Debt Of Honor (1994)

by Tom - Jack Ryan 06 Clancy

  Nagumo would have thought My God, had he been a Christian, but his religion was animistic, and his internal reactions were different, though of exactly the same significance. He'd just been called a liar, and the worst part was that the accusation was ... true.

  The Trent Bill, now officially called the Trade Reform Act, was explained to America that very evening, now that the talking heads had used the time to analyze it. Its philosophical simplicity was elegant. Administration spokesmen, and Trent himself on "MacNeil/Lehrer," explained that the law established a small committee of lawyers and technical-trade experts from the Commerce Department, assisted by international-law authorities from the Department of Justice, who would be empowered to analyze foreign trade laws, to draft American trade regulations that matched their provisions as exactly as possible, and then to recommend them to the Secretary of Commerce, who would advise the President. The President in turn had the authority to activate those regulations by executive order. The order could be voided by a simple majority of both houses of Congress, whose authority on such matters was set in the Constitution--that provision would avoid legal challenge on the grounds of separation of powers. The Trade Reform Act further had a "sunset" provision. In four years from enactment, it would automatically cease to exist unless reenacted by Congress and reapproved by the sitting President--that provision made the TRA appear to be a temporary provision whose sole objective was to establish free international trade once and for all. It was manifestly a lie, but a plausible one, even for those who knew it.

  "Now what could be more fair than that?" Trent asked rhetorically on PBS. "All we're doing is to duplicate the laws of other countries. If their laws are fair for American business, then those same laws must also be fair for the industries of other countries. Our Japanese friends"--he smiled--"have been telling us for years that their laws are not discriminatory. Fine. We will use their laws as fairly as they do."

  The entertaining part for Trent was in watching the man on the other side of the table squirm. The former Assistant Secretary of State, now earning over a million dollars a year as senior lobbyist for Sony and Mitsubishi, just sat there, his mind racing for something to say that would make sense, and Trent could see it in his face. He didn't have a thing.

  "This could be the start of a real trade war--" he began, only to be cut off at the ankles.

  "Look, Sam, the Geneva Convention didn't cause any wars, did it? It simply applied the same rules of conduct to all sides in a conflict. If you're saying that the use of Japanese regulations in American ports will cause a war, then there already is a war and you've been working for the other side, haven't you?" His rapid-fire retort was met with five seconds of very awkward silence. There just wasn't an answer to that question.

  "Whoa!" Ryan observed, sitting in the family room of his house, at a decent hour for once.

  "He's got real killer instinct," Cathy observed, looking up from some medical notes.

  "He does," her husband agreed. "Talk about fast. I just got briefed in on this the other day."

  "Well, I think they're right. Don't you?" his wife asked.

  "I think it's going a little fast." Jack paused. "How good are their docs?"

  "Japanese doctors? Not very, by our standards."

  "Really?" The Japanese public-health system had been held up for emulation. Everything over there was "free," after all. "How come?"

  "They salute too much," Cathy replied, her head back down in her notes. "The professor's always right, that sort of thing. The young ones never learn to do it on their own, and by the time they're old enough to become professors themselves, for the most part they forget how."

  "How often are you wrong, O Associate Professor of Ophthalmic Surgery, ma'am?" Jack chuckled.

  "Practically never," Cathy replied, looking up, "but I never tell my residents to stop asking why, either. We have three Japanese fellows at Wilmer now. Good clinicians, good technical docs, but not very flexible. I guess it's a cultural thing. We're trying to train them out of it. It's not easy."

  "The boss is always right ..."

  "Not always, he isn't." Cathy made a notation for a medication change.

  Ryan's head turned, wondering if he'd just learned something important. "How good are they in developing new treatments?"

  "Jack, why do you think they come here to train? Why do you suppose we have so many in the university up on Charles Street? Why do you suppose so many of them stay here?"

  It was nine in the morning in Tokyo, and a satellite feed brought the American evening news shows into executive offices all over the city. Skilled translators were rendering the conversation into their native tongue. VCRs were making a permanent record for a more thorough analysis later, but what the executives heard was clear enough.

  Kozo Matsuda trembled at his desk. He kept his hands in his lap and out of view so that the others in his office could not see them shake. What he heard in two languages--his English was excellent--was bad enough. What he saw was worse. His corporation was already losing money due to ... irregularities in the world market. Fully a third of his company's products went to the United States, and if that segment of his business were in any way interrupted ...

  The interview was followedby a "focus segment" that showed Nissan Courier, still tied up in Baltimore, with her sister ship, Nissan Voyager, swinging at anchor in the Chesapeake Bay. Yet another car carrier had just cleared the Virginia Capes, and the first of the trio was not even halfway unloaded yet. The only reason they'd shown those particular ships was Baltimore's convenient proximity to Washington. The same was happening in the Port of Los Angeles, Seattle, and Jacksonville. As though the cars were being used to transport drugs, Matsuda thought. Part of his mind was outraged, but more of it was approaching panic. If the Americans were serious, then ...

  No, they couldn't be.

