by Tom Clancy
"Second."
"There is a motion on the floor," Mark Gant said, rather more strongly.
"Those in favor?"
There was a chorus of "ayes."
"Oppose?"
Nothing.
"The motion carries. The presidency of the Columbus Group is now vacant. Is there a further motion from the floor?"
"I nominate George Winston to be our managing director and president," another voice said.
"Second."
"Those in favor?" Gant asked. This vote was identical except in its growing enthusiasm.
"George, welcome back." There was a faint smattering of applause.
"Okay." Winston stood. It was his again. His next comment was desultory: "Somebody needs to tell Yamata." He started pacing the room.
"Now, first thing: I want to see everything we have on Friday's transactions. Before we can start thinking about how to fix the son of a bitch, we need to know how it got broke. It's going to be a long week, folks, but we have people out there that we have to protect."
The first task would be hard enough, he knew. Winston didn't know if anyone could fix it, but they had to start with examining what had gone so badly wrong. He knew he was close to something. He had the itchy feeling that went with the almost-enough information to move on a particular issue. Part of it was instinct, something he both depended on and distrusted until he could make the itch go away with hard facts. There was something else, however, and he didn't know what it was. He did know that he needed to find it.
Even good news could be ominous. General Arima was spending a good deal of time on TV, and he was doing well at it. The latest news was that any citizen who wanted to leave Saipan would be granted free air fare to Tokyo for later transit back to the States. Mainly what he said was that nothing important had changed.
"My ass," Pete Burroughs growled at the smiling face on the tube.
"You know, I just don't believe this," Oreza said, back up after five hours of sleep.
"I do. Check out that knoll southeast of here."
Portagee rubbed his heavy beard and looked. Half a mile away, on a hilltop recently cleared for another tourist hotel (the island had run out of beach space), about eighty men were setting up a Patriot missile battery. The billboard radars were already erected, and as he watched, the first of four boxy containers was rolled into place.
"So what are we going to do about this?" the engineer asked.
"Hey, I drive boats, remember?"
"You used to wear a uniform, didn't you?"
"Coast Guard," Oreza said. "Ain't never killed nobody. And that stuff"—he pointed to the missile site—"hell, you probably know more about it than I do."
"They make 'em in Massachusetts. Raytheon, I think. My company makes some chips for it." Which was the extent of Burroughs's knowledge.
"They're planning to stay, aren't they?"
"Yeah." Oreza got his binoculars and started looking out windows again. He could see six road junctions. All were manned by what looked like ten men or so—a squad; he knew that term—with a mixture of the Toyola Land Cruisers and some jeeps. Though many had holsters on their pistol belts, no long guns were in evidence now, as though they didn't want to make it look like some South American junta from the old days. Every vehicle that passed—they didn't stop any that he saw—received a friendly wave. PR.
Oreza thought, Good PR.
"Some kind of fuckin' love-in," the master chief said. And that would not have been possible unless they were confident as hell. Even the missile crew on the next hill over, he thought. They weren't rushing. They were doing their jobs in an orderly, professional way, and that was fine, but if you expected to use the things, you moved more snappily. There was a difference between peacetime and wartime activity, however much you said that training was supposed to eliminate the difference between the two. He turned his attention back to the nearest crossroads. The soldiers there were not the least bit tense. They looked and acted like soldiers, but their heads weren't scanning the way they ought to on unfriendly ground.
It might have been good news. No mass arrests and detainments, the usual handmaiden of invasions. No overt display of force beyond mere presence. You would hardly know that they were here, except that they were sure as hell here, Portagee told himself. And they planned to stay. And they didn't think anybody was going to dispute that. And he sure as hell was in no position to change their view on anything.
"Okay, here are the first overheads," Jackson said. "We haven't had much time to go over them, but—"
"But we will," Ryan completed the sentence. "I'm a carded National Intelligence Officer, remember? I can handle the raw."
"Am I cleared for this?" Adler asked.
