Debt Of Honor (1994)

by Tom - Jack Ryan 06 Clancy

  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 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 hurting 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?"

  35

  Consequences

  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.

  But not this year and not this time. The satellite photos showed a few wispy clouds, but otherwise fair weather. For a few minutes he wondered if the Pacific Ocean, like Arkansas, was subject to fair-weather gales, but, no, that wasn't likely, since those adiabatic storms resulted mainly from variations in temperature and land elevation, whereas an ocean was both flat and moderate. He checked with a colleague who had been a Navy meteorologist to confirm it, and found himself left only with a mystery. Thinking that perhaps the information he had was wrong, he consulted his telephone book and dialed 011-671-555-1212, since a directory-assistance call was toll-free. He got a recording that told him that there had been a storm. Except there had not been a storm. Was he the first guy to figure that out?

  His next move was to walk across the office to the news department. Within minutes an inquiry went out on one of the wire services.

  "Ryan."

  "Bob Holtzman, Jack. I have a question for you."

  "I hope it's not about Wall Street," Jack replied in as unguarded a voice as he could muster.

  "No, it's about Guam. Why are the phone lines out?"

  "Bob, did you ask the phone company that?" Ryan tried.

  "Yeah. They say there was a storm that took
a lot of lines down. Except for a couple of things. One, there wasn't any storm. Two, there's an undersea cable and a satellite link. Three, a week is a long time. What's going on?" the reporter asked.

  "How many people are asking?"

  "Right now, just me and a TV station in Little Rock that put a request up on the AP wire. Another thirty minutes and it's going to be a lot more. What gives? Some sort of--"

  "Bob, why don't you come on down here," Ryan suggested. Well, it's not as though you expected this to last forever, Jack told himself. Then he called Scott Adler's office. But why couldn't it have waited one more day?

  Yukon was fueling her second set of ships. The urgency of the moment meant that the fleet oiler was taking on two escorts at a time, one on either beam, while her helicopter transferred various parts and other supplies around the formation, about half of them aircraft components to restore Ike's aircraft to full-mission status. The sun would set in another thirty minutes, and the underway-replenishment operations would continue under cover of darkness. Dubro's battle force had darted east, the better to distance itself from the Indian formation, and again had gone to EMCON, with all radars off, and a deceptive placement of their surveillance aircraft. But they'd lost track of the two Indian carriers, and while the Hawkeyes probed cautiously, Dubro sweated.

  "Lookouts report unknown aircraft inbound at two-one-five," a talker called.

  The Admiral swore quietly, lifted his binoculars, and turned to the southwest. There. Two Sea Harriers. Playing it smart, too, he saw. They were at five thousand feet or so, tucked into the neat two-plane element used for tactical combat and air shows, flying straight and level, careful not to overfily any ship directly. Before they had passed over the first ring of escorts, a pair of Tomcats were above and behind them, ready to take them out in a matter of seconds if they showed hostile intent. But hostile intent meant loosing a weapon first, and in this day and age a loosed weapon most probably meant a hit, whatever happened to the launch aircraft. The Harriers flew overhead one time only. They seemed to be carrying extra fuel tanks and maybe a reconnaissance pod, but no weapons, this time. Admiral Chandraskatta was no fool, but then Dubro had never made that assumption. His adversary had played a patient game, sticking to his own mission and biding his time, and learning from every trick the Americans had shown him. None of this was of much comfort to the battle-force commander.

  "Follow them back?" Commander Harrison asked dispassionately.

  Mike Dubro shook his head. "Pull one of the Hummers in close and track by radar."

  When the hell would Washington realize he had an imminent confrontation brewing?

  "Mr. Ambassador," Scott Adler said, folding up the note an aide had just delivered. "It is likely that in the next twenty-four hours your occupation of the Marianas will become public knowledge. At that point the situation will go beyond our control. You have plenipotentiary powers to resolve this affair ..."

  But he didn't, as Adler had begun to suspect, despite assurances to the contrary. He could also see that he'd pushed the man too hard and too fast. Not that he'd had a choice in the matter. The entire affair had been going on for barely a week. In normal diplomatic practice it took that long just to select the kind of chairs the negotiators sat in. In that respect everything had been doomed from the beginning, but Adler was a professional diplomat for whom hope was never dead. Even now as he concluded his latest statement, he looked into the man's eyes for something he'd be able to report to the White House.

  "Throughout our talks we have heard about America's demands, but we have not heard a single word concerning my country's legitimate security interests. Today you have conducted a systematic attack on our financial and economic foundations and--"

  Adler leaned forward. "Mr. Ambassador! A week ago your country did the same thing to us, as the information in front of you demonstrates. A week ago your country conducted an attack on the United States Navy. A week ago your country seized U.S. territory. In equity, sir, you have no place to criticize us for efforts necessary to the restoration of our own economic stability." He paused for a moment, reproving himself for the decidedly undiplomatic language of his outburst, but events had gone beyond such niceties--or they soon would. "We have offered you the opportunity to negotiate in good faith for a mutually acceptable interpretation of the Trade Reform Act. We will accept an apology and reparations for the losses to our Navy. We require the immediate evacuation of Japanese military forces from the Mariana Islands."

  But things had already gone too far for that, and everyone at the table knew it. There just wasn't time. Adler felt the dreadful weight of inevitability. All his skills were useless now. Other events and other people had taken matters out of his hands, and the Ambassador's hands as well. He saw the same look on the man's face that must have been on his own.

  His voice was mechanical. "Before I can respond to that, I must consult with my government. I propose that we adjourn so that consultations may be carried out."

  Adler nodded more with sadness than anger. "As you wish, Mr. Ambassador. If you should need us, we will be available."

  "My God, you kept all that quiet? How?" Holtzman demanded.

  "Because you guys were all looking the other way," Jack answered bluntly. "You've always depended too much on us for information anyway." He instantly regretted those words. It had come out as too much of a challenge. Stress, Jack.

  "But you lied to us about the carriers and you never told us about the submarines at all!"

  "We're trying to stop this thing before it gets worse," President Durling said. "We're talking to them over at State right now."

  "You've had a busy week," the journalist acknowledged. "Kealty's out?"

  The President nodded. "He's talking with the Justice Department and with the victims."

  "The big thing was getting the markets put back in place," Ryan said. "That was the real--"

  "What do you mean? They've killed people!" Holtzman objected.

  "Bob, why have you guys been hammering the Wall Street story so hard all week? Damn it, what was really scary about their attack on us was the way they wrecked the financial markets and did their run on the dollar. We had to fix that first."

  Bob Holtzman conceded the point. "How the hell did you pull that one off?"

  "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 C
huck 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."