Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

supposed a fighting sailor did.

Aboard Snoopy One, an EA-6B Prowler, the flight crew monitored all radar

and radio frequencies. They found and identified six commercial-type

search radars, none of them close to the known location of the Japanese for-

mation. They weren’t making it much of a contest, everyone thought. Nor-

mally these games were a lot more fun.

The captain of the port at Tanapag harbor looked out from his office to see a

large car-carrier working her way around the southern tip of Managaha Is-

land. That was a surprise. He ruffled through the papers on his desk to see

where the telex was to warn him of her arrival. Oh, yes, there. It must have

come in during the night. MV Orchid Ace out of Yokohama. Cargo of

Toyota Land Cruisers diverted for sale to the local Japanese landowners.

Probably a ship that had been scheduled for transit to America. So now the

cars would come here and clog the local roads some more. He grumped and

lifted his binoculars to give her a look and saw to his surprise another lump

on the horizon, large and boxy. Another car carrier? That was odd.

Snoopy One held position and altitude, just under the visual horizon from

the “enemy” formation, about one hundred miles away. The electronic war-

riors in the two backseats had their hands ready on the power switches for

the onboard jammers, but the Japanese didn’t have any of their radars up,

and there was nothing to jam. The pilot allowed herself a look to the south-

east and saw a few flashes, yellow glints off the gold-impregnated canopies

of the inbound Alpha Strike, which was now angling down to the deck to

stay out of radar coverage as long as possible before popping up to loose

their first “salvo” of administrative missiles.

“Tango, tango, tango,” Commander Steve Kennedy said into the gertrude,

giving the code word for a theoretical or “administrative” torpedo launch.

He’d held contact with the Harushio-class for nine hours, taking the time to

get acquainted with the contact, and to get his crew used to something more

demanding than getting heartbeats on a pregnant humpback. Finally bored

with the game, it was time to light up the underwater telephone and, he was

sure, scare the bejeebers out of Sierra-One after giving him ample time to

counterdetect. He didn’t want anyone to say later that he hadn’t given the

other guy a fair break. Not that this sort of thing was supposed to be fair, but

Japan and America were friends, despite the news stuff they’ll IXTII

on the radio for the past few weeks.

“Took his time,” Commander Ugaki said. They’d tracked the American

688 for almost forty minutes. So they were good, but not thai good, ll had

been so hard for them to detect Kurushio that they’d made their attack as

soon as they had a track, and, Ugaki thought, he’d let them have their first

shot. So. The CO looked at his own fire-control director and the four red

solution lights.

He lifted his own gertrude phone to reply in a voice full of good-natured

surprise: “Where did you come from?”

Those crewmen who were in earshot-every man aboard spoke good En-

glish-were surprised at the captain’s announcement. Ugaki saw the looks.

He would brief them in later.

“Didn’t even ‘tango’ back. I guess he wasn’t at GQ.” Kennedy keyed the

phone again. “As per exercise instructions, we will now pull off and turn

on our augmenter.” On his command, USS Asheville turned right and in-

creased speed to twenty knots. She’d pull away to twenty thousand yards

to restart the exercise, giving the “enemy” a better chance at useful train-

ing.

“Conn, sonar.”

“Conn, aye.”

“New contact, designate Sierra-Five, bearing two-eight-zero, twin-screw

diesel surface ship, type unknown. Blade rate indicates about eighteen

knots,” SM/ic Junior Laval announced.

“No classification?”

“Sounds a little, well, little, Cap’n, not the big boomin’ sounds of a large

merchantman.”

“Very well, we’ll run a track. Keep me posted.”

“Sonar, aye.”

It was just too easy, Sanchez thought. The Enterprise group was probably

having a tougher time with their Kongo-class DDGs up north. He was not

pressing it, but holding his extended flight of four at three hundred feet

above the calm surface, at a speed of just four hundred knots. Each of the

four fighter-attack aircraft of Slugger Flight carried four exercise Harpoon

missiles, as did the four trailing in Mauler. He checked his heads-up display

for location. Data loaded into his computer only an hour before gave him a

probable location for the formation, and his GPS navigation system had

brought him right to the programmed place. It was time to check to see how

accurate their operational intelligence was.

