Debt of Honor

The final ridgeline appeared just as programmed. Richter slowed the aircraft, circling to figure out the winds as he looked down for the people he'd been briefed to expect. There. Somebody tossed out a green chem-light, and in his low-light vision systems it looked as bright as a full moon.

'ZORRO Lead calling ZORRO Base, over.'

'Lead, this is Base. Authentication Golf Mike Zulu, over,' the voice replied, giving the okay-code he'd been briefed to expect. Richter hoped the voice didn't have a gun to its head.

'Copy. Out.' He spiraled down quickly, flaring his Comanehe and settling on what appeared to be an almost- flat spot close to the treeline. As soon as the aircraft touched down, three men appeared from the trees. They were dressed like U.S. Army soldiers, and Richter allowed himself a chance to breathe as he cooled off the engines prior to shutdown. The rotor had not yet completed its final revolution before a hose came out to the aircraft's fuel connection.

'Welcome to Japan. I'm Captain Checa.'

'Sandy Richter,' the pilot said, climbing out.

'Any problems coming in?'

'Not anymore.' Hell, I got here, didn't I? he wanted to say, still tense from the three-hour marathon to invade the country. Invade? Eleven Rangers and six aviators. Hey, he thought, you're all under arrest!

'There's number two…' Checa observed. 'Quiet babies, aren't they?'

'We don't want to advertise, sir.' It was perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Comanehe. The Sikorsky engineers had long known that most of the noise generated by a helicopter came from the tail rotor's conflict with the main. The one on the RAH-66 was shrouded, and the main rotor had five fairly thick composite blades, resulting in a helicopter with less than a third of the acoustical signature of any other rotary-wing aircraft yet built. And the area wouldn't hurt, Richter thought, looking around. All the trees, the thin mountain air. Not a bad place for the mission, he concluded as the second Comanche settled down on its landing pad, fitly meters away. The men who had fueled his aircraft were already stringing camouflage netting over it, using poles cut from the pine forest.

'Come on, let's get some food in you.'

'Real food or MRHs?' the chief warrant officer asked.

'You can't have everything, Mr. Richter,' Checa told him.

The aviator remembered when Army C-Rations had also included cigarettes. No longer, what with the new healthy Army, and there wasn't much sense in asking a Ranger for a smoke. Damned athletes.

The Rapiers turned away an hour later, convinced, the Japanese air-defense people were sure, that they could not penetrate the Kami-Eagle line that guarded the northeast approaches to the home islands. Even the best American aircraft and best systems could not defeat what they had to face, and that was good. On their screens they watched the contacts fade off, and soon the emissions from the E-3B's faded as well, heading back to Shemya to report their failure to their masters.

The Americans were realists. Courageous warriors, to be sure—the officers in the E-767's would not make the mistake as their forebears had of thinking that Americans lacked the ardor for real combat operations. That error had been a costly one. But war was a technical exercise, and they had allowed their strength to fall below a line from which recovery was not technically possible. And that was too bad for them.

The Rapiers had to tank on the way back, and didn't use their supercruise ability, because wasting fuel was not purposeful. The weather was again crummy at Shemya, and the fighters rode down under positive ground- control to their safe landings, then taxied off to their hangars, which were more crowded now with the arrival of four F-15E Strike Eagles from Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. They also regarded the mission as a success.

42—Lightning Strikes

'Are you mad?' Scherenko asked.

'Think about it,' Clark said, again back in the Russian Embassy. 'We want a political solution to this, don't we? Then Koga's our best chance. You told us the government didn't put him in the bag. Who does that leave? He's probably right there.' You could even see the building out Scherenko's window, as luck would have it.

'Is it possible?' the Russian asked, worried that the Americans would ask for assistance that he was quite unsuited to provide.

'There's a risk, but it's unlikely he has an army up there. He wouldn't be keeping the guy there unless he wanted to be covert about it. Figure five or six people, max.'

'And two of you!' Scherenko insisted.

'Like the man said,' Ding offered with a very showy smile, 'no big deal.'

So the old KGB file was true. Clark was not a real intelligence officer, but a paramilitary type, and the same was true of his arrogant young partner who mostly just sat there, looking out the window.

'I can offer you nothing by way of assistance.'

'How about weapons?' Clark asked. 'You going to tell me you don't have anything here we can use'? What kind of rezidentura is this?' Clark knew that the Russian would have to temporize. Too bad that these people weren't trained to take much initiative.

'I need permission before I can do any of that.'

Clark nodded, congratulating himself on making a good guess. He opened his laptop computer. 'So do we. You get yours. I'll get mine.'

Jones stubbed out ms cigarette in the Navy-style aluminum ashtray. The pack had been stuck away in a desk drawer, perhaps in anticipation of just such an occasion as this. When a war started, the peacetime rules went out the window. Old habits, especially bad ones, were easy to fall back into—but then that's what war was, too, wasn't it? He could also see that Admiral Mancuso was wavering on the edge of bumming one, and so he made sure the butt was all the way out.

'What do you have, Ron?'

'You take the time to work this gear and you get results. Boomer and me have been **fff^aHang the data all week. We started on the surface ships.' Jones walked to the wall chart. 'We've been plotting the position of the 'cans—'

'All the way from—' Captain Chambers interrupted, only to be cut off.

'Yes sir, all the way from mid-Pac. I've been playing broadband and narrow-band, and checking weather, and I've plotted them.' Jones pointed at the silhouettes pinned to the map.

'That's fine, Ron, but we have satellite overheads for that,' ComSubPac pointed out.

'So am I right?' the civilian asked.

'Pretty close,' Mancuso admitted. Then he pointed to the other shapes pinned to the wall.

'Yeah that's right, Bart. Once I figured how to track the 'cans, then we started working on me submarines. And guess what? I can still bag the fuckers when they snort. Here's your picket line. We get them about a third of the time by my reckoning, and the bearings are fairly constant.'

The wall chart showed six firm contacts. Those silhouettes were within circles between twenty and thirty miles in diameter. Two more were overlaid with question marks.

'That still leaves a few unaccounted for,' Chambers noted.

Jones nodded. 'True. But I got six for sure, maybe eight. We can't get good cuts off the Japanese coast. Just too far. I'm plotting merchantmen shuttling back and forth to the islands, but that's all,' he admitted. 'I'm also tracking a big two-screw contact heading west toward the Marshalls, and I kinda noticed that there's an empty dry dock across the way this morning.'

'That's secret' Mancuso pointed out with a quiet smile.

'Well if I were you guys, I'd tell Stennis to watch out for this line of SSKs, gentlemen—You might want to let the subs head into the briarpatch first, to clean things out, like.'

'We can do that, but I'm worried about the others,' Chambers admitted.

'Conn, sonar.'