Tom Clancy - Debt of Honor

"They're giving us our life back, people," Winston said, pacing up and down again in front of the wooden rail. "We have been attacked by people who wanted to take us down. They wanted to cut our heart out. Well, looks like we have some pretty good doctors here. We're going to be sick for a while, but by the end of next week it's going to be okay."

"Friday noon, eh?" the NYSE asked.

"Correct," Fiedler told him, staring hard now and waiting for a response.

The executive gave it another few seconds of thought, then stood. "You will have the full cooperation of the New York Stock Exchange."

And the prestige of the NYSE was enough to overcome any doubts. Full cooperation was inevitable, but speed in the decision cycle was vital, and in ten more seconds the market officials were standing, smiling, and thinking about getting their shops back together.

"There will be no program trading until further notice," Fiedler said. "Those 'expert systems' nearly killed us. Friday is going to be exciting under the best of circumstances. We want people to use their brains, not their Nintendo systems."

"Agreed," NASDAQ said for the rest.

"We need to rethink those things anyway," Merrill Lynch announced thoughtfully.

"We will coordinate through this office. Think things through," the Fed Chairman told them. "If you have ideas on how to make the transition go more smoothly, we want to know about it. We will reconvene at six. Ladies and gentlemen, we are in this together. For the next week or so we are not competitors. We are team members."

"I have about a million individual investors depending on my house," Winston reminded them. "Some of you have more. Let's not forget that."

There was nothing like an appeal to honor. It was a virtue that all craved, even those who lacked it. Fundamentally, honor was itself a debt, a code of behavior, a promise, something inside yourself that you owed to the others who saw it in you. Everyone in this room wanted all the others to look and see a person worthy of respect and trust, and honor. An altogether useful concept, Winston thought, most particularly in time of trouble.

And then there was one , Ryan thought. The way it always seemed to work at this level, you took care of the simple jobs first and saved the really tough ones for last.

The mission now was more to prevent war than to execute it, but the latter would be part of the former.

The control of Eastern Siberia by Japan and China would have the effect of creating a new-what? Axis? Probably not that. Certainly a new world economic powerhouse, a rival to America in all categories of power. It would give Japan and China a huge competitive advantage in economic terms.

That in and of itself was not an evil ambition. But the methods were. The world had once operated by rules as simple as those of any jungle. If you got it first, it was yours—but only if you had the strength to hold it. Not terribly elegant, nor especially fair by contemporary standards, but the rules had been accepted because the stronger nations generally gave citizens political stability in return for loyalty, and that was usually the first step in the growth of a nation. After a while, however, the human need for peace and security had grown into something else—a desire for a stake in the governance of their country. From 1789, the year that America had ratified its Constitution, to 1989, the year that Eastern Europe had fallen, a mere two centuries, something new had come into the collective mind of mankind. It was called by many names—democracy, human rights, self-determination—but it was fundamentally a recognition that the human will had its own force, and mainly for good.

The Japanese plan sought to deny that force. But the time for the old rules was past, Jack told himself. The men in this room would have to see to it.

"So," his briefing concluded, "that's the overall situation in the Pacific."

The Cabinet Room was full, except for the seat of the Secretary of the Treasury, whose senior deputy was sitting in. Around the roughly diamond-shaped table were the heads of the various departments of the Executive Branch. Senior members of Congress and the military had seats against the four walls.

The Secretary of Defense was supposed to speak next. Instead of rising to the lectern as Ryan went back to his place, however, he flipped open his leather folder of notes and scarcely looked up from them.

"I don't know that we can do this," SecDef began, and with those words the men and women of the President's Cabinet shifted uneasily in their chairs.

"The problem is as much technical as anything. We cannot project sufficient power to—"

"Wait a minute," Ryan interrupted."I want to make a few items clear for everyone, okay?" There were no objections. Even the Defense Secretary seemed relieved that he didn't have to speak.

"Guam is U.S. Territory, has been for almost a century. The people there are our citizens. Japan took the island away from us in 1941, and in 1944 we took it back. People died to do that."

"We think we can get Guam back through negotiations," Secretary Hanson said.

"Glad to hear that," Ryan replied. "What about the rest of the Marianas?"

"My people think it's unlikely that we will get them back through diplomatic means. We'll work on it, of course, but—"

"But what?" Jack demanded. There was no immediate answer. "All right, let's make another thing clear. The Northern Marianas were never a legal possession of Japan, despite what their ambassador told us. They were a Trust Territory under the League of Nations, and so they were not war booty to us when we took them in 1944 along with Guam. In 1947 the United Nations declared them a Trust Territory under the protection of the United States. In 1952 Japan officially renounced all claims to sovereignty to the islands. In 1978, the people of the Northern Marianas opted to become a Commonwealth, politically unified with the United States, and they elected their first governor—we took long enough to let them do that, but they did. In 1986 the U.N. decided that we had faithfully fulfilled our responsibilities to those people, and in the same year the people of those islands all got U.S. citizenship. In 1990 the U.N. Security Council closed out the trusteeship for good.

"Do we all have that? The citizens of those islands are American citizens, with U.S. passports—not because we made them do it, but because they freely chose to be. That's called self-determination. We brought the idea to those rocks, and the people there must have thought that we were serious about it."

"You can't do what you can't do," Hanson said. "We can negotiate—"

"Negotiate, hell!" Jack snarled back. "Who says we can't?"

SecDef looked up from his notes. "Jack, it could take years to rebuild…the things we've deactivated. If you want to blame someone, well, blame me."

"If we can't do it—what's it going to cost?" the Secretary of Health and Human Services asked. "We have things we have to do here—"

"So we let a foreign country strip the citizenship rights of Americans because it's too hard to defend them?" Ryan asked more quietly. "Then what? What about the next time it happens? Tell me, when did we stop being the United States of America? It's a matter of political will, that's all," the National Security Advisor went on. "Do we have any?"

"Dr. Ryan, we live in a real world," the Secretary of the Interior pointed out. "All those people on those islands, can we put their lives at risk?"

"We used to say that freedom had a greater value than life. We used to say the same thing about our political principles," Ryan replied. "And the result is the world which those principles built. The things we call rights—nobody just gave them to us. No, sir. Those ideas are things we fought for. Those are things people died for. The people on those islands are American citizens. Do we owe them anything?"