by Tom Clancy
Indeed, Binichi Murakami thought behind an impassive face. He remembered that he’d signed on partly as a result of being accosted on the streets of Washington by a drunken beggar. How was it possible that someone as clever as himself could be influenced by petty anger? But it had happened, and now he was stuck with the rest. The industrialist sipped his sake and kept his peace while Yamata-san waxed rhapsodic about their country’s future. He was really talking about his own future, of course, and Murakami wondered how many of the men around the table saw that. Fools. But that was hardly fair, was it? After all, he was one of them.
Major Boris Scherenko had no less than eleven highly placed agents within the Japanese government, one of whom was the deputy head of the PSID, a man he’d compromised some years before while on a sex and gambling trip to Taiwan. He was the best possible person to have under control—it was likely that he would one day graduate to chief of the agency and enable the Tokyo rezidentura both to monitor and influence counterintelligence activity throughout the country. What confused the Russian intelligence officer was that none of his agents had been of much help so far.
Then there was the issue of working with the Americans. Given his professional training and experience, it was as if he were heading the welcoming committee for diplomats arriving from Mars. The dispatch from Moscow made it easier to accept. Or somewhat easier. It appeared that the Japanese were planning to rob his country of her most precious potential asset, in conjunction with China, and to use that power base to establish themselves as the world’s most powerful nation. And the strangest thing of all was that Scherenko did not think the plan crazy on its face. Then came his tasking orders.
Twenty missiles, he thought. It was one area he’d never targeted for investigation. After all, Moscow had sold the things to them. They must have considered the possibility that the missiles could be used for—but, no, of course they hadn’t. Scherenko promised himself that he’d sit down with this Clark fellow, an experienced man, and after breaking the ice with a few drinks, inquire delicately if the American’s political direction was as obtuse as that which he received, regardless of the government in question. Perhaps the American would have something useful to say. After all, their governments changed every four or eight years. Perhaps they were used to it.
Twenty missiles, he thought. Six warheads each. Once it had been normal to think of missiles as things that flew in thousands, and both sides had actually been mad enough to accept it as a strategic fact of life. But now, the possibility of a mere ten or twenty—at whom would they really be aimed? Would the Americans really stand up for their new ... what? Friends? Allies? Associates? Or were they merely former enemies whose new status had not yet been decided in Washington? Would they help his country against the new/ old danger? What kept coming back to him was, twenty missiles times six warheads. They would be evenly targeted, and surely enough to wreck his country. And if that were true, they would surely be enough to deter America from helping.
Well, then Moscow is right, Scherenko judged. Full cooperation now was the best way to avoid that situation. America wanted a location on the missiles, probably with the intention of destroying them. And if they don’t, we will.
The Major personally handled three of the agents. His subordinates handled the others, and under his direction messages were prepared for distribution to dead-drops around the city. What do you know about ... How many would answer his call for information? The danger was not so much that the people under his control would not have the information he needed, but that one or more of them would take this opportunity to report in to the government. In asking for something of this magnitude, he ran the risk of giving one of his agents the chance to redeem himself by turning patriot, to reveal the new orders and absolve himself of any guilt. But some risks you had to run. After midnight he took a walk, picking high-traffic areas to place his drops and making the appropriate wake-up signals to alert his people. He hoped that the half of PSID he controlled was the one covering this area. He thought so, but you could never be sure, could you?
Kimura knew he was running risks, but he’d gone beyond that kind of worry now. All he could really hope for was that he was acting as a patriot, and that somehow people would understand and honor that fact after his execution for treason. The other consolation was that he would not die alone.
“I can arrange a meeting with former Prime Minister Koga,” he said simply.
Oh, shit, Clark thought at once. I’m a goddamned spy, he wanted to reply. I’m not with the goddamned State Department. The only good news at the moment was that Chavez didn’t react at all. His heart had probably stopped, John told himself. Like yours just did.
“To what end?” he asked.
“The situation is grave, is it not? Koga-san has no part in this. He is still a man of political influence. His views should be of interest to your government.”
Yeah, you might say that. But Koga was also a politician on the outside, and perhaps willing to trade the lives of some foreigners for an open door back into the government; or just a man who placed country ahead of personal gain—which possibility might cut in just about any direction Clark could imagine.
“Before I can commit to that, I need instructions from my government,” John said. It was rarely that he temporized on anything, but this one was well beyond his experience.
“Then I would suggest that you get it. And soon,” Kimura added as he stood and left.
“I always wondered if my master’s in international relations would come in handy,” Chavez observed, staring into his half-consumed drink. “Of course I have to live long enough to get the parchment.” Might be nice to get married, settle down, have kids, maybe even have a real life someday, he didn’t add.
“Good to see you still have a sense of humor, Yevgeniy Pavlovich.”
“They’re going to tell us to do it. You know that.”
“Da.” Clark nodded, keeping his cover and now trying to think as a Russian would. Did the KGB manual have a chapter for this? he wondered. The CIA’s sure as hell didn’t.
