Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

left. Therefore something else, probably their B-iB bomber, the intelligence

people estimated. And the B-iB was a bomber, whose purpose was far more

sinister than the collection of electronic signals. So the Americans were

thinking of Japan as an enemy whose defenses would have to be penetrated

for the purpose of delivering death, an idea new to neither side in this war-

if war it was, the cooler heads added. But what else could it be? the majority

of the analysts asked, setting the tone of the night’s missions.

Three £-7675 were again up and operating, again with two of them active

and one waiting in the ambush role. This time the radars were turned up in

power, and the parameters for the signal-processing software were electroni-

cally altered to allow for easier tracking of stealthy targets at long range. It

was physics they depended on. The size of the antenna combined with the

power of the signal and the frequency of the electronic waves made it possi-

ble to get hits on almost anything. That was both the good news and the bad

news, the operators thought, as they received all manner of signals now.

There was one change, however. When they thought they had a weak return

from a moving object at long range, they started directing their fighters in

that direction. The Eagles never got within a hundred miles. The return sijj

nals always seemed to lade out when the £-767 switched frequency from

longwave acquisition to shortwave tracking, and thai didn’t bode well for the

Ku-band needed for actual targeting. It did show them that the Americans

were still probing, and that perhaps they knew they were being tracked. And,

everyone thought, if nothing else it was good training for the fighters. If this

were truly a war, all the participants told themselves, then it was becoming

more and more real.

“I don’t buy it,” the Colonel said.

“Sir, it looks to me like they were tracking you. They were sweeping you

at double the rate that I can explain by the rotation of their dome. Their radar

is completely electronic. They can steer their beams, and they were steering

their beams.” The sergeant’s voice was reasonable and respectful, even

though the officer who’d led the first probe was showing a little too much

pride and not quite enough willingness to listen. He’d heard a little of what

he was just told, but now he just shrugged it off.

“Okay, maybe they did get a few hits. We were broadside-aspect to them.

Next time we’ll deploy the patrol line farther out and do a direct penetration.

That cuts our RCS by quite a bit. We have to tickle their line to see how they

react.”

Better you than me, pal, the sergeant thought. He looked out the window.

Elmendorf Air Force Base was in Alaska and subject to dreadful winter

weather-the worst enemy of any man-made machine. As a result the B-is

were all in hangars, which hid them from the satellite that Japan might or

might not have operating. Still, nobody was sure about that.

“Colonel, I’m just a sergeant who diddles with O-scopes, but I’d be care-

ful about that. I don’t know enough about this radar to tell you for sure how

good it is. My gut tells me it’s pretty damned good.”

“We’ll be careful,” the Colonel promised. “Tomorrow night we’ll have

a better set of tapes for you.”

” Roger that, sir.” Better you than me, pal, he thought again.

USS Pasadena had joined the north end of the patrol line west of Midway. It

was possible for the submarines to report in with their satellite radios with-

out revealing their positions except to PacFlt SubOps.

“Not much of a line,” Jones observed, looking at the chart. He’d just

come over to confer on what SOSUS had on Japanese naval movements,

which was at the moment not much. The best news available was that

SOSUS, even with Jones’s improved tracking software, wasn’t getting any-

thing on the line of Olympia, Helena, Honolulu, Chicago, and now

Pasadena. ‘ ‘We used to have more boats than that just to cover the Gap.”

“That’s all the SSNs we have available, Ron,” Chambers replied. “And,

yeah, it ain’t much. But if they forward-deploy their diesel boats, they’d bet-

ter be real careful.” Washington had given them that much by way of orders.

An eastward move of Japanese warships would not tx- lulct.iinl ,in

proval. Mancuso and Chambers hadn’t told Jones thai. Then- was liillr M-IIM-

in dealing with his temper again.

“We have a bunch of SSNs in storage-”

“Seventeen on the West Coast, to be exact,” Chambers said. “Minimum

six months to reactivate them, not countin’ getting the crews spun up.”

Mancuso looked up. “Wait a minute. What about my 726*?”

Jones turned. “I thought they were deactivated.”

SubPac shook his head. “The environmental people wouldn’t let me.

They all have caretaker crews aboard.”

“All five of them,” Chambers said quietly. “Nevada, Tennessee, West

Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. That’s worth calling Washington

about, sir.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jones agreed. The 726-class, more commonly known by the

name of the lead ship, Ohio, which was now high-quality razor blades, was

far slower than the smaller 688-class of fast-attack boats, a lot less maneu-

verable and ten knots slower, but they were also quiet. More than that, they

defined what quiet was.

“Wally, think we can scratch up crews for them?”

“I don’t see why not, Admiral. We could have them moving in a

week … ten days max, if we can get the right people.”

“Well, that’s something I can do.” Mancuso lifted the phone for Wash-

ington.

The business day started in Central Europe at ten o’clock local time, which

was nine o’clock in London, and a dark four o’clock in New York. That

made it six in the evening in Tokyo after what had been at first an exciting

week, then a dull one, which had allowed people to contemplate their bril-

liance at the killing they had made.

Currency traders in the Japanese capital were surprised when things

started quite normally. Markets came up on-line much as a business might

open its doors for customers waiting outside for a long-awaited sale. It had

been announced that it would happen that way. It was just that nobody here

had really believed it. As one man they phoned their supervisors for instruc-

tions, surprising them with the news from Berlin and the other European

centers.

At the New York FBI office, machines wired into the international trading

network showed exactly the same display as those on every other continent.

The Fed Chairman and Secretary Fiedler watched. Both men had phones to

their ears, linked into an encrypted conference line with their European

counterparts.

The Bundesbank made the first move, trading five hundred billion yen for

the current equivalent in dollars to the Bank of Hong Kong, a very cautious

transaction to test the waters. Hong Kong handled it as a matter of course,

seeing a marginal advantage in the German mistake. The Bundesbank was

foolish enough to expect that the reopening of the New York equities mar-

kets would bolster the dollar. The transaction was executed, Fiedler saw. He

turned to the Fed Chairman and winked. The next move was by the Swiss,

and this one was a trillion yen for Hong Kong’s remaining holding in U.S.

Treasuries. That transaction, too, went through the wires in less than a min-

ute. The next one was more direct. The Bern Commercial Bank took Swiss

francs back from a Japanese bank, trading yen holdings for them, another

dubious move occasioned by a phone call from the Swiss government.

The opening of European stock markets saw other moves. Banks and

other institutions that had made a strategic move to buy up Japanese equities

as a counterbalance to Japanese acquisitions in European markets now

started selling them off, immediately converting the yen holdings to other

currencies. That was when the first alarm light went on in Tokyo. The Euro-

peans’ actions might have appeared to be mere profit-taking, but the cur-

rency conversions bespoke a belief that the yen was going to fall and fall

hard, and it was a Friday night in Tokyo, and their trading floors were closed

except for the currency traders and others working the European markets.

“They should be getting nervous now,” Fiedler observed.

“I would,” Jean-Jacques said in Paris. What nobody quite wanted to say

was that the First World Economic War had just begun in earnest. There was

an excitement to it, even though it ran contrary to all their instincts and expe-

rience.

“You know, I don’t have a model to predict this,” Gant said, twenty feet

away from the two government officials. The European action, helpful as it