Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (114 page)

Jackson didn’t mind being the only passenger in the VC- 20B. A man could get used to this sort of treatment, and he had to admit that the Air Force’s executive birds were better than the Navy’s—in fact the Navy didn’t have many, and those were mainly modified P-3 Orions whose turboprop engines provided barely more than half the speed of the twin-engine executive jet. With only a brief refueling stop at Travis Air Force Base, outside San Francisco, he’d made the hop to Hawaii in under nine hours, and it was something to feel good about until on final approach to Hickam he got a good look at the naval base and saw that
Enterprise
was still in the graving dock. The first nuclear-powered carrier and bearer of the U.S. Navy’s proudest name would be out of this one. The aesthetic aspect of it was bad enough. More to the point, it would have been far better to have two decks to use instead of one.

“You have your task force, boy,” Robby whispered to himself. And it was the one every naval aviator wanted. Task Force 77, titularly the main air arm of Pacific Fleet, and, one carrier or not, it was his, and about to sail in harm’s way. Perhaps fifty years earlier there had been an excitement to it. Perhaps when PacFlt’s main striking arm had sailed under Bill Halsey or Ray Spruance, the people in command had looked forward to it. The wartime movies said so, and so did the official logs, but how much of that had been mere posturing, Jackson wondered now, contemplating his own command. Did Halsey and Spruance lose sleep with the knowledge that they were sending young men to death, or was the world simply a different place then, where war was considered as natural an event as a polio epidemic—another scourge that was now a thing of the past. To be Commander Task Force 77 was a life’s ambition, but he’d never really wanted to fight a war—oh, sure, he admitted to himself, as a new ensign, or even as far as lieutenant’s rank, he’d relished the idea of air combat, knowing that as a U.S. naval aviator he was the best in the world, highly trained and exquisitely equipped, and wanting to prove it someday. But over time he’d seen too many friends die in accidents. He’d gotten a kill in the Persian Gulf War, and four more over the Med one clear and starry night, but those last four had been an accident. He’d killed men for no good reason at all, and though he never spoke of it to others, not even his wife, it gnawed at him that he had in effect been tricked into killing other human beings. Not his fault, just some sort of enforced mistake. But that’s what war was for the warriors most of the time, just a huge mistake, and now he had to play his part in another such mistake instead of using TF-77 the way it was supposed to be used, just
to be,
and, merely by being, to prevent wars from happening. The only consolation of the moment was that, again, the mistake, the accident, wasn’t of his making.

If wishes were horses,
he told himself as the aircraft taxied to a stop. The flight attendant opened the door and tossed Jackson’s one bag out to another Air Force sergeant, who walked the Admiral to a helicopter for his next flight, this one to CINCPAC, Admiral Dave Seaton. It was time to don his professional personality. Misused or not, Robby Jackson was a warrior about to assume command of others. He’d examined his doubts and questions, and now it was time to put them away.

“We’re going to owe them big-time for this,” Durling noted, flipping off the TV with his remote.

The technology had been developed for advertising during baseball games, of all things. An adaptation of the blue-screen systems used in the production of movies, advanced computer systems allowed it to be used in real-time, and thus the background behind the batter at the plate could be made to appear to be an advertisement for a local bank or car dealer when in fact it was just the usual green used at ballparks. In this case, a reporter could make his or her live feed from Pearl Harbor—outside the naval base, of course—and the background was that of two carrier profiles, with birds flying past and the antlike shapes of yard workers moving in the distance, and it looked as real as anything else on the TV screen which, after all, was just a collection of multicolored dots.

“They’re Americans,” Jack said. And besides, he was the one who’d bullied them into it, again insulating the President from the politically dangerous task. “They’re supposed to be on our side. We just had to remind them of that.”

“Will it work?” That was the harder question.

“Not for long, but maybe for long enough. It’s a good plan we have in place. We need a few breaks, but we’ve gotten two in the bag already. The important thing is, we’re showing them what they expect to see. They expect both carriers to be there, and they expect the media to tell the whole world about it. Intelligence people are no different from anybody else, sir. They have preconceptions, and when they see them in real life, it just reinforces how brilliant they think they are.”

“How many people do we have to kill?” the President wanted to know next.

“Enough. We don’t know how big the number is, and we’re going to try an’ keep it as low as possible—but, sir, the mission is—”

“I know. I know about missions, remember?” Durling closed his eyes, remembering Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, half a lifetime before. The mission comes first. It was the only way a lieutenant could think, and now for the first time he realized that a president had to think the same way. It hardly seemed fair.

They didn’t see much sun this far north at this time of year, and that suited Colonel Zacharias. The flight from Whiteman to Elmendorf had taken a mere five hours, all of it in darkness because the B-2A flew only in daylight to show itself to people, which was not something for which the aircraft had been conceived. It flew very well indeed, belated proof that Jack Northrop’s idea dating back to the 1930s had been correct: an aircraft consisting exclusively of wing surfaces was the most efficient possible aerodynamic shape. It was just that the flight-control systems required for such an aircraft needed computerized flight controls for proper stability, something that had not been available until just before the engineer’s death. At least he’d seen the model, if not the actual aircraft itself.

Almost everything about it was efficient. Its shape allowed easy storage—three could fit in a hangar designed for one conventional aircraft. It climbed rather like an elevator, and, able to cruise at high altitude, it drank its fuel in cups rather than gallons, or so the wing commander liked to say.

The shot-up B-1B was about ready to fly back to Elmendorf. It would do so on three engines, not a major problem as the aircraft would be carrying nothing more than fuel and its crew as a payload. There were other aircraft based at Shemya now. Two E-3B AWACS birds dispatched from Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma maintained a partial airborne-alert patrol, though this island had power radars of its own, the largest of which was the powerful Cobra Dane missile-detection system built in the 1970s. There was the theoretical possibility that the Japanese could, using tankers, manage a strike against the island, duplicating in length an Israeli mission against the PLO headquarters in North Africa, and though the possibility was remote, it did have to be considered.