As usual the tapes were clearer than the instant analysis of the operators. There had been three, perhaps four—more likely four, given American operational patterns, the intelligence officers opined—aircraft probing Japanese air defenses. Definitely not EC-135s, however. Those aircraft were based on a design almost fifty years old and studded with enough antennas to watch every TV signal in the hemisphere, and would have generated far larger radar returns. Besides, the Americans probably didn’t have four such aircraft left. Therefore something else, probably their B-1B bomber, the intelligence people estimated. And the B-1B was a bomber, whose purpose was far more sinister than the collection of electronic signals. So the Americans were thinking of Japan as an enemy whose defenses would have to be penetrated for the purpose of delivering death, an idea new to neither side in this war—if war it was, the cooler heads added. But what else could it be? the majority of the analysts asked, setting the tone of the night’s missions.
Three E-767s were again up and operating, again with two of them active and one waiting in the ambush role. This time the radars were turned up in power, and the parameters for the signal-processing software were electronically altered to allow for easier tracking of stealthy targets at long range. It was physics they depended on. The size of the antenna combined with the power of the signal and the frequency of the electronic waves made it possible to get hits on almost anything. That was both the good news and the bad news, the operators thought, as they received all manner of signals now. There was one change, however. When they thought they had a weak return from a moving object at long range, they started directing their fighters in that direction. The Eagles never got within a hundred miles. The return signals always seemed to fade out when the E-767 switched frequency from longwave acquisition to shortwave tracking, and that didn’t bode well for the Ku-band needed for actual targeting. It did show them that the Americans were still probing, and that p
erhaps they knew they were being tracked. And, everyone thought, if nothing else it was good training for the fighters. If this were truly a war, all the participants told themselves, then it was becoming more and more real.
“I don’t buy it,” the Colonel said.
“Sir, it looks to me like they were tracking you. They were sweeping you at double the rate that I can explain by the rotation of their dome. Their radar is completely electronic. They can steer their beams, and they were steering their beams.” The sergeant’s voice was reasonable and respectful, even though the officer who’d led the first probe was showing a little too much pride and not quite enough willingness to listen. He’d heard a little of what he was just told, but now he just shrugged it off.
“Okay, maybe they did get a few hits. We were broadside-aspect to them. Next time we’ll deploy the patrol line farther out and do a direct penetration. That cuts our RCS by quite a bit. We have to tickle their line to see how they react.”
Better you than me, pal, the sergeant thought. He looked out the window. Elmendorf Air Force Base was in Alaska and subject to dreadful winter weather—the worst enemy of any man-made machine. As a result the B-1s were all in hangars, which hid them from the satellite that Japan might or might not have operating. Still, nobody was sure about that.
“Colonel, I’m just a sergeant who diddles with O-scopes, but I’d be careful about that. I don’t know enough about this radar to tell you for sure how good it is. My gut tells me it’s pretty damned good.”
“We’ll be careful,” the Colonel promised. “Tomorrow night we’ll have a better set of tapes for you.”
“Roger that, sir.” Better you than me, pal, he thought again.
USS Pasadena had joined the north end of the patrol line west of Midway. It was possible for the submarines to report in with their satellite radios without revealing their positions except to PacFlt SubOps.
“Not much of a line,” Jones observed, looking at the chart. He’d just come over to confer on what SOSUS had on Japanese naval movements, which was at the moment not much. The best news available was that SOSUS, even with Jones’s improved tracking software, wasn’t getting anything on the line of Olympia, Helena, Honolulu, Chicago, and now Pasadena. “We used to have more boats than that just to cover the Gap.”
“That’s all the SSNs we have available, Ron,” Chambers replied. “And, yeah, it ain’t much. But if they forward-deploy their diesel boats, they’d better be real careful.” Washington had given them that much by way of orders. An eastward move of Japanese warships would not be tolerated, and the elimination of one of their submarines would be approved, probably. It was just that the boat holding the contact had to call it in first for political approval. Mancuso and Chambers hadn’t told Jones that. There was little sense in dealing with his temper again.
“We have a bunch of SSNs in storage—”
“Seventeen on the West Coast, to be exact,” Chambers said. “Minimum six months to reactivate them, not countin’ getting the crews spun up.”
Mancuso looked up. “Wait a minute. What about my 726s?”
Jones turned. “I thought they were deactivated.”
SubPac shook his head. “The environmental people wouldn’t let me. They all have caretaker crews aboard.”
“All five of them,” Chambers said quietly. “Nevada, Tennessee, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. That’s worth calling Washington about, sir.”
“Oh, yeah,” Jones agreed. The 726-class, more commonly known by the name of the lead ship, Ohio, which was now high-quality razor blades, was far slower than the smaller 688-class of fast-attack boats, a lot less maneuver-able and ten knots slower, but they were also quiet. More than that, they defined what quiet was.
