His next move was to walk across the office to the news department. Within minutes an inquiry went out on one of the wire services.
“Ryan.”
“Bob Holtzman, Jack. I have a question for you.”
“I hope it’s not about Wall Street,” Jack replied in as unguarded a voice as he could muster.
“No, it’s about Guam. Why are the phone lines out?”
“Bob, did you ask the phone company that?” Ryan tried.
“Yeah. They say there was a storm that took a lot of lines down. Except for a couple of things. One, there wasn’t any storm. Two, there’s an undersea cable and a satellite link. Three, a week is a long time. What’s going on?” the reporter asked.
“How many people are asking?”
“Right now, just me and a TV station in Little Rock that put a request up on the AP wire. Another thirty minutes and it’s going to be a lot more. What gives? Some sort of—”
“Bob, why don’t you come on down here,” Ryan suggested. Well, it’s not as though you expected this to last forever, Jack told himself. Then he called Scott Adler’s office. But why couldn’t it have waited one more day?
Yukon was fueling her second set of ships. The urgency of the moment meant that the fleet oiler was taking on two escorts at a time, one on either beam, while her helicopter transferred various parts and other supplies around the formation, about half of them aircraft components to restore Ike’s aircraft to full-mission status. The sun would set in another thirty minutes, and the underway-replenishment operations would continue under cover of darkness. Dubro’s battle force had darted east, the better to distance itself from the Indian formation, and again had gone to EMCON, with all radars off, and a deceptive placement of their surveillance aircraft. But they’d lost track of the two Indian carriers, and while the Hawkeyes probed cautiously, Dubro sweated.
“Lookouts report unknown aircraft inbound at two-one-five,” a talker called.
The Admiral swore quietly, lifted his binoculars, and turned to the southwest. There. Two Sea Harriers. Playing it smart, too, he saw. They were at five thousand feet or so, tucked into the neat two-plane element used for tactical combat and air shows, flying straight and level, careful not to overfily any ship directly. Before they had passed over the first ring of escorts, a pair of Tomcats were above and behind them, ready to take them out in a matter of seconds if they showed hostile intent. But hostile intent meant loosing a weapon first, and in this day and age a loosed weapon most probably meant a hit, whatever happened to the launch aircraft. The Harriers flew overhead one time only. They seemed to be carrying extra fuel tanks and maybe a reconnaissance pod, but no weapons, this time. Admiral Chandraskatta was no fool, but then Dubro had never made that assumption. His adversary had played a patient game, sticking to his own mission and biding his time, and learning from every trick the Americans had shown him. None of this was of much comfort to the battle-force commander.
“Follow them back?” Commander Harrison asked dispassionately.
Mike Dubro shook his head. “Pull one of the Hummers in close and track by radar.”
When the hell would Washington realize he had an imminent confrontation brewing?
“Mr. Ambassador,” Scott Adler said, folding up the note an aide had just delivered. “It is likely that in the next twenty-four hours your occupation of the Marianas will become public knowledge. At that point the situation will go beyond our control. You have plenipotentiary powers to resolve this affair ...”
But he didn’t, as Adler had begun to suspect, despite assurances to the contrary. He could also see that he’d pushed the man too hard and too fast. Not that he’d had a choice in the matter. The entire affair had been going on for barely a week. In normal diplomatic practice it took that long just to select the kind of chairs the negotiators sat in. In that respect everything had been doomed from the beginning, but Adler was a professional diplomat for whom hope was never dead. Even now as he concluded his latest statement, he looked into the man’s eyes for something he’d be able to report to the White House.
