Debt of Honor Read online

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do. I don’t think we would have gotten this many hits on her with a patrol screw. Let’s plot this out.”

  “Running a plot, already have some of it,” another chief reported. The process was largely computer-aided now. Once it had been a real black art.

  “Posit?” Jones looked up.

  “Position’s right about here, same as the beacon, almost. Sir,” the chief said patiently, making a black mark on the plastic-covered wall chart, “we know where she is, I mean, the rescue—”

  “Ain’t gonna be no rescue.” Jones looked up and stole a cigarette from a passing seaman. There, I finally said it out loud.

  “You can’t smoke in here,” one of the chiefs said. “We have to go outside—”

  “Give me a light and follow me on this,” Jones ordered. He flipped another page, checking the 60Hz line. “Nothing ... nothing. Those diesel boats are pretty good ... but if they’re quiet, they ain’t snorting, and if they ain’t snorting they ain’t going very far ... Asheville sprinted out this way, and probably then she came back in ...” Another page.

  “No rescue, sir?” It had taken fully thirty seconds for the question to be asked.

  “How deep’s the water?”

  “I know that, but the escape trunks ... I mean, I’ve seen it, there’s three of them.”

  Jones didn’t even look up, taking a puff off his first smoke in years. “Yeah, the mom’s hatch, that’s what we called it on Dallas. ‘See, mom, if anything goes wrong, we can get out right there.’ Chief, you don’t get off one of these things, okay? You don’t. That ship is dead, and so’s her crew. I want to see why.”

  “But we already have the crush sounds.”

  “I know. I also know that two of our carriers had a little accident today.” Those sounds were on the SOSUS printouts, too.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m not saying anything.” Another page. At the bottom of it was a large black blotch, the loud sound that marked the death of USS Asheville and all—“What the fuck is this?”

  “We think it’s a double-plot, sir. The bearing’s almost the same as the Asheville sound, and we think the computer—”

  “The time’s off, goddamn it, a whole four minutes.” He flipped back three pages. “See, that’s somebody else.”

  “Charlotte?”

  It was then that Jones felt even colder. His head swam a little from the cigarette, and he remembered why he’d quit. The same signature on the paper, a diesel boat snorting, and, later, a 688-class sprinting. The sounds were so close, nearly identical, and the coincidence of the bearing from the new seafloor array could have made almost anyone think ...

  “Call Admiral Mancuso and find out if Charlotte has checked in.”

  “But—”

  “Right now, Senior Chief!”

  Dr. Ron Jones stood up and looked around. It was the same as before, almost. The people were the same, doing the same work, displaying the same competence, but something was missing. The thing that wasn’t the same was ... what? The large room had a huge chart of the Pacific Ocean on its back wall. Once that chart had been marked with red silhouettes, the class shapes of Soviet submarines, boomers, and fast-attacks, often with black silhouettes in attendance, to show that Pacific SOSUS was tracking “enemy” subs, quarterbacking American fast-attacks onto them, vectoring P-3C Orion ASW birds in to follow them, and occasionally to pounce on and harry them, to let them know who owned the oceans of the world. Now the marks on the wall chart were of whales, some of them with names, just as with the Russian subs, but these names were things like “Moby and Mabel,” to denote a particular pod with a well-known alpha-pair to track by name. There wasn’t an enemy now, and the urgency had gone. They weren’t thinking the way he’d once thought, heading “up north” on Dallas, tracking people they might one day have to kill. Jones had never really expected that, not really-really, but the possibility was something he’d never allowed himself to forget. These men and women, however, had. He could see it, and now he could hear it from the way the chief was talking to SubPac on the phone.

  Jones walked across the room and just took the receiver away. “Bart, this is Ron. Has Charlotte checked in?”

  “We’re trying to raise her now.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to, Skipper,” the civilian said darkly.

  “What do you mean?” The reply caught the meaning. The two men had always communicated on a nonverbal level.

  “Bart, you better come over here. I’m not kidding, Cap’n.”

  “Ten minutes,” Mancuso promised.