“Wally, think we can scratch up crews for them?”
“I don’t see why not, Admiral. We could have them moving in a week ... ten days max, if we can get the right people.”
“Well, that’s something I can do.” Mancuso lifted the phone for Washington.
The business day started in Central Europe at ten o‘clock local time, which was nine o’clock in London, and a dark four o’clock in New York. That made it six in the evening in Tokyo after what had been at first an exciting week, then a dull one, which had allowed people to contemplate their brilliance at the killing they had made.
Currency traders in the Japanese capital were surprised when things started quite normally. Markets came up on-line much as a business might open its doors for customers waiting outside for a long-awaited sale. It had been announced that it would happen that way. It was just that nobody here had really believed it. As one man they phoned their supervisors for instructions, surprising them with the news from Berlin and the other European centers.
At the New York FBI office, machines wired into the international trading network showed exactly the same display as those on every other continent. The Fed Chairman and Secretary Fiedler watched. Both men had phones to their ears, linked into an encrypted conference line with their European counterparts.
The Bundesbank made the first move, trading five hundred billion yen for the current equivalent in dollars to the Bank of Hong Kong, a very cautious transaction to test the waters. Hong Kong handled it as a matter of course, seeing a marginal advantage in the German mistake. The Bundesbank was foolish enough to expect that the reopening of the New York equities markets would bolster the dollar. The transaction was executed, Fiedler saw. He turned to the Fed Chairman and winked. The next move was by the Swiss, and this one was a trillion yen for Hong Kong’s remaining holding in U.S. Treasuries. That transaction, too, went through the wires in less than a minute. The next one was more direct. The Bern Commercial Bank took Swiss francs back from a Japanese bank, trading yen holdings for them, another dubious move occasioned by a phone call from the Swiss government.
The opening of European stock markets saw other moves. Banks and other institutions that had made a strategic move to buy up Japanese equities as a counterbalance to Japanese acquisitions in European markets now started selling them off, immediately converting the yen holdings to other currencies. That was when the first alarm light went on in Tokyo. The Europeans’ actions might have appeared to be mere profit-taking, but the currency conversions bespoke a belief that the yen was going to fall and fall hard, and it was a Friday night in Tokyo, and their trading floors were closed except for the currency traders and others working the European markets.
“They should be getting nervous now,” Fiedler observed.
“I would,” Jean-Jacques said in Paris. What nobody quite wanted to say was that the First World Economic War had just begun in earnest. There was an excitement to it, even though it ran contrary to all their instincts and experience.
“You know, I don’t have a model to predict this,” Gant said, twenty feet away from the two government officials. The European action, helpful as it was, confounded all computer models and preconceptions.
“Well, pilgrim, that’s why we’ve got brains and guts,” George Winston responded deadpan.
“But what are our markets going to do?”
Winston grinned. “Sure as hell we’re going to find out in, oh, about seven and a half hours. And you don’t even have to shell out for the E-Ticket. Where’s your sense of adventure?”
“I’m glad somebody’s happy about this.”
There were worldwide rules for currency trading. Trading stopped once a currency had fallen a certain amount, but not this time. The floor under the yen was yanked out by every European government, trading didn’t stop, and the yen resumed its fall.
“They can’t do that!” someone said in Tokyo. But they were doing it, and he reached for a phone, knowing even then what his instructions would be. The yen was being attacked. They had to defend it, and the only way was to trade the foreign-currency holdings they already owned in order to bring the yen holdings back home and out of the playing field of international speculation. Worst of all, there was no reason for this acti
on. The yen was strong, especially against the American dollar. Soon it would replace it as the world’s benchmark currency, especially if the American financial markets were foolish enough to reopen later in the day. The Europeans were making a sucker bet of such magnitude as to defy qualification, and since it didn’t make sense, all the Japanese traders could do was to apply their own experience to the situation and act accordingly. The irony of the moment would have been delicious, had they been able to appreciate it. Their actions were virtually automatic. Francs, French and Swiss, British pounds, German D-marks, Dutch guilders, and Danish kroner were disbursed in vast quantities to purchase yen, whose relative value, everyone in Tokyo was sure, could only appreciate, especially if the Europeans pegged their currencies to the dollar.
There was an element of nervousness to it, but they did it, acting on the orders of their superiors, who were even now leaving their homes and catching cars or trains to the various commercial office buildings in which world trading was conducted. Equities were traded off in Europe as well, with the local currencies converted to yen. The expectation again was that when the American collapse resumed, the European currencies would fall, and with them the values of stock issues. Then Japan could reacquire even larger quantities of European stocks. The European moves were a sad case of misplaced loyalty, or confidence, or something, the people in Tokyo thought, but sad or not, it worked in their favor. And that was just fine. By noon London time a massive movement had taken place. Individual investors and smaller institutions, seeing what everyone else had done, had moved in—foolishly, the Japanese knew. Noon London time was seven in the morning on America’s East Coast.