by Tom Clancy
"'Okay, here's where it started, then?" George Winston asked. Mark Gant ran his linger down the screen display.
"Bank of China, Bank of Hong Kong. Imperial Cathay Bank. They bought these up about four months ago, hedging against the yen, and very successfully, it appears. So, Friday, they dumped them to cash in and bought up a truckload of Japanese treasuries. With the movement that happened here, it looks like they turned twenty-two percent on the overall transaction."
They were the first, Winston saw, and being first in the trend, they cashed in big. That sort of hit was of a magnitude to cause more than a few expensive dinners in Hong Kong, a city well suited to the indulgence.
"Look innocent to you?" he asked Gant with a stifled yawn.
The executive shrugged. He was tired, but having the boss back in the saddle gave everyone new energy. "Innocent, hell! It's a brilliant move. They saw something coming, I suppose, or they were just lucky."
Luck, Winston thought, there was always that. Luck was real, something any senior trader would admit over drinks, usually after two or three, the number required to get past the usual "brilliance" bullshit. Sometimes it just felt right, and you did it because of that, and that's all there was to it. If you were lucky, it worked, and if not, you hedged.
"Keep going," he ordered.
"Well, then other banks started doing the same thing." The Columbus Group had some of the most sophisticated computer systems on the Street, able to track any individual issue and category of issues over time, and Gant was a quintessential computer jockey. They next watched the sell-off of other T-Bills by other Asian banks. Interestingly, the Japanese banks were slower off the mark than he would have expected. It was no disgrace to be a little behind Hong Kong. The Chinese were good at this thing, especially those trained by the Brits, who had largely invented modern central banking and were still pretty slick at it. But the Japs were faster than the Thais, Winston thought, or at least they should have been . . .
It was instinct again, just the gut-call of a guy who knew how to work the Street: "Check Japanese treasuries. Mark."
Gant typed in a command, and the rapid advance in the value of the yen was obvious—so much so, in fact, that they hardly needed to track it via computer. "Is this what you want?"
Winston leaned down, looking at the screen. "Show me what Bank of China did when they cashed in."
"Well, they sold off to the Eurodollar market and bought yen. I mean, it's the obvious play—"
"But look who they bought the yen from," Winston suggested.
"And what they paid for it . . ." Gant turned his head and looked at his boss.
"You know why I was always honest here, Mark? You know why I never screwed around, not ever, not even once, not even when I had an in-the-bank sure thing?" George asked. There was more than one reason, of course, but why confuse the issue? He pressed his fingertip to the screen, actually leaving a fingerprint on the glass. He almost laughed at the symbolism. "That's why."
"That doesn't really mean anything. The Japanese knew they could jack it up some and—" Gant didn't quite get it yet, Winston saw. He needed to hear it in his own terms.
"Find the trend, Mark. Find the trend there." Well, son of a bitch, he told himself, heading to the men's room. The trend is my friend. Then he thought of something else:
Fuck with my financial market, will you?
It wasn't much consolation. He had given his business over to a predator, Winston realized, and the damage was well and truly done. His investors had trusted him and he had betrayed that trust. Washing his hands, he looked up into the mirror over the sink, seeing the eyes of a man who'd left his post, deserted his people.
But you're back now, by God, and there's a ton of work to be done.
Pasadena had finally sailed, more from embarrassment than anything else, Jones thought. He'd listened to Bart Mancuso's phone conversation with CINCPAC, explaining that the submarine was loaded with weapons and so filled up with food that her passageways were completely covered with cartons of canned goods, enough for sixty days or more at sea. That was a sign of the not-so-good old days, Jones thought, remembering what the long deployments had been like, and so USS Pasadena, warship of the U.S. Navy, was now at sea, heading west at about twenty knots, using a quiet screw, not a speed screw, he thought. Otherwise he might have gotten a hit on her. The submarine had just passed within fifteen nautical miles of a SOSUS emplacement, one of the new ones that could hear the fetal heartbeat of an unborn whale calf. Pasadena didn't have orders yet, but she'd be in the right place if and when they came, with her crew running constant drills, leaning down, getting that at-sea feeling that came to you when you needed it. That was something.
Part of him dearly wished to be there, but that was part of his past now.
"I don't see nothin', sir." Jones blinked and looked back at the fan-fold page he'd selected.
"Well, you have to look for other things," Jones said. Only a Marine with a loaded pistol would get him out of SOSUS now. He'd made that clear to Admiral Mancuso, who had in turn made it clear to others. There had been a brief discussion of getting Jones a special commission, perhaps to Commander's rank, but Ron had quashed that idea himself. He'd left the Navy a Sonarman 1/c, and that was as good a rank as he'd ever wanted. Besides, it would not have looked good to the chiefs who really ran this place and had already accepted him as one of their own.
Oceanographic Technician 2/c Mike Boomer had been assigned to Jones as personal assistant. The kid had the makings of a good student, Dr. Jones thought, even if he'd left service in P-3's because of chronic airsickness.
