Debt of Honor

'We can trust the Russians?'

'I didn't say trust, Mr. President. What we have here is a confluence of needs and abilities, with a little potential blackmail on the side.'

'Run with it,' the President said without much in the way of consideration. Perhaps it was a measure of his trust in Ryan, thus returning the burden of responsibility back to his visitor. Durling paused for a few seconds before posing his next question. 'What are they up to, Jack?'

'The Japanese? On the face of it, this makes no objective sense at all. What I keep coming back to is, why kill the submarines? Why kill people? It just doesn't seem necessary to have crossed that threshold.'

'Why do this to their most important trading partner?' Durling added, making the most obvious observation. 'We haven't had a chance to think it through, have we?'

Ryan shook his head. 'Things have certainly piled up on us. We don't even know the things we don't know yet.'

The President cocked his head to the side. 'What?'

Jack smiled a little. 'That's something my wife likes to say about medicine. You have to know the things you don't know. You have to figure out what the questions are before you can start looking for answers.'

'How do we do that?'

'Mary Pat has people out asking questions. We go over all the data we have. We try to infer things from what we know, look for connections. You can tell a lot from what the other guy is trying to do and how he's going about it. My biggest one now, why did they kill the two subs?' Ryan looked past the President, out the window to the Washington Monument, that fixed, firm obelisk of white marble. 'They did it in a way that they think will allow us a way out. We can claim it was a collision or something—'

'Do they really expect that we'll just accept the deaths and—'

'They offered us the chance. Maybe they don't expect it, but it's a possibility.' Ryan was quiet for perhaps thirty seconds. 'No. No, they couldn't misread us that badly.'

'Keep thinking out loud,' Durling commanded.

'We've cut our fleet too far back—'

'I don't need to hear that now,' was the answer, an edge on it.

Ryan nodded and held a hand up. 'Too late to worry why or how, I know that. But the important thing is, they know it, too. Everybody knows what we have and don't have, and with the right kind of knowledge and training, you can infer what we can do. Then you structure your operations on a formulation of what you can do, and what he can do about it.'

'Makes sense. Okay, go on.'

'With the demise of the Russian threat, the submarine force is essentially out of business. That's because a submarine is only good for two things, really. Tactically, submarines are good for killing other subs. But strategically, submarines are limited. They cannot control the sea in the same way as surface ships do. They can't project power. They can't ferry troops or goods from one place to another, and that's what sea control really means.' Jack snapped his fingers. 'But they can deny the sea to others, and Japan is an island-nation. So they're afraid of sea-denial.' Or, Jack added in his own mind, maybe they just did what they could do. They crippled the carriers because they could not easily do more. Or could they? Damn, it was still too complicated.

'So we could strangle them with submarines?' Durling asked.

'Maybe. We did it once before. We're down to just a few, though, and that makes their countersub task a lot easier. But their ultimate trump against such a move on our part is their nuclear capacity. They counter a strategic threat to them with a strategic threat to us, a dimension they didn't have in 1941. There's something missing, sir.' Ryan shook his head, still looking at the monument through the thick, bullet-resistant windows. 'There's something big we don't know.'

'The why?'

'The why may be it. First I want to know the what. What do they want? What is their end-game objective?'

'Not why they're doing it?'

Ryan turned his head back to meet the President's eyes. 'Sir, the decision to start a war is almost never rational. World War One, kicked off by some fool killing some other fool, events were skillfully manipulated by Leopold something-or-other, 'Poldi,' they called him, the Austrian Foreign Minister. Skilled manipulator, but he didn't factor in the simple fact that his country lacked the power to achieve what he wanted. Germany and Austria- Hungary started the war. They both lost. World War Two, Japan and Germany took on the whole world, never occurred to them that the rest of the world might be stronger. Particularly true of Japan.' Ryan went on. 'They never really had a plan to defeat us. Hold on that for a moment. The Civil War, started by the South. The South lost. The Franco-Prussian War, started by France. France lost. Almost every war since the Industrial Revolution was initiated by the side which ultimately lost. Q.E.D., going to war is not a rational act. Therefore, the thinking behind it, the why isn't necessarily important, because it is probably erroneous to begin with.'

'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