Debt of Honor jr-6

by Tom Clancy

  The first bomb hit seventy meters below the spillway. A heavy weapon with a thick case of hardened steel, it burrowed fifteen meters into the structure before exploding, first ripping a miniature cavern in the concrete, the shock of the event rippling through the immense wall as the second weapon struck, about five meters over the first.

  A watchman was there, awakened from a nap by the noise from down-valley, but he'd missed the light show and was wondering what it had been when he saw the first muted flash that seemed to come from inside his dam. He heard the second weapon hit. then the delay of a second or so before the shock almost lifted him off his feet.

  "Jesus, did we get them all?" Ryan asked. Contrary to popular belief, and contrary now to his own fervent wishes, the National Reconnaissance Office had never extended real-time capability to the White House. He had to depend on someone else, watching a television in a room at the Pentagon.

  "Not sure, sir. They were all close hits—well, I mean, some were, but some of the bombs appeared too premature—"

  "What does that mean?"

  "They seem to have exploded in midair—three of them, that is, all from the last bomber. We're trying to isolate in on the individual silos now and—"

  "Are there any left intact, damn it'.'" Ryan demanded. Had the gamble failed?

  "One. Maybe two. we're not sure. Stand by, okay?" the analyst asked rather plaintively. "We have another bird overhead in a few minutes."

  The dam might have survived two, but the third hit, twenty meters from the spillway, opened a gap—really, it dislodged a chunk of concrete triangular in shape. The section jerked forward, then stopped, held in place by the immense friction of the man-made rock, and for a second the watchman wondered if the dam might hold. The fourth hit struck in the center of that section and fragmented it. By the time the dust cleared, it had been replaced with fog and vapor as the water started pouring through the thirty-meter gap carved in the dam's face. That gap grew before the watchman's eyes, and only then did it occur to him to race for his shack and lift a phone to warn the people downstream. By that time, a river reborn after three decades of enforced sleep was racing down a valley it had carved over hundreds of millennia.

  "Well?" the man in Tokyo demanded.

  "One missile seems to be fully intact. That's number nine. Number two—well, there may be some minor damage. I have my people checking them all now. What are my orders?"

  "Prepare for a possible launch and stand by."

  "Hai." The line clicked off.

  Now what do I do? the watch officer wondered. He was new at this, new at the entire idea of managing nuclear weapons, a job he'd never wanted, but nobody had ever asked him about that. His remembered protocol of orders came quickly to him, and he lifted a phone—just an ordinary black instrument; there hadn't been time for the theatrics the Americans had affected—for the Prime Minister.

  "Yes, what is this?"

  "Goto-san, this is the Ministry. There has been an attack on our missiles!"

  "What? When?" the Prime Minister demanded. "How bad?"

  "One, possibly two missiles are operational. The rest may be destroyed. We're checking them all now." The senior watch officer could hear the rage at the other end of the line.

  "How quickly can you get them ready for launch?"

  "Several minutes. I have already given the order to bring them to launch status." The officer flipped an order book open to determine the procedures to actually launch the things. He'd been briefed in on it, of course, but now, in the heat of the moment, he felt the need to have it in writing before him as the others in the watch center turned and looked at him in an eerie silence.

  "I'm calling my cabinet now!" And the line went dead.

  The officer looked around. There was anger in the room, but even more, there was fear. It had happened again, a systematic attack, and now they knew the import of the earlier American actions. Somehow they had learned the location of the camouflaged missiles, and then they had used timed attacks on the Japanese air-defense system to cover what they really wanted to do. So what would they themselves be ordered to do now? Launch a nuclear attack? That was madness. The General thought so, and he could see that the cooler heads in his command center felt the same way.

  It was a miracle of sorts. Missile Number Nine's silo was nearly intact. One bomb had exploded a mere six meters away, but the rock around the—no, the officer saw, the bomb hadn't exploded at all. There was a hole in the rocky floor of the valley, but in the light of his flashlight he could see right there, amid the broken rock, the afterpart of something—a fin, perhaps. A dud, he realized, a smart bomb with a faulty fuse. Wasn't that amusing? He raced off next to see Number Two. Running down the valley, he heard some sort of alarm horn and wondered what that was all about. It was a frightening trip, and he marveled at the fact that the Americans hadn't attempted to attack the control bunker. Of the ten missiles in the collection, eight were certainly destroyed. He choked with the fumes of the remaining propellants, but most of that had fireballed into the sky already, leaving behind only noxious gas that the night winds were sweeping away. On reflection he donned a gas mask that covered his face, and, fatally, his ears.

  Silo two had taken a single bomb hit-near miss, he corrected himself. This bomb had missed the center target by perhaps twelve meters, and though it had thrown tons of rock about and cracked the concrete liner, all they had to do was sweep off the debris from the access hatch, then go down to see if the missile was intact.

  Damn the Americans for this! he raged, lifting his portable radio and calling the control hunker. Strangely, there was no reply. Then he noticed that the ground was shaking, but halfway wondered if it might be his own trembling. Commanding himself to be still, he took a deep breath, but the rumbling didn't stop. An earthquake…and what was that howling outside his gas mask? Then he saw it, and there wasn't time to race for the valley walls.

