Debt of Honor

Micro Telecom. It was an entirely ordinary civilian facility whose main construction concern had been protection against autumnal typhoons that regularly battered the island. Ten soldiers, commanded by a major, walked up to the main door and were able to walk right in, then approach the security guard, who simply had no idea what was happening, and, again, didn't even attempt to reach for his sidearm. The junior officer with the detail was a captain trained in signals and communications. All he had to do was point at the various instruments in the central control room. Phone uplinks to the Pacific satellites that transferred telephone and other links from Saipan to America were shut down, leaving the Japan links up—they went to a different satellite, and were backed up with cable—without interfering with downlinked signals. At this hour it was not overly surprising that no single telephone circuit to America was active at the moment. It would stay that way for quite some time.

'Who are you?' the Governor's wife asked.

'I need to see your husband,' Colonel Sasaki replied, 'It's an emergency.' The fact of that statement was made immediately clear by the first shot of the evening, caused when the security guard at the legislature building managed to get his pistol out. He didn't get a round off—an eager paratrooper sergeant saw to that—but it was enough to make Sasaki frown angrily and push past the woman. He saw Governor Comacho, walking to the door in his bathrobe.

'What is this?'

'You are my prisoner,' Sasaki announced, with three other men in the room now to make it clear that he wasn't a robber. The Colonel found himself embarrassed. He'd never done anything like this before, and though he was a professional soldier, his culture as much as any other frowned upon the invasion of another man's house regardless of the reason. He found himself hoping that the shots he'd just heard hadn't been fatal. His men had such orders.

'What?' Comacho demanded. Sasaki just pointed to the couch. 'You and your wife, please sit down. We have no intention of harming you.'

'What is this?' the man asked, relieved that he and his wife weren't in any immediate danger, probably.

'This island now belongs to my country,' Colonel Sasaki explained. It couldn't be so bad, could it? The Governor was over sixty, and could remember when that had been true before.

'A goddamned long way for her to come,' Commander Kennedy observed after taking the message. It turned out that the surface contact was the Muroto, a cutter from the Japanese Coast Guard that occasionally supported fleet operations, usually as a practice target. A fairly handsome ship, but with the low freeboard typical of Japanese naval vessels, she had a crane installed aft for the recovery of practice torpedoes. It seemed that Kurushio had expected the opportunity to get off some practice shots in DATELINE PARTNERS. Hadn't Asheville been told about that?

'News to me, Cap'n,' the navigator said, flipping through the lengthy op-order for the exercise.

'Wouldn't be the first time the clerks screwed up.' Kennedy allowed himself a smile. 'Okay, we've killed them enough.' He keyed his microphone again. 'Very well, Captain, we'll replay the last scenario. Start time twenty minutes from now.'

'Thank you, Captain,' the reply came on the VHP circuit. 'Out.'

Kennedy replaced the microphone. 'Left ten-degrees rudder, all ahead one third. Make your depth three hundred feet.'

The crew in the attack center acknowledged and executed the orders, taking Asheville east for five miles. Fifty miles to the west, USS Charlotte was doing much the same thing, at exactly the same time.

The hardest part of Operation KABUL was on Guam. Approaching its hundredth year as an American-flag possession, this was the largest island in the Marianas chain, and possessed a harbor and real U.S. military installations. Only ten years earlier, it would have been impossible. Not so long ago, the now-defunct Strategic Air Command had based nuclear bombers here. The U.S. Navy had maintained a base for missile submarines, and the security obtaining to both would have made anything like this mission a folly. But the nuclear weapons were all gone—the missiles were, anyway. Now Andersen Air Force base, two miles north of Yigo, was really little more than a commercial airport. It supported trans-Pacific flights by the American Air Force. No aircraft were actually based there any longer except for a single executive jet used by the base commander, itself a leftover from when 13th Air Force had been headquartered on the island. Tanker aircraft that had once been permanently based on Guam were now transient reserve formations that came and went as required. The base commander was a colonel who would soon retire, and he had under him only five hundred men and women, mostly technicians. There were only fifty armed USAF Security Police. It was much the same story at the Navy base whose airfield was now co- located with the Air Force. The Marines who had once maintained security there because of the nuclear weapons stockpile had been replaced by civilian guards, and the harbor was empty of gray hulls. Still, this was the most sensitive part of the overall mission. The airstrips at Andersen would be crucial to the entire operation.

'Pretty ships,' Sanchez thought aloud, looking through his binoculars from his chair in Pri-Fly. 'Nice tight interval on the formation, too.' The four Kongos were on a precise reciprocal heading, about eight miles out, the CAG noted.

'They have the rails lined?' the Air Boss asked. There seemed to be a white line down the sides of all four of the inbound destroyers. 'Rendering honors, yeah, that's nice of them.' Sanchez lifted the phone and punched the button for the navigation bridge. 'Skipper? CAG here. It seems that our friends are going formal on us.'

'Thanks, Bud.' The Commanding Officer of Johnnie Reb made a call to the battle- group commander on Enterprise.

'What?' Ryan said, answering the phone.

'Takeoff in two and a half hours,' the President's secretary told him.

'Be ready to leave in ninety minutes.'

'Wall Street?'

'That's right, Dr. Ryan. He thinks we need to be home a little early. We've informed the Russians. President Grushavoy understands.'

'Okay, thanks,' Ryan said, not really meaning it. He'd hoped to scoot out to see Narmonov for an hour or so. Then the real fun part came. He reached over and shook his wife awake.

A groan: 'Don't even say it.'

'You can sleep the rest of it off on the airplane. We have to be packed and ready in an hour and a half.'

'What? Why?'

'Leaving early,' Jack told her. 'Trouble at home. Wall Street had another meltdown.'

'Bad?' Cathy opened her eyes, rubbing her forehead and thankful it was still dark outside until she looked at the clock.

'Probably a bad case of indigestion.'

'What time is it?'

'Time to get ready to leave.'

'We need maneuvering room,' Commander Harrison said.

'No dummy is he?' Admiral Dubro asked rhetorically. The opposition, Admiral Chandraskatta, had turned west the night before, probably catching on, finally, that the Eisenhower/Lincoln battle force was not where he'd suspected after all. That clearly left a single alternative, and therefore he'd headed west, forcing the Americans against the island chain that India mostly owned. Half of the U.S. Navy's Seventh Fleet was a powerful collection of ships, but their power would be halved again if their location became known. The whole point of Dubro's operations to this point had been to keep the other guy guessing. Well, he'd made his guess. Not a bad one, either.

'What's our fuel state?' Dubro asked, meaning that of his escort ships. The carriers could steam until the food ran out. Their nuclear fuel would not do so for years.

'Everybody's up to ninety percent. Weather's good for the next two days. We can do a speed run if we have to.'

'You thinking the same thing I am?'

'He's not letting his aircraft get too close to the Sri Lankan coast. They might show on air-traffic-control radars and people might ask questions. If we head northeast, then east, we can race past Dondra Head at night and curl back around south. Even money nobody sees us.'

The Admiral didn't like even-money odds. That meant it was just as likely somebody would see the formation,