lose their jobs, right? And on, and on, and on. We have a real problem here, guys,' Jack concluded. 'Monday morning the bankers are going to find out that they don't know what they have, either. The banking crisis didn't really start until 1932, well after the stock market came unglued. Not this time.'
'How bad?' The President asked this question.
'I don't know,' Fiedler replied. 'It's never happened before.'
' 'I don't know' doesn't cut it, Buzz,' Durling said.
'Would you prefer a lie?' the Secretary of the Treasury asked. 'We need the chairman of the Fed in here. We're facing a lot of problems. The first big one is a liquidity crisis of unprecedented proportions.'
'Not to mention a shooting war,' Ryan pointed out for those who might have forgotten.
'Which is the more serious?' President Durling asked.
Ryan thought about it for a second. 'In terms of real net harm to our country? We have two submarines sunk, figure about two hundred fifty sailors dead. Two carriers crippled. They can be fixed. The Marianas are under new ownership. Those are all bad things,' Jack said in a measured voice, thinking as he spoke. 'But they do not genuinely affect our national security because they do not pertain to the real strength of our country. America is a shared idea. We're people who think in a certain way, who believe that they can do the things they want to do. Everything else follows from that. It's confidence, optimism, the one thing that other countries find so strange about us. If you take that away, hell, we're no different from anybody else. The short answer to your question, Mr. President, is that the economic problem is far more dangerous to us than what the Japs just did.'
'You surprise me, Jack,' Durling said.
'Sir, like Buzz said, would you prefer a lie?'
'What the hell is the problem?' Ron Jones asked. The sun was already up, and USS Pasadena was visible, still tied to her pier, the national ensign hanging forlornly in the still air. A fighting ship of the United States Navy was doing nothing at all, and the son of his mentor was dead at the hands of an enemy. Why wasn't anyone doing something about it?
'She doesn't have orders,' Mancuso said, 'because I don't have orders, because CINCPAC doesn't have orders, because National Command Authority hasn't issued any orders.'
'They awake there?'
'SecDef's supposed to be in the White House now. The President's been briefed in by now, probably,' ComSubPac thought.
'But he can't gel his thumb out,' Jones observed.
'He's the President, Ron. We do what he says.'
'Yeah, like Johnson sent my dad to Vietnam.' Jones turned to look at the wall chart. By the end of the day the Japanese surface ships would be out of range for the carriers, which couldn't launch strikes anyway. USS
Mancuso decided not to get angry this time. He was a flag officer and paid to think like one. 'One thing at a time. Our most important assets at risk are those two carriers. We have to get 'em in, and we have to get 'em fixed. Wally is planning operations right now. We have to gather intelligence, think it over, and then decide what we can do.'
'And then see if he'll let us?'
Mancuso nodded. 'That's how the system works.'
'Great.'
The dawn was pleasing indeed. Sitting on the upper deck of the 747, Yamata had taken a window seat on the portside, looking out the window and ignoring the buzz of conversation around him. He had scarcely slept in three days and still the rush of power and elation filled him like a flood. This was the last prescheduled flight in. Mainly administrative personnel, along with some engineers and civilians who would start to put the new government in place. The bureaucrats with that task had been fairly clever in their way. Of course, everyone on Saipan would have a vote, and the elections would be subject to international scrutiny, a political necessity. There were about twenty-nine thousand local citizens, but that didn't count Japanese, many of whom now owned land, homes, and business enterprises. Nor did it count soldiers, and others staying in hotels. The hotels—the largest were Japanese-owned, of course—would be considered condominiums, and all those in the condo units, residents. As Japanese citizens they each had a vote. The soldiers were citizens as well, and also had the franchise, and since their garrison status was indeterminate, they were also considered residents. Between the soldiers and the civilians, there were thirty-one thousand Japanese on the island, and when elections were held, well, his countrymen were assiduous in making use of their civil rights, weren't they? International scrutiny, he thought, staring out to the east, be damned.
It was especially pleasing to watch from thirty-seven thousand feet the first muted glow on the horizon, which seemed much like a garnish for a bouquet of still-visible stars. The glow brightened and expanded, from purple to deep red, to pink, to orange, and then the first sliver of the face of the sun, not yet visible on the black sea below, and it was as though the sunrise were for him alone, Yamata thought, long before the lower people got to enjoy and savor it. The aircraft turned slightly to the right, beginning its descent. The downward path through the early-morning air was perfectly timed, seeming to hold the sun in place all the way down, just the yellow-white sliver, preserving the magical moment for several minutes. The sheer glory moved Yamata nearly to tears. He still remembered the faces of his parents, their modest home on Saipan. His father had been a minor and not terribly prosperous merchant, mainly selling trinkets and notions to the soldiers who garrisoned the island. His father had always been very polite to them, Raizo remembered, smiling, bowing, accepting their rough jokes about his polio- shriveled leg. The boy who had watched thought it normal to be deferential to men carrying arms, wearing his nation's uniform. He'd learned different since, of course. They were merely servants. Whether they carried on the samurai tradition or not—the very word samurai was a derivation of the verb 'to serve,' he reminded himself, clearly implying a master, no?—it was they who looked after and protected their betters, and it was their betters who hired them and paid them and told them what to do. It was necessary to treat them with greater respect than they really deserved, but the odd thing was that the higher they went in rank, the better they understood what their place really was.
'We will touch down in five minutes,' a colonel told him.
'Dozo.' A nod rather than a bow, because he was sitting down, but even so the nod was a measured one, precisely of the sort to acknowledge the service of an underling, showing him both politeness and superiority in the same pleasant gesture. In time, if this colonel was a good one and gained general's rank, then the nod would change, and if he proceeded further, then someday, if he were lucky, Yamata-san might call his given name in friendship, single him out for a smile and a joke, invite him for a drink, and in his advancement to high command, learn who the master really was. The Colonel probably looked forward to achieving that goal. Yamata buckled his seat belt and smoothed his hair.
Captain Sato was exhausted. He'd just spent far too much time in the air, not merely breaking but shredding the crew-rest rules of his airline, but he, too, could not turn away from his duty. He looked off to the left and saw in the morning sky the blinking strokes of two fighters, probably F-15's, one of them, perhaps, flown by his son, circling to protect the soil of what was once again their country. Gently, he told himself. There were soldiers of his country under his care, and they deserved the best. One hand on the throttles, the other on the wheel, he guided the Boeing airliner down an invisible line in the air toward a point his eyes had already selected. On his command to the copilot, the huge flaps went down all the way. Sato eased back on the yoke, bringing up the nose and flaring the aircraft, letting it settle, floating it in until only the screech of rubber told them that they were on the ground.
'You are a poet,' the copilot said, once more impressed by the man's skill.
Sato allowed himself a smile as he engaged reverse-thrust. 'You taxi in.' Then he keyed the cabin intercom. 'Welcome to Japan,' he told the passengers.
Yamata didn't shout only because the remark surprised him so. He didn't wait for the aircraft to stop before he unbuckled. The door to the flight deck was right there, and he had to say something.
'Captain?'
'Yes, Yamata-san?'
