Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

night. A jet flew close by and very low. It woke me up, and I never really got

back to sleep afterward.” He wiped his hands and poured two cups of tea,

offering one to his guest.

“Dozo,” Nomuri said graciously. “They are playing very dangerous

games now,” he went on, wondering what response he’d get.

“It’s madness, but who cares what I think? Not the government, surely.

All they listen to are the ‘great’ ones.” The equipment owner sipped at his

tea and looked around his shop.

“Yes, I am concerned, too. I hope Goto can find a way out of this before

things spin completely out of control.” Nomuri looked outside. The weather

was turning gray and threatening. He heard a decidedly angry grunt.

“Goto? Jusi one more like all the rest. Others Icatl hint by the nose or

some other part il the rumors about him are correct.”

Nomuri chuckled. “Yes, I have heard the stories, too. Still, a man ol some

vigor, eh?” He paused. “So can I rent another of your cycles today?”

“Take number six.” The man pointed. “I just finished servicing it. Pay

attention to the weather,” he warned. “Snow tonight.”

Nomuri held up his backpack. “I want to take some pictures of cloudy

mountains for my collection. The peace here is wonderful, and fine for

thinking.”

“Only in the winter,” the dealer said, returning to his work.

Nomuri knew the way now, and followed the Taki uphill over a trail

crusty from cold and frost. He would have felt a little better about it if the

damned four-wheeled cycle had a better muffler. At least the heavy air

would help attenuate the sound, or so he hoped, as he headed up the same

path he’d taken a few days earlier. In due course he was looking down at the

high meadow, seeing nothing out of the ordinary and wondering if-won-

dering a lot of things. What if the soldiers had run into an ambush? In that

case, Nomuri told himself, I’m toast. But there was no turning back. He set-

tled back into the seat and steered his way down the hillside, stopping as he

was supposed to in the middle of the clearing and taking the hood down off

his red parka. On closer examination, he saw that some sod had been dis-

turbed, and he saw what might have been a trail of sorts into the woodline.

That was when a single figure appeared, waving him up. The CIA officer

restarted the cycle and headed that way.

The two soldiers who confronted him didn’t point weapons. They didn’t

have to. Their faces were painted and their camouflage uniforms told him

everything he needed to know.

“I’m Nomuri,” he said. “The password is Foxtrot.”

“Captain Checa,” the officer replied, extending his hand. “We’ve

worked with the Agency before. Are you the guy who picked this spot?”

“No, but I checked it out a couple days ago.”

“Nice place to build a cabin,” Checa thought. “We even saw a few deer,

little ones. I hope it isn’t hunting season.” The remark caught Nomuri short.

He hadn’t considered that possibility, and didn’t know anything about hunt

ing in Japan. “So what do you have for me?”

“These.” Nomuri took off his backpack and pulled out the cellnlai

phones.

“Are you kiddin’ me?”

“The Japanese military has good stuff for monitoring military i omnium

cations. Hell, they invented a lot of the technology our people u-»e HIM

these”-Nomuri grinned-“everybody has ’em, and they’re digitally en

crypted, and they cover the whole country. Even here. There’s a rq>ealer

tower down on that mountain. Anyway, it’s safer than usinjj your regular

comms. The bill’s paid to the end of the month,” he added.

“lie nice to call home and tell my wii’e thai everything’s going fine,”

Checa thought aloud.

“I’d he careful about that. Here are the numbers you can call.” Nomuri

handed over a sheet. “That’s one’s mine. That one’s a guy named Clark.

That one’s another officer named Chavez-”

“Ding’s over here?” First Sergeant Vega asked.

“You know ’em?”

“We did a job in Africa last fall,” Checa replied. “We get a lot of ‘spe-

cial’ work. You sure you can tell us their names, man?”

“They have covers. You’re probably better off speaking in Spanish. Not

as many people here speak that language. I don’t need to tell you to keep

your transmissions short,” Nomuri added. He didn’t. Checa nodded and

asked the most important question.

“And getting out?”

Nomuri turned to point, but the terrain feature in question was covered in

clouds. “There’s a pass there. Head for it, then downhill to a town called

Hirose. I pick you up there, put you on a train to Nagoya, and you fly off to

either Taiwan or Korea.”

“Just like that.” The comment wasn’t posed as a question, but the dubi-

ous nature of the response was clear anyway.

“There are a couple of hundred thousand foreign businesspeople here.

You’re eleven guys from Spain trying to sell wine, remember?”

“I could use some sangria right now, too.” Checa was relieved to see that

his CIA contact had been briefed in on the same mission. It didn’t always

work out that way. “Now what?”

“You wait for the rest of the mission force to arrive. If something goes

wrong, you call me and head out. If I drop out of the net, you call the others.

If everything goes to hell, you find another way out. You should have pass-

ports, clothes, and-”

“We do.”

“Good.” Nomuri took his camera out of his backpack and started shoot-

ing photos of the cloud-shrouded mountains.

“This is CNN, live from Pearl Harbor,” the reporter ended, and a commer-

cial cut in. The intelligence analyst rewound the tape to examine it again. It

was both amazing and entirely ordinary that he’d be able to get such vital

information so easily. The American media really ran the country, he’d

learned over the years, and perhaps more was the pity. The way they’d

played up the unfortunate incident in Tennessee had inflamed the entire

country into precipitous action, then driven his country into the same, and

the only good news was what he saw on the TV screen: two fleet carriers still

in their dry docks, with two more still in the Indian Ocean, according to the

latest reports from that part of the world, and Pacific Fleet’s other two in

Long Beach, also dry docked and unable to enter service-and that, really,

was that, so far as the Marianas were concerned. He had to formalize his

intelligence estimate with a few pages of analytical prose, but what it came

down to was that America could sting his country, but her ability to project

real power was now a thing of the past. The realization of that meant that

there was little likelihood of a serious contest for the immediate future.

Jackson didn’t mind being the only passenger in the VC-20B. A man could

get used to this sort of treatment, and he had to admit that the Air Force’s

executive birds were better than the Navy’s-in fact the Navy didn’t have

many, and those were mainly modified P-3 Orions whose turboprop engines

provided barely more than half the speed of the twin-engine executive jet.

With only a brief refueling stop at Travis Air Force Base, outside San Fran-

cisco, he’d made the hop to Hawaii in under nine hours, and it was some-

thing to feel good about until on final approach to Hickam he got a good look

at the naval base and saw that Enterprise was still in the graving dock. The

first nuclear-powered carrier and bearer of the U.S. Navy’s proudest name

would be out of this one. The aesthetic aspect of it was bad enough. More to

the point, it would have been far better to have two decks to use instead of

one.

“You have your task force, boy,” Robby whispered to himself. And it

was the one every naval aviator wanted. Task Force 77, titularly the main

air arm of Pacific Fleet, and, one carrier or not, it was his, and about to sail

in harm’s way. Perhaps fifty years earlier there had been an excitement to

it. Perhaps when PacFlt’s main striking arm had sailed under Bill Halsey

or Ray Spruance, the people in command had looked forward to it. The

wartime movies said so, and so did the official logs, but how much of that

had been mere posturing, Jackson wondered now, contemplating his own

command. Did Halsey and Spruance lose sleep with the knowledge that

they were sending young men to death, or was the world simply a different

place then, where war was considered as natural an event as a polio epi-

demic-another scourge that was now a thing of the past. To be Com-

mander Task Force 77 was a life’s ambition, but he’d never really wanted

to fight a war-oh, sure, he admitted to himself, as a new ensign, or even