Debt of Honor

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 recruiting 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.

"There's your two cars," the AMTRAK executive said. It had been so obvious a place to look that a day had been required to realize it. The two oversized flatcars were at the Yoshinobu launch facility, and beside them were three transporter-containers for the SS-19/H-11 booster, just sitting there in the yard. "This might be another one, sticking out of the building."

"They have to have more than two, don't they?" Chris Scott asked.

"I would," Betsy Fleming replied. "But it could just mean a place to stash the cars. And it's the logical place."

"Here or at the assembly plant," Scott agreed with a nod. Mainly they were waiting now for nonvisual data. The only KH-I2 satellite in orbit was approaching Japan and already programmed to look at one small patch of a valley. The visual information had given them a very useful cue. Another fifty meters of the rail spur had disappeared from view between one KH-n pass and another. The photos showed the catenary towers ordinarily used for stringing the overhead power lines needed for electrically powered trains, but the towers did not have wires on them. They had possibly been erected to make the spur look normal to commuters who traveled the route in the Bullet Trains, just one more exercise in hiding something in plain sight.

"You know, if they'd just left it alone…" the AMTRAK guy said, looking at the overheads again.

"Yeah." Betsy responded, checking the clock. But they hadn't. Somebody was hanging camouflage netting on the towers, just around the first turn in the valley. The train passengers wouldn't notice, and, given slightly better timing, the three of them wouldn't have either. "If you were doing this, what would you do next?"

"To hide it from you guys? That's easy," the executive said. "I'd park track-repair cars there. That way it would look ordinary as hell, and they have the room for it. They should have done it before. Do people make mistakes like this all the time?"

"It isn't the first," Scott said.

"And now you're waiting for what?" the man asked.

"You'll see."

Launched into orbit eight years earlier by the Space Shuttle Atlantis, the TRW-built KH-12 satellite had actually survived far beyond its programmed life, but as was true of many products made by that company—the Air Force called it "TR-Wonderful"—it just kept on ticking. The radar-reconnaissance satellite was completely out of maneuvering fuel, however, which meant you had to wait for it to get to a particular place and hope that the operating altitude was suitable to what you wanted.

It was a large cylindrical craft, over thirty feet in length, with immense "wings" of solar receptors to power the onboard Ku-band radar. The solar cells had degraded over the years in the intense radiation environment, allowing only a few minutes of operation per revolution. The ground controllers had waited what seemed a long time for this opportunity. The orbital track was northwest-to-southeast, within six degrees of being directly overhead, close enough to see straight down into the valley. They already knew a lot. The geological history of the place was clear. A river now blocked with a hydroelectric dam had cut the gorge deep. It was more canyon than valley at this point, and the steep sides had been the deciding factor in putting the missiles here. The missiles could launch vertically, but incoming warheads would be blocked from hitting them by the mountains to east and west. It didn't make any difference whose warheads they were. The shape and course of the valley would have had the same effect on Russian RVs as Americans'. The final bit of genius was that the valley was hard rock. Each silo had natural armor. For all those reasons, Scott and Fleming had bet much of their professional reputations on the tasking orders for the KH-12.

"Right about now, Betsy," Scott said, checking the wall clock.

"What exactly will you see?"

"If they're there, we'll know it. You follow space technology?" Fleming asked.

"You're talking to an original Trekkie."

"Back in the 1980's NASA orbited a mission, and the first thing they downloaded was a shot of the Nile delta, underground aquifers that feed into the Mediterranean Sea. We mapped them."

"The same one did the irrigation canals down in Mexico, right, the Mayans, I think. What are you telling me?" the AMTKAK official replied.

"It was our mission, not NASA's. We were telling the Russians that they couldn't hide their silos from us. They got the message, too," Mrs. Fleming explained. Right about then the secure fax machine started chirping. The signal from the KH-12 had been crosslinked to a satellite in geostationary orbit over the Indian Ocean, and from there to the U.S. mainland. Their first read on the signals would be unenhanced, but, they hoped, good enough for a fast check. Scott took the first image off the machine and set it on the table under a bright light, next to a visual print of the same place.

"Tell me what you see."

"Okay, here's the mainline…oh—this thing picks up the ties. The rails are too small, eh?"

