Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

man of the New York Stock Exchange to report his problem and to ask for

guidance. On the assurance that this was no accident, he made the obvious

recommendation and Bernard called the FBI, located close to Wall Street in

the Javits Federal Office Building. The senior official here was a deputy di-

rector, and he dispatched a team of three agents to the primary DTC office

located in midtown.

“What seems to be the problem?” the senior agent asked. The answer

required ten minutes of detailed explanation, and was immediately followed

by a call direct to the Deputy-Director-in-Charge.

MV Orchid Ace had been alongside long enough to off-load a hundred cars.

All of them were Toyota Land Cruisers. Taking down the security shack and

its single drowsy guard proved to be another bloodless exercise, which al-

lowed the buses to enter the fenced storage lot. Colonel Sasaki had enough

men in the three buses to give each a crew of three, and they all knew what to

do. The police substations at Koblerville and on Capitol Hill would be the

first places approached, now that his men had the proper transport. His own

part of the mission was at the latter site, at the home of the Governor.

It was really a coincidence that Nomuri had spent the night in town. He’d

actually given himself an evening off, which happened rarely enough, and

he found that recovery from a night on the town was.facilitated by a trip to

the bathhouse, something his ancestors had gotten right about a thousand

years earlier. After washing, he got his towel and headed to the hot tub,

where the foggy atmosphere would clear his head better than aspirin could.

He would emerge from this civilized institution refreshed, he thought.

“Kazuo,” the CIA officer observed. “Why are you here?”

“Overtime,” the man replied with a tired smile.

“Yamata-san must be a demanding boss,” Nomuri observed, sliding

himself slowly into the hot water, not really meaning anything by the re-

mark. The reply made his head turn.

“I have never seen history happen before,” Taoka said, rubbing his eyes

and moving around a little, feeling the tension bleed from his muscles, but

altogether too keyed up to be sleepy after ten hours in the War Room.

“Well, my history for last night was a very nice hostess,” Nomuri said

with a raised eyebrow. A nice lady of twenty-one years, too, he didn’t add. A

very bright young lady, who had many other people contesting for her atten-

tion, but Nomuri was far closer to her age, and she enjoyed talking to some-

one like him. It wasn’t all about money, Chet thought, his eyes closed over a

smiling face.

“Mine was somewhat more exciting than that.”

“Really? I thought you said you were working.” Nomuri’s eyes opened

reluctantly. Kazuo had found something more interesting than sexual fan-

tasy?

“I was.”

It was just something about the way he said it. “You know, Kazuo, when

you start telling a story, you must finish it.”

A laugh and a shake of the head. “I shouldn’t, but it will be in the papers

in a few hours.”

“What’s that?”

“The American financial system crashed last night.”

“Really? What happened?”

The man’s head turned and he spoke the reply very quietly indeed. “I

helped do it to them.”

It seemed very odd to Nomuri, sitting in a wooden tub filled with 107-

degree water, that he felt a chill.

‘ ‘Wakaremasen.” I don’t understand.

‘ ‘It will be clear in a few days. For now, I must go back.” The salaryman

rose and walked out, very pleased with himself for sharing his role with one

friend. What good was a secret, after all, if at least one person didn’t know

that you had it? A secret could be a grand thing, and one so closely held in a

society like this was all the more precious.

What the hell? Nomuri wondered.

‘ ‘There they are.” The lookout pointed, and Admiral Sato raised his binocu-

lars to look. Sure enough, the clear Pacific sky backlit the mast tops of the

lead screen ships, FFG-7 frigates by the look at the crosstrees. The radar

picture was clear now, a classic circular formation, frigates on the outer ring,

destroyers inward of that, then two or three Aegis cruisers not very different

from his own flagship. He checked the time. The Americans had just set the

morning watch. Though warships always had people on duty, the real work

details were synchronized with daylight, and people would now be rousing

from their bunks, showering, and heading off for breakfast.

