Debt of Honor jr-6

by Tom Clancy

  "I never thought of that, Jack."

  Ryan shrugged. "Some things are too obvious, like Buzz Fiedler said earlier today."

  "But if the why is not important, then the what isn't either, is it?"

  "Yes, it is, because if you can discern the objective, if you can figure out what they want, then you can deny it to them. That's how you start to defeat an enemy. And, you know, the other guy gets so interested in what he wants, so fixed on how important it is, that he starts forgetting that somebody else might try to keep him from getting it."

  "Like a criminal thinking about hitting a liquor store?" Durling asked, both amused and impressed by Ryan's discourse.

  "War is the ultimate criminal act, an armed robbery writ large. And it's always about greed. It's always a nation that wants something another nation has. And you defeat that nation by recognizing what it wants and denying it to them. The seeds of their defeat are usually found in the seeds of their desire."

  "Japan, World War Two?"

  "They wanted a real empire. Essentially they wanted exactly what the Brits had. They just started a century or two too late. They never planned to defeat us, merely to—" He stopped suddenly, an idea forming. "Merely to achieve their goals and force us to acquiesce. Jesus," Ryan breathed. "That's it! It's the same thing all over again. The same methodology. The same objective?" he wondered aloud. It's there, the National Security Advisor told himself. It's all right there. If you can find it. If you can find it all.

  "But we have a first objective of our own," the President pointed out.

  "I know."

  George Winston supposed that, like an old fire horse, he had to respond to the bells. His wife and children still in Colorado, he was over Ohio now, sitting in the back of his Gulfstream, looking down at the crab-shape of city lights. Probably Cincinnati, though he hadn't asked the drivers about their route into Newark.

  His motivation was partially personal. His own fortune had suffered badly in the events of the previous Friday, drawn down by hundreds of millions. The nature of the event, and the way his money was spread around various institutions, had guaranteed a huge loss, since he'd been vulnerable to every variety of programmed trading system. But it wasn't about money. Okay, he told himself, so I lost two hundred mill'. I have lots more where that came from. It was the damage to the entire system, and above all the damage done to the Columbus Group. His baby had taken a huge hit, and like a father returning to the side of his married daughter in time of crisis, he knew that it would always be his. I should have been there, Winston told himself. I could have seen it and stopped it. At least I could have protected my investors. The full effects weren't in yet, but it was so bad as to be almost beyond comprehension. Winston had to do something, had to offer his expertise and counsel. Those investors were still his people.

  It was an easy ride into Newark. The Gulfstream touched down smoothly and taxied off to the general-aviation terminal, where a car was waiting, and one of his senior former employees. He wasn't wearing a tie, which was unusual for the Wharton School graduate.

  Mark Gant hadn't slept in fifty hours, and he leaned against the car for stability because the very earth seemed to move under him, to the accompaniment of a headache best measured on the Richter Scale. For all that, he was glad to be here. If anyone could figure this mess out, it was his former boss. As soon as the private jet stopped, he walked over to stand at the foot of the stairs.

  "How bad?" was the first thing George Winston said. There was warmth between the two men, but business came first.

  "We don't know yet," Gant replied, leading him to the car.

  "Don't know?" The explanation had to wait until they got inside. Gant handed over the first section of the Times without comment.

  "Is this for real?" A speed-reader, Winston scanned across the opening two columns, turning back to page 21 to finish a story framed by lingerie ads.

  Gant's next revelation was that the manager Raizo Yamata had left behind was gone. "He flew back to Japan Friday night. He said to urge Yamata-san to come to New York to help stabilize the situation. Or maybe he wanted to gut himself open in front of his boss. Who the fuck knows?"

  "So who the hell's in charge, Mark?"

  "Nobody," Gant answered. "Just like everything else here."

  "Goddamn it, Mark, somebody has to be giving the orders!"

  "We don't have any instructions," the executive replied. "I've called the guy. He's not at the office-hey, I left messages, tried his house, Yamata's house, everybody's friggin' house, everybody's friggin' office. Zip-0, George. Everybody's running for cover. Hell, for all I know the dumb fuck took a header off the biggest building in town."

  "Okay, I need an office and all the data you have," Winston said.

  "What data?" Gant demanded. "We don't have shit. The whole system went down, remember?"

  "You have the records of our trades, don't you?"

  "Well, yeah, I have our tapes—a copy, anyway," Gant corrected himself. "The FBI took the originals."

  A brilliant technician, Gant's first love had always been mathematics. Give Mark Gant the right instructions and he could work the market like a skilled cardsharp with a new deck of Bicycles. But like most of the people on the Street, he needed someone else to tell him what the job was. Well, every man had some limitations, and on the plus side of the ledger, Gant was smart, honest, and he knew what his limitations were. He knew when to ask for help. That last quality put him in the top 3 or 4 percent. So he must have gone to Yamata and his man for guidance…

  "When all this was going down, what instructions did you have?"

  "Instructions?" Gant rubbed his unshaven face and shook his head. "Hell, we busted our ass to stay ahead of it. If DTC gets its shit together, we'll come out with most of our ass intact. I laid a mega-put on GM and made a real killing on gold stocks, and—"

  "That's not what I mean."

