Debt of Honor

The helicopter just got off, its strobe lights looping away from the now-stationary destroyer. The moment seemed fixed in time when the ship started turning again, or seemed to, then a violent green flash appeared in the water on both sides of the ship, just forward of the bridge under the vertical launch magazine for her surface-to-air missiles. The knifelike shape of the hull was backlit in an eerie, lethal way. The image fixed in Sato's mind for the quarter second it lasted, and then one or more of the destroyer's SAMs exploded, followed by forty others, and Mutsu's forward half disintegrated. Three seconds later, another explosion took place, and when the white water returned back to the surface, there was little more to be seen than a patch of burning oil. Just like her namesake in Nagasaki harbor in 1943…

' Captain!' The copilot had to wrench the control-wheel level away from the Captain before the Boeing went into a stall. 'Captain, we have passengers aboard!'

'That was my brother…'

'We have passengers aboard, damn you!' Without resistance now, he brought the 747 back to level flight, looking at his gyrocompass for the proper heading. 'Captain!'

Sato turned his head back into the cockpit, losing sight of his brother's grave as the airliner changed its heading back to the south.

'I am sorry, Captain Sato, but we also have a job we must do.' He engaged the autopilot before reaching out to the man. 'Are you all right now?'

Sato looked forward into the empty sky. Then he nodded and composed himself. 'Yes, I am quite all right. Thank you. Yes. I am quite all right now,' he repeated more firmly, required by the rules of his culture to set his personal emotions aside for now. Their father had survived his destroyer command, had moved on to captain a cruiser on which he had died off Samar, the victim of American destroyers and their torpedoes…and now again…

'What the hell was that?' Commander Ugaki demanded of his sonar officers.

'Torpedoes, two of them, from the south,' the junior lieutenant replied.

'They've killed Mutsu.'

'What from?' was the next angry shout.

'Something undetected, Captain,' was the weak reply.

'Come south, turns for eight knots.'

'That will take us right through the disturbance from—'

'Yes, I know that.'

'Definite kill,' sonar told him. The signature on the sonar screen was definite. 'No engine sounds from target bearing, but breakup noises, and this here was one big secondary explosion. We got him, sir.'

Richter crossed over the same town the C-17 had overflown a few days earlier, and though somebody might have heard him, that was less of a concern now. Besides, at night a chopper was a chopper, and there were plenty of them here. He settled his Comanche to a cruising altitude of fifty feet and headed due south, telling himself that, sure, the Navy would be there, and sure, he could land on a ship, and sure, everything was going to go just fine.

He was grateful for the tailwind until he saw the waves it was whipping up. Oh, shit…

'Mr. Ambassador, the situation has changed, as you know,' Adler said gently. The room had never heard the sound of more than one voice, but somehow it seemed far quieter now.

Seiji Nagumo, sitting next to his senior, noted that the chair next to Adler was occupied by someone else, another Japanese specialist from the fourth floor. Where was Chris Cook? he asked himself as the American negotiator went on. Why was he not here-and what did it mean?

'As we speak, American aircraft are attacking the Marianas. As we speak, American fleet units are engaging your fleet units. I must tell you that we have every reason to believe that our operations will be successful and that we will be able to isolate the Marianas from the rest of the world. The next part of the operation, if it becomes necessary, will be to declare a maritime exclusion zone around your Home Islands. We have no wish to attack your country directly, but it is within our capabilities to cut off your maritime trade in a matter of days.

'Mr. Ambassador, it is time to put an end to this…'

'As you see,' the CNN reporter said from her perch next to USS Enterprise. Then the camera panned to her right, showing an empty box. 'USS John Stennis has left her dry dock. We are informed that the carrier is even now launching a strike against the Japanese-held Marianas. We were asked to cooperate with government deception operations, and after careful consideration, it was decided that CNN is, after all, an American news service…'

'Bastards!' General Arima breathed, looking at the empty concrete structure, occupied only by puddles and wooden blocks now. Then his phone rang.

When it was certain that the Japanese E-2Cs had them, two Air Force AWACS aircraft flipped their radars on, having staged in from Hawaii, via Dyess on Kwajalein Atoll. In electronic terms it would be an even fight, but the Americans had more aircraft up to make sure it was fair in no other way. Four Japanese Eagles were aloft, and their first instinctive action was to turn northeast toward the intruders, the better to give their comrades standing ground alert time to get aloft and join the air battle before the incoming attack got close enough to catch their comrades on the ground. Simultaneously the ground defenses were warned to expect inbound hostile aircraft.

Sanchez lit off his own targeting radar as he saw the Japanese fighters just over a hundred miles away, heading in to launch their missiles. But they were armed with AMRAAMs, and he was armed with Phoenix, which had about double the range. He and three other aircraft launched two each for a max-range engagement. The eight missiles went into ballistic arcs, heading up to a hundred thousand feet before tipping over at Mach-5 and heading back down, their height giving them the largest possible radar cross section to home on. The Eagles detected the attack and tried to maneuver clear, but seconds later two of the F-15J's were blotted from the sky. The remaining pair kept driving in. The second wave of Phoenixes took care of that.

'What the hell?' Oreza wondered.

The sound of many jet engines starting up interrupted the card game, and all four men in the room went to the windows. Clark remembered to turn all the lights out, and stole the only set of binoculars in the house. The first pair of aircraft blasted off Kobler Field just as he brought them to his eyes. They were single-engine aircraft judging by their afterburner flames.

'What's happening, John?'

'Nobody told me, really, but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out.'

Lights were on all over the field. What mattered was getting the fighters off as rapidly as possible. The same thing would be happening on Guam, probably, but Guam was a good ways off, and the two fighter groups would be engaging the Americans separately, negating the Japanese numerical advantage.

'What are those?'

Commander Peach and her jammers were also at work now. The search radar was powerful, but like all of its type it also transmitted low-frequency waves, and those were easily jammed. The massive collection of false dots both confused their understanding of the developing air action and knocked back their ability to detect the small but unstealthy cruise missiles. Fighters that might have tried to engage them had in fact overrun the inbound targets, giving them a free advance to the island's targets. The search radar atop Mount Takpochao picked them up barely thirty miles out instead of the hoped-for hundred, and was also trying to get a count on the inbound fighters. That gave the three operators on the set a complex task, but they were trained men, and they bent to the demands of the moment, one of their number sounding the alarm to get the island's Patriot missile batteries alerted.

The first part of the operation was going well. The standing Combat Air Patrol had been eliminated without loss, Sanchez saw, wondering if it had been one of his missiles that scored. No one would ever know about that. The next task was to take out the Japanese radar aircraft before the rest of their fighters arrived. To accomplish that, a division of four Tomcats went to burner and rocketed straight for them, rippling off all their missiles for the task.

They were just too brave for then own good, Sanchez saw. The Japanese Hawkeyes should have pulled back, and the defending Eagles should have done the same, but true to the fighter pilot's ethos they'd come out to engage the first wave of raiders instead of waiting. Probably because they thought this was a genuine raid instead of a mere fighter-sweep. The flanking division of four, called Blinder Flight, fulfilled its limited mission of killing the