Debt of Honor Read online

  There was no jetway. People had to climb stairs into the aircraft, just as in the 1950s, but there was still a metal detector, and you still had to check your baggage—this time to Air Force and Secret Service personnel who X-rayed everything and opened much of it for visual inspection.

  “1 hope you left your Victoria’s Secret stuff at home,” Jack observed with a chuckle as he hoisted the last bag on the counter.

  “You’ll find out when we get to Moscow,” Professor Ryan replied with an impish wink. It was her first state trip, and everything at Andrews Air Force Base was new for her.

  “Hello, Dr. Ryan! We finally meet.” Helen D’Agustino came over and extended her hand.

  “Cathy, this is the world’s prettiest bodyguard,” Jack said, introducing the Secret Service agent to his wife.

  “I couldn’t make the last state dinner,” Cathy explained. “There was a seminar up at Harvard.”

  “Well, this trip ought to be pretty exciting,” the Secret Service agent said, taking her leave smoothly to continue her duties.

  Not as exciting as my last one, Jack thought, remembering another story that he couldn’t relate to anyone.

  “Where’s she keep her gun?” Cathy asked.

  “I’ve never searched her for it, honey,” Jack said with a wink of his own.

  “Do we go aboard now?”

  “I can go aboard whenever I want,” her husband replied. “Color me important.” So much the better to board early and show her around, he decided, heading her toward the door. Designed to carry upwards of three hundred passengers in its civilian incarnation, the President’s personal 747 (there was another backup aircraft, of course) was outfitted to hold a third of that number in stately comfort. Jack first showed his wife where they would be sitting, explaining that the pecking order was very clear. The closer you were to the front of the aircraft, the more important you were. The President’s accommodations were in the nose, where two couches could convert into beds. The Ryans and the van Damms would be in the next area, twenty feet or so aft in a space that could seat eight, but only five in this case. Joining them would be the President’s Director of Communications, a harried and usually frantic former TV executive named Tish Brown, recently divorced. Lesser staff members were sorted aft in diminishing importance until you got to the media, deemed less important still.

  “This is the kitchen?” Cathy asked.

  “Galley,” Jack corrected. It was impressive, as were the meals prepared here, actually cooked from fresh ingredients and not reheated as was the way on airliners.

  “It’s bigger than ours!” she observed, to the amused pleasure of the chief cook, an Air Force master sergeant.

  “Not quite, but the chef’s better, aren’t you, Sarge?”

  “I’ll turn my back now. You can slug him, ma’am. I won’t tell.”

  Cathy merely laughed at the jibe. “Why isn’t he upstairs in the lounge?”

  “That’s almost all communications gear. The President likes to wander up there to talk to the crew, but the guys who live there are mainly cryppies.”

  “Cryppies?”

  “Communications guys,” Jack explained, leading his wife back to their seats. The seats were beige leather, extra wide and extra soft, with recently added swing-up TV screens, personal phones, and other features which Cathy started to catalog, down to the presidential seal on the belt-buckles.

  “Now I know what first-class really means.”

  “It’s still an eleven-hour flight, babe,” Jack observed, settling in while others boarded. With luck he’d be able to sleep most of the way.

  The President’s televised departure statement followed its own pattern. The microphone was always set up so that Air Force One loomed in the background, to remind everyone of who he was and to prove it by showing his personal plane. Roy Newton watched more for timing than anything else. Statements like this never amounted to much, and only C-SPAN carried them at all, though the network newsies were always there with cameras in case the airplane blew up on takeoff. Concluding his remarks, Durling took his wife, Anne, by the arm and walked to the stairs, where a sergeant saluted. At the door of the aircraft, the President and the First Lady turned to give a final wave as though already on the campaign trail—in a very real way this trip was part of that almost-continuous process—then went inside. C-SPAN switched back to the floor of the House, where various junior members were giving brief speeches under special orders. The President would be in the air for eleven hours, Newton knew, more time than he needed.

  It was time to go to work.

  The ancient adage was true enough, he thought, arranging his notes. If more than one person knew it, it wasn’t a secret at all. Even less so if you both knew part of it and also knew who knew the rest, because then you could sit down over dinner and let on that you knew, and the other person would think that you knew it all, and would then tell you the parts you hadn’t learned quite yet. The right smiles, nods, grunts, and a few carefully selected words would keep your source going until it was all there in plain sight. Newton supposed it was not terribly different for spies. Perhaps he would have been a good one, but it didn’t pay any better than his stint in Congress—not even as well, in fact—and he’d long since decided to apply his talent to something that could make him a decent living,

  The rest of the game was a lot easier. You had to select the right person to give the information to, and that choice was made merely by reading the local papers carefully. Every reporter had a hot-button item, something for which he or she had a genuinely passionate interest, and for that reason reporters were no different from anyone else. If you knew what buttons to push, you could manipulate anyone. What a pity it hadn’t quite worked with the people in his district, Newton thought, lifting the phone and punching the buttons.

  “Libby Holtzman.”

  “Hi, Libby, this is Roy. How are things?”

  “A little slow,” she allowed, wondering if her husband, Bob, would get anything good on the Moscow trip with the presidential party.