"You are now." Ryan switched on his desk light, and Robby dialed the combination on his attache case. "When's the next pass over Japan?"
"Right about now, but there's cloud cover over most of the islands."
"Nuke hunt?" Adler asked. Admiral Jackson handled the answer.
"You bet your ass, sir." He laid out the first photo of Saipan. There were two car-carriers at the quay. The adjacent parking lot was spotted with orderly rows of military vehicles, most of them trucks.
"Best guess?" Ryan asked.
"An augmented division." His pen touched a cluster of vehicles. "This is a Patriot battery. Towed artillery. This looks like a big air-defense radar that's broken down for transport. There's a twelve-hundred-foot hill on this rock. It'll see a good long way, and the visual horizon from up there is a good fifty miles." Another photo. "The airports. Those are five F-15 fighters, and if you look here, we caught two of their F-3's in the air coming in on final."
"F-3?" Adler asked.
"The production version of the FS-X," Jackson explained. "Fairly capable, but really a reworked F-16. The Eagles are for air defense. This little puppy is a good attack bird."
"We need more passes," Ryan said in a voice suddenly grave. Somehow it was real now. Really real, as he liked to say, metaphysically real. It was no longer the results of analysis or verbal reports. Now he had photographic proof. His country was sure as hell at war.
Jackson nodded. "Mainly we need pros to go over these overheads, but, yeah, we'll be getting four passes a day, weather permitting, and we need to examine every square inch of this rock, and Tinian, and Rota, and Guam, and all the little rocks."
"Jesus, Robby, can we do it?" Jack asked. The question, though posed in the simplest terms, had implications that even he could not yet appreciate. Admiral Jackson was slow to lift his eyes from the overhead photos, and his voice suddenly lost its rage as the naval officer's professional judgment clicked in.
"I don't know yet." He paused, then posed a question of his own. "Will we try?"
"I don't know that, either," the National Security Advisor told him.
"Robby?"
"Yeah, Jack?"
"Before we decide to try, we have to know if we can."
Admiral Jackson nodded. "Aye aye."
He'd been awake most of the night listening to his partner's snoring. What was it about this guy? Chavez asked himself groggily. How the hell could he sleep? Outside, the sun was up, and the overwhelming sounds of Tokyo in the morning beat their way through windows and walls, and still John was sleeping. Well, Ding thought, he was an old guy and maybe he needed his rest. Then the most startling event of their entire stay in the country happened. The phone rang. That caused John's eyes to snap open, but Ding got the phone first.
"Tovarorischiy," a voice said. "All this time in-country and you haven't called me?"
"Who is this?" Chavez asked. As carefully as he'd studied his Russian, hearing it on the phone here and now made the language sound like Martian. It wasn't hard for him to make his voice seem sleepy. It was hard, a moment later, to keep his eyeballs in their sockets.
A jolly laugh that had to be heartfelt echoed down the phone line. "Yevgeniy Pavlovich, who else would it be? Scrape the stubble from your face and join me
for breakfast. I'm downstairs."
Domingo Chavez felt his heart stop. Not just miss a beat, he would have sworn it stopped until he willed it to start working again, and when it did, it went off at warp-factor-three. "Give us a few minutes."
"Ivan Sergeyevich had too much to drink again, da"" the voice asked with another laugh. "Tell him he grows too old for that foolishness. Very well, I will have some tea and wait."
All the while dark's eyes were fixed on his, or for the first few seconds, anyway. Then they started sweeping the room for dangers that had to be around, so pale his partner's face had become. Domingo was not one to get frightened easily, John knew, but whatever he'd heard on the phone had almost panicked the kid.
Well. John rose and switched on the TV. If there were danger outside the door, it was too late. The window offered no escape. The corridor outside could well be jammed full of armed police, and his first order of business was to head for the bathroom. Clark looked in the mirror as the water ran from the flushing toilet. Chavez was there before the handle came back up.
"Whoever was on the phone called me 'Yevgeniy.' He's waiting downstairs, he says."