"All these guys are using Prairie-Masker systems when they snort. It sounds like rain on the surface, remember? Rain on the surface is on the thousand-hertz line. So, we look for rain"—Jones slid a weather photo on the table—"where there ain't no rain. Then we look for sixty-hertz hits, little ones, short ones, brief ones, things you might otherwise ignore, that happen to be where the rain is. They use sixty-hertz generators and motors, right? Then we look for transients, just little dots that look like background noise, that are also where the rain is. Like this." He marked the sheet with a red pen, then looked to the station's command master chief, who was leaning over the other side of the table like a curious god.
"I heard stories about you when I was working the RefTra at Dam Neck. I thought they were sea stories."
"Got a smoke?" the only civilian in the room asked. The master chief handed one over. The antismoking signs were gone and the ashtrays were out. SOSUS was at war, and perhaps the rest of PacFlt would soon catch up.
Jesus, I'm home, Jones told himself. "Well, you know the difference between a sea story and a fairy tale."
"What's that, sir?" Boomer asked.
"A fairy tale starts, 'Once upon a time,' " Jones said with a smile, marking another 60Hz hit on the sheet.
"And a sea story starts, 'No shit,' " the master chief concluded the joke.
Except this little fucker really was that good. "I think you have enough to run a plot, Dr. Jones."
"I think we have a track on an SSK, Master Chief."
"Shame we can't prosecute."
Ron nodded slowly. "Yeah, me, too, but now we know we can get hits on the guys. It's still going to be a mother for P-3's to localize them. They're good boats, and that's a fact." They couldn't get too carried away. All SOSUS did was to generate lines of bearing. If more than one hydrophone set got a hit on the same sound source, you could rapidly triangulate bearings into locations, but those locations were circles, not points, and the circles were as much as twenty miles across. It was just physics, neither friend nor enemy. The sounds that most easily traveled long distances were of the lower frequencies, and for any sort of wave, only the higher frequencies gave the best resolution.
"We know where to look the next time he snorts, too. Anyway, you can call Fleet Operations and tell them there's nobody close to the carriers. Here, here, here, surface groups." He made marks on the paper. "Also
heading west at good speed, and not being real covert about it. All target-track bearings are opening. It's a complete disengagement. They're not looking for any more trouble."
"Maybe that's good."
Jones crushed out the cigarette. "Yeah, Master Chief, maybe it is, if the flags get their shit together."
The funny part was that things had actually calmed down. Morning TV coverage of the Wall Street crash was clinically precise, and the analysis exquisite, probably better than Americans were getting at home, Clark thought, what with all the economics professors doing the play-by-play, along with a senior banker for color commentary. Perhaps, a newspaper editorialized, America will rethink her stance vis-a-vis Japan. Was it not clear that the two countries genuinely needed each other, especially now, and that a strong Japan served American interests as well as local ones? Prime Minister Goto was quoted in a conciliatory way, though not in front of a camera, in language that was for him decidedly unusual and widely covered for that reason.
"Fucking Twilight Zone," Chavez observed in a quiet moment, breaking language cover because he just had to. What the hell, he thought, they were under Russian operational control now. What rules did matter now?
"Russkiy," his senior replied tolerantly.
"Da, tovarisch," was the grumbled reply. "Do you have any idea what's going on. Is it a war or not?"
"The rules sure are funny," Clark said, in English, he realized. It's getting to me, too.
There were other gaijin back on the street, most of them apparently Americans, and the looks they were getting were back to the ordinary suspicion and curiosity, the current hostility level down somewhat from the previous week.
"So what do we do?"
"We try the Interfax number our friend gave us." Clark had his report all typed up. It was the only thing he knew to do, except for keeping his contacts active and fishing for information. Surely Washington knew what he had to tell them, he thought, going back into the hotel. The clerk smiled and bowed, a little more politely this time, as they headed to the elevator. Two minutes later they were in the room. Clark took the laptop from its carry-case, inserted the phone plug in the back, and switched it on. Another minute, and the internal modem dialed the number he'd gotten over breakfast, linking to a line across the Sea of Japan to the Siberian mainland, thence to Moscow, he supposed. He heard the electronic trilling of a ringing phone and waited for linkup.
The station chief had gotten over the cringing associated with having a Russian intelligence officer in the embassy communications room, but he hadn't quite gotten to the whimsy stage yet. The noise from the computer startled him.
"Very clever technique," the visitor said.
"We try."
Anyone who had ever used a modem would recognize the sound, the rasp of running water, or perhaps a floor-polishing brush, just a digital hiss, really, of two electronic units attempting to synchronize themselves so that data could be exchanged. Sometimes it took but a few seconds, sometimes as many as five or even ten. In fact, it only took one second or so with these units, and the remaining hiss was actually the random-appearing digital code of 19,200 characters of information crossing the fiberoptic line per second—first in one direction, then the other. When the real transmission was concluded, formal lockup was achieved, and the guy at the other end sent his twenty column-inches for the day. Just to be on the safe side, the Russians would make sure that the report would be carried in two papers the next day, on page 3 in both cases. No sense in being too obvious.
Then came the hard part for the CIA station chief. On command, he printed two copies of the same report, one of which went to the RVS officer. Was Mary Pat going through change-of-life or something?
"His Russian is very literary, even classical. Who taught him my language?"
