Debt of Honor

worse than it appears to be,' the reporters all said, with only minor changes. When the live reports were done, the cameras were moved and more shots made of the carriers, then still more from the other side of the harbor. They were just backgrounders, like file footage, and showed the ships and the yards without any reporters standing in the way. These tapes were turned over to someone else and digitalized for further use.

'Those are two sick ships,' Oreza observed tersely. Each one represented more than the aggregate tonnage of the entire U.S. Coast Guard, and the Navy, clever people that they were, had let both of them take a shot in the ass. The retired master chief felt his blood pressure increase.

'How long to get them well?' Burroughs asked.

'Months. Long time. Six months…puts us into typhoon season,' Portagee realized to his further discomfort. It got worse with additional consideration. He didn't exactly relish the idea of being on an island assaulted by Marines, either. Here he was, on high ground, within sight of a surface-to-air missile battery that was sure to draw fire. Maybe selling out for a million bucks wasn't so bad an idea after all. With that sort of money he could buy another boat, another house, and do his fishing out of the Florida Keys.

'You know, you can fly out of here if you want.'

'Oh, what's the hurry?'

Election posters were already being printed and posted. The public access channel on the island's cable system updated notices every few hours about the plans for Saipan. If anything, the island was even more relaxed now. Japanese tourists were unusually polite, and for the most part the soldiers were unarmed now. Military vehicles were being used for roadwork. Soldiers were visiting schools for friendly introductions. Two new baseball fields had been created, virtually overnight, and a new league started up.

There was talk that a couple of Japanese major-league teams would commence spring training on Saipan, for which a stadium would have to be constructed, and maybe, it was whispered now, Saipan would have its own team. Which made sense, Oreza supposed. The island was closer to Tokyo than Kansas City was to New York. It wasn't that the residents were happy with the occupation. It was just that they did not see any salvation, and so like most people in such a spot they learned to live with it. The Japanese were going far out of their way to make it as comfortable a process as possible.

For the first week there had been daily protests. But the Japanese commander, General Arima, had come out to meet every such group, TV cameras all around, and invited the leaders into his office for a chat, often televised live. Then came the more sophisticated responses. Government civilians and businessmen held a lengthy press conference, documenting how much money they had invested in the island, showing in graphic form the difference they'd made for the local economy, and promising to do more. It wasn't so much that they had eliminated resentment as shown tolerance of it, promising at every turn to abide by the results of the elections soon to be held. We live here, too, they kept saying. We live here, too.

There had to be hope. Two weeks tomorrow, Oreza thought, and all they heard were reports on goddamned negotiations. Since when had America ever negotiated something like this? Maybe that was it. Maybe it was just his country's obvious sign of weakness that gave him a sense of hopelessness. Nobody was fighting back. Tell us that the government is doing something, he wanted to say to the Admiral at the other end of the satellite phone…

'Well, what the hell.' Oreza walked into the living room, put the batteries back in the phone, slid the antenna into the bottom of the mixing bowl, and dialed the number.

'Admiral Jackson,' he heard.

'Oreza here.'

'Anything new to report?'

'Yeah, Admiral. How the elections are going to go.'

'I don't understand, Master Chief.'

'I see CNN telling us we got two carriers with their legs cut off and people saying we can't do shit, sir. Jesus, Admiral, even when the Argentineans took the goddamned Falklands the Brits said they were coming back. I ain't hearing that. What the hell are we supposed to think?'

Jackson weighed his reply for a few seconds. 'I don't need to tell you the rules on talking about operational stuff. Your job's to give me information, remember?'

'All we keep hearing is how they're going to hold elections, okay? The missile site east of us is camouflaged now—'

'I know that. And the search radar on top of Mount Takpochao is operating, and there's about forty lighter aircraft based at the airport and Kobler. We count sixty more at Andersen on Guam. There are eight 'cans cruising oast of you, and an oiler group approaching them for an unrep. Anything else you want to know?' Even if Oreza was 'compromised,' a polite term for being under arrest, which Jackson doubted, this was nothing secret. Everyone knew America had reconnaissance satellites. On the other hand, Oreza needed to know that Jackson was up-to- date and, more importantly, interested. He was slightly ashamed of what he had to say next. 'Master Chief, I expected better from a guy like you.' The reply made him feel better, though.

'That's what I needed to hear, Admiral.'

'Anything new happens, you tell us about it.'

'Aye aye, sir.'

Jackson broke the connection and lifted a recently arrived report on Johnnie Reb.

'Soon, Master Chief,' he whispered. Then it was time to meet with the people from MacDill Air Force Base, who were, perversely, all wearing Army green. He didn't know that they would remind him of something he'd seen a few months earlier.

The men all had to be Spanish speakers, and look Spanish. Fortunately that wasn't hard. A documents expert flew from Langley to Fort Stewart, Georgia, complete with all the gear he needed, including ten blank passports, for purposes of simplicity, they'd use their real names. First Sergeant Julio Vega sat down in front of the camera, wearing his best suit.

'Don't smile,' the CIA technician told him. 'Europeans don't smile for passports.'

'Yes, sir.' His service nickname was Oso, 'Bear,' but only his peers called him that now. To the rest of the Rangers in Foxtrot Company, Second Battalion, 175th Ranger Regiment, his only name was 'First Sergeant,' and they knew him as an experienced NCO who would back up his captain on the mission for which he'd just volunteered.

'You need better clothes, too.'

'Who's buyin'?' Vega asked, grinning now, though the picture would show the dour face he usually reserved for soldiers who failed to meet his standards of behavior. That would not be the case here, he thought. Eight men, all jump-qualified (as all Rangers were), all people who'd seen combat action in one place or another—and unusually for members of the 175th, all men who hadn't shaved their heads down to stubbly Mohawks. Vega remembered another group like this one, and his grin stopped. Not all of them had come out of Colombia alive.

Spanish speakers, he thought as he left the room. Spanish was probably the language of the Marianas. Like most senior Army noncommissioned officers, he had gotten his bachelor's degree in night school, having majored in military history—it had just seemed the right thing to do for one of his profession, and besides, the Army had paid for it. If Spanish were the language on those rocks, then it gave him an additional reason to think in positive terms about the mission. The name of the operation, which he'd overheard in a brief conversation with Captain Diego Checa, also seemed auspicious. It was called Operation ZORRO, which had amused the Captain enough to allow him to confide in his first sergeant. The 'real' Zorro had been named Don Diego, hadn't he? He had forgotten the bandit's surname, but his senior NCO had not. With a name like Vega, how can I turn down a mission like this? Oso asked himself.

It was a good thing he was in shape, Nomuri thought. Just breathing here was hard enough. Most Western visitors to Japan stayed in the major cities and never realized that the country was every bit as mountainous as Colorado. Tochimoto was a small hill settlement that languished in the winter and expanded in summer as local citizens who grew tired of the crowded sameness of the cities moved into the country to explore. The hamlet, at the end of National Route 140, had essentially pulled in its sidewalks, but Chet was able to find a place to rent a small four-wheel all-terrain cycle, and had told the owner that he just needed a few hours to get away. In return for his money and a set of keys he'd received a stern warning, albeit polite, about following the trail and being careful,