Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

doesn’t it?”

“Sure as hell,” John said, returning to the table and tossing a quarter in

the pot. “Call.”

“Three ladies,” the engineer announced.

“Lucky son of a gun, too,” Clark said, tossing his in.

“Lucky hell! These sunzabitches ruined the best fishing trip I ever had.”

“John, you want I should make some coffee for tonight?”

” He makes the best damned coffee, too.” Burroughs collected the pot. He

was six dollars ahead.

“Portagee, it has been a while. Sure, go ahead. It’s called black-gang cof-

fee. Pete. Old seaman’s tradition,” Clark explained, also enjoying the pleas-

ant inactivity.

“John?” Ding asked.

“Later, my boy.” He picked up the deck and started shuffling adeptly. It

would wait.

“Sure you have enough fuel?” Checa asked. The supplies that had been

dropped in included auxiliary tanks and wings, but Richter shook his

head.

“No prob. Only two hours to the refueling point.”

“Where’s thai?” The signal over the satcomm had said nothing more

than i>R(X i:i;i> to PRIMARY, whatever that meant.

“About two hours away,” the warrant officer said. “Security, Captain,

security.”

“You realize we’ve made a little history here.”

‘ ‘Just so I live to tell somebody about it.” Richter zipped up his flight suit,

tucked in his scarf, and climbed aboard. “Clear!”

The Rangers stood by one last time. They knew the extinguishers were

worthless, but somebody had insisted on packing them along. One by one

the choppers lifted off, their green bodies soon disappearing into the dark-

ness. With that, the Rangers started dumping the remaining equipment into

holes dug during the day. That required an hour, and all that remained was

their walk to Hirose. Checa lifted his cellular phone and dialed the number

he’d memorized.

“Hello?” a voice said in English.

“See you in the morning, I hope?” The question was in Spanish.

“I’ll be there, Senor.”

“Montoya, lead off,” the Captain ordered. They’d keep to the treeline as

far as they could. The Rangers clasped weapons so far unused, hoping to

keep it that way.

“I recommend two weapons,” Lieutenant Shaw said. “Spread the bearings

about ten degrees, converge them in from under the layer, and nail him fore

and aft.”

‘ ‘I like it.” Claggett walked over to the plot for a final examination of the

tactical situation. “Set it up.”

“So what gives?” one of the Army sergeants asked at the entrance to the

attack center. The trouble with these damned submarines was that you

couldn’t just hang around and watch stuff.

“Before we can refuel those helos of yours, we have to make that ‘can go

away,” a petty officer explained as lightly as he could.

“Is it hard?”

“I guess we’d prefer he was someplace else. It puts us on the surface

with-well, somebody’s gonna know there’s somebody around.”

“Worried?”

“Nah,” the sailor lied. Then both men heard the Captain speak.

“Mr. Shaw, let’s go to battle stations torpedo. Firing-point procedures.”

The Tomcats went off first, one every thirty seconds or so until a lull squad

ron of twelve was aloft. Next went four EA-6B jammers, led by C ‘ommandei

Roberta Peach. Her (light of four broke up into elements of two, one to ac-

company each of the two probing Tomcat squadrons.

Captain Dud Sanchc/. had the lead division of tour, unwilling lo cnlruM

the attack of his air group to anyone else. They were five hundred miles out,

heading southwest. In many ways the attack was a repeat of another action in

the early days of 1991, but with a few nasty additions occasioned by the lew

airfields available to the enemy and weeks of careful analysis of operational

patterns. The Japanese were very regular in their patrols. It was a natural

consequence of the orderliness of military life and for that reason a danger-

ous trap to fall into. He gave one look back at the formation’s sparkling

wakes and then focused his mind on the mission.

“Set on one and three.”

“Match generated bearings and shoot,” Claggett said calmly.

The weapons technician turned his handle all to the left, then back to the

right, repeating the exercise for the second tube.

“One and three away, sir.”

“One and three running normal,” sonar reported an instant later.

