Debt of Honor

by Tom Clancy

  “See you around six-thirty, Paul.”

  “Yeah.” Robberton lay right down, giving every indication of someone who could go to sleep at will. A useful talent, Ryan thought.

  “What was that all about?” Caroline Ryan demanded when her husband returned to the bedroom. Jack sat down on the bed to explain.

  “Cathy, uh, tomorrow at Hopkins, there’s going to be somebody with you. Her name is Andrea Price. She’s with the Secret Service. And she’ll be following you around.”

  “Why?”

  “Cathy, we have several problems now. The Japanese have attacked the U.S. Navy, and have occupied a couple of islands. Now, you can’t—”

  “They did what?”

  “You can’t tell that to anyone,” her husband went on. “Do you understand? You can’t tell that to anybody, but since you are going to be with some Japanese people tomorrow, and because of who I am, the Secret Service wants to have somebody around you, just to make totally certain that things are okay.” There would be more to it than that. The Secret Service was limited in manpower, and was not the least bit reticent about asking for assistance from local police forces. The Baltimore City Police, which maintained a high-profile presence at Johns Hopkins at all times—the hospital complex was not located in the best of areas—would probably assign a detective to back up Ms. Price.

  “Jack, are we in any danger?” Cathy asked, remembering distant times and distant terrors, when she’d been pregnant with little Jack, when the Ulster Liberation Army had invaded their home. She remembered how pleased she’d been, and the shame she’d felt for it, when the last of them had been executed for multiple murder—ending, she’d thought, the worst and most fearful episode of her life.

  For his part, Jack realized that it was just one more thing that they hadn’t thought through. If America were at war, he was the National Security Advisor to the President, and, yes, that made him a high-value target. And his wife. And his three children. Irrational? What about war was not?

  “I don’t think so,” he replied after a moment’s consideration, “but, well, we might want to—we might have some additional houseguests. 1 don’t know. I’ll have to ask.”

  “You said they attacked our navy?”

  “Yes, honey, but you can’t—”

  “That means war, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t know, honey.” He was so exhausted that he was asleep thirty seconds after hitting the pillow, and his last conscious thought was a recognition that he knew very little of what he needed to know in order to answer his wife’s questions, or, for that matter, his own.

  Nobody was sleeping in lower Manhattan, at least nobody whom others might think important. It occurred to more than one tired trading executive to observe that they were really earning their money now, but the truth of the matter was that they were accomplishing very little. Proud executives all, they looked around trading rooms filled with computers whose collective value was something only the accounting department knew, and whose current utility was approximately zero. The European markets would soon open. And do what? everyone wondered. There was ordinarily a night-watch here whose job it was to trade European equities, to keep track of the Eurodollar market, the commodities and metals market, and all the economic activity that occurred on the eastern side of the Atlantic as well as the western. On most days it was like the prologue to a book, a precursor to the real action, interesting but not overly vital except, perhaps, for flavor, because the real substance was decided here in New York City.

  But none of that was true today. There was no guessing what would happen this day. Today Europe was the only game in town, and all of the rules had been swept away. The people who manned the computers for this part of the watch cycle were often considered second-string by those who showed up at eight in the morning, which was both untrue and unfair, but in any community there had to be internal competition. This time, as they showed up at their accustomed and ungodly hour, the people who did this regularly noted the presence of front-row executives, and felt a combination of unease and exhilaration. Here was their chance to show their stuff. And here was their chance to screw up, live and in color.

  It started exactly at four in the morning, Eastern Standard Time.

  “Treasuries.” The word was spoken simultaneously in twenty houses as European banks that still had enormous quantities of U.S. T-Bills as a hedge against the struggling European economies and their currencies suddenly felt quite uneasy about holding them. It seemed odd to some that the word had been slow to get out to their European cousins on Friday, but it was always that way, really, and the opening moves, everyone in New York thought, were actually rather cautious. It was soon clear why. There were plenty of “asks,” but not many “bids.” People were trying to sell Treasury Notes, but the interest in buying them was less enthusiastic. The result was prices that dropped just as fast as European confidence in the dollar.

  “This is a steal, down three thirty-seconds already. What can we do?” That question, too, was asked in more than one place, and in each the answer was identical:

  “Nothing,” a word in every case spoken with disgust. There followed something else, usually a variant of Fucking Europeans, depending on the linguistic peculiarities of the senior executives in question. So it had started again, a run on the dollar. And America’s biggest weapon for fighting back was out of business because of a computer program everyone had trusted. The No Smoking signs in several of the trading rooms were ignored. They didn’t have to worry about ashes in the equipment, did they? They really couldn’t use the fucking computers for anything today. It was, one executive snorted to a colleague, a good day for some maintenance on the systems. Fortunately, not everybody felt that way.

  “Okay, here’s where it started, then?” George Winston asked. Mark Gant ran his finger down the screen display.

  “Bank of China, Bank of Hong Kong, Imperial Cathay Bank. They bought these up about four months ago, hedging against the yen, and very successfully, it appears. So, Friday, they dumped them to cash in and bought up a truckload of Japanese treasuries. With the movement that happened here, it looks like they turned twenty-two percent on the overall transaction.”

