste, now there was genuine hostility.

The atmosphere had changed materially since their arrival here, though re-

markably things immediately became more cordial when they identified

themselves as Russians, which prompted Ding to speculate on how they

might make their cover identity more obvious to passersby. Unfortunately

civilian clothing did not offer that option, and so they had to live with the

looks, generally feeling the way a wealthy American might in a high-crime

neighborhood.

Kimura was waiting at the agreed-upon place, an inexpensive drinking

establishment. He already had a few drinks in him.

“Good afternoon,” Clark said pleasantly in English. A beat. “Something

wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Kimura said when the drinks came. There were many

ways of speaking that phrase. This way indicated that he knew something.

‘ ‘There is a meeting of the ministers today. Goto called it. It’s been going on

for hours. A friend of mine in the Defense Agency hasn’t left his office since

Thursday night.”

“Da-so?”

“You haven’t seen it, have you? The way Goto has been speaking about

America.” The MITI official finished off the last of his drink and raised his

hand to order another. Service, typically, was fast.

They could have said that they’d seen the first speech, but instead

“Klerk” asked for Kimura’s read on the situation.

“I don’t know,” the man replied, saying the same thing again while his

eyes and tone told a somewhat different story. “I’ve never seen anything

like this. The-what is the word?-rhetoric. At my ministry we have been

waiting for instructions all week. We need to restart the trade talks with

America, to reach an understanding, but we have no instructions. Our people

in Washington are doing nothing. Goto has spent most of his time with De-

fense, constant meetings, and with his zaibatsu friends. It’s not the way

things are here at all.”

“My friend,” Clark said with a smile, his drink now untouched after a

single sip, “you speak as though there is something serious in the air.”

‘ ‘You don’t understand. There is nothing in the air. Whatever is going on,

MITI is not a part of it.”

“And?”

‘ ‘MITI is part of everything here. My Minister is there now, finally, but he

hasn’t told us anything.” Kimura paused. Didn’t these two know anything?

“Who do you think makes our foreign policy here? Those dolts in the For-

eign Ministry? They report to us. And the Defense Agency, who cares what

they think about anything? We are the ones who shape our country’s poli-

cies. We work with the zaibatsu, we coordinate, we … represent business in

our relations with other countries and their markets, we make the position

papers for the Prime Minister to give out. That’s why I entered the ministry

in the first place.”

“But not now?” Clark asked.

“Now? Goto is meeting with them himself, and spends the rest of his time

with people who don’t matter, and only now is my Minister called in-well,

yesterday,” Kimura corrected himself. “And he’s still there.”

The man seemed awfully rattled, Chave/. told himself, ovi-r whal seemed

to be little more than some bureaucratic turf-fighting. The Ministry