Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

“And the ‘secret weapon’ you mentioned?” Scherenko asked the senior

man.

“It’s a secret.” Clark headed for the door, with Chavez in his wake. They

had all day to wait for their chance, if that was what it was, and get their

nerves even more frayed.

It was a characteristically stormy day at Shemya. Sleet driven by a fifty-knot

gale pelted the base’s single runway and the noise threatened to disturb the

sleep of the fighter pilots. Inside the hangars, the eight fighter aircraft were

crammed together to protect them from the elements. It was especially nec-

essary for the F-22S, as no one had yet fully determined what damage the

elements could do to their smooth surfaces, and thus the radar cross section.

This was not the time to find out. The storm’s precipitation should pass in a

few hours, the weather weenies said, though the gale-force winds could well

last another month. Outside, the ground crews worried about the tie-downs

on the tanker and AW ACS birds, and struggled around in bulky cold-

weather gear to make certain everything was secure.

The other aspects of base-security were handled at the Cobra Dane array.

Though it looked like the screen from an old drive-in theater, it was in fact a

massive version of the solid-state radar array used by the Japanese £-7675,

or for that matter the Aegis cruisers and destroyers in both contending na-

vies. Originally emplaced to monitor Soviet missile tests and later to do SDI

research, it was powerful enough to scan thousands of miles into space, and

hundreds in the atmosphere. Its electronic probes swept constantly now,

searching lor intruders, but so far finding only commercial airliners Nil

those were watched very closely indeed. An F-i.sli Strike Eagle loaded with

air-to-air missiles could be sent aloft in ten minutes if one of them looked the

least bit dangerous.

The dreary routine continued through the day. For a brief few hours there-

was enough gray illumination through the clouds to suggest that the sun

might be up, in a theoretical sense, but by the time the pilots were roused, the

view out the windows of their quarters might as well have been painted

black, for even the runway lights were out, lest they give some unwelcome

visitor a visual aid in finding the base through the gloom.

“Questions?”

The operation had been planned rapidly but carefully, and the four lead

pilots had taken a hand in it, then tested it the night before, and while there

were risks, well, hell, there always were.

“You Eagle jocks think you can handle this?” the most senior Rapier

driver asked. He was a lieutenant colonel, which didn’t protect him from the

reply.

“Don’t worry, sir,” a major said. “It’s such a nice ass to look at.” Then

she blew a kiss.

The Colonel, actually an engineering test pilot pulled away from develop-

mental work under way on the F-22 with the 57th Weapons Wing at Nellis

Air Force Base, knew the “old” Air Force only from the movies and stories

he’d heard when he’d been a youngster coming up the line, but he took the

insult in the spirit in which it had been offered. The Strike Eagles might not

be stealthy, but they were pretty damned mean. They were about to engage

in a combat mission, and rank didn’t matter as much as competence and

confidence.

“Okay, people”-once he would have just said men-“we’re time-criti-

cal on this one. Let’s get it on.”

The tanker crews chuckled to themselves about the fighter-jock mentality,

and how the women in the Air Force had really bought into it. The Major

was a dish, one of them thought. Maybe when she grew up she could come

and fly United, he observed to the captain who’d be right-seating for him.

“A man could do worse,” the Southwest Airlines first officer noted. The

tankers got off twenty minutes later, followed by one of the £-365.

The fighters, typically, went off last. The crews all wore their cold-

weather nomex flight-suits and made the proper gestures about survival

gear, which was really a joke over the North Pacific this time of year, bul

rules were rules. G-suits went on last of all, uncomfortable and restrictive UN

they were. One by one, the Rapier drivers walked to their birds, the Eaglr

crews two-by-two. The colonel who’d lead the mission ostentatiously lore

off the Velcro RAPIER patch and replaced it with the counterculture one

Lockheed employees had made up. I he silhouette of the original P-jX Light-

ning overlaid with the graceful profile of the company’s newest steed, and

further decorated with a while-yellow thunderbolt. Tradition, after all, the

Colonel thought, even though he hadn’t been born until the last of the twin-

boom -385 had been sold to the strippers. I le did remember building models

of the first American long-range fighler. used only one time for their actual

designed purpose, for which a driver named Tex Lamphier had won a little

immortality. This one would not be terribly different from that day over the

northern Solomons.

The fighters had to be towed out into the open, and even before they

started engines, every crew member could feel the wind buffeting the fight-

ers. It was the time when the fingers tingle on the controls and the pilots shift

around a little in the seats to make everything just so. Then, one by one, the

fighters lit off and taxied down to the runway’s edge. The lights came back

on, blue parallel lines stretching off into the gloom, and the fighters lifted off

singly, a minute apart, because paired takeoffs in these weather conditions

were too dangerous, and this wasn’t a night for unnecessary mistakes. Three

minutes later, the two flights of four formed up over the top of the clouds,

where the weather was clear, with bright stars and the multicolored aurora to

their right, curtains of changing colors, greens and purples as the stellar wind

affected charged particles in the upper atmosphere. The curtain effect was

both lovely and symbolic to the Lightning pilots.

The first hour was routine, the two quartets of aircraft cruising southwest,

their anticollision lights blinking away to give visual warning of the close

proximity. Systems checks were performed, instruments monitored, and

stomachs settled as they approached the tanker aircraft.

The tanker crews, all reservists who flew airliners in civilian life, had

taken care to locate smooth-weather areas, which the fighter drivers ap-

preciated even though they deemed everyone else second best. It took more

than forty minutes to top off everyone’s fuel tanks, and then the tankers

resumed their orbit, probably so that their crews could catch up on their Wall

Street Journals, the fighter pilots all thought, heading southwest again.

Things changed now. It was time for business. Their kind.

Sandy Richter drew the mission, of course, because it had been his idea from

the start, months before at Nellis Air Force Base. It had worked there, and all

he had to figure out was whether it would work here as well. On that he was

probably betting his life.

Richter had been in that business since he was seventeen-when he’d lied

about his age and gotten away with it, being large and tough. Along the way,

he’d corrected his official package, but he was still in his twenty-ninth year

of service and soon to retire to a quieter life. All that time, Richter had driven

snakes and only snakes. If a helicopter didn’t carry weapons, then he wasn’t

interested. Starling with the AH-t Huey Cobra, he had in time graduated

to the AH-64 Apache and driven it into his second, briefer war in the skies

over the Arabian Peninsula. Now with the last bird he would ever fly, he

started the engines on the Comanche and began his 6,75151 hour of flight,

according to the log book.

The twin turboshaft engines spun up normally and the rotor began its rota-

tion. The ersatz ground crew of Rangers were hamming it up with the one

fire extinguisher they had. It was about large enough to put out a cigarette,

Richter thought crossly as he increased power and lifted off. The thin moun-

tain air had a negative effect on performance, but not that much, and he’d

soon be down at sea level anyway. The pilot gave his head the usual shake to

make sure the helmet was securely in place and headed eastward, tracing up

the wooded slopes of Shiraishi-iwz.

‘ There they are,” the lead -22 pilot said to himself. The first sign was chirp-

ing in his headset, immediately followed by information on his threat re-

ceiver: AIR DEFENSE RADAR, AIRBORNE, TYPE J, BEARING 213. Next came

data linked over from the £-36, which had been in place long enough to plot

its location. The Sentry wasn’t using its radar at all tonight. After all, the

Japanese had taught the Americans a lesson the night before, and they