Debt of Honor

position of real authority, but by the time they got there they must have accumulated enough inner rage to make Hitler look like a pansy. Along the way they bled those feelings off with drinking binges and sexual orgies of the sort he'd heard about in this very hot tub. The stories about jaunts to Thailand and Taiwan and most recently the Marianas were especially interesting, stuff that would have made his college chums at UCLA blush. Those things were all symptoms of a society that cultivated psychological repression, whose warm and gentle facade of good manners was like a dam holding back all manner of repressed rage and frustration.

That dam occasionally leaked, mostly in an orderly, controlled way, but the strain on the dam was unchanging, and one result of that strain was a way of looking at others, especially gaijin, in a manner that insulted Nomuri's American-cultivated egalitarian outlook. It would not be long, he realized, before he started hating this place. That would be unhealthy and unprofessional, the CIA officer thought, remembering the repeated lessons from the Farm: a good field spook identified closely with the culture he attacked. But he was sliding in the other direction, and the irony was that the deepest reason for his growing antipathy was that his roots sprang from this very country.

'You really want more like her?' Nomuri asked, eyes closed.

'Oh, yes. Fucking Americans will soon be our national sport.' Taoka chuckled. 'We had a fine time of it the past two days. And I was there to see it all happen,' his voice concluded in awe. It had all paid off. Twenty years of toeing the line had brought its reward, to have been there in the War Room, listening to it all, following it all, seeing history written before his eyes. The salaryman had made his mark, and most importantly of all, he'd been noticed. By Yamata-san himself.

'So what great deeds have happened while I was performing my own, eh?' Nomuri asked, opening his eyes and giving off a leering smile.

'We just went to war with America, and we've won!' Taoka proclaimed.

'War? Nan ja? We accomplished a takeover of General Motors, did we?'

'A real war, my friend. We crippled their Pacific Fleet and the Marianas Islands are Japanese again.'

'My friend, you cannot tolerate too much alcohol,' Nomuri thought, really believing what he'd just said to the blowhard.

'I have not had a drink in four days!' Taoka protested. 'What I told you is true!'

'Kazuo,' Chet said patiently as though to a bright child, 'You tell stories with a skill and style better than any man I have ever mot. Your descriptions of women make my loins swell as though I were there myself.' Nomuri smiled. 'But you exaggerate.'

'Not this time, my friend, truly,' Taoka said, really wanting his friend to believe him, and so he started giving details.

Nomuri had no real military training. Most of his knowledge of such affairs came from reading books and watching movies. His instructions for operating in Japan had nothing to do with gathering information on the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, but rather with trade and foreign-affairs matters. But Kazuo Taoka was a fine storyteller, with a keen eye for detail, and it took only three minutes before Nomuri had to close his eyes again, a smile fixed on his lips. Both actions were the result of his training in Yorktown, Virginia, as was that of his memory, which struggled now to record every single word while another part of his consciousness wondered how the hell he was going to get the information out. His other reaction was one that Taoka could neither see nor hear, a quintessential Americanism, spoken within the confines of the CIA officer's mind: You motherfuckers!

'Okay, JUMPER is up and pretty much put together,' Helen d'Agustino said. 'JASMINE'—the code name for Anne Durling—'will be in another cabin. SecState and SecTreas are up and having their coffee. Arnie van Damm is probably in better shape than anybody aboard. Showtime. How about the fighters?'

'They'll join up in about twenty minutes. We went with the F-15's out of Otis. Better range, they'll follow us all the way down. I'm really being paranoid on that, ain't I?'

Daga's eyes gave off a coldly professional smile. 'You know what I've always liked about you, Dr. Ryan?'

'What's that?'

'I don't have to explain security to you like I do with everybody else. You think just like I do.' It was a lot for a Secret Service agent to say. 'The President is waiting, sir.' She led him down the stairs.

Ryan bumped into his wife on the way forward. Pretty as ever, she was not suffering from the previous night despite her husband's warning, and on seeing Jack she almost made a joke that it was he who'd had the problem. 'What's the matter?'

'Business, Cathy.'

'Bad?'

Her husband just nodded and went forward, past a Secret Service agent and an armed Air Force security policeman. The two convertible couches had been made up. President Durling was sitting down in suit pants and white shirt. His tie and jacket were not in evidence at this time. A silver pot of coffee was on the low table. Ryan could see out the windows on both sides of the nose cabin. They were flying a thousand feet or so above fleecy cumulus clouds.

'I hear you've been up all night, Jack,' Durling said.

'Since before Iceland, whenever that was, Mr. President,' Ryan told him. He hadn't washed, hadn't shaved, and his hair probably looked like Cathy's after a long procedure under a surgical cap. Worse still was the look in his eyes as he prepared to deliver grimmer news than he'd ever spoken.

'You look like hell. What's the problem?'

'Mr. President, based on information received over the last few hours, I believe that the United States of America is at war with Japan.'

'What you need is a good chief to run this for you,' Jones observed. 'Ron, one more of those, and I'll toss you in the brig, okay? You've thrown enough weight around for one day,' Mancuso replied in a weary voice. 'Those people were under my command, remember?'

'Have I been that much of a jerk?'

'Yeah, Jonesy, you have.' Chambers handled that answer. 'Maybe Seaton needed to be brought up short once, but you overdid it big-time. And now we need solutions, not smartass bullshit.'

Jones nodded but kept his own counsel. 'Very well, sir. What assets do we have?'

'Best estimate, they have eighteen boats deployable. Two are in overhaul status and are probably unavailable for months at least,' Chambers replied, doing the enemy first. 'With Charlotte and Asheville out of the game, we have a total of seventeen. Four of those are in yard- overhaul and unavailable. Four more are in bobtail-refits alongside the pier here or in 'Dago. Another four are in the IO. Maybe we can shake those loose, maybe we can't. That leaves five. Three of those are with the carriers for the 'exercise,' one's right down below at the pier. The last one's at sea up in the Gulf of Alaska doing workups. That has a new CO-what, just three weeks since he relieved?'

'Correct.' Mancuso nodded. 'He's just learning the job.'

'Jesus, the cupboard's that bare?' Jones was now regretting his comment on having a good chief around. The mighty United States Pacific Fleet, as recently as five years ago the most powerful naval force in the history of civilization, was now a frigate navy.

'Five of us, eighteen of them, and they're all spun-up to speed. They've been running ops for the last couple of months.' Chambers looked at the wall chart and frowned. 'That's one big fuckin' ocean, Jonesy.' It was the way he added the last statement that worried the contractor.

'The four in refits?'

'That order's out. 'Expedite readiness for sea.' And that brings the number to nine, in a couple of weeks, if we're lucky.'

'Mr. Chambers, sir?'

Chambers turned back. 'Yeah, Petty Officer Jones?'

'Remember when we used to head up north, all alone, tracking four or five of the bad guys at once?'

The operations officer nodded soberly, almost nostalgically. His reply was quiet. 'Long time ago, Jonesy. We're dealing with SSKs now, on their home turf and—'

'Did you trade your balls in to get that fourth stripe on your shoulder?''

Chambers turned around in an instant rage. 'You listen to me, boy, I—'

But Ron Jones just snarled back. ' 'I,' hell, you, used to be a kickass officer! I trusted you to know what to do