Debt of Honor - Tom Clancy [414]
"It has to be Cook," Adler said again. "Nobody else on the delegation knows, and Chris does my informal contacts with their number-two, Seiji Nagumo." The diplomat paused, then let his anger show. "It's just perfect, isn't it?"
"Espionage investigation?" Murray asked. Significantly, he saw, the President let Ryan handle the answer.
"Fast and quiet, Dan."
"And then?" Adler wanted to know.
"If it's him, we flip the bastard right over." Murray nodded at once on hearing the FBI euphemism.
"What do you mean, Jack?" Durling asked.
"It's a real opportunity. They think they have a good intel source, and they've shown the willingness to use the information from it. Okay," Jack said, "we can use that to our advantage. We give them some juicy information and then we stick it right up their ass."
The most immediate need was to buttress the air defenses for the Home Islands. That realization caused no small amount of thinking at Japanese defense headquarters, and most uncomfortably, it was based on partial information, not the precise sort of data that had been used to prepare the overall operational plan that the military high command was trying to stick with. The best radar warning systems their country owned were seaborne on the four Kongo-class Aegis destroyers patrolling off the northern Marianas.
They were formidable ships with self-contained air-defense systems. Not quite as mobile as the E-767's, they were more powerful, however, and able to take care of themselves. Before dawn, therefore, an order was flashed out for the four-ship squadron to race north to establish a radar-picket line east of the Home Islands. After all, the U.S. Navy wasn't doing anything, and if their country's defenses came back together, there was yet a good chance for a diplomatic solution.
On Mutsu, Admiral Sato saw the logic of it when he receipted the signal and gave orders for his ships to go to their maximum sustained speed. Nonetheless, he was concerned. He knew that his SPY radar systems could detect stealthy aircraft, something the Americans had demonstrated in tests against his own, and his ships were sufficiently powerful that American aircraft would not lightly engage them. What worried him was that for the first time his country was not acting but reacting to American moves. That, he hoped, was temporary.
"That's interesting," Jones observed at once. The traces were only a few minutes old, but there were two of them, probably representing more than two ships in a tight formation, making noise and with a slight northerly bearing change.
"Surface ships, sure as hell," OT 2/c Boomer observed. "This looks like pounding—" He stopped when Jones circled another trace in red.
"And that's a blade-rate. Thirty-plus knots, and that means warships in one big hurry." Jones walked over to the phone and called ComSubPac.
"Bart? Ron? We have something here. That 'can squadron that's been operating around Pagan."
"What about it?" Mancuso asked.
"They seem to be doing a speed-run north. We have anybody up waiting for them?" Then Jones remembered several inquiries about the waters around Honshu. Mancuso wasn't telling him everything, as was to be expected for operational matters. The way he evaded the question would be the real answer, the civilian thought.
"Can you plot me a course?"
Bingo. "Give us a little while, an hour maybe? The data is still a little fuzzy, Skipper."
The voice was not overly disappointed at the answer, Jones noted. "Aye, sir. We'll keep you posted."
"Good work, Ron."
Jones replaced the phone and looked around. "Senior Chief? Let's start doing a plot on these traces." Somewhere north, he thought, somebody was waiting. He wondered who it might be, and came up with one answer.
Time was working in the opposite direction now. Hiroshi Goto opened his cabinet meeting at ten in the morning, local time, which was midnight in Washington, where his negotiators were. It was clear that