Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

make an issue of it, which he thought unlikely, but also something, he

warned them, for which they had to be prepared. The formation was spread

out now, three thousand meters between ships, racing west at maximum sus-

tainable speed. That was using up fuel at a dangerous rate, but there would

be a tanker at Guam to refuel them, and Sato wanted to be under his own

ASW umbrella as soon as possible. Once at Guam he could consider future

operations. The first one had been successful. With luck there would not

have to be a second, but if there were, he had many things to consider.

“Contacts?” the Admiral asked, entering the Combat Information Cen-

ter.

“Everything in the air is squawking commercial,” the air-warfare officer

replied.

‘ ‘Military aircraft all carry transponders,” Sato reminded him.’ ‘And they

all work the same way.”

‘ ‘Nothing is approaching us.” The formation was on a course deliberately

offset from normal commercial air corridors, and on looking at the billboard

display, the Admiral could see that traffic was in all those corridors. True, a

military-surveillance aircraft could see them from some of the commercial

tracks, but the Americans had satellites that were just as good. His intelli-

gence estimates had so far proved accurate. The only threat that really con-

cerned him was from submarines, and that one was manageable.

Submarine-launched Harpoon or Tomahawk missiles were a danger with

which he was prepared to deal. Each of the destroyers had her SPY-1D radar

up and operating, scanning the surface. Every fire-control director was

manned. Any inbound cruise missile would be detected and engaged, first by

his American-made (and Japanese-improved) SM-2MR missiles, and be-

hind those weapons were CIWS gatling-gun point-defense systems. They

would stop most of the inbound “vampires,” the generic term for cruise

missiles. A submarine could close and engage with torpedoes, and one of the

larger warheads could kill any ship in his formation. But they would hear the

torpedo coming in, and his ASW helicopters would do their very best to

pounce on the attacking sub, deny her the chance to continue the engage-

ment, and just maybe kill her. The Americans didn’t have all that many sub-

marines, and their commanders would be correspondingly cautious,

especially if he managed to add a third kill to the two already accomplished.

What would the Americans do? Well, what could they do now? he asked

himself. It was a question he’d asked himself again and again, and he always

had the same answer. They’d drawn down too much. They depended on

their ability to deter, forgetting that deterrence hinged on the perceived abil-

ity to take action if deterrence failed: the same old equation of don’t-want-to

but can. Unfortunately for them, the Americans had leaned too much on the

former and neglected the latter, and by all the rules Sato knew, by the time

they could again, their adversary would be able to stop them. The overall

strategic plan he’d helped to execute was not new at all-just better-exe-

cuted than it had been the first time, he thought, standing close to the triple

billboard display and watching the radar symbols of commercial aircraft

march along their defined pathways, their very action proclaiming that the

world was resuming its normal shape without so much as a blip.

The hard part always seemed to come after the decisions were made, Ryan

knew. It wasn’t making them that wore on the soul so much as having to live

with them. Had he done the right things? There was no measure except hind-

sight, and that always came too late. Worse, hindsight was always negative

because you rarely looked back to reconsider things that had gone right. At a

certain level, things stopped being clear-cut. You weighed options, and you

weighed the factors, but very often you knew that no matter which way you

jumped, somebody would be hurt. In those cases the idea was to hurt the

least number of people or things, but even then real people were hurt who

would otherwise not be hurt at all, and you were choosing, really, whose

lives would be injured-or lost-like a disinterested god-figure from my-

thology. It was worse still if you knew some of the players, because they had

faces your mind could see and voices it could hear. The ability to make such

decisions was called moral courage by those who didn’t have to do it, and

stress by those who did.

And yet he had to do it. He’d undertaken this job in the knowledge that

such moments would come. He’d placed Clark and Chavez at risk before in

the liasl African deserl. and he vaguely remembered woiiyiiif> alxml llial,

but the mission had come off and after that it had seemed like tiuk or Ural

on Halloween, a wonderfully clever little game played by nation against na

tion. The fact that a real human being in the person of Mohammed Alxlul

Corp had lost his life as a result-well, it was easy to say, now, that he’d

deserved his fate. Ryan had allowed himself to file that entire memory away

in some locked drawer, to be dredged out years later should he ever succumb

to the urge to write memoirs. But now the memory was back, removed from

the files by the necessity to put the lives of real men at risk again. Jack

locked his confidential papers away before heading toward the Oval Office.

“Off to see the boss,” he told a Secret Service agent in the north-south

corridor.

“SWORDSMAN heading to JUMPER,” the agent said into his microphone,

for to those who protected everyone in what to them was known as the

House, they were as much symbols as men, designations, really, for what

their functions were.

But I’m not a symbol, Jack wanted to tell him. I’ma man, with doubts. He

passed four more agents on the way, and saw how they looked at him, the

trust and respect, how they expected him to know what to do, what to tell the

Boss, as though he were somehow greater than they, and only Ryan knew

that he wasn’t. He’d been foolish enough to accept a job with greater respon-

sibilities than theirs, that’s all, greater than he’d ever wanted.

“Not fun, is it?” Durling said when he entered the office.

‘ ‘Not much.” Jack took his seat.

The President read his advisor’s face and mind at the same time, and

smiled. “Let’s see. I’m supposed to tell you to relax, and you’re supposed to

tell me the same thing, right?”

“Hard to make a correct decision if you’re overstressed,” Ryan agreed.

“Yeah, except for one thing. If you’re not stressed, then it isn’t much of a

decision, and it’s handled at a lower level. The hard ones come here. A lot of

people have commented on that,” the President said. It was a remarkably

generous observation, Jack realized, for it voluntarily took some of the bur-

den off his shoulders by reminding him that he did, after all, merely advise

the President. There was greatness in the man at the ancient oak desk. Jack

wondered how difficult a burden it was to bear, and if its discovery had come

as a surprise-or merely, perhaps, as just one more necessity with which one

had to deal.

“Okay, what is it?”

“I need your permission for something.” Ryan explained the Golovko

offers-the first made in Moscow, and the second only a few hours earlier-

and their implications.

“Does this give us a larger picture?” Durling asked.

“Possibly, but we don’t have enough to go with.”

“And?”

“A decision of this type always goes up to your level,” Ryan told him.

“Why do I have to-”

“Sir, it reveals both the identity of intelligence officers and methods of

operation. I suppose technically it doesn’t have to be your decision, but it is

something you should know about.”

“You recommend approval.” Durling didn’t have to ask.

“Yes, sir.”

“We can trust the Russians?”

“I didn’t say trust, Mr. President. What we have here is a confluence of

needs and abilities, with a little potential blackmail on the side.”

“Run with it,” the President said without much in the way of considera-

tion. Perhaps it was a measure of his trust in Ryan, thus returning the burden

of responsibility back to his visitor. Durling paused for a few seconds before

posing his next question. “What are they up to, Jack?”

“The Japanese? On the face of it, this makes no objective sense at all.

What I keep coming back to is, why kill the submarines? Why kill people? It

just doesn’t seem necessary to have crossed that threshold.”

“Why do this to their most important trading partner?” Durling added,

making the most obvious observation. “We haven’t had a chance to think it

through, have we?”

Ryan shook his head. “Things have certainly piled up on us. We don’t

even know the things we don’t know yet.”