Debt of Honor

The tracks meandered, looking to all the world like aerial photographs of sand dunes in some trackless desert, but if you knew what to look for, every spidery trace and twist had meaning. Jones slowed his analysis, taking in every minute's record of reception and sweeping from left to right, making marks and notes as he went. The chiefs who'd been assisting him stood back now, knowing that a master was at work, that he saw things they should have seen, but had not, and knowing why a man younger than they called an admiral by his first name.

'Attention on deck,' some voice called presently, 'Submarine Force, Pacific, arriving.' Mancuso came in, accompanied by Captain Chambers, his operations officer, and an aide who kept out of the way. The Admiral just looked at Jones's face.

'You raise Charlotte yet, Bart?'

'No.'

'Come here.'

'What are you telling me, Jonesy?'

Jones took the red pen to the bottom of the page. 'There's the crush, that's the hull letting go.'

Mancuso nodded, letting out a breath. 'I know, Ron.'

'Look here. That's high-speed maneuvering—'

'Something goes wrong, you go max power and try to drive her up to the roof,' Captain Chambers observed, not seeing it yet, or more probably not wanting to, Jones thought. Well, Mr. Chambers had always been a pretty nice officer to work for.

'But she wasn't heading straight for the roof, Mr. Chambers. Aspect changes, here and here,' Jones said, moving the pen upward on the printout page, backwards in time, marking where the width of the traces varied, and the bearings changed subtly. 'She was turning, too, at max power on a speed screw. This is probably a decoy signature. And this'—his hand went all the way to the right—'is a fish. Quiet one, but look at the bearing rates. It was turning, too, chasing Asheville, and that gives these traces here, all the way back to this time-point here.' Ron circled both traces, and though separated on the paper by fourteen inches, the shallow twists and turns were almost identical. The pen moved again, upwards on the sheet, then shot across to another frequency column. 'To a launch transient. Right there.'

'Fuck,' Chambers breathed.

Mancuso leaned over the paper sheet, next to Jones, and he saw it all now. 'And this one?'

'That's probably Charlotte, also maneuvering briefly. See, here and here, look like aspect changes on these traces to me. No transients because it was probably too far away, same reason we don't have a track on the fish.' Jones moved the pen back to the track of USS Asheville. 'Here. That Japanese diesel boat launched on her. Here. Asheville tried to evade and failed. Here's the first explosion from the torpedo warhead. Engine sounds stop here—she took the hit from aft. Here's the internal bulkheads letting go. Sir, Asheville was sunk by a torpedo, probably a Type 89, right about the same time that our two carriers had their little accident.'

'It's not possible,' Chambers thought.

When Jones turned his head, his eyes looked like the buttons on a doll's face. 'Okay, sir, then you tell me what these signals denote.' Somebody had to goad him into reality.

'Christ, Ron!'

'Settle down, Wally,' ComSubPac said quietly, looking at the data and searching for another plausible interpretation. He had to look, even in the knowledge that there was no other possible conclusion.

'Wasting your time, Skipper.' Jones tapped the track of USS Gary. 'Somebody better tell that frigate that it ain't a rescue she's on. She's sailing in harm's way. There's two SSKs out there with warshots, and they already used them twice.' Jones walked to the wall chart. He had to search around for a red marker, lifted it, and drew two circles, both about thirty miles in diameter. 'Somewhere here. We'll get a better cut on them when they snort next. Who's the surface track, by the way?'

'Reportedly a coast-guard cutter, one of theirs, heading in for the rescue,' SubPac answered.

'We might want to think about killing it,' Jones suggested, marking that contact in red also, then setting the pen down. He'd just taken the final step. The surface ship whose position he'd marked was not 'she,' but rather it. An enemy. A target.

'We have to see CINCPAC,' Mancuso said.

Jones nodded. 'Yes, sir, I think we do.'

22—The Global Dimension

The bomb was impressive. It exploded outside the Trincomalee Tradewinds, a new luxury hotel mainly built with Indian money. A few people, none closer than half a block away, would remember the vehicle, a small white delivery truck that had been big enough to contain half a ton of AMFO, an explosive mixture composed of nitrogen- based fertilizer and diesel fuel. It was a concoction easily made up in a bathtub or laundry basin, and in this case sufficient to rip the facade off the ten-story hotel, killing twenty-seven people and injuring another hundred or so in the process. Scarcely had the noise died when a telephone call came in to the local Reuters office.

'The final phase of liberation has begun,' the voice said, probably reading the words off a prepared statement, as terrorists often did. 'The Tamil Tigers will have their homeland and their autonomy or there will be no peace in Sri Lanka. This is only the beginning of the end of our struggle. We will explode one bomb per day until we achieve our goal.' Click.

For more than a hundred years, Reuters had been one of the world's most efficient news services, and the Colombo office was no exception, even on a weekend. In ten minutes the report went out on the wire—a satellite link today—to the agency's London headquarters, where it was instantly relayed across the global news network as a 'flash' story.

Many U.S. agencies routinely monitor the news-wire services, including the intelligence services, the FBI, Secret Service, and the Pentagon. This was also true of the White House Signals Office, and so it was that twenty- five minutes after the bomb went off, an Air Force sergeant put his hand on Jack Ryan's shoulder. The National Security Advisor's eyes opened to see a finger pointed topside.

'Flash traffic, sir,' the voice whispered.

Ryan nodded sleepily, slipped off his seat belt, and thanked God that he hadn't drunk too much in Moscow. In the dim lights of the cabin everyone else was conked out. To keep from waking his wife it was necessary to step over the table. He almost tripped, but the sergeant grabbed his arm.

'Thank you, ma'am.'

'No problem, sir.' Ryan followed her to the spiral stairs and headed up to the communications area on the upper deck.

'What gives?' He resisted the temptation to ask the time. It would have begged another question: the time in Washington, the time where the plane was now, or the time where the flash traffic had originated. Just another sign of progress, Ryan thought, heading to the thermal printer, you had to ask when 'now' was. The communications watch officer was an Air Force first lieutenant, black, slim, and pretty.

'Good morning, Dr. Ryan. The National Security Office said to flag this one for you.' She handed over the slippery paper Jack hated. The thermal printers were quiet, though, and this communications room, like all the others, was noisy enough already. Jack read the Reuters dispatch, too new as yet to have any analysis from CIA or elsewhere.

'That's the indicator we were looking for. Okay, let's get a secure phone.'

'Some other stuff that's just come in,' an airman said, handing over more papers. 'The Navy had a bad day.'

'Oh?' Ryan sat down in a padded chair and flipped on a reading light.

'Oh, shit,' he said next. Then he looked up. 'Coffee, please, Lieutenant?'

The officer sent an enlisted man for a cup.

'First call?'

'NMCC, the senior watch officer.' The National Security Advisor checked his watch, did the arithmetic, and decided that he'd gotten about five hours of sleep total. It was not likely that he'd get much more between here,