Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [411]
"Sir, we just put our lives at risk for you, but, okay, don't trust us at all. I'm not dumb enough to tell you what to do. I don't know your politics well enough for that. What I'm telling you is very simple. We will be doing things—what all of them are, I do not know anyway, so I can't tell you. We want to end this war with a minimum of violence, but there will be violence. You also want the war to end, right?"
"Of course I want it to end," Koga said, his manners not helped by his fatigue.
"Well, sir, you do whatever you think is best, okay? You see, Mr. Koga, you don't have to trust us, but we sure as hell have to trust you to do what's best for your country and for ours." Clark's comment, exasperated as it was, turned out to be the best thing he could have said.
"Oh." The politician thought that one over. "Yes. That's right, isn't it?"
"Where can we drop you off?"
"Kimura's home," Koga said at once.
"Fine." Clark dredged up the location and turned the car onto Route 122 to head for it. Then he reminded himself that he'd learned one highly important thing this night, and that after getting this guy to a place of relative safety, his top priority was getting that information to Washington. The empty streets helped, and though he wished for coffee to keep himself alert, it was a mere forty minutes to the crowded neighborhood of diminutive tract homes where the MITI official lived. The lights were already on when they pulled up to the house, and they just let Koga out to walk to the door. Isamu Kimura answered the door and took his guest inside with a mouth almost as wide as the entrance to his home.
Who ever said these people didn't show emotion? Clark asked himself.
"Who do you suppose the leaker is?" Ding asked, still in the backseat.
"Good boy—you caught that, too."
"Hey, I'm the only college graduate in the car, Mr. C." Ding opened the computer to draft the dispatch to Langley, again via Moscow.
"They did what?" Yamata snarled into the phone.
"This is serious." It was General Arima, and he'd just gotten the word from Tokyo himself. "They smashed our air defenses and just went away afterwards."
"How?" the industrialist demanded. Hadn't they told him that the Kami aircraft were invincible?
"They don't know how yet, but I'm telling you this is very serious. They have the ability to raid the Home Islands now."
Think, Yamata told himself, shaking his head to clear the cobwebs. "General, they still cannot invade our islands, can they? They can sting us, but they cannot really hurt us, and as long as we have nuclear weapons…"
"Unless they try something else. The Americans are not acting as we have been given to expect."
That remark stung the next Governor of Saipan. Today was supposed to have been the day on which he'd begin his campaign. Well, yes, he'd overestimated the effect his action would have on the American financial markets, but they had crippled the American fleet, and they had occupied the islands, and America did not have the ability to storm even one of the Marianas, and America did not have the political will to launch a nuclear attack on his country. Therefore they were still ahead of the game. Was it to be expected that America would not fight back somewhat? Of course not. Yamata lifted his TV controller and switched it on, catching the beginning of a CNN Headline News broadcast, and there was the American correspondent, standing right on the edge of some dock or other, and there behind him were two American carriers, still in their docks, still unable to do anything.
"What does intelligence tell us about the Indian Ocean?" he asked the General.
"The two American carriers are still there," Arima assured