Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

“Yeah.” Ore/.a got his binoculars and started looking out windows again.

He could see six road junctions. All were manned by what looked like Ion

men or so-a squad; he knew that term-with a mixture of the Toyola I .and

Cruisers and some jeeps. Though many had holsters on their pistol Ix-lis, no

long guns were in evidence now, as though they didn’t want to make it look

like some South American junta from the old days, livery vehicle that

pussed-they didn’t stop any that he saw-received a friendly wave. PR.

()rc/.a thought. Good PR.

“Some kind of fuckin’ love-in,” the master chief said. And that would

not have been possible unless they were confident as hell. Even the missile

crew on the next hill over, he thought. They weren’t rushing. They were

doing their jobs in an orderly, professional way, and that was fine, but if you

expected to use the things, you moved more snappily. There was a differ-

ence between peacetime and wartime activity, however much you said that

training was supposed to eliminate the difference between the two. He

turned his attention back to the nearest crossroads. The soldiers there were

not the least bit tense. They looked and acted like soldiers, but their heads

weren’t scanning the way they ought to on unfriendly ground.

It might have been good news. No mass arrests and detainments, the usual

handmaiden of invasions. No overt display of force beyond mere presence.

You would hardly know that they were here, except that they were sure as

hell here, Portagee told himself. And they planned to stay. And they didn’t

think anybody was going to dispute that. And he sure as hell was in no posi-

tion to change their view on anything.

“Okay, here are the first overheads,” Jackson said. “We haven’t had much

time to go over them, but-”

“But we will,” Ryan completed the sentence. “I’m a carded National

Intelligence Officer, remember? I can handle the raw.”

“Am I cleared for this?” Adler asked.

“You are now.” Ryan switched on his desk light, and Robby dialed the

combination on his attache case. “When’s the next pass over Japan?”

“Right about now, but there’s cloud cover over most of the islands.”

“Nuke hunt?” Adler asked. Admiral Jackson handled the answer.

“You bet your ass, sir.” He laid out the first photo of Saipan. There were

two car-carriers at the quay. The adjacent parking lot was spotted with or-

derly rows of military vehicles, most of them trucks.

“Best guess?” Ryan asked.

“An augmented division.” His pen touched a cluster of vehicles. “This is

• Patriot battery. Towed artillery. This looks like a big air-defense radar

that’s broken down for transport. There’s a twelve-hundred-foot hill on this

rock. It’ll see a good long way, and the visual horizon from up there is a

good fifty miles.” Another photo. “The airports. Those are five F-15 fight-

ers, and if you look here, we caught two of their F-3S in the air coming in on

final.”

“F-3?” Adler asked.

“The production version of the FS-X,” Jackson explained. “Fairly capa-

ble, but really a reworked F-i6. The Eagles are for air defense. This little

puppy is a good attack bird.”

“We need more passes,” Ryan said in a voice suddenly grave. Somehow

it was real now. Really real, as he liked to say, metaphysically real. It was no

longer the results of analysis or verbal reports. Now he had photographic

proof. His country was sure as hell at war.

Jackson nodded. “Mainly we need pros to go over these overheads, but,

yeah, we’ll be getting four passes a day, weather permitting, and we need to

examine every square inch of this rock, and Tinian, and Rota, and Guam,

and all the little rocks.”

“Jesus, Robby, can we do it?” Jack asked. The question, though posed in

the simplest terms, had implications that even he could not yet appreciate.

Admiral Jackson was slow to lift his eyes from the overhead photos, and his

voice suddenly lost its rage as the naval officer’s professional judgment

clicked in.

‘ ‘I don’t know yet.” He paused, then posed a question of his own. “Will

we try?”

“I don’t know that, either,” the National Security Advisor told him.

“Robby?”

“Yeah, Jack?”

“Before we decide to try, we have to know if we can.”

Admiral Jackson nodded. “Aye aye.”

