by Tom Clancy
“That’s an escalation,” Cook warned. “We want to be careful about that.”
“What about their SS-19s?” the second NIO inquired delicately.
“They think they need them. It will not be easy to talk them out of ’em.” Cook looked around the table. “We have nuked their country, remember. It’s a very sensitive subject, and we’re dealing with people motivated by paranoia. I recommend caution on that issue.”
“Noted,” Ryan said as he stood. “You know what I want, people. Get to work.” It felt a little good to be able to give an order like that, but less so to have to do it, and less still in anticipation of the answers he would receive for his questions. But you had to start somewhere.
“Another hard day?” Nomuri asked.
“I thought with Yamata gone it would get easier,” Kazuo said. He shook his head, leaning back against the fine wood rim of the tub. “I was wrong.”
The others nodded curt agreement at their friend’s observation, and they all missed Taoka’s sexual stories now. They needed the distraction, but only Nomuri knew why they had ended.
“So what is going on? Now Goto says that we need America. Last week they were our enemies, and now we are friendly again? This is very confusing for a simple person like me,” Chet said, rubbing his closed eyes, and wondering what the bait would draw. Developing his rapport with these men had not been easy because they and he were so different, and it was to be expected that he would envy them, and they him. He was an entrepreneur, they thought, who ran his own business, and they the senior salarymen of major corporations. They had security. He had independence. They were expected to be overworked. He marched to his own drum. They had more money. He had less stress. And now they had knowledge, and he did not.
“We have confronted America,” one of their number said.
“So I gather. Isn’t that highly dangerous?”
“In the short term, yes,” Taoka said, letting the blisteringly hot water soothe his stress-knotted muscles. “Though I think we have already won.”
“But won what, my friend? I feel I have started watching a mystery in the middle of the show, and all I know is that there’s a pretty, mysterious girl on the train to Osaka.” He referred to a dramatic convention in Japan, mysteries based on how efficiently the nation’s trains ran.
“Well, as my boss tells it,” another senior aide decided to explain, “it means true independence for our country.”
“Aren’t we independent already?” Nomuri asked in open puzzlement. “There are hardly any American soldiers here to annoy us anymore.”
“And those under guard now,” Taoka observed. “You don’t understand. Independence means more than politics. It means economic independence, too. It means not going to others for what we need to survive.”
“It means the Northern Resource Area, Kazuo,” another of their number said, going too far, and knowing it from the way two pairs of eyes opened in warning.
“I wish it would mean shorter days and getting home on time for a change instead of sleeping in a damned coffin-tube two or three nights a week,” one of the more alert ones said to alter the course of the conversation.
Taoka grunted. “Yes, how can one get a girl in there?” The guffaws that followed that one were forced, Nomuri thought.
“You salarymen and your secrets! Ha!” the CIA officer snapped. “I hope you do better with your women.” He paused. “Will all this affect my business?” A good idea, he thought, to ask a question like that.
“For the better, I should think,” Kazuo said. There was general agreement on that point.
“We must all be patient. There will be hard times before the good ones truly come.”
“But they will come,” another suggested confidently. “The really hard part is behind us.”
Not if I can help it, Nomuri didn’t tell them. But what the hell did “Northern Resource Area” mean? It was so like the intelligence business that he knew he’d heard something important, quite without knowing what the hell it was all about. Then he had to cover himself with a lengthy discourse on his new relationship with the hostess, to be sure, again, that they would remember this, and not his questions.
It was a shame to have to arrive in the darkness, but that was mere fortune. Half of the fleet had diverted for Guam, which had a far better natural harbor, because all the people in these islands had to see the Japanese Navy—Admiral Sato was weary of the “Self-Defense Force” title. His was a navy now, composed of fighting ships and fighting men that had tasted battle, after a fashion, and if historians would later comment that their battle had not been a real one or a fair one, well, what military textbook did not cite the value of surprise in offensive operations? None that he knew of, the Admiral told himself, seeing the loom of Mount Takpochao through his binoculars. There was already a powerful radar there, up and operating, his electronics technicians had told him an hour earlier. Yet another important factor in defending what was again his country’s native soil.
He was alone on the starboard bridge wing in the pre-dawn gloom. Such an odd term, he thought. Gloom? Not at all. There was a wonderful peace to this, especially when you were alone to keep it to yourself, and your mind started editing the distractions out. Above his head was the faint buzz of electronic gear, like a hive of slumbering bees, and that noise was soon blanked out. There was also the distant hum of the ship’s systems, mostly the engines, and air-conditioning blowers, he knew, shrugging it off. There were no human noises to trouble him. The captain of Mutsu enforced good bridge discipline. The sailors didn’t speak unless they had reason to, concentrating on their duties as they were supposed to do. One by one, Admiral Sato eliminated the extraneous noises. That left only the sound of the sea, the wonderful swish of steel hull parting the waves. He looked down to see it, the fan-shaped foam whose white was both brilliant and faint at the same time, and aft the wide swath was a pleasant fluorescent green from the disturbance of phytoplankton, tiny creatures that came to the surface at night for reasons Sato had never troubled himself to understand. Perhaps to enjoy the moon and stars, he told himself with a smile in the darkness. Ahead was the island of Saipan, just a space on the horizon blacker than the darkness itself; it seemed so because it occulted the stars on the western horizon, and a seaman’s mind knew that where there were no stars on a clear night, then there had to be land. The lookouts at their stations atop the forward superstructure had seen it long before him, but that didn’t lessen the pleasure of his own discovery, and as with sailors of every generation there was something special to a landfall, because every voyage ended with discovery of some sort. And so had this one.
