Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [412]
"Then they cannot really hurt us, can they?"
"Well, no, really they cannot." the General admitted. "But we must make other arrangements."
"Then I suggest you make them, Arima-san," Yamata replied in a voice so polite as to constitute a stinging insult.
The worst part was not knowing what had happened. The data links from the three dead Kami aircraft had ended with the elimination of -Two. All the rest of their information was inferred rather than actually known. Ground-based monitoring stations had copied the emissions of -Four and -Six and then seen those emissions stop within the same minute. There had been no obvious alarm for any of the three radar aircraft. They'd just stopped transmitting, leaving nothing more behind than floating debris on the rolling ocean. The fighters—well, they did have tapes of the radio conversations. It had taken less than four minutes for that. First the confident, professionally laconic comments of fighter pilots closing on targets, then a series of What?s. followed by hurried calls to go active with their radars, more calls that they'd been illuminated. One pilot had reported a hit, then immediately gone off the air—but a hit from what? How could the same aircraft that killed the Kamis have gotten the fighters, too? The Americans had only four of their expensive new F-22's. And the Kamis had been tracking those. What evil magic had…? But that was the problem. They didn't know.
The air-defense specialists, and the engineers who had developed the world's finest airborne radar systems, shook their heads, looking down, feeling immense personal disgrace and not knowing why. Of the ten such aircraft built, five were destroyed, and only four others available for service, and all they knew for sure was that they couldn't risk them over water anymore. Orders were also issued to deploy the standby E-2C aircraft that the E-767's had replaced, but those were less capable American designs, and the officers had to accept the fact that somehow the air defenses of their country had been severely compromised.
It was seven in the evening, and Ryan was about to leave for home when the secure fax machine started buzzing. His phone started ringing even before paper appeared.
"Can't you people ever keep secrets?" an accented voice demanded angrily.
"Sergey? What's the problem?"
"Koga is our best chance for terminating hostilities, and someone on your side told the Japanese that he's in contact with you!" Golovko nearly shouted from his home, where it was three in the morning. "Do you want to kill the man?"
"Sergey Nikolay'ch, will you for Christ's sake settle the hell down?" Jack sat back down in his chair, and by this time he had the page to read. It had come directly from the U.S. Embassy communications people in Moscow, doubtless on orders of a sort from the RVS. "Oh, shit." Pause. "Okay, we got him out of trouble, didn't we?"
"You're penetrated at a high level, Ivan Emmetovich."
"Well, you should know how easy it is to do that."
"We're working to find out who it is, I assure you." The voice was still angry.
Wouldn't that be great? Jack thought behind painfully closed eyes. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service testifies in Federal District Court.
"Not many people know this. I'll get back to you."
"I am so pleased to hear that you restrict sensitive information to such trustworthy people, Jack." The line went dead. Ryan depressed the switch and punched up another number from memory.
"Murray."
"Ryan. Dan, I need you here in a hurry." Jack's next call was to Scott Adler. Then he walked off again toward the President's office. The positive news he had to report, Ryan supposed, was that the other side had used important information clumsily. Yamata again, he was sure, acting like a businessman rather than a professional spook. He hadn't even troubled himself to disguise the information he had, not caring that it would also reveal its source. The man didn't know his limitations. Sooner