Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

carrying real bombs or cruise missiles, and they were well within the launch

radius for the latter. That created a problem for the air-defense commander,

and the time of day did not make it better. His precise instructions were not

yet precise enough, and there was no command guidance he could depend on

in Tokyo. But the inbounds were within the Air Defense Identification Zone,

and they were probably bombers, and-what? the General asked himself.

For now he ordered the fighters to split up, each closing on a separate target.

It was going too fast. He should have known better, but you couldn’t plan for

everything, and they were bombers, and they were too close, and they were

heading in fast.

“Are we getting extra hils?” ihe aircraft commander asked. He planned to

get no closer than one hundred miles to the airborne radar, and he already

had his escape procedures in mind.

“Sir, that’s negative. I’m getting a sweep every six seconds, but no elec-

tronic steering on us yet.”

“I don’t think they can see us this way,” the pilot thought aloud.

“If they do, we can get out of Dodge in a hurry.” The copilot flexed his

lingers nervously and hope his confidence was not misplaced.

There could be no tally-ho call. The fighters were above the cloud layer.

Descending through clouds under these circumstances ran risks. The orders

came as something of an anticlimax after all the drills and preparation, and a

long, boring night of patrolling. Kami-Two changed frequencies and began

electronic beam-steering on all three of her inbound contacts.

“They’re hitting us,” the EWO reported at once. “Freq change, pulsing us

hard on the Ku-band.”

“Probably just saw us.” That made sense, didn’t it? As soon as they plot-

ted an inbound track, they’d try to firm it up. It gave him a little more time to

work with. He’d keep going in for another few minutes, the Colonel thought,

just to see what happened.

“He’s not turning,” the Captain said. He should have turned away immedi-

ately, shouldn’t he? everyone aboard wondered. There could only be one

good reason why he hadn’t, and the resulting order was obvious. Kami-two

changed frequencies again to fire-control mode, and an Eagle fighter loosed

two radar-homing missiles. To the north, another Eagle was still just out of

range of its newly assigned target. Its pilot punched burner to change that.

“Lock-up-somebody’s locked-up on us!”

“Evading left.” The Colonel moved the stick and increased power for a

screaming dive down to the wavetops. A series of flares combined with

chaff clouds emerged from the bomber’s tail. They stopped almost at once in

the cold air and hovered nearly motionless. The sophisticated radar aboard

the £-767 identified the chaff clouds and automatically ignored them, steer

ing its pencil-thin radar beam on the bomber, which was still moving. All the

missile had to do was follow it in. All the years of design work were paying

off now, and the onboard controllers commented silently to themselves on

the unexpected situation. The system had been designed to protect against

Russians, not Americans. How remarkable.

“I can’t break lock.” The EWO tried active jamming next, but the pencil

beam thul was hammering the aluminum skin of their Lancer was Iwo mil-

lion watts of power, and his jammers couldn’t begin to deal with it. The

aircraft lurched into violent corkscrew maneuvers. They didn’t know where

the missiles were, and they could only do what the manual said, but the man-

ual, they realized a little late, hadn’t anticipated this sort of adversary. When

the first missile exploded on contact with the right wing, they were too close

to the water for their ejection seats to be of any help.

The second B-i was luckier. It took a hit that disabled two engines, but

even with half power it was able to depart the Japanese coast too rapidly for

the Eagle to catch up, and the flight crew wondered if they would make She-

mya before something else important fell off of their hundred-million-dollar

aircraft. The rest of the flight retreated as well, hoping that someone could

tell them what had gone wrong.

Of greater moment, yet another hostile act had been committed, and four

more people were dead, and turning back would now be harder still for both

sides in a war without any discernible rules.

Consideration

Il wasn’t that much of a surprise, Ryan told himself, but it would be of little

consolation to the families of the four Air Force officers. It ought to have

been a simple, safe mission, and the one bleak positive was that sure enough

it had learned something. Japan had the world’s best air-defense aircraft.

They would have to be defeated if they were ever to take out their interconti-

nental missiles-but taken out the missiles had to be. A considerable pile of

documents lay on his desk. NASA reports of the Japanese 88-19. Tracking

on the observed test-firings of the birds. Evaluation of the capabilities of the

missiles. Guesses about the payloads. They were all guesses, really. He

needed more than that, but that was the nature of intelligence information.

You never had enough to make an informed decision, and so you had to

make an uninformed decision and hope that your hunches were right. It was

a relief when the STU-6 rang, distracting him from the task of figuring what

he could tell the President about what he didn’t know.

‘ ‘Hi, MP. Anything new?”

‘ ‘Koga wants to meet with our people,” Mrs. Foley replied at once.” Pre-

liminary word is that he’s not very pleased with developments. But it’s a

risk,” she added.

Itwouldbe so much easier if I didn’t know those two, Ryan though!. “Ap-

proved,” was what he said. “We need all the information we can gel. We

need to know who’s really making the decisions over there.”

“It’s not the government. Not really. That’s what all the data indicates.

That’s the only plausible reason why the RVS didn’t see this coming. So the

obvious question is-”

“And the answer to that question is yes, Mary Pat.”

“Somebody will have to sign off on that. Jack,” the Deputy Director (Op-

erations) said evenly.

“Somebody will,” the National Security Advisor promised.

He was the Deputy Assistant Commercial Attache, a young diplomat, only

twenty-five, who rarely got invited to anything important, and when he was,

merely hovered about like a court page from a bygone era, attending his

senior, fetching drinks, and generally looking unimportant. He was an intel-

ligence officer, of course, and junior at that job as well. His was the task of

making pickups from dead-drops while on his way into the embassy every

morning that the proper signals were spotted, as they were this morning, a

Sunday in Tokyo. The task was a challenge to his creativity because he had

to make the planned seem random, had to do it in a different way every time,

but not so different as to seem unusual. It was only his second year as a field

intelligence officer, but he was already wondering how the devil people

maintained their careers in this business without going mad.

There it was. A soda can-a red Coca-Cola in this case-lying in the gut-

ter between the left-rear wheel of a Nissan sedan and the curb, twenty meters

ahead, where it was supposed to be. It could not have been there very long.

Someone would have picked it up and deposited it in a nearby receptacle. He

admired the neatness of Tokyo and the civic pride it represented. In fact he

admired almost everything about these industrious and polite people, but

that only made him worry about how intelligent and thorough their coun-

terintelligence service was. Well, he did have a diplomatic cover, and had

nothing more to fear than a blemish on a career that he could always

change-his cover duties had taught him a lot about business, should he de-

cide to leave the service of his government, he kept telling himself. He

walked down the crowded morning sidewalk, bent down, and picked up the

soda can. The bottom of the can was hollow, indented for easy stacking, and

his hand deftly removed the item taped there, and then he simply dropped

the can in the trash container at the end of the block before turning left to

head for the embassy. Another important mission done, even if all it had

appeared to be was the removal of street litter from this most fastidious of

cities. Two years of professional training, he thought, to be a trash collector.

Perhaps in a few years he would start recruiting his own agents. At least your

hands stayed clean that way.

On entering the embassy he found his way to Major Scherenko’s office

and handed over what he’d retrieved before heading off to his own desk for a

brief morning’s work.

Boris Scherenko was as busy as he’d ever expected to be. His assignment