Debt of Honor

  At the most basic level it all came down to needs and time. People had needs. Food and shelter were the first two of those. So other people grew the food and built the houses. Both required time to do, and since time was the most precious commodity known to man, you had to compensate people for it. Take a car—people needed transportation, too. When you bought a car, you paid people for the time of assembly, for the time required to fabricate all the components; ultimately you were paying miners for the time required to dig the iron ore and bauxite from the ground. That part was simple enough. The complexity began with all of the potential options. You could drive more than one kind of car. Each supplier of goods and services involved in the car had the option to get what he needed from a variety of sources, and since time was precious, the person who used his time most efficiently got a further reward. That was called competition, and competition was a never-ending race of everyone against everyone else. Fundamentally, every business, and in a sense every single person in the American economy, was in competition with every other. Everyone was a worker. Everyone was also a consumer. Everyone provided something for others to use. Everyone selected products and services from the vast menu that the economy offered. That was the basic idea.

  The true complexity came from all the possible interactions. Who bought what from whom. Who became more efficient, the better to make use of their time, benefiting both the consumers and themselves at once. With everyone in the game, it was like a huge mob, with everyone talking to everyone else. You simply could not keep track of all the conversations.

  And yet Wall Street held the illusion that it could, that its computer models could predict in broad terms what would happen on a daily basis. It was not possible. You could analyze individual companies, get a feel for what they were doing right and wrong. To a limited degree, from one or a few such analyses you could see trends and profit by them. But the use of computers and modeling techniques had gone too far, extrapolating farther and farther away from baseline reality, and while it had worked, after a fashion, for years, that had only magnified the illusion. With the collapse three days earlier, the illusion was shattered, and now they had nothing to cling to. Nothing but me, George Winston thought, reading their faces.

  The former president of the Columbus Group knew his limitations. He knew the degree to which he understood the system, and knew roughly where that understanding ended. He knew that nobody could quite make the whole thing work, and that train of thought took him almost as far as he needed to go on this dark night in New York.

  “This looks like a place without a leader. Tomorrow, what happens?” he asked, and all the “rocket scientists” averted their eyes from his, looking down at the table, or in some cases sharing a glance with the person who happened to be across it. Only three days before, someone would have spoken, offered an opinion with some greater or lesser degree of confidence. But not now, because nobody knew. Nobody had the first idea. And nobody spoke up.

  “You have a president. Is he telling you anything?” Winston asked next. Heads shook.

  It was Mark Gant, of course, who posed the question, as Winston had known he would.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, it is the board of directors which selects our president and managing director, isn’t it? We need a leader now.”

  “George,” another man asked. “Are you back?”

  “Either that or I’m doing the goddamnedest out-of-body trip you people have ever seen.” It wasn’t much of a joke, but it did generate smiles, the beginning of a little enthusiasm for something.

  “In that case, I submit the motion that we declare the position of president and managing director to be vacant.”

  “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 Toyota 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 tha
t 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 attaché 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-3s 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 Clark’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 ll’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 Attaché, 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 d
escription 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.