Debt of Honor

'Oh, he'd turn it over for a lot more, or maybe if he was smart, just rent it.'

'But then where would we live?'

'You wouldn't,' Burroughs replied. 'How much you want to bet they give you a first-class ticket stateside at the settlement. Think about it,' the engineer suggested.

'Well, that's interesting,' Robby Jackson thought. 'Anything else happening?'

'The 'cans we saw before are gone now. Things are settling back down to-hell, they are normal now except for all the soldiers around.'

'Any trouble?'

'No, sir, nothing. Same food ships coming in, same tankers, same everything. Air traffic has slowed down a lot. The soldiers are sort of dug in, but they're being careful how they do it. Not much visible anymore. There's still a lot of bush country on the island. I guess they're all hid in there. I ain't been goin' lookin', y'know?' Jackson heard him say.

'That's fine. Just stay cool, Master Chief. Good report. Let me get back to work.'

'Okay, Admiral.'

Jackson made his notes. He really should have turned this stuff over to somebody else, but Chief Oreza would want a familiar voice on the other end of the circuit, and everything was taped for the intelligence guys anyway.

But he had others things to do, too. The Air Force would be running another probe of Japanese air defenses tonight. The SSN patrol line would move west another hundred miles, and people would gather a lot of intelligence information, mainly from satellites. Enterprise would make Pearl Harbor today. There were two complete carrier air wings at Barbers Point Naval Air Station, but no carriers to put them on. The Army's 251st Infantry Division (Light) was still based at Schofield Barracks a few miles away, but there were no ships to put them on, either. The same was true of the First Marine Division at Camp Pendelton, California. The last time America had struck at the Mariana Islands, Operation FORAGER, 15 June 1944, he'd troubled himself to find out. there had been 535 ships, 127,571 troops. The combined ships of the entire U.S. Navy and every merchant ship flying the Stars and Stripes did not begin to approach the first number; the Army and Marines combined would have been hard pressed to find enough light-infantry troops to meet the second. Admiral Ray Spruance's Fifth Fleet— which no longer existed—had consisted of no less than fifteen fast carriers. PacFlt now had none. Five divisions had been tasked to the mission of retaking the islands, supported by over a thousand tactical aircraft, battleships, cruisers, destroyers…

And you're the lucky son of a bitch who has to come up with a plan to take the Marianas back. With what? We can't deal with them force-on-force, Jackson told himself. They did hold the islands, and their weapons, mainly American-designed, were formidable. The worst complication was the quantity of civilians. The 'natives'—all of them American citizens—numbered almost fifty thousand, most of whom lived on Saipan, and any plan that took many of those lives in the name of liberation would be a weight his conscience was unready to bear. It was a whole new kind of war, with a whole new set of rules, few of which he had figured out yet. But the central issues were the same. The enemy has taken something of ours, and we have to take it back or America was no longer a great power. Jackson hadn't spent his entire adult life in uniform so that he could be around when that bit of history got written. Besides, what would he say to Master Chief Manuel Oreza?

We can't do it force-on-force. America no longer had the ability to move a large army except from one base to another. There was really no large army to move, and no large navy to move it. There were no useful advance bases to support an invasion. Or were there? America still owned most of the islands in the Western Pacific, and every one had an airstrip of one kind or other. Airplanes flew farther now, and could refuel in midair. Ships could stay at sea almost indefinitely, a skill invented by the U.S. Navy eighty years earlier and made more convenient still by the advent of nuclear power. Most importantly, weapons technology had improved. You didn't need a bludgeon anymore. There were rapiers now. And overhead imagery.

Saipan. That's where the issue would be decided. Saipan was the key to the island chain. Jackson lifted his phone.

'Ryan.'

'Robby. Jack, how free a hand do we have?'

'We can't kill many people. It's not 1945 anymore,' the National Security Advisor told him. 'And they have nuclear missiles.'

'Yeah, well, we're looking for those, so they tell me, and I know that's our first target if we can find them. What if we can't?'

'We have to,' Ryan replied. Have to? he wondered. His best intelligence estimate was that the command-and-control over those missiles was in the hands of Hiroshi Goto, a man of limited intelligence and genuine antipathy to America. A more fundamental issue was that he had no confidence at all in America's ability to predict the man's actions. What might seem irrational to Ryan could seem reasonable to Goto- and to whoever else he depended upon for advice, probably Raizo Yamata, who had begun the entire business and whose personal motivations were simply unknown. 'Robby, we have to take them out of play, and to do that, yeah, you have a free hand. I'll clear that with NCA,' he added, meaning National Command Authority, the dry Pentagon term for the President.

'Nukes?' Jackson asked. It was his profession to think in such terms, Ryan knew, however horrid the word and its implications were.

'Rob, we don't want to do that unless there's no choice at all, but you are authorized to consider and plan for the possibility.'

'I just had a call from our friend on Saipan. It seems somebody wants to pay top dollar for his house.'

'We think they may try to stage elections—a referendum on sovereignty. If they can move people off the island, then, well, it makes them some points, doesn't it?'

'We don't want that to happen, do we?'

'No, we don't. I need a plan, Rob.'

'We'll get one for you,' the Deputy J-3 promised.

Durling appeared on TV again at nine in the evening, Eastern Time. There were already rumbles out. The TV anchors had followed their stories about developments on Wall Street with confused references to the carrier accident the previous week and to urgent negotiations between Japan and the United States over the Mariana Islands, where, they noted, communications were out following a storm that might never have happened. It was very discomforting for them to say what they didn't know. By this time Washington correspondents were trading information and sources, amazed at having missed something of this magnitude. That amazement translated itself into rage at their own government for concealing something of this dimension. Background briefings that had begun at eight helped to assuage them somewhat.

Yes, Wall Street was the big news. Yes, it was more vital to the overall American well-being than some islands that not a few of their number had to be shown on a map. But, no, damn it, the government didn't have the right not to tell the media what was going on. Some of them, though, realized that the First Amendment guaranteed their freedom to find things out, not to demand information from others. Others realized that the Administration was trying to end the affair without bloodshed, which went part of the way to calming them down. But not all of the way.

'My fellow Americans,' Durling began for the second time in the day, and it was immediately apparent that, as pleasing as the events of the afternoon had been, the news this evening would be bad. And so it was.

There is something about inevitability that offends human nature. Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed. But man is also a creature prone to error, and sometimes that makes inevitable the things that he so often seeks to avoid.

The four B-1B Lancer bombers were five hundred miles offshore now, again spread on a line centered due east of Tokyo. This time they turned directly in, took an exact westerly heading of two-seven-zero degrees, and dropped down to a low-penetration altitude. The electronic-warfare officers aboard each of the aircraft now knew more than they had two nights earlier.

Now at least they could ask the right questions. Additional satellite information had fixed the location of every air-defense radar site in the country, and they knew they could beat those. The important part of this night's mission was to get a feel for the capabilities of the E-767's, and that demanded more circumspection.

The B-1B had been reworked many times since the 1970's. It had actually become slower rather than faster,