Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

ments for additional data.

“Probably a scatter from us,” the senior controller said, busy now with

vectoring his fighters onto the still-inbound contacts.

“No, no, frequency wasn’t right for that.” The officer ran imuilier instru-

ment check, but there was nothing else to support the ixld feeling that had

just turned his arms cold.

I t) M

“Hngine-heat warning. Engine-heat warning,” the voice was telling him be-

cause he’d ignored the visual display rather blatantly, the onboard computer

thought.

“I know, honey,” Richter replied.

Over the Nevada desert, he’d managed a zoom-climb to twenty-one thou-

sand feet, so far beyond the normal flight envelope of a helicopter that it had

actually frightened him, Richter remembered, but that had been in relatively

warm air, and it was colder here. He blazed through twenty thousand feet,

still with a respectable climb rate, just as the target changed course, turning

away from him. It seemed to be orbiting at about three hundred knots, proba-

bly using one engine for propulsion and the other to generate power for its

radar. He hadn’t been briefed on it, but it seemed reasonable enough. What

mattered was that he had seconds to get within range, but the huge turbofan

engines on the converted airliner were inviting targets for his Stingers.

“Just in range, Sandy.”

“Roger.” His left hand selected missiles from his weapons panel. The

side doors on the aircraft snapped open. Attached to each of them were three

Stinger missiles. With his last vestige of control, he slued the aircraft around,

flipped the cover off the trigger switch, and squeezed six times. All of the

missiles blazed off their rails, arcing upwards toward the aircraft two miles

away. With that, Richter eased way back on the throttles and nosed over,

diving and cooling his abused engines, watching the ground while his back-

seater followed the progress of the missiles.

The first Stinger burned out and fell short. The remaining five did better,

and though two of them lost power before reaching the target, four of them

found it, three to the right engine and one to the left.

“Hits, multiple hits.”

The £-707, at low speed, didn’t have much of a chance. The Stingers had

small warheads, hut the civilian-spec engines on the aircraft were poorly de-

signed to deal with damage. Both immediately lost power, and the one that

had actually been powering the aircraft came apart first. Fragments of tur-

bine blades exploded through the safety casing and ripped into the right

wing, severing the flight controls and destroying aerodynamic performance.

The converted airliner rolled immediately right, and did not recover, its

flight crew surprised at the unannounced disaster and quite unable to deal

with it. Half of the starboard wing separated from the aircraft almost at once,

and on the ground, radar operators saw the alpha-numeric display marking

the position of Kami-Two flip to the emergency setting of 7711 and then

simply disappear.

“That’s a hard kill, Sandy.”

“Roger.” The Comanche was falling rapidly now, heading toward the

clutter of the coast. Engine temps were back to normal, and Richter hoped he

hadn’t done them permanent harm. As for the rest, he’d killed people before.

” Kami-Two just dropped off the air,” the communications officer reported.

“What?” the senior controller asked, distracted by his intercept mission.

“Garbled call, explosion, something like that, then the data links just

dropped off.”

“Stand by, I have to vector my Eagles in.”

It had to be getting twitchy for the 15-Echoes, the Colonel knew. Their job

tor the moment was to be bait, to draw the Japanese Eagles out farther over

I he water while the Lightnings went in behind them to chop down their

AKW support and spring the trap. The good news for the moment was that

I lie third £-767 had just gone off the air. So the other side of the mission had

happened as planned. That was nice for a change. And so, for the rest. ..

“Two, this is lead, executing, now!” The Colonel flipped his illumination

radars on, twenty miles from the orbiting AEW aircraft. Next he opened the

weapons-bay doors to give the AMRAAM missiles a chance to see their

cjuarry. Both One and Two had acquisition, and he triggered both off. “Fox-

Two, Fox-Two on the North Guy with two Slammers!”

The opening of the weapons bay instantly made the Lightnings about as

stealthy as a tall building. Blips appeared on five different screens, along

with additional warnings as to the speed and heading of the newly discov-

ered aircraft. The additional word from the countermeasures officer was the

final voice of doom.

