Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

how demagogues do their thing. A woman directed it, and it reminded

me-”

“Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl,” Clark said. “Yeah, it’s a clas-

sic, all right. By the way, you need a haircut.”

“Huh?”

The training was really paying off, Major Sato knew without looking. On

command, all four of the F-I5 Eagles tripped their brakes and surged for-

ward along the runway at Misawa. They’d flown more than three hundred

hours in the past twelve months, a third of that in the past two alone, and now

the pilots could risk a formation takeoff that would do an aerial-demonstra-

tion team proud. Except his flight of four was not the local version of the

Blue Angels. They were members of the Third Air Wing. Sato had to con-

centrate, of course, to watch the airspeed indicator in his heads-up display

before rotating the aircraft off the concrete. Gear came up on his command,

and he knew without looking that his wingman was no more than four me-

ters off his tip. It was dangerous to do it this way, but it was also good for

morale. It thrilled the ground crew as much as it impressed the curious driv-

ing by on the highway. A thousand feet off the ground, wheels and flaps up,

accelerating through four hundred knots, he allowed himself a turn of the

head both ways. Sure enough. It was a clear day, the cold air devoid of hu-

midity, still lit by the late-afternoon sun. Sato could see the southernmost

Kuriles to his north, once part of his country, stolen by the Russians at the

end of the Second World War, and ruggedly mountainous, like Hokkaido,

the northernmost of the Home Islands … One thing at a time, the Major told

himself.

“Come right,” he ordered over the radio circuit, bringing the flight to a

new course of zero-five-five. They were still climbing, gradually, to save

fuel for the exercise.

It was hard to believe that this aircraft design was almost thirty years old.

But that was just the shape and the concept. Since the American engineers at

McDonnell-Douglas had dreamed it all up, the improvements had been such

as to transform everything but the silhouette. Almost everything on Sato’s

personal bird was Japanese-made, even the engines. Especially the electron-

ics.

There was a steady stream of aircraft in both directions, nearly all of them

commercial wide-bodies carrying businessmen to or from Japan, from or to

North America, on a well-defined commercial routing that traced down the

Kurile chain, past the Kamchatka Peninsula, then on to the Aleutians. If any-

one wondered how important his country was, Salo thought in tin- privacy of

his cockpit, this was it. The low-angle sun reflected oil the aluminum tail

fins of numerous aircraft, and from his current altitude of thirty -seven thou-

sand feet he could see them lined up-like cars on a highway, it seemed,

yellow dots preceding white trails of vapor that stretched off into infinity.

Then it was time to go to work.

The flight of four split into separated pairs left and right of the airliner

track. The training mission for the evening was not complex, but vital none-

theless. Behind them, over a hundred miles to the southwest, an airborne

early-warning aircraft was assuming its station just off the northeastern tip

of Honshu. That was an £-767. Based on the twin-engine Boeing airliner (as

the American E-3A was based on the far older 707 airframe), a rotating

dome sat atop the converted wide-body. Just as his F-isJ was an improved

local version of an American fighter plane, so the £-767 was a vastly im-

proved Japanese interpretation of another American invention. They’d never

learn, Sato thought, his eyes scanning the horizon every few seconds before

returning to the forward visual display. They’d invented so much, then given

the unfulfilled rights to his countrymen for further perfection. In fact the

Americans had played the same game with the Russians, improving every

military weapon the latter had ever made, but in their arrogance ignoring the

possibility that someone could do the same with their own magical systems.

The radar on the £-767 was like nothing aloft. For that reason, the radar on

the nose of his Eagle was switched off.

Simple in concept, the overall system was murderously complex in execu-

tion. The fighters had to know their precise position in three dimensions, and

so did the AEW bird supporting them. Beyond that, radar pulses from the

8-767 were precisely timed. The result was mere mathematics. Knowing the

position of the transmitter, and their own position, the Eagles could then re-

ceive the radar reflections and plot the blips as though the data were gener-

ated by their own onboard radar systems. A meld of Soviet-developed

bi-static radars and American airborne-radar technology, this system took

the idea one step further. The AEW radar was frequency-agile, able to

switch instantly from a longwave search mode to a shortwave fire-control

mode, and it could actually guide air-to-air missiles fired by the fighters. The

radar was also of sufficient size and power that it could, everyone thought,

defeat stealth technology.

In only a few minutes it was clear that the system worked. The four air-to-

air missiles on his wings were dummies, with no rocket motors. The seeker-

heads were real, however, and onboard instruments showed that the missiles

were tracking inbound and outbound airliners even more clearly than they

would have done from the Eagle’s own radar. It was a first, a genuinely new

piece of military technology. Only a few years earlier, Japan would probably

have offered it for sale, almost certainly to America, because this sort of

thing had value beyond gold. But the world had changed, and the Americans

would probably have not seen the point in spending the money Cor it. Be-

sides, Japan wasn’t about to sell this to anyone. Not now, Sato thought. Es-

pecially not now.

Their hotel was not necessarily an especially good one. Though it catered to

foreign visitors, the management recognized that not all gaijin were

wealthy. The rooms were small, the corridors narrow, the ceilings low, and a

breakfast of a glass of juice, a cup of coffee, and one croissant cost only fifty

dollars instead of the hundred or so charged elsewhere. As the saying in the

U.S. government went, Clark and Chavez were “living off the economy,”

frugally, as Russians would have to do. It wasn’t all that great a hardship.

Crowded and intense as Japan was, it was still far more comfortable than

Africa had been, and the food, while strange, was exotic and interesting

enough that the novelty hadn’t quite worn off yet. Ding might have grumped

about the desire for a burger, but to say such a thing, even in Russian, would

have broken cover. Returning after an eventful day, Clark inserted the key

card in the slot on the door and twisted the knob. He didn’t even stop when

he felt and removed the small piece of tape on the inside surface of the knob.

Inside, he merely held it up to show Ding, then headed to the bathroom to

flush it away.

Chavez looked around the room, wondering if it was bugged, wondering

if this spook stuff was all it was cracked up to be. It certainly seemed so

mysterious. The tape on the doorknob. Somebody wanted a meet. Nomuri. It

had to be him. The fieldcraft was clever, Chavez told himself. Whoever had

left the marker had just walked down the corridor, and his hand had probably

just tapped the knob, a gesture that even a careful observer might have

missed. Well, that was the idea.

“I’m going to head out for a drink,” “Klerk” announced in Russian. /’//

see what’s up.

” Vanya, you do too much of that.” Fine. It was his regular routine in any

case.

“Some Russian you are,” Clark said for the microphones, if any, as he

went out the door.

How the hell, Chavez wondered, am I supposed to get any studying done?

He’d been forced to leave his books in Korea-they were all in English, of

course. He couldn’t take notes or go over things. If I have to lose time on my

master’s, Ding thought, I’m going to ask the Agency to reimburse me for the

blown courses.

The bar, half a block away, was most agreeable. The room was dark. The

booths were small and separated by solid partitions, and a mirror behind the

ranks of liquor bottles made countersurveillance easy. Better yet, the bar-

slools were almost all taken, which forced him to look elsewhere alter a

show of disappointment. Clark strolled all the way to (he back. Nnmuri was

waiting.

“Taking chances, aren’t we?” John said over the music. A waitress came

up. He ordered a vodka, neat, specifying a local one to save money.

“Orders from home,” Nomuri told him. He stood without another word,