  "He said to run with it. He got us out of the bank stocks in one big hurry, thank God. Damn if he didn't see that one coming first. We were pretty well placed before it all went down. If it hadn't been for all the panic calls—I mean, Jesus, George, it finally happened, y'know? One-eight-hundred-R-U-N. Jesus, if people had just kept their heads." A sigh. "But they didn't, and now, with the DTC fuckup…George, I don't know what's going to be opening up tomorrow, man. If this is true, if they can rebuild the house by tomorrow morning, hey, man, I don't know. I just don't," Gant said as they entered the Lincoln Tunnel.

  The whole story of Wall Street in one exhausted paragraph, Winston told himself, looking at the glossy tile that made up the interior of the tunnel. Just like the tunnel, in fact. You could see forward and you could see behind, but you couldn't see crap to the sides. You couldn't see outside the limited perspective.

  And you had to.

  "Mark, I'm still a director of the firm."

  "Yes, so?"

  "And so are you," Winston pointed out.

  "I know that, but—"

  "The two of us can call a board meeting. Start making calls," George Winston ordered. "As soon as we're out of this damned hole in the ground."

  "For when?" Gant asked.

  "For now, goddamn it!" Winston swore. "Those who're out of town, I'll send my jet for."

  "Most of the guys are in the office." Which was the only good news he'd heard since Friday afternoon, George thought, nodding for his former employee to go on. "I suppose most everyone else is closed."

  They cleared the tunnel about then. Winston pulled the cellular phone from its holder and handed it over.

  "Start calling." Winston wondered if Gant knew what he was going to request at the meeting. Probably not. A good man in a tunnel, he had never outgrown his limitations. Why the hell did I ever leave? Winston demanded of himself. It just wasn't safe to leave the American economy in the hands of people who didn't know how it worked.

  "Well, that worked," Admiral Dubro said. Fleet speed slowed to twenty knots. They were now two hundred miles due east of Dondr
a Head. They needed more sea room, but getting this far was success enough. The two carriers angled apart, their respective formations dividing and forming protective rings around the centerpieces, Abraham Lincoln and Dwight D. Eisenhower. In another hour the formations would be outside of visual contact, and that was good, but the speed run had depleted bunkers, and that was very bad. The nuclear-powered carriers perversely were also tankers of a sort. They carried tons of bunker fuel for their conventionally powered escorts, and were able to refuel them when the need arose. It soon would. The fleet oilers Yukon and Rappahannock were en route from Diego Garcia with eighty thousand tons of distillate fuel between them, but this game was getting old in a hurry. The possibility of a confrontation compelled Dubro to keep all his ships' bunkers topped off. Confrontation meant potential battle, and battle always necessitated speed, to go into harm's way, and to get the hell out of it, too.

  "Anything from Washington yet?" he asked next.

  Commander Harrison shook his head. "No, sir."

  "Okay," the battle-force commander said with a dangerous calm. Then he headed off to communications. He'd solved a major operational problem, for the moment, and now it was time to scream at someone.

  27—Piling On

  Everything was running behind, at maximum speed, largely in circles, getting nowhere at amazing speed. A city both accustomed to and dedicated to the prevention of leaks, Washington and its collection of officials were too busy with four simultaneous crises to respond effectively to any of them. None of that was unusual, a fact that would have been depressing to those who ought to be dealing with it, a digression for which, of course, they didn't have time. The only good news, Ryan thought, is that the biggest story hadn't quite leaked. Yet.

  "Scott, who're your best people for Japan?"

  Adler was still a smoker or had bought a pack on his way over from Foggy Bottom. It required all of Ryan's diminishing self-control not to ask for one, but neither could he tell his guest not to light up. They all had to deal with stress in their own ways. The fact that Adler's had once been Ryan's was just one more inconvenience in a weekend that had gone to hell faster than he'd thought possible.

  "I can put a working group together. Who runs it?"

  "You do," Jack answered.

  "What will Brett say?"

  "He'll say, 'Yes, sir,' when the President tells him," Ryan replied, too tired to be polite.

  "They have us by the balls, Jack."

  "How many potential hostages?" Ryan asked. It wasn't just the residual military people. There had to be thousands of tourists, businessmen, reporters, students…

  "We have no way of finding out, Jack. None," Adler admitted. "The good news is that we have no indications of adverse treatment. It's not 1941, at least I don't think so."

  "If that starts…" Most Americans had forgotten the manner of treatment accorded foreign prisoners. Ryan was not one of them. "Then we start going crazy. They have to know that."

  "They know us a lot better than they did back then. So much interaction. Besides, we have tons of their people over here, too."

  "Don't forget, Scott, that their culture is fundamentally different from ours. Their religion is different. Their view of man's place in nature is different. The value they place on human life is different," the National Security Advisor said darkly.

  "This isn't a place for racism, Jack," Adler observed narrowly.

  "Those are all facts. I didn't say they're inferior to us. I said that we're not going to make the mistake of thinking they're motivated in the same way we are—okay?"