“Mauler, this is lead, popping up-now!” Sanchez pulled back easily on

the stick. “Going active-now!” With the second command he flipped on

his search radar.

There they were, big as hell on the display. Sanchez selected the lead ship

in the formation and spun up the seeker heads in the otherwise inert missiles

hanging from his wings. He got four ready lights. “This is Slugger-Lead.

Launch launch launch! Rippling four vampires.”

“Two, launching four.”

“Three, launch four.”

“Four, launching three, one abort on the rail.” About par for the course,

Sanchez thought, framing a remark for his wing maintenance officer.

In a real attack the aircraft would have angled back down to the surface

after firing their missiles so as not to expose themselves. For the purposes of

the exercise they descended to two hundred feet and kept heading in to simu-

late their own missiles. Onboard recorders would take down the radar and

tracking data from the Japanese ships in order to evaluate their performance,

which so far was not impressive.

Faced with the irksome necessity of allowing women to fly in real combat

squadrons off real carriers, the initial compromise had been to put them in

electronic-warfare aircraft, hence the Navy’s first female squadron com-

mander was Commander Roberta Peach of VAQ-I37, “The Rooks.” The

most senior female carrier aviator, she deemed it her greatest good fortune

that another naval aviator, female, already had the call sign “Peaches,”

which allowed her to settle on “Robber,” a name she insisted on in the air.

‘ ‘Getting signals now, Robber,” the lead EWO in the back of her Prowler

reported. “Lots of sets lighting off.”

“Shut ’em back down,” she ordered curtly.

“Sure are a lot of ’em . . . targeting a Harm on an SPG-si. Tracking and

ready.”

“Launching now,” Robber said. Shooting was her prerogative as aircraft

commander. As long as the SPG-5I missile-illumination radar was up and

radiating, the Harm antiradar missile was virtually guaranteed to hit.

Sanchez could see the ships now, gray shapes on the visual horizon. An un-

pleasant screech in his headphones told him that he was being illuminated

with both search and fire-control radar, never a happy bit of news even in an

exercise, all the more so that the “enemy” in this case had American-

designed SM-2 Standard surface-to-air missiles with whose performance he

was quite familiar. It looked like a Hatakaze-class. Two SPG-siC missile

radars. Only one single-rail launcher. She could guide only iwo ;il a time.

His aircraft represented two missiles. The Hornet was a larger tar^ol than the

Harpoon was, and was not going as low or as fast as the missile dul. On the

other hand, he had a protective jammer aboard, which evened the equation

somewhat. Bud eased his stick to the left. It was against safely rules to fly

directly over a ship under circumstances like this, and a few seconds later he

passed three hundred yards ahead of the destroyer’s bow. At least one of his

missiles would have hit, he judged, and that one was only a five-thousand-

ton tin can. One Harpoon warhead would ruin her whole day, making his

follow-up attack with cluster munitions even more deadly.

“Slugger, this is lead. Form up on me.”

“Two-”

“Three-”

“Four,” his flight acknowledged.

Another day in the life of a naval aviator, the CAG thought. Now he could

look forward to landing, going into CIC, and spending the rest of the next

twenty-four hours going over the scores. It just wasn’t very exciting any-

more. He’d splashed real airplanes, and anything else wasn’t the same. But

flying was still flying.

The roar of aircraft overhead was usually exhilarating. Sato watched the last

of the gray American fighters climb away, and lifted his binoculars to see

their direction. Then he rose and headed below to the CIC.

“Well?” he asked.

‘ ‘Departure course is as we thought.” Fleet-Ops tapped the satellite photo

that showed both American battle groups, still heading west, into the pre-

vailing winds, to conduct flight operations. The photo was only two hours

old. The radar plot showed the American aircraft heading to the expected

point.

“Excellent. My respects to the captain, make course one-five-five, maxi-