Debt of Honor

'More goddamned cars. You know, when I came here it was kinda like Cape Cod in the winter. Now it's more like the Cape in the summer. Wall-to-goddamned-wall.' Portagee shrugged. More tourists made for more crowding, spoiling the island, but also bringing him more business.

'Expensive place to live?'

'Getting that way,' Oreza confirmed. Another 747 flew off the island. 'That's funny…'

'What?'

'That one didn't come out of the airport.'

'What do you mean?'

'That one came out of Kobler. It's an old SAC runway, BUFF field.'

'BUFF?'

'Big Ugly Fat Fucker,' Portagee explained. 'B-52's. There's five or six runways in the islands that can take big birds, dispersal fields from the bad old days,' he went on. 'Kobler's right next to my old LORAN station. I'm surprised they still keep it up. Hell, I didn't know they did, even.'

'I don't understand.'

'There used to be a Strategic Air Command base on Guam. You know, nukes, all that big shit? In case the crap hit the fan, they were supposed to disperse off Andersen Air Force Base so one missile couldn't get them all. There's two big-bird runways on Saipan, the airport and Kobler, two more on Tinian, leftovers from World War Two, and two more on Guam.'

'They're still good to use?'

'No reason why not.' Oreza's head turned. 'We don't get many hard freezes here to rip things up.' The next 747 came off Saipan International, and in the clear evening sky they could see yet another coming in from the eastern side of the island.

'This place always this busy?'

'No, most I've ever seen. Goddamned hotels must be packed solid.' Another shrug. 'Well, that means the hotels'll be interested in buying that fish off ya.'

'How much?'

'Enough to cover the charter, Pete. That's one big fish you brought in. But tomorrow you have to get lucky again.'

'Hey, you find me another big boy like our friend down there, and I don't care what you charge.'

'I love it when people say that.' Oreza eased back on the throttles as he approached the marina. He aimed for the main dock. They needed the hoist to get the fish off. The albacore was the third-largest he'd ever brought in, and this Burroughs guy wasn't all that bad a charter.

'You make a living at this?'

Portagee nodded. 'With my retirement pay, yeah, it's not a bad life. Thirty-some years I drove Uncle's boats, and now I get to drive me own—and she' s paid for.'

Burroughs was looking at the commercial ships now. He lifted the skipper's binoculars. 'You mind?'

'Strap around your neck if you don't mind.' Amazing that people thought the strap was some sort of decoration.

'Sure.' Burroughs did that, adjusting the focus for his eyes and examining Orchid Ace. 'Ugly damned things…'

'Not made to be pretty. Made to carry cars.' Oreza started the final turn in.

'That's no car. Looks like some kind of construction thing, bulldozer, like…'

'Oh?' Portagee called for his mate, a local kid, to come topside and work the lines. Good kid, fifteen, might try for the Coast Guard and spend a few years learning the trade properly. Oreza was working on that.

'The Army have a base here?'

'Give me a light and follow me on this,' Jones ordered. He flipped another page, checking the 60Hz line. 'Nothing…nothing. Those diesel boats are pretty good…but if they're quiet, they ain't snorting, and if they ain't snorting they ain't going very far…Asheville sprinted out this way, and probably then she came back in…' Another page.

'No rescue, sir?' It had taken fully thirty seconds for the question to be asked.

'How deep's the water?'

'I know that, but the escape trunks…I mean, I've seen it, there's three of them.'

Jones didn't even look up, taking a puff off his first smoke in years.

'Yeah, the mom's hatch, that's what we called it on Dallas. 'See, mom, if anything goes wrong, we can get out right there.' Chief, you don't get off one of these things, okay? You don't. That ship is dead, and so's her crew. I want to see why.'

'But we already have the crush sounds.'

'I know. I also know that two of our carriers had a little accident today.' Those sounds were on the SOSUS printouts, too.

'What are you saying?'

'I'm not saying anything.' Another page. At the bottom of it was a large black blotch, the loud sound that marked the death of USS Asheville and all—'What the fuck is this?'

'We think it's a double-plot, sir. The bearing's almost the same as the Asheville sound, and we think the computer—'

'The time's off, goddamn it, a whole four minutes.' He flipped back three pages. 'See, that's somebody else.'

'Charlotte?'

It was then that Jones felt even colder. His head swam a little from the cigarette, and he remembered why he'd quit. The same signature on the paper, a diesel boat snorting, and, later, a 688-class sprinting. The sounds were so close, nearly identical, and the coincidence of the bearing from the new seafloor array could have made almost anyone think…

'Call Admiral Mancuso and find out if Charlotte has checked in.'

'But—'

'Right now, Senior Chief!'

Dr. Ron Jones stood up and looked around. It was the same as before, almost. The people were the same, doing the same work, displaying the same competence, but something was missing. The thing that wasn't the same was…what? The large room had a huge chart of the Pacific Ocean on its back wall. Once that chart had been marked with red silhouettes, the class shapes of Soviet submarines, boomers, and fast-attacks, often with black silhouettes in attendance, to show that Pacific SOSUS was tracking 'enemy' subs, quarterbacking American fast- attacks onto them, vectoring P-3C Orion ASW birds in to follow them, and occasionally to pounce on and harry them, to let them know who owned the oceans of the world. Now the marks on the wall chart were of whales, some of them with names, just as with the Russian subs, but these names were things like 'Moby and Mabel,' to denote a particular pod with a well-known alpha-pair to track by name. There wasn't an enemy now, and the urgency had gone. They weren't thinking the way he'd once thought, heading 'up north' on Dallas, tracking people they might one day have to kill. Jones had never really expected that, not really-really, but the possibility was something he'd never allowed himself to forget. These men and women, however, had. He could see it, and now he could hear it from the way the chief was talking to SubPac on the phone.

Jones walked across the room and just took the receiver away. 'Bart, this is Ron. Has Charlotte checked in?'

'We're trying to raise her now.'

'I don't think you're going to, Skipper,' the civilian said darkly.

'What do you mean?' The reply caught the meaning. The two men had always communicated on a nonverbal level.

'Bart, you better come over here. I'm not kidding, Cap'n.'

'Ten minutes,' Mancuso promised.

Jones stubbed his smoke out in a metal waste can and returned to the printouts. It was not an easy thing for him now, but he flipped to the pages where he'd stopped. The printouts were made with pencils that were located on metal shuttle-bars, marking received noises in discrete frequency ranges, and the marks were arranged with the low frequencies on the left, and the higher ones on the right. Location within the range columns denoted bearing.