  "But what about the possibility of a trade war?" Jim Lehrer asked that Trent person.

  "Jim, I've been saying for years that we've been in a trade war with Japan for a generation. What we've just done is to level the playing field for everyone."

  "But if this situation goes further, won't American interests be hurt?"

  "Jim, what are those interests? Are American business interests worth burning up little children?" Trent shot back at once.

  Matsuda cringed when he heard that. The image was just too striking for a man whose earliest childhood memory was of the early morning of March 10, 1945. Not even three years old, his mother carrying him from his house looking back and seeing the towering flames caused by Curtis LeMay's 21st Bomber Command. For years he'd awakened screaming in the night, and for all his adult life he'd been a committed pacifist. He'd studied history, learned how and why the war had begun, how America had pushed his antecedents into a corner from which there had been only a single escape--and that a false one. Perhaps Yamata was right, he thought, perhaps the entire affair had been of America's making. First, force Japan into a war, then crush them in an effort to forestall the natural ascendancy of a nation destined to challenge American power. For all that, he had never been able to understand how the zaibatsu of the time, members of the Black Dragon Society, had not been able to find a clever way out, for wasn't war just too dreadful an option? Wasn't peace, however humiliating, to be preferred to the awful destruction that came with war?

  It was different now. Now he was one of them, and now he saw what lay in the abyss of not going to war. Were they so wrong then, he asked himself, no longer hearing the TV or his translator. They'd sought real economic stability for their country: the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

  The history books of his youth had called it all a lie, but was it?

  For his country's economy to function, it needed resources, raw materials, but Japan had virtually none except coal, and that polluted the air. Japan needed iron, bauxite, petroleum, needed almost everything to be shipped in, in order to be transformed into finished goods that could be shipped out. They needed cash to pay for
the raw materials, and that cash came from the buyers of the finished products. If America, his country's largest and most important trading partner, suddenly stopped trading, that cash flow would stop. Almost sixty billion dollars.

  There would be various adjustments, of course. Today on the international money markets, the yen would plummet against the dollar and every other hard currency in the world. That would make Japanese products less expensive everywhere--

  But Europe would follow suit. He was sure of that. Trade regulations already stiffer than the Americans' would become tougher still, and that trading surplus would also decline, and at the same time the value of the yen would fall all the more. It would take more cash to buy the resources without which his country would enter total collapse. Like falling from a precipice, the downward acceleration would merely grow faster and faster, and the only consolation of the moment was that he would not be there to see the end of it, for long before that happened, this office would no longer be his. He'd be disgraced, with all the rest of his colleagues. Some would choose death, perhaps, but not so many. That was something for TV now, the ancient traditions that had grown from a culture rich in pride but poor in everything else. Life was too comfortable to give it up so easily--or was it? What lay ten years in his country's future? A return to poverty... or ... something else?

  The decision would partly be his, Matsuda told himself, because the government of his country was really an extension of the collective will of himself and his peers. He looked down at the shaking hands in his lap. He thanked his two employees, and sent them on their way with a gracious nod before he was able to lift his hands to the surface of his desk and reach for a telephone.

  Clark thought of it as a "forever flight," and even though KAL had upgraded them to first-class, it really hadn't helped much; not even the charming Korean flight attendants in lovely traditional dress could make the process much better than it was. He'd seen two of the three movies--on other flights--and the third wasn't all that interesting. The sky-news radio channel had held his interest for the forty minutes required to update him on the happenings of the world, but after that it became repetitive, and his memory was too finely trained to need that. The KAL magazine was only good for thirty minutes--even that was a stretch--and he was current on the American news journals. What remained was crushing boredom. At least Ding had his course material to divert him. He was currently reading through the Masseys' classic Dreadnought, about how international relations had broken down a century earlier because the various European nations--more properly their leaders--had failed to make the leap of imagination required to keep the peace. Clark remembered having read it soon after publication.

  "They just can't make it, can they?" he asked his partner after an hour of reading over his shoulder. Ding read slowly, taking in every word one at a time. Well, it was study material, wasn't it?

  "Not real smart, John." Chavez looked up from his pages of notes and stretched, which was easier for his small frame than it was for Clark's. "Professor Alpher wants me to identify three or four crucial fault-points for my thesis, bad decisions, that sort of thing. More to it than that, y'know? What they had to do was, well, like step outside themselves and look back and see what it was all about, but the dumb fucks didn't know how to do that. They couldn't be objective. The other part is, they didn't think anything all the way through. They had all those great tactical ideas, but they never really looked at where things were leading them. You know, I can identify the goofs for the doc, wrap it up real nice just like she wants, but it's gonna be bullshit, John. The problem wasn't the decisions. The problem was the people making them. They just weren't big enough for what they were doing. They just didn't see far enough, and that's what the peons were paying them to do, y'know?" Chavez rubbed his eyes, grateful for the distraction. He'd been reading and studying for eleven hours, with only brief breaks for meals and head calls. "1 need to run a few miles," he grumped, also weary from the flight.

