Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

dent. Every morning he sat through thirty or forty minutes of reports from

the government’s various security agencies, and then presented the data in

the Oval Office. This morning he’d told his boss, again, that there was noth-

ing all that troubling on the horizon.

“SANDALWOOD,” she said for his opening.

“What about it?” Jack asked, leaning back in his chair.

“I had an idea and ran with it.”

“What’s that?” the National Security Advisor asked.

“I told Clark and Chavez to reactivate THISTLE, Lyalin’s old net in

Japan.”

Ryan blinked. “You’re telling me that nobody ever-”

“He was doing mainly commercial stuff, and we have that Executive

Order, remember?”

Jack suppressed a grumble. THISTLE had served America once, and not

through commercial espionage. “Okay, so what’s happening?”

‘ ‘This.” Mrs. Foley handed over a single printed page, about five hundred

single-spaced words once you got past the cover sheet.

Ryan looked up from the first paragraph. ” ‘Genuine panic in MITF?”

‘ ‘That’s what the man says. Keep going.” Jack picked up a pen, chewing

on it.

“Okay, what else?”

“Their government’s going to fall, sure as hell. While Clark was talking

to this guy, Chavez was talking to another. State ought to pick up on this in

another day or so, but it looks like we got it first for a change.”

Jack sat forward at that point. It wasn’t that much of a surprise. Brett Han-

son had warned about this possibility. The State Department was, in fact, the

only government agency that was leery of the TRA, though its concerns had

stayed within the family, as it were.

“There’s more?”

“Well, yeah, there is. We’ve turned up the missing girl, all right. It ap-

pears to be Kimberly Norton, and sure enough, she’s the one involved with

Goto, and he’s going to be the next PM,” she concluded with a smile.

It wasn’t really very funny, of course, though that depended on your per-

spective, didn’t it? America now had something to use on Goto, and Goto

looked to be the next Prime Minister. It wasn’t an entirely bad thing. .. .

“Keep talking,” Ryan ordered.

“We have the choice of offering her a freebie home, or we could

“MP, the answer to that is no.” Ryan closed his eyes. He’d been thinking

about this one. Before, he’d been the one to take the detached view, but he

had seen a photograph of the girl, and though he’d tried briefly to retain his

detachment, it had lasted only as long as it took to return home and look at

his own children. Perhaps it was a weakness, his inability to contemplate the

use of people’s lives in the furtherance of his country’s goals. If so, it was a

weakness that his conscience would allow him. Besides: “Does anybody

think she can act like a trained spook? Christ’s sake, she’s a messed-up girl

who skipped away from home because she was getting crummy grades at

her school.”

“Jack, it’s my job to float options, remember?” Every government in the

world did it, of course, even America, even in these advanced feminist

times. They were nice girls, everyone said, usually bright ones, government

secretaries, many of them, who were managed through the Secret Service of

all places, and made good money serving their government. Ryan had no

official knowledge whatever of the operation, and wanted to keep it that

way. Had he acquired official knowledge and not spoken out against it, then

what sort of man would he be? So many people assumed that high govern-

ment officials were just moral robots who did the things they had to do for

their country without self-doubts, untroubled by conscience. Perhaps it had

been true once-possibly it still was for many-but this was a different

world, and Jack Ryan was the son of a police officer.

“You’re the one who said it first, remember? That girl is an American

citizen who probably needs a little help. Let’s not turn into something we are

not, okay? It’s Clark and Chavez on this one?”

“Correct.”

‘ ‘I think we should be careful about it, but to offer the girl a ticket home. If

she says no, then maybe we can consider something else, but no screwing

around on this one. She gets a fair offer of a ride home.” Ryan looked down

at Clark’s brief report and read it more carefully. Had it come from someone

else, he would not have taken it so seriously, but he knew John Clark, had

taken the time to learn everything about him. It would someday make for an

enjoyable conversation.

“I’m going to keep this. I think maybe the President needs to read it,

too.”

“Concur,” the DDO replied.

“Anything else like this comes in …”

“You’ll know,” Mary Pat promised.

“Good idea on THISTLE.”

“I want Clark to-well, to press maybe a little harder, and see if we de-

velop similar opinions.”

“Approved,” Ryan said at once. “Push as hard as you want.”

Yamata’s personal jet was an old Gulfstream G-IV. Though fitted with aux-

iliary fuel tanks, it could not ordinarily nonstop the 6,740-mile hop from

Tokyo to New York. Today was different, his pilot told him. The jet stream

over the North Pacific was fully one hundred ninety knots, and they’d have it

for several hours. That boosted their ground speed to 782 miles per hour. It

would knock two full hours off the normal flight time.

Yamata was glad. The time was important. None of what he had in his

mind was written down, so there were no plans to go over. Though weary

from long days that had of late stretched into longer weeks, he found that his

body was unable to rest. A voracious reader, he could not get interested in

any of the material that he kept on his aircraft. He was alone; there was no

one with whom to speak. There was nothing at all to do, and it seemed

strange to Yamata. His G-IV cruised at forty-one thousand feet, and it was a

clear morning below him. He could see the surface of the North Pacific

clearly, the endless ranks of waves, some of their crests decorated with

white, driven by high surface winds. The immortal sea. For almost all of his

life, it had been an American lake, dominated by their navy. Did the sea

know that? Did the sea know that it would change?

Change. Yamata grunted to himself. It would start within hours of his ar-

rival in New York.

“This is Bud on final. I have the ball with eight thousand pounds of fuel,”

Captain Sanchez announced over his radio circuit. As commander of the air

wing for USS John Stennis (CVN-74), his F/A-i8F would be the first

aboard. Strangely, though the most senior aviator aboard, he was new to the

Hornet, having spent all of his career in the F-I4 Tomcat. Lighter and more

agile, and finally with enough fuel capacity to do more than take off, circle

the deck once, and return (so it often seemed), he found himself liking the

chance to fly alone for a change, after a whole career spent in two-seat air-

craft. Maybe the Air Force pukes had a good idea after all. . . .

Ahead of him, on the huge flight deck of the new carrier, enlisted men

made the proper tension adjustments on the arrester wires, took the empty

weight of his attack fighter, and added the fuel amount he’d called in. It had

to be done every time. Huge flight deck, he thought, half a mile out. For

those standing on the deck it looked huge enough, but for Sanchez it increas-

ingly looked like a matchbook. He cleared his mind of the thought, concen-

trating on his task. The Hornet buffeted a little coming through the burble of

disturbed air caused by the carrier’s massive “island” structure, but the

pilot’s eyes were locked on the ‘ ‘meatball,” a red light reflected off a mirror,

keeping it nicely centered. Some called Sanchez “Mister Machine,” for of

his sixteen hundred-odd carrier landings-you logged every one loss than

fifty had failed to catch the optimum number-three wire.

Cicntly, gently, he told himself, easing the stick back with his right hand

while the left worked the throttles, watching his sink rate, and . . . yes. He

could feel the fighter jerk from catching the wire-number three, he was

sure-and slow itself, even though the rush to the edge of the angled deck

seemed sure to dump him over the side. The aircraft stopped, seemingly

inches from the line where black-topped steel fell off to blue water. Really, it

was closer to a hundred feet. Sanchez disengaged his tail hook, and allowed

the wire to snake back to its proper place. A deck crewman started waving at

him, telling him how to get to where he was supposed to go, and the expen-

sive jet aircraft turned into a particularly ungainly land vehicle on the