Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

electronic systems). He knew they had to be out there, at least one, perhaps

two American submarines-Charlotte and Asheville, his intelligence briefs

had told him-but it wasn’t the boats he feared. It was the crews. The Amer-

ican submarine force had been reduced drastically in size, but evidently not

in quality. He’d expected to detect his adversary for DATELINE PARTNERS

hours before. Perhaps, Ugaki told himself, they hadn’t even had a sniff of

him yet, but he wasn’t sure of that, and over the past thirty-six hours he’d

come fully to the realization that this was no longer a game, not since he’d

received the code phrase “Climb Mount Niitaka.” How confident he had

been a week earlier, but now he was at sea and underwater. The transition

from theory to reality was striking.

“Anything?” he asked his sonar officer, getting a headshake for an an-

swer.

Ordinarily, an American sub on an exercise like this was “augmented,”

meaning that a sound source was switched on, which increased the amount

of radiated noise she put in the water. Done to simulate the task of detecting

a Russian submarine, it was in one way arrogant and in another way very

clever of the Americans. They so rarely played against allies or even their

own forces at the level of their true capabilities that they had learned to oper-

ate under a handicap-like a runner with weighted shoes. As a result, when

they played a game without the handicap, they were formidable indeed.

Well, so am I! Ugaki told himself. Hadn’t he grown up tracking Russian

subs like the Americans? Hadn’t he gotten in close of a Russian Akula?

Patience. The true samurai is patient. This was not a task for a merchant,

after all.

“It is like tracking whales, isn’t it?” Commander Steve Kennedy observed.

“Pretty close,” Sonarman i/c Jacques Yves Laval, Jr., replied quietly,

watching his display and rubbing his ears, sweaty from the headphones.

“You feel cheated?”

“My dad got to play the real game. All I ever heard growing up, sir, was

what he could tell me about going up north and stalking the big boys on their

own turf.” Frenchy Laval was a name well known in the submarine commu-

nity, a great sonarman who had trained other great sonarmen. Now retired as

a master chief, his son carried on the tradition.

The hell of it was, tracking whales had turned out to be good training.

They were stealthy creatures, not because they sought to avoid detection, but

simply because they moved with great efficiency, and the submarines had

found that moving in close enough to count and identify the members of

individual pods or families was at least diverting if not exactly exciting. For

the sonarmen anyway, Kennedy thought. Not much for weapons depart-

ment. .. .

Laval’s eyes focused on the waterfall display. He settled more squarely

into his chair and reached for a grease pencil, tapping the third-class next to

him.

“Two-seven-zero,” he said quietly.

“Yeah.”

“What you got, Junior?” the CO asked.

“Just a sniff, sir, on the sixty-hcrt/ line.” Thirty seconds Liter: “l-irming

up.”

Kennedy stood behind the two watch-standers. There were now two dot-

ted lines, one in the sixty-hertz frequency portion of the display, another on a

higher-frequency band. The electric motors on the Japanese Harushio-class

submarine used sixty-cycle A/C electrical current. An irregular series of

dots, yellow on the dark screen, started cascading down in a column under

the “60” frequency heading like droplets falling in slow motion from a

leaky faucet, hence the appellation “waterfall display.” Junior Laval let it

grow for a few more seconds to see if it might be random and decided that it

was probably not.

“Sir, I think we might want to start a track now. Designate this contact

Sierra-One, possible submerged contact, bearing settling down on two-sev-

en-four, strength is weak.”

Kennedy relayed the information to the fire-control tracking party fifteen

feet away. Another technician activated the ray-path analyzer, a high-end

Hewlett-Packard minicomputer programmed to examine the possible paths

through the water that the identified acoustical signal might have followed.

Though widely known to exist, the high-speed software for this piece of kit

was still one of the Navy’s most closely held secrets, a product, Kennedy

remembered, of Sonosystems, a Groton-based company run by one of

Frenchy Laval’s top proteges. The computer chewed on the input data for

perhaps a thousand microseconds and displayed its reply.

