Debt of Honor

'The Japanese military has good stuff for monitoring military communication. Hell, they invented a lot of the technology our people use. But these'—Nomuri grinned—'everybody has 'em, and they're digitally encrypted, and they cover the whole country. Even here. There's a repeater tower down on that mountain. Anyway, it's safer than using your regular comms. The bill's paid to the end of the month,' he added.

'Be nice to call home and tell my wife that everything's going fine,' Checa thought aloud.

'I'd he careful about that. Here are the numbers you can call.' Nomuri handed over a sheet. 'That's one's mine. That one's a guy named Clark. That one's another officer named Chavez—'

'Ding's over here?' First Sergeant Vega asked.

'You know 'em?'

'We did a job in Africa last fall,' Checa replied. 'We get a lot of 'special' work. You sure you can tell us their names, man?'

'They have covers. You're probably better off speaking in Spanish. Not as many people here speak that language. I don't need to tell you to keep your transmissions short,' Nomuri added. He didn't. Checa nodded and asked the most important question.

'And getting out?'

Nomuri turned to point, but the terrain feature in question was covered in clouds. 'There's a pass there. Head for it, then downhill to a town called Hirose. I pick you up there, put you on a train to Nagoya, and you fly off to either Taiwan or Korea.'

'Just like that.' The comment wasn't posed as a question, but the dubious nature of the response was clear anyway.

'There are a couple of hundred thousand foreign businesspeople here. You're eleven guys from Spain trying to sell wine, remember?'

'I could use some sangria right now, too.' Checa was relieved to see that his CIA contact had been briefed in on the same mission. It didn't always work out that way. 'Now what?'

'You wait for the rest of the mission force to arrive. If something goes wrong, you call me and head out. If I drop out of the net, you call the others. If everything goes to hell, you find another way out. You should have passports, clothes, and—'

'We do.'

'Good.' Nomuri took his camera out of his backpack and started shooting photos of the cloud-shrouded mountains.

'This is CNN, live from Pearl Harbor,' the reporter ended, and a commercial cut in. The intelligence analyst rewound the tape to examine it again. It was both amazing and entirely ordinary that he'd be able to get such vital information so easily. The American media really ran the country, he'd learned over the years, and perhaps more was the pity. The way they'd played up the unfortunate incident in Tennessee had inflamed the entire country into precipitous action, then driven his country into the same, and the only good news was what he saw on the TV screen: two fleet carriers still in their dry docks, with two more still in the Indian Ocean, according to the latest reports from that part of the world, and Pacific Fleet's other two in Long Beach, also dry docked and unable to enter service-and that, really, was that, so far as the Marianas were concerned. He had to formalize his intelligence estimate with a few pages of analytical prose, but what it came down to was that America could sting his country, but her ability to project real power was now a thing of the past. The realization of that meant that there was little likelihood of a serious contest for the immediate future.

Jackson didn't mind being the only passenger in the VC-20B. A man could get used to this sort of treatment, and he had to admit that the Air Force's executive birds were better than the Navy's—in fact the Navy didn't have many, and those were mainly modified P-3 Orions whose turboprop engines provided barely more than half the speed of the twin-engine executive jet. With only a brief refueling stop at Travis Air Force Base, outside San Francisco, he'd made the hop to Hawaii in under nine hours, and it was something to feel good about until on final approach to Hickam he got a good look at the naval base and saw that Enterprise was still in the graving dock. The first nuclear-powered carrier and bearer of the U.S. Navy's proudest name would be out of this one. The aesthetic aspect of it was bad enough. More to the point, it would have been far better to have two decks to use instead of one.

'You have your task force, boy,' Robby whispered to himself. And it was the one every naval aviator wanted. Task Force 77, titularly the main air arm of Pacific Fleet, and, one carrier or not, it was his, and about to sail in harm's way. Perhaps fifty years earlier there had been an excitement to it. Perhaps when PacFlt's main striking arm had sailed under Bill Halsey or Ray Spruance, the people in command had looked forward to it. The wartime movies said so, and so did the official logs, but how much of that had been mere posturing, Jackson wondered now, contemplating his own command. Did Halsey and Spruance lose sleep with the knowledge that they were sending young men to death, or was the world simply a different place then, where war was considered as natural an event as a polio epidemic—another scourge that was now a thing of the past. To be Commander Task Force 77 was a life's ambition, but he'd never really wanted to fight a war—oh, sure, he admitted to himself, as a new ensign, or even as far as lieutenant's rank, he'd relished the idea of air combat, knowing that as a U.S. naval aviator he was the best in the world, highly trained and exquisitely equipped, and wanting to prove it someday. But over lime he'd seen too many friends die in accidents. He'd gotten a kill in the Persian Gulf War, and four more over the Med one clear and starry night. But those last four had been an accident. He'd killed men for no good reason at all, and though he never spoke of it to others, not even his wife. It gnawed at him that he had in effect been tricked into killing other human beings. Not his fault, just some sort of enforced mistake. But that's what war was for the warriors most of the time, just a huge mistake, and now he had to play his part in another such mistake instead of using TF-77 the way it was supposed to be used, just to be, and, merely by being, to prevent wars from happening. The only consolation of the moment was that, again, the mistake, the accident, wasn't of his making.

If wishes were horses, he told himself as the aircraft taxied to a stop. The flight attendant opened the door and tossed Jackson's one bag out to another Air Force sergeant, who walked the Admiral to a helicopter for his next flight, this one to CINCPAC, Admiral Dave Seaton. It was time to don his professional personality. Misused or not, Robby Jackson was a warrior about to assume command of others. He'd examined his doubts and questions, and now it was time to put them away.

'We're going to owe them big-time for this,' Durling noted, flipping off the TV with his remote.

The technology had been developed for advertising during baseball games, of all things. An adaptation of the blue-screen systems used in the production of movies, advanced computer systems allowed it to be used in real- time, and thus the background behind the batter at the plate could be made to appear to be an advertisement for a local bank or car dealer when in fact it was just the usual green used at ballparks. In this case, a reporter could make his or her live feed from Pearl Harbor—outside the naval base, of course—and the background was that of two carrier profiles, with birds flying past and the antlike shapes of yard workers moving in the distance, and it looked as real as anything else on the TV screen which, after all, was just a collection of multicolored dots.

'They're Americans,' Jack said. And besides, he was the one who'd bullied them into it, again insulating the President from the politically dangerous task. 'They're supposed to be on our side. We just had to remind them of that.'

'Will it work?' That was the harder question.

'Not for long, but maybe for long enough. It's a good plan we have in place. We need a few breaks, but we've gotten two in the bag already. The important thing is, we're showing them what they expect to see. They expect both carriers to be there, and they expect the media to tell the whole world about it. Intelligence people are no different from anybody else, sir. They have preconceptions, and when they see them in real life, it just reinforces how brilliant they think they are.'

'How many people do we have to kill?' the President wanted to know next.

'Enough. We don't know how big the number is, and we're going to try an' keep it as low as possible—but, sir, the mission is—'

'I know. I know about missions, remember?' Durling closed his eyes, remembering Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, half a lifetime before. The mission comes first. It was the only way a lieutenant could think, and now for the first time he realized that a president had to think the same way. It hardly seemed fair.

They didn't see much sun this far north at this time of year, and that suited Colonel Zacharias. The flight from Whiteman to Elmendorf had taken a mere five hours, all of it in darkness because the B-2A flew only in daylight to