"Correct." Betsy found the spur line. The concrete rail ties were fifteen centimeters in width, and made for a good, sharp radar return that looked like a line of offset dashes.

"It goes quite a way up the valley, doesn't it?" The AMTRAK guy's face was down almost on the paper, tracing with his pen. "Turn, turn. What are these?" he asked, touching the tip to a series of white circles.

Scott placed a small ruler on the sheet. "Betsy?"

"Dense-packed it, too. My, aren't we clever. It must have cost a fortune to do this."

"Beautiful work," Scott breathed. The rail spur curved left and right, and every two hundred meters was a silo, not three meters away from the marching ranks of rail ties. "Somebody really thought this one through."

"You lost me."

"Dense-pack," Mrs. Fleming said. "It means that if you attempt to hit the missile field, the first warhead throws so much debris into the air that the next warhead gets trashed on the way in."

"It means that you can't use nuclear weapons to take these boys out—not easily anyway," Scott went on. "Summarize what you know for me," he ordered.

"This is a rail line that doesn't make any commercial sense. It doesn't go anywhere, so it can't make money. It's not a service siding, too long for that. It's standard gauge, probably because of the cargo-dimension requirements."

"And they're stringing camouflage netting over it," Betsy finished the evaluation, and was already framing the National Intelligence Estimate they had to draft tonight. "Chris, this is the place."

"But I only count ten. There's ten more we have to find."

It was hard to think of it as an advantage, but the downsizing of the Navy had generated a lot of surplus staff, so finding another thirty-seven people wasn't all that hard. That brought Tennessee's complement to one hundred twenty, thirty-seven short of an Ohio's normal crew size, a figure Dutch Claggett could accept. He didn't need the missile technicians, after all. His crew would be heavy on senior petty officers, another burden he would bear easily, the CO told himself, standing atop the sail and watching his men load provisions under the glaring lights. The reactor plant was up and running. Even now his engineering officer was conducting drills. Just forward of the sail, a green Mark 48 ADCAP torpedo was sliding backwards down the weapons-loading hatch under the watchful eyes of a chief torpedoman. There were only sixteen of those torpedoes to be had, but he didn't expect to need that many for the mission he anticipated. Asheville and Charlotte. He'd known men on both, and if Washington got its thumb out, maybe he'd do something about that.

A car pulled up to the brow, and a petty officer got out, carrying a metal briefcase. He made his way aboard, dodging around the crewmen tossing cartons, then down a hatch.

"That's the software upgrade for the sonar systems," Claggett's XO said.

"The one they've been tracking whales with."

"How long to upload it?"

"Supposedly just a few minutes."

"I want to be out of here before dawn, X."

"We'll make it. First stop Pearl?"

Claggett nodded, pointing to the other Ohios, also loading men and chow. "And I don't want any of those turkeys beating us there, either."

It wasn't a comfortable feeling, but the sight was worth it. Johnnie Reb rested on rows of wooden blocks, and towered above the floor of the dry dock like some sort of immense building. Captain Sanchez had decided to give things a look, and stood alongside the ship's commanding officer. As they watched, a traveling crane removed the remains of the number-three screw. Workers and engineers in their multicolored hard hats made way, then converged back on the skeg, evaluating the damage. Another crane moved in to begin the removal of number-four tailshaft. It had to be pulled straight out, its inboard extremity already disconnected from the rest of the assembly.

"Bastards," the skipper breathed.

"We can fix her," Sanchez noted quietly.

"Four months. If we're lucky," the Captain added. They just didn't have the parts to do it any faster. The key, unsurprisingly, was the reduction gears. Six complete gear sets would have to be manufactured, and that took time. Enterprise's entire drive-train was gone, and the efforts to get the ship to safely as quickly as possible had wrecked the one gear set that might have been repairable. Six months for her, if the contractor could get spun up in a hurry, and work three-shift weeks to get the job done. The rest of the repairs were straightforward.

"How quick to get number-one shaft back to battery?" Sanchez asked.

The Captain shrugged. "Two-three days, for what that's worth."

Sanchez hesitated before asking the next question. He should have known the answer, and he was afraid it would sound really stupid—oh, what the hell? He had to go off to Barbers Point anyway. And the only dumb questions, he'd told people for years, were the ones you didn't ask.

"Sir, I hate to sound stupid, but how fast will she go on two shafts?"

