Debt of Honor

formidable as before. Yes, they have made their show of force, but they have not as yet so much as flown over our territory.'

'We must do more than that,' Goto said, recalling his instructions. 'We can put more pressure on the Americans by making our ultimate weapons public.'

'No!' a minister said at once. 'That will cause chaos here!'

'It will also cause chaos there,' Goto replied, somewhat weakly, the rest of the cabinet thought. Again, they saw, he was voicing the thoughts and orders of someone else. They knew who that was. 'It will force them to alter the tone of their negotiations.'

'It could easily force them to consider a grave attack on us.'

'They have too much to lose,' Goto insisted.

'And we do not?' the Minister shot back, wondering just where his loyalty to his patron ended and his loyalty to his countrymen began. 'What if they decide to preempt?'

'They cannot. They don't have the weapons to do it. Our missiles have been very carefully located.'

'Yes, and our air-defense systems are invincible, too,' another minister snorted.

'Perhaps the best thing to do is for our ambassador to suggest that we might reveal that we have the atomic weapons. Perhaps that would be enough.' a third minister suggested. There were some nods around the table, and Goto, despite his instructions, agreed to that.

The hardest part was keeping warm, despite all the cold-weather gear they had brought along. Richter snuggled himself into the sleeping bag, and allowed himself to be vaguely guilty for the fact that the Rangers had to maintain listening outposts around the rump airfield they'd established on this frigid mountainside. His principal worry was a system failure in one of the three aircraft. Despite all the redundancies built into them, there were several items which, if they broke, could not be fixed. The Rangers knew how to fuel the birds, and how to load weapons, but that was about it. Richter had already decided to let them worry about ground security. If so much as a platoon showed up in this high meadow, they were doomed. The Rangers could kill every intruder, but one radio call could have a battalion here in hours, and there was no surviving that. Special-operations, he thought. They were good so long as they worked, just like everything else you did in uniform, but the current situation had a safety margin so thin that you could see through it. Then there was the issue of getting out, the pilot reminded himself. He might as well have joined the Navy.

'Nice house.'

The rules were different in time of war, Murray told himself. Computers made it easier, a fact that the Bureau had been slow to learn. Assembling his team of young agents, the first task had been to run nothing more sophisticated than a credit check, which gave an address. The house was somewhat upscale, but within the reach, barely, of a supergrade federal employee if he'd saved his pennies over the years. That was something Cook had not done, he saw. The man did all his banking at First Virginia, and the FBI had a man able to break into the bank records, far enough to see that, like most people, Christopher Cook had lived largely from one bi-weekly paycheck to the next, saving a mere fourteen thousand dollars along the way, probably for the college education of his kids, and that, Murray knew, was on the dumb side of optimistic, what with the cost of American higher education. More to the point, when he'd settled on the new house, the savings had gone untouched. He had a mortgage, but the amount was less than two hundred thousand dollars, and with the hundred-eighty realized from the sale of his previous home, that left a sizable gap that bank records could not explain. Where had the other money come from? A call to a contact at the IRS, proposing a possible case of tax evasion, had turned up other computerized records, enough to show that there was no additional family income to explain it; a check of antecedents showed that the parents of both the Cooks, all deceased, had not left either husband or wile with a windfall. Their cars, a further check showed, were paid for, and while one of them was four years old, another was a Buick that probably had the original smell still inside, and that also had been purchased with cash. What they had was a man living beyond his means, and while the government had often enough failed to make note of that in espionage cases, it had learned a little of late.

'Well?' Murray asked his people.

'It's not a case yet, but it sure as hell smells like one,' the next-senior agent thought. 'We need to visit some banks and get a look at more records.' For which a court order was required, but they already knew which judge to go to for that. The FBI always knew which judges were tame and which were not.

Similar checks, of course, had been run on Scott Adler, who, they found, was divorced, living alone in a Georgetown flat, paying alimony and child support, driving a nice car, but otherwise very normal. Secretary Hanson was quite wealthy from years of practicing law, and a poor subject for attempted bribery. The extensive background checks run on all the subjects for their government offices and security clearances were reexamined and found to be normal, except for Cook's recent auto and home purchases. Somewhere along the line they'd find a canceled check drawn on some bank or other to explain the easy house settlement. That was one nice thing about hanks. They had records on everything, and it was always on some sort of paper, and it always left a trail.

'Okay, we will proceed on the assumption that he's our boy.' The Deputy Assistant Director looked around at the bright group of agents who, like him, had neglected to consider the possibility that Barbara binders had been on a prescription medication that had acted with the brandy Ed Kealty had once kept close at all times. Their collective embarrassment was as great as his own. Not an entirely bad thing, Dan thought. You worked hard to restore your credibility after a goof.

Jackson felt the hard thump of the carrier landing, then the snapping deceleration of the arrester wire as he was pressed hard into the back-facing passenger seat of the COD. Another odious experience over, he thought. He much preferred to land on a carrier with his own hands on the controls, uncomfortable with trusting his life to some teenage lieutenant, or so they now all looked to the Admiral. He felt the aircraft turn to the right, heading off to an unoccupied portion of the flight deck, and presently a door opened and he hustled out. A deck crewman saluted, pointing him to an open door in the carrier's island structure. The ship's bell was there, and as soon as he got under cover, a Marine saluted, and a bosun's mate worked the striker on the hell, announcing into the 1-MC system, 'Task Force Seventy-Seven, arriving.'

'Welcome aboard, sir,' Bud Sanchez said with a grin, looking very natty in his flight suit. 'Captain's on the bridge, sir.'

'Then let's get to work.'

'How's the leg, Robby?' the CAG asked halfway up the third ladder.

'Stiff as hell after all the sitting.' It had taken time. The briefing at Pearl Harbor, the Air Force flight to Eniwetok, then waiting for the C-2A to show up to bring him to his command. Jackson was beyond jet lag, but for all that, eager now, about noon, he thought, according to where the sun was.

'Is the cover story holding?' Sanchez asked next.

'No telling, Bud. Until we get there.' Jackson allowed a Marine to open the door to the wheelhouse. His leg really was stiff, just one more reminder that flight operations were over for him.

'Welcome aboard, sir,' the CO said, looking up from a sheaf of dispatches.

The roar of afterburners told Jackson that Johnnie Reb was conducting flight operations, and he looked quickly forward to see a Tomcat leap off the port-forward cat. The carrier was about halfway between the Carolines and Wake. The latter island was somewhat closer to the Marianas, and for that reason was not being used for anything. Wake had a fine airfield, still supported by the Air Force. Eniwetok was just a recovery field, known to be such, and therefore made a more covert base for staging aircraft, if a far less convenient one for maintaining them.

'Okay, what's been happening since I left Pearl?' Jackson asked.

'Some good news.' The CO handed over one of the dispatches.

'It's definite as hell.' Jones said, leaning over the sonar traces.

'They sure are in a hurry,' Mancuso agreed, his eyes plotting speed and distance and not liking what they saw, further confirming what Jones suspected.

'Who's waiting for them?'

'Ron, we can't—'

'Sir, I can't be much help to you if I don't know,' Jones observed reasonably. 'You think I'm a security risk or something?'

Mancuso thought for a few seconds before answering. 'Tennessee's lying right overtop the Eshunadaoki Seamount, supporting a special operation that goes off in the next twenty-four