Debt of Honor

'The one you killed, you mean? Kaneda?'

'Yes, sir. He murdered an American citizen, a girl named Kimberly Norton, and I am actually rather happy that I took him down.'

'Who was she?'

'She was Goto's mistress,' Clark explained. 'And when she became a political threat to your new Prime Minister, Raizo Yamata decided to have her eliminated. We came to your country just to get her home. That was all,' Clark went on, telling what was partially a lie.

'None of this is necessary,' Koga said discordantly. 'If your Congress had just given me a chance to—'

'Sir, maybe that's right. I don't know if it is or not, but maybe it is,' Chavez, said. 'That doesn't much matter now, does it?'

'Tell me, then, what does matter?'

'Ending this goddamned thing before too many people get hurt,' Clark suggested. 'I've fought in wars and they are not fun. Lots of young kids get to die before they have the chance to get married and have kids of their own, and that's bad, okay?' Clark paused before going on. 'It's bad for my country, and for damned sure it's going to be worse for yours.'

'Yamata thinks—'

'Yamata is a businessman,' Chavez said. 'Sir, you'd better understand this. He doesn't know what he's started.'

'Yes, you Americans are very good at killing. I saw that myself fifteen minutes ago.'

'In that case, Mr. Koga, you also saw that we left one man alive.'

Clark's angry reply stopped conversation cold for several seconds. Koga was slow to realize that it was true. The one outside the door had been alive when they'd walked over his body, moaning and shuddering as though from electric shocks, but definitely alive.

'Why didn't you…?'

'There was no reason to kill him,' Chavez said. 'I'm not going to apologize for that Kaneda bastard. He had it coming, and when I came into the room, he was reaching for a weapon, and that's tough cookies, sir. But this isn't a movie. We don't kill people for amusement, and we came in to rescue you because somebody has to end this goddamned war—okay?'

'Even then—even then, what your Congress did…how can my country survive economically—'

'Will it be better for anybody if the war goes on?' Clark asked. 'If Japan and China kick off against Russia, what happens to you then? Who do you suppose will really pay the price for that mistake? China? I don't think so.'

The first word in Washington came via satellite. One of NSA's orbiting 'hitchhiker' ELINT birds happened to be overhead to record the termination of signal—that was the NSA term for it—from three AEW aircraft. Other NSA listening posts recorded radio chatter that lasted for several minutes before ending. Analysts were trying to make sense of it now, the report in Ryan's hands told him.

Only one kill, the Colonel told himself. Well, he'd have to be content with that. His wingman had bagged the last of the F-15J's. The southern element had gotten three, and the Strike Eagles had gotten the other four when their support had been cut off, leaving them suddenly and unexpectedly vulnerable. Presumably the ZORRO team had gotten the third E-767. On the whole, not a bad night's work, but a long one, he thought, forming his flight of four back up for the rendezvous with the tanker and the three hours back to Shemya. The hardest part was the enforced radio silence. Some of his people had to be counting coup in a big way, full of themselves in the way of fighter pilots who had done the job and lived to tell the tale, and wanting to talk through it. That would change shortly, he thought, the enforced silence forcing him to think about his first-ever air-to-air kill. Thirty people on the aircraft. Damn, he was supposed to feel good about a kill, wasn't he? So why didn't he?

Something interesting had just happened, Dutch Claggett thought. They were still catching bits and pieces of the SSK in their area, but whoever it was, it had turned north and away from them, allowing Tennessee to remain on station. In the way of submarines on patrol, he'd come close enough to the surface to put up his ESM antenna and track the Japanese radar aircraft for the past day or so, learning what he could for possible forwarding to others. Electronic-intelligence gathering had been a submarine mission since before his application to Annapolis, and his crew included two electronics techs who showed a real aptitude for it. But they'd had two on the monitoring systems that had just gone—poof! Then they'd caught some radio chatter, excited by the sound of it, and one by one those voices had gone off the air, somewhere to his north.

'You suppose we just got up on the scoreboard, Cap'n?' Lieutenant Shaw asked, expecting the Captain to know, because captains were supposed to know everything, even though they didn't.

'Seems that way.'

'Conn, sonar.'

'Conn, aye.'

'Our friend is snorting again, bearing zero-zero-nine, probable CZ contact,' the sonar chief thought.

'I'll start the track,' Shaw said, heading aft for the plotting table.

'So what happened?' Durling asked.

'We killed three of their radar aircraft, and the strike force annihilated their fighter patrol.' This was not a time, however, for gloating.

'This is the twitchiest part?'

Ryan nodded. 'Yes, sir. We need them confused for a while longer, but for now they know something is happening. They know—'

'They know it might be a real war after all. Any word on Koga?'

'Not yet.'

It was four in the morning and all three men were showing it. Koga was over the stress period, for the moment, trying to use his head instead of his emotions while his two hosts—that was how he thought of them, rather to his surprise—drove him around and wondered how smart it was to have left the one guard alive outside Yamata's condo. He would be up and moving by now? Would he call the police? Someone else? What would result from the night's adventure?

'How do I know that I can trust you?' Koga asked after a lengthy silence.

Clark's hands squeezed the wheel hard enough to leave fingerprints in the plastic. It was the movies and TV that caused dumbass questions like that. In those media, spies did all manner of complicated things in the hope of outsmarting the equally brilliant adversaries against whom they were pitted. Reality was different. You kept operations as simple as you could because even the simplest things could blow up on you, and if the other guy was so goddamned brilliant, you wouldn't even know who the hell he was; and tricking people into doing the things you wanted them to do was something that only worked if you arranged a single option for the other guy, and even then he'd often as not do something unexpected anyway.

'Sir, we just put our lives at risk for you, but, okay, don't trust us at all. I'm not dumb enough to tell you what to do. I don't know your politics well enough for that. What I'm telling you is very simple. We will be doing things —what all of them are, I do not know anyway, so I can't tell you. We want to end this war with a minimum of violence, but there will be violence. You also want the war to end, right?'

'Of course I want it to end,' Koga said, his manners not helped by his fatigue.

'Well, sir, you do whatever you think is best, okay? You see, Mr. Koga, you don't have to trust us, but we sure as hell have to trust you to do what's best for your country and for ours.' Clark's comment, exasperated as it was, turned out to be the best thing he could have said.

'Oh.' The politician thought that one over. 'Yes. That's right, isn't it?'

'Where can we drop you off?'

'Kimura's home,' Koga said at once.

'Fine.' Clark dredged up the location and turned the car onto Route 122 to head for it. Then he reminded himself that he'd learned one highly important thing this night, and that after getting this guy to a place of relative safety, his top priority was getting that information to Washington. The empty streets helped, and though he wished for coffee to keep himself alert, it was a mere forty minutes to the crowded neighborhood of diminutive tract homes where the MITI official lived. The lights were already on when they pulled up to the house, and they just let