Debt Of Honor (1994)

by Tom - Jack Ryan 06 Clancy

  Durling appeared on TV again at nine in the evening, Eastern Time. There were already rumbles out. The TV anchors had followed their stories about developments on Wall Street with confused references to the carrier accident the previous week and to urgent negotiations between Japan and the United States over the Mariana Islands, where, they noted, communications were out following a storm that might never have happened. It was very discomforting for them to say what they didn't know. By this time Washington correspondents were trading information and sources, amazed at having missed something of this magnitude. That amazement translated itself into rage at their own government for concealing something of this dimension. Background briefings that had begun at eight helped to assuage them somewhat. Yes, Wall Street was the big news. Yes, it was more vital to the overall American well-being than some islands that not a few of their number had to be shown on a map. But, no, damn it, the government didn't have the right not to tell the media what was going on. Some of them, though, realized that the First Amendment guaranteed their freedom to find things out, not to demand information from others. Others realized that the Administration was trying to end the affair without bloodshed, which went part of the way to calming them down. But not all of the way.

  "My fellow Americans," Durling began for the second time in the day, and it was immediately apparent that, as pleasing as the events of the afternoon had been, the news this evening would be bad. And so it was.

  There is something about inevitability that offends human nature. Man is a creature of hope and invention, both of which belie the idea that things cannot be changed. But man is also a creature prone to error, and sometimes that makes inevitable the things that he so often seeks to avoid.

  The four B-1B Lancer bombers were five hundred miles offshore now, again spread on a line centered due east of Tokyo. This time they turned directly in, took an exact westerly heading of two-seven-zero degrees, and dropped down to a low-penetration altitude. The electronic-warfare officers aboard each of the aircraft now knew more than they had two nights earlier. Now at least they could ask the right questions. Additional satellite information had fixed the location of every air-defense radar site in the country, and they knew they could beat those. The important part of this night's mission was to get a feel for the capabilities of the E-767s, and that demanded more circumspection.

  The B-1B had been reworked many times since the 1970s. It had actually become slower rather than faster, but it had also become stealthy. Especially from nose-on, the Lancer had the radar cross section--the RCS--of a large bird, as opposed to the B-2A, which had the RCS of a sparrow attempting to hide from a hawk. It also had blazing speed at low-level, always the best way to avoid engagement if attacked, which the crews hoped to avoid. The mission for tonight was to "tickle" the orbiting early-warning aircraft, wait for them to react electronically, and then turn and run back to Elmendorf with better data than what they had already developed, from which a real attack plan could be formulated. The flight crews had forgotten only one thing. The air temperature was 31 degrees Fahrenheit on part of their aircraft and 35 on another.

  Kami-Two was flying one hundred miles east of Choshi, following a precise north-south line at four hundred knots. Every fifteen minutes the aircraft reversed course. It had been up on patrol for seven hours, and was due to be relieved at dawn. The crew was tired but alert, not yet quite settled into the numbing routine of their mission.

  The real problem was technical, which affected the operators badly. Their radar, sophisticated as it was, did them fewer favors than one might imagine. Designed to make the detection of stealthy aircraft possible, it had achieved its goal, perhaps--they didn't really know yet--through a number of incremental improvements in performance. The radar itself was immensely powerful, and being of solid-state construction, both highly reliable and precise in its operation. Internal improvements included reception gear cooled with liquid nitrogen to boost sensitivity by a factor of four, and signal-processing software that missed little. That was really the problem. The radar displays were TV tubes that showed a computer-generated picture called a raster-scan, rather than the rotating-analog readout known since the invention of radar in the 1930s. The software was tuned to find anything that generated a return, and at the power and sensitivity settings being used now, it was showing things that weren't really there. Migratory birds, for example. The software engineers had programmed in a speed gate to ignore anything slower than one hundred thirty kilometers per hour, else they would have been tracking cars on the highways to their west, but the software took every return signal before deciding whether to show it to the operator, and if anything lay on or beyond that ring a few seconds later, it was plotted as a possible moving aircraft contact. In that way, two albatrosses a few thousand meters apart became a moving aircraft in the mind of the onboard computer. It was driving the operators mad, and along with them the pilots of the two Eagle fighters that flew thirty kilometers outboard of the surveillance aircraft. The result of the software problem was irritation that had already transformed itself into poor judgment. In addition, with the current sensitivity of the overall system, the still-active streams of commercial aircraft looked for all the world like fleets of bombers, and the only good news was that Kami-One to their north was dealing with them, classifying and handing them off.

  "Contact, one-zero-one, four hundred kilometers," a captain on one of the boards said into the intercom. "Altitude three thousand meters ... descending. Speed five hundred knots."

  "Another bird?" the colonel commanding the mission asked crossly.

  "Not this one ... contact is firming up."

  Another aviator with the rank of colonel eased his stick down to take his bomber lower. The autopilot was off now. In and out, he told himself, scanning the sky ahead of him.

  "There's our friend," one of the EWOs said. "Bearing two-eight-one."