“Throughout our talks we have heard about America’s demands, but we have not heard a single word concerning my country’s legitimate security interests. Today you have conducted a systematic attack on our financial and economic foundations and—”
Adler leaned forward. “Mr. Ambassador! A week ago your country did the same thing to us, as the information in front of you demonstrates. A week ago your country conducted an attack on the United States Navy. A week ago your country seized U.S. territory. In equity, sir, you have no place to criticize us for efforts necessary to the restoration of our own economic stability.” He paused for a moment, reproving himself for the decidedly undiplomatic language of his outburst, but events had gone beyond such niceties—or they soon would. “We have offered you the opportunity to negotiate in good faith for a mutually acceptable interpretation of the Trade Reform Act. We will accept an apology and reparations for the losses to our Navy. We require the immediate evacuation of Japanese military forces from the Mariana Islands.”
But things had already gone too far for that, and everyone at the table knew it. There just wasn’t time. Adler felt the dreadful weight of inevitability. All his skills were useless now. Other events and other people had taken matters out of his hands, and the Ambassador’s hands as well. He saw the same look on the man’s face that must have been on his own.
His voice was mechanical. “Before I can respond to that, I must consult with my government. I propose that we adjourn so that consultations may be carried out.”
Adler nodded more with sadness than anger. “As you wish, Mr. Ambassador. If you should need us, we will be available.”
“My God, you kept all that quiet? How?” Holtzman demanded.
“Because you guys were all looking the other way,” Jack answered bluntly. “You’ve always depended too much on us for information anyway.” He instantly regretted those words. It had come out as too much of a challenge. Stress, Jack.
“But you lied to us about the carriers and you never told us about the submarines at all!”
“We’re trying to stop this thing before it gets worse,” President Durling said. “We’re talking to them over at State right now.”
“You’ve had a busy week,” the journalist acknowledged. “Kealty’s out?”
The President nodded. “He’s talking with the Justice Department and with the victims.”
“The big thing was getting the markets put back in place,” Ryan said. “That was the real—”
“What do you mean? They’ve killed people!” Holtzman objected.
“Bob, why have you guys been hammering the Wall Street story so hard all week? Damn it, what was really scary about their attack on us was the way they wrecked the financial markets and did their run on the dollar. We had to fix that first.”
Bob Holtzman conceded the point. “How the hell did you pull that one off?”
“God, who would have thunk it?” Mark Gant asked. The bell had just rung to close the abbreviated trading day. The Dow was down four and a quarter points, with four hundred million shares traded. The S&P 500 was actually up a fraction, as was NASDAQ, because the blue-chip companies had suffered more from general nerves than the smaller fry. But the bond market was the best of all, and the dollar was solid. The Japanese yen, on the other hand, had taken a fearful beating against every Western currency.
“The changes in bonds will drop the stock market next week,” Winston said, rubbing his face and thanking Providence for his luck. Residual nerves in the market would encourage people to seek out safer places for their money, though the strength of the dollar would swiftly ameliorate that.
“By the end of the week?” Gant wondered. “Maybe. I’m not so sure. A lot of manufacturing stocks are still undervalued.”
“Your move on Citibank was brilliant,” the Fed Chairman said, taking a place next to the traders.
“They didn’t deserve the hit th
ey took last week, and everyone knew it. I was just the first to make the purchase,” Winston replied matter-of-factly. “Besides, we came out ahead on the deal.” He tried not to be too smug about it. It had just been another exercise in psychology; he’d done something both logical and unexpected to initiate a brief trend, then cashed in on it. Business as usual.
“Any idea how Columbus made out today?” Secretary Fiedler asked.
“Up about ten,” Gant replied at once, meaning ten million dollars, a fair day’s work under the circumstances. “We’ll do better next week.”
An FBI agent came over. “Call in from DTC. They’re posting everything normally. That part of the system seems to be back to normal.”
“What about Chuck Searls?” Winston asked.
“Well, we’ve taken his apartment completely apart. He had two brochures about New Caledonia, of all places. That’s part of France, and we have the French looking for him.”
“Want some good advice?”
“Mr. Winston, we always look for advice,” the agent replied with a grin. The mood in the room was contagious.
“Look in other directions, too.”
