by Tom Clancy
The “Navy Blue” prefix on a signal denoted information that would be of interest to the entire fleet, perhaps sensitive in nature, less often highly classified; in this case it was something too big to be kept a secret. Two of Pacific Fleet’s four aircraft carriers were out of business for a long time. The other two, Eisenhower and Lincoln, were in the IO, and were likely to remain there. Ships know few secrets, and even before Admiral Dubro got his copy of the dispatch, word was already filtering through his flagship. No chief swore more vilely than the battle-force commander, who already had enough to worry about. The same response greeted the signals personnel who informed the senior naval officers on Pentagon duty.
Like most intelligence officers in a foreign land in time of danger, Clark and Chavez didn’t have a clue. If they had, they would probably have caught the first plane anywhere. Spies have never been popular with anyone, and the Geneva Protocols merely affirmed a rule for time of war, mandating their death as soon after apprehension as was convenient, usually by firing squad.
Peacetime rules were a little more civilized, but generally with the same end result. It wasn’t something CIA emphasized in its recruiting interviews. The international rules of espionage allowed for this unhappy fact by giving as many field intelligence officers as possible diplomatic covers, along with which came immunity from harm. Those were called “legal” agents, protected by international treaty as though they really were the diplomats their passports said they were. Clark and Chavez were “illegals,” and not so protected—in fact, John Clark had never once been given a “legal” cover. The importance of this became clear when they left their cheap hotel for a meeting with Isamu Kimura.
It was a pleasant afternoon made less so by the looks they got as gaijin; no longer a mixture of curiosity and distaste, now there was genuine hostility. The atmosphere had changed materially since their arrival here, though remarkably things immediately became more cordial when they identified themselves as Russians, which prompted Ding to speculate on how they might make their cover identity more obvious to passersby. Unfortunately civilian clothing did not offer that option, and so they had to live with the looks, generally feeling the way a wealthy American might in a high-crime neighborhood.
Kimura was waiting at the agreed-upon place, an inexpensive drinking establishment. He already had a few drinks in him.
“Good afternoon,” Clark said pleasantly in English. A beat. “Something wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Kimura said when the drinks came. There were many ways of speaking that phrase. This way indicated that he knew something. “There is a meeting of the ministers today. Goto called it. It’s been going on for hours. A friend of mine in the Defense Agency hasn’t left his office since Thursday night.”
“Da—so?”
“You haven’t seen it, have you? The way Goto has been speaking about America.” The MITI official finished off the last of his drink and raised his hand to order another. Service, typically, was fast.
They could have said that they’d seen the first speech, but instead “Klerk” asked for Kimura’s read on the situation.
“I don’t know,” the man replied, saying the same thing again while his eyes and tone told a somewhat different story. “I’ve never seen anything like this. The—what is the word?—rhetoric. At my ministry we have been waiting for instructions all week. We need to restart the trade talks with America, to reach an understanding, but we have no instructions. Our people in Washington are doing nothing. Goto has spent most of his time with Defense, constant meetings, and with his zaibatsu friends. It’s not the way things are here at all.”
“My friend,” Clark said with a smile, his drink now untouched after a single sip, “you speak as though there is something serious in the air.”
“You don’t understand. There is nothing in the air. Whatever is going on, MITI is not a part of it.”
“And?”
“MITI is part of everything here. My Minister is there now, finally, but he hasn’t told us anything.” Kimura paused. Didn’t these two know anything? “Who do you think makes our foreign policy here? Those dolts in the Foreign Ministry? They report to us. And the Defense Agency, who cares what they think about anything? We are the ones who shape our country’s policies. We work with the zaibatsu, we coordinate, we ... represent business in our relations with other countries and their markets, we make the position papers for the Prime Minister to give out. That’s why I entered the ministry in the first place.”
“But not now?” Clark asked.
“Now? Goto is meeting with them himself, and spends the rest of his time with people who don’t matter, and only now is my Minister called in—well, yesterday,” Kimura corrected himself. “And he’s still there.”
The man seemed awfully rattled, Chavez told himself, over what seemed to be little more than some bureaucratic turf-fighting. The Ministry of International Trade and Industry was being outmaneuvered by someone else. So?
“You are upset that the industry leaders meet directly with your Prime Minister,” he asked.
“So much, and so long, yes. They’re supposed to work through us, but Goto has always been Yamata’s lapdog.” Kimura shrugged. “Perhaps they want to make policy directly now, but how can they do that without us?”
Without me, the man means, Chavez thought with a smile. Dumb-ass bureaucrat. CIA was full of them, too.
