Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (65 page)

“Where’s Admiral Seaton?” ComSubPac asked the nearest yeoman. The petty officer just pointed to the office suite. Mancuso led the other two in that direction.

“Where the hell have you been?” CINCPAC demanded as they came into his inner office.

“SOSUS, sir. Admiral, you know Captain Chambers, my operations officer. This is Dr. Ron Jones—”

“The sonarman you used to brag on?” Admiral David Seaton allowed himself a pleasant moment. It was brief enough.

“That’s right, sir. We were just over at SOSUS checking the data on—”

“No survivors, Bart. Sorry, but the S-3 crew says—”

“Sir, they were killed,” Jones interrupted, tired of the preliminaries. His statement stopped everything cold.

“What do you mean, Dr. Jones?” CINCPAC asked after perhaps as much as a second.

“I mean
Asheville
and
Charlotte
were torpedoed and sunk by Japanese submarines, sir.”

“Now wait a minute, son. You mean
Charlotte,
too?” Seaton’s head turned. “Bart, what is this?” SubPac didn’t get a chance to answer.

“I can prove it, sir.” Jones held up the sheaf of papers under his arm. “I need a table with a light over it.”

Mancuso’s face was pretty grim. “Sir, Jonesy appears to be right. These were not accidents.”

“Gentlemen, I have fifteen Japanese officers in the operations room right now trying to explain how the fire control on their ’cans works and—”

“You have Marines, don’t you?” Jones asked coldly. “They carry guns, don’t they?”

“Show me what you have.” Dave Seaton gestured at his desk.

Jones walked CINCPAC through the printouts, and if Seaton wasn’t exactly a perfect audience, he surely was a quiet one. On further examination, the SOSUS traces even showed the surface ships and the Mark 50 antisub torpedoes that had crippled half of PacFlt’s carriers. The new array off Kure was really something, Jones thought.

“Look at the time, sir. All of this happened over a period of what? Twenty minutes or so. You have two hundred fifty dead sailors out there, and it wasn’t any accident.”

Seaton shook his head like a horse shedding troublesome insects. “Wait a minute, I haven’t had any word—I mean, the threat board is blank. There aren’t any indications at all that—”

“There are now, sir.” Jones wasn’t letting up at all.

“But—”

“Goddamn it, Admiral!” Jones swore. “Here it is, black and white, okay? There are other copies of this back at the SOSUS building, there’s a tape record, and I can show it to you on a fucking TV screen. You want your own experts to go over there, well, shit, they’re right here, ain’t they?” The contractor pointed to Mancuso and Chambers. “We have been
attacked,
sir.”

“What are the chances that this is some sort of mistake?” Seaton asked. His face was as ghostly pale as the cloth of his undress-white uniform shirt.

“Just about zero. 1 suppose you could wait for them to take an ad out in
The New York Times
if you want additional confirmation.” Diplomacy had never been Jones’s strongest suit, and he was too angry to consider it anyway.

“Listen, mister—” Seaton began, but then he bit off his words, and instead looked up at his type commander. “Bart?”

“I can’t argue with the data, sir. If there were a way to dispute it, Wally or I would have found it. The people at SOSUS concur. It’s hard for me to believe, too,” Mancuso conceded.
“Charlotte
has failed to check in and—”

“Why didn’t her beacon go off?” CINCPAC asked.

“The gadget is located on the sail, aft corner. Some of my skippers weld them down. The fast-attack guys resisted putting them aboard last year, remember? Anyway, the fish could have destroyed the BST or for some reason it didn’t deploy properly. We have that noise indicator at
Charlotte’s
approximate location, and she has failed to respond to an emergency order to communicate with us. There is no reason, sir, to assume that she’s still alive.” And now that Mancuso had said it, it was official. There was one more thing that needed to be said.

“You’re telling me we’re at war.” The statement was delivered in an eerily quiet voice. ComSubPac nodded.

“Yes, sir, I am.”

“I didn’t have any warning at all,” Seaton objected.

“Yeah, you have to admire their sense of tradition, don’t you?” Jones observed, forgetting that the last time there had been ample warning, all of it unheeded.