  “How about dinner?” He knew that her husband was away.

  “What about?” she asked. She knew it wasn’t a tryst or something similarly foolish. Newton was a player, and usually had something interesting to tell.

  “It’ll be worth your time,” he promised. “Jockey Club, seven-thirty?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Newton smiled. It was all fair play, wasn’t it? He’d lost his congressional seat on the strength of an accusation about influence-peddling. It hadn’t been strong enough to have merited prosecution (someone else had influenced that), but it had been enough, barely, to persuade 50.7 percent of the voters in that off-year election that someone else should have the chance to represent them. In a presidential-election year, Newton thought, he would almost certainly have eked out a win, but congressional seats once lost are almost never regained.

  It could have been much worse. This life wasn’t so bad, was it? He’d kept the same house, kept his kids in the same school, then moved them on to good colleges, kept his membership in the same country club. He just had a different constituency now, no ethics laws to trouble his mind about—not that they ever had, really—and it sure as hell paid a lot better, didn’t it?

  DATELINE PARTNERS was being run out via computer-satellite relay—three of them, in fact. The Japanese Navy was linking all of its data to its fleet-operations center in Yokohama. The U.S. Navy did the same into Fleet-Ops at Pearl Harbor. Both headquarters offices used a third link to swap their own pictures. The umpires who scored the exercise in both locations thus had access to everything, but the individual fleet commanders did not. The purpose of the game was to give both sides realistic battle training, for which reason cheating was not encouraged—“cheating” was a concept by turns foreign and integral with the fighting of wars, of course.

  Pacific Fleet’s type commanders, the admirals in charge of the surface, air, submarine, and service forces, respectively, watched fr
om their chairs as the game unfolded, each wondering how his underlings would perform.

  “Sato’s no dummy, is he?” Commander Chambers noted.

  “The boy’s got some beautiful moves,” Dr. Jones opined. A senior contractor with his own “special-access” clearance, he’d been allowed into the center on Mancuso’s parole. “But it isn’t going to help him up north.”

  “Oh?” SubPac turned and smiled. “You know something I don’t?”

  “The sonar departments on Charlotte and Asheville are damned good, Skipper. My people worked with them to set up the new tracking software, remember?”

  “The CO’s aren’t bad either,” Mancuso pointed out.

  Jones nodded agreement. “You bet, sir. They know how to listen, just like you did.”

  “God,” Chambers breathed, looking down at the new four-ring shoulder boards and imagining he could feel the added weight. “Admiral, you ever wonder how we would have made it without Jonesy here?”

  “We had Chief Laval with us, remember?” Mancuso said.

  “Frenchy’s son is the lead sonarman on Asheville, Mr. Chambers.” For Jones, Mancuso would always be “skipper” and Chambers would always be a lieutenant. Neither officer objected. It was one of the rules of the naval service that bonded officers and (in this case, former) enlisted personnel.

  “I didn’t know that,” SubPac admitted.

  “Just joined up with her. He was on Tennessee before. Very sharp kid, made first-class three years out of his A-school.”

  “That’s faster than you did it,” Chambers observed. “Is he that good?”

  “Sure as hell. I’m trying to recruit him for my business. He got married last year, has a kid on the way. It shouldn’t be too hard to bribe him out into civilian life.”

  “Thanks a lot, Jonesy,” Mancuso growled. “I oughta kick your ass outa here.”

  “Oh, come on, Skipper. When’s the last time we got together for some real fun?” In addition to which, Jones’s new whale-hunting software had been incorporated in what was left of the Pacific SOSUS system. “About time for an update.”

  The fact that both sides had observers in the other’s headquarters was something of a complication, largely because there were assets and capabilities in both cases that were not strictly speaking shared. In this case, SOSUS-GENERATED traces that might or might not be the Japanese submarine force northwest of Kure were actually better than what appeared on the main plotting board. The real traces were given to Mancuso and Chambers. Each side had two submarines. Neither American boat showed up on the traces, but the Japanese boats were conventionally powered, and had to go periodically to snorkeling depth in order to run their diesels and recharge their batteries. Though the Japanese submarines had their own version of the American Prairie-Masker systems, Jones’s new software had gone a long way to defeat that countermeasure. Mancuso and the rest retired to the SubPac plotting room to examine the newest data.

  “Okay, Jonesy, tell me what you see,” Mancuso ordered, looking at the paper printouts from the underwater hydrophones that littered the bottom of the Pacific.

  The data was displayed both electronically on TV-type displays and on fan-fold paper of the sort once used for computer printouts for more detailed analysis. For work like this, the latter was preferred, and there were two sets. One of them had already been marked up by the oceanographic technicians of the local SOSUS detachment. To make this a double-blind analysis, and to see if Jones still knew how, Mancuso kept separate the set already analyzed by his people.

  Still short of forty, Jones had gray already in his thick dark hair, though he chewed gum now instead of smoking. The intensity was still there, Mancuso saw. Dr. Ron Jones flipped pages like an accountant on the trail of embezzlement, his finger tracing down the vertical lines on which frequencies were recorded.

  “We assume that they’ll snort every eight hours or so?” he asked.