The visual horizon was about twelve nautical miles away. His squadron of

four ships was heading east at thirty-two knots, their best possible continu-

ous speed. The Americans were westbound at eighteen.

“Send by blinker light to the formation: Dress ships.”

Saipan’s main satellite uplink facility was off Beach Road, close to the Sun

Inn Motel, and operated by MTC Micro Telecom. It was an entirely ordinary

civilian facility whose main construction concern had been protection

against autumnal typhoons that regularly battered the island. Ten soldiers,

commanded by a major, walked up to the main door and were able to walk

right in, then approach the security guard, who simply had no idea what was

happening, and, again, didn’t even attempt to reach for his sidearm. The ju-

nior officer with the detail was a captain trained in signals and communica-

tions. All he had to do was point at the various instruments in the central

control room. Phone uplinks to the Pacific satellites that transferred tele-

phone and other links from Saipan to America were shut down, leaving the

Japan links up-they went to a different satellite, and were backed up with

cable-without interfering with downlinked signals. At this hour it was not

overly surprising that no single telephone circuit to America was active at

the moment. It would stay that way for quite some time.

“Who are you?” the Governor’s wife asked.

“I need to see your husband,” Colonel Sasaki replied, “ll’s an emer-

gency.”

The fact of that statement was made immediately clear by the first shot of

the evening, caused when the security guard at the legislature building

managed to get his pistol out. He didn’t get a round off-an eager para-

trooper sergeant saw to that-but it was enough to make Sasaki frown an-

grily and push past the woman. He saw Governor Comacho, walking to the

door in his bathrobe.

“What is this?”

“You are my prisoner,” Sasaki announced, with three other men in the

room now to make it clear that he wasn’t a robber. The Colonel found him-

self embarrassed. He’d never done anything like this before, and though he

was a professional soldier, his culture as much as any other frowned upon

the invasion of another man’s house regardless of the reason. He found him-

self hoping that the shots he’d just heard hadn’t been fatal. His men had such

orders.

‘ ‘What?” Comacho demanded. Sasaki just pointed to the couch.

“You and your wife, please sit down. We have no intention of harming

you.”

“What is this?” the man asked, relieved that he and his wife weren’t in

any immediate danger, probably.

“This island now belongs to my country,” Colonel Sasaki explained. It

couldn’t be so bad, could it? The Governor was over sixty, and could re-

member when that had been true before.

“A goddamned long way for her to come,” Commander Kennedy observed

after taking the message. It turned out that the surface contact was the

Muroto, a cutter from the Japanese Coast Guard that occasionally supported

fleet operations, usually as a practice target. A fairly handsome ship, but

with the low freeboard typical of Japanese naval vessels, she had a crane

installed aft for the recovery of practice torpedoes. It seemed that Kurushio

had expected the opportunity to get off some practice shots in DATELINE

PARTNERS. Hadn’t Asheville been told about that?

“News to me, Cap’n,” the navigator said, flipping through the lengthy

op-order for the exercise.

“Wouldn’t be the first time the clerks screwed up.” Kennedy allowed

himself a smile. “Okay, we’ve killed them enough.” He keyed his micro-

phone again. “Very well, Captain, we’ll replay the last scenario. Start time

twenty minutes from now.”

“Thank you, Captain,” the reply came on the VHP circuit. “Out.”

Kennedy replaced the microphone. “Left ten-degrees rudder, all ahead

one third. Make your depth three hundred feet.”

The crew in the attack center acknowledged and executed the orders, tak-

ing Asheville east for five miles. Fifty miles to the west, USS Charlotte was

doing much the same thing, at exactly the same time.

The hardest part of Operation KABUL was on Guam. Approaching its hun-

dredth year as an American-flag possession, this was the largest island in the

Marianas chain, and possessed a harbor and real U.S. military installations.

Only ten years earlier, it would have been impossible. Not so long ago, the