Robert Frezza - [Colonial War 02]

by Fire in a Faraway Place (epub)

  Setagaya Ward, Tokyo

  AT 9:03, A TAXI DROPPED HOROSHI MIZOGUCHI OFF AT AN ORNATE

  residence in Tokyo’s Setagaya Ward, near the western edge of the city. With ill-concealed distaste, the driver escorted Mizoguchi to the door. Mizoguchi politely thanked him.

  Knocking on the door, he was admitted by the maid, who led him into the house’s study.

  “Kozo-sama, your visitor is here to see you,” the maid announced.

  Mizoguchi smiled at her slip and bowed low. “I am greatly honored that a nihonjinron scholar of your stature would condescend to meet with me on such inadequate notice.”

  “I am honored,” Kozo said, inclining his head slightly to acknowledge Mizoguchi’s bow and puffing himself up a little. “Was your trip here pleasant?”

  “When one is steadfast of purpose, inconveniences are of no great consequence,” Mizoguchi said, listening carefully to ascertain where other persons were located in the professor’s home.

  “Yes, anything can be done if one sets one’s mind to it. Life is merely a succession of moments, and what matters most is one’s sense of purpose at any given moment,” Kozo said inconsequentially, seating his visitor. He abruptly dispensed with pleasantries. “You said that you were interested in discussing the ‘eight directions under one roof.’ ”

  “Yes, it seems to me to be an important concept.” “Clarification of the fundamental principles of national policy leads inexorably to the concept that the eight directions must all come under a single roof through a process of spiritual mobilization.”

  “Naturally.”

  “While there are always unpredictable events, strength of purpose will carry one through.”

  “Of course, professor. I have become concerned, however, that there are certain dangers inherent in such a course, and that other peoples may not see benefits.”

  “The ways of heaven are not always apparent to lesser beings,” Kozo said dogmatically. “As 1 have explained in my books, we must continue to strive to foster progress even though ignorant and ill-advised persons oppose us. How is it that you have become interested in this subject?”

  “My experiences on colonial planets have convinced me that the situation on these worlds is becoming increasingly serious.” “I am pleased that you have become aware of the severity of the situation that faces us and of the need for complete firmness of purpose,” the professor commented.

  “Unfortunately, while I see the need for firmness of purpose, my experiences have convinced me that in striving to bring all peoples under the one roof of Imperial rule, some persons have caused great hardship and resentment. Although few books are printed with raised characters for a blind person to read, I recently read one book which had a profound effect on me. It had to do with the animals in the zoo at Ueno during the Great Pacific War.”

  “You should call it the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity War,” Kozo corrected impatiently. “What did the book say?” “It mentioned that toward the end of the war, after the Americans had defeated our air and naval forces, the decision was made to destroy the animals which could become dangerous in the event that they escaped during an air raid. Among the animals which were to be destroyed were the elephants.” Mizoguchi’s voice softened.

  “At first, the keepers decided to kill them by putting poison in their food, but elephants are very intelligent, and they refused to eat the poisoned food. The keepers loved them too much to shoot them, so it was decided reluctantly that they should be allowed to starve to death. Toward the end, it was very sad. Hidden behind curtains, the last two elephants would hobble to their feet with their remaining strength and perform tricks in the hope that any people watching them would take pity and feed them.”

  “Yes, it is indeed a very sad story.” Kozo’s eyes narrowed. “But what has this to do with anything? In comparison to the great task of bringing the eight directions under one roof that we are embarked upon, elephants are not of any importance.” “May I ask what time it is, honored professor?”

  “It is a few moments after nine o’clock.” Kozo’s voice took on a strident edge. “You did say that you had to see me on a matter of great urgency, a matter of life and death, which is why I agreed to see you.”

  “I believe that people should be more sensitive about elephants. And also about people,” Mizoguchi said, judging Kozo’s exact position from the sound of his voice. He pulled the pin on a gas grenade and expertly tossed it in Kozo’s lap before it burned his fingers as the chemicals inside reacted.

  A few seconds later, Mizoguchi got up and left the room before the filters in his nostrils became impregnated. As he left, he calmly shut the door so that the professor’s family would not become involved. Stopping at a pay phone, he used some of the money Coldewe had given him to call his wife.