"What did he sound like?" Clark asked.
"Russian, right accent, right syntax." The toilet stopped running, and they couldn't speak anymore for a while.
Shit, Clark thought, looking in the mirror for an answer, but finding only two very confused faces. Well. The intelligence officer started washing up and thinking over possibilities. Think. If it had been the Japanese police, would they have bothered to…? No. Not likely. Everyone regarded spies as dangerous in addition to being loathsome, a curious legacy of James Bond movies. Intelligence officers were about as likely to start a firefight as they were to sprout wings and fly. Their most important physical skills were running and hiding, but nobody ever seemed to grasp that, and if the local cops were on to them, then…then he would have awakened to a pistol in his face. And he hadn't, had he? Okay. No immediate danger. Probably.
Chavez watched in no small amazement as Clark took his time washing his hands and face, shaving carefully, and brushing his teeth before he relinquished the bathroom. He even smiled when he was done, because that expression was necessary to the tone of his voice.
"Yevgeniy Pavlovich, we must appear kulturny for our friend, no? It's been so many months." Five minutes later they were out the door.
Acting skills are no less important to intelligence officers than to those who work the legitimate theater, for like the stage, in the spy business there are rarely opportunities for retakes. Major Boris Il'ych Scherenko was the deputy rezident of RVS Station Tokyo, awakened four hours earlier by a seemingly innocuous call from the embassy. Covered as Cultural Attache, he'd most recently been busy arranging the final details for a tour of Japan by the St. Petersburg Ballet. For fifteen years an officer of the First Chief (Foreign) Directorate of the KGB, he now fulfilled the same function for his newer and smaller agency. His job was even more important now, Scherenko thought. Since his nation was far less able to deal with external threats, it needed good intelligence more than ever. Perhaps that was the reason for this lunacy. Or maybe the people in Moscow had gone completely mad.
There was no telling. At least the tea was good.
Awaiting him in the embassy had been an enciphered message from Moscow Center-that hadn't changed—with names and detailed descriptions. It made identification easy. Easier than understanding the orders he had.
"Vanya!" Scherenko nearly ran over, seizing the older man's hand for a hearty handshake, but forgoing the kiss that Russians are known for. That was partly to avoid offending Japanese sensibilities and partly because the American might slug him, passionless people that they were. Madness or not, it was a moment to savor. These were two senior CIA officers, and tweaking their noses in public was not without its humor. "It's been so long!"
The younger one, Scherenko saw, was doing his best to conceal his feelings, but not quite well enough. KGB/RVS didn't know anything about him. But his agency did know the name John Clark. It was only a name and a cursory description that could have fit a Caucasian male of any nationality. One hundred eighty-five to one hundred ninety centimeters. Ninety kilos. Dark hair. Fit. To that Scherenko added, blue eyes, a firm grip. Steady nerve.
Very steady nerve, the Major thought.
"Indeed it has. How is your family, my friend?"
Add excellent Russian to that, Scherenko thought, catching the accent of St. Petersburg. As he cataloged the physical characteristics of the American, he saw two sets of eyes, one blue, one black, doing the same to him. "Natalia misses you. Come! I am hungry! Breakfast!" He led the other two back to his corner booth.
"CLARK, JOHN (none?)", the thin file in Moscow was headed. A name so nondescript that other cover names were unknown and perhaps never assigned. Field officer, paramilitary type, believed to perform special covert functions. More than two (2) Intelligence Stars for courage and/or proficiency in field operations. Brief stint as a Security and Protective Officer, during which time no one had troubled himself to get a photo, Scherenko thought. Typical. Staring at him across the table now, he saw a man relaxed and at ease with the old friend he'd met for the first time perhaps as much as two minutes earlier. Well, he'd always known that CIA had good people working for them.
"We can talk here," Scherenko said more quietly, sticking to Russian.
"Is that so…?"
