Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

sponded to at least fifty minor traffic accidents and two major ones, but

mainly he regretted not having gotten the new Cresta to the car wash the

previous night. The bright paint was streaked with salt, and he was glad the

car came with underbody coating as a “standard option,” because his vener-

able old pickup truck didn’t have that, and it was corroding down to junk

even as it sat still in their driveway. Beyond that, it seemed a competent little

car. A few inches more leg room would have been nice, but it was her car,

not his, and she didn’t really need the room. The automobile was lighter than

his police radio car, and had only half the engine power. That made for

somewhat increased vibration, largely dampened out by the rubberized en-

gine mounts but still there. Well, he told himself, that helped the kids to

clonk out.

They must have had even more snow here, he saw. Rock salt had ac-

cumulated in the center of his lane like a path of sand or something. Shame

they had to use so much. Really tore up the cars. But not his, Denton was

sure, having read through all the specifications before deciding to surprise

Candy with her red Cresta.

The mountains that cut diagonally across this part of America are called the

Clrcat Smokies, a name applied, according to local lore, by Dan’1 Boone

himself. Actually part of a single range that ran from Georgia to Maine and

beyond, changing local names almost as often as it changed states, in this

urea humidity from the numerous lakes and streams combined with atmo-

spheric conditions to generate fog that occurred on a year-round basis.

Will Snyder of Pilot Lines was on overtime, a profitable situation for the

union driver. The Fruehauf trailer attached to his Kenworth diesel tractor

was filled with rolls of carpeting from a North Carolina mill en route to a

distributorship in Memphis for a major sale. An experienced driver, Snyder

was perfectly happy to be out on a Saturday, since the pay was better, and

besides, football season was over and the grass wasn’t growing yet. He fully

expected to be home for dinner in any case. Best of all, the roads were fairly

clear during this winter weekend, and he was making good time, the driver

told himself, negotiating a sweeping turn to the right and down into a valley.

“Uh-oh,” he murmured to himself. It was not unusual to see fog here,

close to the State Route 95 North exit, the one that headed off to the bomb

people at Oak Ridge. There were a couple of trouble spots on 1-40, and this

was one. “Damned fog.”

There were two ways to deal with this. Some braked down slowly for fuel

economy, or maybe just because they didn’t like going slow. Not Snyder. A

professional driver who saw major wrecks on the side of the highway every

week, he slowed down immediately, even before visibility dropped below a

hundred yards. His big rig took its time stopping, and he knew a driver

who’d converted some little Japanese roller-skate into tinfoil, along with its

elderly driver, and his time wasn’t worth the risk, not at time-and-a-half it

wasn’t. Smoothly downshifting, he did what he knew to be the smartest

thing, and just to be sure, flipped on his running lights.

Pierce Denton turned his head in annoyance. It was another Cresta, the

sporty CQQ version that they made only in Japan so far, this one black with a

red stripe down the side that whizzed past, at eighty or a little over, his

trained eye estimated. In Greeneville that would have been a hundred-dollar

ticket and a stern lecture from Judge Tom Anders. Where had those two kids

come from? He hadn’t even noticed their approach in his mirror. Temporary

tag. Two young girls, probably one had just got her license and her new car

from Daddy to go with it and was taking her friend oul to demonstrate what

real freedom was in America, Officer Denton thought, freedom to be a

damned fool and get a ticket your first day on the road. But this wasn’t his

jurisdiction, and that was a job for the state boys. Typical, he thought with a

shake of the head. Chattering away, hardly watching the road, but it was

better to have them in front than behind.

“Lord,” Snyder breathed. Locals, he’d heard in a truck stop once, blamed it

on the “crazy people” at Oak Ridge. Whatever the reason, visibility had

dropped almost instantly to a mere thirty feet. Not good. He flipped his run-

ning lights to the emergency-blinker setting and slowed down more. He’d

never done the calculation, but at this weight his tractor-trailer rig needed

over sixty feet to stop from thirty miles per hour, and that was on a dry road,

which this one was not. On the other hand… no, he decided, no chances. He

lowered his speed to twenty. So it cost him half an hour. Pilots knew about

this stretch of 1-40, and they always said it was better to pay the time than to

pay off the insurance deductible. With everything in hand, the driver keyed

his CB radio to broadcast a warning to his fellow truckers.

It was like being inside a Ping-Pong ball, he told them over Channel 19,

and his senses were fully alert, staring ahead into a white mass of water

vapor when the hazard was approaching from the rear.

The fog caught them entirely by surprise. Denton’s guess had been a correct

one. Nora Dunn was exactly eight days past her sixteenth birthday, three

days past getting her temporary permit, and forty-nine miles into her sporty

new C99- First of all she’d selected a wide, nice piece of road to see how fast

it would go, because she was young and her friend Amy Rice had asked.

With the compact-disc player going full blast, and trading observations on

various male school chums, Nora was hardly watching the road at all, be-

cause, after all, it wasn’t all that hard to keep a car between the solid line to

the right and the dashy one to the left, was it, and besides, there wasn’t any-

body in the mirror to worry about, and having a car was far better than a date

with a new boy, because they always had to drive anyway, for some reason

or other, as though a grown woman couldn’t handle a car herself.

The look on her face was somewhat startled when visibility went down to

not very much-Nora couldn’t estimate the exact distance-and she took

her foot off the accelerator pedal, allowing the car to slow down from the

previous cruising speed of eighty-four. The road behind was clear, and

surely the road ahead would be, too. Her driving teachers had told her every-

thing she needed to know, but as with the lessons of all her other teachers,

some she’d heard and some she had not. The important ones would come

with experience. Experience, however, was a teacher with whom she was

nnl yet fully acquainted, and whose grading curve was far too steep for the

moment al hand.

She did see the running lights on the Fruehauf trailer, but she was new to

llio road, and the amber spots might have been streetlights, except that most

interstate highways didn’t have them, a fact she hadn’t been driving long

enough to learn. It was scarcely a second’s additional warning in any case.

Hy the time she saw the gray, square shadow, it was simply too late, and her

s|xrcd was only down to sixty-five. With the tractor-trailer’s speed at twenty,

il was roughly the equivalent of hitting a thirty-ton stationary object at forty-

live miles per hour.

It was always a sickening sound. Will Snyder had heard it before, and it

reminded him of a truckload of aluminum beer cans being crunched in a

compressor, the decidedly unmusical crump of a car body’s being crushed

by speed and mass and laws of physics that he’d learned not in high school

hut rather by experience.

The jolt to the left-rear corner of the trailer slewed the front end of the

forty-foot van body to the right, but fortunately, his low speed allowed him

to maintain control enough to get his rig stopped quickly. Looking back and

to his left, he saw the remains of that cute new Jap car that his brother wanted

to get, and Snyder’s first ill-considered thought was that they were just too

damned small to be safe, as though it would have mattered under the circum-

stances. The center- and right-front were shredded, and the frame was

clearly bent. A blink and further inspection showed red where clear glass

was supposed to be …

“Oh, my God.”

Amy Rice was already dead, despite the flawless performance of her passen-

ger-side air bag. The speed of the collision had driven her side of the car