Debt of Honor

'Straight board shut,' the chief of the boat announced from his post on the port-forward corner of the attack center. As was normal, the submarine's most senior enlisted man was the diving officer. Every opening in the ship's hull was closed tight, the red circles on the diving board replaced now with red horizontal dashes. 'Pressure in the boat.'

'All systems aligned and checked for dive. The compensation is entered. We are rigged for dive,' the OOD announced.

'Okay, let's take her down. Dive the ship. Make your depth one hundred feet.' Claggett looked around the compartment, first checking the status boards, then checking the men. Tennessee hadn't been underwater for more than a year. Neither had her crew, and he looked around for any first-dive nerves as the officer of the deck gave the proper commands for the evolution. It was normal that a few of the younger men shook their heads, reminding themselves that they were submariners, after all, and supposedly used to this. The sounds of escaping air made that clear enough. Tennessee took a gentle five-degree down angle at the bow. For the next few minutes the submarine would be checked for trim to see that the ship was properly balanced and that all onboard systems really did work, as all tests and inspections had already made certain. That process required half an hour. Claggett could well have gone faster, and the next time he certainly would, but for the moment it was time to get everyone comfortable again.

'Mr. Shaw, come left to new course two-one-zero.'

'Aye, helm, left ten degrees rudder, come to new course two-one-zero.'

The helmsman responded properly, bringing the submarine to her base course.

'All ahead full.' Clagget ordered.

'All ahead full, aye.' The full-speed bell would take Tennessee to twenty-six knots. There were actually four more knots of speed available with a flank bell. It was a little-known fact that someone had made a mistake with the Ohio-class of boomers. Designed for a maximum speed of just over twenty-six knots, the first full-power trials on the lead boat in the class had lopped out at just over twenty-nine, and later models had been marginally faster still. Well, Claggett thought with a smile, the U.S. Navy had never been especially interested in slow ships; they were less likely to dodge out of harm's way.

'So far, so good,' Claggett observed to his OOD.

Lieutenant Shaw nodded. Another officer on his way out of the Navy, he'd been tapped as the boat's navigator, and having served with Dutch Claggett before, he'd not objected to coming back one more time. 'Speed's coming up nicely, Cap'n.'

'We've been saving a lot of neutrons lately.'

'What's the mission?'

'Not sure yet, but damned if we aren't the biggest fast-attack submarine ever made,' Claggett observed.

'Time to stream.'

'Then do it, Mr. Shaw.'

A minute later the submarine's lengthy towed-sonar was allowed to deploy aft, guided into the ship's wake via the starboard-side after diving plane. Even at high speed, the thin-line array immediately began providing data to the sonarmen forward of the attack center. Tennessee was at full speed now, diving deeper to eight hundred feet. The increased water pressure eliminated the chance of cavitation coming off her sophisticated screw system. Her natural-circulation reactor plant gave off no pump noise. Her smooth lines created no flow noise at all. Inside, crewmen wore rubber-soled shoes. Turbines were mounted on decks connected to the hull via springs to isolate and decouple propulsion sounds. Designed to radiate no noise at all, and universally referred to even by the fast-attack community as 'black holes,' the class really was the quietest thing man had ever put to sea. Big, with nowhere near the speed and maneuverability of the smaller attack boats, Tennessee and her sisters were still ahead in the most important category of performance. Even whales had a hard time hearing one.

Force-on-force, Robby Jackson thought again. If that's impossible, then what?

'Well, if we can't play this like a prizefight, then we play it like a card game,' he said to himself, alone in his office. He looked up in surprise, then realized that he'd heard his own words spoken aloud. It wasn't very professional to be angry, but Rear Admiral Jackson was indulging himself with anger for the moment. The enemy— that was the term he was using now—assumed that he and his colleagues in J-3 could not construct an effective response to their moves. To them it was a matter of space and time and force. Space was measured in thousands of miles. Time was being measured in months and years. Force was being measured in divisions and fleets.

What if they were wrong? Jackson asked himself. Shemya to Tokyo was two thousand miles. Elmendorf to Tokyo was another thousand. But space was time. Time to them was the number of months or years required to rebuild a navy capable of doing what had been done in 1944, but that wasn't in the cards, and therefore was irrelevant. And force wasn't everything you had. Force was what you managed to deliver to the places that needed to be hit. Everything else was wasted energy, wasn't it?

More important still was perception. His adversaries perceived that their own limiting factors applied to others as well. They defined the contest in their terms, and if that's how America played the game, then America would lose. So his most important task was to make up his own set of rules. And so he would, Jackson told himself. That's where he began, on a clear sheet of unlined white paper, with frequent looks at the world map on his wall.

Whoever had run the night watch at CIA was intelligent enough, Ryan thought. Intelligent enough to know that information received at three in the morning could wait until six, which bespoke a degree of judgment rare in the intelligence community, and one for which he was grateful. The Russians had transmitted the dispatch to the Washington rezidentura, and from there it had been hand-carried to CIA. Jack wondered what the uniformed guards at CIA had thought when they had let the Russian spooks through the gate. From there the report had been driven to the White House, and the courier had been waiting for Ryan in his anteroom when he came in.

'Sources report a total of nine (9) 'H-11' rockets at Yoshinobu. Another missile is at the assembly plant, being used as an engineering test-bed for a proposed structural upgrade. That leaves ten (10) or eleven (11) rockets unaccounted for, more probably the former, location as yet unknown. Good news, Ivan Emmetovich. I presume your satellite people are quite busy. Ours are as well. Golovko.'

'Yes, they are, Sergey Nikolay'ch,' Ryan whispered, flipping open the second folder the courier had brought down. 'Yes, they are.'

Here goes nothing, thought Sanchez.

AirPac was a vice admiral, and in as foul a mood as every other officer at the Pearl Harbor Naval Base. Responsible for every naval aircraft and flight deck from Nevada west, his ought to have been the point command for the war that had begun only a few days earlier, but not only could he not tell his two active carriers in the Indian Ocean what he wanted, he could see his other two carriers, sitting side by side in dry docks. And likely to remain there for months, as a CNN camera crew was now making clear to viewers across the entire world.

'So what is it?' he asked his visitors.

'Do we have plans for visiting WestPac?' Sanchez asked.

'Not anytime soon.'

'I can be ready to move in less than ten days,' Johnnie Reb's CO announced.

'Is that a fact?' AirPac inquired acidly.

'Number-one shaft's okay. If we fix number four, I can do twenty-nine, maybe thirty knots. Probably more. The trials on two shafts had the wheels attached. Eliminate the drag from those, maybe thirty-two.'

'Keep going,' the Admiral said.

'Okay, the first mission has to be to eliminate their airplanes, right?'

Sanchez said. 'For that I don't need Hoovers and 'Truders. Johnnie Reb can handle four squadrons of Toms and four more of Plastic Bugs, Robber's det of Queers to do the jamming, plus an extra det of Hummers. And guess what?'

AirPac nodded. 'That almost equals their fighter strength on the islands. ' It was dicey. One carrier deck against two major island bases wasn't exactly…but the islands were pretty far apart, weren't they? Japan had other ships out there, and submarines, which is what he feared in particular.

'It's a start, maybe.'