Debt of Honor

'You mean like, invasion, like war, taking over, all that stuff?'

Portagee nodded. 'Yes, sir, that's what it looks like.'

'Turn the phone off, now!' The urgency in his voice was unmistakable. Nobody had thought any of this through yet, and both were coming to terms with it from different directions and at different speeds.

'Honey, I'll be back, okay? We're fine. 'Bye.' Oreza thumbed the CLEAR button. 'What's the problem, Pete?'

'This isn't some joke, right? You're not doing a number to mess with my head, tourist games and all that stuff, are you?'

'Jesus, I need a beer.' Oreza opened the refrigerator and took one out. That it was a Japanese brand did not for the moment matter. He tossed one to his guest. 'Pete, this ain't no play-acting, okay? In case you didn't notice, we seen at least a battalion of troops, mechanized vehicles, fighters. And that asshole on the dock was real interested in the radio on my boat.'

'Okay.' Burroughs opened his beer and took a long pull. 'Let's say this is a no-shitter. You can DF one of those things.'

'Dee-eff? What do you mean?' A pause while he dusted off some long-unused memories. 'Oh…yeah.'

It was busy at the headquarters of Commander-in-Chief Pacific. CINCPAC was a Navy command, a tradition that dated back to Admiral Chester Nimitz. At the moment people were scurrying about. They were almost all in uniform. The civilian employees were rarely in on weekends, and with a few exceptions it was too late for them anyway. Mancuso saw the collective mood as he came through security, people looking down with harried frowns, moving quickly the better to avoid the heavy atmosphere of an office in considerable turmoil. Nobody wanted to be caught in the storm.

'Where's Admiral Seaton?' ComSubPac asked the nearest yeoman. The petty officer just pointed to the office suite. Mancuso led the other two in that direction.

'Where the hell have you been?' CINCPAC demanded as they came into his inner office.

'SOSUS, sir. Admiral, you know Captain Chambers, my operations officer. This is Dr. Ron Jones—'

'The sonarman you used to brag on?' Admiral David Seaton allowed himself a pleasant moment. It was brief enough.

'That's right, sir. We were just over at SOSUS checking the data on—'

'No survivors, Bart. Sorry, but the S-3 crew says—'

'Sir, they were killed,' Jones interrupted, tired of the preliminaries. His statement stopped everything cold.

'What do you mean, Dr. Jones?' CINCPAC asked after perhaps as much as a second.

'I mean Asheville and Charlotte were torpedoed and sunk by Japanese submarines, sir.'

'Now wait a minute, son. You mean Charlotte, too?' Seaton's head turned. 'Bart, what is this?' SubPac didn't get a chance to answer.

'I can prove it, sir.' Jones held up the sheaf of papers under his arm. 'I need a table with a light over it.'

Mancuso's face was pretty grim. 'Sir, Jonesy appears to be right. These were not accidents.'

'Gentlemen, I have fifteen Japanese officers in the operations room right now trying to explain how the fire control on their 'cans works and—'

'You have Marines, don't you?' Jones asked coldly. 'They carry guns, don't they?'

'Show me what you have.' Dave Seaton gestured at his desk.

Jones walked CINCPAC through the printouts, and if Seaton wasn't exactly a perfect audience, he surely was a quiet one. On further examination, the SOSUS traces even showed the surface ships and the Mark 50 antisub torpedoes that had crippled half of PacFlt's carriers. The new array off Kure was really something, Jones thought.

'Look at the time, sir. All of this happened over a period of what? Twenty minutes or so. You have two hundred fifty dead sailors down there, and it wasn't any accident.'

Seaton shook his head like a horse shedding troublesome insects. 'Wait a minute, I haven't had any word-I mean, the threat board is blank. There aren't any indications at all that—'

'There are now, sir.' Jones wasn't letting up at all.

'But—'

'Goddamn it, Admiral!' Jones swore. 'Here it is, black and while, okay? There are other copies of this back at the SOSUS building, there's a tape record, and I can show it to you on a fucking TV screen. You want your own experts to go over there, well, shit, they're right here, ain't they?' The contractor pointed to Mancuso and Chambers. 'We have been attacked, sir.'

'What are the chances that this is some sort of mistake?' Seaton asked. His face was as ghostly pale as the cloth of his undress-white uniform shirt.

'Just about zero. I suppose you could wait for them to take an ad out in The New York Times if you want additional confirmation.' Diplomacy had never been Jones's strongest suit, and he was too angry to consider it anyway.

'Listen, mister—' Seaton began, but then he bit off his words, and instead looked up at his type commander. 'Bart?'

'I can't argue with the data, sir. If there were a way to dispute it, Wally or I would have found it. The people at SOSUS concur. It's hard for me to believe, too,' Mancuso conceded. 'Charlotte has failed to check in and—'

'Why didn't her beacon go off?' CINCPAC asked.

'The gadget is located on the sail, aft corner. Some of my skippers weld them down. The fast-attack guys resisted putting them aboard last year, remember? Anyway, the fish could have destroyed the BST or for some reason it didn't deploy properly. We have that noise indicator at Charlotte's approximate location, and she has failed to respond to an emergency order to communicate with us. There is no reason, sir, to assume that she's still alive.' And now that Mancuso had said it, it was official. There was one more thing that needed to be said.

'You're telling me we're at war.' The statement was delivered in an eerily quiet voice. ComSubPac nodded.

'Yes, sir, I am.'

'I didn't have any warning at all,' Seaton objected.

'Yeah, you have to admire their sense of tradition, don't you?' Jones observed, forgetting that the last time there had been ample warning, all of it unheeded.

Pete Burroughs didn't finish his fifth beer of the day. The night had not brought peace. Though the sky was clear and full of stars, brighter lights continued to approach Saipan from the east, taking advantage of the trade winds to ease their approach into the island's two American-built runways. Each jumbo jet had to be carrying at least two hundred soldiers, probably closer to three. They could see the two airfields. Oreza's binoculars were more than adequate to pick out the aircraft and the fuel trucks that scurried about to fill up the arriving jets so that they could rapidly go home to make another shuttle run. It didn't occur to anyone to keep a count until it was a few hours too late.

'Car coming in,' Burroughs warned, alerted by the glow of turning lights. Oreza and he retreated to the side of the house, hoping to be invisible in the shadows. The car was another Toyota Land Cruiser, which drove down the lane, reversed direction at the end of the cul-de-sac, and headed back out after having done not very much of anything but look around and perhaps count the cars in the various driveways-more likely to see if people were gathered in an inopportune way. 'You have any idea what to do?' he asked Oreza when it was gone.

'Hey, I was Coast Guard, remember? This is Navy shit. No, more like Marine shit.'

'It sure is deep shit, man. You suppose anybody knows?'

'They gotta. Somebody's gotta,' Portagee said, lowering the glasses and heading back into the house. 'We can watch from inside our bedroom. We always leave the windows open anyway.' The cool evenings here, always fresh and comfortable from the ocean breezes, were yet another reason for his decision to move to Saipan. 'What exactly do you do, Pete?'

'Computer industry, several things really. I have a masters in EE. My real specialty area is communications, how computers talk to each other. I've done a little government work. My company does plenty, but mostly on