by Tom Clancy
“We put in speed bumps and other safeguards as a result of the last time. This event blew right through them. In less than three hours,” SecTreas added uneasily, wondering, as an academic would, why good theoretical measures had failed to work as expected.
“True. It’ll be interesting to see why. Remember, Buzz, it has happened before.”
“Statement,” the President said, giving a one-word order.
Fiedler nodded, thinking for a moment before speaking. “Okay, we say that the system is fundamentally sound. We have all manner of automated safeguards. There is no underlying problem with the market or with the American economy. Hell, we’re growing, aren’t we? And TRA is going to generate at least half a million manufacturing jobs in the coming year. That’s a hard number, Mr. President. That’s what I’ll say for now.”
“Defer anything else until we get back?” Durling asked.
“That’s my advice,” Fiedler confirmed. Ryan nodded agreement.
“Okay, get hold of Tish and put it out right away.”
There was an unusual number of charter flights, but Saipan International Airport wasn’t all that busy an airport despite its long runways, and increased business made for increased fees. Besides, it was a weekend. Probably some sort of association, the tower chief thought as the first of the 747s out of Tokyo began its final approach. Of late Saipan had become a much more popular place for Japanese businessmen. A recent court decision had struck down the constitutional provision prohibiting foreign ownership of land and now allowed them to buy up parcels. In fact, the island was more than half foreign-owned now, a source of annoyance to many of the native Chamorros people, but not so great an annoyance as to prevent many of them from taking the money and moving off the land. It was bad enough already. On any given weekend, the number of Japanese on Saipan outnumbered the citizens, and typically treated the owners of the island like ... natives.
“Must be a bunch going to Guam, too,” the radar operator noted, examining the line of traffic heading farther south.
“Weekend. Golf and fishing,” the senior tower controller observed, looking forward to the end of his shift. The Japs—he didn’t like them very much—were not going to Thailand as much for their sex trips. Too many had come home with nasty gifts from that country. Well, they did spend money here—a lot of it—and for the privilege of doing it for this weekend they’d boarded their jumbo-jets at about two in the morning ...
The first JAL 747 charter touched down at 0430 local time, slowing and turning at the end of the runway in time for the next one to complete its final approach. Captain Torajiro Sato turned right onto the taxiway and looked around for anything unusual. He didn’t expect it, but on a mission like this—Mission? he asked himself. That was a word he hadn’t used since his F-86 days in the Air Self-Defense Force. If he’d stayed, he would have been a Sho by now, perhaps even commanding his country’s entire Air Force. Wouldn’t that have been grand? Instead—instead he’d left that service and started with Japan Air Lines, at the time a place of far greater respect. He’d hated that fact then, and now hoped that it would change for all time. It would be an Air Force now, even if someone lesser than he was actually in command.
He was still a fighter pilot at heart. You didn’t have much chance to do anything exciting in a 747. He’d been through one serious inflight emergency eight years before, a partial hydraulic failure, and handled it so skillfully that he hadn’t bothered telling the passengers. No one outside the flight deck had even noticed. His feat was now a routine part of the simulator training for 747 captains. Beyond that frantic but satisfying moment, he strove for precision. He was something of a legend in an airline known worldwide for its excellence. He could read weather charts like a fortune-teller, pick the precise tar-strip on a runway where his main gear would touch, and had never once been more that three minutes off an arrival time.
Even taxiing on the ground, he drove the monstrous aircraft as though it were a sports car. So it was today, as he approached the jetway, adjusted his power settings, nosewheel steering, and finally the brakes, to come to a precise stop.
“Good luck, Nisa, ” he told Lieutenant Colonel Seigo Sasaki, who’d ridden the jump seat in the cockpit for the approach, scanning the ground for the unusual and seeing nothing.
The commander of the special-operations group hustled aft. His men were from the First Airborne Brigade, ordinarily based at Narashino. There were two companies aboard the 747, three hundred eighty men. Their first mission was to assume control of the airport. It would not be difficult, he hoped.
The JAL personnel at the gate had not been briefed for the events of the day, and were surprised to see that all the people leaving the charter flight were men, all about the same age, all carrying identical barrel-bags, and that the first fifty or so had the tops unzipped and their hands inside. A few held clipboards on which were diagrams of the terminal, as it had not been possible to perform a proper rehearsal for the mission. While baggage handlers struggled with the cargo containers out of the bottom of the aircraft, other soldiers headed for the baggage area, and simply walked through EMPLOYEES ONLY signs to start unpacking the heavy weapons. At another jetway, a second airliner arrived.
Colonel Sasaki stood in the middle of the terminal now, looking left and right, watching his teams of ten or fifteen men fan out and, he saw, doing their job quietly and well.
“Excuse me,” a sergeant said pleasantly to a bored and sleepy security guard. The man looked up to see a smile, and down to see that the barrel bag over the man’s shoulder was open, and that the hand in it held a pistol. The guard’s mouth gaped comically and the private disarmed him without a struggle. In less than two minutes, the other six guards on terminal duty were similarly taken into custody. A lieutenant led a squad to the security office, where three more men were disarmed and handcuffed. All the while continuous if terse radio messages were flowing in to their colonel.