  Jones stubbed his smoke out in a metal waste can and returned to the printouts. It was not an easy thing for him now, but he flipped to the pages where he’d stopped. The printouts were made with pencils that were located on metal shuttle-bars, marking received noises in discrete frequency ranges, and the marks were arranged with the low frequencies on the left, and the higher ones on the right. Location within the range columns denoted bearing. The tracks meandered, looking to all the world like aerial photographs of sand dunes in some trackless desert, but if you knew what to look for, every spidery trace and twist had meaning. Jones slowed his analysis, taking in every minute’s record of reception and sweeping from left to right, making marks and notes as he went. The chiefs who’d been assisting him stood back now, knowing that a master was at work, that he saw things they should have seen, but had not, and knowing why a man younger than they called an admiral by his first name.

  “Attention on deck,” some voice called presently, “Submarine Force, Pacific, arriving.” Mancuso came in, accompanied by Captain Chambers, his operations officer, and an aide who kept out of the way. The Admiral just looked at Jones’s face.

  “You raise Charlotte yet, Bart?”

  “No.”

  “Come here.”

  “What are you telling me, Jonesy?”

  Jones took the red pen to the bottom of the page. “There’s the crush, that’s the hull letting go.”

  Mancuso nodded, letting out a breath. “I know, Ron.”

  “Look here. That’s high-speed maneuvering—”

  “Something goes wrong, you go max power and try to drive her up to the roof,” Captain Chambers observed, not seeing it yet, or more probably not wanting to, Jones thought. Well, Mr. Chambers had always been a pretty nice officer to work for.

  “But she wasn’t heading straight for the roof, Mr. Chambers. Aspect changes, here and here,” Jones said, moving the pen upward on the printout page, backwards in time, marking where the width of the traces varied, and the bearings changed subtly. “She was turning, too, at max power on a speed screw. This is probably a decoy signature. And this”—his hand went all the way to the right—“is a fish. Quiet one, but look at the bearing rates. It was turning, too, chasing Asheville, and that gives these traces here, all the way back to this time-point here.” Ron circled both traces, and though separated on the paper by fourteen inches, the shallow twists and turns were almost identical. The pen moved again, upwards on the sheet, then shot across to another frequency column. “To a launch transient. Right there.”

  “Fuck,” Chambers breathed.

  Mancuso leaned over the paper sheet, next to Jones, and he saw it all now. “And this one?”

  “That’s probably Charlotte, also maneuvering briefly. See, here and here, look like aspect changes on these traces to me. No transients because it was probably too far away, same reason we don’t have a track on the fish.” Jones moved the pen back to the track of USS Asheville. “Here. That Japanese diesel boat launched on her. Here. Asheville tried to evade and failed. Here’s the first explosion from the torpedo warhead. Engine sounds stop here—she took the hit from aft. Here’s the internal bulkheads letting go. Sir, Asheville was sunk by a torpedo, probably a Type 89, right about the same time that our two carriers had their little accident.”

  “It’s not possible,” Chambers thought.

  When
Jones turned his head, his eyes looked like the buttons on a doll’s face. “Okay, sir, then you tell me what these signals denote.” Somebody had to goad him into reality.

  “Christ, Ron!”

  “Settle down, Wally,” ComSubPac said quietly, looking at the data and searching for another plausible interpretation. He had to look, even in the knowledge that there was no other possible conclusion.

  “Wasting your time, Skipper.” Jones tapped the track of USS Gary. “Somebody better tell that frigate that it ain’t a rescue she’s on. She’s sailing in harm’s way. There’s two SSKs out there with warshots, and they already used them twice.” Jones walked to the wall chart. He had to search around for a red marker, lifted it, and drew two circles, both about thirty miles in diameter. “Somewhere here. We’ll get a better cut on them when they snort next. Who’s the surface track, by the way?”

  “Reportedly a coast-guard cutter, one of theirs, heading in for the rescue,” SubPac answered.

  “We might want to think about killing it,” Jones suggested, marking that contact in red also, then setting the pen down. He’d just taken the final step. The surface ship whose position he’d marked was not “she,” but rather it. An enemy. A target.

