Debt of Honor

Clark reached into his coat and pulled out his passport. 'We are Russian journalists.'

The cop examined the booklet and handed it back. 'Much colder in Moscow this time of year?'

'Much,' Clark confirmed with a nod. The officer moved off, having handled his curiosity attack for the day.

'Not so sure, Ivan Sergeyevich,' Ding observed when he'd gone. 'It can get pretty cold here, too.'

'I suppose you can always get another job.'

'And miss all this fun?' Both men rose and walked toward their parked car. There was a map in the glove box.

The Russian Air Force personnel at Verino had a natural curiosity of their own, but the Americans weren't helping matters. There were now over a hundred American personnel on their base, barracked in the best accommodations. The three helicopters and two vehicular trailers had been rolled into hangars originally built for MiG-25 fighters. The transport aircraft were too large for that, but had been rolled inside as much as their dimensions allowed, with the tails sticking out in the open, but they could as easily have been mistaken for IL-86s, which occasionally stopped off here. The Russian ground crewmen established a secure perimeter, which denied contact of any sort between the two sets of air-force personnel, a disappointment for the Russians.

The two trailers inside the easternmost hangar were electronically linked with a thick black coaxial cable. Another cable ran outside to a portable satellite link that was similarly guarded.

'Okay, let's rotate it,' a sergeant said. A Russian officer was watching—protocol demanded that the Americans let someone in; this one was surely an intelligence officer—as the birdcage image on the computer screen turned about as though on a phonograph. Next the image moved through a vertical axis, as if it were flying over the stick image. 'That's got it,' the sergeant observed, closing the window on the computer screen and punching UPLOAD to transmit it to the three idle helicopters.

'What did you just do? May I ask?' the Russian inquired.

'Sir, we just taught the computers what to look for.' The answer made no sense to the Russian, true though it was.

The activity in the second van was easier to understand. High-quality photos of several tall buildings were scanned and digitalized, their locations programmed in to a tolerance of only a few meters, then compared with other photos taken from a very high angle that had to denote satellite cameras. The officer leaned in close to get a better feel for the sharpness of the imagery, somewhat to the discomfort of the senior American officer—who, however, was under orders to take no action that might offend the Russians in any way.

'It looks like an apartment building, yes?' the Russian asked in genuine curiosity.

'Yes, it does,' the American officer replied, his skin crawling despite the hospitality they had all experienced here. Orders or not, it was a major federal felony to show this kind of thing to anyone who lacked the proper clearances, even an American.

'Who lives there?'

'I don't know.' Why can't this guy just go away?

By evening the rest of the Americans were up and moving. Incomprehensibly with shaggy hair, not like soldiers at all, they started jogging around the perimeter of the main runway. A few Russians joined in, and a race of sorts started, with both groups running in formation. What started off friendly soon became grim. It was soon clear that the Americans were elite troops unaccustomed to being bested in anything, against which the Russians had pride of place and better acclimatization. Spetznaz, the Russians were soon gasping to one another, and because it was a dull base with a tough-minded commander, they were in good enough shape that after ten kilometers they managed to hold their own. Afterward, both groups mingled long enough to realize that language barriers prevented much in the way of conversation, though the tension in the visitors was clear enough without words.

'Weird-looking things,' Chavez said.

'Just lucky for us that they picked this place.' It was security again, John thought, just like the fighters and bombers at Pearl Harbor had all been bunched together to protect against sabotage or some such nonsense because of a bad intelligence estimate. Another factor might have been the convenience of maintenance at a single location, but they hadn't been assigned to this base originally, and so the hangars weren't large enough. As a result, six E-767's were sitting right there in the open, two miles away and easily distinguished by their odd shape. Better yet, the country was just too crowded for the base to be very isolated. The same factors that placed cities in the flat spots also placed airfields there, but the cities had grown up first. There were light-industrial buildings all around, and the mainly rectangular air base had highways down every side. The next obvious move was to check the trees for wind direction. Northwesterly wind. Landing aircraft would come in from the southeast. Knowing that, they had to find a perch.

Everything was being used now. Low-orbit electronic-intelligence satellites were also gathering signals, fixing the patrol locations of the AEW aircraft, not as well as the ELINT aircraft could, but far more safely. The next step would to enlist submarines in the job, but that could take time, someone had told them. Not all that many submarines to go around, and those that were there had a job to do. Hardly a revelation. The electronic order of battle was firming up, and though not everything the ELINT techs discovered was good news, at least they did have the data from which the operations people might formulate some sort of plan or other. For the moment, the locations of the racetrack patterns used by three orbiting E-767's were firmly plotted. They seemed to stay fairly stationary from day to day. The minor daily variations might have had as much to do with local winds as anything else, which made it necessary to downlink information to their ground-control center. And that was good news, too.

The medium-price hotel was more than they could ordinarily afford, but for all that it lay right under the approach to runway three-two-left of the nearby air base. Perhaps the noise was just so normal to the country that people filtered it out, Chavez thought, remembering the incessant street racket from their hostelry in Tokyo. The back was better, the clerk assured them, but the best he could offer was a corner room. The really offensive noise was at the front of the hotel: the runway terminated only half a kilometer from the front door. It was the takeoffs that really shook things up. Landings were far easier to sleep through.

'I'm not sure I like this,' Ding observed when he got to the room.

'Who said we were supposed to?' John moved a chair to the window and took the first watch.

'It's like murder, John.'

'Yeah, I suppose it is.' The hell of it was, Ding was right, but somebody else had said it wasn't and that's what counted. Sort of.

'No other options?' President Durling asked.

'No, sir, none that I see.' It was a first for Ryan. He'd managed to stop a war, alter a fashion. He'd terminated a 'black' operation that would probably have caused great political harm to his country. Now he was about to initiate one—well, not exactly, he told himself. Somebody else had started this war, but just though it might be, he didn't exactly relish what he was about to do. 'They're not going to back off.'

'We never saw it coming,' Durling said quietly, knowing that it was too late for such thoughts.

'And maybe that's my fault,' Ryan replied, feeling that it was his duty to take the blame. After all, national security was his bailiwick. People would die because of what he'd done wrong, and die from whatever things he might do right. For all the power exercised from this room, there really were no choices, were there?

'Will it all work?'

'Sir, that is something we'll just have to see.'

It turned out to be easier than expected. Three of the ungainly twin-engine aircraft taxied in a line to the end of the runway, where each took its turn to face into the northwest winds, stopping, advancing its engines to full power, backing off to see if the engines would flame out, and when they didn't, going again to full power, but this time slipping the brakes and accelerating into its takeoff roll. Clark checked his watch and unfolded a road map of Honshu.

All that was required was a phone call. The Boeing Company's Commercial Airplane Group issued an Emergency Airworthiness Directive, called an EAD, concerning the auto-landing system on its 767 commercial aircraft. A fault of unknown origin had affected the final approach of a TWA airliner on final into St. Louis, and until determination of the nature of the fault, operators were strongly advised to deactivate that feature of the flight-