Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

new seafloor array could have made almost anyone think . . .

“Call Admiral Mancuso and find out if Charlotte has checked in.”

“But-”

‘ ‘Right now, Senior Chief!”

Dr. Ron Jones stood up and looked around. It was the same as before,

almost. The people were the same, doing the same work, displaying the

same competence, but something was missing. The thing that wasn’t the

same was … what? The large room had a huge chart of the Pacific Ocean on

its back wall. Once that chart had been marked with red silhouettes, the class

shapes of Soviet submarines, boomers, and fast-attacks, often with black sil-

houettes in attendance, to show that Pacific SOSUS was tracking “enemy”

subs, quarterbacking American fast-attacks onto them, vectoring P-3C

Orion ASW birds in to follow them, and occasionally to pounce on and harry

(hem, lo let them know who owned the oceans of the world. Now the marks

on the wall chart were of whales, some of them with names, just as with the

Russian subs, but these names were things like “Moby and Mabel,” to de-

note a particular pod with a well-known alpha-pair to track by name. There

wasn’t an enemy now, and the urgency had gone. They weren’t thinking the

way he’d once thought, heading “up north” on Dallas, tracking people they

might one day have to kill. Jones had never really expected that, not really-

really, but the possibility was something he’d never allowed himself to for-

get. These men and women, however, had. He could see it, and now he could

hear it from the way the chief was talking to SubPac on the phone.

Jones walked across the room and just took the receiver away. “Bart, this

is Ron. Has Charlotte checked in?”

“We’re trying to raise her now.”

“I don’t think you’re going to, Skipper,” the civilian said darkly.

“What do you mean?” The reply caught the meaning. The two men had

always communicated on a nonverbal level.

“Bart, you better come over here. I’m not kidding, Cap’n.”

“Ten minutes,” Mancuso promised.

Jones stubbed his smoke out in a metal waste can and returned to the

printouts. It was not an easy thing for him now, but he flipped to the pages

where he’d stopped. The printouts were made with pencils that were located

on metal shuttle-bars, marking received noises in discrete frequency ranges,

and the marks were arranged with the low frequencies on the left, and the

higher ones on the right. Location within the range columns denoted bear-

ing. The tracks meandered, looking to all the world like aerial photographs

of sand dunes in some trackless desert, but if you knew what to look for,

every spidery trace and twist had meaning. Jones slowed his analysis, taking

in every minute’s record of reception and sweeping from left to right, mak-

ing marks and notes as he went. The chiefs who’d been assisting him stood

back now, knowing that a master was at work, that he saw things they should

have seen, but had not, and knowing why a man younger than they called an

admiral by his first name.

“Attention on deck,” some voice called presently, “Submarine Force,

Pacific, arriving.” Mancuso came in, accompanied by Captain Chambers,

his operations officer, and an aide who kept out of the way. The Admiral just

looked at Jones’s face.

“You raise Charlotte yet, Bart?”

“No.”

“Come here.”

“What are you telling me, Jonesy?”

Jones took the red pen to the bottom of the page. “There’s the crush,

that’s the hull letting go.”

Mancuso nodded, letting out a breath. “I know, Ron.”

“Look here. That’s high-speed maneuvering-”

“Something goes wrong, you go max power and try to drive her up to the

roof,” Captain Chambers observed, not seeing it yet, or more probably not

wanting to, Jones thought. Well, Mr. Chambers had always been a pretty

nice officer to work for.

“But she wasn’t heading straight for the roof, Mr. Chambers. Aspect

changes, here and here,” Jones said, moving the pen upward on the printout

page, backwards in time, marking where the width of the traces varied, and

the bearings changed subtly. “She was turning, too, at max power on a

speed screw. This is probably a decoy signature. And this”-his hand went

all the way to the right-‘ ‘is a fish. Quiet one, but look at the bearing rates. It

was turning, too, chasing Asheville, and that gives these traces here, all the

way back to this time-point here.” Ron circled both traces, and though sepa-

rated on the paper by fourteen inches, the shallow twists and turns were al-

most identical. The pen moved again, upwards on the sheet, then shot across

to another frequency column. “To a launch transient. Right there.”