  “We have to see CINCPAC,” Mancuso said.

  Jones nodded. “Yes, sir, I think we do.”

  22

  The Global Dimension

  The bomb was impressive. It exploded outside the Trincomalee Tradewinds, a new luxury hotel mainly built with Indian money. A few people, none closer than half a block away, would remember the vehicle, a small white delivery truck that had been big enough to contain half a ton of AMFO, an explosive mixture composed of nitrogen-based fertilizer and diesel fuel. It was a concoction easily made up in a bathtub or laundry basin, and in this case sufficient to rip the façade off the ten-story hotel, killing twenty-seven people and injuring another hundred or so in the process. Scarcely had the noise died when a telephone call came in to the local Reuters office.

  “The final phase of liberation has begun,” the voice said, probably reading the words off a prepared statement, as terrorists often did. “The Tamil Tigers will have their home-land and their autonomy or there will be no peace in Sri Lanka. This is only the beginning of the end of our struggle. We will explode one bomb per day until we achieve our goal.” Click.

  For more than a hundred years, Reuters had been one of the world’s most efficient news services, and the Colombo office was no exception, even on a weekend. In ten minutes the report went out on the wire—a satellite link today—to the agency’s London headquarters, where it was instantly relayed across the global news network as a “flash” story.

  Many U.S. agencies routinely monitor the news-wire services, including the intelligence services, the FBI, Secret Service, and the Pentagon. This was also true of the White House Signals Office, and so it was that twenty-five minutes after the bomb went off, an Air Force sergeant put his hand on Jack Ryan’s shoulder. The National Security Advisor’s eyes opened to see a finger pointed topside.

  “Flash traffic, sir,” the voice whispered.

  Ryan nodded sleepily, slipped off his seat belt, and thanked God that he hadn’t drunk too much in Moscow. In the dim lights of the cabin everyone else was conked out. To keep from waking his wife it was necessary to step over the table. He almost tripped, but the sergeant grabbed his arm.

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “No problem, sir.” Ryan followed her to the spiral stairs and headed up to the communications area on the upper deck.

  “What gives?” He resisted the temptation to ask the time. It would have begged another question: the time in Washington, the time where the plane was now, or the time where the flash traffic had originated. Just another sign of progress, Ryan thought, heading to the thermal printer, you had to ask when “now” was. The communications watch officer was an Air Force first lieutenant, black, slim, and pretty.

  “Good morning, Dr. Ryan. The National Security Office said to flag this one for you.” She handed over the slippery paper Jack hated. The thermal printers were quiet, though, and this communications room, like all the others, was noisy enough already. Jack read the Reuters dispatch, too new as yet to have any analysis from CIA or elsewhere.

  “That’s the indicator we were looking for. Okay, let’s get a secure phone.”

  “Some other stuff that’s just come in,” an airman said, handing over more papers. “The Navy had a bad day.”

  “Oh?” Ryan sat down in a padded chair and flipped on a reading light. “Oh, shit,” he said next. Then he looked up. “Coffee, please, Lieutenant?” The officer sent an enlisted man for a cup.

  “First call?”

  “NMCC, the senior watch officer.” The National Security Advisor checked his watch, did the arithmetic, and decided that he’d gotten about five hours of sleep total. It was not likely that he’d get much more between here, wherever that was, and Washington.

  “Line three, Dr. Ryan. Admiral Jackson on the other end.”

  “This is SWORDSMAN,” Ryan said, using his official Secret Service code name. They’d tried to hang GUN-FIGHTER on him, a token of backhanded respect for his earlier life.

  “This is SWITCHBOARD. Enjoying the flight, Jack?” It was a constant amazement to Ryan that the secure digital comm links had such high transmission quality. He could recognize his friend’s voice, and even his humorous tone. He could also tell that it was somewhat forced.

  “These Air Force drivers are pretty good. Maybe you should think about learning from them. Okay, what gives? What are you doing in the shop?”

  “Pac Fleet had a little incident a few hours ago.”

  “So I see. Sri Lanka first,” SWORDSMAN ordered.

