Jack Ryan 8 - Debt of Honor (120 page)

“Not with a bang but a whimper?” the President asked.

“That's the idea,” Ryan said, selling the phone down. Satellite imagery showed that whatever the losses had been in the air battle, the Japanese had lost another fourteen aircraft due to cluster munitions on their airfields. Their principal search radars were gone, and they'd shot off a lot of SAMs. The next obvious step was to isolate the islands entirely from air and sea traffic, and that could be done before the end of the week. The press release was already being prepared if the necessity presented itself.

“We've won,” the National Security Advisor said. “It's just a matter of convincing the other side.”

“You've done well, Jack,” Durling said.

“Sir, if I'd managed to get the job done properly, it never would have started in the first place,” Ryan replied after a second's pause. He remembered getting things started along those lines… about a week too late to matter. Damn.

“Well, we seem to have done that with India, according to what Dave Williams just cabled in.” The President paused. “And what about this?”

“First we worry about concluding hostilities.”

“And then?”

“We offer them an honorable way out.” Upon elaboration. Jack was pleased to see that the Boss agreed with him.

There would be one more thing, Durling didn't say, but he needed just a little more thinking about it. For the moment it was enough that America looked to be winning this war, and with it he'd won re-election for saving the economy and safeguarding the rights of American citizens. It had been quite an interesting month, the President thought, looking at the other man in the room and wondering what might have come to pass without him. After Ryan left, he placed a telephone call to the Hill.

One other advantage of airborne-radar aircraft was that they made counting coup a lot easier. They could not always show which missile killed which aircraft, but they did show them dropping off the screen.

“Port Royal reports recovery complete,” a talker said.

“Thank you,” Jackson said. He hoped the Army aviators weren't too disappointed to have landed on a cruiser instead of Johnnie Reb, but he needed his deck space.

“I count twenty-seven kills,” Sanchez said. Three of his own fighters had fallen, with only one of the pilots rescued. The casualties were lighter than expected, though that fact didn't make the letter-writing any easier for the CAG.

“Well, it's not exactly like the Turkey Shoot, but it wasn't bad. Tack on fourteen more from the Tomahawks. That's about half their fighter strength—most of their F-15s—and they only have the one Hummer left. They're on the short end from now on.” The battle-force commander went over the other data. A destroyer gone and the rest of their Aegis ships in the wrong place to interfere with the combat action. Eight submarines definitely destroyed. The overall operational concept had been to detach the arms from the body first, just as had been done in the Persian Gulf, and it had proved to be even easier over water than over land. “Bud, if you were commanding the other side, what would you try next?”

“We still can't invade.” Sanchez paused. "It's a losing game any way you cut it,

but the last time we had to come this way…" He looked at his commander.

“There is that. Bud, get a Tom ready for a flight with me in the back.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Sanchez made his way off.

“You thinking what I—” Stennis's captain asked with a raised eyebrow.

“What do we got to lose, Phil?”

“A pretty good admiral, Rob,” he replied quietly.

“Where do you keep your radios in this barge?” Jackson asked with a wink.

“Where have you been?” Goto asked in surprise.

“In hiding, after your patron kidnapped me.” Koga walked in without so much as an announcement, took a seal without being bidden, and generally displayed the total lack of manners that proclaimed his renewed power. “What do you have to say for yourself.'” the former Prime Minister demanded of his successor.

“You cannot talk to me that way.” But even these words were weak.

“How marvelous. You lead our nation to ruin, but you insist on deference from someone whom your master almost killed. With your knowledge?” Koga asked lightly.

“Certainly not—and who murdered the—”

“Who murdered the criminals? Not I,” Koga assured him. “There is a more important question: what are you going to do?”

“Why, I haven't decided that yet.” This attempt at a strong statement fell short on several counts.

“You haven't spoken to Yamata yet, you mean.”

“I decide things for myself!”

“Excellent. Do so now.”

“You cannot order me about.”

“And why not? I will soon be back in that seat. You have a choice. Either you will resign your position this morning or this afternoon I will speak in the Diet and request a vote of no-confidence. It is a vote you will not survive. In either case you are finished.” Koga stood and started to leave. “I suggest you do so honorably.”

People were lined up in the terminal, standing in line at the counters to get tickets home, Captain Sato saw, as he walked past with a military escort. He was only a young lieutenant, a paratrooper still apparently eager to fight, which was more than could be said for the others in the building. The waiting jeep raced away, heading for the military airfield. The natives were out now, unlike before, carrying signs urging the “Japs” to leave. Some of them ought to be shot for their insolence, Sato thought, still coming to terms with his grief. Ten minutes later, he entered one of Kobler's hangars. Fighters were circling overhead, probably afraid to stray offshore, he thought.

“In here, please,” the Lieutenant said.

He walked into the building with consummate dignity, his uniform cap tucked inside his left arm, his back erect, hardly looking at anything, his eyes fixed on the distant wall of the building until the lieutenant stopped and pulled the rubber sheet off the body.

“Yes, that is my son.” He tried not to look, and blessedly the face was not grossly disfigured, possibly protected by the flight helmet while the rest of the body had burned as he sat trapped in his wrecked fighter. But when he closed his eyes he could see his only child writhing in the cockpit, less than an hour after his brother had drowned. Could destiny be so cruel as this? And how was it that those who had served his country had to die, while a mere transporter of civilians was allowed to pass through the American fighters with contempt?

“The squadron command believes that he shot down an American fighter before turning back,” the Lieutenant offered. He'd just made that up, but he had to say something, didn't he?

“'Thank you, Lieutenant. I have to return to my aircraft now.” No more words

were passed on the way hack to the airport. The army officer left the man with

his grief and his dignity.

