Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

Admiral Charles Lockwood, and of all the men who’d defeated Japan, only

Chester Nimitz and maybe Charles Layton had been more important. It was

Lockwood, sitting in this very office on the heights overlooking Pearl Har-

bor, who had sent out Mush Morton and Dick O’Kane and Gene Fluckey,

and the rest of the legends to do battle in their fleet boats. The same office,

the same door, and even the same title on the door-Commander, Sub-

marine Force, United States Pacific Fleet-but the rank required for it was

lower now. Rear Admiral Bart Mancuso, USN, knew that he’d been lucky to

make it this far. That was the good news.

The bad news was that he was essentially the receiver of a dying business.

Lockwood had commanded a genuine fleet of submarines and tenders. More

recently, Austin Smith had sent his forty or so around the world’s largest

ocean, but Mancuso was down to nineteen fast-attack boats and six boom-

ers-and all of the latter were alongside, awaiting dismantlement at Bremer-

ton. None would be kept, not even as a museum exhibit of a bygone age,

which didn’t trouble Mancuso as much as it might have. He’d never liked

the missile submarines, never liked their ugly purpose, never liked their bor-

ing patrol pattern, never liked the mind-set of their commanders. Raised in

fast-attack, Mancuso had always preferred to be where the action is-was,

he corrected himself.

Was. It was all over now, or nearly so. The mission of the nuclear-pow-

ered fast-attack submarine had changed since Lockwood. Once the hunters

of surface ships, whether merchants or men-of-war, they’d become special-

ists in the elimination of enemy subs, like fighter aircraft dedicated to the

extermination of their foreign cousins. That specialization had narrowed

their purpose, focusing their equipment and their training until they’d

become supreme at it. Nothing could excel an SSN in the hunting of another.

What nobody had ever expected was that the other side’s SSNs would go

away. Mancuso had spent his professional life practicing for something he’d

hoped would never come, detecting, localizing, closing on, and killing So-

viet subs, whether missile boats or other fast-attacks. In fact, he’d achieved

something that no other sub skipper had ever dreamed of doing. He’d as-

sisted in the capture of a Russian sub, a feat of arms still among his country’s

most secret accomplishments-and a capture was better than a kill, wasn’t

it?-but then the world had changed. He’d played his role in it, and was

proud of that. The Soviet Union was no more.

Unfortunately-as he thought of it-so was the Soviet Navy, and without

enemy submarines to worry about, his country, as it had done many times in

the past, had rewarded its warriors by forgetting them. There was little mis-

sion for his boats to do now. The once large and formidable Soviet Navy was

essentially a memory. Only the previous week he’d seen satellite photos of

the bases at Petropavlovsk and Vladivostok. Every boat the Soviets-Rus-

sians!-were known to have had been tied alongside, and on some of the

overheads he’d been able to see the orange streaks of rust on the hulls where

the black paint had eroded off.

The other possible missions? Hunting merchant traffic was largely a

joke-worse, the Orion drivers, with their own huge collection of P-3C air-

craft, also designed for submarine hunting, had long since modified their

aircraft to carry air-to-surface missiles, and had ten times the speed of any

sub, and in the unlikely event that someone wanted to clobber a merchant

ship, they could do it better and faster.

The same was true of surface warships-what there were of them. The sad

truth, if you could call it that, was that the U.S. Navy, even gutted and down-

sized as it was, could handle any three other navies in the world in less time

than it would take the enemies to assemble their forces and send out a press

release of their malicious intent.

And so now what? Even if you won the Super Bowl, there were still teams

to play against next season. But in this most serious of human games, victory

meant exactly that. There were no enemies left at sea, and lew enough on

land, and in the way of the new world, the submarine force was the first of

many uniformed groups to be without work. The only reason there was a

ComSubPac at all was bureaucratic inertia. There was a Com-everything-

else-Pac, and the submarine force had to have its senior officer as the social

and military equal of the other communities, Air, Surface, and Service.

Of his nineteen fast-attack boats, only seven were currently at sea. Four

were in overhaul status, and the yards were stretching out their work as

much as possible to justify their own infrastructure. The rest were alongside

their tenders or their piers while the ship-service people found new and inter-

esting things to do, protecting their infrastructure and military/civilian iden-

tity. Of the seven boats at sea, one was tracking a Chinese nuclear fast-attack

boat; those submarines were so noisy that Mancuso hoped the sonarmen’s

ears weren’t being seriously hurt. Stalking them was about as demanding as

watching a blind man on an empty parking lot in broad daylight. Two others

were doing environmental research, actually tracking midocean whale popu-

lations-not for whalers, but for the environmental community. In so doing,

his boats had achieved a real march on the tree-huggers. There were more

whales out there than expected. Extinction wasn’t nearly the threat everyone

had once believed it to be, and the various environmental groups were hav-

ing their own funding problems as a result. All of which was fine with Man-

cuso. He’d never wanted to kill a whale.

The other four boats were doing workups, mainly practicing against one

another. But the environmentalists were taking their own revenge on Sub-

marine Force, United States Pacific Fleet. Having protested the construction

and operation of the boats for thirty years, they were now protesting their

dismantlement, and more than half of Mancuso’s working time was rele-

gated to filing all manner of reports, answers to questions, and detailed ex-

planations of his answers. “Ungrateful bastards,” Mancuso grumbled. He

was helping out with the whales, wasn’t he? The Admiral growled into his

coffee mug and flipped open a new folder.

“Good news, Skipper,” a voice called without warning.

”Who the hell let you in?”

“I have an understanding with your chief,” Ron Jones replied. “He says

you’re buried by paperwork.”

“He ought to know.” Mancuso stood to greet his guest. Dr. Jones had

problems of his own. The end of the Cold War had hurt defense contractors,

too, and Jones had specialized in sonar systems used by submarines. The

difference was that Jones had made himself a pile of money first. “So

what’s the good news?”

“Our new processing software is optimized for listening to our warm-

blooded oppressed fellow mammals. Chicago just phoned in. They have

identified another twenty humpbacks in the Gulf of Alaska. I think I’ll get

the contract from NOAA. I can afford to buy you lunch now,” Jones con-

eluded, settling into a leather chair. He liked Hawaii, and was dressed for it,

In cusual shirt and no socks to clutter up his formal Reeboks.

“You ever miss the good old days?” Bart asked with a wry look.

“You mean chasing around the ocean, four hundred feet down, stuck in-

»idc a steel pipe two months at a time, smelling like the inside of an oilcan,

with a touch of locker room for ambience, eating the same food every week,

watching old movies and TV shows on tape, on a TV the size of a sheet of

paper, working six on and twelve off, getting maybe five decent hours of

alccp a night, and concentrating like a brain surgeon all the time? Yeah, Bart,

those were the days.” Jones paused and thought for a second. “I miss being

young enough to think it was fun. We were pretty good, weren’t we?”

“Better ‘n average,” Mancuso allowed. “What’s the deal with the

whales?”

“The new software my guys put together is good at picking out their

breathing and heartbeats. It turns out to be a nice clear hertz line. When those

guys are swimming-well, if you put a stethoscope up against them, your

eardrums would probably meet in the middle of your head.”

“What was the software really for?”

“Tracking Kilo-class boats, of course.” Jones grinned as he looked out

the windows at the largely empty naval base. “But I can’t say that anymore.

We changed a few hundred lines of code and ginned up a new wrapper for

the box, and talked to NOAA about it.”

Mancuso might have said something about taking that software into the

Persian Gulf to track the Kilo-class boats the Iranians owned, but intelli-

gence reported that one of them was missing. The submarine had probably