He’d been awake most of the night listening to his partner’s snoring. What

was it about this guy? Chavez asked himself groggily. How the hell could he

sleep? Outside, the sun was up, and the overwhelming sounds of Tokyo in

the morning beat their way through windows and walls, and still John was

sleeping. Well, Ding thought, he was an old guy and maybe he needed his

rest. Then the most startling event of their entire stay in the country hap-

pened. The phone rang. That caused John’s eyes to snap open, but Ding got

the phone first.

‘ ‘Tovarorischiy,” a voice said. “All this time in-country and you haven’t

called me?”

“Who is this?” Chavez asked. As carefully as he’d studied his Russian,

hearing it on the phone here and now made the language sound like Martian.

It wasn’t hard for him to make his voice seem sleepy. It was hard, a moment

later, to keep his eyeballs in their sockets.

A jolly laugh that had to be heartfelt echoed down the phone line. “Yev-

geniy Pavlovich, who else would it be? Scrape the stubble Ironi yoiu luce

and join me for breakfast. I’m downstairs.”

Domingo Chavez felt his heart stop. Not just miss a heal ho would have

sworn it stopped until he willed it to start working again, and when il did. il

went off at warp-factor-three. “Give us a few minutes.”

“Ivan Sergeyevich had too much to drink again, da”” the voice asked

with another laugh. “Tell him he grows too old for that foolishness. Very

well, I will have some tea and wait.”

All the while dark’s eyes were fixed on his, or for the first few seconds,

anyway. Then they started sweeping the room for dangers that had to be

around, so pale his partner’s face had become. Domingo was not one to get

frightened easily, John knew, but whatever he’d heard on the phone had al-

most panicked the kid.

Well. John rose and switched on the TV. If there were danger outside the

door, it was too late. The window offered no escape. The corridor outside

could well be jammed full of armed police, and his first order of business

was to head for the bathroom. Clark looked in the mirror as the water ran

from the flushing toilet. Chavez was there before the handle came back up.

“Whoever was on the phone called me ‘Yevgeniy.’ He’s waiting down-

stairs, he says.”

“What did he sound like?” Clark asked.

“Russian, right accent, right syntax.” The toilet stopped running, and

they couldn’t speak anymore for a while.

Shit, Clark thought, looking in the mirror for an answer, but finding only

two very confused faces. Well. The intelligence officer started washing up

and thinking over possibilities. Think. If it had been the Japanese police,

would they have bothered to… ? No. Not likely. Everyone regarded spies as

dangerous in addition to being loathsome, a curious legacy of James Bond

movies. Intelligence officers were about as likely to start a firefight as they

were to sprout wings and fly. Their most important physical skills were run-

ning and hiding, but nobody ever seemed to grasp that, and if the local cops

were on to them, then . . . then he would have awakened to a pistol in his

face. And he hadn’t, had he? Okay. No immediate danger. Probably.

Chavez watched in no small amazement as Clark took his time washing

his hands and face, shaving carefully, and brushing his teeth before he relin-

quished the bathroom. He even smiled when he was done, because that ex-

pression was necessary to the tone of his voice.

“Yevgeniy Pavlovich, we must appear kulturny for our friend, no? It’s

been so many months.” Five minutes later they were out the door.

Acting skills are no less important to intelligence officers than to those

who work the legitimate theater, for like the stage, in the spy business there

are rarely opportunities for retakes. Major Boris Il’ych Scherenko was the

deputy rezident of RVS Station Tokyo, awakened four hours earlier by a

seemingly innocuous call from the embassy. Covered as Cultural Attache,

he’d most recently been busy arranging the final details for a tour of Japan

by the St. Petersburg Ballet. For fifteen years an officer of the First Chief

(Foreign) Directorate of the KGB, he now fulfilled the same function for his

newer and smaller agency. His job was even more important now, Sche-

renko thought. Since his nation was far less able to deal with external threats,

it needed good intelligence more than ever. Perhaps that was the reason for