Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

“What the hell?” Ore/a wondered.

The sound of many jet engines starting up interrupted the card game, and

all four men in the room went to the windows. Clark remembered to turn all

the h>jhls out, and stole the only set of binoculars in the house. The first pair

ol uiixTafi bla/ed off Kobler Field just as he brought them to his eyes. They

were single-engine aircraft judging by their afterburner flames.

“What’s happening, John?”

“Nobody told me, really, but it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.”

Lights were on all over the field. What mattered was getting the fighters

off as rapidly as possible. The same thing would be happening on Guam,

probably, but Guam was a good ways off, and the two fighter groups would

be engaging the Americans separately, negating the Japanese numerical ad-

vantage.

“What are those?”

Commander Peach and her jammers were also at work now. The search

radar was powerful, but like all of its type it also transmitted low-frequency

waves, and those were easily jammed. The massive collection of false dots

both confused their understanding of the developing air action and knocked

back their ability to detect the small but unstealthy cruise missiles. Fighters

that might have tried to engage them had in fact overrun the inbound targets,

giving them a free advance to the island’s targets. The search radar atop

Mount Takpochao picked them up barely thirty miles out instead of the

hoped-for hundred, and was also trying to get a count on the inbound fight-

ers. That gave the three operators on the set a complex task, but they were

trained men, and they bcnl to the demands of the moment, one of their num-

ber sounding the alarm to get me island’s Patriot missile batteries alerted.

The first part of the operation was going well. The standing Combat Air

Patrol had been eliminated without loss, Sanchez saw, wondering if it had

been one of his missiles that scored. No one would ever know about that.

The next task was to take out the Japanese radar aircraft before the rest of

their fighters arrived. To accomplish that, a division of four Tomcats went to

burner and rocketed straight for them, rippling off all their missiles for the

task.

They were just too brave for then own good, Sanchez saw. The Japanese

Hawkeyes should have pulled back, and the defending Eagles should have

done the same, but true to the fighter pilot’s ethos they’d come out to engage

the first wave of raiders instead of waiting. Probably because they thought

this was a genuine raid instead of a mere fighter-sweep. The flanking divi-

sion of four, called Blinder Flight, fulfilled its limited mission of killing the

airborne-radar birds, then turned hack to John Stennis to refuel and rearm.

Now the only airborne radar was American. The Japanese came on, trying to

blunt the attack that really did not exist, seeking to engage targets whose

only goal had been the attention of the outbound interceptors.

It was obvious to the radar operators that the majority «il It* mimics were

headed for them instead of the airfield. They didn’t trmlr iriiMfk* *lmui that

There wasn’t time. They watched as the E-2s fell from the *k>, iim l.n .t \\.ty

for them to guess exactly why, but the remaining AHW uiruafl *•« mill mi

the runway at Kobler as the fighters were racing to gel ofl, MM! ihp hut i>l

them were approaching the distant American aircraft, which w*>ii>,

ingly, not headed in as expected. Guam was on the radio now.

information at the same time it announced that its fighters were

off the ground to deal with the attack.

“Two minutes on the cruise missiles,” one of the operators said ovei ilu-

interphones.

‘ ‘Tell Kobler to get its E-2 up immediately,” the senior officer in the con

trol van said when he saw that the two already up were gone. Their van wan

a hundred yards from the radar transmitter, but it hadn’t been dug in yet. It

had been planned for the coming week.

“Wow!” Chavez observed. They were outside now. Some clever soul had

killed the electrical power for their part of the island, which allowed them to

step out of the house for a better view of the light show. Half a mile to their

east, the first Patriot blew out of its box-launcher. The missile streaked only

a few hundred meters up before its thrust-vector controls turned it as sharply

as a billiard ball off a rail, aiming it down below the visible horizon. Three

more followed a few seconds later.

“Cruise missiles coming in.” This remark came from Burroughs. “Over

to the north, looks like.”

