Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

choice of words.”

‘ ‘Mary Pat’s the Deputy Director of Operations now?” Ryan looked up to

see the curt nod.

“She was in here a month ago to plead her case for upgrading her side of

the house. She was very persuasive. Al Trent just got the authorization

through committee yesterday.”

Jack chuckled. “Agriculture or Interior this time?” That part of CIA’s

budget was almost never in the open. The Directorate of Operations always

got part of its funding through legerdemain.

“Health and Human Services, I think.”

“But it’ll still be two or three years before-”

“I know.” Durling fidgeted in his seat. “Look, Jack, if it mattered to you

that much, then why-”

“Sir, if you’ve read through my file, you know why.” Dear God, Jack

wanted to say, how much am I expected to- But he couldn’t, not here, not to

this man, and so he didn’t. Instead he went back into the briefing book, flip-

ping pages, and read as rapidly as comprehension permitted.

‘ T know, it was a mistake to downplay the human-intelligence side of the

house. Trent and Fellows said so. Mrs. Foley said so. You can get over-

loaded in this office, Jack.”

Ryan looked up and almost smiled until he saw the President’s face. There

was a tiredness around the eyes that Durling was unable to conceal. But then

Durling saw the expression on Jack’s own face.

“When can you start?” the President of the United States asked.

The engineer was back, flipping on the lights and looking at his machine

tools. His supervisory office was almost all glass, and elevated slightly so

that he could see all the activity in the shop with no more effort than a raised

head. In a few minutes his staff would start arriving, and his presence in the

office earlier than any of the team-in a country where showing up two

hours early was the norm-would set the proper tone. The first man arrived

only Ion minutes later, hung up his coat, and headed to the far corner to start

Ihc coffee. Not lea, both men thought at the same time. Surprisingly West-

ern. The others arrived in a bunch, both resentful and envious of their col-

league, because they all noticed that the chief’s office was lit and occupied.

A lew exercised at their worktables, both to loosen themselves up and to

nhow their devotion. At start-time minus two hours, the chief walked out of

his office and called for his team to gather around for the first morning’s talk

uboul what they were doing. They all knew, of course, but they had to be told

liny way. It took ten minutes, and with that done, they all went to work. And

Ihis was not at all a strange way for a war to begin.

Dinner was elegant, served in the enormous high-ceilinged dining room to

Ihe sound of piano, violin, and the occasional ting of crystal. The table chat-

»er was ordinary, or so it seemed to Jack as he sipped his dinner wine and

worked his way through the main course. Sally and little Jack were doing

well at school, and Kathleen would turn two in another month, as she tod-

dled around the house at Peregrine Cliff, the dominating and assertive apple

of her father’s eye, and the terror of her day-care center. Robby and Sissy,

childless despite all their efforts, were surrogate aunt and uncle to the Ryan

trio, and took as much pride in the brood as Jack and Cathy did. There was a

sadness to it, Jack thought, but those were the breaks, and he wondered if

Sissy still cried about it when alone in bed, Robby off on a job somewhere.

Jack had never had a brother. Robby was closer than a brother could ever

have been, and his friend deserved better luck. And Sissy, well, she was just

an angel.

“I wonder how the office is doing.”

“Probably conjuring up a plan for the invasion of Bangladesh,” Jack

said, looking up and reentering the conversation.

“That was last week,” Jackson said with a grin.

“How do they manage without us?” Cathy wondered aloud, probably

worrying about a patient.

“Well, concert season doesn’t start for me until next month,” Sissy ob-

served.

“Mmmm,” Ryan noted, looking back down at his plate, wondering how

he was going to break the news.

“Jack, I know,” Cathy finally said. “You’re not good at hiding it.”

“Who-”

“She asked where you were,” Robby said from across the table. “A

naval officer can’t lie.”

“Did you think I’d be mad?” Cathy asked her husband.

“Yes.”

“You don’t know what he’s like,” Cathy told the others. “Every morn-

ing, gels liis paper and grumbles. Every night, catches the news and grum-

hlcs. Every Sunday, watches the interview shows and grumhles. Jack,” she

said quietly, “do you think I could ever stop doing surgery?”

“Probably not, but it’s not the same-”

“No, it’s not, but it’s the same for you. When do you start?” Caroline

Ryan asked.

1

Alumni

There was a university somewhere in the Midwest, Jack had once heard on

Ihe radio, which had an instrument package designed to go inside a tornado.

Each spring, graduate students and a professor or two staked out a likely

swath of land, and on spotting a tornado, tried to set the instrument package,

called “Toto”-what else?-directly in the path of the onrushing storm. So

far they had been unsuccessful. Perhaps they’d just picked the wrong place,

Ryan thought, looking out the window to the leafless trees in Lafayette Park.

The office of the President’s National Security Advisor was surely cyclonic

enough for anyone’s taste, and, unfortunately, much easier for people to

enter.

“You know,” Ryan said, leaning back in his chair, “it was supposed to

be a lot simpler than this.” And I thought it would be, he didn’t add.

“The world had rules before,” Scott Adler pointed out. “Now it

doesn’t.”

“How’s the President been doing, Scott?”

“You really want the truth?” Adler asked, meaning, We are in the White

House, remember? and wondering if there really were tape machines cover-

ing this room. “We screwed up the Korean situation, but we lucked out.

Thank God we didn’t screw up Yugoslavia that badly, because there just

isn’t any luck to be had in that place. We haven’t been handling Russia very

well. The whole continent of Africa’s a dog’s breakfast. About the only

thing we’ve done right lately was the trade treaty-”

“And that doesn’t include Japan and China,” Ryan finished for him.

“Hey, you and I fixed the Middle East, remember? That’s working out

fairly nicely.”

TOM ( I. A N( Y

“Holiest spot right now?” Ryan didn’t want praise for that. The “suc-

cess” had developed some very adverse consequences, and was the prime

reason he had left government service.

“Take your pick,” Adler suggested. Ryan grunted agreement.

“SecState?”

“Hanson? Politician,” replied the career foreign-service officer. And a

proud one at that, Jack reminded himself. Adler had started off at State right

after graduating number one in his Fletcher School class, then worked his

way up the career ladder through all the drudgery and internal politics that

had together claimed his first wife’s love and a good deal of his hair. It had to

be love of country that kept him going, Jack knew. The son of an Auschwitz

survivor, Adler cared about America in a way that few could duplicate. Bet-

ter still, his love was not blind, even now that his current position was politi-

cal and not a career rank. Like Ryan, he served at the pleasure of the

President, and still he’d had the character to answer Jack’s questions hon-

estly.

“Worse than that,” Ryan went on for him. “He’s a lawyer. They always

get in the way.”

“The usual prejudice,” Adler observed with a smile, then applied some

of his own analytical ability. “You have something running, don’t you?”

Ryan nodded. “A score to settle. I have two good guys on it now.”

The task combined oil-drilling and mining, to be followed by exquisitely

line finishing work, and it had to be performed on time. The rough holes

were almost complete. It had not been easy drilling straight down into the

basallic living rock on the valley even one time, much less ten, each one of

the holes fully forty meters deep and ten across. A crew of nine hundred men

working in three rotating shifts had actually beaten the official schedule by

two weeks, despite the precautions. Six kilometers of rail had been laid from

the nearest Shin-Kansen line, and for every inch of it the catenary towers

normally erected to carry the overhead electrical lines instead were the sup-

ports for four linear miles of camouflage netting.

The geological history of this Japanese valley must have been interesting,

the construction superintendent thought. You didn’t see the sun until an hour

or more after it rose, the slope was so steep to the east. No wonder that previ-