Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [390]
"You wait for the rest of the mission force to arrive. If something goes wrong, you call me and head out. If I drop out of the net, you call the others. If everything goes to hell, you find another way out. You should have passports, clothes, and—"
"We do."
"Good." Nomuri took his camera out of his backpack and started shooting photos of the cloud-shrouded mountains.
"This is CNN, live from Pearl Harbor," the reporter ended, and a commercial cut in. The intelligence analyst rewound the tape to examine it again. It was both amazing and entirely ordinary that he'd be able to get such vital information so easily. The American media really ran the country, he'd learned over the years, and perhaps more was the pity. The way they'd played up the unfortunate incident in Tennessee had inflamed the entire country into precipitous action, then driven his country into the same, and the only good news was what he saw on the TV screen: two fleet carriers still in their dry docks, with two more still in the Indian Ocean, according to the latest reports from that part of the world, and Pacific Fleet's other two in Long Beach, also dry docked and unable to enter service-and that, really, was that, so far as the Marianas were concerned. He had to formalize his intelligence estimate with a few pages of analytical prose, but what it came down to was that America could sting his country, but her ability to project real power was now a thing of the past. The realization of that meant that there was little likelihood of a serious contest for the immediate future.
Jackson didn't mind being the only passenger in the VC-20B. A man could get used to this sort of treatment, and he had to admit that the Air Force's executive birds were better than the Navy's—in fact the Navy didn't have many, and those were mainly modified P-3 Orions whose turboprop engines provided barely more than half the speed of the twin-engine executive jet. With only a brief refueling stop at Travis Air Force Base, outside San Francisco, he'd made the hop to Hawaii in under nine hours, and it was something to feel good about until on final approach to Hickam he got a good look at the naval base and saw that Enterprise was still in the graving dock. The first nuclear-powered carrier and bearer of the U.S. Navy's proudest name would be out of this one. The aesthetic aspect of it was bad enough. More to the point, it would have been far better to have two decks to use instead of one.
"You have your task force, boy," Robby whispered to himself. And it was the one every naval aviator wanted. Task Force 77, titularly the main air arm of Pacific Fleet, and, one carrier or not, it was his, and about to sail in harm's way. Perhaps fifty years earlier there had been an excitement to it. Perhaps when PacFlt's main striking arm had sailed under Bill Halsey or Ray Spruance, the people in command had looked forward to it. The wartime movies said so, and so did the official logs, but how much of that had been mere posturing, Jackson wondered now, contemplating his own command. Did Halsey and Spruance lose sleep with the knowledge that they were sending young men to death, or was the world simply a different place then, where war was considered as natural an event as a polio epidemic—another scourge that was now a thing of the past. To be Commander Task Force 77 was a life's ambition, but he'd never really wanted to fight a war—oh, sure, he admitted to himself, as a new ensign, or even as far as lieutenant's rank, he'd relished the idea of air combat, knowing that as a U.S. naval aviator he was the best in the world, highly trained and exquisitely equipped, and wanting to prove it someday. But over lime he'd seen too many friends die in accidents. He'd gotten a kill in the Persian Gulf War, and four more over the Med one clear and starry night. But those last four had been an accident. He'd killed men for no good reason at all, and though he never spoke of it to others, not even his wife. It gnawed