Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

Scott Adler.

“Guam, demilitarized. That’s definite. Maybe more. That’s not definite.”

“Interesting,” Adler thought. “So you were right on their allowing us to

save face. Nice call, Chris.”

“What will we offer them back?”

“Gornisch,” the Deputy Secretary of State said coldly. He was thinking

about his father, and the tattoo on his forearm, and how he’d learned that a 9

was an upside-down 6, and how his father’s freedom had been taken away

by a country once allied with the owner of this embassy and its lovely if cold

garden. It was somewhat unprofessional and Adler knew it. Japan had of-

fered a safe haven during those years to a few lucky European Jews, one of

whom had become a cabinet secretary under Jimmy Carter. Perhaps if his

father had been one of those fortunate few, his attitude might have been dif-

ferent, but his father hadn’t, and his wasn’t. “For starters we lean on them

hard and see what happens.”

“I think that’s a mistake,” Cook said after a moment.

“Maybe,” Adler conceded. “But they made the mistake first.”

The military people didn’t like it at all. It annoyed the civilians, who had

established the site approximately five times as fast as these uniformed

boneheads would have managed, not to mention doing it in total secrecy and

less expensively.

“It never occurred to you to hide the site?” the Japanese general de-

manded.

“How could anyone find this?” the senior engineer shot back.

“They have cameras in orbit that can pick up a packet of cigarettes lying

on the ground.”

“And a whole country to survey.” The engineer shrugged. “And we are

in the bottom of a valley whose sides are so steep that an inbound ballistic

warhead can’t possibly hit it without striking those peaks first.” The man

pointed. “And now they do not even have the missiles they need to do it,”

he added.

The General had instructions to be patient, and he was, after his initial

outburst. It was his site to command now. “The first principle is to deny

information to the other side.”

“So we hide it, then?” the engineer asked politely.

“Yes.”

“Camouflage netting on the catenary towers?” They’d done it during the

construction phase.

“If you have them, it’s a good beginning. Later we can consider other

more permanent measures.”

“By train, eh?” The AMTRAK official noted after the completion of his

briefing. “Back when I started in the business, I was with the Great North-

ern, and the Air Force came to us half a dozen times about how to move

missiles around by rail. We ended up moving a lot of concrete in for them.”

“So you’ve actually thought this one over a few times?” Betsy Fleming

asked.

“Oh, yeah.” The official paused. “Can I see the pictures now?” The

goddamned security briefing had taken hours of unnecessary threats, after

which he’d been sent back to his hotel to contemplate the forms-and to

allow the FBI to run a brief security check, he imagined.

Chris Scott flipped the slide projector on. He and Fleming had already

made their own analysis, but the purpose of having an outside consultant

was to get a free and fresh opinion. The first shot was of the missile, just to

give him a feel for the size of the thing. Then they went to the shot of the

train car.

“Okay, it sure looks like a flatcar, longer than most, probably specially

made for the load. Steel construction. The Japanese are good at this sort of

thing. Good engineers. There’s a crane to lift something. How much docs

one of these monsters weigh?”

“Figure a hundred tons for the missile itself,” Betsy answered. “Maytx-

twenty for the transporter-container.”

“That’s pretty heavy for a single object, but not all that big a deal. Well

within limits for the car and the roadbed.” He paused for a moment. “I don’t

see any obvious electronics connections, just the usual brake lines and stuff.

You expect them to launch off the cars?”

“Probably not. You tell us,” Chris Scott said.

“Same thing I told the Air Force twenty-some years ago for the MX.

Yeah, you can move them around, but it doesn’t make finding them all that

hard unless you assume that you’re going to make a whole lot of railcars that

look exactly alike-and even then, like for the mainline on the Northern,

you have a fairly simple target. Just a long, thin line, and guess what, our

mainline from Minneapolis to Seattle was longer than all the standard-gauge

track in their country.”

“So?” Fleming asked.

“So this isn’t a launch car. It’s just a transport car. You didn’t need me to

tell you that.”

No, but it is nice to hear it from somebody else, Betsy thought.

“Anything else?”

“The Air Force kept telling me how delicate the damned things are. They

don’t like being bumped. At normal operating speeds you’re talking three

lateral gees and about a gee and a half of vertical acceleration. That’s not

good for the missile. Next problem is dimensional. That car is about ninety

feet long, and the standard flatcar for their railroads is sixty or less. Their

railroads are mainly narrow-gauge. Know why?”

‘ ‘I just assumed that they picked-”

“It’s all engineering, okay?” the AMTRAK executive said. “Narrow-

gauge track gives you the ability to shoehorn into tighter spots, to take

sharper turns, generally to do things smaller. But they went to standard

gauge for the Shin-Kansen because for greater speed and stability you just

need it wider. The length of the cargo and the corresponding length of the car

to carry it means that if you turn too tightly, the car overlaps the next track

and you run the risk of collision unless you shut down traffic coming the

other way every time you move these things. That’s why the missile is some-

where off the Shin-Kansen line. It has to be. Then next, there’s the problem

of the cargo. It really messes things up for everybody.”

“Keep going,” Betsy Fleming said.

“Because the missiles are so delicate, we would have been limited to low

speed-it would have wrecked our scheduling and dispatching. We never

wanted the job. The money to us would have been okay, but it would proba-

bly have hurt us in the long run. The same thing would be true of them,

wouldn’t it? Even worse. The Shin-Kansen line is a high-speed passenger

routing. They meet timetables like you wouldn’t believe, and they wouldn’t

much like things that mess them up.” He paused. “Best guess? They used

those cars to move the things from the factory to someplace else and that’s

all. I’d bet a lot of money that they did everything at night, too. If I were you

I’d hunt around for these cars, and expect to find them in a yard somewhere

doing nothing. Then I’d start looking for trackage off the mainline that

doesn’t go anywhere.”

Scott changed slides again. “How well do you know their railroads?”

“I’ve been over there often enough. That’s why they let you draft me.”

“Well, tell me what you think of this one.” Scott pointed at the screen.

“That’s some bitchin’ radar,” a technician observed. The trailer had been

flown up to Elmendorf to support the B-i mission. The bomber crews were

sleeping now, and radar experts, officer- and enlisted-rank, were going over

the taped records of the snooper flight.

“Airborne phased array?” a major asked.

“Sure looks that way. Sure as hell isn’t the APY-i we sold them ten years

back. We’re talking over two million watts, and the way the signal strength

jumps. Know what they’ve got here? It’s a rotating dome, probably a single

planar array,” the master sergeant said. “So it’s rotating, okay. But they can

steer it electronically, too.”

“Track and scan?”

“Why not? It’s frequency-agile. Damn, I wish we had one of these, sir.”

The sergeant picked up a photo of the aircraft. “This thing is going to be a

problem for us. All that power-makes you wonder if they might get a hit.

Makes me wonder if they were tracking the is, sir.”

“From that far out?” The B-iB was not strictly speaking a stealthy air-

craft. From nose-on it did have a reduced radar signature. From abeam the

radar cross section was considerably larger, though still smaller than any

conventional airplane of similar physical dimensions.

“Yes, sir. I need to play with the tapes some.”

”What will you look for?”

“The rotodome probably turns at about six rpm. The pulses we’re record-

ing ought to be at about that interval. Anything else, and they were steering

the beam at us.”

“Good one, Sarge. Run it down.”

All Aboard

Yamata was annoyed to be back in Tokyo. His pattern of operation in thirty

years of business had been to provide command guidance, then let a team of

subordinates work out the details while he moved on to other strategic is-