“Sir, it’s direct path. My initial range estimate is between eight and

twelve thousand yards.”

“Set it up,” the approach officer told the petty officer on the fire-control

director.

“This one ain’t no humpback,” Laval reported three minutes later. “I

have three lines on the guy now, classify Sierra-One as a definite submarine

contact, operating on his electric motors.” Junior told himself that Laval

pire had made his rep stalking HEN-class Russian subs, which were about

as hard to track as an earthquake. He adjusted his headphones. “Bearing

steady at two-seven-four, getting hints of a blade rate on the guy.”

“Solution light,” the lead fire-controlman reported. “I have a valid solu-

tion for tube three on target Sierra-One.”

“Left ten-degrees rudder, come to new course one-eight-zero,” Kennedy

ordered next to get a crossbearing, from which would come a better range-

gate on the target, and also data on the sub’s course and speed. “Let’s slow

her down, turns for five knots.”

The stalk was always the fun part.

“If you do that, you’re cutting your own throat with a dull knife,” Anne

Quinlan said in her customarily direct way.

Kcalty was sitting in his office. Ordinarily the number-two man in any

organization would be in charge when number-one was away, but the mira-

cle of modern communications meant that Roger could do everything he

needed to do at midnight over Antarctica if he had to. Including putting out a

press statement from his aircraft in Moscow that he was hanging his Vice

President out to dry.

Realty’s first instinct was to proclaim to the entire world that he knew he

had the confidence of his President. That would hint broadly that the news

stories were true, and muddy the waters sufficiently to give him room to

maneuver, the thing he needed most of all.

“What we need to know, Ed,” his chief of staff pointed out, not for the

first time, “is who the hell started this.” That was the one thing the story had

left out, clever people that reporters were. She couldn’t ask him how many

of the women in his office he’d visited with his charms. For one thing he

probably didn’t remember, and for another, the hard part would be identify-

ing those he hadn’t.

“Whoever it was, it was somebody close to Lisa,” another staffer ob-

served. That insight made light bulbs flash inside every head in the office.

“Barbara.”

‘ ‘Good guess,” the ‘ ‘Chief’-which was how Quinlan liked to be identi-

fied-thought. “We need to confirm that, and we need to settle her down

some.”

“Woman scorned,” Kealty murmured.

“Ed, I don’t want to hear any of that, okay?” the Chief warned. “When

the hell are you going to learn that ‘no’ doesn’t mean ‘maybe later’? Okay,

I’ll go see Barbara myself, and maybe we can talk her out of this, but, god-

dammit, this is the last time, okay?”

I!!

“Is this where the dresser was?” Ryan asked.

“I keep forgetting how well informed you are,” Golovko observed, just

to flatter his guest, since the story was actually widely known.

Jack grinned, still feeling more than a little of Alice-through-the-Looking-

Glass. There was a completely ordinary door in the wall now, but until the

time of Yuri Andropov, a large wooden clothes cabinet had covered it, for in

the time of Beriya and the rest, the entrance to the office of Chairman of the

KGB had to be hidden. There was no door off the main corridor, and none

visible even in the anteroom. The melodrama of it had to have been absurd,

Ryan thought, even to Lavrentiy Beriya, whose morbid fear of assassina-

tion-though hardly unreasonable-had dreamed up this obtuse security

measure. It hadn’t helped him avoid death at the hands of men who’d hated

him even more than they’d feared him. Still and all, wasn’t it bizarre enough

just for the President’s National Security Advisor to enter the office of the

Chairman of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service? Beriya’s ashes must

have been stirring up somewhere, Ryan thought, in whatever sewer they’d

dropped the urn. He turned to look at his host, his mind imagining the oak

bureau still, and halfway wishing they’d kept the old name of KGB, Com-

mittee for State Security, just for tradition’s sake.

“Sergey Nikolay’ch, has the world really changed so much in the past-

God, only ten years?”

“Not even that, my friend.” Golovko waved Jack to a comfortable leather

chair that dated back to the building’s previous incarnation as home office of