“Until somebody with better hands comes along and learns how to do it, yes.” Cathy smiled. “I suppose I am, for a few more months, anyway.”
“So how’s the champ?” Bernie Katz asked, entering the room and seeing Price for the first time. The pass on her coat puzzled him. “Do I know you?”
“Andrea Price.” The agent gave Katz a quick and thorough visual check before shaking hands. He actually found it flattering until she added, “Secret Service.”
“Where were the cops like you when I was a kid?” the surgeon asked gallantly.
“Bernie was one of my first mentors here. He’s department chairman now,” Cathy explained.
“About to be overtaken in prestige by my colleague. I come bearing good news. I have a spy on the Lasker Committee. You’re in the finals, Cathy.”
“What’s a Lasker?” Price asked.
“There’s one step up from a Lasker Prize,” Bernie told her. “You have to go to Stockholm to collect it.”
“Bernie, I’ll never have one of those. A Lasker is hard enough.”
“So keep researching, girl!” Katz hugged her and left.
I want it, I want it, I want it! Cathy told herself silently. She didn’t have to give voice to the words. It was plain for Special Agent Price to see. Damn, didn’t this beat guarding politicians?
“Can I watch one of your procedures?”
“If you want. Anyway, come on.” Cathy led her back to her office, not minding her at all now. On the way they walked through the clinic, then one of the labs. In the middle of a corridor, Dr. Ryan stopped dead in her tracks, reached into her pocket, and pulled out a small notebook.
“Did I miss something?” Price asked. She knew she was talking too much, but it took time to learn the habits of your protectees. She also read Cathy Ryan as the type who didn’t like being protected, and so needed to be made comfortable about it.
“You’ll have to get used to me,” Professor Ryan said, smiling as she scribbled a few notes. “Whenever I have an idea, I write it down right away.”
“Don’t trust your memory?”
“Never. You can’t trust your memory with things that affect live patients. One of the first things they teach you in medical school.” Cathy shook her head as she finished up. “Not in this business. Too many opportunities to screw up. If you don’t write it down, then it never happened.”
That sounded like a good lesson to remember, Andrea Price told herself, following her principal down the corridor. The code name, SURGEON, was perfect for her. Precise, smart, thorough. She might even have made a good agent except for her evident discomfort around guns.
It was already a regular routine, and in many ways that was not new. For a generation, the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force had responded to Russian fighter activity out of the forward base at Dolinsk Sokol—at first in cooperation with the USAF—and one of the regular tracks taken by the Soviet Air Force had earned the name “Tokyo Express,” probably an unknowing reference to a term invented in 1942 by the United States Marines on Guadalcanal.
For security reasons the E-767s were based with the 6th Air Wing at Komatsu, near Tokyo, but the two F-15Js that operated under the control of the E-767 now aloft over the town of Nemuro at the northeast tip of the island of Hokkaido were actually based on the Home Island at Chitose. These were a hundred miles offshore, and each carried eight missiles, four each of heat-seekers and radar-homers. All were warshots now, requiring only a target.
It was after midnight, local time. The pilots were well rested and alert, comfortably strapped into their ejection seats, their sharp eyes scanning the darkness while fingers made delicate course-corrections on the sticks. Their own targeting radars were switched off, and though their aircraft still flashed with anticollision strobe lights, those were easily switched off should the necessity arise, making them visually nonexistent.
“Eagle One-Five,” the digital radio told the element leader, “check out commercial traffic fifty kilometers zero-three-five your position, course two-one-five, angels three-six.”
“Roger, Kami,” the pilot replied on keying his radio. Kami, the call sign for the orbiting surveillance aircraft, was a word with many meanings, most of them supernatural like “soul” or “spirit.” And so they had rapidly become the modern manifestation of the spirits guarding their country, with the F-15Js as the strong arms that gave power to the will of those spirits. On command, the two fighters came right, climbing on a shallow, fuel-efficient slope for five minutes until they were at thirty-seven thousand feet, cruising outbound from their country at five hundred knots, their radars still off, but now they received a digital feed from the Kami that appeared on their own sets, one more of the new innovations and something the Americans didn’t have. The element leader alternated his eyes up and down. A pity, he thought, that the hand-off display didn’t integrate with his head-up display. Maybe the next modification would do that.
“There,” he said over his low-power radio.
“I have it,” his wingman acknowledged.
Both fighters turned to the left now, descending slowly behind what appeared to be an Air Canada 767-ER. Yes, the floodlit tail showed the maple-leaf logo of that airline. Probably the regular transpolar flight out of Toronto International into Narita. The timing was about right. They approached from almost directly astern—not quite exactly, lest an overly quick overtake result in a ramming—and the buffet told them that they were in the wake turbulence of a “heavy,” a wide-bodied commercial transport. The flight leader closed until he could see the line of cabin lights, and the huge engine under each wing, and the stubby nose of the Boeing product. He keyed his radio again.
“Kami, Eagle One-Five.”
“Eagle.”
“Positive identification, Air Canada Seven-Six-Seven Echo Romeo, inbound at indicated course and speed.” Interestingly, the drill for the BARCAP—Barrier Combat Air Patrol—was to use English. That was the international language of aviation. All their pilots spoke it, and it worked better for important communications.