  They were the first, Winston saw, and being first in the trend, they cashed in big. That sort of hit was of a magnitude to cause more than a few expensive dinners in Hong Kong, a city well suited to the indulgence.

  “Look innocent to you?” he asked Gant with a stifled yawn.

  The executive shrugged. He was tired, but having the boss back in the saddle gave everyone new energy. “Innocent, hell! It’s a brilliant move. They saw something coming, I suppose, or they were just lucky.”

  Luck, Winston thought, there was always that. Luck was real, something any senior trader would admit over drinks, usually after two or three, the number required to get past the usual “brilliance” bullshit. Sometimes it just felt right, and you did it because of that, and that’s all there was to it. If you were lucky, it worked, and if not, you hedged.

  “Keep going,” he ordered.

  “Well, then other banks started doing the same thing.” The Columbus Group had some of the most sophisticated computer systems on the Street, able to track any individual issue and category of issues over time, and Gant was a quintessential computer jockey. They next watched the sell-off of other T-Bills by other Asian banks. Interestingly, the Japanese banks were slower off the mark than he would have expected. It was no disgrace to be a little behind Hong Kong. The Chinese were good at this thing, especially those trained by the Brits, who had largely invented modern central banking and were still pretty slick at it. But the Japs were faster than the Thais, Winston thought, or at least they should have been ...

  It was instinct again, just the gut-call of a guy who knew how to work the Street: “Check Japanese treasuries, Mark. ”

  Gant typed in a command, and the rapid advance in the value of the yen was obvious—so much so, in fact, that they hardly needed to track it
via computer. “Is this what you want?”

  Winston leaned down, looking at the screen. “Show me what Bank of China did when they cashed in.”

  “Well, they sold off to the Eurodollar market and bought yen. I mean, it’s the obvious play—”

  “But look who they bought the yen from,” Winston suggested.

  “And what they paid for it ...” Gant turned his head and looked at his boss.

  “You know why I was always honest here, Mark? You know why I never screwed around, not ever, not even once, not even when I had an in-the-bank sure thing?” George asked. There was more than one reason, of course, but why confuse the issue? He pressed his fingertip to the screen, actually leaving a fingerprint on the glass. He almost laughed at the symbolism. “That’s why.”

  “That doesn’t really mean anything. The Japanese knew they could jack it up some and—” Gant didn’t quite get it yet, Winston saw. He needed to hear it in his own terms.

  “Find the trend, Mark. Find the trend there.” Well, son of a bitch, he told himself, heading to the men’s room. The trend is my friend. Then he thought of something else:

  Fuck with my financial market, will you?

  It wasn’t much consolation. He had given his business over to a predator, Winston realized, and the damage was well and truly done. His investors had trusted him and he had betrayed that trust. Washing his hands, he looked up into the mirror over the sink, seeing the eyes of a man who’d left his post, deserted his people.

  But you’re back now, by God, and there’s a ton of work to be done.

  Pasadena had finally sailed, more from embarrassment than anything else, Jones thought. He’d listened to Bart Mancuso’s phone conversation with CINCPAC, explaining that the submarine was loaded with weapons and so filled up with food that her passageways were completely covered with cartons of canned goods, enough for sixty days or more at sea. That was a sign of the not-so-good old days, Jones thought, remembering what the long deployments had been like, and so USS Pasadena, warship of the U.S. Navy, was now at sea, heading west at about twenty knots, using a quiet screw, not a speed screw, he thought. Otherwise he might have gotten a hit on her. The submarine had just passed within fifteen nautical miles of a SOSUS emplacement, one of the new ones that could hear the fetal heartbeat of an unborn whale calf. Pasadena didn’t have orders yet, but she’d be in the right place if and when they came, with her crew running constant drills, leaning down, getting that at-sea feeling that came to you when you needed it. That was something.

  Part of him dearly wished to be there, but that was part of his past now.

  “I don’t see nothin’, sir.” Jones blinked and looked back at the fan-fold page he’d selected.

  “Well, you have to look for other things,” Jones said. Only a Marine with a loaded pistol would get him out of SOSUS now. He’d made that clear to Admiral Mancuso, who had in turn made it clear to others. There had been a brief discussion of getting Jones a special commission, perhaps to Commander’s rank, but Ron had quashed that idea himself. He’d left the Navy a Sonarman 1/c, and that was as good a rank as he’d ever wanted. Besides, it would not have looked good to the chiefs who really ran this place and had already accepted him as one of their own.

  Oceanographic Technician 2/c Mike Boomer had been assigned to Jones as personal assistant. The kid had the makings of a good student, Dr. Jones thought, even if he’d left service in P-3s because of chronic airsickness.

  “All these guys are using Prairie-Masker systems when they snort. It sounds like rain on the surface, remember? Rain on the surface is on the thousand-hertz line. So, we look for rain”—Jones slid a weather photo on the table—“where there ain’t no rain. Then we look for sixty-hertz hits, little ones, short ones, brief ones, things you might otherwise ignore, that happen to be where the rain is. They use sixty-hertz generators and motors, right? Then we look for transients, just little dots that look like background noise, that are also where the rain is. Like this.” He marked the sheet with a red pen, then looked to the station’s command master chief, who was leaning over the other side of the table like a curious god.

