Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [361]
"You need better clothes, too."
"Who's buyin'?" Vega asked, grinning now, though the picture would show the dour face he usually reserved for soldiers who failed to meet his standards of behavior. That would not be the case here, he thought. Eight men, all jump-qualified (as all Rangers were), all people who'd seen combat action in one place or another—and unusually for members of the 175th, all men who hadn't shaved their heads down to stubbly Mohawks. Vega remembered another group like this one, and his grin stopped. Not all of them had come out of Colombia alive.
Spanish speakers, he thought as he left the room. Spanish was probably the language of the Marianas. Like most senior Army noncommissioned officers, he had gotten his bachelor's degree in night school, having majored in military history—it had just seemed the right thing to do for one of his profession, and besides, the Army had paid for it. If Spanish were the language on those rocks, then it gave him an additional reason to think in positive terms about the mission. The name of the operation, which he'd overheard in a brief conversation with Captain Diego Checa, also seemed auspicious. It was called Operation ZORRO, which had amused the Captain enough to allow him to confide in his first sergeant. The "real" Zorro had been named Don Diego, hadn't he? He had forgotten the bandit's surname, but his senior NCO had not. With a name like Vega, how can I turn down a mission like this? Oso asked himself.
It was a good thing he was in shape, Nomuri thought. Just breathing here was hard enough. Most Western visitors to Japan stayed in the major cities and never realized that the country was every bit as mountainous as Colorado. Tochimoto was a small hill settlement that languished in the winter and expanded in summer as local citizens who grew tired of the crowded sameness of the cities moved into the country to explore. The hamlet, at the end of National Route 140, had essentially pulled in its sidewalks, but Chet was able to find a place to rent a small four-wheel all-terrain cycle, and had told the owner that he just needed a few hours to get away. In return for his money and a set of keys he'd received a stern warning, albeit polite, about following the trail and being careful, for which he'd graciously thanked the man and gone on his way, following the River Taki—more a nice brook than a river—up into the mountains. After the first hour, and about seven miles, he reckoned, he'd switched off the motor, pulled out his earplugs, and just listened.
Nothing. He hadn't seen a track in the mud and gravel path alongside the cascading stream, nor any sign of occupancy in the handful of rustic summer homes he'd passed along the way, and now, listening, he heard nothing at all but for the wind. There was a ford on his map, two more miles up, and sure enough it was both marked and usable, and allowed him to go east toward Shiraishi-san. Like most mountains, it had sides sculpted by time and water into numerous dead-end valleys, and Mount Shiraishi had a particularly nice valley, as yet unmarred by house or cabin. Perhaps Boy Scouts came here in summer to camp and commune with the nature the rest of their country had worked so hard to extinguish. More likely it was just a spot with no minerals valuable enough to justify a road or rail line. It was also one hundred air miles from Tokyo, and for all practical purposes might as easily have been in Antarctica.
Nomuri turned south, and climbed a smooth part of the slope to the crest of the southern ridge. He wanted a further look and listen, and, while he spotted a single hall-built dwelling a few miles below, he saw no column of smoke from a wood fire, nor the rising steam from someone's hot tub, and he heard nothing at all that was not of nature. Nomuri spent thirty minutes scanning the area with a pair