  The Patriot crew heard it also, but ignored it. It was the reload crew who got the only warning. Set in the wye of the railroad tracks, they were rigging a launch canister of four more missiles when the white wall exploded out the entrance to the valley. Their shouts went unheard, though one of their number managed to scramble to safety before the hundred-foot wave engulfed the site.

  Two hundred miles over his head, an orbiting camera overflew the valley from southwest to northeast, all nine of its cameras following the same rush of water.

  45—Line of Battle

  "There they go," Jones said. The shuttling pencils on the fan-fold paper showed nearly identical marks, the thin traces on the 1000Hz line indicated that Prairie-Masker systems were in use, and similarly faint lower-frequency marks denoted the use of marine diesel engines. There were seven of them, and though the bearings were not showing much change as yet, they soon would. The Japanese submarines were all now at snorting depth, and the time was wrong. They snorted on the hour, usually, typically one hour into a watch cycle, which allowed the officers and men on duty time to get used to the ship after a rest period, and also to do a sonar check before entering their most vulnerable evolution. But it was twenty-five after the hour now, and they'd all started snorting within the same five-minute period, and that meant movement orders. Jones lifted the phone and punched the button for SubPac.

  "Jones here."

  "What's happening, Ron?"

  "Whatever bait you just dropped in the water, sir, they just took after it. I have seven tracks," he reported. "Who's waiting for them?"

  "Not on the phone, Ron," Mancuso said. "How are things over there?"

  "Pretty much under control," Jones replied, looking around at the chiefs. Good men and women already, and his additional training had put them fully on-line.

  "Why don't you bring your data over here, then? You've earned it."

  "See you in ten," the contractor said.

  "We got 'em," Ryan said.

  "How sure are you?" Durling asked.

  "Here, sir." Jack put three photos on the Presi
dent's desk, just couriered over from NRO.

  "This is what it looked like yesterday." There was nothing to see, really, except for the Patriot missile battery. The second photo showed more, and though it was a radar photo in black and white, it had been computer-blended with another visual overhead to give a more precise picture of the missile field. "Okay, this is seventy minutes old," Ryan said, setting the third one down.

  "It's a lake." He looked up, surprised even though he'd been briefed.

  "The place is under about a hundred feet of water, will be for another few

  hours," Jack explained. "Those missiles are dead—"

  "Along with how many people?" Durling asked.

  "Over a hundred," the National Security Advisor reported, his enthusiasm for the event instantly gone. "Sir—there wasn't any way around that."

  The President nodded. "I know. How sure are we that the missiles…?"

  "Pre-flood shots showed seven of the holes definitely hit and destroyed. One more probably wrecked, and two unknowns, but definitely with shock damage of some sort. The weather seals on the holes won't withstand that much water pressure, and ICBMs are too delicate for that sort of treatment. Toss in debris carried downstream from the flooding. The missiles are as dead as we can make them without a nuclear strike of our own, and we managed to do the mission without it." Jack paused. "It was all Robby Jackson's plan. Thanks for letting me reward him for it."

  "He's with the carrier now?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Well, it would seem that he's the man for the job, wouldn't it?" the President asked rhetorically, clearly relieved at the evening's news. "And now?"

  "And now, Mr. President, we try to settle this one down once and for all."

  The phone rang just then. Durling lifted it. "Oh. Yes, Tish?"

  "There's an announcement from the Japanese government that they have nuclear weapons and they hope—"

  "Not anymore, they don't," Durling said, cutting off his communications director. "We'd better make an announcement of our own."

  "Oh, yeah," Jones said, looking at the wall chart. "You did that one in a big hurry, Bart."

  The line was west of the Marianas. Nevada was the northernmost boat. Thirty miles south of her was West Virginia. Another thirty and there was Pennsylvania. Maryland was the southernmost former missile submarine. The line was ninety miles across, and really extended a theoretical thirty more, fifteen to the north and south of the end-boats, and they were two hundred miles west of the westward-moving line of Japanese SSKs. They had just arrived in place after the warning from Washington that the word had been leaked somehow or other to the Japanese.

  "Something like this happened once before, didn't it?" Jones asked, remembering that these were all battleship names, and more than that, the names of battlewagons caught alongside the quays one morning in December, long before his birth. The original holders of the names had been resurrected from the mud and sent off to take islands back, supporting soldiers and Marines under the command of Jesse Oldendorf, and one dark night in Surigao Strait…but it wasn't a time for history lessons.

  "What about the 'cans?" Chambers asked.

  "We lost them when they went behind the Bonins, sir. Speed and course were fairly constant. They ought to pass over Tennessee around midnight, local time, but by that time our carrier—"

  "You have the operation all figured out," Mancuso observed.

  "Sir, I've been tracking the whole ocean for you. What d'ya expect?"

  "Ladies and gentlemen," the President said in the White House Press Room. He was winging it, Ryan saw, just working off some scribbled notes, never something to make the Chief Executive comfortable. "You've just this evening heard an announcement by the Japanese government that they have fabricated and deployed nuclear-tipped intercontinental missiles.