Ryan found himself wishing that the Flat Earth Society was right. In that case the world could have been a single time zone. As it was, the Marianas were fifteen hours ahead, Japan fourteen, Moscow eight. Western Europe's principal financial markets were five and six ahead, depending on the country. Hawaii was five hours behind. He had contacts in all of those places, and everyone was working on local time, and it was so different in every case that just keeping track of who was probably awake and who was probably asleep occupied much of his thoughts. He grunted to himself in bed, remembering with nostalgia the confusion that always came to him on long flights. Even now people were working in some of those places, none under his control, and he knew he had to sleep if he were going to be able to deal with any of them when the sun returned to where he lived and worked. But sleep wasn't coming, and all he saw was the pine decking that made up his bedroom ceiling.

"Any ideas?" Cathy asked.

Jack grunted. "I wish I'd stuck with merchant banking."

"And then who'd be running things?"

A long breath. "Somebody else."

"Not as well, Jack," his wife suggested.

"True," he admitted to the ceiling.

"How do you think people will react to this?"

"I don't know. I'm not even sure how I'm reacting to it," Jack admitted. "It's not supposed to be like this at all. We're in a war that doesn't make any sense. We just got rid of the last nuclear missiles ten days ago, and now they're back, and pointed at us, and we don't have any to point back at them, and if we don't stop this thing fast—I don't know, Cathy."

"Not sleeping doesn't help."

"Thank God, married to a doctor." He managed a smile. "Well, honey, you got us out of one problem anyway."

"How did I do that?"

"By being smart." By using your head all the time, his mind went on. His wife didn't do anything without thinking it through first. She worked pretty slowly by the standards of her profession. Perhaps that was normal for someone pushing the frontiers buck, always considering and planning and evaluating—like a good intelligence officer, in fact—and then when everything was ready and you had it all figured out, zap with her laser. Yeah, that wasn't a bad way to operate, was it?

"Well, I think they've learned one lesson," Yamata said. A rescue aircraft had recovered two bodies and some floating debris from the American bomber. The bodies would be treated with dignity, it had been decided. The names had already been telexed to Washington via the Japanese Embassy, and in due course the remains would be returned. Showing mercy was the proper thing to do, for many reasons. Someday America and Japan would be friends again, and he didn't want to poison that possibility. It was also bad for business.

"The Ambassador reports that they do not offer us anything," Goto replied after a moment.

"They have not as yet evaluated their position, and ours."

"Will they repair their financial systems?"

Yamata frowned. "Perhaps. But they still have great difficulties. They still need to buy from us, they still need to sell to us—and they cannot strike us effectively, as four of their airmen, possibly eight, just learned to their sorrow." Things had not gone entirely in accord with his plans, but, then, when had things ever really done that? "What we must do next is to show them that the people who live on Saipan prefer our rule to theirs. Then world opinion will work in our favor, and that will defuse the situation greatly."

And until then, Yamata thought, things were going well. The Americans would not soon again probe his country's mainland. They didn't have the ability to retake the islands, and by the time they did, well, Japan would have a new ally, and perhaps even new political leadership, wouldn't it?

"No, I am not being watched," Koga assured them.

"As a reporter—no, you know better than that, don't you?" Clark asked.

"I know you are an intelligence officer. I know Kimura here has been in contact with you." They were in a comfortable teahouse close to the Ara River. Nearby was the boat-racing course built for the 1964 Olympics. It was also conveniently close to a police station, John reminded himself. Why, he wondered, had he always feared the attention of police officers? Under the circumstances, it seemed the proper thing to nod his understanding of the situation.

"In that case, Koga-san, we are at your mercy."

"I presume your government now knows what is going on. All of it," Koga went on distastefully. "I've spoken with my own contacts as well."

"Siberia," Clark said simply.

"Yes," Koga responded. "That is part of it. Yamata-san's hatred for America is another part, but most of all, it's pure madness."

"The Americans' reaction is not really a matter of my immediate concern, but I can assure you that my country will not meekly submit to an invasion of our soil," John said calmly.

"Even if China is involved?" Kimura asked.

"Especially if China is involved," Chavez said just to let everyone know he was there. "I presume that you study history, as we do."

"I fear for my country. The time for such adventures is long past, but the people who—do you really understand how policy decisions are made here? The will of the people is an irrelevance. I tried to change that. I tried to bring an end to the corruption."