  “I heard stories about you when I was working the Ref-Tra at Dam Neck. 1 thought they were sea stories.”

  “Got a smoke?” the only civilian in the room asked. The master chief handed one over. The antismoking signs were gone and the ashtrays were out. SOSUS was at war, and perhaps the rest of PacFlt would soon catch up. Jesus, I’m home, Jones told himself. “Well, you know the difference between a sea story and a fairy tale.”

  “What’s that, sir?” Boomer asked.

  “A fairy tale starts, ‘Once upon a time,’ ” Jones said with a smile, marking another 60hz hit on the sheet.

  “And a sea story starts, ‘No shit,’ ” the master chief concluded the joke. Except this little fucker really was that good. “I think you have enough to run a plot, Dr. Jones.”

  “I think we have a track on an SSK, Master Chief.”

  “Shame we can’t prosecute.”

  Ron nodded slowly. “Yeah, me, too, but now we know we can get hits on the guys. It’s still going to be a mother for P-3s to localize them. They’re good boats, and that’s a fact.” They couldn’t get too carried away. All SOSUS did was to generate lines of bearing. If more than one hydrophone set got a hit on the same sound source, you could rapidly triangulate bearings into locations, but those locations were circles, not points, and the circles were as much as twenty miles across. It was just physics, neither friend nor enemy. The sounds that most easily traveled long distances were of the lower frequencies, and for any sort of wave, only the higher frequencies gave the best resolution.

  “We know where to look the next time he snorts, too. Anyway, you can call Fleet Operations and tell them there’s nobody close to the carriers. Here, here, here, surface groups.” He made marks on the paper. “Also heading west at good speed, and not being real covert about it. All target-track bearings are opening. It’s a complete disengagement. They’re not looking for any more trouble.”

  “Maybe that’s good.”

  Jones crushed out the cigarette. “Yeah, Master Chief, maybe it is, if the flags get their shit together.”

  The funny part was that things had actually calmed down. Morning TV coverage of the Wall Street crash was clinically precise, and the analysis exquisite, probably better than Americans were getting at home, Clark thought, what with all the economics professors doing the play-by-play, along with a senior banker for color commentary. Perhaps, a newspaper editorialized, America will rethink her stance vis-à-vis Japan. Was it not clear that the two countries genuinely needed each other, especially now, and that a strong Japan served American interests as well as local ones? Prime Minister Goto was quoted in a conciliatory way, though not in front of a camera, in language that was for him decidedly unusual and widely covered for that reason.

  “Fucking Twilight Zone,” Chavez observed in a quiet moment, breaking language cover because he just had to. What the hell, he thought, they were under Russian operational control now. What rules did matter now?

  “Russkiy, ” his senior replied tolerantly.

  “Da, tovarisch,” was the grumbled reply. “Do you have any idea what’s going on. Is it a war or not?”

  “The rules sure are funny,” Clark said, in English, he realized. It’s getting to me, too.

  There were other gaijin back on the street, most of them apparently Americans, and the looks they were getting were back to the ordinary suspicion and curiosity, the current hostility level down somewhat from the previous week.

  “So what do we do?”

  “We try the Interfax number our friend gave us.” Clark had his report all typed up. It was the only thing he knew to do, except for keeping his contacts active and fishing for information. Surely Washington knew what he had to tell them, he thought, going back into the hotel. The clerk smiled and bowed, a little more politely this time, as they headed to the elevator. Two minutes later they were i
n the room. Clark took the laptop from its carry-case, inserted the phone plug in the back, and switched it on. Another minute, and the internal modem dialed the number he’d gotten over breakfast, linking to a line across the Sea of Japan to the Siberian mainland, thence to Moscow, he supposed. He heard the electronic trilling of a ringing phone and waited for linkup.

  The station chief had gotten over the cringing associated with having a Russian intelligence officer in the embassy communications room, but he hadn’t quite gotten to the whimsy stage yet. The noise from the computer startled him.

  “Very clever technique,” the visitor said.

  “We try.”

  Anyone who had ever used a modem would recognize the sound, the rasp of running water, or perhaps a floor-polishing brush, just a digital hiss, really, of two electronic units attempting to synchronize themselves so that data could be exchanged. Sometimes it took but a few seconds, sometimes as many as five or even ten. In fact, it only took one second or so with these units, and the remaining hiss was actually the random-appearing digital code of 19,200 characters of information crossing the fiberoptic line per second—first in one direction, then the other. When the real transmission was concluded, formal lockup was achieved, and the guy at the other end sent his twenty column-inches for the day. Just to be on the safe side, the Russians would make sure that the report would be carried in two papers the next day, on page 3 in both cases. No sense in being too obvious.

  Then came the hard part for the CIA station chief. On command, he printed two copies of the same report, one of which went to the RVS officer. Was Mary Pat going through change-of-life or something?

  “His Russian is very literary, even classical. Who taught him my language?”