Jack Ryan 8 - Debt of Honor (27 page)

“Please, Hiroshi, indulge me this one time,” Yamata said reasonably.

“Oh, very well.” He continued in English: “Kimba-chan, my friend and I need to speak in private for a few minutes.”

She had the good manners not to object verbally, Yamata saw, but the disappointment in her face was not hidden. Did that mean she was trained not to react, or trained to react as a mindless girl would? And did her dismissal matter? Would Goto relate everything to her? Was he that much under her spell? Yamata didn't know, and not knowing, at this moment, struck him as dangerous.

“I love fucking Americans,” Goto said coarsely after the door slid shut behind her. It was strange. For all his cultured language, in this one area he spoke like someone of the streets. It was clearly a great weakness, and for that reason, a worrisome one.

“I am glad to hear that, my friend, for soon you will have the chance to do it some more,” Yamata replied, making a few mental notes.

An hour later, Chet Nomuri looked up from his pachinko machine to see Yamata emerge. As usual, he had both a driver and another man, this one far more serious-looking, doubtless a bodyguard or security guy of some sort. Nomuri didn't know his name, but the type was pretty obvious. The zaibatsu talked to him, a short remark, and there was no telling what it was. Then all three men got into the car and drove off. Goto emerged ninety minutes later, refreshed as always. At that point Nomuri stopped playing the vertical pinball game and changed location to a place down the block. Thirty minutes more and the Norton girl came out. This time Nomuri was ahead of her, walking, taking the turn, then waiting for her to catch up. Okay, he thought five minutes later. He was now certain he knew what building she lived in. She'd purchased something to eat and carried it in. Good.

“Morning, MP.” Ryan was just back from his daily briefing to the President. Every morning he sat through thirty or forty minutes of reports from the government's various security agencies, and then presented the data in the Oval Office. This morning he'd told his boss, again, that there was nothing all that troubling on the horizon.

“S
ANDALWOOD
,” she said for his opening.

“What about it?” Jack asked, leaning back in his chair.

“I had an idea and ran with it.”

“What's that?” the National Security Advisor asked.

“I told Clark and Chavez to reactivate T
HISTLE
, Lyalin's old net in
Japan
.”

Ryan blinked. “You're telling me that nobody ever—”

“He was doing mainly commercial stuff, and we have that Executive Order, remember?”

     Jack suppressed a grumble. T
HISTLE
had served
America
once, and not through commercial espionage. “Okay, so what's happening?”

“This.” Mrs. Foley handed over a single printed page, about five hundred single-spaced words once you got past the cover sheet.

Ryan looked up from the first paragraph. “Genuine panic in MITI?”

“That's what the man says. Keep going.” Jack picked up a pen, chewing on it.

“Okay, what else?”

“Their government's going to fall, sure as hell. While
Clark
was talking to this guy, Chavez was talking to another. State ought to pick up on this in another day or so, but it looks like we got it first for a change.”

Jack sat forward at that point. It wasn't that much of a surprise. Brett Hanson had warned about this possibility. The State Department was, in fact, the only government agency that was leery of the TRA, though its concerns had stayed within the family, as it were.

“There's more?”

“Well, yeah, there is. We've turned up the missing girl, all right. It appears to be Kimberly Norton, and sure enough, she's the one involved with Goto, and he's going to be the next PM,” she concluded with a smile.

It wasn't really very funny, of course, though that depended on your perspective, didn't it?
America
now had something to use on Goto, and Goto looked to be the next Prime Minister. It wasn't an entirely bad thing…

“Keep talking,” Ryan ordered.

“We have the choice of offering her a freebie home, or we could—”

“MP, the answer to that is no.” Ryan closed his eyes. He'd been thinking about this one. Before, he'd been the one to take the detached view, but he had seen a photograph of the girl, and though he'd tried briefly to retain his detachment, it had lasted only as long as it took to return home and look at his own children. Perhaps it was a weakness, his inability to contemplate the use of people's lives in the furtherance of his country's goals. If so, it was a weakness that his conscience would allow him. Besides: “Does anybody think she can act like a trained spook? Christ's saké, she's a messed-up girl who skipped away from home because she was getting crummy grades at her school.”