  John checked his watch. "Forty minutes out. We've already started our descent."

  "You suppose the big shots are any different today?" Ding asked tiredly.

  Clark laughed. "My boy, what's the one thing in life that never changes?"

  The young officer smiled. "Yeah, and the other one is, people like us are always caught in the open when they blow it." He rose and walked to the head to wash his face. Looking in the mirror, he was glad that they'd spend a day at an Agency safe house. He'd need to wash up and shave and unwind before putting on his mission identity. And maybe make some start notes for his thesis.

  Clark looked out the window and saw a Korean landscape lit up with the pink, feathery light of a breaking dawn. The lad was turning intellectual on him. That was enough for a weary, eyes-closed grin with his face turned to the plastic window. The kid was smart enough, but what would happen when Ding wrote the dumb fucks didn't know how into his master's thesis? He was talking about Gladstone and Bismarck, after all. That got him laughing so hard that he started coughing in the airliner-dry air. He opened his eyes to see his partner emerge from the first-class head. Ding almost bumped into one of the flight attendants, and though he smiled politely at her and stepped aside to let her pass, he didn't track her with his eyes, Clark noticed, didn't do what men usually did with someone so young and attractive. Clearly his mind was set on another female form.

  Damn, this is getting serious.

  Murray nearly exploded: "We can't do that now! God damn it, Bill, we've got everything lined up, the information's going to leak sure as hell, and that's not even fair to Kealty, much less our witnesses."

  "We do work for the President, Dan," Shaw pointed out. "And the order came directly from him, not even through the AG. Since when did you care about Kealty, anyway?" It was, in fact, the same line Shaw had used on President Durling. Bastard or not, rapist or not, he was entitled to due process of law and a fair crack at defending himself. The FBI was somewhat maniacal on that, but the real reason for their veneration of judicial fair-play was that when you convicted a guy after following all the rules, you knew that you'd nailed the right bastard. It also made the appeals process a lot easier to swallow.

  "This accident thing, right?"

  "Yeah. He doesn't want two big stories jockeying on the front page. This trade flap is a pretty big deal, and he says Kealty can wait a week or two. Dan, our Ms. Linders has waited several years, will another couple of weeks--"

  "Yes, and you know it," Murray snapped back. Then he paused. "Sorry, Bill. You know what I mean." What he meant was simple: he had a case ready to go, and it was time to run with it. On the other hand, you didn't say no to the President.

  "He's already talked to the people on the Hill. They'll sit on it."

  "But their staffers won't."

  10

  Seduction

  "1 agree it's not good," Chris Cook said.

  Nagumo was looking down at the rug in the sitting room. He was too stunned at the events of the previous few days even to be angry. It was like discovering that the world was about to end, and that there was nothing he could do about it. Supposedly, he was a middle-level foreign-ministry official who didn't "play" in the high-level negotiations. But that was window-dressing. His task was to set the framework for his country's negotiating positions and, moreover, to gather intelligence information on what America really thought, so that his titular seniors would know exactly what opening positions to take and how far they could press. Nagumo was an intelligence officer in fact if not in name. In that role, his interest in the process was personal and surprisingly emotional. Seiji saw himself as a defender and protector of his country and its people, and also as an honest bridge between his country and America. He wanted Americans to appreciate his people and his culture. He wanted them to partake of its products. He wanted America to see Japan as an equal, a good and wise friend from whom to learn. Americans were a passionate people, so often ignorant of their real needs--as the overly proud and pampered often are. The curre
nt American stance on trade, if that was what it seemed to be, was like being slapped by one's own child. Didn't they know they needed Japan and its products? Hadn't he personally trained American trade officials for years?

  Cook squirmed in his seat. He, too, was an experienced foreign-service officer, and he could read faces as well as anyone. They were friends, after all, and, more than that, Seiji was his personal passport to a remunerative life after government service.

  "If it makes you feel any better, it's the thirteenth."

  "Hmph?" Nagumo looked up.

  "That's the day they blow up the last missiles. The thing you asked about? Remember?"

  Nagumo blinked, slow to recall the question he'd posed earlier. "Why then?"

  "The President will be in Moscow. They're down to a handful of missiles now. I don't know the exact number, but it's less than twenty on each side. They're saving the last one for next Friday. Kind of an odd coincidence, but that's how the scheduling worked out. The TV boys have been prepped, but they're keeping it quiet. There'll be cameras at both places, and they're going to simulcast the last two--blowing them up, I mean." Cook paused. "So that ceremony you talked about, the one for your grandfather, that's the day."

  "Thank you, Chris." Nagumo stood and walked to the bar to pour himself another drink. He didn't know why the Ministry wanted that information, but it was an order, and he'd pass it along. "Now, my friend, what can we do about this?"

  "Not much, Seiji, at least not right away. I told you about the damned gas tanks, remember? I told you Trent was not a guy to tangle with. He's been waiting for an opportunity like this for years. Look, I was on the Hill this afternoon, talking to people. You've never seen mail and telegrams like this one, and goddamned CNN won't let the story go."