Pete Burroughs didn’t finish his fifth beer of the day. The night had not brought peace. Though the sky was clear and full of stars, brighter lights continued to approach Saipan from the east, taking advantage of the trade winds to ease their approach into the island’s two American-built runways. Each jumbo jet had to be carrying at least two hundred soldiers, probably closer to three. They could see the two airfields. Oreza’s binoculars were more than adequate to pick out the aircraft and the fuel trucks that scurried about to fill up the arriving jets so that they could rapidly go home to make another shuttle run. It didn’t occur to anyone to keep a count until it was a few hours too late.

“Car coming in,” Burroughs warned, alerted by the glow of turning lights. Oreza and he retreated to the side of the house, hoping to be invisible in the shadows. The car was another Toyota Land Cruiser, which drove down the lane, reversed direction at the end of the cul-de-sac, and headed back out after having done not very much of anything but look around and perhaps count the cars in the various drive-ways—more likely to see if people were gathered in an inopportune way. “You have any idea what to do?” he asked Oreza when it was gone.

“Hey, I was Coast Guard, remember? This is Navy shit. No, more like Marine shit.”

“It sure is deep shit, man. You suppose anybody knows?”

“They gotta. Somebody’s gotta,” Portagee said, lowering the glasses and heading back into the house. “We can watch from inside our bedroom. We always leave the windows open anyway.” The cool evenings here, always fresh and comfortable from the ocean breezes, were yet another reason for his decision to move to Saipan. “What exactly do you do, Pete?”

“Computer industry, several things really. I have a masters in EE. My real specialty area is communications, how computers talk to each other. I’ve done a little government work. My company does plenty, but mostly on another side of the house.” Burroughs looked around the kitchen. Mrs. Oreza had prepared a light dinner, a good one, it appeared, though it was growing cold.

“You were worried about having people track in on your phone.”

“Maybe just being paranoid, but my company makes the chips for scanners that the Army uses for just that purpose.”

Oreza sat down and started shoveling some of the stir-fry onto his plate. “I don’t think anything’s paranoid anymore, man.”

“I hear ya, Skipper.” Burroughs decided to do the same, and looked at the food with approval. “Y’all trying to lose weight?”

Oreza grunted. “We both need to, Izzy and me. She’s been taking classes in low-fat stuff.”

Burroughs looked around. Though the home had a dining room, like most retired couples (that’s how he thought of them, even though they clearly were not), they ate at a small table in their kitchen. The sink and counter were neatly laid out, and the engineer saw the steel mixing and serving bowls. The stainless steel gleamed. Isabel Oreza, too, ran a tight ship, and it was plain enough who was the skipper at home.

“Do I go to work tomorrow?” she asked, her mind drifting, trying to come to terms with the change in local affairs.

“I don’t know, honey,” her husband replied, his own thoughts stopped cold by the question. What would he do? Go fishing again as though nothing at all had happened?

“Wait a minute,” Pete said, still looking at the mixing bowls. He stood, took the two steps needed to reach the kitchen counter, and lifted the largest bowl. It was sixteen inches in diameter and a good five or six inches deep. The bottom was flat, perhaps a three-inch circle, but the rest of it was spherical, almost parabolic in shape. He pulled his sat-phone out of his shirt pocket. He’d never measured the antenna, but now, extending it, he saw it was less than four inches in length. Burroughs looked over at Oreza. “You have a drill?”

“Yeah, why?”

“DF, hell. I got it!”

“You lost me, Pete.”

“We drill a hole in the bottom, put the antenna through it. The bowl’s made out of steel. It reflects radio waves just like a microwave antenna. Everything goes up. Hell, it might even make the transmitter more efficient.”

“You mean like, E.T. phone home?”

“Close enough, Cap’n. What if nobody’s phoned home on this one?” Burroughs was still trying to think it through, coming to terms slowly with a very frightening situation. “Invasion” meant “war.” War, in this case, was between America and Japan, and however bizarre that possibility was, it was also the only explanation for the things he’d seen that day. If it was a war, then he was an enemy alien. So were his hosts. But he’d seen Oreza do some very fancy footwork at the marina.

“Let me get my drill. How big a hole you need?” Burroughs handed over the sat-phone. He’d been tempted to toss it through the air, but stopped himself on the realization that it was perhaps his most valuable possession. Oreza checked the diameter of the little button at the end of the slim metal whip and went for his tool kit.