“We’re checking everything.”
“Yeah, Buzz,” the President said, lifting the phone. Ryan, Holtzman, and two Secret Service agents saw JUMPER close his eyes and let out a long breath. He’d been getting reports from Wall Street all afternoon, but it wasn’t official for him until he heard it from Secretary Fiedler. “Thanks, my friend. Please let everybody know that I—good, thanks. See you tonight.” Durling replaced the phone. “Jack, you are a good man in a storm.”
“One storm left.”
“So does that end it?” Holtzman asked, not really understanding what Durling had said. Ryan took the answer.
“We don’t know yet.”
“But—”
“But the incident with the carriers can be written off as an accident, and we won’t know for sure what happened to the submarines until we look at the hulls. They’re in fifteen thousand feet of water,” Jack told him, cringing inwardly for saying such things. But this was war, and war was something you tried to avoid. If possible, he reminded himself. “There’s the chance that we can both back away from this, write it off to a misunderstanding, a few people acting without authority, and if they get hammered for it, nobody else dies.”
“And you’re telling me all this?”
“It traps you, doesn’t it?” Jack asked. “If the talks over at State work out, then you have a choice, Bob. You can either help us keep things quiet, or you can have a shooting war on your conscience. Welcome to the club, Mr. Holtzman.”
“Look, Ryan, I can’t—”
“Sure you can. You’ve done it before.” Jack noted that the President sat there and listened, saying nothing. That was partly to distance himself from Ryan’s maneuvering, but another part, perhaps, liked what he saw. And Holtzman was playing along.
“So what does all this mean?” Goto asked.
“It means that they will bluster,” Yamata told him. It means that our country needs leadership, he couldn’t say. “They cannot take the islands back. They lack the resources to attack us. They may have patched up their financial markets for now, but Europe and America cannot survive without us indefinitely, and by the time they realize that, we will not need them as we do now. Don’t you see? This has always been about independence for us! When we achieve that, everything will change.”
“And for now?”
“Nothing changes. The new American trade laws would have the same effect as hostilities. At least this way we get something for it, and we will have the chance of ruling our own house.”
That’s what it really came down to, the one thing that nobody but he ever quite saw. His country could make products and sell them, but so long as his country needed markets more than the markets needed his country, trade laws could cripple Japan, and his country would have no recourse at all. Always the Americans. It was always them, forcing an early end to the Russo-Japanese War, denying their imperial ambitions, allowing them to build up their economy, then cutting the legs out from under them, three times now, the same people who’d killed his family. Didn’t they see? Now Japan had struck back, and timidity still prevented people from seeing reality. It was all Yamata could manage to rein in his anger at this small and foolish man. But he needed Goto, even though the Prime Minister was too stupid to realize that there was no going back.
“You’re sure that they cannot ... respond to our actions?” Goto asked after a minute or so of contemplation.
“Hiroshi, it is as I have been telling you for months. We cannot fail to win—unless we fail to try.”
“Damn, I wish we could use these things to do our surveys.” The real magic of overhead imagery lay not in individual photographs, but rather in pairs of photographs, generally taken a few seconds apart from the same camera, then transmitted down to the ground stations at Sunnyvale and Fort Belvoir. Real-time viewing was all well and good to excite the imagination of congressmen privy to such things or to count items in a hurry. For real work, you used prints, set in pairs and viewed through a stereoscope, which worked better than the human eyes for giving precise three-dimensionality to the photos. It was almost as good as flying over in a helicopter. Maybe even better, the AMTRAK official thought, because you could go backwards as well as forwards.
“The satellites cost a lot of money,” Betsy Fleming observed.
“Yeah, like our whole budget for a year. This one’s interesting.” A team of professional photo-interpretation experts was analyzing every frame, of course, but the plain truth of the matter was that CIA and NRO had stopped being interested in the technical aspects of railroad-building decades ago. Tracking individual trains loaded with tanks or missiles was one thing. This was something else.