More sounds. First the jerky whirs of electrical motors turning radar systems, then something else. He knew he was late noticing it, off to starboard, a deep rumble, like something tearing, growing rapidly in intensity until he knew it could only be the roar of an approaching aircraft. He lowered his binoculars and looked off to the right, seeing nothing until his eyes caught movement close aboard, and two dart shapes streaked overhead. Mutsu trembled in their wake, giving Admiral Sato a chill followed by a flush of anger. He pulled open the door to the wheelhouse.
“What the hell was that?”
“Two F-3s conducting an attack drill,” the officer of the deck replied. “They’ve been tracking them in CIC for several minutes. We had them illuminated with our missile trackers.”
“Will someone tell those ‘wild eagles’ that flying directly over a ship in the dark risks damage to us, and foolish death to them!”
“But, Admiral—” the OOD tried to say.
“But we are a valuable fleet unit and I do not wish one of my ships to have to spend a month in the yard having her mast replaced because some damned fool of an aviator couldn’t see us in the dark!”
“Hai. I will make the call at once.”
Spoiling my morning that way, Sato fumed, going back out to sit in the leather chair and doze off.
Was he the first guy to figure i
t out? Winston asked himself. Then he asked himself why he should find that surprising. The FBI and the rest were evidently trying to put things back together, and their main effort was probably to defend against fraud. Worse, they were also going over all the records, not just those of the Columbus Group. It had to be a virtual ocean of data, and they would have been unfamiliar with the stuff, and this was a singularly bad time for on-the-job training.
The TV told the story. The Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank had been on all the morning talk shows, which had to have kept his driver busy in D.C. this day, followed by a strong public statement in the White House Press Room, followed by a lengthy interview on CNN. It was working, after a fashion, and TV showed that as well. A lot of people had shown up at banks before lunch, surprised there to find piles of cash trucked out the previous night to make what in military terms was probably called a show of force. Though the Chairman had evidently jawboned every major banker in the country, the reverse was true of the tellers meeting depositors at their windows: Oh, you want cash? Well, of course we have all you need. In not a few cases, by the time people got home they started to feel a new variety of paranoia—keep all this cash at home?—and by afternoon some had even begun coming back to redeposit.
That would be Buzz Fiedler’s work, too, and a good man he was, Winston thought, for an academic. The Treasury Secretary was only buying time, and doing so with money, but it was a good tactic, good enough to confuse the public into believing things were not as bad as they appeared.
Serious investors knew better. Things were bad, and the play in the banks was a stopgap measure at best. The Fed was dumping cash into the system. Though a good idea for a day or so, the net effect by the end of the week had to be to weaken the dollar further still, and already American T-Bills were about as popular in the global financial community as plague rats. Worst of all, though Fiedler had prevented a banking panic for the time being, you could hold back a panic only so long, and unless you could restore confidence in a real way, the longer you played stopgap games, the worse would be the renewed panic if those measures failed, for then there would be no stopping it. That was what Winston really expected.
Because the Gordian knot around the throat of the investment system would not soon be untied.
Winston thought he had decoded the likely cause of the event, but along the way he’d learned that there might not be a solution. The sabotage at DTC had been the master stroke. Fundamentally, no single person knew what he owned, what he’d paid for it, when he’d gotten it, or what cash he had left; and the absence of knowledge was metastatic. Individual investors didn’t know. Institutions didn’t know. The trading houses didn’t know. Nobody knew.
How would the real panic start? In short order, pension funds would have to write their monthly checks—but would the banks honor them? The Fed would encourage them to do so, but somewhere along the line there would be one bank that would not, due to troubles of its own—just one, such things always began in a single place, after all—and that would start yet another cascade, and the Fed would have to step in again by boosting the money supply, and that could start a hyperinflationary cycle. That was the ultimate nightmare. Winston well remembered the way that inflation had affected the market and the country in the late 1970s, the “malaise” that had indeed been real, the loss of national confidence that had manifested itself with nutcases building cabins in the Northwestern mountains and bad movies about life after the apocalypse. And even then inflation had topped out at what? Thirteen percent or so. Twenty-percent interest rates. A country strangling from nothing more than the loss of confidence that had resulted from gasoline lines and a vacillating president. Those times might well seem nostalgic indeed.
