Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

those Moscow knows about.”

“But not these others?”

Zhang smiled. “No.”

Even in a culture where men and women learn to control their feelings,

the Minister could not conceal his ama/.cment at the paper in his hands. They

didn’t shake, but he used them to place the page flat on the polished table,

smoothing it out as though it were a piece of fine silk.

“This could double the wealth of our country.”

“That is conservative,” observed the senior field officer of his country’s

intelligence service. Zhang, covered as a diplomat, actually conducted more

diplomacy than most of his country’s senior foreign-service officers. It was

more of an embarrassment to them than to him. “You need to remember that

this is the estimate the Japanese have given us, Comrade Minister. They

fully expect access to half of what they discover, and since they will perforce

spend most of the development money …”

A smile. “Yes, while we take most of the strategic risks. Offensive little

people,” the Minister added. Like those with whom Zhang had negotiated in

Tokyo, the Minister and the Marshal, who continued to keep his peace, were

veterans of the 8th Route Army. They too had memories of war-but not of

war with America. He shrugged. “Well, we need them, don’t we?”

‘ ‘Their weapons are formidable,” the Marshal noted.’ ‘But not their num-

bers.”

‘ ‘They know that,” Zhang Han San told his hosts.’ ‘It is, as my main con-

tact says, a convenient marriage of needs and requirements, but he hopes

that it will develop, in his words, into a true and cordial relationship between

peoples with a true-”

“Who will be on top?” the Marshal asked, smiling coarsely.

“They will, of course. He thinks,” Zhang Han San added.

“In that case, since they are courting us, it is they who need to make the

first overt moves,” the Minister said, defining his country’s policy in a way

that would not offend his own superior, a small man with elfin eyes and the

sort of determination to make a lion pause. He looked over at the Marshal,

who nodded soberly. The man’s capacity for alcohol, both of the others

thought, was remarkable.

“As I expected,” Zhang announced with a smile. “Indeed, as they ex-

pect, since they anticipate the greatest profit.”

“They are entitled to their illusions.”

“I admire your confidence,” the NASA engineer observed from the view-

ers’ gallery over the shop floor. He also admired their funding. The govern-

ment had fronted the money for this industrial conglomerate to acquire the

Soviet design and build it. Private industry sure had a lot of muscle here,

didn’t it?

“We think we have the trans-stage problem figured out. A faulty valve,”

the Japanese designer explained. “We used a Soviet design.”

”What do you mean?”

“I mean that we used their valve design for the trans-stage fuel tanks. It

wasn’t a good one. They tried to do everything there with extremely lighl

weight, but-”

The NASA representative blinked hard. “You mean to tell me that their

whole production run of the missile was-”

A knowing look cut the American off. “Yes. At least a third of them

would have failed. My people believe that the test missiles were specially

engineered, but that the production models were, well, typically Russian.”

“Hmph.” The American’s bags were already packed, and a car was wait-

ing to take him to Narita International for the interminable flight to Chicago.

He looked at the production floor of the plant. It was probably what General

Dynamics had looked like back in the 19608, at the height of the Cold War.

The boosters were lined up like sausages, fifteen of them in various stages of

assembly, side by side, one after the other, while white-coated technicians

performed their complicated tasks. “These ten look about done.”

“They are,” the factory manager assured him.

“When’s your next test shot?”

“Next month. We’ve got our first three payloads ready,” the designer

replied.

“When you guys get into something, you don’t fool around, do you?”

“It’s simply more efficient to do it this way.”

“So they’re going to go out of here fully assembled?”

A nod. “That’s right. We’ll pressurize the fuel tanks with inert gas, of

course, but one of the nice things about using this design is that they’re de-

signed to be moved as intact units. That way you save final-assembly time at

the launch point.”

“Move them out by truck?”

“No.” The Japanese engineer shook his head. “By rail.”

“What about the payloads?”

“They’re being assembled elsewhere. That’s proprietary, I’m afraid.”

The other production line did not have foreign visitors. In fact it had few

visitors at all despite the fact that it was located in the suburbs of Tokyo. The

sign outside the building proclaimed it to be a research-and-development

center for a major corporation, and those who lived nearby guessed that it

was for computer chips or something similar. The power lines that went into

it were not remarkable, since the most power-hungry units were the heating

and air-conditioning units that sat in a small enclosure in the back. Traffic in

and out was unremarkable as well. There was a modest parking lot with

space for perhaps eighty automobiles, and the lot was almost always at least

half full. There was a discreet security fence, pretty much like what would

have been around any other light-industry facility anywhere in the world,

and a security shack at both entrances. Cars and trucks came and went, and

that was pretty much that for the casual observer.

Inside was .something else. Although the two external security points were

slal’t’cd by smiling men who politely gave directions to disoriented motorists,

inside the building it was something else entirely. Each security desk fea-

tured hidden attachments which held German-made P-38 pistols, and the

guards here didn’t smile much. They didn’t know what they were guarding,

of course. Some things were just too unusual to be recognized. No one had

ever produced a TV documentary on the fabrication of nuclear devices.

The shop floor was fifty meters long by fifteen wide, and there were two

evenly spaced rows of machine tools, each of them enclosed with Plexiglas.

Each enclosure was individually climate-controlled by a separate ventilation

system, as was the room as a whole. The technicians and scientists wore

white coveralls and gloves not unlike those required of workers in a com-

puter-chip plant, and indeed when some of them stepped outside for a

smoke, passersby took them for exactly that.

In the clean room, roughly shaped plutonium hemispheres came in at one

end, were machined into their final shapes at several stages, and emerged

from the other end so polished they looked like glass. Each was then placed

in a plastic holder and hand-carried out of the machine shop to the storage

room, where each was set on an individual shelf made of steel covered with

plastic. Metal contact could not be allowed, because plutonium, in addition

to being radioactive, and warm due to its alpha-radiation decay, was a reac-

tive metal, quick to spark on contact with another metal, and actually flam-

mable. Like magnesium and titanium, the metal would burn with gusto, and,

once ignited, was the very devil to extinguish. For all that, handling the hem-

ispheres-there were twenty of them-became just one more routine for the

engineers. That task had long since been completed.

The harder part was the RV bodies. These were large, hollow, inverted

cones, 120 centimeters in height and 50 across at the base, made of uranium-

238, a darkly reddish and very hard metal. At just over four hundred kilo-

grams each, the bulky cones had to be precisely machined for absolute

dynamic symmetry. Intended to “fly” after a fashion, both through vacuum

and, briefly, through air, they had to be perfectly balanced, lest they become

unstable in flight. Ensuring that had to everyone’s surprise turned out to be

the most difficult production task of all. The casting process had been reor-

dered twice, and even now the RV bodies were periodically rotated, similar

to the procedure for balancing an automobile tire, but with far more stringent

tolerances. The exterior of each of the ten was not as finely machined as the

parts that went inside, though they were smooth to the ungloved touch. In-

side was something else. Slight but symmetrical irregularities would allow

the “physics package”-an American term-to fit in snugly, and, if the mo-

ment came-which everyone hoped it would not, of course-the enormous

flux of high-energy “fast” neutrons would attack the RV bodies, causing a

“fast-fission” reaction, and doubling the energy released by the plutonium,

tritium, and lithium deuteride within.

That was the elegant part, the engineers thought, especially those unfamil-

iar with nuclear physics who had learned the process along the way. The

U-238, so dense and hard and difficult to work, was a highly refractory

metal. The Americans even used it to make armor for their tanks, it resisted