Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

did, and that was that. Then it was time to go to work.

Hollywood to the contrary, it was a highly unusual accident. Automobiles

did not routinely turn into fireballs under any circumstances, and this one,

his trained eyes saw at once, should not have been all that serious. Okay,

there was one unavoidable fatality from the crash itself, the girl in the death

seat of the first Cresta, who’d been nearly decapitated. But not the rest, there

was no obvious reason for them. The first Cresta had rear-ended the truck at

… forty or fifty miles of differential speed. Both air bags had deployed, and

one of them ought to have saved the driver of the first car, he saw. The sec-

ond car had hit at about a thirty-degree angle to the first. Damned fool of a

cop to make a mistake like that, Nicholson thought. But the wife hadn’t been

belted in … maybe she’d been attending to the kids in the back and dis-

tracted her husband. Such things happened, and nobody could undo it now.

Of the six victims, one had been killed by collision, and the other five by

fire. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Cars were not supposed to burn, and

so Nicholson had his people reactivate a crossover half a mile back on the

Interstate so that the three accident vehicles could remain in place for a

while. He got on his car radio to order up additional accident investigators

from Nashville, and to recommend notifying the local office of the National

Transportation Safety Board. As it happened, one of the local employees of

that federal agency lived close to Oak Ridge. The engineer, Rebecca Upton,

was on the scene thirty minutes after receiving her call. A mechanical engi-

neer and graduate of the nearby University of Tennessee, who’d been study-

ing this morning for her PE exam, she donned her brand-new official

coveralls and started crawling around the wreckage while the tow-truck op-

erators waited impatiently, even before the backup police team arrived from

Nashville. Twenty-four, petite, and red-haired, she came out from under the

once-red Cresta with her freckled skin smudged, and her green eyes teary

from the lingering gasoline fumes. Sergeant Nicholson handed over a Styro-

foam cup of coffee that he’d gotten from a fireman.

“What do you think, ma’am?” Nicholson asked, wondering if she knew

anything. She looked like she did, he thought, and she wasn’t afraid to get

her clothes dirty, a hopeful sign.

“Both gas tanks.” She pointed. “That one was sheared clean off. The

other one was crumpled by the impact and failed. How fast was it?”

“The collision, you mean?” Nicholson shook his head. “Not that fast.

Ballpark guess, forty to fifty.”

“I think you’re right. The gas tanks have structural-integrity standards,

and this crash shouldn’t have exceeded them.” She took the proffered hand-

kerchief and wiped her face.’ ‘Thanks, Sergeant.” She sipped her coffee and

looked back at the wrecks, wondering.

” What are you thinking?”

Ms. Upton turned back. “I’m thinking that six people-”

“Five,” Nicholson corrected. “The trucker got one kid out.”

“Oh-I didn’t know. Shouldn’t have happened. No good reason for it. It

was an under-sixty impact, nothing really unusual about the physical factors.

Smart money is there’s something wrong with the car design. Where are you

taking them?” she asked, feeling very professional now.

“The cars? Nashville. I can hold them at headquarters if you want,

ma’am.”

She nodded. “Okay, I’ll call my boss. We’re probably going to make this

a federal investigation. Will your people have any problem with that?”

She’d never done that before, but knew from her manual that she had the

authority to initiate a full NTSB inquiry. Most often known for handling the

analysis of aircraft accidents, the National Transportation Safety Board also

looked into unusual train and vehicle mishaps and had the authority to re-

quire cooperation of every federal agency in the pursuit of hard data.

Nicholson had participated in one similar investigation. He shook his

head. “Ma’am, my captain will give you all the cooperation you can han-

dle.”

‘ ‘Thank you.” Rebecca Upton almost smiled, but this wasn’t the place for

it. “Where are the survivors? We’ll have to interview them.”

‘ ‘Ambulance took them back to Knoxville. Just a guess, but they probably

air-lifted them to Shriners’.” That hospital, he knew, had a superb burn unit.