  The New Akasaki Prince Hotel, Tokyo

  AT 9:11, ZEREBTSOV BROUGHT ALL OF THE ELEVATORS IN THE NEW

  Akasaki Prince Hotel to the top floor and locked them in place. Then he tossed a smoke candle down one of the stairwells and pulled the building’s fire alarm.

  Knocking on doors, Zerebtsov, Soe, and Alariesto preemp-torially directed the people on the top floor to evacuate the area, patting their submachine guns for emphasis. As soon as they hustled them away, they booby-trapped the stairwells with hair-fine wire threaded to incapacitation grenades, pitched some more smoke candles down the stairwells, and used a bolt gun to secure alloy strips across the doors to hold them secure.

  With the reporters broadcasting from the New Akasaki Prince, Zerebtsov expected the police to show, and as a good recon man, he had no intention of making their job easier.

  Iruma Air Base, oiiIhi
  AT 9:09, THE UGHTWELL GOMAN I POWERED Her WAY INTO the

  upper-atmosphere over the headquarters of the Central Air Defense District at Iruma, northwest of Tokyo. The Central Air Defense District hadn’t faced a serious foreign threat in a hundred years, and when Sanmartin and Malinov descended, it was at its fourth level of alert, which is to say it was completely unprepared.

  Roused suddenly out of lethargy by the nuclear explosion in the vicinity of Yamato Station, Iruma lost precious minutes assuring itself that Yamato Station was indeed gone and more precious minutes recognizing that the explosion was not accidental. With no available officer senior enough to authorize a response, the command hastily dusted off its emergency procedures, with predictable results.

  Ten kilometers above the base, Malinov let loose a hail of fusion-charged “chicken seed” that struck and released energy into buildings, parked aircraft, and radars.

  Goaded into action, Central Air Defense District directed the Atsugi and Hachioji air defense sites and its own antiaircraft defenses to fire on the intruder. Atsugi failed to respond, since Karaev’s men weren’t answering phones. Before communications failed, Hachioji reported that it was under ground attack. The haphazard response by the base’s own defenses was not enough to save it.

  Taking minor damage from a laser battery, “Speedy” painted the base’s operations center with a laser designator and released one of Reinikka’s 210mm penetrators. Plunging, the missile struck one of the doors of the huge concrete structure at an oblique angle and drilled deep inside to explode twenty meters and three levels below the ground. A huge cloud of dust puffed out of the shattered armored door. Smaller missiles smashed hangars and mobile missile batteries.

  Having neutralized Iruma, Sanmartin and Malinov leveled out the Gomani and headed south-southeast to bring themselves over Air Defense Command Headquarters at Fuchu. They gave key buildings on that installation a thorough seventy-second dusting with composite particles. Within minutes of the strike on Yamato Station, Tokyo’s air-defense system was headless.

  In a raspy voice, Malinov radioed, “Tora, tora, tora,” to Vereshchagin and Coldewe, indicating surprise and success. As

  Sanmartin aimed the corvette toward central Tokyo, Malinov asked, “You bring your handkerchief?”

  S
anmartin had the handkerchief his wife had embroidered many years ago next to his skin and pulled it out for Malinov to see, “My little piece of Suid-Afrika.”

  Tachikawa Air Base, outside Tokyo

  EVEN AS 1RUMA WAS COMING UNDER FIRE, A SHUTTLE FLEW IN LOW

  over No. 3 runway at the interceptor base at Tachikawa, twenty-five kilometers west-northwest of Tokyo. Broadcasting clear-language distress signals, the shuttle touched down, ignoring communications from the tower, and the clamshell doors in back opened out.

  A handful of security policemen emerged from the tower. After a short but animated discussion, they piled into a vehicle and drove toward the shuttle.

  Within seconds, however, alerted by the Central Air Defense District, the control tower assumed the aspect of a disturbed beehive. Pilots and aircrew scrambled out to man the two ready fighter planes on runway No. 1, and a swarm of security policemen poured out of the building.