‘ ‘Going for the radar on that hilltop, I bet,” Clark thought. There followed

a series of flashes that outlined the high ground to their east. The thunder of

the explosions they represented took a few seconds more. Additional Patri-

ots went off, and the civilians watched as the battery crew erected another

box-launcher on its truck-transporter. They could also see that the process

was taking too long.

The first wave of twenty Tomahawks was climbing now. They’d streaked in

a bare three meters over the wave tops toward the sheer cliffs of Saipan’s

eastern coast. Automated weapons, they did not have the ability to avoid or

even to detect fire directed at them, and the first ripple of Patriot SAMs did

well, with twelve shots generating ten kills, but the remaining ten were

climbing now, all targeted on the same spot. Four more of the cruise missile*

fell to SAMs, and a fifth lost power and slammed into the cliff face at Laolao

Kattan. The SAM radars lost them at that point, and the battery commander*

i tilled a wnrninx to the rmlur people, hut it was tar loo lute to be helpful, and,

one hy one, live thousand pound warheads exploded over the top of Mount

I iik|NH lum

“Thai takes care of that,” Clark said when the sound passed. Then he

paused to listen. Others were out in the open now, standing around the cul-

de-sac neighborhood. Individual hoots joined into a chorus of cheers that

drowned out the shouts of the missile crew on the hilltop to the east.

Fighters were still rocketing off Kobler Field below them, generally tak-

ing off in pairs, with some singles. The blue flames of their afterburners

turned in the sky before blinking off, as the Japanese fighters turned to form

up and meet the inbound raid. Last of all, Clark and the others heard the

electric-fan sound of the last remaining Hawkeye, heading off last of all de-

spite the advice of the now-dead radar crew.

The island grew silent for a few moments, a strange emptiness to the air as

people caught their breath and waited for the second act of the midnighl

drama.

Only fifty miles offshore, USS Pasadena and three other SSNs came to an-

tenna depth and launched six missiles each. Some of them were aimed at

Saipan. Four went to Tinian. Two to Rota. The rest skimmed the wave tops

for Andersen Air Force Base on Guam.

“Up scope!” Claggett ordered. The search periscope hissed up on hydraulic

power. “Hold!” he called as the top of the instrument cleared the water. He

turned slowly, looking for lights in the sky. None.

“Okay, the antenna next.” Another hiss announced the raising of the

UHF whip antenna. The Captain kept his eyes on the scope, still looking

around. His right hand waved. There were some fuzzy radar signals from

distant transmitters, but nothing able to detect the submarine.

“INDY CARS, this is PIT CRI-W, over,” the communications officer said

into a microphone.

“Thank God,” Richter said aloud, keying his microphone. “PiT CREW, this

is INDY LEAD, authenticate, over.”

“Foxtrot Whiskey.”

“Charlie Tango,” Richter replied, checking the radio codes on his knee

pad. “We are five out, and we sure could use a drink, over.”

“Stand by,” he heard back.

“Surface the ship,” Claggett ordered, lifting the i-MC. “Now hear this,

we’re surfacing the ship, maintain battle stations. Army crews, stand by.”

The proper gear was sitting next to the midships escape trunk and the

larger capsule hatch designed to handle the guidance packages for ballistic

missiles. One of Tennessee’s damage-control parties stood by to pass the

gear, and a chief would work the fueling-hose connector hidden in the casing

over the missile room.

“What’s that?” INDY-TWO asked over the radio circuit. “Lead, this is

Three, chopper to the north. Say again, chopper to the north, big one.”

“Take him out!” Richter ordered at once. There could be no friendly

choppers about. He turned and increased altitude for a look of his own. The

guy even had his strobes on. “PiT CREW, this is INDY LEAD, there’s chopper

traffic up here to the north. What gives, over?”

Claggett didn’t hear that. Tennessee’s sail had just broken the surface, and

he was standing by the ladder to the top of the sail. Shaw took the micro-