Debt of Honor

thing. It is well sited for that purpose. Except that there's no such cars there.'

The resolution on the photos was just fantastic. They'd been taken close to noon local time, and you could see the sun's glint on the rails of the mainline, and the spur as well. He figured that the width of the rails was about the resolution limit of the cameras, an interesting fact that he couldn't relay to anyone else. The ties were concrete, like the rest of the Bullet Train line, and the quality of the engineering was, well, something he'd envied for a long time. The official looked up reluctantly.

'No way it's a revenue line. The turns are all wrong. You couldn't do thirty miles per hour through there, and the train sets on that line cruise over a hundred. Funny, though, it just disappears.'

'Oh?' Betsy asked.

'See for yourself.' The executive stood to stretch, giving Mrs. Fleming a place at the viewer. He picked up a large-scale map of the valley and looked to see where things went.

'You know, when Hill and Stevens built the Great Northern—'

Betsy wasn't interested. 'Chris, take a look at this.'

Their visitor looked up from the map. 'Oh. The truck? I don't know what color they paint their—'

'Not green.'

Time usually worked in favor of diplomacy, but not in this case, Adler thought as he entered the White House. He knew the way, and had a Secret Service agent to conduct him in case he got lost. The Deputy Secretary of State was surprised to see a reporter in the Oval Office, even more so when he was allowed to stay.

'You can talk,' Ryan told him. Scott Adler took a deep breath and started his report.

'They're not backing down on anything. The Ambassador isn't very comfortable with the situation, and it shows. I don't think he's getting much by way of instructions out of Tokyo, and that worries me. Chris Cook thinks they're willing to let us have Guam back in a demilitarized condition, but they want to keep the rest of the islands. I dangled the TRA at them, but no substantive response.' He paused before going on. 'It's not going to work. We can keep at it for a week or a month, but it's just not going to happen. Fundamentally they don't know what they're into. They see a continuum of engagement between the military and economic sides. They don't see the firebreak between the two. They don't see that they've crossed over a line, and they don't see the need to cross back.'

'You're saying there's a war happening,' Holtzman observed, to make things clear. It made him feel foolish to ask the question. He didn't notice the same aura of unreality surrounding everyone else in the room.

Adler nodded. 'I'm afraid so.'

'So what are we going to do about it?'

'What do you suppose?' President Durling asked.

Commander Dutch Claggett had never expected to be in this situation. A last-track officer since his graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy twenty-three years earlier, his career had come to a screeching halt aboard USS Maine, when as executive officer he'd been present for the only loss of an American fleet-ballistic-missile submarine. The irony was that his life's ambition had been command of a nuclear submarine, but command of Tennessee meant nothing at all now. It was just an entry on his first resume when he entered the civilian job market. Her designed mission was to carry Trident-II sea-launched ballistic missiles, but the missiles were gone and the only reason that she still existed at all was because the local environmental movement had protested her dismantlement to Federal District Court, and the judge, a lifelong member of the Sierra Club, had agreed to the arguments, which were again on their way back to the United States Court of Appeals.

Claggett had been in command of Tennessee for nine months now, but the only time he'd been under way had been to move from one side of the pier to another. Not exactly what he'd had in mind for his career. It could be worse, he told himself in the privacy of his cabin. He could have been dead, along with so many of the others from USS Maine.

But Tennessee was still all his—he didn't even share her with a second CO—and he was still a naval officer in command of a man-o'-war, technically speaking, and his reduced crew of eighty-five drilled every day because that was the life of the sea, even tied alongside a pier. His reactor plant, known to its operators as Tennessee Power and Light Company, was lit up at least once per week. The sonarmen played acquisition-and-tracking games against audiotapes, and the rest of those aboard operated every shipboard system, down to tinkering with the single Mark 48 torpedo aboard. It had to be this way. The rest of the crew wasn't being SERB'd, after all, and it was his duty to them to maintain their professional standing should they get the transfers they all wanted to a submarine that actually went to sea.

'Message from SubPac, sir,' a yeoman said, handing over a clipboard.

Claggett took the board and signed first for receipt. Report earliest date ready to put to sea.

'What the hell?' Commander Claggett asked the bulkhead. Then he realized that the message ought to have come through Group at least, not straight from Pearl. He lifted his phone and dialed SubPac from memory. 'Admiral Mancuso, please. Tennessee calling.'

'Dutch? What's your materiel condition?' Bart Mancuso asked without preamble.

'Everything works, sir. We even had our ORSE two weeks ago, and we maxed it.' Claggett referred to the Operational Reactor Safeguards Examination, still the Holy Grail of the Nuclear Navy, even for razor-blade fodder.

'I know. How soon?' Mancuso asked. The bluntness of the question was like something from the past.

'I need to load food and torps, and I need thirty people.'

'Where are you weak?'

Claggett thought for a moment. His officers were on the young side, but he didn't mind that, and he had a good collection of senior chiefs. 'Nowhere, really. I'm working these people hard.'

'Okay, good. Dutch, I'm cutting orders to get you ready to sail ASAP. Group is getting into gear now. I want you moving just as fast as you can. Mission orders are on the way. Be prepared to stay at sea for ninety days.'

'Aye aye, sir.' Claggett heard the line go dead. A moment later he lifted his phone and called for his department heads and chiefs to meet in the wardroom. The meeting had not yet started when the phone rang again. It was a call from Group asking for Claggett's precise manpower needs.

'Your house has a fine view. Is it for sale?'

Oreza shook his head. 'No, it's not,' he told the man at the door.

'Perhaps you would think about it. You are a fisherman, yes?'

'Yes, sir, I am. I have a charter boat—'

'Yes, I know.' The man looked around, clearly admiring the size and location of what was really a fairly ordinary tract house by American standards. Manuel and Isabel Oreza had bought it five years earlier, just barely beating the real-estate boom on Saipan. 'I would pay much for this,' the man said.

'But then where would I live?' Portagee asked.

'Over a million American dollars,' the man persisted.

Strangely enough, Oreza felt a flash of anger at the offer. He still had a mortgage, after all, and paid the bill every month—actually his wife did, but that was beside the point. The typical American monthly ritual of pulling the ticket out of the book, filling out the check, tucking both in the preprinted envelope, and dropping it in the mail on the first day of the month-the entire procedure was proof to them that they did indeed own their first house after thirty-plus years of being government-service tumbleweeds. The house was theirs.

'Sir, this house is mine, okay? I live here. I like it here.'

The man was as friendly and polite as he could be, in addition to being a pushy son of a bitch. He handed over a card. 'I know. Please excuse my intrusion. I would like to hear from you after you have had a chance to consider my offer.' And with that he walked to the next house in the development.

'What the hell?' Oreza whispered, closing the door.

'What was that all about?' Pete Burroughs asked.

'He wants to pay me a million bucks for the house.'

'Nice view,' Burroughs observed. 'On the California coast this would go for a nice price. But not that much. You wouldn't believe what Japanese real-estate prices are.'

'A million bucks?' And that was just his opening offer, Oreza reminded himself. The man had his Toyota Land Cruiser parked in the cul-de-sac, and was clearly walking from one house to another, seeing what he could buy.