Debt of Honor

navigational tasks. Like most Japanese he'd been raised to think of war as something to be avoided as assiduously as plague. The overnight development of a conflict with America, well, it had felt good for a day or so to teach the arrogant gaijin a lesson, but that was fantasy talking, and this was increasingly real. Then the double-barreled notification that his country had fielded nuclear arms—that was madness enough—only immediately to be followed by the American claim that the weapons had been destroyed. This was an American aircraft, after all, a Boeing 747-400PIP, five years old but state-of-the-art in every respect, reliable and steady. There was little America had to learn about the building of aircraft, and if this one was as good as he knew it to be, then how much more formidable still were their military aircraft? The aircraft his country's Air Force flew were copies of American designs—except for the AEW 767's he'd heard so much about, first about how invincible they were, and more recently about how there were only a few left. This madness had to stop. Didn't everyone see that? Some must, he thought, else why was his airliner half full of people who didn't want to be on Saipan despite their earlier enthusiasm?

But his captain did not see that at all, did he? the copilot asked himself. Torajiro Sato was sitting there, fixed as stone in the left seat, as though all were normal when plainly it was not.

All he had to do was look down in the afternoon sunlight to see those destroyers—doing what? They were guarding their country's coast against the possibility of attack. Was that normal?

'Conn, Sonar.'

'Conn, aye.' Clagget had the conn for the afternoon watch. He wanted the crew to see him at work, and more than that, wanted to keep the feel for conning his boat.

'Possible multiple contacts to the south,' the sonar chief reported.

'Bearing one-seven-one. Look like surface ships at high speed, sir, getting pounding and a very high blade rate.'

That was about right, the CO thought, heading for the sonar room again. He was about to order a track to be plotted, but when he turned to do so, he saw two quartermasters already setting it up, and the ray-path analyzer printing its first cut on the range. His crew was fully drilled in now, and things just happened automatically, but better. They were thinking as well as acting.

'Best guess, they're a ways off, but look at all this,' the chief said. It was clearly a real contact. Data was appearing on four different frequency lines.

Then the chief held up his phones. 'Sounds like a whole bunch of screws turning—a lot of racing and cavitation, has to be multiple ships, traveling in column.'

'And our other friend?' Claggett asked.

'The sub? He's gone quiet again, probably just tooling along on batteries at five or less.' That contact was a good twenty miles off, just beyond the usual detection range.

'Sir, initial range cut on the new contacts is a hundred-plus-thousand yards, CZ contact,' another tech reported.

'Bearing is constant. Not a wiggle. They heading straight for us or close to it. They pounding hard. What are surface conditions like, sir?'

'Waves eight to ten feet, Chief.' A hundred thousand yards plus. More than fifty nautical miles, Claggett thought. Those ships were driving hard. Right to him, but he wasn't supposed to shoot. Damn. He took the required three steps back into control. 'Right ten-degrees rudder, come to new course two-seven-zero. Tennessee came about to a westerly heading, the better to give her sonar operators a range for the approaching destroyers. His last piece of operational intelligence had predicted this, and the timing of the information was as accurate as it was unwelcome.

In a more dramatic setting, in front of cameras, the atmosphere might have been different, but although the setting was dramatic in a distant sense, right now it was merely cold and miserable. Though these men were the most elite of troops, it was far easier to rouse yourself for combat against a person than against unremitting environmental discomfort. The Rangers, in their mainly white camouflage overclothing, moved about as little as possible, and the lack of physical activity merely made them more vulnerable to the cold and to boredom, the soldier's deadliest enemy. And yet that was good, Captain Checa thought. For a single squad of soldiers four thousand miles from the nearest U.S. Army base—and that base was Fort Wainwright in Alaska—it was a hell of a lot safer to be bored than to be excited by the stimulus of a combat action without any hope of support. Or something like that. Checa faced the problem common to officers: subject to the same discomfort and misery as his men, he was not allowed to bitch. There was no other officer to bitch to in any case, and to do so in front of the men was bad for morale, even though the men probably would have understood.

'Be nice to get back to Fort Stewart, sir,' First Sergeant Vega observed.

'Spread on that sunblock and catch some rays on the beach.'

'And miss all this beautiful snow and sleet, Oso?' At least the sky was clear now.

'Roge-o, Captain. But I got my fill o' this shit when I was a kid in Chicago.' He paused, looking and listening around again. The noise-discipline of the other Rangers was excellent, and you had to look very closely indeed to see where the lookouts were standing.

'Ready for the walk out tonight?'

'Just so's our friend is waiting on the far side of that hill.'

'I'm sure he will he,' Checa lied.

'Yes, sir. I am, too.' If one could do it, why not two? Vega thought. 'Did all this stuff work?'

The killers in their midst were sleeping in their bags, in holes lined with pine branches and covered with more branches for additional warmth. In addition to guarding the pilots, the Rangers had to keep them healthy, like watching over infants, an odd mission for elite troops, but troops of that sort generally drew the oddest.

'So they say.' Checa looked at his watch. 'We shake them loose in another two hours.'

Vega nodded, hoping that his legs weren't too stiff for the trek south.

The patrol pattern had been set in the mission briefing. The four boomers had thirty-mile sectors, and each sector was divided into three ten-mile segments. Each boat could patrol in the center slot, leaving the north and south slots empty for everything but weapons. The patrol patterns were left to the judgment of individual skippers, but they worked out the same way. Pennsylvania was on a northerly course, trolling along at a mere five knots, just as she'd done for her now-ended deterrence patrols carrying Trident missiles.

She was making so little noise that a whale might have come close to a collision, if it were the right time for whales in this part of the Pacific, which it wasn't. Behind her, at the end of a lengthy cable, was her towed-array sonar, and the two-hour north-south cycle allowed it to trail straight out in a line, with about ten minutes or so required for the turns at the end of the cycles to get it straight again for maximum performance.

Pennsylvania was at six hundred feet, the ideal sonar depth given today's water conditions. It was just sunset up on the roof when the first trace appeared on her sonar screens. It started as a series of dots, yellow on the video screen, trickling down slowly with time, and shifting a little to the south in bearing, but not much. Probably, the lead sonarman thought, the target had been running on battery for the past few hours, else he would have caught the louder signals of the diesels used to charge them, but there the contact was, on the expected 60Hz line. He reported the contact data to the fire-control tracking party.

Wasn't this something, the sonarman thought. He'd spent his entire career in missile boats, so often tracking contacts which his submarine would maneuver to avoid, even though the boomer fleet prided itself on having the best torpedomen in the fleet. Pennsylvania carried only fifteen weapons aboard—there was a shortage of the newest version of the ADCAP torpedo, and it had been decided not to bother carrying anything less capable under the circumstances. It also had three other torpedolike units, called LEMOSSs, for Long-Endurance Mobile Submarine Simulator. The skipper, another lifelong boomer sailor, had briefed the crew on his intended method of attack, and everyone aboard approved. The mission, in fact, was just about ideal. The Japanese had to move through their line. Then operational pattern was such that for them to pass undetected through the line of battle, as the skipper had taken to calling it, was most unlikely.

'Now hear this,' the Captain said over the 1-MC announcing system. Every speaker had been turned down, so that the announcement came as a whisper that the men strained to hear. 'We have a probable submerged contact in our kill zone. I am going to conduct the attack just as we briefed it. Battle stations,' he concluded in the voice of a man ordering breakfast at HoJo's.