Debt of honor

Ehrenschuld ( Debt of Honor in English ) is a political thriller by Tom Clancy from 1994. The book is part of the Jack Ryan series.

Ryan is named US National Security Advisor when the Japanese government, led by a group of large industrialists ( zaibatsu ), wages war with the United States.

The book refers, among other things, to Siberia as the “Northern Raw Material Area”, which the Clancy novel In the Sign of the Dragon , published in 2000, takes up again. The novel transitions seamlessly into the following work, Orders from Above .

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In New York , the Japanese industrialist Raizo Yamata buys the majority stake in the Columbus Group fund company . George Winston, the company's founder and chairman, leaves the company and devotes himself to his private life. Yamata then flies on to Saipan , the main island of the Northern Mariana Islands , where his parents fell to their deaths from a cliff after being conquered by the United States during World War II . Only he survived then. On Saipan he bought a large piece of land where his parents' house used to be. At the same time he has secret nuclear missiles built to pursue his goals.

At the same time, a tragic accident happened on Interstate 40 in East Tennessee, triggered by the negligent quality control of Japanese imported cars. This is followed by a “Trade Reform Act”, a law that severely restricts the ability of the Japanese to act in the USA . The Japanese economy is badly damaged. Some Japanese industrialists, led by Raizo Yamata, then crash the New York Stock Exchange . While the Americans are getting out of the situation surprisingly well, Japanese troops are occupying the American Northern Mariana Islands , a group of islands in the Pacific, and are pushing the American navy, weakened by disarmament, back out of this area.

While the American agent John Clark and Domingo Chavez sudden and unexpected spy shops meet in Japan, Jack Ryan tried as national security adviser to President Roger Durling in security issues as well as possible to advise. A short time later, an unofficial war rages over the Mariana Islands.

The use of aircraft carriers , AWACS , fighter jets and three Comanche forces the Japanese to surrender . Clark and Chavez free ex-Prime Minister Mogataru Koga. The current Prime Minister Goto, who is influenced by Yamata, had put Koga out of the way.

Not long afterwards, Roger Durling named Jack Ryan vice president . Kamikaze instincts awaken in a JAL pilot who lost half his family in this war . With his plane, a Boeing 747 , he flies to the Capitol in Washington, where Congress is currently meeting. The exploding fuel of the plane and the collapse of the building caused the death of President Durling and almost all of the top leadership of the United States , as well as Jack Ryan, who at the time was in an underground connecting tunnel with his family on the way from the White House to the Capitol President of the United States.