Debt of Honor

north like a dying bird. He forced himself to look away from the impact area. He just didn't want to see or know where it hit. Not that it mattered. The towering fireball lit up the area as though from a lightning strike. It hit Ding like a punch in the stomach to realize what he'd done, and there came the sudden urge to vomit.

Kami-Five saw it, ten miles out, the sickening flare of yellow on the ground short and right of the airfield that could only mean one thing. Aviators are disciplined people. For the pilot and copilot of the next E-767 there also came a sudden emptiness in the stomach, a tightening of muscles. They wondered which of their squadron mates had just smeared themselves into the ground, which families would receive unwanted visitors, which faces they would no longer see, which voices they would no longer hear, and punished themselves for not paying closer attention to the radio, as though it would have mattered. Instinctively both men checked their cockpit for irregularities. Engines okay. Electronics okay. Hydraulics okay. Whatever had happened to the other one, their aircraft was fine.

'Tower, Five, what happened, over?'

'Five, Tower, Three just went in. We do not know why. Runway is clear.'

'Five, roger, continuing approach, runway in sight.' He took his hand off the radio button before he could say something else. The two aviators traded a look. Kami-three. Good friends. Gone. Enemy action would have been easier to accept than the ignominy of something as pedestrian as a landing crash, whatever the cause. But for now their heads turned back to the flight path. They had a mission to finish, and twenty-five fellow crewmen aft to deliver safely home despite their sorrow.

'Want me to take it?' John asked.

'My job, man.' Ding checked the capacitor charge again, then wiped his face. He clenched his fists to stop the slight trembling he noticed, both ashamed and relieved that he had it. The widely spaced landing lights told him that this was another target, and he was in the service of his country, as they were in the service of theirs, and that was that. But better to do it with a proper weapon, he thought. Perhaps, his mind wandered, the guys who preferred swords had thought the same thing when faced with the advent of muskets. Chavez shook his head one last time to clear it, and aimed his light through the open window, working his way back from the opening as he lined up on the approaching aircraft. There was a shroud on the front to prevent people outside the room from seeing the flash, but he didn't want to take any more chances than he had to…

…right about…

…now…

He punched the button again, and again the silvery aluminum skin around the aircraft's cockpit flared brightly, for just a second or so. Off to the left he could hear the warbling shriek of fire engines, doubtless heading to the site of the first crash. Not like the fire sirens at home, he thought irrelevantly. The E-767 didn't do anything at first, and he wondered for a second if he'd done it right. Then the angle of the nose light changed downward, but the airplane didn't turn at all. It just increased its rate of descent. Maybe it would hit them in the hotel room, Chavez, thought. It was too late to run away, and maybe God would punish him for killing fifty people. He shook his head and dismantled the light, waiting, finding comfort in concentrating on a mechanical task.

Clark saw it, too, and also knew that there was no purpose in darting from the room. The airplane should be flaring now…perhaps the pilot thought so, too. The nose came up, and the Boeing product roared perhaps thirty feet over the roof of the building. John moved to the side windows and saw the wingtip pass over, rotating as it did so. The aircraft started to climb, or attempt to, probably for a go-around, but without enough power, and it stalled halfway down the runway, perhaps five hundred feet in the air, falling off on the port wing and spiraling in for yet another fireball. Neither he nor Ding thanked God for a deliverance that they might not have deserved in any case.

'Pack the light and get your camera,' Clark ordered.

'Why?'

'We're reporters, remember?' he said, this time in Russian.

Ding's hands were shaking enough that he had trouble disassembling the light, but John didn't move to help him. Everyone needed time to deal with feelings like this. They hadn't killed bad men deserving of death, after all. They had erased the lives of people not unlike themselves, doomed by their oaths of service to someone who didn't merit their loyalty. Chavez finally got a camera out, selected a hundred-millimeter lens for the Nikon F5 body, and followed his boss out the door. The hotel's small lobby was already filled with people, almost all of them Japanese. 'Klerk' and 'Chekov' walked right through them, running across the highway to the airport's perimeter fence, where the latter started taking pictures. Things were sufficiently confused that it was ten minutes before a policeman came over.

'What are you doing!' Not so much a question as an accusation.

'We are reporters,' 'Klerk' replied, handing over his credentials.

'Stop what you are doing!' the cop ordered next.

'Have we broken a law? We were in the hotel across the road when this happened.' Ivan Sergeyevich turned, looking down at the policeman. Me paused. 'Oh! Have the Americans attacked you? Do you want our film?'

'Yes!' the officer said with a sudden realization. He held out his hand, gratified at their instant cooperative response to his official authority.

'Yevgeniy, give the man your film right now.'

'Chekov' rewound the roll and ejected it, handing it over.

'Please return to the hotel. We will come for you if we need you.'

I bet you will. 'Room four-sixteen,' Clark told him. 'This is a terriblething. Did anyone survive?'

'I don't know. Please go now,' the policeman said, waving them across the road.

'God have mercy on them,' Chavez said in English, meaning it.

Two hours later a KH-11 overflew the area, its infrared cameras scanning the entire Tokyo area, among others. The photorecon experts at the National Reconnaissance Office took immediate note of the two smoldering fires and the aircraft parts that littered the area around them. Two E-767's had bitten the dust, they saw with no small degree of satisfaction. They were mainly Air Force personnel and, distant from the human carnage of the scene, all they saw was two dead targets. The imagery was real-timed to several destinations. In the J-3 area of the Pentagon, it was decided that Operation ZORRO'S first act had gone about as they had planned. They would have said as hoped, but that might have spoiled the luck. Well, they thought, CIA wasn't quite entirely useless.

It was dark at Pearl Harbor. Flooding the dry dock had required ten hours, which had rushed the time up to and a little beyond what was really safe, but war had different rules on safety. With the gate out of the way, and with the help of two large harbor tugs, John Stennis drove out of the dock and, turning, left Enterprise behind. The harbor pilot nervously got the ship out in record time, then to be ferried back to shore by helicopter, and before midnight, Johnnie Reb was in deep water and away from normal shipping channels, heading west.

The accident-investigation team showed up almost at once from their headquarters in Tokyo. A mixed group consisting of military and civilian personnel, it was the latter element that owned the greater expertise because this was really a civil aircraft modified for military use. The 'black box' (actually painted Day-Glo orange) flight recorder from Kami-Five was recovered within a few lucky minutes, though the one from Kami-Three proved harder to find. It was taken back to the Tokyo lab for analysis. The problem for the Japanese military was rather more difficult. Two of their precious ten E-767's were now gone, and another was in its service hangar for overhaul and upgrade of its radar systems. That left seven, and keeping three on constant duty would be impossible. It was simple arithmetic. Each aircraft had to be serviced, and the crews had to rest. Even with nine operational aircraft, keeping three up all the time, with three more down and the other three in standby, was murderously destructive to the men and equipment. There was also the question of aircraft safety. A member of the investigation team discovered the Airworthiness Directive on the 767 and determined that it applied to the model the Japanese had converted to AEW use. Immediately, the autolanding systems were deactivated, and the natural first conclusion from the civilian investigators was that the flight crews, perhaps weary from their long patrol flights, had engaged it for their approaches. The senior uniformed officer was tempted to accept it, except for one thing: few airmen liked automatic-landing systems, and military airmen were the least likely of all to turn their aircraft over to something