  "That's fair, I suppose," the Deputy Secretary of State conceded.

  "So I want people who really understand their culture in here to advise me. I want people who think like they do." The trick would be finding space for them, but there were offices downstairs whose occupants could move out, albeit kicking and screaming about how important protocol and political polling were.

  "I can find a few," Adler promised.

  "What are we hearing from the embassies?"

  "Nobody knows much of anything. One interesting development in Korea, though."

  "What's that?"

  "The defense attache in Seoul went to see some friends about getting some bases moved up in alert level. They said no. That's the first time the ROKs ever said no to us. I guess their government is still trying to figure all this out."

  "It's too early to start that, anyway."

  "Are we going to do anything?"

  Ryan shook his head. "I don't know yet." Then his phone buzzed.

  "NMCC on the STU, Dr. Ryan."

  "Ryan," Jack said, lifting the phone. "Yes, put him through. Shit," he breathed so quietly that Adler hardly caught it. "Admiral, I'll be back to you later today."

  "Now what?"

  "The Indians," Ryan told him.

  "I call the meeting to order," Mark Gant said, tapping the table with his pen. Only two more than half of the seats were filled, but that was a quorum. "George, you have the floor."

  The looks on all the faces troubled George Winston. At one level the men and women who determined policy for the Columbus Group were physically exhausted. At another they were panicked. It was the third that caused him the most pain: the degree of hope they showed at his presence, as though he were Jesus come to clean out the temple. It wasn't supposed to be this way. No one man was supposed to have that sort of power. The American economy was too vast. Too many people depended on it. Most of all, it was too complex for one man or even twenty to comprehend it all. That was the problem with the models that everyone depended on. Sooner or later it came down to trying to gauge and measure and regulate something that simply was. It existed. It worked. It functioned. People needed it, but nobody really knew how it worked. The Marxists' illusion that they did know had been their fundamental flaw. The Soviets had spent three generations trying to command an economy to work instead of just letting it go on its own, and had ended up beggars in the world's richest nation. And it was not so different here. Instead of controlling it, they tried to live off it, but in both cases you had to have the illusion that you understood it. And nobody did, except in the broadest sense.

  At the most basic level it all came down to needs and time. People had needs. Food and shelter were the first two of those. So other people grew the food and built the houses. Both required time to do, and since time was the most precious commodity known to man, you had to compensate people for it. Take a car-people needed transportation, too. When you bought a car, you paid people for the time of assembly, for the time required to fabricate all the components; ultimately you were paying miners for the time required to dig the iron ore and bauxite from the ground. That part was simple enough. The complexity began with all of the potential options. You could drive more than one kind of car. Each supplier of goods and services involved in the car had the option to get what he needed from a variety of sources, and since time was precious, the person who used his time most efficiently got a further reward. That was called competition, and competition was a never-ending race of everyone against everyone else. Fundamentally, every business, and in a sense every single person in the American economy, was in competition with every other. Everyone was a worker. Everyone was also a consumer. Everyone provided something for others to use. Everyone selected products and services from the vast menu that the economy offered. That was the basic idea.

  The true complexity came from all the possible interactions. Who bought what from whom. Who became more efficient, the better to make use of their time, benefiting both the consumers and themselves at once. With everyone in the game, it was like a huge mob, with everyone talking to everyone else. You simply could not keep track of all the conversations. And yet Wall Street held the illusion that it could, that its computer models could predict in broad terms what would happen on a daily basis. It was not possible. You could analyze individual companies, get a idea of what they were doing right and wrong. To a limited degree, from one or a few such analyse
s you could see trends and profit by them. But the use of computers and modeling techniques had gone too far, extrapolating farther and farther away from baseline reality, and while it had worked, after a fashion, for years, that had only magnified the illusion. With the collapse three days earlier, the illusion was shattered, and now they had nothing to cling to. Nothing but me, George Winston thought, reading their faces.

  The former president of the Columbus Group knew his limitations. He knew the degree to which he understood the system, and knew roughly where that understanding ended. He knew that nobody could quite make the whole thing work, and that train of thought took him almost as far as he needed to go on this dark night in New York.

  "This looks like a place without a leader. Tomorrow, what happens?" he asked, and all the "rocket scientists" averted their eyes from his, looking down at the table, or in some cases sharing a glance with the person who happened to be across it. Only three days before, someone would have spoken, offered an opinion with some greater or lesser degree of confidence. But not now, because nobody knew. Nobody had the first idea. And nobody spoke up.

  "You have a president. Is he telling you anything?" Winston asked next.

  Heads shook.

  It was Mark Gant, of course, who posed the question, as Winston had known he would.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, it is the board of directors which selects our president and managing director, isn't it? We need a leader now."

  "George," another man asked. "Are you back?"

  "Either that or I'm doing the goddamnedest out-of-body trip you people have ever seen." It wasn't much of a joke, but it did generate smiles, the beginning of a little enthusiasm for something.

  "In that case, I submit the motion that we declare the position of president and managing director to be vacant."