Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [307]
"I have one around here."
"Short version," Ryan ordered.
"A little larger than Japan's. They've downsized since reunification, but what they retained is high-quality. Mainly U.S. weapons and doctrine. Their air force is pretty good. I've played with them and—"
"If you were an ROK general, how afraid would you be of Japan?"
"I'd be wary," Admiral Jackson replied. "Not afraid, but wary. They don't like Japan very much, remember."
"I know. Send me copies of that attache report and the ROK OrBat."
"Aye aye." The line clicked off. Ryan called CIA next. Mary Pat still wasn't available, and her husband picked up. Ryan didn't bother with preliminaries.
"Ed, have you had any feedback from Station Seoul?"
"The ROKs seem very nervous. Not much cooperation. We've got a lot of friends in the KCIA, but they're clamming up on us, no political direction as yet."
"Anything different going on over there?"
"Well, yes," Ed Foley answered. "Their air force is getting a little more active. You know they have established a big training area up in the northern part of the country, and sure enough they're running some unscheduled combined-arms exercises. We have some overheads of it."
"Next, Beijing," Ryan said.
"A whole lot of nothing. China is staying out of this one. They say that they want no part of this, they have no interest in this. It doesn't concern them."
"Think about that, Ed," Jack ordered.
"Well, sure, it does concern them…oh…"
It wasn't quite fair and Ryan knew it. He now had fuller information than anyone else, and a huge head start on the analysis. "We just developed some information. I'll have it sent over as soon as it's typed up. I want you down here at two-thirty for a skull session."
"We'll be there," the almost-DDO promised.
And there it was, right on the map. You just needed the right information, and a little time.
Korea was not a country to be intimidated by Japan. The latter country had ruled the former for almost fifty years earlier in the century, and the memories for Koreans were not happy ones. Treated as serfs by their conquerors, to this day there were few quicker ways to get dead than to refer to a Korean citizen as a Jap. The antipathy was real, and with the growing Korean economy and the competition to Japan that it made, the resentment was bilateral. Most fundamental of all was the racial element. Though Korea and Japan were in fact countries of the same genetic identity, the Japanese still regarded Koreans as Hitler had once regarded Poles. The Koreans, moreover, had their own warrior tradition. They'd sent two divisions of troops to Vietnam, had built a formidable military of their own to defend against the now—dead madmen to their north. Once a beaten-down colony of Japan, they were now tough, and very, very proud. So what, then, could have cowed them out of honoring treaty commitments to America?
Not Japan. Korea had little to fear from direct attack, and Japan could hardly use her nuclear weapons on Korea. Wind patterns would transport whatever fallout resulted right back to the country that had sent the weapons. But immediately to Korea's north was the world's most populous country, with the world's largest standing army, and that was enough to frighten the ROKs, as it would frighten anyone.
Japan needed and doubtless wanted direct access to natural resources. It had a superb and fully developed economic base, a highly skilled manpower pool, all manner of high-tech assets. But Japan had a relatively small population in proportion to her economic strength.
China had a vast pool of people, but not as yet highly trained, a rapidly developing economy still somewhat lacking in high technology. And like Japan, China needed better access to resources.
And to the immediate north of both China and Japan was the world's last unexploited treasure house.
Taking the Marianas would prevent or at least hinder the approach of America's principal strategic arm, the U.S. Navy, from approaching