  "That fact has been known to your government for several weeks now, and the existence of those weapons is the reason for the careful and circumspect way in which the Administration has dealt with the Pacific Crisis. As you can well imagine, that development has weighed heavily on us, and has affecled our response to Japanese aggression against U.S. soil and citizens in the Marianas.

  "I can now tell you that those missiles have been destroyed. They no longer exist," Durling said in a forceful voice.

  "The current situation is this: the Japanese military still hold the Marianas Islands. That is not acceptable to the United States of America. The people living on those islands are American citizens, and American forces will do anything necessary to redeem their freedom and human rights. I repeat: we will do anything necessary to restore those islands to U.S. rule.

  "We call tonight on Prime Minister Goto to announce his willingness to evacuate Japanese forces from the Marianas forthwith. Failure to do so will compel us to use whatever force is necessary to remove them.

  "That is all I have to say right now. For whatever questions you have on the events of this evening, I turn you over to my National Security Advisor, Dr. John Ryan." The President walked toward the door, ignoring a riot of shouted questions, while a few easels were set up for visual displays. Ryan stood at the lectern, making everyone wait as he told himself to speak slowly and clearly.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, this was called Operation TIBBETS. First of all let me show you what the targets were." The cover came off the first photo, and for the first time the American people saw just what the nation's reconnaissance satellites were capable of. Ryan lifted his pointer and started identifying the scene for everyone, giving the cameras time to close in on them.

  "Holy shit," Manuel Oreza observed. "That's why."

  "Looks like a pretty good reason to me," Pete Burroughs observed. Then the screen went blank.

  "We're sorry, but a technical problem has temporarily interrupted the CNN satellite feed," a voice told them.

  "My ass!" Portagee snarled back.

  "They'll come here next, won't they?"

  "About fuckin' time, too," Oreza thought.

  "Manny, what about that missile thing on the next hill?" his wife wanted to know.

  "We're preparing copies of all these photos for you. They should be ready in about an hour or so. Sorry for the delay," Jack told them. "It's been rather a busy time for us.

  "Now, the mission was carried out by B-2 bombers based at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri—"

  "Staging out of where?" a reporter asked.

  "You know we're not going to discuss that," Jack said in reply.

  "That's a nuclear-weapons platform," another voice said. "Did we—"

  "No. The strike was carried out with precision-guided conventional munitions. Next card, please," Ryan said to the man at the easel. "As you can see here, the valley is largely intact…" It was easier than he'd expected, and perhaps better that he'd not had much time to worry about it, and Ryan remembered his first time delivering a briefing in the White House. It had been harder than this one, despite the blaze of TV lights now in his face.

  "You destroyed a dam?"

  "Yes, we did. It was necessary to be completely certain that these weapons were destroyed and—"

  "What about casualties?"

  "All of our aircraft are on their way back—might already be there, but I haven't—"

  "What about Japanese deaths?" the reporter insisted.

  "I don't know about that," Jack replied evenly.

  "Do you care?" she demanded, wondering what sort of answer she'd get.

  "The mission, ma'am, was to eliminate nuclear arms targeted on the United States by a country that has already attacked U.S. forces. Did we kill Japanese citizens in this attack? Yes, we did. How many? I do not know. Our concern in this case was American lives at risk. I wish you would keep in mind that we didn't start this war. Japan did. When you start a war you take risks. This is one risk they undertook—and in this case they lost. I am the President's National Security Advisor, and my job description is to help President Durling safeguard this country first of all. Is that clear?"
Ryan asked. He'd allowed just a little anger to enter his reply, and the indignant look on the reporter's face didn't prevent a few nods from her colleagues.

  "What about asking the press to lie in order to—"

  "Stop!" Ryan commanded, his face reddening. "Do you wish to place the lives of American servicemen at risk? Why do that? Why the hell would you want to do that?"

  "You bullied the networks into—"

  "This feed is going worldwide. You do know that, don't you?" Ryan paused to take a breath. "Ladies and gentlemen, I would remind you that most of the people in this room are American citizens. Speaking for myself now"—he was afraid to look to where the President was standing—"you do realize that the President is responsible to the mothers and fathers and wives and children of the people who wear our country's uniform for their safety. Real people are at risk today, and I wish you folks in the press would bear that in mind from time to time."

  "Jesus," Tish Brown whispered behind Durling. "Mr. President, it might be a good idea to—"

  "No." He shook his head. "Let him go on."

  The Press Room became silent. Someone whispered something sharp to the standing journalist, who managed to take her seat, flushing as she did so.

  "Dr. Ryan, Bob Holtzman of the Washington Post," he said unnecessarily. "What are the chances of ending this conflict without further violence?"

  "Sir. that is entirely up to the Japanese government. The citizens of the Marianas are, as the President said, American citizens, and this country does not allow other nations to change such things. If Japan is willing to withdraw her forces, they may do so in peace. If not, then other operations will take place."

  "Thank you, Dr. Ryan," Holtzman said loudly, effectively ending the press conference. Jack hustled toward the door, ignoring the additional questions.