"I honestly don't know," the station chief lied, successfully as it turned out. The hell of it was, the Russian was right. That occasioned a frown.
"Want me to help with the translation?"
Shit. He smiled. "Sure, why not?"
"Ryan." A whole five hours of sleep, Jack grumped, lifting the secure carphone. Well, at least he wasn't doing the driving.
"Mary Pat here. We have something. It'll be on your desk when you get there."
"How good?"
"It's a start," the DDO said. She was very economical in her use of words. Nobody really trusted radiophones, secure or not.
"Hello, Dr. Ryan. I'm Andrea Price." The agent was already dressed in a lab coat, complete with picture-pass clipped to the lapel, which she held up. "My uncle is a doctor, GP in Wisconsin. I think he'd like this." She smiled.
"Do I have anything to worry about?"
"I really don't think so," Agent Price said, still smiling. Protectees didn't like to see worried security personnel, she knew.
"What about my children?"
"There are two agents outside their school, and one more is in the house across from the day-care center for your little one," the agent explained. "Please don't worry. They pay us to be paranoid, and we're almost always wrong, but it's like in your business. You always want to be wrong on the safe side, right?"
"And my visitors?" Cathy asked.
"Can I make a suggestion?"
"Yes."
"Get them all Hopkins lab coats, souvenirs, like. I'll eyeball them all when they change." That was pretty clever, Cathy Ryan thought.
"You're carrying a gun?"
"Always," Andrea Price confirmed. "But I've never had to use it, never even took it out for an arrest. Just think of me as a fly on the wall," she said.
More like a falcon, Professor Ryan thought, but at least a tame one.
"How are we supposed to do that, John?" Chavez asked in English. The shower was running. Ding was sitting on the floor, and John on the toilet.
"Well, we seen 'em already, haven't we?" the senior officer pointed out.
"Yeah, in the fuckin' factory!"
"Well, we just have to find out where they went." On the face of it, the statement was reasonable enough. They just had to determine how many and where, and oh, by the way, whether or not there were really nukes riding on the nose. No big deal. All they knew was that they were SS-19-type launchers, the new improved version thereof, and that they'd left the factory by rail.
Of course, the country had over twenty-eight thousand kilometers of rail lines. It would have to wait. Intelligence officers often worked banker's hours, and this was one of those cases. Clark decided to get into the shower to clean off before heading for bed. He didn't know what to do, yet, or how to go about it, but worrying himself to death would not improve his chances, and he'd long since learned that he worked better with a full eight hours under his belt, and occasionally had a creative thought while showering. Sooner or later Ding might learn those tricks as well, he thought, seeing the expression on the kid's face.
"Hi, Betsy," Jack said to the lady waiting in his office's anteroom. "You're up early. And who are you?"
"Chris Scott. Betsy and I work together."
Jack waved them into his office, first checking his fax machine to see if Mary Pat had transmitted the information from Clark and Chavez, and, seeing it there, decided it could wait. He knew Betsy Fleming from his CIA days as a self-taught expert on strategic weapons. He supposed Chris Scott was one of the kids recruited from some university with a degree in what Betsy had learned the hard way. At least the younger one was polite about it, saying that he worked with Betsy. So had Ryan, once, years ago, while concerned with arms-control negotiations. "Okay, what do we have?"
"Here's what they call the H-11 space booster." Scott opened his case and pulled out some photos. Good ones, Ryan saw at once, made with real film at close range, not the electronic sort shot through a hole in someone's pocket. It wasn't hard to tell the difference, and Ryan immediately recognized an old friend he'd thought dead and decently buried less than a week before.
"Sure as hell, the SS-19. A lot prettier this way, too." Another photo showed a strin
g of them on the assembly building's floor. Jack counted them and grimaced. "What else do I need to know?"
"Here," Betsy said. "Check out the business end."
"Looks normal," Ryan observed.
"That's the point. The nose assembly is normal," Scott pointed out. "Normal for supporting a warhead bus, not for a commo-sat payload. We wrote that up a while back, but nobody paid any attention to it," the technical analyst added. "The rest of the bird's been fully re-engineered. We have estimates for the performance enhancements."
"Short version?"
"Six or seven MIRVs each and a range of just over ten thousand kilometers," Mrs. Fleming replied. "Worst-case, but realistic."
"That's a lot. Has the missile been certified, tested? Have they tested a bus that we know of?" the National Security Advisor asked.
"No data. We have partial stuff on flight tests of the launcher from surveillance in the Pacific, stuff AMBER BALL caught, but it's equivocal on several issues," Scott told him.
"Total birds turned out?"
"Twenty-five we know about. Of those, three have been used up in flight tests, and two are at their launch facility being mated up with orbital payloads. That leaves twenty."
"What payloads?" Ryan asked almost on a whim.
"The NASA guys think they are survey satellites. Real-time-capable photo-sats. So probably they are," Betsy said darkly.
"And so probably they've decided to enter the overhead intelligence business. Well, that makes sense, doesn't it?" Ryan made a couple of notes. "Okay, the downside, worst-case threat is twenty launchers with seven MIRVs each, for a total of one hundred forty?"