“Roger.” And on further command, the fighters broke off to their programmed patrol area. The Canadian pilot of the airliner would never know that two armed fighters had closed to within three hundred meters of his aircraft—but then he had no reason to expect that any would, because the world was at peace, at least this part of it.
For their part, the fighter-drivers accepted their new duties phlegmatically along with the modification in their daily patterns of existence. For the indefinite future no less than two fighters would hold this patrol station, with two more back at Chitose at plus-five alert, and another four at plus-thirty. Their wing commander was pressing for permission to increase his alert-status further still, for despite what Tokyo said, their nation was at war, and that was what he’d told his people. The Americans were formidable adversaries, he’d said in his first lecture to his pilots and senior ground-staff. Clever ones, devious, and dangerously aggressive. Worst of all, at their best they were utterly unpredictable, the reverse of the Japanese who, he’d gone on, tended to be highly predictable. Perhaps that was why he’d been posted to this command, the pilots thought. If things went further, the first contact with hostile American forces would be here. He wanted to be ready for it, despite the huge price of money, fuel, and fatigue that attended it. The pilots thoroughly approved. War was a serious business, and though new to it, they didn’t shrink from its responsibilities.
The time factor would soon become his greatest frustration, Ryan thought. Tokyo was fourteen hours ahead of Washington. It was dark there now, and the next day, and whatever clever idea he might come up with would have to wait hours until implementation. The same was true in the IO, but at least he had direct comms to Admiral Dubro’s battle force. Getting word to Clark and Chavez meant going via Moscow, and then farther either by contact via RVS officer in Tokyo—not something to be done too frequently—or by reverse-modem message whenever Clark lit up his computer for a dispatch to the Interfax News Ag
ency. There would necessarily be a time lag in anything he did, and that could get people killed.
It was about information. It always was, always would be. The real trick was in finding out what was going on. What was the other side doing? What were they thinking?
What is it that they want to accomplish? he asked himself.
War was always about economics, one of the few things that Marx had gotten right. It was just greed, really, as he’d told the President, an armed robbery writ large. At the nation-state level, the terms were couched in terms such as Manifest Destiny or Lebensraum or other political slogans to grab the attention and ardor of the masses, but that’s what it came down to: They have it. We want it. Let’s get it.
And yet the Mariana Islands weren’t worth it. They were simply not worth the political or economic cost. This affair would ipso facto cost Japan her most lucrative trading partner. There could be no recovery from this, not for years. The market positions so carefully established and exploited since the 1960s would be obliterated by something politely termed public resentment but far more deeply felt than that. For what possible reason could a country so married to the idea of business turn its back on practical considerations?
But war is never rational, Jack. You told the President that yourself.
“So tell me, what the hell are they thinking?” he commanded, instantly regretting the profanity.
They were in a basement conference room. For the first meeting of the working group, Scott Adler was absent, off with Secretary Hanson. There were two National Intelligence Officers, and four people from State, and they looked as puzzled and bemused as he did, Ryan thought. Wasn’t that just great. For several seconds nothing happened. Hardly unexpected, Jack thought. It was always a matter of clinical interest for him when he asked for real opinions from a group of bureaucrats: who would say what?
“They’re mad and they’re scared.” It was Chris Cook, one of the commercial guys from State. He’d done two tours at the embassy in Tokyo, spoke the language passably well, and had run point on several rounds of the trade negotiations, always taking back seat to senior men and women, but usually the guy who did the real work. That was how things were, and Jack remembered resenting that others sometimes got the credit for his ideas. He nodded at the comment, seeing that the others around the table did the same, grateful that someone else had taken the initiative.
“I know why they’re mad. Tell me why they’re scared.”
“Well, hell, they still have the Russians close by, and the Chinese, both still major powers, but we’ve withdrawn from the Western Pacific, right? In their mind, it leaves them high and dry—and now it looks to them like we’ve turned on them. That makes us potential enemies, too, doesn’t it? Where does that leave them? What real friends do they have?”
“Why take the Marianas?” Jack asked, reminding himself that Japan had not been attacked by those countries in historically recent times, but had done so herself to all of them. Cook had made a perhaps unintended point. How did Japan respond to outside threats? By attacking first.
“It gives them defensive depth, bases outside their home islands.”
Okay, that makes sense, Jack thought. Satellite photos less than an hour old hung on the wall. There were fighters now on the airstrips at Saipan and Guam, along with E-2C Hawkeye airborne-early-warning birds of the same type that operated off American carriers. That created a defensive barrier that extended twelve hundred miles almost due south from Tokyo. It could be seen as a formidable wall against American attacks, and was in essence a reduced version of Japanese grand strategy in the Second World War. Again Cook had made a sound observation.
“But are we really a threat to them?” he asked.
“We certainly are now,” Cook replied.
“Because they forced us to be,” one of the NIOs snarled, entering the discussion. Cook leaned across the table at him.
