Debt of Honor

Click. 'Guns? What for?'

'Don't many islanders own guns?'

'Not that I know of.' Oreza shook his head. 'Anyway, I've never been attacked by a fish. No, I don't have any, even at home.'

Clearly the officer was pleased by that news. 'Oreza, what sort of name is that?' It sounded native to the Ishii.

'Originally, you mean? Way back, my people come from Portugal.'

'Your family here a long time?'

Oreza nodded. 'You bet.' Five years was a long time, wasn't it? A husband and wife constituted a family, didn't they?

'The radios, VHP you say, short-range?' The man looked around for other instruments, but clearly there were none.

'Mainly line-of-sight, yes, sir.'

The captain nodded. 'Very good. Thank you. Beautiful boat. You take great pride in it, yes?'

'Yes, sir, I do.'

'Thank you for showing me around. You can go now,' the man said finally, not quite knowing how discordant the final sentence was. Oreza escorted him to the dock and watched him leave, rejoining his men without another word.

'What was—'

'Pete, you want to button it for a minute?' The command was delivered in his Master Chief's voice, and had the desired effect. They walked over to Oreza's car, letting the others pull away, marching as soldiers did to a precise one hundred twenty paces per minute, the sergeant a step to his cap tain's left and half a pace behind, walking exactly in step. By the time the fisherman got to his car it was clear that yet another Toyota Land Cruiser was at the entrance to the marina parking lot, not really doing anything but sitting there, with three men inside, all in uniform.

'Some kind of exercise? War games? What gives?' Burroughs asked once they were in Oreza's car.

'Beats the shit out of me, Pete.' He started up and headed out of the lot, turning right to go south on Beach Road. In a few minutes they passed by the commercial docks. Portagee took his time, obeying all rules and limits, and blessing his luck that he had the same model car and color the soldiers used.

Or almost. The vehicles off-loading from Orchid Ace now were mainly olive-green. A steady cab-rank of airport buses off-loaded people in uniforms of the same color. They appeared to be going to a central point, then dispersing either to the parked military vehicles or to the ship, perhaps to off-load their assigned units.

'What are those big boxy things?'

'It's called MLRS, Multiple-Launch Rocket System.' There were six of them now, Oreza saw.

'What's it for?' Burroughs asked.

'Killing people,' Portagee replied tersely. As they drove by the access road to the docks, a soldier waved them on vigorously. More trucks, deuce-and-a-halfs. More soldiers, maybe five or six hundred. Oreza continued south. Every major intersection had a Land Cruiser in place, and no less than three soldiers, some with pistol belts, occasionally one with a slung rifle. It took a few minutes to realize that there wasn't a single police car in evidence. He turned left onto Wallace Highway.

'My hotel?'

'How about dinner at my place tonight?' Oreza headed up the hill, past the hospital, finally turning left into his development. Though a man of the sea, he preferred a house in high ground. It also afforded a fine view of the southern part of the island. His was a home of modest size with lots of windows. His wife, Isabel, was an administrator at the hospital, and the home was close enough that she could walk to work if the mood suited her. The mood this evening was not a happy one. As soon as he pulled into the driveway, his wife was out the door.

'Manni, what's going on?' Her ancestry was like his. Short, round, and dark-complected, now her swarthy skin was pale.

'Let's go inside, okay? Honey, this is Pete Burroughs. We went fishing today.' His voice was calm, but his eyes swept around. The landing lights of four aircraft were visible to the east, lined up a few miles apart, approaching the island's two large runways. When the three of them were inside, and the doors shut, the talking could start.

'The phones are out. I tried to call Rachel and I got a recording. The overseas lines are down. When I went to the mall—'

'Soldiers?' Portagee asked his wife.

'Lots of 'em, and they're all—'

'Japs.' Master Chief Quartermaster Manuel Oreza, United States Coast Guard, retired, completed the thought.

'Hey, that's not the polite way to—'

'Neither's an invasion, Mr. Burroughs.'

'What?'

Oreza lifted the kitchen phone and hit the speed-dial button for his daughter's house in Massachusetts.

'We're sorry, but a cable problem has temporarily interrupted Trans-pacific service. Our people are working on the problem. Thank you for your patience—'

'My ass!' Oreza told the recording. 'Cable, hell, what about the satellite dishes?'

'Can't call out?' Burroughs was slow to catch on, but at least this was something he knew about.

'No, doesn't seem that way.'

'Try this.' The computer engineer reached into his pocket and pulled out his cellular phone.

'I have one,' Isabel said. 'It doesn't work either. I mean it's fine for local calls, but—'

'What number?'

'Area code 617,' Portagee said, giving the rest of the number.

'Wait, I need the USA prefix.'

'It's not going to work,' Mrs. Oreza insisted.

'You don't have satellite phones here yet, eh?' Burroughs smiled. 'My company just got us all these things. I can download on my laptop, send faxes with it, all that stuff. Here.' He handed the phone over. 'It's ringing.'

The entire system was new, and the first such phone had not yet been sold in the islands yet, a fact that the Japanese military had troubled itself to learn in the past week, but the service was global, even if the local marketing people hadn't started selling the things here. The signal from the small device went to one of thirty-five satellites in a low-orbit constellation to the nearest ground station. Manila was the closest, beating Tokyo by a mere thirty miles, though even one mile would have been enough for the executive programming that ran the system. The Luzon ground station had been in operation for only eight weeks, and immediately relayed the call to another satellite, this one a Hughes bird in geosynchronous orbit over the Pacific, back down to a ground station in California, and from there via fiberoptic to Cambridge, Massachusetts.

'Hello?' the voice said, somewhat crossly, since it was 5:00 A.M. in America's Eastern Time Zone.

'Rachel?'

'Daddy?'

'Yeah, honey.'

'You okay out there?' his daughter asked urgently 'What do you mean?'

'I tried to call Mom, but the recording said you had a big storm and the lines were down.'

'There wasn't any storm, Rach,' Oreza said without much thought on the matter.

'What's the matter, then?'

Jesus, where do I start? Portagee asked himself. What if nobody…was that possible?

'Uh, Portagee,' Burroughs said.

'What is it?' Oreza asked.

'What's what, Daddy?' his daughter asked also, of course.

'Wait a minute, honey. What is it, Pete?' He put his hand over the receiver.