  “That’s the smart thing, to keep their batteries fully charged,” Chambers agreed with a nod.

  “What time are they operating on?” Jones asked. Typically, American submarines at sea adjusted their clocks to Greenwich Mean Time—recently changed to “Universal Time” with the diminution of the Royal Navy, whose power had once allowed the prime meridian to be defined by the British.

  “I presume Tokyo,” Mancuso replied. “That’s us minus five.”

  “So we start looking for patterns, midnight and even hours their time.” There were five of the wide-folded sheets. Jones flipped one complete set at a time, noting the time references in the margins. It took him ten minutes.

  “Here’s one, and here’s another. These two are possible. This one’s also possible, but I don’t think so. I’ll put money down on this one ... and this one for starters.” His fingers tapped on seemingly random lines of dots.

  “Wally?”

  Chambers turned to the other table and flipped the marked-up sets to the proper time settings. “Jonesy, you fuckin’ witch!” he breathed. It had taken a team of skilled technicians—experts all—over two hours to do what Jones had accomplished in a few minutes before their again-incredulous eyes.

  The civilian contractor pulled a can of Coke from the nearby cooler and popped it open. “Gentlemen,” he asked, “who’s the all-time champ?”

  That was only part of it, of course. The printouts merely gave bearing to a suspected noise source, but there were several of the bottom-sited SOSUS arrays, and triangulation had already been accomplished, nailing the datum points down to radii of ten to fifteen nautical miles. Even with Jones’s improvements in the system, that still left a lot of ocean to search.

  The phone rang. It was Commander-in-Chief Pacific Fleet. Mancuso took the call and made his recommendations for vectoring Charlotte and Asheville onto the suspected contacts. Jones observed the exchange and nodded approval.

  “See what I mean, Skipper? You always did know how to listen.”

  Murray had been out discussing a few budgetary matters with the Assistant-Director-in-Charge of the Washington Field Office, therefore missing the phone call. The top-secret dispatch from the White House was tucked away in secure files, and then his secretary had been called out to bring a sick child home from school. As a result, the handwritten message from Ryan had been unconscionably late in coming to his attention.

  “The Norton girl,” he said, walking into Director Shaw’s office.

  “Bad?”

  “Dead,” Murray said, handing the paper over. Shaw scanned it quickly.

  “Shit,” the FBI Director whispered. “Did she have a prior history of drug use?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “Word from Tokyo?”

  “I haven’t checked in with the Leg-At yet. Bad timing for that, Bill.”

  Shaw nodded, and the thought in his mind was transparent. Ask any FBI agent for the case he bragged about, and it is always kidnapping. It was really how the Bureau had made its name back in the 1930s. The Lindbergh Law had empowered the FBI to assist any local police force as soon as the possibility existed that the victim could have been taken across a state line. With the mere possibility—the victims were rarely actually transported so far—the whole weight and power of America’s premier law-enforcement agency descended on the case like a pack of especially hungry wolves. The real mission was always the same: to get the victim back alive, and there the results were excellent. The secondary objective was to apprehend, charge, and try the subjects in question, and there the record, statistically speaking, was better still. They didn’t know yet if Kimberly Norton had been a kidnap victim. They did know that she would be coming home dead. That single fact, for any FBI agent, was a professional failure.

  “Her father’s a cop.”

  “I remember, Dan.”

  “I want to go out there and talk it over with O’Keefe.” Part of it was because Captain Norton deserved to hear it from other cops, not through the media. Part of it was because the cops on the case had to do it, to admit their failur
e to him. And part of it would be for Murray to take a look at the case file himself, to be sure for himself that all that might have been done, had been done.

  “I can probably spare you for a day or two,” Shaw replied. “The Linders case is going to wait until the President gets back anyway. Okay, get packed.”

  “This is better than the Concorde!” Cathy gushed at the Air Force corporal who served dinner. Her husband almost laughed. It wasn’t often that Caroline Ryan’s eyes went quite so wide, but then he was long accustomed to this sort of service, and the food was certainly better than she customarily ate in the Hopkins physicians’ dining room. And there the plates didn’t have gold trim, one of the reasons that Air Force One had so much pilferage.

  “Wine for madam?” Ryan lifted the bottle of Russian River chardonnay and poured as his plate came down.

  “We don’t drink wine on the chicken farm, you see,” she told the corporal with a small measure of embarrassment.

  “Everybody’s this way the first time, Dr. Ryan. If you need anything, please buzz me.” She headed back to the galley.

  “See, Cathy, 1 told you, stick with me.”

  “I wondered how you got used to flying,” she noted, tasting the broccoli. “Fresh.”

  “The flight crew’s pretty good, too.” He gestured to the wineglasses. Not a ripple.

  “The pay isn’t all that great,” Arnie van Damm said from the other side of the compartment, “but the perks ain’t too bad.”

  “The blackened redfish isn’t bad at all.”

  “Our chef stole the recipe from the Jockey Club. Best Cajun redfish in town,” van Damm explained. “I think he had to trade his potato soup for it. Fair deal,” Arnie judged. “He gets the crust just right, doesn’t he?”