Debt of Honor

Koga out to walk to the door. Isamu Kimura answered the door and took his guest inside with a mouth almost as wide as the entrance to his home.

Who ever said these people didn't show emotion? Clark asked himself.

'Who do you suppose the leaker is?' Ding asked, still in the backseat.

'Good boy—you caught that, too.'

'Hey, I'm the only college graduate in the car, Mr. C.' Ding opened the computer to draft the dispatch to Langley, again via Moscow.

'They did what?' Yamata snarled into the phone.

'This is serious.' It was General Arima, and he'd just gotten the word from Tokyo himself. 'They smashed our air defenses and just went away afterwards.'

'How?' the industrialist demanded. Hadn't they told him that the Kami aircraft were invincible?

'They don't know how yet, but I'm telling you this is very serious. They have the ability to raid the Home Islands now.'

Think, Yamata told himself, shaking his head to clear the cobwebs. 'General, they still cannot invade our islands, can they? They can sting us, but they cannot really hurt us, and as long as we have nuclear weapons…'

'Unless they try something else. The Americans are not acting as we have been given to expect.'

That remark stung the next Governor of Saipan. Today was supposed to have been the day on which he'd begin his campaign. Well, yes, he'd overestimated the effect his action would have on the American financial markets, but they had crippled the American fleet, and they had occupied the islands, and America did not have the ability to storm even one of the Marianas, and America did not have the political will to launch a nuclear attack on his country. Therefore they were still ahead of the game. Was it to be expected that America would not fight back somewhat? Of course not. Yamata lifted his TV controller and switched it on, catching the beginning of a CNN Headline News broadcast, and there was the American correspondent, standing right on the edge of some dock or other, and there behind him were two American carriers, still in their docks, still unable to do anything.

'What does intelligence tell us about the Indian Ocean?' he asked the General.

'The two American carriers are still there,' Arima assured him. 'They were seen both visually and on radar yesterday, within four hundred kilometers of Sri Lanka.'

'Then they cannot really hurt us, can they?'

'Well, no, really they cannot.' the General admitted. 'But we must make other arrangements.'

'Then I suggest you make them, Arima-san,' Yamata replied in a voice so polite as to constitute a stinging insult.

The worst part was not knowing what had happened. The data links from the three dead Kami aircraft had ended with the elimination of -Two. All the rest of their information was inferred rather than actually known. Ground-based monitoring stations had copied the emissions of -Four and -Six and then seen those emissions stop within the same minute. There had been no obvious alarm for any of the three radar aircraft. They'd just stopped transmitting, leaving nothing more behind than floating debris on the rolling ocean. The fighters—well, they did have tapes of the radio conversations. It had taken less than four minutes for that. First the confident, professionally laconic comments of fighter pilots closing on targets, then a series of What?s. followed by hurried calls to go active with their radars, more calls that they'd been illuminated. One pilot had reported a hit, then immediately gone off the air—but a hit from what? How could the same aircraft that killed the Kamis have gotten the fighters, too? The Americans had only four of their expensive new F-22's. And the Kamis had been tracking those. What evil magic had…? But that was the problem. They didn't know.

The air-defense specialists, and the engineers who had developed the world's finest airborne radar systems, shook their heads, looking down, feeling immense personal disgrace and not knowing why. Of the ten such aircraft built, five were destroyed, and only four others available for service, and all they knew for sure was that they couldn't risk them over water anymore. Orders were also issued to deploy the standby E-2C aircraft that the E-767's had replaced, but those were less capable American designs, and the officers had to accept the fact that somehow the air defenses of their country had been severely compromised.

It was seven in the evening, and Ryan was about to leave for home when the secure fax machine started buzzing. His phone started ringing even before paper appeared.

'Can't you people ever keep secrets?' an accented voice demanded angrily.

'Sergey? What's the problem?'

'Koga is our best chance for terminating hostilities, and someone on your side told the Japanese that he's in contact with you!' Golovko nearly shouted from his home, where it was three in the morning. 'Do you want to kill the man?'

'Sergey Nikolay'ch, will you for Christ's sake settle the hell down?' Jack sat back down in his chair, and by this time he had the page to read. It had come directly from the U.S. Embassy communications people in Moscow, doubtless on orders of a sort from the RVS. 'Oh, shit.' Pause. 'Okay, we got him out of trouble, didn't we?'

'You're penetrated at a high level, Ivan Emmetovich.'

'Well, you should know how easy it is to do that.'

'We're working to find out who it is, I assure you.' The voice was still angry.

Wouldn't that be great? Jack thought behind painfully closed eyes. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service testifies in Federal District Court.

'Not many people know this. I'll get back to you.'

'I am so pleased to hear that you restrict sensitive information to such trustworthy people, Jack.' The line went dead. Ryan depressed the switch and punched up another number from memory.

'Murray.'

'Ryan. Dan, I need you here in a hurry.' Jack's next call was to Scott Adler. Then he walked off again toward the President's office. The positive news he had to report, Ryan supposed, was that the other side had used important information clumsily. Yamata again, he was sure, acting like a businessman rather than a professional spook. He hadn't even troubled himself to disguise the information he had, not caring that it would also reveal its source. The man didn't know his limitations. Sooner or later he'd pay dearly for that weakness.

Jackson's last set of orders before heading off to the Pacific had involved ordering twelve B-1B bombers of the 384th Bomb Wing to fly east from their base in southern Kansas, first to Lajes in the Azores, staging on from there toward Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The flight of ten thousand miles took more than a day, and when the aircraft arrived at the base farthest from America of any, the crews were thoroughly exhausted. The three KC- 10's that brought along ground crewmen and support equipment landed soon thereafter, and the entire assembly of people was soon asleep.

'What do you mean?' Yamata demanded. It was a chilling thought. His own home had been invaded. By whom? 'I mean Koga has disappeared and Kaneda is dead. One of your security people is still alive, but all he saw was two or three gaijin. They disabled him and he doesn't even know how.'

'What is being done?'

'It's being handled as a police matter,' Kazuo Taoka told his boss. 'Of course I didn't tell them about Koga.'

'He must be found, and quickly.' Yamata looked out the window. Luck was still with him. The call, after all, had caught him at home.

'I don't know—'

'I do. Thank you for the information.' Yamata killed the line, then placed another call.

Murray hurried through White House security, having left his service pistol in his official car. His month had not been any better than the rest of the government's. He'd blown the Linders case with a rookie mistake. Brandy plus a cold medication, he said to himself yet again, wondering just what Ryan and the President would have to say to him about that. The criminal case had come apart, and his only satisfaction was that at least he had not brought a possibly innocent man to trial and further embarrassed the Bureau. Whether or not Ed Kealty was really guilty of anything was a side issue for the FBI detective. If you couldn't prove it to a jury, then the defendant was innocent, and that was that. And the man would soon be leaving government service for good. That was something, Murray told himself as a Secret Service agent conducted him not to Ryan's office, but to the one at the opposite corner of the West Wing.