Clark's mind was racing, trying to decide if the man was sincere or not. "We face similar problems, as you have probably heard. The question is, what do we do now?"

The torment on the man's face was clear. "I do not know. I asked for this meeting in the hope that your government will understand that not everyone here is mad."

"You must not think of yourself as a traitor, Koga-san," Clark said after a moment's consideration. "Truly you are not. What does a man do when he feels that his government is taking incorrect action? And you are correct in your judgment that the possible consequences of this current course of action could well be serious. My country has neither the time nor the energy to waste on conflict, but if it is forced on us, well, then we must react. Now I must ask you a question."

"Yes, I know." Koga looked down at the table. He thought about reaching for his drink, but was too afraid that his hand would shake.

"Will you work with us to prevent this from happening?" This is something/or somebody a hell of a lot more senior than I am, John told himself, but he was here, and the senior pukes were not.

"Doing what?"

"I lack the seniority to tell you exactly what that might be, but I can convey requests from my government. At the very least we will ask you for information, and perhaps for influence. You are still respected within government circles. You still have friends and allies in the Diet. We will not ask you to compromise those things. They are too valuable to be thrown away."

"I can speak out against this madness. I can—"

"You can do many things, Koga-san, but please, for the sake of your country and mine, please do nothing without first considering the effects you will achieve by taking action." My next career change, Clark thought. Political advisor. "We are agreed, are we not, that the objective here is to avoid a major war?"

"Hai."

"Any fool can start a war," Chavez announced, thanking Providence for his master's courses. "It takes a better man to prevent one, and it takes careful thought."

"I will listen to your counsel I do not promise you that I will follow it. But I will listen."

Clark nodded. "That is all we can ask." The rest of the meeting was procedural. Another such rendezvous would be too dangerous. Kimura would handle messages from this point on. Clark and Chavez left first, heading back to their hotel by foot. It was a very different affair from dealing with Mohammed Abdul Corp. Koga was honorable, bright, and wanted to do the right thing, even if it entailed treason. But John realized that his words to the man hadn't just been part of the seduction dance. At a certain point, state policy became a matter of conscience, and he was grateful that this man seemed to have one.

"Straight board shut," the chief of the boat announced from his post on the port-forward corner of the attack center. As was normal, the submarine's most senior enlisted man was the diving officer. Every opening in the ship's hull was closed tight, the red circles on the diving board replaced now with red horizontal dashes. "Pressure in the boat."

"All systems aligned and checked for dive. The compensation is entered. We are rigged for dive," the OOD announced.

"Okay, let's take her down. Dive the ship. Make your depth one hundred feet." Claggett looked around the compartment, first checking the status boards, then checking the men. Tennessee hadn't been underwater for more than a year. Neither had her crew, and he looked around for any first-dive nerves as the officer of the deck gave the proper commands for the evolution. It was normal that a few of the younger men shook their heads, reminding themselves that they were submariners, after all, and supposedly used to this. The sounds of escaping air made that clear enough. Tennessee took a gentle five-degree down angle at the bow. For the next few minutes the submarine would be checked for trim to see that the ship was properly balanced and that all onboard systems really did work, as all tests and inspections had already made certain. That process required half an hour. Claggett could well have gone faster, and the next time he certainly would, but for the moment it was time to get everyone comfortable again.

"Mr. Shaw, come left to new course two-one-zero."

"Aye, helm, left ten degrees rudder, come to new course two-one-zero."

The helmsman responded properly, bringing the submarine to her base course.

"All ahead full." Clagget ordered.

"All ahead full, aye." The full-speed bell would take Tennessee to twenty-six knots. There were actually four more knots of speed available with a flank bell. It was a little-known fact that someone had made a mistake with the Ohio-class of boomers. Designed for a maximum speed of just over twenty-six knots, the first full-power trials on the lead boat in the class had lopped out at just over twenty-nine, and later models had been marginally faster still. Well, Claggett thought with a smile, the U.S. Navy had never been especially interested in slow ships; they were less likely to dodge out of harm's way.

"So far, so good," Claggett observed to his OOD.

Lieutenant Shaw nodded. Another officer on his way out of the Navy, he'd been tapped as the boat's navigator, and having served with Dutch Claggett before, he'd not objected to coming back one more time. "Speed's coming up nicely, Cap'n."