It wasn’t all the way thought through, but such things never were. Most of the tourists who came to Saipan were Japanese, but not quite all of them. The Pacific island was a good place for a lot of things. One of them was deep-sea fishing, and the waters here were not as crowded as those around Florida and the Gulf of California. Pete Burroughs was sunburned, exhausted, and thoroughly satisfied with an eleven-hour day at sea. It was just the perfect thing, the computer engineer told himself, sitting in the fighting chair and sipping a beer, to get a person over a divorce. He’d spent the first two hours getting offshore, then three hours trolling, then four hours fighting against the biggest goddamned albacore tuna he’d ever seen. The real problem would be convincing his fellow workers that it wasn’t a lie. The monster was too big to mount over his mantel, and besides, his ex-had the house and the fireplace. He’d have to settle for a photo, and everyone knew the stories about that, damn it. Blue-screen technology had reached fishermen. For twenty bucks you could have your choice of monster fish hanging from its electronic tail behind you. Now, if he’d caught a shark, he could have taken home the jaw and teeth, but an albacore, magnificent as it was, was just tuna fish. Well, what the hell, his wife hadn’t believed his stories about the late nights at work either. The bitch. Good news, bad news. She didn’t like fishing either, but now he could fish all he wanted. Maybe even fish for a new girl. He popped open another beer.
The marina didn’t look very busy for a weekend. The main port area was, though, three big commercial ships, ugly ones, he thought, though he didn’t know exactly what they were on first sight. His company was in California, though not close to the water, and most of his fishing was of the freshwater sort. This trip had been a life’s ambition. Tomorrow, maybe, he’d get something else. For the moment, he looked left at the albacore. Had to be at least seven hundred pounds. Nowhere close to the record, but one hell of a lot bigger than the monster salmon he’d gotten the year before with his trusty Ted Williams spinning rig. The air shook again, spoiling his moment with his fish. The overhead shadow announced another goddamned 747 coming out of the airport. It wouldn’t be long before this place was spoiled, too. Hell, it already was. About the only good news was that the Japanese who came here to kick loose and screw Filipina bar girls didn’t like to fish much.
The boat’s skipper brought them in smartly. His name was Oreza, a retired Master Chief Quartermaster, U.S. Coast Guard. Burroughs left the fighting chair, headed topside, and sat down next to him.
“Get tired of talking to your fish?”
“Don’t like drinking alone, either.”
“Bad habit from the old days?”
The skipper nodded. “Yeah, I guess. I’ll buy you one at the club, though. Nice job on the fish. First time, you said?”
“First time in blue water,” Burroughs said proudly.
“Coulda fooled me, Mr. Burroughs.”
“Pete,” the engineer corrected.
“Pete,” Oreza confirmed. “Call me Portagee.”
“You’re not from around here.”
“New Bedford, Massachusetts, originally. Winters are too cold. I served here once, long time back. There used to be a Coast Guard station down at Punta Arenas, closed now. The wife and I liked the climate, liked the people, and, hell, the competition statewide for this sort of business is too stiff,” Oreza explained. “What the hell, the kids are all grown. So anyway, we ended up coming out here.”
“You know how to handle a boat pretty well.”
Portagee nodded. “I ought to. I’ve been doing it thirty-five years, more if you count going out with my pop.” He eased to port, coming around Mañagaha Island. “The fishing out of New Bedford’s gone to hell, too.”
“What are those guys?” Burroughs asked, pointing to the commercial port.
“Car carriers. When I came in this morning they were moving jeeps out of that one.” The skipper shrugged. “More goddamned cars. You know, when I came here it was kinda like Cape Cod in the winter. Now it’s more like the Cape in the summer. Wall-to-goddamned-wall.” Portagee shrugged. More tourists made for more crowding, spoiling the island, but also bringing him more business.
“Expensive place to live?”
“Getting that way,” Oreza confirmed. Another 747 flew off the island. “That’s funny ...”
“What?”
“That one didn’t come out of the airport.”
“What do you mean?”
“That one came out of Kobler. It’s an old SAC runway, BUFF field.”
“BUFF?”
“Big Ugly Fat Fucker,” Portagee explained. “B-52s. There’s five or six runways in the islands that can take big birds, dispersal fields from the bad old days,” he went on. “Kobler’s right next to my old LORAN station. I’m surprised they still keep it up. Hell, 1 didn’t know they did, even.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There used to be a Strategic Air Command base on Guam. You know, nukes, all that big shit? In case the crap hit the fan, they were supposed to disperse off Andersen Air Force Base so one missile couldn’t get them all. There’s two big-bird runways on Saipan, the airport and Kobler, two more on Tinian, leftovers from World War Two, and two more on Guam.”
“They’re still good to use?”
“No reason why not.” Oreza’s head turned. “We don’t get many hard-freezes here to rip things up.” The next 747 came off Saipan International, and in the clear evening sky they could see yet another coming in from the eastern side of the island.
“This place always this busy?”
“No, most I’ve ever seen. Goddamned hotels must be packed solid.” Another shrug. “Well, that means the hotels’ ll be interested in buying that fish off ya.”
“How much?”
“Enough to cover the charter, Pete. That’s one big fish you brought in. But tomorrow you have to get lucky again.”
“Hey, you find me another big boy like our friend down there, and I don’t care what you charge.”
“I love it when people say that.” Oreza eased back on the throttles as he approached the marina. He aimed for the main dock. They needed the hoist to get the fish off. The albacore was the third-largest he’d ever brought in, and this Burroughs guy wasn’t all that bad a charter.
“You make a living at this?”