  Automatically, both pilot and copilot looked to their right. Unsurprisingly, they saw nothing. The copilot looked back in. At night you wanted to keep an eye on instruments. The lack of good external references meant you ran the risk of vertigo, the loss of spatial orientation, which all aviators feared. They seemed to be approaching some layered clouds. His eyes checked the external temperature gauges. Thirty-five, and that was good. Two or three degrees lower and you ran the risk of icing, and the B-1, like most military aircraft, didn't have deicing equipment. Well, the mission was electronic, not visual, and clouds didn't mean much to radar transmission or reception.

  But clouds did mean moisture, and the copilot allowed himself to forget that the temperature gauge was in the nose, and the tail was quite a bit higher. The temperature there was thirty-one, and ice started forming on the bomber's tailfin. It wasn't even enough to cause any degradation in the controls. But it was enough to make a subtle change in the shape of the aircraft, whose radar cross section depended on millimeter tolerances.

  "That's a hard contact," the Captain said on Kami-Two. He worked his controls to lock on it, transmitting the contact to the Colonel's own display. "Maybe another one now."

  "I have it." The contact, he saw, was leveling out and heading straight for Tokyo. It could not possibly be an airliner. No transponder. The base course was wrong. The altitude was wrong. The penetration speed was wrong. It had to be an enemy. With that knowledge, he told his two fighters to head for it.

  "I think I can start interrogating it more--"

  "No," the Colonel replied over the IC phones.

  The two F-15J fighters had just topped off their tanks and were well sited for the interception. The alpha-numeric symbols on the Kami's screens showed them close, and aboard the fighters the pilots could see the same display and didn't have to light off their own targeting radars. With their outbound speed of five hundred knots, and a corresponding speed on the inbound track, it wouldn't be long.

  At the same time a report was downlinked to the regional air-defense headquarters, and soon many people were watching the electronic
drama. There were now three inbound aircraft plotted, spaced out as though to deliver an attack. If they were B-1 bombers, everyone knew, they could be carrying real bombs or cruise missiles, and they were well within the launch radius for the latter. That created a problem for the air-defense commander, and the time of day did not make it better. His precise instructions were not yet precise enough, and there was no command guidance he could depend on in Tokyo. But the inbounds were within the Air Defense Identification Zone, and they were probably bombers, and--what? the General asked himself. For now he ordered the fighters to split up, each closing on a separate target. It was going too fast. He should have known better, but you couldn't plan for everything, and they were bombers, and they were too close, and they were heading in fast.

  "Are we getting extra hits?" the aircraft commander asked. He planned to get no closer than one hundred miles to the airborne radar, and he already had his escape procedures in mind.

  "Sir, that's negative. I'm getting a sweep every six seconds, but no electronic steering on us yet."

  "I don't think they can see us this way," the pilot thought aloud.

  "If they do, we can get out of Dodge in a hurry." The copilot flexed his fingers nervously and hoped his confidence was not misplaced.

  There could be no tally-ho call. The fighters were above the cloud layer. Descending through clouds under these circumstances ran risks. The orders came as something of an anticlimax after all the drills and preparation, and a long, boring night of patrolling. Kami-Two changed frequencies and began electronic beam-steering on all three of her inbound contacts.

  "They're hitting us," the EWO reported at once. "Freq change, pulsing us hard on the Ku-band."

  "Probably just saw us." That made sense, didn't it? As soon as they plotted an inbound track, they'd try to firm it up. It gave him a little more time to work with. He'd keep going in for another few minutes, the Colonel thought, just to see what happened.

  "He's not turning," the Captain said. He should have turned away immediately, shouldn't he? everyone aboard wondered. There could only be one good reason why he hadn't, and the resulting order was obvious. Kami-two changed frequencies again to fire-control mode, and an Eagle fighter loosed two radar-homing missiles. To the north, another Eagle was still just out of range of its newly assigned target. Its pilot punched burner to change that.

  "Lock-up--somebody's locked-up on us!"

  "Evading left." The Colonel moved the stick and increased power for a screaming dive down to the wavetops. A series of flares combined with chaff clouds emerged from the bomber's tail. They stopped almost at once in the cold air and hovered nearly motionless. The sophisticated radar aboard the E-767 identified the chaff clouds and automatically ignored them, steering its pencil-thin radar beam on the bomber, which was still moving. All the missile had to do was follow it in. All the years of design work were paying off now, and the onboard controllers commented silently to themselves on the unexpected situation. The system had been designed to protect against Russians, not Americans. How remarkable.

  "I can't break lock." The EWO tried active jamming next, but the pencil beam that was hammering the aluminum skin of their Lancer was two million watts of power, and his jammers couldn't begin to deal with it. The aircraft lurched into violent corkscrew maneuvers. They didn't know where the missiles were, and they could only do what the manual said, but the manual, they realized a little late, hadn't anticipated this sort of adversary. When the first missile exploded on contact with the right wing, they were too close to the water for their ejection seats to be of any help.

