Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

contact with. Now, that could be a coincidence. Goto and his master just

might not want him making political noise while they carry out their opera-

tion. It could also mean that there’s a leak somewhere.”

‘ ‘Who on our side knows?”

“Ed and Mary Pat at CIA. Me. You. Scott Adler and whomever Scott

told.”

“But we don’t know for sure that there’s a leak.”

“No, sir, we don’t. But it is extremely likely.”

“Set it aside for now. What if we don’t do anything?”

“Sir, we have to. If we don’t, then sometime in the future you can expect

a war between Russia on one hand and Japan and China on the other, with us

doing God knows what. CIA is still trying to do its estimate, but I don’t see

how the war can fail to go nuclear. ZORRO may not be the prettiest thing

we’ve ever tried to do, but it’s the best chance we have. The diplomatic is-

sues are not important,” Ryan went on. “We’re playing for much higher

stakes now. But if we can kill off the guys who initiated this mess, then we

can cause Goto’s government to fall. And then we can get things back under

some sort of control.”

The odd part, Durling realized, was the trade-off concerning which side

was pitching which sort of moderation. Hanson and SecDef took the classi-

cal diplomatic line-they wanted to take the time to be sure there was no

other option to resolve the crisis through peaceful means, but if diplomacy

failed, then the door was opened for a much wider and bloodier conflict.

Ryan and Jackson wanted to apply violence at once in the hope of avoiding a

wider war later. The hell ol it was, either side could he right or wrong, and

the only way to know for sure was to read the history books twenty years

from now.

“If the plan doesn’t work …”

‘ ‘Then we’ve killed some of our people for nothing,” Jack said honestly.

“You will pay a fairly high price yourself, sir.”

What about the fleet commander-I mean the guy commanding the car-

rier group. What about him?”

“If he chokes, the whole thing comes apart.”

“Replace him,” the President said. “The mission is approved.” There

was one other item to be discussed. Ryan walked the President through that

one, too, before leaving the room and making his phone calls.

The perfect Air Force mission, people in blue uniforms liked to say, was run

by a mere captain. This one was commanded locally by a special-operations

colonel, but at least he was a man who’d been recently passed over for gen-

eral’s rank, a fact that endeared him to his subordinates, who knew why he’d

failed to screen for flag rank. People in spec-ops just didn’t fit in with the

button-down ideal of senior leadership. They were too … eccentric for that.

The final mission brief evolved from data sent by real-time link from Fort

Meade, Maryland, to Verino, and the Americans still cringed at the knowl-

edge that Russians were learning all sorts of things about America’s ability

to gather and analyze electronic data via satellite and other means-after all,

the capability had been developed for use against them. The exact positions

of two operating £-7673 were precisely plotted. Visual satellite data had

counted fighter aircraft-at least those not in protective shelters-and the

orbiting KH-12’s last pass had counted airborne aircraft and their positions.

The colonel commanding the detachment went over the penetration course

that he had personally worked out with the flight crew, and while there were

worries, the two young captains who would fly the C-I7A transport chewed

their gum and nodded final approval. One of them even joked about how it

was time a “trash-hauler” got a little respect.

The Russians had their part to play, too. From Vuzhno-Sakalinsk South on

the Kamchatka Peninsula, eight MiG-3i interceptors lifted off for an air-

defense exercise, accompanied by an IL-86 Mainstay airborne-early-warn-

ing aircraft. Four Sukhoi fighters took off ten minutes later from Sokol to act

as aggressors. The Sukhois with long-range fuel tanks headed southeast, re-

maining well outside Japanese airspace. The controllers in both Japanese

8-7675 recognized it for what it was: a fairly typical and stylized Russian

training exercise. Nevertheless, it did involve warplanes, and merited their

close attention, all the more so that it was astride the most logical approach

toulc lor American aircraft like the B-is that had so recently “tickled” their

tin defenses. It had the effect of drawing the E-767S both north and east

Mimewhiil, and with them their fighter escorts. The reserve AW ACS aircraft

WHS almost ordered aloft, hut the ground-based air-defense commander de-

i idcd sensibly merely to increase his alert state a bit.

The (‘ i?A (ilobcinaster-lll was the newest and most expensive air-trans-

port aircraft ever to force its way through the Pentagon’s procurement sys-

tem. Anyone familiar with that procedural nightmare would have preferred

flak, because at least bombing missions were designed to succeed, whereas

the procurement system seemed most often designed to fail. That it didn’t

was a tribute of sorts to the ingenuity of the people dedicated to confounding

it. No expense had been spared, and a few new ones located for use, but what

had resulted was a “trash-hauler” (the term most often used by fighter pi-

lots) with pretensions of the wild life.

This one took off just after local midnight, heading south-southwest as

though it were a civil flight to Vladivostok. Just short of that city it took fuel

from a KC-I35 tanker-the Russian midair refueling system was not com-

patible with American arrangements-and departed the Asian mainland,

now heading due south exactly on the 13 2nd Meridian.

The Globemaster was the first-ever cargo aircraft designed with special-

operations in mind. The normal flight crew of only two was supplemented

with two “observer” positions for which modular instrument packages

were provided. In this case, both were electronics-warfare officers now

keeping tabs on the numerous air-defense radar sites that littered the Rus-

sian, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese coasts, and directing the flight crew to

thread their way through as many null areas as was possible. That soon re-

quired a rapid descent and a turn east.

“Don’t you just love this?” First Sergeant Vega asked his commander.

The Rangers were sitting on fold-down seats in the cargo area, dressed in

combat gear that had made them waddle like ducks aboard the aircraft an

hour earlier under the watchful eyes of the loadmaster. It was widely be-

lieved within the Army’s airborne community that the Air Force awarded

points to its flight crews for making their passengers barf, but in this case

there would be no complaints. The most dangerous part of the mission was

right now, despite their parachutes, something the Air Force crewmen, sig-

nificantly, didn’t bother with. They would be of little use in any case should

a stray fighter happen upon their transport at almost any time up to the pro-

grammed jump.

Captain Checa just nodded, mainly wishing he were on the ground, where

an infantryman belonged, instead of sitting as helpless as an unborn child in

the womb of a woman addicted to disco dancing.

Forward, the EWO displays were coloring up. The rectangular TV-type

tube displayed u computer memory of every known radar installation on

Japan’s western coast. It hadn’t been hard to input the information, as most

of them had been established a generation or two earlier by Americans, back

when Japan had been a massive island base for use against the Soviet Union

and liable to Russian attack for that reason. The radars had been upgraded

along the way, but any picket line had its imperfections, and these had been

mostly known to the Americans beforehand, and then reevaluated by ELINT

satellites in the last week. The aircraft was heading southeast now, leveling

out two hundred feet over the water and tooling along at its maximum low-

level speed of three hundred fifty knots. It made for a very bumpy ride,

which the flight crew didn’t notice, though everyone else did. The pilot wore

low-light goggles, and swept his head around the sky while the copilot con-

centrated on the instruments. The latter crewman was also provided with a

head-up display just like that on a fighter. It displayed compass heading,

altitude, airspeed, and also gave him a thin green line to indicate the horizon,

which he could sometimes see depending on the state of the moon and

clouds.

” I have strobes very high at ten o’clock,” the pilot reported. Those would

be airliners on a standard commercial routing. “Nothing else.”

The copilot gave her screen another look. The radar plot was exactly as

programmed, with their flight path following a very narrow corridor of black

amid radial spikes of red and yellow, which indicated areas covered by de-

fense and air-control radars. The lower they flew, the wider was the black-