Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

combat action without any hope of support. Or something like that. Checa

faced the problem common to officers: subject to the same discomfort and

misery as his men, he was not allowed to bitch. There was no other officer to

bitch to in any case, and to do so in front of the men was bad for morale, even

though the men probably would have understood.

“Be nice to get back to Fort Stewart, sir,” First Sergeant Vega observed.

“Spread on that sunblock and catch some rays on the beach.”

“And miss all this beautiful snow and sleet, Oso?” At least the sky was

clear now.

“Roge-o, Captain. But I got my fill o’ this shit when I was a kid in Chi-

cago.” He paused, looking and listening around again. The noise-discipline

of the other Rangers was excellent, and you had to look very closely indeed

to see where the lookouts were standing.

“Ready for the walk out tonight?”

“Just NO’S our friend is wailing on the far side of that hill.”

“I’m sure he will he,” Checa lied.

“Yes, sir. 1 am, too.” If one could do it, why not two? Vega thought. “Did

all this stuff work?”

The killers in their midst were sleeping in their bags, in holes lined with

pine branches and covered with more branches for additional warmth. In

addition to guarding the pilots, the Rangers had to keep them healthy, like

watching over infants, an odd mission for elite troops, but troops of that sort

generally drew the oddest.

“So they say.” Checa looked at his watch. “We shake them loose in an-

other two hours.”

Vega nodded, hoping that his legs weren’t too stiff for the trek south.

The patrol pattern had been set in the mission briefing. The four boomers

had thirty-mile sectors, and each sector was divided into three ten-mile seg-

ments. Each boat could patrol in the center slot, leaving the north and south

slots empty for everything but weapons. The patrol patterns were left to the

judgment of individual skippers, but they worked out the same way. Penn-

sylvania was on a northerly course, trolling along at a mere five knots, just as

she’d done for her now-ended deterrence patrols carrying Trident missiles.

She was making so little noise that a whale might have come close to a colli-

sion, if it were the right time for whales in this part of the Pacific, which it

wasn’t. Behind her, at the end of a lengthy cable, was her towed-array sonar,

and the two-hour north-south cycle allowed it to trail straight out in a line,

with about ten minutes or so required for the turns at the end of the cycles to

get it straight again for maximum performance.

Pennsylvania was at six hundred feet, the ideal sonar depth given today’s

water conditions. It was just sunset up on the roof when the first trace ap-

peared on her sonar screens. It started as a series of dots, yellow on the video

screen, trickling down slowly with time, and shifting a little to the south in

bearing, but not much. Probably, the lead sonarman thought, the target had

been running on battery for the past few hours, else he would have caught

the louder signals of the diesels used to charge them, but there the contact

was, on the expected 6oh/. line. I le reported the contact data to the fire-con-

trol tracking party.

Wasn’t this something, the sonarman thought. He’d spent his entire career

in missile boats, so often tracking contacts which his submarine would ma-

neuver to avoid, even though the boomer fleet prided itself on having the

best torpedomen in the fleet. Pennsylvania carried only fifteen weapons

aboard-there was a shortage of the newest version of the ADCAP torpedo,

and it had been decided not to bother carrying anything less capable under

the circumstances. It also had three other torpedolike units, called

LEMOSSs, for Long-Endurance Mobile Submarine Simulator. The skipper,

another lifelong boomer sailor, had briefed the crc*