Debt of Honor

'SANDALWOOD,' she said for his opening.

'What about it?' Jack asked, leaning back in his chair.

'I had an idea and ran with it.'

'What's that?' the National Security Advisor asked.

'I told Clark and Chavez to reactivate THISTLE, Lyalin's old net in Japan.'

Ryan blinked. 'You're telling me that nobody ever—'

'He was doing mainly commercial stuff, and we have that Executive Order, remember?'

Jack suppressed a grumble. THISTLE had served America once, and not through commercial espionage. 'Okay, so what's happening?'

'This.' Mrs. Foley handed over a single printed page, about five hundred single-spaced words once you got past the cover sheet.

Ryan looked up from the first paragraph. 'Genuine panic in MITF?'

'That's what the man says. Keep going.' Jack picked up a pen, chewing on it.

'Okay, what else?'

'Their government's going to fall, sure as hell. While Clark was talking to this guy, Chavez was talking to another. State ought to pick up on this in another day or so, but it looks like we got it first for a change.'

Jack sat forward at that point. It wasn't that much of a surprise. Brett Hanson had warned about this possibility. The State Department was, in fact, the only government agency that was leery of the TRA, though its concerns had stayed within the family, as it were.

'There's more?'

'Well, yeah, there is. We've turned up the missing girl, all right. It appears to be Kimberly Norton, and sure enough, she's the one involved with Goto, and he's going to be the next PM,' she concluded with a smile. It wasn't really very funny, of course, though that depended on your perspective, didn't it? America now had something to use on Goto, and Goto looked to be the next Prime Minister. It wasn't an entirely bad thing…

'Keep talking,' Ryan ordered.

'We have the choice of offering her a freebie home, or we could—'

'MP, the answer to that is no.' Ryan closed his eyes. He'd been thinking about this one. Before, he'd been the one to take the detached view, but he had seen a photograph of the girl, and though he'd tried briefly to retain his detachment, it had lasted only as long as it took to return home and look at his own children. Perhaps it was a weakness, his inability to contemplate the use of people's lives in the furtherance of his country's goals. If so, it was a weakness that his conscience would allow him. Besides: 'Does anybody think she can act like a trained spook? Christ's sake, she's a messed-up girl who skipped away from home because she was getting crummy grades at her school.'

'Jack, it's my job to float options, remember?' Every government in the world did it, of course, even America, even in these advanced feminist times. They were nice girls, everyone said, usually bright ones, government secretaries, many of them, who were managed through the Secret Service of all places, and made good money serving their government. Ryan had no official knowledge whatever of the operation, and wanted to keep it that way. Had he acquired official knowledge and not spoken out against it, then what sort of man would he be? So many people assumed that high government officials were just moral robots who did the things they had to do for their country without self-doubts, untroubled by conscience. Perhaps it had been true once—possibly it still was for many—but this was a different world, and Jack Ryan was the son of a police officer.

'You're the one who said it first, remember? That girl is an American citizen who probably needs a little help. Let's not turn into something we are not, okay? It's Clark and Chavez on this one?'

'Correct.'

'I think we should be careful about it, but to offer the girl a ticket home. If she says no, then maybe we can consider something else, but no screwing around on this one. She gets a fair offer of a ride home.' Ryan looked down at Clark's brief report and read it more carefully. Had it come from someone else, he would not have taken it so seriously, but he knew John Clark, had taken the time to learn everything about him. It would someday make for an enjoyable conversation.

'I'm going to keep this. I think maybe the President needs to read it, too.'

'Concur,' the DDO replied.

'Anything else like this comes in…'

'You'll know,' Mary Pat promised.

'Good idea on THISTLE.'

'I want Clark to—well, to press maybe a little harder, and see if we develop similar opinions.'

'Approved,' Ryan said at once. 'Push as hard as you want.'

Yamata's personal jet was an old Gulfstream G-IV. Though fitted with auxiliary fuel tanks, it could not ordinarily nonstop the 6,740-mile hop from Tokyo to New York. Today was different, his pilot told him. The jet stream over the North Pacific was fully one hundred ninety knots, and they'd have it for several hours. That boosted their ground speed to 782 miles per hour. It would knock two full hours off the normal flight time.

Yamata was glad. The time was important. None of what he had in his mind was written down, so there were no plans to go over. Though weary from long days that had of late stretched into longer weeks, he found that his body was unable to rest. A voracious reader, he could not get interested in any of the material that he kept on his aircraft. He was alone; there was no one with whom to speak. There was nothing at all to do, and it seemed strange to Yamata. His G-IV cruised at forty-one thousand feet, and it was a clear morning below him. He could see the surface of the North Pacific clearly, the endless ranks of waves, some of their crests decorated with white, driven by high surface winds. The immortal sea. For almost all of his life, it had been an American lake, dominated by their navy. Did the sea know that? Did the sea know that it would change? Change. Yamata grunted to himself. It would start within hours of his arrival in New York.

'This is Bud on final. I have the ball with eight thousand pounds of fuel,' Captain Sanchez announced over his radio circuit. As commander of the air wing for USS John Stennis (CVN-74), his F/A-18F would be the first aboard. Strangely, though the most senior aviator aboard, he was new to the Hornet, having spent all of his career in the F-14 Tomcat. Lighter and more agile, and finally with enough fuel capacity to do more than take off, circle the deck once, and return (so it often seemed), he found himself liking the chance to fly alone for a change, after a whole career spent in two-seat aircraft. Maybe the Air Force pukes had a good idea after all…

Ahead of him, on the huge flight deck of the new carrier, enlisted men made the proper tension adjustments on the arrester wires, took the empty weight of his attack fighter, and added the fuel amount he'd called in. It had to be done every time. Huge flight deck, he thought, half a mile out. For those standing on the deck it looked huge enough, but for Sanchez it increasingly looked like a matchbook. He cleared his mind of the thought, concentrating on his task. The Hornet buffeted a little coming through the burble of disturbed air caused by the carrier's massive 'island' structure, but the pilot's eyes were locked on the 'meatball,' a red light reflected off a mirror, keeping it nicely centered. Some called Sanchez 'Mister Machine,' for of his sixteen hundred- odd carrier landings—you logged every one—less than fifty had failed to catch the optimum number-three wire.

Gently, gently, he told himself, easing the stick back with his right hand while the left worked the throttles, watching his sink rate, and…yes. He could feel the fighter jerk from catching the wire—number three, he was sure —and slow itself, even though the rush to the edge of the angled deck seemed sure to dump him over the side. The aircraft stopped, seemingly inches from the line where black-topped steel fell off to blue water. Really, it was closer to a hundred feet. Sanchez disengaged his tail hook, and allowed the wire to snake back to its proper place. A deck crewman started waving at him, telling him how to get to where he was supposed to go, and the expensive jet aircraft turned into a particularly ungainly land vehicle on the world's most expensive parking lot. Five minutes later, the engines shut down and, tie-down chains in place, Sanchez popped the canopy and climbed down the steel ladder that his brown-jerseyed plane-captain had set in place.

'Welcome aboard, Skipper. Any problems?'

'Nary a one.' Sanchez handed over his flight helmet and trotted off to the island. Three minutes after that he was observing the remainder of the landings.

Johnnie Reb was already her semiofficial nickname, since she was named for a long-term U.S. Senator from Mississippi, also a faithful friend of the Navy. The ship even smelled new, Sanchez