Tom Clancy - Debt of Honor

It was a hell of a speech the President had given five hours earlier. Everyone on the floor had seen it at least once, most of them right here, followed by a pep talk from the head of the NYSE that would have done Knute Rockne proud. They had a mission that day, a mission that was more important than their individual well-being, and one that, if accomplished, would see to their long-term security as well as that of the entire country. They had spent the day reconstructing their activities of the previous Friday, to the point where every trader knew what quantities of which stock he or she held, what every position was. Some even remembered the moves they'd been planning to make, but most of those had been "up" moves rather than "down" ones, and their collective memory would not allow them to follow through on them.

On the other hand, they remembered well the panic of the afternoon seven days before, and, knowing that it had been both artificial and malicious, no one wished to start it afresh. And besides, Europe had signaled its confidence in the dollar in the strongest terms. The bond market was as solidly fixed as though set in granite, and the first moves of the day had been to buy U.S. Treasuries to take advantage of the stunning deal offered by the Fed Chairman. That move was the best confidence-builder they'd ever seen.

For over ninety seconds by one trader's watch, exactly nothing happened on the floor of the exchange. The ticker simply displayed nothing. The phenomenon evoked snorts of disbelief from men whose minds raced to understand it. The little-guy investors, without a clue, were making few calls, and those who did were told by their brokers to sit tight. And for the most part that was what they did. Those who did make sell orders had them handled in-house by their brokerage houses from the reservoir of issues that they had on hand, left over from the previous week. But the big traders weren't doing anything, either. Each of them was waiting for somebody else to do something. The inactivity of merely a minute and a half seemed an eternity to people accustomed to frantic action, and when the first major play happened, it came as a relief.

That first big move of the day, predictably, came from the Columbus Group. It was a massive purchase of Citibank common. Seconds later, Merrill Lynch pushed the button for a similar acquisition of Chemical Bank.

"Yeah," a few voices said on the floor. It made sense, didn't it? Citibank was vulnerable to a fall in the dollar, but the Europeans had seen to it that the dollar was rising in value, and that made First National City Bank a good issue to pick up on. As a result, the first tick of the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up, defying every prediction of every computer.

"Yeah, we can do this," another floor trader observed. "I want a hundred Manny-Hanny at six," he announced. That would be the next bank to benefit from the increasing strength of the dollar, and he wanted a supply that he could move out at six and a quarter. The stocks that had led the slide the previous week would now lead a rise, and for the same reasons as before. Mad as it sounded, it made perfect sense, they all realized. And as soon as the rest of the market figured it out, they could all cash in on it.

The news ticker on the wall was up and running, again giving shorthand selections off the wire services. GM, it said, was rehiring twenty thousand workers for its plants around Detroit in anticipation of increased auto sales. The callback would take nine months, the announcement didn't say, and was the result of a call from the Secretaries of Commerce and Labor, but it was enough to excite interest in auto stocks, and that excited interest in machine tools. By 12:05:30. the Dow was up five points. Hardly a hiccup after the five-hundred-point plummet seven days before, but it looked like Everest on a clear day from the floor of the NYSE.

"I don't believe this," Mark Gant observed, several blocks away in the Javits Federal Office Building.

"Where the hell is it written down that computers are always right?"

George Winston inquired with another forced grin. He had his own worries. Buying up Citibank was not without dangers, but his move, he saw, had the proper effect on the issue. When it had moved up three points, he initiated a slow sell-off to cash in, as other fund managers moved in to follow the trend. Well, that was predictable, wasn't it? The herd just needed a leader. Show them a trend and wait for them to follow, and if it was contrarian, so much the better.

"First impression—it's working," the Fed Chairman told his European colleagues. All the theories said it should, but theories seemed thin at moments like this. Both he and Secretary Fiedler were watching Winston, now leaning back in his chair, chewing on a pen and talking calmly into a phone. They could not hear what he was saying. At least his voice was calm, though his body was that of a man in a fight, every muscle tense. But after another five minutes they saw him stretch tense muscles and smile and turn and say something to Gant, who merely shook his head in wonderment as he watched his computer screen do things that it didn't believe possible.

"Well, how about that," Ryan said.

"Is it good?" President Durling asked.

"Let's put it this way: if I were you I'd give your speechwriter a dozen long-stemmed red roses and tell her to plan on working here another four years or so."

"It's way too early for that, Jack," the President replied somewhat crossly.

Ryan nodded. "Yes, sir, I know. What I mean to tell you is, you did it. The markets may—hell, will fluctuate the rest of the day, but they're not going to free-fall like we initially expected. It's about confidence, Boss. You restored it, and that's a fact."

"And the rest of it?"

"They've got a chance to back down. We'll know by the end of the day."

"And if they don't?"

The National Security Advisor thought about that. "Then we have to figure a way to fight them without hurling them too badly. We have to find their nukes and we have to settle this thing down before it really gets out of control."

"Is that possible?"

Ryan pointed to the screen. "We didn't think this was possible, did we?"

It happened in Idaho, in a community outside Mountain Home Air Force Base. A staff sergeant based there had flown out to Andersen Air Force Base on Guam to work on the approach-control radars. His wife had delivered a baby a week after his departure, and she attempted to call him that evening to tell him about his new daughter, only to learn that the phones were out due to a storm. Only twenty years old and not well educated, she'd accepted the news with disappointment. The military comm links were busy, an officer had told her, convincingly enough that she'd gone home with tears in her eyes. A day later she'd talked to her mother and surprised her with the news that her husband didn't know about his daughter yet. Even in time of war, her mother thought, such news always got through—and what storm could possibly be worse than fighting a war?

So she called the local TV station and asked for the weatherman, a sagacious man of fifty who was excellent at predicting the tornadoes that churned through the region every spring, and, it was widely thought, saved five or ten lives each year with his instant analysis of which way the funnel clouds moved.

The weatherman in turn was the kind who enjoyed being stopped in the local supermarkets with friendly comments, and took the inquiry as yet another compliment for his professional expertise, and besides, he'd never checked out the Pacific Ocean before. But it was easy enough. He linked into the NOAA satellite system and used a computer to go backwards in time to see what sort of storm had hammered those islands. The time of year was wrong for a typhoon, he knew, but it was the middle of an ocean, and storms happened there all the time.