Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

ways the Americans. It was always them, forcing an early end to the Russo-

Japanese War, denying their imperial ambitions, allowing them to build up

their economy, then cutting the legs out from under them, three times now,

the same people who’d killed his family. Didn’t they see? Now Japan had

struck back, and timidity still prevented people from seeing reality. It was all

Yamata could manage to rein in his anger at this small and foolish man. But

he needed Goto, even though the Prime Minister was too stupid to realize

that there was no going back.

“You’re sure that they cannot. . . respond to our actions?” Goto asked

after a minute or so of contemplation.

“Hiroshi, it is as I have been telling you for months. We cannot fail to

win-unless we fail to try.”

” Damn, I wish we could use these things to do our surveys.” The real magic

of overhead imagery lay not in individual photographs, but rather in pairs of

photographs, generally taken a few seconds apart from the same camera,

then transmitted down to the ground stations at Sunnyvale and Fort Belvoir.

Real-time viewing was all well and good to excite the imagination of con-

gressmen privy to such things or to count items in a hurry. For real work, you

used prints, set in pairs and viewed through a stereoscope, which worked

better than the human eyes for giving precise three-dimensionality to the

photos. It was almost as good as flying over in a helicopter. Maybe even

better, the AMTRAK official thought, because you could go backwards as

well as forwards.

“The satellites cost a lot of money,” Betsy Fleming observed.

“Yeah, like our whole budget for a year. This one’s interesting.” A team

of professional photo-interpretation experts was analyzing every frame, of

course, but the plain truth of the matter was that CIA and NRO had stopped

being interested in the technical aspects of railroad-building decades ago.

Tracking individual trains loaded with tanks or missiles was one thing. This

was something else.

“How so?”

“The Shin-Kansen line is a revenue maker. This spur isn’t going to make

much money for them. Maybe they can cut a tunnel up here,” he went on,

manipulating the photos. “Maybe they can make it into that city but me,

I’d come the other way and save the money on engineering. Of course it

could just be a shunt to use for servicing the mainline.”

“Huh?”

He ditln’l even lift his eyes from (he slereo-viewer. “A place lo slash

work cars, snowblowers, that sort of thing. It is well sited for that purpose.

Except that there’s no such cars there.”

The resolution on the photos was just fantastic. They’d been taken close to

noon local time, and you could see the sun’s glint on the rails of the main-

line, and the spur as well. He figured that the width of the rails was about the

resolution limit of the cameras, an interesting fact that he couldn’t relay to

anyone else. The ties were concrete, like the rest of the Bullet Train line, and

the quality of the engineering was, well, something he’d envied for a long

time. The official looked up reluctantly.

“No way it’s a revenue line. The turns are all wrong. You couldn’t do

thirty miles per hour through there, and the train sets on that line cruise over

a hundred. Funny, though, it just disappears.”

“Oh?” Betsy asked.

“See for yourself.” The executive stood to stretch, giving Mrs. Fleming a

place at the viewer. He picked up a large-scale map of the valley and looked

to see where things went. “You know, when Hill and Stevens built the Great

Northern.

Betsy wasn’t interested. “Chris, take a look at this.”

Their visitor looked up from the map. ‘ ‘Oh. The truck? I don’t know what

color they paint their-”

‘ ‘Not green.”

Time usually worked in favor of diplomacy, but not in this case, Adler

thought as he entered the White House. He knew the way, and had a Secret

Service agent to conduct him in case he got lost. The Deputy Secretary of

State was surprised to see a reporter in the Oval Office, even more so when

he was allowed to stay.

“You can talk,” Ryan told him. Scott Adler took a deep breath and

started his report.

“They’re not backing down on anything. The Ambassador isn’t very

comfortable with the situation, and it shows. I don’t think he’s getting much

by way of instructions out of Tokyo, and that worries me. Chris Cook thinks

they’re willing to let us have Guam back in a demilitarized condition, but

they want to keep the rest of the islands. I dangled the TRA at them, but no

substantive response.” He paused before going on. “It’s not going to work.

We can keep at it for a week or a month, but it’s just not going to happen.

Fundamentally they don’t know what they’re into. They see a continuum of

engagement between the military and economic sides. They don’t see the

firebreak between the two. They don’t see that they’ve crossed over a line,

and they don’t see the need to cross back.”

“You’re saying there’s a war happening,” Holtzman observed, to make

things clear, ll made him led foolish to ask the question. I le didn’t notice the

same aura of unreality surrounding everyone else in the room.

Adler nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

“So what are we going to do about it?”

“What do you suppose?” President Durling asked.

Commander Dutch Claggett had never expected to be in this situation. A

last-track officer since his graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy twenty-

three years earlier, his career had come to a screeching halt aboard USS

Maine, when as executive officer he’d been present for the only loss of an

American fleet-ballistic-missile submarine. The irony was that his life’s am-

bition had been command of a nuclear submarine, but command of Tennes-

see meant nothing at all now. It was just an entry on his first resume when he

entered the civilian job market. Her designed mission was to carry Trident-II

sea-launched ballistic missiles, but the missiles were gone and the only rea-

son that she still existed at all was because the local environmental move-

ment had protested her dismantlement to Federal District Court, and the

judge, a lifelong member of the Sierra Club, had agreed to the arguments,

which were again on their way back to the United States Court of Appeals.

Claggett had been in command of Tennessee for nine months now, but the

only time he’d been under way had been to move from one side of the pier to

another. Not exactly what he’d had in mind for his career. // could be worse,

he told himself in the privacy of his cabin. He could have been dead, along

with so many of the others from USS Maine.

But Tennessee was still all his-he didn’t even share her with a second

CO-and he was still a naval officer in command of a man-o’-war, techni-

cally speaking, and his reduced crew of eighty-five drilled every day be-

cause that was the life of the sea, even tied alongside a pier. His reactor

plant, known to its operators as Tennessee Power and Light Company, was

lit up at least once per week. The sonarmen played acquisition-and-tracking

games against audiotapes, and the rest of those aboard operated every ship-

board system, down to tinkering with the single Mark 48 torpedo aboard. It

had to be this way. The rest of the crew wasn’t being SERB’d, after all, and it

was his duty to them to maintain their professional standing should they get

the transfers they all wanted to a submarine that actually went to sea.

“Message from SubPac, sir,” a yeoman said, handing over a clipboard.

Claggett took the board and signed first for receipt.

Report earliest date ready to put to sea.

“What the hell?” Commander Claggett asked the bulkhead. Then he real

ized that the message ought to have come through Group at least, not straight

from Pearl. He lifted his phone and dialed SubPac from memory. “Admiral

Mancuso, please. Tennessee calling.”

“Dutch? What’s your materiel cotulition?” Bart Mancuso asked without

preamble.

“Everything works, sir. We even had our ORSE two weeks ago, and we

maxed it.” Claggett referred to the Operational Reactor Safeguards Exami-

nation, still the Holy Grail of the Nuclear Navy, even for razor-blade fodder.

“I know. How soon?” Mancuso asked. The bluntness of the question was

like something from the past.

‘ ‘I need to load food and torps, and I need thirty people.”

“Where are you weak?”

Claggett thought for a moment. His officers were on the young side, but

he didn’t mind that, and he had a good collection of senior chiefs. “No-

where, really. I’m working these people hard.”

“Okay, good. Dutch, I’m cutting orders to get you ready to sail ASAP.

Group is getting into gear now. I want you moving just as fast as you can.