Debt of Honor

this all the time?'

'It isn't the first,' Scott said.

'And now you're waiting for what?' the man asked.

'You'll see.'

Launched into orbit eight years earlier by the Space Shuttle Atlantis, the TRW-built KH-12 satellite had actually survived far beyond its programmed life, but as was true of many products made by that company—the Air Force called it 'TR-Wonderful'—it just kept on ticking. The radar-reconnaissance satellite was completely out of maneuvering fuel, however, which meant you had to wait for it to get to a particular place and hope that the operating altitude was suitable to what you wanted.

It was a large cylindrical craft, over thirty feet in length, with immense 'wings' of solar receptors to power the onboard Ku-band radar. The solar cells had degraded over the years in the intense radiation environment, allowing only a few minutes of operation per revolution. The ground controllers had waited what seemed a long time for this opportunity. The orbital track was northwest-to-southeast, within six degrees of being directly overhead, close enough to see straight down into the valley. They already knew a lot. The geological history of the place was clear. A river now blocked with a hydroelectric dam had cut the gorge deep. It was more canyon than valley at this point, and the steep sides had been the deciding factor in putting the missiles here. The missiles could launch vertically, but incoming warheads would be blocked from hitting them by the mountains to east and west. It didn't make any difference whose warheads they were. The shape and course of the valley would have had the same effect on Russian RVs as Americans'. The final bit of genius was that the valley was hard rock. Each silo had natural armor. For all those reasons, Scott and Fleming had bet much of their professional reputations on the tasking orders for the KH-12.

'Right about now, Betsy,' Scott said, checking the wall clock.

'What exactly will you see?'

'If they're there, we'll know it. You follow space technology?' Fleming asked.

'You're talking to an original Trekkie.'

'Back in the 1980's NASA orbited a mission, and the first thing they downloaded was a shot of the Nile delta, underground aquifers that feed into the Mediterranean Sea. We mapped them.'

'The same one did the irrigation canals down in Mexico, right, the Mayans, I think. What are you telling me?' the AMTKAK official replied.

'It was our mission, not NASA's. We were telling the Russians that they couldn't hide their silos from us. They got the message, too,' Mrs. Fleming explained. Right about then the secure fax machine started chirping. The signal from the KH-12 had been crosslinked to a satellite in geostationary orbit over the Indian Ocean, and from there to the U.S. mainland. Their first read on the signals would be unenhanced, but, they hoped, good enough for a fast check. Scott took the first image off the machine and set it on the table under a bright light, next to a visual print of the same place.

'Tell me what you see.'

'Okay, here's the mainline…oh—this thing picks up the ties. The rails are too small, eh?'

'Correct.' Betsy found the spur line. The concrete rail ties were fifteen centimeters in width, and made for a good, sharp radar return that looked like a line of offset dashes.

'It goes quite a way up the valley, doesn't it?' The AMTRAK guy's face was down almost on the paper, tracing with his pen. 'Turn, turn. What are these?' he asked, touching the tip to a series of white circles.

Scott placed a small ruler on the sheet. 'Betsy?'

'Dense-packed it, too. My, aren't we clever. It must have cost a fortune to do this.'

'Beautiful work,' Scott breathed. The rail spur curved left and right, and every two hundred meters was a silo, not three meters away from the marching ranks of rail ties. 'Somebody really thought this one through.'

'You lost me.'

'Dense-pack,' Mrs. Fleming said. 'It means that if you attempt to hit the missile field, the first warhead throws so much debris into the air that the next warhead gets trashed on the way in.'

'It means that you can't use nuclear weapons to take these boys out—not easily anyway,' Scott went on. 'Summarize what you know for me,' he ordered.

'This is a rail line that doesn't make any commercial sense. It doesn't go anywhere, so it can't make money. It's not a service siding, too long for that. It's standard gauge, probably because of the cargo-dimension requirements.'

'And they're stringing camouflage netting over it,' Betsy finished the evaluation, and was already framing the National Intelligence Estimate they had to draft tonight. 'Chris, this is the place.'

'But I only count ten. There's ten more we have to find.'

It was hard to think of it as an advantage, but the downsizing of the Navy had generated a lot of surplus staff, so finding another thirty-seven people wasn't all that hard. That brought Tennessee's complement to one hundred twenty, thirty-seven short of an Ohio's normal crew size, a figure Dutch Claggett could accept. He didn't need the missile technicians, after all. His crew would be heavy on senior petty officers, another burden he would bear easily, the CO told himself, standing atop the sail and watching his men load provisions under the glaring lights. The reactor plant was up and running. Even now his engineering officer was conducting drills. Just forward of the sail, a green Mark 48 ADCAP torpedo was sliding backwards down the weapons-loading hatch under the watchful eyes of a chief torpedoman. There were only sixteen of those torpedoes to be had, but he didn't expect to need that many for the mission he anticipated. Asheville and Charlotte. He'd known men on both, and if Washington got its thumb out, maybe he'd do something about that.

A car pulled up to the brow, and a petty officer got out, carrying a metal briefcase. He made his way aboard, dodging around the crewmen tossing cartons, then down a hatch.

'That's the software upgrade for the sonar systems,' Claggett's XO said.

'The one they've been tracking whales with.'

'How long to upload it?'

'Supposedly just a few minutes.'

'I want to be out of here before dawn, X.'

'We'll make it. First stop Pearl?'

Claggett nodded, pointing to the other Ohios, also loading men and chow. 'And I don't want any of those turkeys beating us there, either.'

It wasn't a comfortable feeling, but the sight was worth it. Johnnie Reb rested on rows of wooden blocks, and towered above the floor of the dry dock like some sort of immense building. Captain Sanchez had decided to give things a look, and stood alongside the ship's commanding officer. As they watched, a traveling crane removed the remains of the number-three screw. Workers and engineers in their multicolored hard hats made way, then converged back on the skeg, evaluating the damage. Another crane moved in to begin the removal of number-four tailshaft. It had to be pulled straight out, its inboard extremity already disconnected from the rest of the assembly.

'Bastards,' the skipper breathed.

'We can fix her,' Sanchez noted quietly.

'Four months. If we're lucky,' the Captain added. They just didn't have the parts to do it any faster. The key, unsurprisingly, was the reduction gears. Six complete gear sets would have to be manufactured, and that took time. Enterprise's entire drive-train was gone, and the efforts to get the ship to safely as quickly as possible had wrecked the one gear set that might have been repairable. Six months for her, if the contractor could get spun up in a hurry, and work three-shift weeks to get the job done. The rest of the repairs were straightforward.

'How quick to get number-one shaft back to battery?' Sanchez asked.

The Captain shrugged. 'Two-three days, for what that's worth.'

Sanchez hesitated before asking the next question. He should have known the answer, and he was afraid it would sound really stupid—oh, what the hell? He had to go off to Barbers Point anyway. And the only dumb questions, he'd told people for years, were the ones you didn't ask.

'Sir, I hate to sound stupid, but how fast will she go on two shafts?'