“We’re being illuminated at very close range, bearing zero-two-seven!”

“What? Who is that?” He had problems of his own, with his Eagles about

to launch missiles at the incoming Americans. Kami-Six had just switched

to fire-control mode, to allow the interceptors to fire in the blind-launch

mode, as they’d done with the B-i bombers. He couldn’t stop that now, the

senior officer told himself.

The last warning was far too late for counteraction. Just five miles out, the

two missiles switched on their own homing radars. They were coming in at

Mach-3+, driven by solid-fuel rocket motors toward a huge radar target, and

the AIM-I2O AMRAAM, known to its users as the Slammer, was one of the

new generation of brilliant weapons. The pilot finally got the word, listening

in to the countermeasures channel. He rolled his aircraft left, attempting a

nearly impossible split-S dive that he knew was a waste of effort because at

the last second he saw the yellow glow of rocket exhaust.

“Kill,” I ighlmng Lead whispered lo himself. “Lightning Flight, this is

lend Ninth (iuy is down.”

“I mil, this is Three, South Guy is down,” he heard next.

Ami now, the (‘olonel thought, using a particularly cruel Air Force euphe-

iniiiMt, it was time lo kill some baby seals. The four Lightnings were between

Ihc Japanese i oast and eight F-isJ Eagle interceptors. To seaward of them,

ll»c I i-si Sirikc liagles would be turning back in, lighting off their own

imlrtii ntiil loosmn their own AMRAAMs. Some would make kills, and the

JII|>UIICM- lighters that survived them would run for home, right into his flight

ol IIMII

The ground• control radars couldn’t see the aerial combat taking place. It was

too far out and below the radar hori/on. They did see one aircraft racing for

their coast, one ol theirs by the transponder code. Then it stopped cold in the

air, and the transponder went off. In the air-defense headquarters, data

downloaded from the three dead AEW aircraft gave no clues, except for one

fact-the war their country had started was now very real and had taken an

unexpected turn.

Dancing to the Tune

“I know you’re not Russians,” Koga said, sitting in the back of the car with

Chavez while Clark did the driving.

“Why would you think that?” John asked innocently.

“Because Yamata thinks that I have been in contact with Americans. You

two are the only gaijin with whom I have spoken since this madness began.

What is going on here?” the politician demanded.

“Sir, what is going on right now is that we rescued you from people who

wanted you dead.”

“Yamata would not be so foolish as that,” Koga retorted, not yet recov-

ered from the shock of seeing violence uncontained by the borders of a TV

cabinet.

“He has started a war, Koga-san. What is your death against that?” the

man in the driver’s seat inquired delicately.

“So you are Americans,” he persisted.

Oh, what the hell, Clark thought. “Yes, sir, we are.”

“Spies?”

“Intelligence officers,” Chavez preferred. “The man who was in the

room with you-”

“The one you killed, you mean? Kaneda?”

“Yes, sir. He murdered an American citizen, a girl named Kimberly Nor-

ton, and I am actually rather happy that I took him down.”

“Who was she?”

“She was Goto’s mistress,” Clark explained. “And when she became a

political threat to your new Prime Minister, Raizo Yamata decided to have

lici rlimmiiled. We came to your country just to get her home. That was all,”

(‘lurk went on, lolling what was partially a lie.

“None of ihis is necessary,” Koga said discordantly. “If your Congress

had just given me a chance to-”

“Sir, maybe that’s right. I don’t know if it is or not, but maybe it is,”

(‘have/, said. ”That doesn’t much matter now, does it?”

1 ‘Tell me, then, what does matter?”

“Ending this goddamned thing before too many people get hurt,” Clark

suggested. ‘ ‘I’ve fought in wars and they are not fun. Lots of young kids get

to die before they have the chance to get married and have kids of their own,

and that’s bad, okay?” Clark paused before going on. “It’s bad for my coun-

try, and for damned sure it’s going to be worse for yours.”

” Yamata thinks-”

“Yamata is a businessman,” Chavez said. “Sir, you’d better understand