“Why do people start wars? Because they’re afraid of something! For Christ’s sake, they’ve gone through more governments in the last five years than the Italians. The country is politically unstable. They have real economic problems. Until recently their currency’s been in trouble. Their stock market’s gone down the tubes because of our trade legislation, and we’ve faced them with financial ruin, and you ask why they got a little paranoid? If something like this happened to us, what the hell would we do?” the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State demanded, rather cowing the National Intelligence Officer, Ryan saw.
Good, he thought. A lively discussion was usually helpful, as the hottest fire made the strongest steel.
“My sympathy for the other side is mitigated by the fact that they have invaded U.S. territory and violated the human rights of American citizens.” The reply to Cook’s tirade struck Ryan as somewhat arch. The response was that of a lead hound on the scent of a crippled fox, able to play with the quarry instead of the other way around for a change. Always a good feeling.
“And we’ve already put a couple hundred thousand of their citizens out of work. What about their rights?”
“Fuck their rights! Whose side are you on, Cook?”
The DASS just leaned back into his chair and smiled as he slid the knife in. “I thought I was supposed to tell everyone what they’re thinking. Isn’t that what we’re here for? What they’re thinking is that we’ve jerked them around, bashed them, belittled them, and generally let them know that we tolerate them through sufferance and not respect since before I was born. We’ve never dealt with them as equals, and they think that they deserve better from us, and they don’t like it. And you know,” Cook went on, “I don’t blame them for feeling that way. Okay, so now they’ve lashed out. That’s wrong, and I deplore it, but we need to recognize that they tried to do it in as nonlethal a way as possible, consistent with their strategic goals. That’s something we need to consider here, isn’t it?”
“The Ambassador says his country is willing to let it stop here,” Ryan told them, noting the look in Cook’s eyes. Clearly he’d been thinking about the situation, and that was good. “Are they serious?”
He’d asked another tough question again, something that the people around the table didn’t much like. Tough questions required definitive answers, and such answers could often be wrong. It was toughest for the NIOs. The National Intelligence Officers were senior people from CIA, DIA, or NSA, usually. One of them was always with the President to give him an opinion in the event of a rapidly evolving crisis. They were supposed to be experts in their fields, and they were, as, for that matter, was Ryan, who’d been an NIO himself. But there was a problem with such people. An NIO was generally a serious, tough-minded man or woman. They didn’t fear death, but they did fear being wrong on a hard call. For that reason, even putting a gun to one’s head didn’t guarantee an unequivocal answer to a tough question. He looked from face to face, seeing that Cook did the same, with contempt on his face.
“Yes, sir, I think it likely that they are. It’s also likely that they will offer us something back. They know that they have to let us save face here, too. We can count on it, and that will work in our favor if we choose to negotiate with them. ”
“Would you recommend that?”
A smile and a nod. “It never hurts you to talk with somebody, no matter what the situation is, does it? I’m a State Department puke, remember? I have to recommend that. I don’t know the military side. I don’t know if we can contest this thing or not. I presume we can, and that they know we can, and that they know they’re gambling, and that they’re even more scared than we are. We can use that in our favor.”
“What can we press for?” Ryan asked, chewing on his pen.
“Status quo ante,” Cook replied at once. “Complete withdrawal from the Marianas, restoration of the islands and their citizens to U.S. rule, reparations to the families of the people killed, punishment of those responsible for their deaths.” Even the NIOs nodded at that, Ryan saw. He was already starting to like Cook. He spoke his mind, and wh
at he said had a logic to it.
“What will we get?” Again the answer was plain and simple.
“Less.” Where the hell has Scott Adler been hiding this guy? Ryan thought. He speaks my language. “They have to give us something, but they won’t give it all back.”
“And if we press?” the National Security Advisor asked.
“If we want it all back, then we may have to fight for it,” Cook said. “If you want my opinion, that’s dangerous.” Ryan excused the facile conclusion. He was, after all, a State Department puke, and part of that culture.
“Will the Ambassador have the clout to negotiate?”
“I think so, yes,” Cook said after a moment. “He has a good staff, he’s a very senior professional diplomat. He knows Washington and he knows how to play in the bigs. That’s why they sent him here.”
Jaw, jaw is better than war, war. Jack remembered the words of Winston Churchill. And that was true, especially if the former did not entirely preclude the threat of the latter.
“Okay,” Ryan said. “I have some other things that need doing. You guys stay here. I want a position paper. I want options. I want multiple opening positions for both sides. I want end-game scenarios. I want likely responses on their part to theoretical military moves on our part. Most of all,” he said directly to the NIOs, “I want a feel for their nuclear capacity, and the conditions under which they might feel the need to make use of it.”
“What warning will we have?” The question, surprisingly, came from Cook. The answer, surprisingly, came from the other NIO, who felt the need, now, to show something of what he knew.
“The Cobra Dane radar on Shemya still works. So do the DSPS satellites. We’ll get launch warning and impact prediction if it comes to that. Dr. Ryan, have we done anything—”
“The Air Force has air-launched cruise missiles in the stockpile. They would be carried in by B-1 bombers. We also have the option of rearming Tomahawk cruise missiles with W-80 warheads as well for launch by submarines or surface ships. The Russians know that we may exercise that option, and they will not object so long as we keep it quiet.”