Debt of Honor

escorts were dangerously close to empty bunkers, and that was a hazard he could not afford. Dubro drank his wake-up coffee while his eyes burned holes in the bulkhead. Commander Harrison sat across from the Admiral's desk, sensibly not saying much of anything until his boss was ready to speak.

'What's the good word, Ed?'

'We still have them outgunned, sir,' the Force Operations Officer replied. 'Maybe we need to demonstrate that.'

Outgunned? Dubro wondered. Well, yes, that was true, but only two thirds of his aircraft were fully mission-capable now. They'd been away too long from base. They were running out of the stores needed to keep the aircraft operating. In the hangar bay, aircraft sat with inspection hatches open, awaiting parts that the ship no longer had. He was depending on the replenishment ships for those, for the parts flown into Diego Garcia from stateside. Three days after delivery, he'd be back to battery, after a fashion, but his people were tired. Two men had been hurt on the flight deck the day before. Not because they were stupid. Not because they were inexperienced. Because they'd been doing it too damned long, and fatigue was even more dangerous to the mind than to the body, especially in the frenetic environment of a carrier's flight deck. The same was true of everyone in the battle force, from the lowliest striker to…himself. The strain of continuous decision-making was starting to tell. And all he could do about that was to switch to decaf.

'How are the pilots?' Mike Dubro asked.

'Sir, they'll do what you tell them to do.'

'Okay, we do light patrolling today. I want a pair of Toms up all the time, at least four more on plus-five, fully armed for air-to-air. Fleet course is one-eight-zero, speed of advance twenty-five knots. We link up with the replenishment group and get everyone topped off. Otherwise, we do a stand-down. I want people rested insofar as that is possible. Our friend is going to start hunting tomorrow, and the game is going to get interesting.'

'We start going head-to-head?' the ops officer asked.

'Yeah.' Dubro nodded. He checked his watch. Nighttime in Washington. The people with brains would be heading for bed now. He'd soon make another demand for instructions, and he wanted the smart ones to pass it along, preferably with a feel for the urgency of his situation. Pay-or-play time was grossly overdue, and all he could be sure of now was that it would come unexpectedly—and after that, Japan? Harrison and his people were already spending half of their time on that.

The tradecraft, again, was of the bad-TV variety, and the only consolation was that maybe the Russians were right. Maybe Scherenko had told them the truth. Maybe they were not in any real danger from the PSID. That seemed a very thin reed to Clark, none of whose education had encouraged him to trust Russians to do anything pleasant to Americans.

'The wheel may be crooked,' he whispered to himself—in English, damn it! In any event, what they'd done was laughably simple. Nomuri had parked his car in the same lease-garage that the hotel maintained for its guests, and now Nomuri had a key to Clark's rental car, and over the left-side visor was a computer disk. This Clark retrieved and handed to Chavez, who slid it into their laptop. An electronic chime announced the activation of the machine as Clark headed out into the traffic. Ding copied the file over to the hard- disk and erased the floppy, which would soon be disposed of. The report was verbose. Chavez read it silently before turning the car radio on, then relayed the high points in whispers over the noise.

'Northern Resource Area?' John asked.

'Da. A curious phrase,' Ding agreed, thinking. It occurred to him that his diction was better in Russian than English, perhaps because he'd learned English on the street, and Russian in a proper school from a team of people with a genuine love for it. The young intelligence officer dismissed the thought angrily.

Northern Resource Area, he thought. Why did that sound familiar? But they had other things to do, and that was tense enough. Ding found that while he liked the paramilitary end of being a field officer, this spy stuff was not exactly his cup of tea. Too scary, too paranoid.

Isamu Kimura was at the expected meeting site. Fortunately his job allowed him to be in and out a lot, and to sit down with foreigners as a matter of routine. One benefit was that he had an eye for safe places. This one was on the docks, thankfully not overly busy at the moment, but at the same time a location where such a meeting would not be overly out of character. It was also a hard one to bug. There were still harbor sounds to mask quiet conversation.

Clark was even more uneasy, if that were possible. With any covert recruitment there was a period during which open contact was safe, but the safety diminished linearly over time at a rapid but unknown rate, and there were other considerations. Kimura was motivated by—what? Clark didn't know why Oleg Lyalin had been able to recruit him. It wasn't money. The Russians had never paid him anything. It wasn't ideology. Kimura wasn't a Communist in his political creed. Was it ego? Did he think he was worthy of a better post that someone else had taken? Or, most dangerously of all, was he a patriot, the eccentric personal sort who judged what was good for his country in his own mind? Or, as Ding might have observed, was he just fucked up? Not a very elegant turn of phrase, but in Clark's experience not an unknown state of affairs, either. The simple version was that Clark didn't know; worse, any motivation for treason simply justified betraying your country to another, and there was something in him that refused to feel comfortable with such people. Perhaps cops didn't like dealing with informants either, John told himself. Small comfort, that.

'What's so important?' Kimura asked, halfway down a vacant quay. The idle ships in Tokyo Bay were clearly visible, and he wondered if the meeting place had been selected for just that reason.

'Your country has nuclear weapons,' Clark told him simply.

'What?' First the head turned, then the feet stopped, then a very pale look came over his face.

'That's what your ambassador in Washington told the American president on Saturday. The Americans are in a panic. At least that's what Moscow Center has told us.' Clark smiled in a very Russian way. 'I must say that you've won my professional admiration to have done it so openly, especially buying our own rockets to be the delivery vehicles. I must also tell you that the government of my country is decidedly displeased by this development.'

'The rockets could easily be aimed at us.' Chavez added dryly, 'They make people nervous.'

'I had no idea. Are you sure?' Kimura started walking again, just to get his blood flowing.

'We have a highly placed source in the U.S. government. It is not a mistake.' Clark's voice, Ding noted, was coldly businesslike: Ah, your car has a scratch on the bumper. I know a good man to fix it.

'So that's why they thought they could get away with it.' Kimura didn't have to say any more, and it was plain that a piece of the puzzle had just dropped into place in his mind. He took a few breaths before speaking again: 'This is madness.'

And those were three of the most welcome words John had heard since calling home from Berlin to hear that his wife had safely delivered their second child. Now it was time for real hardball. He spoke without smiling, fully into his role as a senior Russian intelligence officer, trained by the KGB to be one of the best in the world: 'Yes, my friend. Any time you frighten a major power, that is truly madness. Whoever is playing this game, I hope they know how dangerous it is. Please heed my words, Gospodin Kimura. My country is gravely concerned. Do you understand? Gravely concerned. You've made fools of us before America and the entire world. You have weapons that can threaten my country as easily as they can threaten America. You have initiated action against the United States, and we do not see a good reason for it. That makes you unpredictable in our eyes, and a country with nuclear- tipped rockets and political instability is not a pleasant prospect. This crisis is going to expand unless sensible people take proper action. We are not concerned about your commercial disagreements with America, but when the possibility of real war exists, then we are concerned.'

Kimura was still pale at the prospect.

'What is your rank, Klerk-san?'

'I am a full colonel of the Seventh Department, Line PR, the First Chief Directorate of the Committee for State Security.'

'I thought—'

'Yes, the new name, the new designation, what rubbish,' Clark observed with a snort. 'Kimura-san, I am an intelligence officer. My job is to protect my country. I'd expected this posting to be a simple, pleasant one, but now I find myself—did I tell you about our Project RYAN?'

'You mentioned it once, but—'