Sato was on his flight deck twenty minutes later, the 747 already pre-flighted, and, he was sure, completely filled with people returning home under the promise of safe passage by the Americans. The ground tractor pushed the Boeing away from the jetway. It was driven by a native, and the gesture he flashed to the cockpit on decoupling from their aircraft was not exactly a friendly one. But the final insult came as he waited for clearance to take off. A fighter came in to land, not a blue Eagle, it was a haze-gray aircraft with
NAVY
painted on the engine nacelles.

“Nice touch, Bud. Grease job,” Jackson said as the canopy came up.

“We aim to please, sir,” Sanchez replied nervously. As he taxied off to the right, the welcoming committee, such as it was, all wore green fatigues and carried rifles. When the aircraft stopped, an aluminum extension ladder was laid alongside the aircraft. Jackson climbed out first, and at the bottom of the ladder a field-grade officer saluted him correctly.

“That's a Tomcat,” Oreza said, handing over the binoculars. “And that officer ain't no Jap.”

“Sure as hell,” Clark confirmed, watching the black officer get into a jeep. What effect would this have on his tentative orders? Attractive as it might be to put the arm on Raizo Yamata, even getting close enough to evaluate the possibility—his current instructions—was not a promising undertaking. He had also reported on conditions on Saipan, and that word, he thought, was good. The Japanese troops he'd seen earlier in the day were not the least bit jaunty, though some officers, especially the junior ones, seemed very enthusiastic about their mission, whatever that was right now. It was about what you expected of lieutenants in any army.

The Governor's house, set on the local Capitol Hill next to the convention center, seemed a pleasant enough structure. Jackson was sweating now. The tropical sun was hot enough, and his nomex flight suit was just too good an insulator. Here a colonel saluted him and led him inside.

Robby knew General Arima on sight, remembering the intelligence file he'd seen in the Pentagon. They were of about the same height and build, he saw. The General saluted. Jackson, bareheaded and under cover, was not allowed to do so under naval regulations. It seemed the proper response not to, anyway. He nodded his head politely, and left it at that.

“General, can we speak in private?”

Arima nodded and led Jackson into what looked like a combination den/office. Robby took a seat, and his host was kind enough to hand over a glass of ice water.

“Your position is…?”

“I am Commander Task Force Seventy-Seven. I gather you are the commander of Japanese forces on Saipan.” Robby drank the water down. It annoyed him greatly to be sweating, but there was no helping that.

“Correct.”

“In that case, sir, I am here to request your surrender.” He hoped the General knew the semantic difference between “request” and “demand,” the customary verb for the occasion.

“I am not authorized to do that.”

“General, what I'm about to say to you is the position of my government. You may leave the islands in peace. You may take your light weapons with you. Your heavy equipment and aircraft will remain behind for later determination of status. For the moment we require that all Japanese citizens leave the island, pending the restoration of normal relations between our countries.”

“I am not authorized to—”

“I'll be saying the same thing on Guam in two hours, and the American Ambassador in Tokyo is now requesting a meeting with your government.”

“You do not have the ability to take this one island back, much less all of them.”

“That is true,” Jackson conceded. “It is also true that we can easily stop all ships from entering or leaving Japanese ports for the indefinite future. We can similarly cut off this island from air and sea traffic.”

“That is a threat,” Arima pointed out.

“Yes, sir, it is. In due course your country will starve. Its economy will come to a complete hall. That serves no one's purposes.” Jackson paused.

“Up until this point only military people have suffered. They pay us to take chances. If it goes any further, then everyone suffers more, but your country most of all. It will also generate additional bad feelings on both sides, when our actions should be to restore normal relations as rapidly as circumstances allow.”

“I am not authorized to—”

“General, fifty years ago you could have said that, and it was the custom of your armed forces to fight to the last man. It was also the custom of your armed forces to deal with people in the lands you occupied in a way that even you must find barbaric—I say that because you have behaved honorably in all respects or so all my information tells me. For that I thank you, sir,” Jackson went on. speaking evenly and politely. “This is not the nineteen-forties. I wasn't born before the end of that war, and you were a toddler then. That sort of behavior is a thing of the past. There is no place for it in the world today.”

“My troops have behaved properly,” Arima confirmed, not knowing what else to say under the circumstances.

“Human life is a precious commodity, General Arima, far too precious to be wasted unnecessarily. We have limited our combat actions to militarily important targets. We have not as yet inflicted harm on the innocent, as you have not. But if this war continues, that will change, and the consequences will be harder on you than on us. There is no honor in that for either side. In any case, I must now fly to Guam. You know how to reach me by radio.” Jackson stood.

“I must await orders from my government.”

“I understand,” Robby replied, thankful that Arima meant that he would follow those orders from his government.

Usually when Al Trent came to the White House it was in the company of Sam Fellows, the ranking minority member of the Select Committee, but not this time, because Sam was in the other party. A member of his party's Senate leadership was there also. The hour made this a political meeting, with most of the White House staffers gone for the day, and a President allowing himself a release from the stress of his office.

“Mr. President, I gather that things have gone well?”

Durling nodded cautiously. “Prime Minister Goto is not yet able to meet with the Ambassador. We're not sure why, but Ambassador Whiting says not to worry. The public mood over there is shifting our way rapidly.”

Trent took a drink from the Navy steward who served in the Oval Office. That part of the White House staff must have kept a list of the favored drinks for the important. In Al's case it was vodka and tonic, Finnish Absolut vodka, a habit begun while a student at Tufts University, forty years earlier.

“Jack said all along that they didn't know what they were getting into.”

“Bright boy, Ryan,” the senior Senator agreed. “He's done you quite a few favors, Roger.” Trent noted with annoyance that this stalwart member of what he liked to call “the upper house” felt the right to first-name the President in private. Typical senator, the House member thought.

“Bob Fowler gave you some good advice,” Trent allowed.