Defending against that were the Air Force’s only four F-22A Rapier fighters, the world’s first true stealth fighter aircraft, taken from advanced testing at Nellis Air Force Base and dispatched with four senior pilots and their support crews to this base at the edge of the known universe. But the Rapier—known to the pilots by the name the manufacturer, Lockheed, had initially preferred, “Lightning-II”—hadn’t been designed for defense, and now, with the sun back down after its brief and fitful appearance, it was time for the original purpose. As always the tanker lifted off first, even before the fighter pilots walked from the briefing hut to their aircraft shelters for the start of the night’s work.

“If he flew out yesterday, why are there lights on?” Chavez asked, looking up at the penthouse apartment.

“Timer on the lights to scare burglars away?” John wondered lightly.

“This ain’t L.A., man.”

“Then I suppose there’s people there, Yevgeniy Pavlovich.” He turned the car onto another street.

Okay, we know that Koga wasn’t arrested by the local police. We know that Yamata is running this whole show. We know that his security chief, Kaneda, probably killed Kim
berly
Norton.
We
know
that
Yamata is out of town. And we know that his apartment has lights on....

Clark found a place to park the car. Then he and Chavez went walking, first of all circling the block, looking around for patterns and opportunities in a process called reconnaissance that started at the ground level and seemed more patient than it really was.

“A lot we don’t know, man,” Chavez breathed.

“I thought you wanted to see somebody’s eyes, Domingo,” John reminded his partner.

He had singularly lifeless eyes, Koga thought, not like a human at all. They were dark and large, but seemingly dry, and they just looked at him—or perhaps they just pointed in his direction and lingered there, the former Prime Minister wondered. Whatever they were, they gave no clue as to what lay behind them. He’d heard about Kiyoshi Kaneda, and the term most often used to describe him was
ronin,
a historical reference to samurai warriors who’d lost their master and couldn’t find another, which was deemed a great disgrace in the culture of the time. Such men had turned into bandits, or worse, after they’d lost contact with the
bushido
code that had for a thousand years sustained the elements of the Japanese population entitled to carry and use weapons. Such men, once they found a new master to serve, became fanatics, Koga remembered, so fearful of returning to their former status that they would do nearly anything to avoid that fate.

It was a foolish reverie, he knew, looking at the man’s back as he watched TV. The age of the samurai was past, and along with it the feudal lords who had ruled them, but there the man was, watching a samurai drama on NHK, sipping his tea and taking in every scene. He didn’t react at all, as though hypnotized by the highly stylized tale, which was really the Japanese version of American Westerns from the 1950s, highly simplified melodramas of good and evil, except that the heroic figure, always laconic, always invincible, always mysterious, used a sword instead of a six-gun. And this fool Kaneda was devoted to such stories, he’d learned over the past day and a half.

Koga stood and started moving back to the bookcase, and that was all he had to do for the man’s head to turn and look.
Watchdog,
Koga thought without looking back as he selected another book to read. And a formidable one, especially with four others about, two sleeping now, one in the kitchen, and one outside the door. He hadn’t a chance of escaping, the politician knew. Perhaps a fool, but the sort that a careful man feared.

Who was Kaneda, really? he wondered. A former Yakuza, probably. He didn’t show any of the grotesque tattoos that people in that subculture affected, deliberately making themselves different in a culture that demanded conformity—but at the same time demonstrating conformity in a society of outcasts. On the other hand, he just sat there wearing a business suit whose only concession to comfort was the unbuttoned jacket. Even the ronin’s posture was rigid as he sat there erect, Koga saw, himself sitting back down with a book but looking over it at his captor. He knew he couldn’t fight the man and win—Koga had never troubled himself to learn any of the martial arts that his country had helped develop, and the man was physically formidable. And he was not alone.

He
was
a watchdog. Seemingly impassive, seemingly at rest, he was in fact more like a coiled spring, ready to leap and strike, and civilized only so long as those around him acted in such a way as not to arouse him, and so obvious about it that you just knew that it was madness to offend him. It shamed the politician that he was so easily cowed, but cowed he was, because he was a bright and thoughtful man, unwilling to squander his one chance, if he had that much, in a foolish gesture.

Many of the industrialists had men like this one. Some of them even carried handguns, which was almost unthinkable in Japan, but the right person could make the right sort of approach to the right official, and a very special permit could be issued, and that possibility didn’t so much frighten Koga as revolt him. The sword of a ronin was bad enough, and in this context would merely have been theatrical, but a gun for Koga was pure evil, something that didn’t belong in his culture, a coward’s weapon. That was what he was dealing with, really. Kaneda was undoubtedly a coward, unable to master his own life, able even to break the law only on orders from others, but with those orders he could do anything. What a dreadful commentary on his country. People like this were used by their masters to strong-arm unions and business competitors. People like Kaneda had assaulted demonstrators, sometimes even in the open, and gotten away with it because the police had looked the other way or managed not to be present, even though reporters and photographers had come to find the scene of the day’s interest. People like this and their masters held his country back from true democracy, and the realization was all the more bitter for Koga because he’d known it for years, dedicated his life to changing it, and failed; and so here he was in Yamata’s penthouse apartment, under guard, probably to be released someday as the political irrelevance he already was or would soon become, then to watch his country fall totally under the control of a new kind of master—or an old one, he told himself. And not a thing he could do about it, which was why he sat with a book in his hands while Kaneda sat in front of a TV watching some actor perform in a drama whose beginning, middle, and end were all foretold a thousand times, pretending that it was both real and new, when it was neither.