“Very well,” Claggett acknowledged. He had been aboard a submarine

and heard those words before, and that shot had missed, to which fact he

owed his life. This was tougher. They didn’t have as good a feel for the

location of the destroyer as they would have liked, but neither did he have

much choice in the matter. The two ADCAPs would run slow under the

layer for the first six miles before shifting to their highest speed setting,

which was seventy-one knots. With luck the target wouldn’t have much

chance to figure where the fish had come from. “Reload one and three

with ADCAPs.”

Timing, as always, was crucial. Jackson left the flag bridge after the fighters

got off, and headed below to the combat information center, the better to

coordinate an operation already figured out down to the minute. The next

part was for his two Spruance destroyers, now thirty miles south of the car-

rier group. That made him nervous. The Spruances were his best ASW ships,

and though SubPac reported that the enemy sub screen was withdrawing

west, hopefully into a trap, he worried about the one SSK that might be left

behind to cripple Pacific Heel’s last carrier deck. So many things to worry

about, he thought, looking at the sweep hand on the bulkhead-mounted

clock.

Precisely at 1145:00 local time, destroyers Gushing and Ingersoll turned

broadside to the wind and began launching their Tomahawk missiles, signal-

ing this fact by a five-element satellite transmission. A total of forty cruise

missiles angled up into the sky, shed their solid-fuel boosters, then angled

down for the surface. After the six-minute launch exercise, the destroyers

increased speed to rejoin the battle group, wondering what their Tomahawk*

would accomplish.

“I wonder which one it is?” Sato murmured. They’d passed two already,

the Aegis destroyers visible only from their wakes now, the barely visible

arrowhead at the front of the spreading V of white foam.

“Call them up again?”

“It will anger my brother, but it must be lonely down there.” Again Sato

switched his radio setting, then depressed the switch on the wheel.

“JAL 747 Flight calling Mutsu.”

Admiral Sato wanted to grumble, but it was a friendly voice. He took the

headset from the junior communications officer and closed his thumb on the

switch. “Torajiro, if you were an enemy I would have you now.”

He checked the radar display-only commercial targets were on the two-

meter-square tactical-display screen. The SPY-iD radar showed everything

within a hundred-plus miles, and most things out to nearly three hundred.

The ship’s SH-6oJ helicopter had just refueled for another antisub sweep,

and though he was still at sea in time of war, he could allow himself a joke

with his brother, flying up there in the big aluminum tub, doubtless filled

with his countrymen.

“Time, sir,” Shaw said, checking his electronic stopwatch. Commander

Claggett nodded.

“Weps, bring them up and go active.”

The proper command went to the torpedoes, now nearly two miles apart

on either side of the target. The ADCAP-“additional capability”-version

of the Mark 48 had a huge solid-state sonar system built into its twenty-one-

inch nose. The unit launched from tube one was slightly closer, and its ad-

vanced imaging system acquired the destroyer’s hull on the second sweep.

Immediately, the torpedo turned right to home in, relaying its display to the

launch point as it did so.

“Hydrophone effects, bearing two-three-zero! Enemy torpedo hearing

three-zero!” a sonar officer shouted. “Its seeker is active!”

Sato’s head turned sharply toward the sonar room, and instantly n new

item appeared on the tactical display. Damn, he thought, and Knm\hn> said

the area was safe. The SSK was only a few miles oil.

“Countermeasures!” Mutsu’s captain ordered at OIKC. In sei onds the dc

slroyer streamed an American-designed Nixie decoy off her fantail.

“Launch the helicopter at once!”

“Brother, I am somewhat busy now. Have a good flight. Good-bye for

now.” The radio circuit went dead.

Captain Sato first wrote off the end of the conversation to the fact that his

brother did have duties to perform, then before his eyes he saw the destroyer

five miles below him turn sharply to the left, with more boiling foam at her

stern to indicate a sudden increase in speed.

“Something’s wrong here,” he breathed over the intercom.

“We got him, sir. One or both,” the fire-controlman announced.

“Target is increasing speed and turning to starboard,” sonar reported.

“Both units are in acquisition and closing. Target isn’t pinging anything

yet.”

‘ ‘Unit one range to target is now two thousand yards. Unit three is twenty-

two hundred out. Both units are tracking nicely, sir.” The petty officer’s

eyes were locked on the weapons display, ready to override a possible mis-