Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

just wanted to see the flag, Clark thought. It was always a pleasant sight in a

foreign land, even if it did fly over a building designed by some bureaucrat

with the artistic sense of-

“Somebody’s worried about security,” Chavez said.

“Yevgeniy Pavlovich, I know your English is good. You need not prac-

tice it on me.”

“Excuse me. The Japanese are concerned with a riot, Vanya? Except for

that one incident, there hasn’t been much hooliganism …” His voice trailed

off. There were two squads of fully armed infantrymen arrayed around the

building. That seemed very odd indeed. Over here, Ding thought, one or two

police officers seemed enough to-

“Yob’tvoyu mat.”

Clark was proud of the lad just then. Foul as the imprecation was, it was

also just what a Russian would have said. The reason for it was also clear.

The guards around the embassy perimeter were looking in as much as they

were looking out, and the Marines were nowhere to be seen.

“Ivan Sergeyevich, something seems very odd.”

‘ ‘Indeed it does, Yevgeniy Pavlovich,” John Clark said evenly. He didn’t

let the car slow down, and hoped the troops on the sidewalk wouldn’t notice

the two gaijin driving by and take down their license number. It might be a

good time to change rental cars.

“The name is Arima, first name Tokikichi, sir, Lieutenant General, age

fifty-three.” The Army sergeant was an intelligence specialist. “Graduated

their National Defense Academy, worked his way up the line as an infantry-

man, good marks all the way. He’s airborne qualified. Took the senior

course at Carlisle Barracks eight years ago, did just fine. ‘Politically astute,’

the form sheet says. Well connected. He’s Commanding General of their

Eastern Army, a rough equivalent of a corps organization in the U.S. Army,

but not as heavy in corps-level assets, especially artillery. That’s two infan-

try divisions, First and Twelfth, their First Airborne Brigade, First Engineer

Brigade, Second Anti-Air Group, and other administrative attachments.”

The sergeant handed over the folder, complete with a pair of photos. The

enemy has a face now, Jackson thought. At least one face. Jackson examined

it for a few seconds and closed the folder back. It was about to go to Condi-

tion FRANTIC in the Pentagon. The first of the Joint Chiefs was in the parking

lot, and he was the lucky son of a bitch to give them the news, such as it was.

Jackson assembled his documents and headed off to the Tank, a pleasant

room, actually, located on the outside of the building’s E-Ring.

Chet Nomuri had spent the day meeting at irregular hours with three of his

contacts, learning not very much except that something very strange was

afoot, though nobody knew what. His best course of action, he decided, was

to head back to the bathhouse and hope Kazuo Taoka would turn up. He

finally did, by which time Nomuri had spent so much time soaking in the

blisteringly hot water that his body felt like pasta that had been in the pot for

about a month.

“You must have had a day like I did,” he managed to say with a crooked

smile.

“How was yours?” Kazuo asked, his smile tired but enthusiastic.

“There is a pretty girl at a certain bar. Three months I’ve worked on her.

We had a vigorous afternoon.” Nomuri reached below the surface of the

water, feigning agony in an obvious way. “It may never work again.”

“I wish that American girl was still around,” Taoka said, settling in the

tub with a prolonged Ahhhhh. ‘ ‘I am ready for someone like her now.”

“She’s gone?” Nomuri asked innocently.

“Dead,” the salaryman said, easily controlling his sense of loss.

“What happened?”

“They were going to send her home. Yamata sent Kaneda, his security

man, to tidy things up. But it seems she used narcotics, and she was found

dead of an overdose. A great pity,” Taoka observed, as if he were describing

the demise of a neighbor’s cat. “But there are more where she came from.”

Nomuri just nodded with weary impassivity, remarking to himself that

this was a side of the man he hadn’t seen before. Kazuo was a fairly typical

Japanese salaryman. He’d joined his company right out of college, starting

off in a position little removed from clerkship. After serving five years, he’d

been sent off to a business school, which in this country was the intellectual

equivalent of Parris Island, with a touch of Buchenwald. There was just

something outrageous about how this country operated. He expected that

things would be different. It was a foreign land, after all, and every country

was different, which was fundamentally a good thing. America was the

proof of that. America essentially lived off the diversity that arrived at her

shores, each ethnic community adding something to the national pot, creat-

ing an often boiling but always creative and lively national mix. But now he

truly understood why people came to the U.S., especially people from this

country.

Japan demanded much of its citizens-or more properly, its culture did.

The boss was always right. A good employee was one who did as he was

lolcl. To advance you had to kiss a lot of ass, sing the company song, exercise

like somebody in goddamned boot camp every morning, showing up an hour

early to show how sincere you were. The amazing part was that anything

creative happened here at all. Probably the best of them fought their way to

the top despite all this, or perhaps were smart enough to disguise their inner

feelings until they got to a position of real authority, but by the time they got

there they must have accumulated enough inner rage to make Hitler look

like a pansy. Along the way they bled those feelings off with drinking binges

and sexual orgies of the sort he’d heard about in this very hot tub. The stories

about jaunts to Thailand and Taiwan and most recently the Marianas were

especially interesting, stuff that would have made his college chums at

UCLA blush. Those things were all symptoms of a society that cultivated

psychological repression, whose warm and gentle facade of good manners

was like a dam holding back all manner of repressed rage and frustration.

That dam occasionally leaked, mostly in an orderly, controlled way, but the

strain on the dam was unchanging, and one result of that strain was a way of

looking at others, especially gaijin, in a manner that insulted Nomuri’s

American-cultivated egalitarian outlook. It would not be long, he realized,

before he started hating this place. That would be unhealthy and unprofes-

sional, the CIA officer thought, remembering the repeated lessons from the

Farm: a good field spook identified closely with the culture he attacked. But

he was sliding in the other direction, and the irony was that the deepest rea-

son for his growing antipathy was that his roots sprang from this very coun-

try.

“You really want more like her?” Nomuri asked, eyes closed.

“Oh, yes. Fucking Americans will soon be our national sport.” Taoka

chuckled. ‘ ‘We had a fine time of it the past two days. And I was there to see

it all happen,” his voice concluded in awe. It had all paid off. Twenty years

of toeing the line had brought its reward, to have been there in the War

Room, listening to it all, following it all, seeing history written before his

eyes. The salaryman had made his mark, and most importantly of all, he’d

been noticed. By Yamata-san himself.

“So what great deeds have happened while I was performing my own,

eh?” Nomuri asked, opening his eyes and giving off a leering smile.

‘ ‘We just went to war with America, and we’ve won!” Taoka proclaimed.

“War? Nan ja? We accomplished a takeover of General Motors, did

we?”

“A real war, my friend. We crippled their Pacific Fleet and the Marianas

Islands are Japanese again.”

“My friend, you cannot tolerate too much alcohol,” Nomuri thought, re-

ally believing what he’d just said to the blowhard.

“I have not had a drink in four days!” Taoka protested. “What I told you

is true!”

“Kazuo,” Chet said patiently as though to a bright child, “You tell sto-

ries with a skill anil style better than any man I have ever mot. Yum ilescnp-

tions of women make my loins swell as though I wciv thai- myself.”

Nomuri smiled. “But you exaggerate.”

“Not this time, my friend, truly,” Taoka said, really wanting his Inoiul to

believe him, and so he started giving details.

Nomuri had no real military training. Most of his knowledge of such af-

fairs came from reading books and watching movies. His instructions for

operating in Japan had nothing to do with gathering information on the Japa-

nese Self-Defense Forces, but rather with trade and foreign-affairs matters.

But Kazuo Taoka was a fine storyteller, with a keen eye for detail, and it