Tom Clancy - Debt of Honor

"Got it on tape," an Air Force intelligence officer told him. "He confirms the satellite data. I'm inclined to believe that he's still safe."

"Let's keep him that way. I don't want anybody calling out to them without my say-so," Jackson ordered.

"Roge-o, sir." I don't think we can anyway, he didn't add.

"Tough day?" Paul Robberton asked.

"I've had worse," Ryan answered. But this crisis was too new for so confident an evaluation. "Does your wife mind…?"

"She's used to having me away, and we'll get a routine figured out in a day or so." The Secret Service agent paused. "How's the Boss doing?"

"As usual he gets the hard parts. We all dump on him, right?" Jack admitted, looking out the window as they turned off Route 50. "He's a good man, Paul."

"So are you, doc. We were all pretty glad to get you back." He paused. "How tough is it?" The Secret Service had the happy circumstance of needing to know almost everything, which was just as well, since they overheard almost everything anyway.

"Didn't they tell you? The Japanese have built nukes. And they have ballistic launchers to deliver them."

Paul's hands tightened on the wheel. "Lovely. But they can't be that crazy."

"On the evening of December 7, 1941, USS Enterprise pulled into Pearl Harbor to refuel and rearm. Admiral Bill Halsey was riding the bridge, as usual, and looked at the mess from the morning's strike and said, 'When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.' " Ryan wondered why he'd just said that.

"That's in your book. It must have been a good line for the guys around him."

"I suppose. If they use their nukes, that's what'll happen to them. Yeah, they have to know that," Ryan said, his fatigue catching up with him.

"You need about eight hours, Dr. Ryan, maybe nine," Robberton said judiciously. "It's like with us. Fatigue really messes up your higher-brain functions. The Boss needs you sharp, doc, okay?"

"No argument there. I might even have a drink tonight," Ryan thought aloud.

There was an extra car in the driveway, Jack saw, and a new face that looked out the window as the official car pulled into the parking pad.

"That's Andrea. I already talked with her. Your wife had a good lecture today, by the way. Everything went just fine."

"Good thing we have two guest rooms." Jack chuckled as he walked into the house. The mood was happy enough, and it seemed that Cathy and Agent Price were getting along. The two agents conferred while Ryan ate a light dinner.

"Honey, what's going on?" Cathy asked.

"We're involved in a major crisis with Japan, plus the Wall Street thing."

"But how come—"

"Everything that's happened so far has been at sea. It hasn't broken the news yet, but it will."

"War?"

Jack looked up and nodded. "Maybe."

"But the people at Wilmer today, they were just as nice—you mean they don't know either?"

Ryan nodded. "That's right."

"That doesn't make any sense!"

"No, honey, it sure doesn't." The phone rang just then, the regular house phone. Jack was the closest and picked it up. "Hello?"

"Is this Dr. John Ryan?" a voice asked.

"Yeah. Who's this?"

"George Winston. I don't know if you remember, but we met last year at the Harvard Club. I gave a little speech about derivatives. You were at the next table over. By the way, nice job on the Silicon Alchemy IPO."

"Seems like a while ago," Ryan said. "Look, it's kinda busy down here, and—"

"I want to meet with you. It's important," Winston said.

"What about?"

"I'll need fifteen or twenty minutes to explain it. I have my G at Newark. I can be down whenever you say." The voice paused. "Dr. Ryan, I wouldn't be asking unless I thought it was important."

Jack thought about it for a second. George Winston was a serious player.

His rep on the Street was enviable: tough, shrewd, honest. And, Ryan remembered, he'd sold control of his fleet to somebody from Japan. Somebody named Yamata—a name that had turned up before. "Okay, I'll squeeze you in. Call my office tomorrow about eight for a time."

"See you tomorrow then. Thanks for listening." The line went dead.

When he looked over at his wife, she was back at work, transcribing notes from her carry-notebook to her laptop computer, an Apple IIIc laptop.

"I thought you had a secretary for that," he observed with a lopsided smile.

"She can't think about these things when she writes up my notes. I can." Cathy was afraid to relate Bernie's news on the Lasker. She'd picked up several bad habits from her husband. One of them was his Irish-peasant belief in luck, and how you could spoil luck by talking about it. "I had an interesting idea today, just after the lecture."

"And you wrote it right down," her husband observed. Cathy looked up with her usual impish smile.

"Jack, if you don't write it down—"

"Then it never happened."

The dawn came up like thunder in this part of the world, or so the poem went. Sure as hell the sun was hot, Admiral Dubro told himself. It was almost as hot as his temper. His demeanor was normally pleasant, but he had simmered in both tropical heat and bureaucratic indifference for long enough. He supposed that the policy weenies and the planning weenies and the political weenies had the same take on things: he and his battle force could dance around here indefinitely without detection, doing their Ghostbusters number and intimidating the Indians without actual contact. A fine game, to be sure, but not an endless one. The idea was to get your battle force in close without detection and then strike at the enemy without warning. A nuclear-powered carrier was good at that. You could do it once, twice, even three times if the force commander had it together, but you couldn't do it forever, because the other side had brains, too, and sooner or later a break would go the wrong way.

In this case it wasn't the players who'd goofed. It was the water boy, and it hadn't even been much of an error. As his operations people had reconstructed events, a single Indian Sea Harrier at the very end of its patrol arc had had his look-down radar on and gotten a hit on one of Dubro's oilers, which were now racing northeast to refill his escort ships whose bunkers were nearly two thirds empty after the speed run south of Sri Lanka. An hour later another Harrier, probably stripped of weapons and carrying nothing but fuel tanks, had gotten close enough for a visual. The replenishment-group commander had altered course, but the damage was done. The placement of the two oilers and their two-frigate escort could only have meant that Dubro was now east-by-south of Dondra Head. The Indian fleet had turned at once, satellite photos showed, split into two groups, and headed northeast as well Dubro had little choice but to allow the oilers to continue on then base course. Covertness or not, his oil-fueled escorts were dangerously close to empty bunkers, and that was a hazard he could not afford. Dubro drank his wake-up coffee while his eyes burned holes in the bulkhead. Commander Harrison sat across from the Admiral's desk, sensibly not saying much of anything until his boss was ready to speak.

"What's the good word, Ed?"

"We still have them outgunned, sir," the Force Operations Officer replied. "Maybe we need to demonstrate that."

Outgunned? Dubro wondered. Well, yes, that was true, but only two thirds of his aircraft were fully mission-capable now. They'd been away too long from base. They were running out of the stores needed to keep the aircraft operating. In the hangar bay, aircraft sat with inspection hatches open, awaiting parts that the ship no longer had. He was depending on the replenishment ships for those, for the parts flown into Diego Garcia from stateside. Three days after delivery, he'd be back to battery, after a fashion, but his people were tired. Two men had been hurt on the flight deck the day before. Not because they were stupid. Not because they were inexperienced. Because they'd been doing it too damned long, and fatigue was even more dangerous to the mind than to the body, especially in the frenetic environment of a carrier's flight deck. The same was true of everyone in the battle force, from the lowliest striker to…himself. The strain of continuous decision-making was starting to tell. And all he could do about that was to switch to decaf.