“Jack, it's my job to float options, remember?” Every government in the world did it, of course, even
America
, even in these advanced feminist times. They were nice girls, everyone said, usually bright ones, government secretaries, many of them, who were managed through the Secret Service of all places, and made good money serving their government. Ryan had no official knowledge whatever of the operation, and wanted to keep it that way. Had he acquired official knowledge and not spoken out against it, then what sort of man would he be? So many people assumed that high government officials were just moral robots who did the things they had to do for their country without self-doubts, untroubled by conscience. Perhaps it had been true once—possibly it still was for many—but this was a different world, and Jack Ryan was the son of a police

officer.

“You're the one who said it first, remember? That girl is an American citizen who probably needs a little help. Let's not turn into something we are not, okay? It's Clark and Chavez on this one?”

“Correct.”

“I think we should be careful about it, but to offer the girl a ticket home. If she says no, then maybe we can consider something else, but no screwing around on this one. She gets a fair offer of a ride home.” Ryan looked down at
Clark
's brief report and read it more carefully. Had it come from someone else, he would not have taken it so seriously, but he knew John Clark, had taken the time to learn everything about him. It would someday make for an enjoyable conversation.

“I'm going to keep this. I think maybe the President needs to read it, too.”

“Concur,” the DDO replied.

“Anything else like this comes in…”

“You'll know,” Mary Pat promised.

“Good idea on T
HISTLE
.”

“I want
Clark
to—well, to press maybe a little harder, and see if we develop similar opinions.”

“Approved,” Ryan said at once. “Push as hard as you want.”

•     •     •

Yamata's personal jet was an old Gulfstream G-IV. Though fitted with auxiliary fuel tanks, it could not ordinarily nonstop the 6,740-mile hop from
Tokyo
to
New York
. Today was different, his pilot told him. The jet stream over the North Pacific was fully one hundred ninety knots, and they'd have it for several hours. That boosted their ground speed to 782 miles per hour. It would knock two full hours off the normal flight time.

Yamata was glad. The time was important. None of what he had in his mind was written down, so there were no plans to go over. Though weary from long days that had of late stretched into longer weeks, he found that his body was unable to rest. A voracious reader, he could not get interested in any of the material that he kept on his aircraft. He was alone; there was no one with whom to speak. There was nothing at all to do, and it seemed strange to Yamata. His G-IV cruised at forty-one thousand feet, and it was a clear morning below him. He could see the surface of the North Pacific clearly, the endless ranks of waves, some of their crests decorated with white, driven by high surface winds. The immortal sea. For almost all of his life, it had been an American lake, dominated by their navy. Did the sea know that? Did the sea know that it would change?

Change. Yamata grunted to himself. It would start within hours of his arrival in
New York
.

“This is Bud on final. I have the ball with eight thousand pounds of fuel,” Captain Sanchez announced over his radio circuit. As commander of the air wing for USS John Stennis (CVN-74), his F/A-18F would be the first aboard. Strangely, though the most senior aviator aboard, he was new to the Hornet, having spent all of his career in the F-14 Tomcat. Lighter and more agile, and finally with enough fuel capacity to do more than take off, circle the deck once, and return (so it often seemed), he found himself liking the chance to fly alone for a change, after a whole career spent in two-seat aircraft. Maybe the Air Force pukes had a good idea after all…

Ahead of him, on the huge flight deck of the new carrier, enlisted men made the proper tension adjustments on the arrester wires, took the empty weight of his attack fighter, and added the fuel amount he'd called in. It had to be done every time. Huge flight deck, he thought, half a mile out. For those standing on the deck it looked huge enough, but for Sanchez it increasingly looked like a matchbook. He cleared his mind of the thought, concentrating on his task. The Hornet buffeted a little coming through the burble of disturbed air caused by the carrier's massive “island” structure, but the pilot's eyes were locked on the “meatball,” a red light reflected off a mirror, keeping it nicely centered. Some called Sanchez “Mister Machine,” for of his sixteen hundred-odd carrier landings—you logged every one—less than fifty had failed to catch the optimum number-three wire.