“Hello?”

“Rachel? It’s Dad.”

“You sure you’re okay? Can I call you guys now?”

“Honey, we’re fine, but there’s a problem here.” How the hell to explain this? he wondered. Rachel Oreza Chandler was a prosecuting attorney in Boston, actually looking forward to leaving government service and becoming a criminal lawyer in private practice, where the job satisfaction was rarer, but the pay and hours were far better. Approaching thirty, she was now at the stage where she worried about her parents in much the same way they’d once worried about her. There was no sense in worrying Rachel now, he decided. “Could you get a phone number for me?”

“Sure, what number?”

“Coast Guard Headquarters. It’s in D.C., at Buzzard’s Point. I want the watch center. I’ll wait,” he told her.

The attorney put one line on hold and dialed D.C. information. In a minute she relayed the number, hearing her father repeat it word for word back to her. “That’s right. You sure things are okay? You sound a little tense.”

“Mom and I are just fine, honest, baby.” She hated it when he called her that, but it was probably too late to change him. Poppa would just never be PC.

“Okay, you say so. I hear that storm was really bad. You have electricity back yet?” she asked, forgetting that there hadn’t been a storm at all.

“Not yet, honey, but soon, probably,” he lied. “Later, baby.”

“Coast Guard Watch Center, Chief Petty Officer Obrecki, this is a nonsecure line,” the man said, just as rapidly as possible to prevent the person on the other end from understanding a single word.

“Are you telling me that that fuzzy-cheeked infant who sailed on
Panache
with me made
chief?”
It was good enough to startle the man at the other end, and the reply was comprehensible.

“This is Chief Obrecki. Who’s this?”

“Master
Chief Oreza,” was the answer.

“Well, how the hell are you, Portagee? 1 heard you retired.” The chief of the watch leaned back in his chair. Now that he was a chief himself, he could refer to the man at the other end by his nickname.

“I’m on Saipan. Okay, kid, listen up: put your watch officer on right now.”

“What’s the matter, Master Chief?”

“No time, okay? Let’s do it.”

“Fair enough.” Obrecki put the call on hold. “Commander, could you pick up on one, ma’am?”

“NMCC, this is Rear Admiral Jackson,” Robby said, tired and in a very foul mood. Only reluctantly did he lift the phone, on the recommendation of a youngish Air Force major.

“Admiral, this is Lieutenant Commander Powers, Coast Guard, over at Buzzard’s Point. I have a call on the line from Saipan. The caller is a retired Command Master Chief. One of ours.”

Damn it, I have a broke carrier division out there,
his mind raged. “That’s nice, Commander. You want to clue me in fast? It’s busy here.”

“Sir, he reports a whole lot of Japanese troops on the island of Saipan.”

Jackson’s eyes came up off the dispatches on his desk. “What?”

“I can patch him over now, sir.”

“Okay,” Robby said guardedly.

“Who’s this?” another voice asked, old and gruff. He sounded like a chief, Robby thought.

“I’m Rear Admiral Jackson, in the National Military Command Center.” He didn’t have to order a tape on the line. They were all taped.

“Sir, this is Master Chief Quartermaster Manuel Oreza, U.S. Coast Guard, retired, serial number three-two-eight-six-one-four-zero-three-zero. I retired five years ago and moved to Saipan. I operate a fishing boat here. Sir, there are a lot—and I mean a whole goddamned pisspot full—of Japanese troops, uniformed and carrying arms, on this-here rock, right now, sir.”

Jackson adjusted his hand on the phone, gesturing for another officer to pick up. “Master Chief, I hope you understand that I find that a little bit hard to believe, okay?”

“Shit, sir, you oughta see it from my side. I am looking out my window right now. I can see down on the airport and Kobler Field. I count a total of six jumbo-jet aircraft, four at the airport and two at Kobler. I observed a pair of F-15 Eagle fighters with meatball markings circling over the island a few hours ago. Question, sir, is there any sort of joint exercise under way at this time?” the voice asked. It was stone sober, Jackson thought. It sure as hell sounded like a command master chief.

The Air Force major listening fifteen feet away was scribbling notes, though an invitation to Jurassic Park would have seemed somewhat more realistic.

“We just concluded a joint exercise, but Saipan didn’t have anything to do with it.”