Tom Clancy - Debt of Honor

Cook looked away, staring at the wall that enclosed the garden. He spoke quietly. "What will you give up?"

"Guam, definitely, but it must be demilitarized," Nagumo replied in the same voice. "And you?"

"So far, nothing."

"You must give me something to work with, Chris," Nagumo observed.

"There's nothing to offer, except maybe a cessation of hostilities—before they actually start."

"When will that happen?"

"Not anytime soon, thank God. We do have time to work with. Let's make good use of it," Cook urged.

"I'll pass that along. Thank you." Nagumo wandered off to join a member of his delegation. Cook did the same, ending up three minutes later with Scott Adler.

"Guam, demilitarized. That's definite. Maybe more. That's not definite."

"Interesting," Adler thought. "So you were right on their allowing us to save face. Nice call, Chris."

"What will we offer them back?"

" Gornisch ," the Deputy Secretary of State said coldly. He was thinking about his father, and the tattoo on his forearm, and how he'd learned that a 9 was an upside-down 6, and how his father's freedom had been taken away by a country once allied with the owner of this embassy and its lovely if cold garden. It was somewhat unprofessional and Adler knew it. Japan had offered a safe haven during those years to a few lucky European Jews, one of whom had become a cabinet secretary under Jimmy Carter. Perhaps if his father had been one of those fortunate few, his attitude might have been different, but his father hadn't, and his wasn't. "For starters we lean on them hard and see what happens."

"I think that's a mistake," Cook said after a moment.

"Maybe," Adler conceded. "But they made the mistake first."

The military people didn't like it at all. It annoyed the civilians, who had established the site approximately five times as fast as these uniformed boneheads would have managed, not to mention doing it in total secrecy and less expensively.

"It never occurred to you to hide the site?" the Japanese general demanded.

"How could anyone find this?" the senior engineer shot back.

"They have cameras in orbit that can pick up a packet of cigarettes lying on the ground."

"And a whole country to survey." The engineer shrugged. "And we are in the bottom of a valley whose sides are so steep that an inbound ballistic warhead can't possibly hit it without striking those peaks first." The man

pointed. "And now they do not even have the missiles they need to do it," he added.

The General had instructions to be patient, and he was, after his initial outburst. It was his site to command now. "The first principle is to deny information to the other side."

"So we hide it, then?" the engineer asked politely.

"Yes."

"Camouflage netting on the catenary towers?" They'd done it during the construction phase.

"If you have them, it's a good beginning. Later we can consider other more permanent measures."

"By train, eh?" The AMTRAK official noted after the completion of his briefing. "Back when I started in the business, I was with the Great Northern, and the Air Force came to us half a dozen times about how to move missiles around by rail. We ended up moving a lot of concrete in for them."

"So you've actually thought this one over a few times?" Betsy Fleming asked.

"Oh, yeah." The official paused. "Can I see the pictures now?" The goddamned security briefing had taken hours of unnecessary threats, after which he'd been sent back to his hotel to contemplate the forms-and to allow the FBI to run a brief security check, he imagined.

Chris Scott flipped the slide projector on. He and Fleming had already made their own analysis, but the purpose of having an outside consultant was to get a free and fresh opinion. The first shot was of the missile, just to give him a feel for the size of the thing. Then they went to the shot of the train car.

"Okay, it sure looks like a flatcar, longer than most, probably specially made for the load. Steel construction. The Japanese are good at this sort of thing. Good engineers. There's a crane to lift something. How much docs one of these monsters weigh?"

"Figure a hundred tons for the missile itself," Betsy answered. "Maybe twenty for the transporter-container."

"That's pretty heavy for a single object, but not all that big a deal. Well within limits for the car and the roadbed." He paused for a moment. "I don't see any obvious electronics connections, just the usual brake lines and stuff. You expect them to launch off the cars?"

"Probably not. You tell us," Chris Scott said.

"Same thing I told the Air Force twenty-some years ago for the MX. Yeah, you can move them around, but it doesn't make finding them all that hard unless you assume that you're going to make a whole lot of railcars that look exactly alike—and even then, like for the mainline on the Northern, you have a fairly simple target. Just a long, thin line, and guess what, our mainline from Minneapolis to Seattle was longer than all the standard-gauge track in their country."

"So?" Fleming asked.

"So this isn't a launch car. It's just a transport car. You didn't need me to tell you that."

No, but it is nice to hear it from somebody else , Betsy thought. "Anything else?"

"The Air Force kept telling me how delicate the damned things are. They don't like being bumped. At normal operating speeds you're talking three lateral gees and about a gee and a half of vertical acceleration. That's not good for the missile. Next problem is dimensional. That car is about ninety feet long, and the standard flatcar for their railroads is sixty or less. Their railroads are mainly narrow-gauge. Know why?"

"I just assumed that they picked—"

"It's all engineering, okay?" the AMTRAK executive said. "Narrow-gauge track gives you the ability to shoehorn into tighter spots, to take sharper turns, generally to do things smaller. But they went to standard gauge for the Shin-Kansen because for greater speed and stability you just need it wider. The length of the cargo and the corresponding length of the car to carry it means that if you turn too tightly, the car overlaps the next track and you run the risk of collision unless you shut down traffic coming the other way every time you move these things. That's why the missile is somewhere off the Shin-Kansen line. It has to be. Then next, there's the problem of the cargo. It really messes things up for everybody."

"Keep going," Betsy Fleming said.

"Because the missiles are so delicate, we would have been limited to low speed—it would have wrecked our scheduling and dispatching. We never wanted the job. The money to us would have been okay, but it would probably have hurt us in the long run. The same thing would be true of them, wouldn't it? Even worse. The Shin-Kansen line is a high-speed passenger routing. They meet timetables like you wouldn't believe, and they wouldn't much like things that mess them up." He paused. "Best guess? They used those cars to move the things from the factory to someplace else and that's all. I'd bet a lot of money that they did everything at night, too. If I were you I'd hunt around for these cars, and expect to find them in a yard somewhere doing nothing. Then I'd start looking for trackage off the mainline that doesn't go anywhere."

Scott changed slides again. "How well do you know their railroads?"

"I've been over there often enough. That's why they let you draft me."

"Well, tell me what you think of this one." Scott pointed at the screen.

"That's some bitchin' radar," a technician observed. The trailer had been flown up to Elmendorf to support the B-1 mission. The bomber crews were sleeping now, and radar experts, officer- and enlisted-rank, were going over the taped records of the snooper flight.