This would be far worse, something not like America at all, something from the Weimar Republic, something from Argentina in the bad old days, or Brazil under military rule. And it wouldn’t stop just with America, would it? Just as in 1929, the ripple effects would spread far, crippling economies across the world, well beyond even Winston’s capacity for prediction. He would not be badly hurt personally, George knew. Even the 90-percent diminution of his personal wealth would leave a vast and comfortable sum—he always hedged some of his bets on issues that owned physically real things, like oil or gold; and he had his own gold holdings, real metal bars in vaults, like a miser of old—and since major depressions were ultimately deflationary, the relative value of his diverse holdings would actually increase after a time. He knew that he and his family would survive and thrive, but the cost to those less fortunate than himself was economic and social chaos. And he wasn’t in the business just for himself, was he? Over time he’d come to think long at night about the little guys who’d seen his TV ads and entrusted him with their savings. It was a magic word, trust. It meant that you had an obligation to the people who gave it to you. It meant that they believed what you said about yourself, and that you had to prove that it was real, not merely to them, but to yourself as well. Because if you failed, then houses were not bought, kids not educated, and the dreams of real people not unlike yourself would die aborning. Bad enough just in America, Winston thought, but this event would—could—affect the entire world.
And he had to know what he’d done. It was not an accident. It had been a well-considered plan, executed with style. Yamata. That clever son of a bitch, Winston thought. Perhaps the first Japanese investor he’d ever respected. The first one who’d really understood the game both tactically and strategically. Well, that was sure as hell the case. The look on his face, those dark eyes over the champagne glass. Why didn’t you see it then? So that was the game after all, wasn’t it?
But no. It couldn’t be the entire game. A part of it, perhaps, a tactic aimed at something else. What? What could be so important that Raizo Yamata was willing to kiss off his personal fortune, and along the way destroy the very global markets upon which his own corporations and his own national economy depended? That was not something to enter the mind of a businessman, certainly not something to warm the soul of a maven on the Street.
It was strange to have it all figured out and yet not understand the sense of it. Winston looked out the window as the sun set on New York Harbor. He had to tell somebody, and that somebody had to understand what this was all about. Fiedler? Maybe. Better somebody who knew the Street ... and knew other things, too. But who?
“Are they ours?” All four lay alee in Laolao Bay. One of their number was tucked alongside an oiler, doubtless taking on fuel.
Oreza shook his head. “Paint’s wrong. The Navy paints its ships darker, bluer, like.”
“They look like serious ships, man.” Burroughs handed the binoculars back.
“Billboard radars, vertical-launch cells for missiles, antisub helicopters. They’re Aegis ‘cans, like our Burke class. They’re serious, all right. Airplanes are afraid of ’em.” As Portagee watched, a helicopter lifted off one and headed for the beach.
“Report in?”
“Yeah, good idea.”
Burroughs went into the living room and put the batteries back in his phone. The idea of completely depowering it was probably unnecessary, but it was safe, and neither man was interested in finding out how the Japanese treated spies, for that was what they were. It was also awkward, putting the antenna through the hole in the bottom of the serving bowl and then holding it next to your head, but it did give a certain element of humor to the exercise, and they needed a reason to smile at something.
“NMCC, Admiral Jackson.”
“You have the duty again, sir?”
“Well, Master Chief, I guess we both do. What do you have to report?”
“Four Aegis destroyers offshore, east side of the island. One’s taking fuel on now from a small fleet oiler. They showed up just after dawn. Two more car carriers at the quay, another on the horizon outbound. We counted twenty fighter aircraft a while ago. About half of them are F-15s with twin tails. The other half are single tails, but I don’t know the type. Ot
herwise nothing new to tell you about.”
Jackson was looking at a satellite photo only an hour old showing four ships in line-ahead formation, and fighters dispersed at both the airfields. He made a note and nodded.
“What’s it like there?” Robby asked. “I mean, they hassling anybody, arrests, that sort of thing?” He heard the voice at the other end snort.
“Negative, sir. Everybody’s just nice as can be. Hell, they’re on TV all the time, the public-access cable channel, telling us how much money they plan to spend here and all the things they’re gonna do for us.” Jackson heard the disgust in the man’s voice.
“Fair enough. I might not always be here. I do have to get a little sleep, but this line is set aside for your exclusive use now, okay?”
“Roger that, Admiral.”
“Play it real cool, Master Chief. No heroic shit, okay?”
“That’s kid stuff, sir. I know better,” Oreza assured him.
“Then close down, Oreza. Good work.” Jackson heard the line go dead before he set his phone down. “Better you than me, man,” he added to himself. Then he looked over at the next desk.
“Got it on tape,” an Air Force intelligence officer told him. “He confirms the satellite data. I’m inclined to believe that he’s still safe.”
“Let’s keep him that way. I don’t want anybody calling out to them without my say-so,” Jackson ordered.
“Roge-o, sir.” I don’t think we can anyway, he didn’t add.
“Tough day?” Paul Robberton asked.
“I’ve had worse,” Ryan answered. But this crisis was too new for so confident an evaluation. “Does your wife mind ... ?”
“She’s used to having me away, and we’ll get a routine figured out in a day or so.” The Secret Service agent paused. “How’s the Boss doing?”