“How so?”
“The Shin-Kansen line is a revenue maker. This spur isn’t going to make much money for them. Maybe they can cut a tunnel up here,” he went on, manipulating the photos. “Maybe they can make it into that city—but me, I’d come the other way and save the money on engineering. Of course it could just be a shunt to use for servicing the mainline.”
“Huh?”
He didn’t even lift his eyes from the stereo-viewer. “A place to stash work cars, snowblowers, that sort of thing. It is well sited for that purpose. Except that there’s no such cars there.”
The resolution on the photos was just fantastic. They’d been taken close to noon local time, and you could see the sun’s glint on the rails of the mainline, and the spur as well. He figured that the width of the rails was about the resolution limit of the cameras, an interesting fact that he couldn’t relay to anyone else. The ties were concrete, like the rest of the Bullet Train line, and the quality of the engineering was, well, something he’d envied for a long time. The official looked up reluctantly.
“No way it’s a revenue line. The turns are all wrong. You couldn’t do thirty miles per hour through there, and the train sets on that line cruise over a hundred. Funny, though, it just disappears.”
“Oh?” Betsy asked.
“See for yourself.” The executive stood to stretch, giving Mrs. Fleming a place at the viewer. He picked up a large-scale map of the valley and looked to see where things went. “You know, when Hill and Stevens built the Great Northern ...”
Betsy wasn’t interested. “Chris, take a look at this.”
Their visitor looked up from the map. “Oh. The truck? I don’t know what color they paint their—”
“Not green.”
Time usually worked in favor of diplomacy, but not in this case, Adler thought as he entered the White House. He knew the way, and had a Secret Service agent to conduct him in case he got lost. The Deputy Secretary of State was surprised to see a reporter in the Oval Office, even more so when he was allowed to stay.
“You can talk,” Ryan told him. Scott Adler took a deep breath and started his report.
“They’re not backin
g down on anything. The Ambassador isn’t very comfortable with the situation, and it shows. I don’t think he’s getting much by way of instructions out of Tokyo, and that worries me. Chris Cook thinks they’re willing to let us have Guam back in a demilitarized condition, but they want to keep the rest of the islands. I dangled the TRA at them, but no substantive response.” He paused before going on. “It’s not going to work. We can keep at it for a week or a month, but it’s just not going to happen. Fundamentally they don’t know what they’re into. They see a continuum of engagement between the military and economic sides. They don’t see the firebreak between the two. They don’t see that they’ve crossed over a line, and they don’t see the need to cross back.”
“You’re saying there’s a war happening,” Holtzman observed, to make things clear. It made him feel foolish to ask the question. He didn’t notice the same aura of unreality surrounding everyone else in the room.
Adler nodded. “I’m afraid so.”
“So what are we going to do about it?”
“What do you suppose?” President Durling asked.
Commander Dutch Claggett had never expected to be in this situation. A fast-track officer since his graduation from the U.S. Naval Academy twenty-three years earlier, his career had come to a screeching halt aboard USS Maine, when as executive officer he’d been present for the only loss of an American fleet-ballistic-missile submarine. The irony was that his life’s ambition had been command of a nuclear submarine, but command of Tennessee meant nothing at all now. It was just an entry on his first resume when he entered the civilian job market. Her designed mission was to carry Trident-II sea-launched ballistic missiles, but the missiles were gone and the only reason that she still existed at all was because the local environmental movement had protested her dismantlement to Federal District Court, and the judge, a lifelong member of the Sierra Club, had agreed to the arguments, which were again on their way back to the United States Court of Appeals. Claggett had been in command of Tennessee for nine months now, but the only time he’d been under way had been to move from one side of the pier to another. Not exactly what he’d had in mind for his career. It could be worse, he told himself in the privacy of his cabin. He could have been dead, along with so many of the others from USS Maine.