Portagee nodded. “With my retirement pay, yeah, it’s not a bad life. Thirty-some years I drove Uncle’s boats, and now I get to drive me own—and she’s paid for.”
Burroughs was looking at the commercial ships now. He lifted the skipper’s binoculars. “You mind?”
“Strap around your neck if you don’t mind.” Amazing that people thought the strap was some sort of decoration.
“Sure.” Burroughs did that, adjusting the focus for his eyes and examining Orchid Ace. “Ugly damned things ...”
“Not made to be pretty. Made to carry cars.” Oreza started the final turn in.
“That’s no car. Looks like some kind of construction thing, bulldozer, like ...”
“Oh?” Portagee called for his mate, a local kid, to come topside and work the lines. Good kid, fifteen, might try for the Coast Guard and spend a few years learning the trade properly. Oreza was working on that.
“The Army have a base here?”
“Nope. The Air Force and Navy still have some folks down on Guam, but not even much there anymore.” There. He killed his throttles, and the Springer drifted to a halt, just perfect. Again, Oreza thought, as always taking pleasure from doing a seaman’s job just so. A man on the dock turned the crank to swing the hoist over his fantail, giving a thumbs-up when he saw the size of the fish. Watching to see that the boat was tied up properly, Oreza sat back, killed his engines, and thought about the evening’s first beer.
“Here, take a look.” Burroughs handed the glasses over.
Portagee turned in his chair and readjusted the binoculars to his eyes before training them in on the car carrier down the coast. He knew how the ships were arranged. He’d done safety inspection on them while on shore duty with the Coast Guard. He’d inspected this very ship, in fact, one of the first built-for-the-purpose automobile ferries, designed to carry trucks and other cargo as well as private cars. Some of the decks had a lot of overhead ...
“What?”
“You know what it is?”
“No.” It was a tracked vehicle. It was in shadows because the sun was low in the sky, but the paintwork was definitely dark, and it had a large box of some sort on the back. Then something clicked. It was some kind of missile launcher. He remembered seeing them on TV during the Persian Gulf War, just before his retirement. Oreza stood to get a slightly better angle. There were two others in the parking lot....
“Oh, okay, I got it, some sort of exercise,” Burroughs said, heading down the ladder to the main deck. “See, that’s a fighter plane over there. My cousin used to fly it before he went with American. It’s an F-15 Eagle, Air Force bird.”
Oreza turned the glasses and caught the fighter circling. Sure enough, there were two of them flying in a nice tight military formation, F-15 Eagle fighters, circling the center of the island in a classic display of protection for one’s native soil ... except for one thing. The national emblem on the wings was a solid red circle.
Again, Jones preferred the paper printouts to an electronic display. The latter was better for live-action, but on high-speed playback got the eyes tired too fast, and this was a job that demanded care. Lives might depend on it, he told himself, already thinking that was a lie. Two senior chief oceanographic technicians went through the pages with him. They started with midnight, and had to check carefully. The submarine-exercise area off Kure atoll had been chosen for its proximity to a series of hydrophones, part of the Pacific SOSUS system. The near array was one of the last ever implanted, and was the size of a garage or small house. Actually part of a mega-array, it was electronically linked to another installation fifty nautical miles away, but that one was older, smaller, and less capable. A cable linked them both, leading first to Kure, then to Midway, where there was a satellite uplink to back up the cable that led all the way to Pearl Harbor. The ocean was in fact crisscrossed with such cables. For quite some time during the Cold War, the U.S. Navy had laid almost as much as Bell Telephone, occasionally chartering the latter’s ships for the task.
“Okay, there’s Kurushio snorting,” Jones said, circling the black marks in red.
“How the hell did you ever beat Masker?” one of the chiefs asked in surprise.
“Well, it
is a good system, but you ever really listen to it?”
“I haven’t been at sea in ten years,” the senior chief replied.
“When I was on Dallas, we played games with Moosbrugger for a week, down at AUTEC in the Bahamas.”
“The Moose has a big rep.”
“And it’s a no-shit rep, too. We couldn’t hold her, she couldn’t hold us, it was a real mother,” Jones went on, speaking now not like a civilian contractor with a doctorate, but like the proud sonarman he’d been, and, he realized, still was. “They had a helicopter pilot who was giving us fits, too. Anyway”—he flipped another page—“then I figured it out. Masker sounds like rain hitting the surface, like a spring shower. Not real noisy, but the freqs are unique, you can get a good cut on ’em. Then I realized all we had to do was see what the topside weather was like. If it’s blue sky, and you hear rain bearing zero-two-zero, that’s the guy. It was clear yesterday northwest of Kure. I checked with Fleet Weather before I came over.”
The senior chief nodded and smiled. “I’ll remember that one, sir.”
“Okay, we have the Jap here at midnight. Now let’s see what else we can find.” He flipped forward to the next fan-fold page. Had circumstances been different he might have seen it as a paper Slinky, one of his new son’s favorite toys. “That’s gotta be Asheville, probably sprinting off to restart a scenario. She’s wearing a speed screw, isn’t she?”