"We've been saving a lot of neutrons lately."

"What's the mission?"

"Not sure yet, but damned if we aren't the biggest fast-attack submarine ever made," Claggett observed.

"Time to stream."

"Then do it, Mr. Shaw."

A minute later the submarine's lengthy towed-sonar was allowed to deploy aft, guided into the ship's wake via the starboard-side after diving plane. Even at high speed, the thin-line array immediately began providing data to the sonarmen forward of the attack center. Tennessee was at full speed now, diving deeper to eight hundred feet. The increased water pressure eliminated the chance of cavitation coming off her sophisticated screw system. Her natural-circulation reactor plant gave off no pump noise. Her smooth lines created no flow noise at all. Inside, crewmen wore rubber-soled shoes. Turbines were mounted on decks connected to the hull via springs to isolate and decouple propulsion sounds. Designed to radiate no noise at all, and universally referred to even by the fast-attack community as "black holes," the class really was the quietest thing man had ever put to sea. Big, with nowhere near the speed and maneuverability of the smaller attack boats, Tennessee and her sisters were still ahead in the most important category of performance. Even whales had a hard time hearing one.

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.

The three in Connecticut were sitting in an open-sided shed when the Sikorsky employees arrived. The onboard systems were fully functional, and they had each been flown only just enough by the company test pilots to make sure that they could fly. All the systems had been checked out properly through the onboard diagnostic computer which, of course, had also diagnosed itself. After fueling, the three were wheeled out onto the ramp and flown out just after dark, north to Westover Air Force Base, in western Massachusetts, where they would be loaded in a Galaxy transport of the 327th Military Airlift Squadron for a flight to a place northeast of Las Vegas that wasn't on any official maps, though its existence wasn't much of a secret.

Back in Connecticut, three wooden mockups were wheeled into the shed, its open side visible from the residential area and highway three hundred yards uphill. People would even be seen to work on them all week.

Even if you didn't really know the mission yet, the requirements were pretty much the same. Tennessee reduced speed to twenty knots, five hundred miles off the coast.

"Engine room answers all ahead two-thirds, sir."

"Very well," Commander Claggett acknowledged. "Left twenty-degrees rudder, come to new course zero-three-zero." The helmsman repeated that order back, and Claggett's next command was, "Rig ship for ultra-quiet."

He already knew the physics of what he was doing, but moved aft to the plotting table anyway, to recheck the ship's turning circle. The Captain, too, had to check everything he did. The sharp course reversal was designed to effect a self-noise check. All over the submarine, unnecessary equipment was switched off, and crewmen not on duty got into their individual bunks as their ship turned. The crew, Claggett noted, was already getting into the swing.

Trailing behind Tennessee at the end of a thousand-yard cable was her towed sonar array, itself a thousand feet long. In another minute the submarine was like a dog chasing her own lengthy tail, a bare thousand yards abeam of it, and still doing twenty knots while sonarmen listened on their own systems for noise from their own ship. Claggett's next stop was the sonar room, so that he could watch the displays himself. It was electronic incest of sorts, the best sonar systems ever made trying to locate the quietest ship ever made.

"There we are, sir." The lead sonarman marked his screen with a grease pencil. The Captain tried not to be too disappointed. Tennessee was doing twenty knots, and the array was only a thousand yards off for the few seconds required for the pass to be made.

"Nobody's that invisible, sir," Lieutenant Shaw observed.

"Bring her back to base course. We'll try it again at fifteen knots." To the sonar chief: "Put a good man on the tapes. So let's find that rattle all, shall we?" Ten minutes later Tennessee commenced another self-noise check.

"It's all going to be done in the saddle, Jack. As I read this, time works for them, not for us." It wasn't that Admiral Jackson liked it. There didn't appear to he another way, and this war would be come-as-you-are and make up your own rules as you went along.

"You may be right on the political side. They want to stage the elections soon, and they seem awfully confident—"

"Haven't you heard? They're flying civilians in hand over fist," Jackson told him. "Why do that? I think they're all going to become instant residents, and they're all going to vote Ja on the Anschluss. Our friends with the phone can see the airport. The inbound flights have slacked off some, but look at the numbers. Probably fifteen thousand troops on the island. They can all vote. Toss in the Japanese tourists already there, and those who've flown in, and that's all she wrote, boy."