“You need anything else, ma’am? We have a highway to clear.”

“Please be careful with the cars, we-”

“We’ll treat it like criminal evidence, ma’am,” Sergeant Nicholson as-

sured the bright little girl, with a fatherly smile.

All in all, Ms. Upton thought, not a bad day. Tough luck for the occupants

of the cars-that went without saying, and the reality and horror of their

deaths were not lost on her-bul this was her job, and her first really worth-

while assignment since joining the Department of Transportation. She

walked back to her car, a Nissan hatchback, and stripped oil her coveralls,

donning in their place her NTSB windbreaker. It wasn’t especially warm,

but for the first time in her government career, she felt as though she were

really part of an important team, doing an important job, and she wanted the

whole world to know who she was and what she was doing.

“Hi.” Upton turned to see the smiling face of a TV reporter.

“What do you want?” she asked briskly, having decided to act very busi-

nesslike and official.

“Anything you can tell us?” He held the microphone low, and his cam-

eraman, while nearby, wasn’t turning tape at the moment.

“Only off the record,” Becky Upton said after a second’s reflection.

“Fair enough.”

“Both gas tanks failed. That’s what killed those people.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Very.” She paused. “There’s going to be an NTSB investigation.

There’s no good reason for this to have happened. Okay?”

“You bet.” Wright checked his watch. In another ten minutes he’d be

live on satellite again, and this time he’d have something new to say, which

was always good. The reporter walked away, head down, composing his

new remarks for his global audience. What a great development: the Na-

tional Transportation Safety Board was going to investigate the Motor Trend

Car of the Year for a potentially lethal safety defect. No good reason for

these people to have died. He wondered if his cameraman could get close

enough now to see the charred, empty child seats in the back of the other car.

Good stuff.

Ed and Mary Patricia Foley were in their top-floor office at CIA headquar-

ters. Their unusual status had made for some architectural and organiza-

tional problems at the Agency. Mary Pat was the one with the title of Deputy

Director (Operations), the first female to make that rank in America’s lead

spy agency. An experienced field officer who had worked her country’s best

and longest-lived agent-in-place, she was the cowboy half of the best hus-

band-wife team CIA had ever fielded. Her husband, Ed, was less flashy but

more careful as a planner. Their respective talents in tactics and strategy

were highly complementary, and though Mary Pat had won the top job,

she’d immediately done away with her need for an executive assistant, put-

ting Ed in that office and making him her equal in real terms, if not bureau-

cratic ones. A new doorway had been cut in the wall so that he could stroll in

without passing the executive secretary in the anteroom, and together they

managed CIA’s diminished collection of case officers. The working rela-

tionship was as close as their marriage, with all the compromises that at-

tended the latter, and the result was the smoothest leadership of the Director-

ate of Operations in years.

“We need to pick a name, honey.”

“How about FIREMAN?”

“Not FlREFlGHTER 1”

A smile. “They’re both men.”

“Well, Lyalin says they’re doing fine on linguistics.”

‘ ‘Good enough to order lunch and find the bathroom.” Mastering the Jap-

anese language was not a trivial intellectual challenge. “How much you

want to bet they’re speaking it with a Russian accent?”

A light bulb went off in both their minds at about the same time. “Cover

identities?”

“Yeah . . .” Mary Pat almost laughed. “Do you suppose anyone will

mind?”

It was illegal for CIA officers to adopt the cover identity of journalists.

American journalists, that is. The rule had recently been redrafted, at Ed’s

urging, to point out that quite a few of the agents his officers recruited were

third-world journalists. Since both the officers assigned to the operation

spoke excellent Russian, they could easily be covered as Russian journalists,

couldn’t they? It was a violation of the spirit of the rule, but not the letter; Ed

Foley had his cowboy moments too.

“Oh, yeah,” said Mary Pat. “Clark wants to know if we would like him

to take a swing at reactivating THISTLE.”

“We need to talk to Ryan or the President about that,” Ed pointed out,