Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

killing Americans. They hanged him for killing his own people and for sell-

ing narcotics. That’s not the stuff martyrs are made of. Case closed,” Jack

concluded, sticking the unread sheets of paper in his out basket. “Now, what

have we learned about India?”

“Diplomatically speaking, nothing.”

“Mary Pat?” Jack asked the CIA representative.

“There’s a heavy mechanized brigade doing intensive training down

south. We have overheads from two days ago. They seem to be exercising as

a unit.”

“Humint?”

“No assets in place,” Mrs. Foley admitted, delivering what had become a

CIA mantra. “Sorry, Jack. It’ll be years before we can field people every-

where we want.”

Ryan grumbled silently. Satellite photos were fine for what they were, but

they were merely photographs. Photos only gave you shapes, not thoughts.

Ryan needed thoughts. Mary Pat was doing her best to fix that, he remem-

bered.

‘ ‘According to the Navy, their fleet is very busy, and their pattern of oper-

ations suggests a barrier mission,” The satellites did show that the Indian

Navy’s collection of amphibious-warfare ships was assembled in two squad-

rons. One was at sea, roughly two hundred miles from its base, exercising

together as a group. The other was alongside at the same naval base under-

going maintenance, also as a group. The base was distant from the brigade

undergoing its own exercises, but there was a rail line from the army base to

the naval one. Analysts were now checking the rail yards at both facilities on

a daily basis. The satellites were good for that, at least.

“Nothing at all, Brett? We have a pretty good ambassador over there as I

recall.”

“I don’t want him to press too hard. It could damage what influence

and access we have,” SecState announced. Mrs. Foley tried not to roll her

eyes.

“Mr. Secretary,” Ryan said patiently, “in view of the fact that we have

neither information nor influence at the moment, anything he might develop

will be useful. Do you want me to make the call or will you?”

“He works for me, Ryan.” Jack waited a few beats before responding to

the prod. He hated territorial fights, though they were seemingly the favorite

sport in the executive branch of the government.

“He works for the United States of America. Ultimately he works for the

President. My job is to tell the President what’s going on over there, and I

need information. Please turn him loose. He’s got a CIA chief working for

him. He has three uniformed attaches. I want them all turned loose. The ob-

ject of the exercise is to classify what looks to the Navy and to me like prepa-

rations for a possible invasion of a sovereign country. We want to prevent

that.”

“I can’t believe that India would really do such a thing,” Brett Hanson

said somewhat archly. “I’ve had dinner with their Foreign Minister several

times, and he never gave me the slightest indication-”

“Okay.” Ryan interrupted quietly to ease the pain he was about to inflict.

“Fine, Brett. But intentions change, and they did give us the indicator that

they want our fleet to go away. I want the information. I am requesting that

you turn Ambassador Williams loose to rattle a few bushes. He’s smart and I

trust his judgment. That’s a request on my part. I can ask the President to

make it an order. Your call, Mr. Secretary.”

Hanson weighed his options, and nodded agreement with as much dignity

as he could summon. Ryan had just cleared up a situation in Africa that had

gnawed at Roger Durling for two years, and so was the prettiest kid on the

block, for the moment. It wasn’t every day that a government employee in-

creased the chances for a President to get himself reelected. The suspicion

that CIA had apprehended Corp had already made it way in the media, and

was being only mildly denied in the White House pressroom. It was no way

to conduct foreign policy, but that issue would be fought on another battle-

field.

“Russia,” Ryan said next, ending one discussion and beginning another.

The engineer at the Yoshinobu space-launch complex knew he was not the

first man to remark on the beauty of evil. Certainly not in his country, where

the national mania for craftsmanship had probably begun with the loving

attention given to swords, the meter-long katana of the samurai. There, the

steel was hammered, bent over, hammered again, and bent over again twenty

times in a lamination process that resulted in over a million layers of steel

made from a single original casting. Such a process required an immense

amount of patience from the prospective owner, who would wait patiently

even so, displaying a degree of downward-manners for which that period of

his country was not famous. Yet so it had been, for the samurai needed his

sword, and only a master craftsman could fabricate it.

But not today. Today’s samurai-if you could call him that-used the tel-

ephone and demanded instant results. Well, he would still have to wait, the

engineer thought, as he gazed at the object before him.

In fact, the thing before his eyes was an elaborate lie, but it was the clever-

ness of the lie, and its sheer engineering beauty that excited his self-admira-

tion. The plug connections on the side of it were fake, but only six people

here knew that, and the engineer was the last of them as he headed down the

ladder from the top portion of the gantry tower to the next-lower level. From

there, they would ride the elevator to the concrete pad, where a bus waited to

carry them to the control bunker. Inside the bus, the engineer removed his

white-plastic hard-hat and started to relax. Ten minutes later, he was in a

comfortable swivel chair, sipping tea. His presence here and on the pad

hadn’t been necessary, but when you built something, you wanted to see it

all the way through, and besides, Yamata-san would have insisted.

The H-n booster was new. This was only the second test-firing. It was

actually based on Soviet technology, one of the last major ICBM designs the

Russians had built before their country had come apart, and Yamata-san had

purchased the rights to the design for a song (albeit written in hard cur-

rency), then turned all the drawings and data over to his own people for mod-

ification and improvement. It hadn’t been hard. Improved steel for the

casing and better electronics for the guidance system had saved fully 1,200

kilograms of weight, and further improvements in the liquid fuels had taken

the performance of the rocket forward by a theoretical 17 percent. It had

been a bravura performance by the design team, enough to attract the interest

of NASA engineers from America, three of whom were in the bunker to

observe. And wasn’t that a fine joke?

The countdown proceeded according to plan. The gantry came back on its

rails. Floodlights bathed the rocket, which sat atop the pad like a monu-

ment-but not the kind of monument the Americans thought.

“Hell of a heavy instrument package,” a NASA observer noted.

‘ ‘We want to certify our ability to orbit a heavy pay load,” one of the mis-

sile engineers replied simply.

“Well, here we go….”

The rocket-motor ignition caused the TV screens to flare briefly, until

Ihcy compensated electronically for the brilliant power of the white flame.

The H-11 booster positively leaped upward atop a column of flame and a

trail of smoke.

“What did you do with the fuel?” the NASA man asked quietly.

“Better chemistry,” his Japanese counterpart replied, watching not the

screen but a bank of instruments. “Better quality control, purity of the oxi-

di/er, mainly.”

‘ ‘They never were very good at that,” the American agreed.

He just doesn’t see what he sees, both engineers told themselves. Yamata-

sun was correct. It was amazing.

Radar-guided cameras followed the rocket upward into the clear sky. The

H-l i climbed vertically for the first thousand feet or so, then curved over in

a slow, graceful way, its visual signature diminishing to a white-yellow disk.

The flight path became more and more horizontal until the accelerating

rocket body was heading almost directly away from the tracking cameras.

“BECO,” the NASA man breathed, just at the proper moment. BECO

meant booster-engine cutoff, because he was thinking in terms of a space

launcher. “And separation … and second-stage ignition …” He got those

terms right. One camera tracked the falling first stage, still glowing from

residual fuel burnoff as it fell into the sea.

“Going to recover it?” the American asked.

“No.”

All heads shifted to telemetric readouts when visual contact was lost. The

rocket was still accelerating, exactly on its nominal performance curve,

heading southeast. Various electronic displays showed the H-n’s progress

both numerically and graphically.

“Trajectory’s a little high, isn’t it?”

“We want a high-low orbit,” the project manager explained. “Once we