The National Security Advisor winced. "That is simple, isn't it?"

"I remember when the Voting Rights Act got passed. It made a big difference in Mississippi when I was a kid. Don't you just love how people can use law to their benefit?"

"It sure is a civilized war, isn't it?" Nobody ever said they were stupid, Jack told himself. The results of the election would be bogus, but all they really had to do was muddle things. The use of force required a clear cause. So negotiations were part of the strategy of delay. The other side was still determining the rules of the game. America did not yet have a strategy of action.

"That's what we need to change."

"How?"

Jackson handed over a folder. "Here's the information I need."

Mutsu had satellite communications, which included video that could be uplinked from fleet headquarters at Yokohama. It was a pretty sight, really, Admiral Sato thought, and so good of CNN to give it to him. Enterprise with three propellers wrecked, and the fourth visibly damaged. John Stennis with two already removed, a third clearly beyond repair; the fourth, unfortunately, seemed to be intact. What was not visible was internal damage. As he watched, one of the huge manganese-bronze propellers was removed from the latter ship, and another crane maneuvered in, probably, the destroyer's engineering officer observed, to withdraw part of the starboard outboard shaft.

"Five months," he said aloud, then heard the reporter's estimate of six, pleasantly the opinion of some unnamed yard worker.

"That's what headquarters thinks."

"They can't defeat us with destroyers and cruisers," Mutsu's captain observed. "But will they pull their two carriers out of the Indian Ocean?"

"Not if our friends continue to press them. Besides," Sato went on quietly, "two carriers are not enough, not against a hundred fighters on Guam and Saipan…more if I request it, as I probably will. It's really a political exercise now."

"And their submarines?" the destroyer's CO wondered, very nervous.

"So why can't we?" Jones asked.

"Unrestricted warfare is out," SubPac said.

"It worked before."

"They didn't have nuclear weapons before," Captain Chambers said.

"Oh." There was that, Jones admitted to himself. "Do we have a plan yet?"

"For the moment, keeping them away from us," Mancuso said. It wasn't exactly a mission to thrill Chester Nimitz, but you had to start somewhere. "What do you have for me?"

"I've gotten a couple of hits on snorting subs east of the islands. Nothing good enough to initiate a hunt, but I don't suppose we're sending P-3's in there anyway. The SOSUS troops are up to speed, though. Nothing's going to slip past us." He paused. "One other thing. I got one touch"—a touch was less firm than a hit—"on somebody off the Oregon coast."

"Tennessee," Chambers said. "That's Dutch Claggett. He's due in here zero-two-hundred Friday."

Jones was impressed with himself. "Damn, a hit on an Ohio. How many others?"

"Four more, the last one leaves the pier in about an hour." Mancuso pointed at his wall chart. "I told each one to run over that SOSUS array for a noise check. I knew you'd be around to sniff after them. Don't get too cocky about it. They're doing a speed run into Pearl."

Jones nodded and turned. "Good one, Skipper."

"We haven't completely lost it yet, Dr. Jones."

"Goddamn it, Chief!" Commander Claggett swore.

"My fault, sir. Sure as hell." He took it like a man. It was a toolbox. It had been found stuck between a seawater pipe and the hull, where minor vibrations off the spring-suspended deck had made the wrenches inside rattle, enough that the submarine-towed sonar had detected the noise. "It isn't one of ours, probably a yard worker left it aboard." Three other chief petty officers were there to share the experience. It could have happened to anyone. They knew what was coming next, too. Their captain took a deep breath before going on. A good show of anger was required, even for his chiefs.

"Every inch of the hull from the collision bulkhead to the tailshaft. Every loose nut, every bolt, every screwdriver. If it's layin' on the deck, pick it up. If it's loose, tighten it. No stoppin' till it's done. I want this ship so quiet I can hear the dirty jokes you're thinking about me."

"It'll get done, sir," the Chief of the Boat promised. Might as well get used to no sleep, he didn't say, and sure enough—

"You got it, COB, no sleep until this boat makes a tomb look noisy." On reflection, Claggett thought he could have picked a better metaphor.