Gently, gently, he told himself, easing the stick back with his right hand while the left worked the throttles, watching his sink rate, and…yes. He could feel the fighter jerk from catching the wire—number three, he was sure—and slow itself, even though the rush to the edge of the angled deck seemed sure to dump him over the side. The aircraft stopped, seemingly inches from the line where black-topped steel fell off to blue water. Really, it was closer to a hundred feet. Sanchez disengaged his tail hook, and allowed the wire to snake back to its proper place. A deck crewman started waving at him, telling him how to get to where he was supposed to go, and the expensive jet aircraft turned into a particularly ungainly land vehicle on the world's most expensive parking lot. Five minutes later, the engines shut down and, tie-down chains in place, Sanchez popped the canopy and climbed down the steel ladder that his brown-jerseyed plane-captain had set in place.

“Welcome aboard, Skipper. Any problems?”

“Nary a one.” Sanchez handed over his flight helmet and trotted off to the island. Three minutes after that he was observing the remainder of the landings.

Johnnie Reb was already her semiofficial nickname, since she was named for a long-term U.S. Senator from
Mississippi
, also a faithful friend of the Navy. The ship even smelled new, Sanchez thought, not so long out of the yards of Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry dock. She'd done her trials off the East Coast and sailed around the Horn to
Pearl Harbor
. Her newest sister,
United States
, would be ready for trials in another year, and yet another was beginning construction. It was good to know that at least one branch of the Navy was still in business—more or less.

The aircraft of his wing came in about ninety seconds apart. Two squadrons, each of twelve F-14 Tomcats, two more with an identical number of F/A-18 Hornets. One medium-attack squadron of ten A-6E Intruders, then the special birds, three E-3C Hawkeye early-warning aircraft, two C-2 CODs, four EA-6B Prowlers…and that was all, Sanchez thought, not as pleased as he ought to be.

Johnnie Reb could easily accommodate another twenty aircraft, but a carrier air wing wasn't what it used to be, Sanchez thought, remembering how crowded a carrier had once been. The good news was that it was easier to move aircraft around the deck now. The bad news was that the actual striking power of his wing was barely two-thirds of what it had once been. Worse, naval aviation had fallen on hard times as an institution. The Tomcat design had begun in the 1960's—Sanchez had been contemplating high school then, and wondering when he'd be able to drive a car. The Hornet had first flown as the YF-I7 in the early 1970's. The Intruder had started life in the 1950's, about the time Bud had gotten his first two-wheeler. There was not a single new naval aircraft in the pipeline. The Navy had twice flubbed its chance to buy into Stealth technology, first by not buying into the Air Force's F-117 project, then by fielding the A-12 Avenger, which had turned out to be stealthy enough, just unable to fly worth a damn. And so now this fighter pilot, after twenty years of carrier operations, a “comer” being fast-tracked for an early flag—now with the last and best flying command of his career, Sanchez had less power to wield than anyone before him. The same was true of
Enterprise
, fifty miles to the east.

But the carrier was still queen of the sea. Even in her diminished capacity, Johnnie Reb had more striking power than both Indian carriers combined, and Sanchez judged that keeping
India
from getting too aggressive ought not to be overly taxing. A damned good thing that was the only problem on the horizon, too.

“That's it,” the Air Boss observed as the last EA-6B caught the number-two wire. “Recovery complete. Your people look pretty good, Bud.”

“We have been working at it, Todd.” Sanchez rose from his seat and headed below toward his stateroom, where he'd freshen up before meeting first with his squadron commanders, and then with the ops staff to plan the operations for D
ATELINE
P
ARTNERS
. It ought to be a good workup, Sanchez thought. An
Atlantic
Fleet sailor for most of his career, it would be his first chance to look at the Japanese Navy, and he wondered what his grandfather would have thought of this. Henry Gabriel “Mike” Sanchez had been the CAG on USS Wasp in 1942, taking on the Japanese in the
Guadalcanal
campaign. He wondered what Big Mike would have thought of the upcoming exercise.

“Come on, you have to give me something,” the lobbyist said. It was a mark of just how grim things were that his employers had told him it was possible they might have to cut back on their expenditures in D.C. That was very unwelcome news. It wasn't just me, the former Congressman from
Ohio
told himself. He had an office of twenty people to take care of, and they were Americans, too, weren't they? And so he had chosen his target with care. This Senator had problems, a real contender in his primary, and another, equally real opponent in the general election. He needed a larger war chest. That made him amenable to reason, perhaps.