  The second B-1 was luckier. It took a hit that disabled two engines, but even with half power it was able to depart the Japanese coast too rapidly for the Eagle to catch up, and the flight crew wondered if they would make Shemya before something else important fell off of their hundred-million-dollar aircraft. The rest of the flight retreated as well, hoping that someone could tell them what had gone wrong.

  Of greater moment, yet another hostile act had been committed, and four more people were dead, and turning back would now be harder still for both sides in a war without any discernible rules.

  36

  Consideration

  It wasn't that much of a surprise, Ryan told himself, but it would be of little consolation to the families of the four Air Force officers. It ought to have been a simple, safe mission, and the one bleak positive was that sure enough it had learned something. Japan had the world's best air-defense aircraft. They would have to be defeated if they were ever to take out their intercontinental missiles--but taken out the missiles had to be. A considerable pile of documents lay on his desk. NASA reports of the Japanese SS-19. Tracking on the observed test-firings of the birds. Evaluation of the capabilities of the missiles. Guesses about the payloads. They were all guesses, really. He needed more than that, but that was the nature of intelligence information. You never had enough to make an informed decision, and so you had to make an uninformed decision and hope that your hunches were right. It was a relief when the STU-6 rang, distracting him from the task of figuring what he could tell the President about what he didn't know.

  "Hi, MP. Anything new?"

  "Koga wants to meet with our people," Mrs. Foley replied at once. "Preliminary word is that he's not very pleased with developments. But it's a risk," she added.

  It would be so much easier if I didn't know those two, Ryan thought. "Approved," was what he said. "We need all the information we can get. We need to know who's really making the decisions over there."

  "It's not the government. Not really. That's what all the data indicates. That's the only plausible reason why the RVS didn't see this coming. So the obvious question is--"

  "And the answer to that question is yes, Mary Pat."

  "Somebody will have to sign off on that, Jack," the Deputy Director (Operations) said evenly.

  "Somebody will," the National Security Advisor promised.

  He was the Deputy Assistant Commercial Attache, a young diplomat, only twenty-five, who rarely got invited to anything important, and when he was, merely hovered about like a court page from a bygone era, attending his senior, fetching drinks, and generally looking unimportant. He was an intelligence officer, of course, and junior at that job as well. His was the task of making pickups from dead-drops while on his way into the embassy every morning that the proper signals were spotted, as they were this morning, a Sunday in Tokyo. The task was a challenge to his creativity because he had to make the planned seem random, had to do it in a different way every time, but not so different as to seem unusual. It was only his second year as a field intelligence officer, but he was already wondering how the devil people maintained their careers in this business without going mad.

  There it was. A soda can--a red Coca-Cola in this case--lying in the gutter between the left-rear wheel of a Nissan sedan and the curb, twenty meters ahead, where it was supposed to be. It could not have been there very long. Someone would have picked it up and deposited it in a nearby receptacle. He admired the neatness of Tokyo and the civic pride it represented. In fact he admired almost everything about these industrious and polite people, but that only made him worry about how intelligent and thorough their counterintelligence service was. Well, he did have a diplomatic cover, and had nothing more to fear than a blemish on a career that he could always change--his cover duties had taught him a lot about business, should he decide to leave the service of his government, he kept telling himself. He walked down the crowded morning sidewalk, bent down, and picked up the soda can. The bottom of the can was hollow, indented for easy stacking, and his hand deftly removed the item taped there, and then he simply dropped the can in the trash container at the end of the block before turning left to head for the embassy. Another important mission done, even if all it had appeared to be was the removal of street litter from this most fastidious of cities. Two years of professional training, he thought, to be a trash collector. Perhaps in a few years he would start recrui
ting his own agents. At least your hands stayed clean that way.

  On entering the embassy he found his way to Major Scherenko's office and handed over what he'd retrieved before heading off to his own desk for a brief morning's work.

  Boris Scherenko was as busy as he'd ever expected to be. His assignment was supposed to be a nice, quiet, commercial-spying post, learning industrial techniques that his country might easily duplicate, more a business function than one of pure espionage. The loss of Oleg Lyalin's THISTLE network had been a professional catastrophe that he had labored for some time to correct without great success. The traitor Lyalin had been a master at insinuating himself into business operations while he himself had worked to effect a more conventional penetration of the Japanese government organs, and his efforts to duplicate the former's achievements had barely begun to bear fruit when his tasking had changed back to something else entirely, a mission as surprising to him as the current situation doubtless was to the Americans who had been so badly stung by their erstwhile allies. Just one more truism that the Americans had allowed themselves to forget. You couldn't trust anyone.

  The package just delivered on his desk was at least easy to work with: two frames of thirty-five-millimeter film, black and white, already developed as a photographic negative. It was just a matter of peeling off the gray tape and unfolding it, a task that took some minutes. As sophisticated as his agency was, the actual work of espionage was often as tedious as assembling a child's birthday toys. In this case, he used a pocket knife and a bright light to remove the film, and nearly cut himself in the process. He placed the two frames in cardboard holders, which went one at a time into a slide-viewer. The next task was to transcribe the data onto a paper pad, which was just one more exercise in tedium. It was worth it, he saw at once. The data would have to be confirmed through other sources, but the news was good.