The tower chief turned when the door opened—a guard had handed over the pass card and punched in the entry code on the keypad without the need for much encouragement—to see three men with automatic rifles.
“What the hell—”
“You will continue your duties as before,” a captain, or ichii, told him. “My English is quite good. Please do not do anything foolish.” Then he lifted his radio microphone and spoke in Japanese. The first phase of Operation KABUL was completed thirty seconds early, and entirely without violence.
The second load of soldiers took over airport security. These men were in uniform to make sure that everyone knew what was going on, and they took their places at all entrances and control points, commandeering official vehicles to set additional security points on the access roads into the airport. This wasn’t overly hard, as the airport was on the extreme southern part of the island, and all approaches were from the north. The commander of the second detachment relieved Colonel Sasaki. The former would control the arrival of the remaining First Airborne Brigade elements tasked to Operation KABUL. The latter had other tasks to perform.
Three airport buses pulled up to the terminal, and Colonel Sasaki boarded the last after moving around to make sure that all his men were present and properly organized. They drove immediately north, past the Dan Dan Golf Club, which adjoined the airport, then left on Cross Island Road, which took them in sight of Invasion Beach. Saipan is by no means a large island, and it was dark—there were very few streetlights—but that didn’t lessen the cold feeling in Sasaki’s stomach. He had to run this mission on time and on profile or risk catastrophe. The Colonel checked his watch. The first aircraft would now be landing on Guam, where the possibility of organized resistance was very real. Well, that was the job of First Division. He had his own, and it had to be done before dawn broke.
The word got out very quickly. Rick Bernard placed his first call to the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange to report his problem and to ask for guidance. On the assurance that this was no accident, he made the obvious re
commendation and Bernard called the FBI, located close to Wall Street in the Javits Federal Office Building. The senior official here was a deputy director, and he dispatched a team of three agents to the primary DTC office located in midtown.
“What seems to be the problem?” the senior agent asked. The answer required ten minutes of detailed explanation, and was immediately followed by a call direct to the Deputy-Director-in-Charge.
MV Orchid Ace had been alongside long enough to off-load a hundred cars. All of them were Toyota Land Cruisers. Taking down the security shack and its single drowsy guard proved to be another bloodless exercise, which allowed the buses to enter the fenced storage lot. Colonel Sasaki had enough men in the three buses to give each a crew of three, and they all knew what to do. The police substations at Koblerville and on Capitol Hill would be the first places approached, now that his men had the proper transport. His own part of the mission was at the latter site, at the home of the Governor.
It was really a coincidence that Nomuri had spent the night in town. He’d actually given himself an evening off, which happened rarely enough, and he found that recovery from a night on the town was facilitated by a trip to the bathhouse, something his ancestors had gotten right about a thousand years earlier. After washing, he got his towel and headed to the hot tub, where the foggy atmosphere would clear his head better than aspirin could. He would emerge from this civilized institution refreshed, he thought.
“Kazuo,” the CIA officer observed. “Why are you here?”
“Overtime,” the man replied with a tired smile.
“Yamata-san must be a demanding boss,” Nomuri observed, sliding himself slowly into the hot water, not really meaning anything by the remark. The reply made his head turn.
“I have never seen history happen before,” Taoka said, rubbing his eyes and moving around a little, feeling the tension bleed from his muscles, but altogether too keyed up to be sleepy after ten hours in the War Room.
“Well, my history for last night was a very nice hostess,” Nomuri said with a raised eyebrow. A nice lady of twenty-one years, too, he didn’t add. A very bright young lady, who had many other people contesting for her attention, but Nomuri was far closer to her age, and she enjoyed talking to someone like him. It wasn’t all about money, Chet thought, his eyes closed over a smiling face.
“Mine was somewhat more exciting than that.”
“Really? I thought you said you were working.” Nomuri’s eyes opened reluctantly. Kazuo had found something more interesting than sexual fantasy?
“I was.”
It was just something about the way he said it. “You know, Kazuo, when you start telling a story, you must finish it.”
A laugh and a shake of the head. “I shouldn’t, but it will be in the papers in a few hours.”
“What’s that?”
“The American financial system crashed last night.”
“Really? What happened?”
The man’s head turned and he spoke the reply very quietly indeed. “I helped do it to them.”
It seemed very odd to Nomuri, sitting in a wooden tub filled with 107-degree water, that he felt a chill.
“Wakarémasen.” I don’t understand.
“It will be clear in a few days. For now, I must go back.” The salaryman rose and walked out, very pleased with himself for sharing his role with one friend. What good was a secret, after all, if at least one person didn’t know that you had it? A secret could be a grand thing, and one so closely held in a society like this was all the more precious.
What the hell? Nomuri wondered.