The CO made his way back forward, reminding himself to thank his sonar chief for isolating the source of the noise. It was better to have found it the first day out, and he had to raise hell about it. Those were the rules. He had to command himself not to smile. The Captain, after all, was supposed to be a stern son of a bitch—when he found something wrong, that is, and in a few minutes the chiefs would relay all his wrath on to others and feel the same way about it.

Things had already changed, he saw, as he passed through the reactor spaces. Like doctors in an operating room, the reactor watch sat or stood as their assignments dictated, mainly watching, making a few notes at the proper times. At sea for less than a day, and already Xerox copies of Think Quiet were taped to both sides of every watertight door. Those few crewmen he encountered in the passageways made way for him, often with a curt, proud nod. Yeah, we're pros, too, sir. Two men were jogging in the missile room, a long and now useless compartment, and Claggett, as service etiquette dictated, made way for them, almost smiling again as he did so.

"Toolbox, right?" the executive officer asked when the CO reentered the Attack Center. "I had that happen to me on Hampton after our first refit."

"Yep." Claggett nodded. "Turn of the next watch, we do a fore-and-aft walkdown."

"Could be worse, sir. Once coming out of a yard overhaul, a guy I know had to reenter the dry dock. They found a friggin' extension ladder in the forward ballast tank." Stories like that made submariners shiver.

"Toolbox, sir?" the sonar chief asked.

Now he could smile. Claggett leaned against the doorframe and nodded as he pulled out a five-dollar bill. "Good call, Chief."

"Wasn't all that much." But the chief petty officer pocketed the five anyway. On Tennessee, as on a lot of submarines, every wrench aboard had its handle dipped in liquid vinyl, which both gave a slightly better grip, especially to a sweaty hand, and also cut way back on the chance of rattling.

"Some yard puke, I bet," he added with a wink.

"I only pay once," Claggett observed. "Any new contacts?"

"Single-screw low-speed diesel surface ship bearing three-four-one, way out. It's a CZ contact, designated Sierra-Thirty. They're working a plot now, sir." He paused for a moment, and his mood changed. "Cap'n?"

"What is it, Chief?"

"Asheville and Charlotte, is it true?"

Commander Clagget nodded again. "That's what they told me."

"We'll even the score, sir."

Roger Durling lifted the sheet of paper. It was handwritten, which was something the President rarely saw. "This is rather thin, Admiral."

"Mr. President, you're not going to authorize a systematic attack on their country, are you?" Jackson asked.

Durling shook his head. "No, that's more than I want. The mission is to get the Marianas back and to prevent them from carrying through on the second part of their plan."

Robby took a deep breath. This was what he'd been preparing for.

"There's a third part, too," Jackson announced.

The two men with him froze.

"What's that, Rob?" Ryan asked after a moment.

"We just figured it out, Jack. The Indian task-force commander, Chandraskatta? He went to Newport a while back. Guess who was in the same class." He paused. "A certain Japanese admiral named Sato."

Ryan closed his eyes. Why hadn't somebody turned this up before? "So, three countries with imperial ambitions…"

"It looks that way to me, Jack. Remember the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere? Good ideas keep coming back. We need to stop it all," Jackson said forcefully. "I spent twenty-some years training for a war that nobody wanted to fight—with the Russians. I'd rather train to keep the peace. That means stopping these guys right now."

"Will this work?" the President asked.

"No guarantees, sir. Jack tells me there's a diplomatic and political clock on the operation. This isn't Iraq. Whatever international consensus we have is just with the Europeans, and that'll evaporate sooner or later."

"Jack?" Durling asked.

"If we're going to do it, this is probably the way."

"Risky."

"Mr. President, yes, sir, it's risky," Robby Jackson agreed. "If you think diplomacy will work to get the Marianas back, fine. I don't especially want to kill anybody. But if I were in their shoes, I would not give those islands back. They need them for Phase Two, and if that happens, even if the Russians don't go nuke…"

A giant step backwards, Ryan thought. A new alliance of sorts, one that could stretch from the Arctic Circle to Australia. Three countries with nuclear capacity, a huge resource base, massive economies, and the political will to use violence to achieve their ends. The Nineteenth Century all over, played on a far larger field. Economic competition backed by force, the classic formula for unending war.

"Jack?" the President asked again.

Ryan nodded slowly. "I think we have to. You can pick any reason you want. They all come out the same way."

"Approved."