Tom Clancy - Debt of Honor

"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 they 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 really 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.