  Suddenly, a bright bolt of lightning appeared from inside the shuttle and speared the security vehicle cruising down the runway. Two Cadillacs and two slicks under Daniel Savichev’s command roared down the shuttle’s ramp. One Cadillac had 1,200 rounds of 30mm ammunition on board, Savichev’s had 150 rounds of 90mm, and Savichev didn’t intend to take any of it home.

  An infantry platoon and a mortar section followed to provide covering fire. Fanning out, Savichev’s vehicles struck the air-defense lasers and then began systematically to take the airbase apart. One section of the Iceman’s riflemen provided perimeter defense while the other two sections made certain of the buildings that the armored cars were ripping apart. The mortar set up in a small depression just off the runway and began laying smoke and white phosphorus.

  A few more riflemen tolled a tilt-rotor out the back of the shuttle with its wings folded. Shielded by the smoke, they snapped its wings into place, and it lifted off to pick up Snyman’s and Karaev’s men.

  From the base of the shuttle, Piotr Kolomeitsev watched the action intently, occasionally relaying suggestions. The Iceman had sixty-seven men to hold his tiny airhead on Japanese soil and had no reason to believe he needed more. Although the base held several thousand men belonging to the Air Defense Forces, only a few were trained for ground combat, and less than half of these were armed.

  It took the Iceman’s men fourteen minutes to wreck every airplane on the base and reduce most of the buildings to burning ruins, including the ordnance sheds. Three Imperial maintenance men who had improvised a tank destroyer by mounting a launcher on a utility vehicle were dead, as was a brave pilot who attempted to use his aircraft as a stationary weapons platform. Altogether, nearly a third of the base’s personnel were casualties, and the rest were leaderless and demoralized.

  Daniel Savichev carefully backed his Cadillac up the ramp into the shuttle to top it off with more 90mm ammunition, Savichev’s eyes glowed hotly. The intensity of the firing had partly deformed the barrel of his gun.

  Interlude

  AFTER A MOMENTARY BLIP CAUSED BY OVERSEAS TRANSACTIONS

  and by the sale of Shoji’s stock, the Tokyo stock market settled down to an uneventful trading day.

  At 9:10, the real excitement started shortly after the police evacuated the exchange in response to one of Zerebtsov’s bomb threats. Because most institutional investors trade directly with each other electronically, evacuating the exchange did not halt stock trading. In fact, trading intensified six minutes later as Timo Haerkoennen began operating from the Daikichi terminal.

  The first phase of the program Haerkoennen grafted onto the bank’s electronic trading program was slightly mischievous. Following his preprogrammed instructions, the Daikichi Sanwa snapped up thousands of thirty-day put options on DKU group stocks. The options would allow Daikichi to sell DKU stocks at set prices for the next thirty days, leading anyone observing the market to conclude that the bank was betting heavily that the prices of these stocks would fall. Since the bank had been rigging DKU stock prices, to use Redzup’s quaint phrase, “since Jesus was a lance-corporal,” this sent a ripple through the financial world.

  Despite sagging confidence in the market as a whole, most DKU investors expected that the Daikichi Sanwa would continue to intervene to keep DKU stock prices high. Few of them had hedged themselves against a drop in prices.

  The market had recently been shaken by news that the directors of the Bank of Japan had failed to reach a consensus on raising the discount rate, and by an announcement that the government would recapitalize a public agency set up to purchase problem loans from banks, in effect providing banks with yet another subsidy. Although the move was intended to bolster confidence in the banking system, it had the unanticipated effect of convincing investors that banks would pursue even riskier ventures now that the government was prepared to protect them from the consequences of bad decisions.

  In this context, Haerkoennen’s opening gambit struck market observers as the initial salvo in some incredibly bold campaign to wring a quick profit out of the market: not only was the Daikichi prepared to let DKU prices fall, it was apparently going to push them down. Investors quickly began selling to protect themselves.

  The second phrase of Haerkoennen’s program capitalized on fears raised by the first phase. Quietly, at a speed that human operators could never hope to match, the Daikichi began liquidating its immense holdings of DKU group stocks and stock warrants.