“There they are.” The lookout pointed, and Admiral Sato raised his binoculars to look. Sure enough, the clear Pacific sky backlit the mast tops of the lead screen ships, FFG-7 frigates by the look at the crosstrees. The radar picture was clear now, a classic circular formation, frigates on the outer ring, destroyers inward of that, then two or three Aegis cruisers not very different from his own flagship. He checked the time. The Americans had just set the morning watch. Though warships always had people on duty, the real work details were synchronized with daylight, and people would now be rousing from their bunks, showering, and heading off for breakfast.
The visual horizon was about twelve nautical miles away. His squadron of four ships was heading east at thirty-two knots, their best possible continuous speed. The Americans were westbound at eighteen.
“Send by blinker light to the formation: Dress ships.”
Saipan’s main satellite uplink facility was off Beach Road, close to the Sun Inn Motel, and operated by MTC Micro Telecom. It was an entirely ordinary civilian facility whose main construction concern had been protection against autumnal typhoons that regularly battered the island. Ten soldiers, commanded by a major, walked up to the main door and were able to walk right in, then approach the security guard, who simply had no idea what was happening, and, again, didn’t even attempt to reach for his sidearm. The junior officer with the detail was a captain trained in signals and communications. All he had to do was point at the various instruments in the central control room. Phone uplinks to the Pacific satellites that transferred telephone and other links from Saipan to America were shut down, leaving the Japan links up—they went to a different satellite, and were backed up with cable—without interfering with downlinked signals. At this hour it was not overly surprising that no single telephone circuit to America was active at the moment. It would stay that way for quite some time.
“Who are you?” the Governor’s wife asked.
“I need to see your husband,” Colonel Sasaki replied. “It’s an emergency.”
The fact of that statement was made immediately clear by the first shot of the evening, caused when the security guard at the legislature building managed to get his pistol out. He didn’t get a round off—an eager paratrooper sergeant saw to that—but it was enough to make Sasaki frown angrily and push past the woman. He saw Governor Comacho, walking to the door in his bathrobe.
“What is this?”
“You are my prisoner,” Sasaki announced, with three other men in the room now to make it clear that he wasn’t a robber. The Colonel found himself embarrassed. He’d never done anything like this before, and though he was a professional soldier, his culture as much as any other frowned upon the invasion of another man’s house regardless of the reason. He found himself hoping that the shots he’d just heard hadn’t been fatal. His men had such orders.
“What?” Comacho demanded. Sasaki just pointed to the couch.
“You and your wife, please sit down. We have no intention of harming you.”
“What is this?” the man asked, relieved that he and his wife weren’t in any immediate danger, probably.
“This island now belongs to my country,” Colonel Sasaki explained. It couldn’t be so bad, could it? The Governor was over sixty, and could remember when that had been true before.
“A goddamned long way for her to come,” Commander Kennedy observed after taking the message. It turned out that the surface contact was the Muroto, a cutter from the Japanese Coast Guard that occasionally supported fleet operations, usually as a practice target. A fairly handsome ship, but with the low freeboard typical of Japanese naval vessels, she had a crane installed aft for the recovery of practice torpedoes. It seemed that Kurushio had expected the opportunity to get off some practice shots in DATELINE PARTNERS. Hadn’t Asheville been told about that?
“News to me, Cap’n,” the navigator said, flipping through the lengthy op-order for the exercise.
“Wouldn’t be the first time the clerks screwed up.” Kennedy allowed himself a smile. “Okay, we’ve killed them enough.” He keyed his microphone again. “Very well, Captain, we’ll replay the last scenario. Start time twenty minutes from now.”
“Thank you, Captain,” the reply came on the VHF circuit. “Out.”
Kennedy replaced the microphone. “Left ten-degrees rudder, all ahead one third. Make your depth three hundred feet.”
The hardest part of Operation KABUL was on Guam. Approaching its hundredth year as an American-flag possession, this was the largest island in the Marianas chain, and possessed a harbor and real U.S. military installations. Only ten years earlier, it would have been impossible. Not so long ago, the now-defunct Strategic Air Command had based nuclear bombers here. The U.S. Navy had maintained a base for missile submarines, and the security obtaining to both would have made anything like this mission a folly. But the nuclear weapons were all gone—the missiles were, anyway. Now Andersen Air Force base, two miles north of Yigo, was really little more than a commercial airport. It supported trans-Pacific flights by the American Air Force. No aircraft were actually based there any longer except for a single executive jet used by the base commander, itself a leftover from when 13th Air Force had been headquartered on the island. Tanker aircraft that had once been permanently based on Guam were now transient reserve formations that came and went as required. The base commander was a colonel who would soon retire, and he had under him only five hundred men and women, mostly technicians. There were only fifty armed USAF Security Police. It was much the same story at the Navy base whose airfield was now co-located with the Air Force. The Marines who had once maintained security there because of the nuclear weapons stockpile had been replaced by civilian guards, and the harbor was empty of gray hulls. Still, this was the most sensitive part of the overall mission. The airstrips at Andersen would be crucial to the entire operation.