"Scherenko, Boris Il'ych, Major, deputy rezident," he said, finally introducing himself. Next he nodded to each of his guests. "You are John Clark—and Domingo Chavez."
"And this is the fucking Twilight Zone," Ding muttered.
" 'Plum blossoms bloom, and pleasure women buy new scarves in a brothel room.' Not exactly Pushkin, is it? Not even Pasternak. Arrogant little barbarians." He'd been in Japan for three years. He'd arrived expecting to find a pleasant, interesting place to do business. He'd come to dislike many aspects of Japanese culture, mainly the assumed local superiority to everything else in the world, particularly offensive to a Russian who felt exactly the same way.
"Would you like to tell us what this is all about, Comrade Major?" Clark asked.
Scherenko spoke calmly now. The humor of the event was now behind them all, not that the Americans had ever appreciated it. "Your Maria Patricia Foleyeva placed a call to our Sergey Nikolayevich Golovko, asking for our assistance. I know that you are running another officer here in Tokyo, but not his name. I am further instructed to tell you, Comrade Klerk, that your wife and daughters are fine. Your younger daughter made the dean's list at her university again, and is now a good candidate for admission to medical school. If you require further proof of my bona-fides, I'm afraid I cannot help you." The Major noted a thin expression of pleasure on the younger man's face and wondered what that was all about.
Well, that settles that, John thought. Almost. "Well, Boris, you sure as hell know how to get a man's attention. Now, maybe you can tell us what the hell is going on."
"We didn't see it either," Scherenko began, going over all the high points. It turned out that his data was somewhat better than what Clark had gotten from Chet Nomuri, but did not include quite everything. Intelligence was like that. You never had the full picture, and the parts left out were always important.
"How do you know we can operate safely?"
"You know that I cannot—"
"Boris Il'ych, my life is in your hands. You know I have a wife and two daughters. My life is important to me, and to them," John said reasonably, making himself appear all the more formidable to the pro across the table. It wasn't about fear. John knew that he was a capable field spook, and Scherenko gave the same impression. "Trust" was a concept both central to and alien from intelligence operations. You had to trust your people, and yet you could never trust them all the way in a business where dualisms were a way of life.
"Your cover works better for you than you think. The Japanese think that you are Russians. Because of that, they will not trouble y
ou. We can see to that," the deputy rezident told them confidently.
"For how long?" Clark asked rather astutely, Scherenko thought.
"Yes, there is always that question, isn't there?"
"How do we communicate?" John asked.
"I understand that you require a high-quality telephone circuit." He handed a card under the table. "All of Tokyo is now fiberoptic. We have several similar lines to Moscow. Your special communications gear is being flown there as we speak. I understand it is excellent. I would like to see it," Boris said with a raised eyebrow.
"It's just a ROM chip, man," Chavez told him. "I couldn't even tell you which one it is."
"Clever," Scherenko thought.
"How serious are they?" the younger man asked him.
"They appear to have moved a total of three divisions to the Marianas. Their navy has attacked yours." Scherenko gave what details he knew. "I should tell you that our estimate is that you will face great difficulties in taking your islands back."
"How great? "Clark asked.
The Russian shrugged, not without sympathy. "Moscow believes it unlikely. Your capabilities are almost as puny as ours have become."
And that's why this is happening, Clark decided on the spot. That was why he had a new friend in a foreign land. He'd told Chavez, practically on their first meeting, a quote from Henry Kissinger: "Even paranoids have enemies." He sometimes wondered why the Russians didn't print that on their money, rather like America's Epluribus unum. The hell of it was, they had a lot of history to back that one up. And so, for that matter, did America.
"Keep talking."
"We have their government intelligence organs thoroughly penetrated, also their military, but THISTLE is a commercial network, and I gather you have developed better data than I have. I'm not sure what that means."
Which wasn't strictly true, but Scherenko was distinguishing between what he knew and what he thought; and, like a good spook, giving voice only to the former for now.
"So we both have a lot of work to do."
Scherenko nodded. "Feel free to come to the chancery."