Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [410]
The first word in Washington came via satellite. One of NSA's orbiting "hitchhiker" ELINT birds happened to be overhead to record the termination of signal—that was the NSA term for it—from three AEW aircraft. Other NSA listening posts recorded radio chatter that lasted for several minutes before ending. Analysts were trying to make sense of it now, the report in Ryan's hands told him.
Only one kill, the Colonel told himself. Well, he'd have to be content with that. His wingman had bagged the last of the F-15J's. The southern element had gotten three, and the Strike Eagles had gotten the other four when their support had been cut off, leaving them suddenly and unexpectedly vulnerable. Presumably the ZORRO team had gotten the third E-767. On the whole, not a bad night's work, but a long one, he thought, forming his flight of four back up for the rendezvous with the tanker and the three hours back to Shemya. The hardest part was the enforced radio silence. Some of his people had to be counting coup in a big way, full of themselves in the way of fighter pilots who had done the job and lived to tell the tale, and wanting to talk through it. That would change shortly, he thought, the enforced silence forcing him to think about his first-ever air-to-air kill. Thirty people on the aircraft. Damn, he was supposed to feel good about a kill, wasn't he? So why didn't he?
Something interesting had just happened, Dutch Claggett thought. They were still catching bits and pieces of the SSK in their area, but whoever it was, it had turned north and away from them, allowing Tennessee to remain on station. In the way of submarines on patrol, he'd come close enough to the surface to put up his ESM antenna and track the Japanese radar aircraft for the past day or so, learning what he could for possible forwarding to others. Electronic-intelligence gathering had been a submarine mission since before his application to Annapolis, and his crew included two electronics techs who showed a real aptitude for it. But they'd had two on the monitoring systems that had just gone—poof! Then they'd caught some radio chatter, excited by the sound of it, and one by one those voices had gone off the air, somewhere to his north.
"You suppose we just got up on the scoreboard, Cap'n?" Lieutenant Shaw asked, expecting the Captain to know, because captains were supposed to know everything, even though they didn't.
"Seems that way."
"Conn, sonar."
"Conn, aye."
"Our friend is snorting again, bearing zero-zero-nine, probable CZ contact," the sonar chief thought.
"I'll start the track," Shaw said, heading aft for the plotting table.
"So what happened?" Durling asked.
"We killed three of their radar aircraft, and the strike force annihilated their fighter patrol." This was not a time, however, for gloating.
"This is the twitchiest part?"
Ryan nodded. "Yes, sir. We need them confused for a while longer, but for now they know something is happening. They know—"
"They know it might be a real war after all. Any word on Koga?"
"Not yet."
It was four in the morning and all three men were showing it. Koga was over the stress period, for the moment, trying to use his head instead of his emotions while his two hosts—that was how he thought of them, rather to his surprise—drove him around and wondered how smart it was to have left the one guard alive outside Yamata's condo. He would be up and moving by now? Would he call the police? Someone else? What would result from the night's adventure?
"How do I know that I can trust you?" Koga asked after a lengthy silence.
Clark's hands squeezed the wheel hard enough to leave fingerprints in the plastic. It was the movies and TV that caused dumbass questions like that. In those media, spies did all manner of complicated things in the hope of outsmarting the equally brilliant adversaries against whom they were pitted. Reality was different. You kept