  “Nothing much more than the wire dispatch. We have some still photos, too, and we expect video in a half-hour or so. The consulate in Trincomalee is reporting in now. They confirm the incident. One American citizen injured, they think, just one, and not real serious, but he’s asking to be evac’d soonest. Mike is being painted into a corner. He’s going to try an’ maneuver out of it when the sun goes down. Our estimate is that our friends are starting to get real frisky. Their amphibs are still alongside, but we’ve lost track of that brigade. The area they’ve been using to play games in appears empty. We have overheads three hours old, and the field is empty.”

  Ryan nodded. He slid the plastic blind off the window by his chair. It was dark outside. There were no lights to be seen below. Either they were over the ocean already or there were clouds down there. All he could see was the blinking strobe on the aircraft’s wingtip.

  “Any immediate dangers there?”

  “Negative,” Admiral Jackson thought. “We estimate a week to take positive action, minimum, but we also estimate that positive action is now likely. The folks up the river concur. Jack,” Robby added, “Admiral Dubro needs instructions on what he can do about things, and he needs them soon.”

  “Understood.” Ryan was making notes on an Air Force One scratchpad that the journalists hadn’t managed to steal yet. “Stand by.” He looked up at the Lieutenant. “ETA to Andrews?”

  “Seven and a half hours, sir. Winds are pretty stiff. We’re approaching the Icelandic coast now.”

  Jack nodded. “Thank you. Robby, we’re seven and a half out. I’ll be talking to the Boss before we get in. Start thinking about setting a briefing up two hours after we get in.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Okay. Now, what the hell happened to those carriers?”

  “Supposedly one of the Jap ’cans had a little malfunction and rippled off her Mark 50s. They caught both CVNs in the ass. Enterprise has damage to all four shafts. Stennis has three down. They report no fatalities, some minor injuries.”

  “Robby, how the hell—”

  “Hey, SWORDSMAN, I just work here, remember.”

  “How long?”

  “Four to six months to effect repairs, that’s what we have now. Wait, stand by, Jack.
” The voice stopped, but Ryan could hear murmurs and papers shuffling. “Wait a minute—something else just came in.”

  “Standing by.” Ryan sipped his coffee and returned to the task of figuring out what time it was.

  “Jack, something bad. We have a SUBMISS/SUBSUNK in Pac Fleet.”

  “What’s that?”

  “USS Asheville, that’s a new 688, her BST-3 just started howling. Stennis has launched a bird to check it out, and a ’can’s heading up there, too. This ain’t good.”

  “What’s the crew? Like a hundred?”

  “More, one-twenty, one-thirty. Oh, damn. Last time this happened, I was a mid.”

  “We had an exercise going with them, didn’t we?”

  “DATELINE PARTNERS, yes, just ended yesterday. Until a couple hours ago, looked like a good exercise. Things went in the shitter in a hurry ...” Jackson’s voice trailed off. “Another signal. First report, Stennis launched a Hoover—”

  “What?”

  “S-3 Viking, ASW bird. Four-man crew. They report no survivors from the sub. Shit,” Jackson added, even though it wasn’t exactly a surprise. “Jack, I need to do some work here, okay?”

  “Understood. Keep me posted.”

  “Will do. Out.” The line went dead.

  Ryan finished off his coffee and dropped the plastic cup into a basket bolted to the floor of the aircraft. There was no point in waking the President just yet. Durling would need his sleep. He was coming home to a financial crisis, a political mess, maybe a brewing war, in the Indian Ocean, and now the situation with Japan would only get worse after this damned-fool accident in the Pacific. Durling was entitled to a little good luck, wasn’t he?

  By coincidence Oreza’s personal car was a white Toyota Land Cruiser, a popular vehicle on the island. He and his charter were walking toward it when two more just like it pulled into the marina’s parking lot. Six people got out and walked straight toward them. The former Command Master Chief stopped dead in his tracks. He’d left Saipan just before dawn, having picked Burroughs up at the hotel himself, the better to catch the tuna chasing their own food in the early morning. Though traffic on the way in to the dock had been ... well, a little busier than usual, the world had held its normal shape.