Tom Clancy - Debt of Honor

Force-on-force , Robby Jackson thought again. If that's impossible, then what?

"Well, if we can't play this like a prizefight, then we play it like a card game," he said to himself, alone in his office. He looked up in surprise, then realized that he'd heard his own words spoken aloud. It wasn't very professional to be angry, but Rear Admiral Jackson was indulging himself with anger for the moment. The enemy—that was the term he was using now—assumed that he and his colleagues in J-3 could not construct an effective response to their moves. To them it was a matter of space and time and force. Space was measured in thousands of miles. Time was being measured in months and years. Force was being measured in divisions and fleets.

What if they were wrong? Jackson asked himself. Shemya to Tokyo was two thousand miles. Elmendorf to Tokyo was another thousand. But space was time. Time to them was the number of months or years required to rebuild a navy capable of doing what had been done in 1944, but that wasn't in the cards, and therefore was irrelevant. And force wasn't everything you had. Force was what you managed to deliver to the places that needed to be hit. Everything else was wasted energy, wasn't it?

More important still was perception. His adversaries perceived that their own limiting factors applied to others as well. They defined the contest in their terms, and if that's how America played the game, then America would lose. So his most important task was to make up his own set of rules. And so he would, Jackson told himself. That's where he began, on a clear sheet of unlined white paper, with frequent looks at the world map on his wall.

Whoever had run the night watch at CIA was intelligent enough, Ryan thought. Intelligent enough to know that information received at three in the morning could wait until six, which bespoke a degree of judgment rare in the intelligence community, and one for which he was grateful. The Russians had transmitted the dispatch to the Washington rezidentura , and from there it had been hand-carried to CIA. Jack wondered what the uniformed guards at CIA had thought when they had let the Russian spooks through the gate. From there the report had been driven to the White House, and the courier had been waiting for Ryan in his anteroom when he came in.

"Sources report a total of nine (9) 'H-11' rockets at Yoshinobu. Another missile is at the assembly plant, being used as an engineering test-bed for a proposed structural upgrade. That leaves ten (10) or eleven (11) rockets unaccounted for, more probably the former, location as yet unknown. Good news, Ivan Emmetovich. I presume your satellite people are quite busy. Ours are as well. Golovko."

"Yes, they are, Sergey Nikolay'ch," Ryan whispered, flipping open the second folder the courier had brought down. "Yes, they are."

Here goes nothing , thought Sanchez.

AirPac was a vice admiral, and in as foul a mood as every other officer at the Pearl Harbor Naval Base. Responsible for every naval aircraft and flight deck from Nevada west, his ought to have been the point command for the war that had begun only a few days earlier, but not only could he not tell his two active carriers in the Indian Ocean what he wanted, he could see his other two carriers, sitting side by side in dry docks. And likely to remain there for months, as a CNN camera crew was now making clear to viewers across the entire world.

"So what is it?" he asked his visitors.

"Do we have plans for visiting WestPac?" Sanchez asked.

"Not anytime soon."

"I can be ready to move in less than ten days," Johnnie Reb's CO announced.

"Is that a fact?" AirPac inquired acidly.

"Number-one shaft's okay. If we fix number four, I can do twenty-nine, maybe thirty knots. Probably more. The trials on two shafts had the wheels attached. Eliminate the drag from those, maybe thirty-two."

"Keep going," the Admiral said.

"Okay, the first mission has to be to eliminate their airplanes, right?"

Sanchez said. "For that I don't need Hoovers and 'Truders. Johnnie Reb can handle four squadrons of Toms and four more of Plastic Bugs, Robber's det of Queers to do the jamming, plus an extra det of Hummers. And guess what?"

AirPac nodded. "That almost equals their fighter strength on the islands. " It was dicey. One carrier deck against two major island bases wasn't exactly…but the islands were pretty far apart, weren't they? Japan had other ships out there, and submarines, which is what he feared in particular.

"It's a start, maybe."

"We need some other elements," Sanchez agreed. "Anybody going to say no when we ask?"

"Not at this end," the Admiral said after a moment's thought.

The CNN reporter had made her first live feed from atop the edge of the dry dock, and it showed the two nuclear-powered carriers sitting on their blocks, not unlike twin babies in side-by-side cradles. Somebody in CINCPAC's office must have paid a price for letting her in, Ryan thought, because the second feed was from much farther away, the flattops across the harbor but still clearly visible behind her back, as she said much the same things, adding that she had learned from informed sources that it could be as much as six months before Stennis and Enterprise could again put to sea.

Isn't that just great , Jack grumbled to himself. Her estimate was as good as the one sitting on his desk with Top Secret written on the folder in red lettering. Maybe it was even better, since her source was probably a yard worker with real experience in that largest of body and fender shops. She was followed by a learned commentator—this one a retired admiral working at a Washington think-tank—who said that taking the Marianas back would be extremely difficult at best.

The problem with a free press was that it gave out information to everyone, and over the past two decades it had become so good a source of information that his country's own intelligence services used it for all manner of time-critical data. For its part, the public had grown more sophisticated in its demands for news, and the networks had responded by improving both its collection and analysis. Of course, the press had its weaknesses. For real insider information it depended too much on leaks and not enough on shoe-leather, especially in Washington, and for analysis it often selected people motivated less by facts than by an agenda. But for things that one could see, the press often worked better than trained intelligence officers on the government payroll.

The other side depended on it too , Jack thought. Just as he was watching his office TV, so were others, all over the world…

"You look busy," Admiral Jackson said from the door.

"I'm waiting just as fast as I can." Ryan waved him to a seat. "CNN just reported on the carriers."

"Good," Robby replied.

"Good?"

"We can have Stennis back to sea in seven to ten days. Old pal of mine, Bud Sanchez, is the CAG aboard her, and he has some ideas I like. So does AirPac."

"A week? Wait a minute." Yet another effect of TV news, was that people often believed it over official data, even though in this case the classified report was identical with—

Three were still in Connecticut, and the other three were undergoing tests in Nevada. Everything about them was untraditional. The fabrication plant, for example, was more like a tailor shop than an aircraft factory. The basic material for the airframes arrived in rolls, which were laid out on a long, thin table where computer-driven laser cutters sliced out the proper shapes. Those were then laminated and baked in an oven until the carbon-fiber fabric formed a sandwich stronger than steel, but far lighter-and, unlike steel, transparent to electromagnetic energy. Nearly twenty years of design work had gone into this, and the first pedestrian set of requirements had grown into a book as thick as a multi-volume encyclopedia. A typical Pentagon program, it had taken too long and cost too much, but the final product, if not exactly worth the wait, was certainly worth having, even at twenty million dollars per copy, or, as the crews put it, ten million dollars per seat.