“Fuck,” Chambers breathed.

Mancuso leaned over the paper sheet, next to Jones, and he saw it all now.

“And this one?”

‘ ‘That’s probably Charlotte, also maneuvering briefly. See, here and here,

look like aspect changes on these traces to me. No transients because it was

probably too far away, same reason we don’t have a track on the fish.” Jones

moved the pen back to the track of USS Asheville. “Here. That Japanese

diesel boat launched on her. Here. Asheville tried to evade and failed. Here’s

the first explosion from the torpedo warhead. Engine sounds stop here-she

took the hit from aft. Here’s the internal bulkheads letting go. Sir, Asheville

was sunk by a torpedo, probably a Type 89, right about the same time that

our two carriers had their little accident.”

“It’s not possible,” Chambers thought.

When Jones turned his head, his eyes looked like the buttons on a doll’s

face. “Okay, sir, then you tell me what these signals denote.” Somebody

had to goad him into reality.

“Christ, Ron!”

“Settle down, Wally,” ComSubPac said quietly, looking at the data and

searching for another plausible interpretation. He had to look, even in the

knowledge that there was no other possible conclusion.

“Wasting your time, Skipper.” Jones tapped the track of USS Gary.

“Somebody better tell that frigate that it ain’t a rescue she’s on. She’s sail-

ing in harm’s way. There’s two SSKs out there with warshots, and they al-

ready used them twice.” Jones walked to the wall chart. He had to search

around for a red marker, lifted it, and drew two circles, both about thirty

miles in diameter. “Somewhere here. We’ll get a better cut on them when

they snort next. Who’s the surface track, by the way?”

“Reportedly a coast-guard cutter, one of theirs, heading in for the res-

cue,” SubPac answered.

“We might want to think about killing it,” Jones suggested, marking that

contact in red also, then setting the pen down. He’d just taken the final step.

The surface ship whose position he’d marked was not “she,” but rather it.

An enemy. A target.

“We have to see CINCPAC,” Mancuso said.

Jones nodded. “Yes, sir, I think we do.”

The Global Dimension

The bomb was impressive. It exploded outside the Trincomalee Tradewinds,

a new luxury hotel mainly built with Indian money. A few people, none

closer than half a block away, would remember the vehicle, a small white

delivery truck that had been big enough to contain half a ton of AMFO, an

explosive mixture composed of nitrogen-based fertilizer and diesel fuel. It

was a concoction easily made up in a bathtub or laundry basin, and in this

case sufficient to rip the facade off the ten-story hotel, killing twenty-seven

people and injuring another hundred or so in the process. Scarcely had the

noise died when a telephone call came in to the local Reuters office.

“The final phase of liberation has begun,” the voice said, probably read-

ing the words off a prepared statement, as terrorists often did. “The Tamil

Tigers will have their homeland and their autonomy or there will be no peace

in Sri Lanka. This is only the beginning of the end of our struggle. We will

explode one bomb per day until we achieve our goal.” Click.

For more than a hundred years, Reuters had been one of the world’s most

efficient news services, and the Colombo office was no exception, even on a

weekend. In ten minutes the report went out on the wire-a satellite link

today-to the agency’s London headquarters, where it was instantly relayed

across the global news network as a “flash” story.

Many U.S. agencies routinely monitor the news-wire services, including

the intelligence services, the FBI, Secret Service, and the Pentagon. This

was also true of the White House Signals Office, and so it was that twenty-

five minutes after the bomb went off, an Air Force sergeant put his hand on

Jack Ryan’s shoulder. The National Security Advisor’s eyes opened to see a

finger pointed topside.

“Hash traffic, sir,” the voice whispered.

Ryan nodded sleepily, slipped off his scat belt, and thanked (iod thai lie

hadn’t drunk too much in Moscow. In the dim lights of the calun everyone