  Stock investors assume that a stock market is “efficient” in the sense that investors have equal information and price stocks such that the expected return on assets of similar risks will be equal. Japan’s tax structure and the manipulative practices of the banks made the Japanese stock market inefficient, but even in an inefficient market, the price of a stock should not decline when a large seller gets rid of it, unless the fact that that particular seller wants to get rid of the stock constitutes new information for the market to react to. Unfortunately, the fact the parent bank of the DKU group was dumping DKU stocks in huge chunks was information for the market to react to.

  Stock prices move quickly in response to new information, and investors who react first have decided advantages. Because market theory assumes that each player is attempting to make money, it didn’t occur to anyone that Daikichi’s trading was calculated to lose the maximum amount of money in the short est possible time. Thus, when investors saw the Daikichi going berserk, they immediately assumed that the biggest gorilla in the game knew something very bad that they didn’t—and tried to react first.

  Despite this, for the first eleven minutes of the DKU fire sale that Haerkoennen initiated, as prices fell to lower than normal levels, big computerized trading programs executed automatic-buy orders, gobbling up huge blocks of shares. Unfortunately, no single entity had ever owned the quantity of stock that the Daikichi did, much less tried to unload it all at once. As the cost of the shares being liquidated exceeded the debt limits built into trading programs, the automatic-buy orders stopped—and prices plummeted.

  Still, profit-seekers began rushing in to snap up bargains, and the market would likely have stabilized at much lower levels—particularly if the exchange directors had been present to halt trading—if more new information had not come in from the news media.

  Stock prices reflect people’s hopes and fears far more than they reflect the intrinsic cash value of a company’s salable assets. The fact that warships in Tokyo’s skies and hard-bitten infantrymen in Tokyo’s streets were dedicated to ruining United Steel-Standard and other DKU companies explained to everyone’s satisfaction why the Daikichi Sanwa was dumping stock. At computer terminals around Japan, investors took Daikichi’s perceived assessment of the DKU group’s future at face value. They panicked.

  A panic is interesting to observe. Although intricate mathematical formulae generally describe the ways that markets and prices behave very accurately, a stock market in a panic takes on human characteristics. It becomes a game of musical chairs—no one wants to be the one holding the stock when the music s
tops, so everyone tries to sit at once. After decades of manipulation by the Daikichi Sanwa, the law of averages caught up with DKU group stock prices and mugged them.

  The stocks that speculators had bought in hopes of quick killings fell the fastest. Within fifteen minutes, the shrewder investors were already unloading other stocks whose prices would fall in reaction to the collapse of the DKU group.

  To heighten the effect, the third phase of Haerkoennen’s program began liquidating the massive mutual funds that Daikichi managed, selling off corporate bonds and stock shares of unrelated companies.

  “ALL RIGHT, MISTER FINANCIAL WIZARD,” HAERKOENNEN TOLD

  Redzup, “the program is entered and running. Now, I think it’s time for us to start thinking about getting out of here—what are you looking at?”

  “This private phone directory we printed out has some very interesting numbers on it, you know.” Redzup picked up the telephone and started dialing.

  “Vulko, what are you doing?!”

  “Is this the president of Dozan Chemical?” Redzup demanded in fluent Japanese. “Please never mind how I got your number. Are you aware of the uncertainty in today’s stock market? ... Please excuse, 1 have just purchased a majority of your company’s shares. It would save considerable difficulty if you did not report for work tomorrow.” Redzup slammed down the phone.

  Haerkoennen crossed his arms. “Uh, Vulko, you realize that all of hell is breaking loose about twelve blocks away. Don’t you think—”

  “Just one more call,” Redzup said, dialing another number.

  AS FISCAL DISASTER LOOMED, INVESTORS FRANTICALLY LOOKED

  for Japan’s banking system to pour in capital to cushion the radical adjustment in prices—as the banking system had done for two centuries. Unfortunately, the corpses in the Ministry of Finance were in no position to lead such an effort, and even as Japan’s bankers began calling one another to discuss the crisis, Hans Coldewe came on the air to say that the corvette Lightwell Gomani was about to make a firing run on the Bank of Japan and the headquarters buildings of Japan’s second, third, and fourth largest banks—and that the people inside had approximately ten minutes to get out. The moment for intervention passed. The market’s safety net failed to operate.