'The problem is as much technical as anything. We cannot project sufficient power to—'
'Wait a minute,' Ryan interrupted.'I want to make a few items clear for everyone, okay?' There were no objections. Even the Defense Secretary seemed relieved that he didn't have to speak.
'Guam is U.S. Territory, has been for almost a century. The people there are our citizens. Japan took the island away from us in 1941, and in 1944 we took it back. People died to do that.'
'We think we can get Guam back through negotiations,' Secretary Hanson said.
'Glad to hear that,' Ryan replied. 'What about the rest of the Marianas?'
'My people think it's unlikely that we will get them back through diplomatic means. We'll work on it, of course, but—'
'But what?' Jack demanded. There was no immediate answer. 'All right, let's make another thing clear. The Northern Marianas were never a legal possession of Japan, despite what their ambassador told us. They were a Trust Territory under the League of Nations, and so they were not war booty to us when we took them in 1944 along with Guam. In 1947 the United Nations declared them a Trust Territory under the protection of the United States. In 1952 Japan officially renounced all claims to sovereignty to the islands. In 1978, the people of the Northern Marianas opted to become a Commonwealth, politically unified with the United States, and they elected their first governor—we took long enough to let them do that, but they did. In 1986 the U.N. decided that we had faithfully fulfilled our responsibilities to those people, and in the same year the people of those islands all got U.S. citizenship. In 1990 the U.N. Security Council closed out the trusteeship for good.
'Do we all have that? The citizens of those islands are American citizens, with U.S. passports—not because we made them do it, but because they freely chose to be. That's called self-determination. We brought the idea to those rocks, and the people there must have thought that we were serious about it.'
'You can't do what you can't do,' Hanson said. 'We can negotiate—'
'Negotiate, hell!' Jack snarled back. 'Who says we can't?'
SecDef looked up from his notes. 'Jack, it could take years to rebuild…the things we've deactivated. If you want to blame someone, well, blame me.'
'If we can't do it—what's it going to cost?' the Secretary of Health and Human Services asked. 'We have things we have to do here—'
'So we let a foreign country strip the citizenship rights of Americans because it's too hard to defend them?' Ryan asked more quietly. 'Then what? What about the next time it happens? Tell me, when did we stop being the United States of America? It's a matter of political will, that's all,' the National Security Advisor went on. 'Do we have any?'
'Dr. Ryan, we live in a real world,' the Secretary of the Interior pointed out. 'All those people on those islands, can we put their lives at risk?'
'We used to say that freedom had a greater value than life. We used to say the same thing about our political principles,' Ryan replied. 'And the result is the world which those principles built. The things we call rights—nobody just gave them to us. No, sir. Those ideas are things we fought for. Those are things people died for. The people on those islands are American citizens. Do we owe them anything?'
Secretary Hanson was uncomfortable with this line of thought. So were others, but they deferred to him, grateful to be able to do so. 'We can negotiate from a position of strength—but we have to go carefully.'
'How carefully?' Ryan asked quietly.
'Damn it, Ryan, we can't risk nuclear attack over a few thousand—'
'Mr. Secretary, what's the magic number, then? A million? Our place in the world is based on a few very simple ideas—and a lot of people lost their lives for those ideas.'
'You're talking philosophy,' Hanson shot back. 'Look, I have my negotiating team together. We'll get Guam back.'
'No, sir, we're going to get them all back. And I'll tell you why.' Ryan leaned forward, looking up and down the table. 'If we don't, then we cannot prevent a war between Russia on one side and Japan and China on the other. I think I know the Russians. They will fight for Siberia. They have to. The resources there are their best chance for bootstrapping their country into the next century. That war could go nuclear. Japan and China probably don't think it'll go that far, people, but I'm telling you it will. You know why?
'If we cannot deal with this situation effectively, then who can? The Russians will think they're alone. Our influence with them will be zero, they'll have their backs against a wall, and they'll lash out the only way they can, and the butcher's bill will be like nothing the world has ever seen, and I'm not ready for another dark age.
'So we don't have a choice. You can name any reason you want, but it all comes down to the same thing: we have a debt of honor to the people on those islands who decided that they wanted to be Americans. If we don't defend that principle, we don't defend anything. And nobody will trust us, and nobody will respect us, not even ourselves. If we turn our back on them, then we are not the people we say we are, and everything we've ever done is a lie.'
Through it all, President Durling sat quietly in his place, scanning faces, most especially his Secretary of Defense, and behind him, against the wall, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the man SecDef had picked to assist him in the dismantlement of the American military. Both men were looking down, and it was clear that both men were unworthy of the moment. It was also clear that their country could not afford to be.
'How can we do it, Jack?' Roger Durling asked.
'Mr. President, I don't know yet. Before we try, we have to decide if we are going to or not, and that, sir, is your call.'
Durling weighed Ryan's words, and weighed the desirability of polling his cabinet for their opinions, but the faces told him something he didn't like.
He remembered his time in Vietnam when he'd told his troopers that, yes, it all mattered, even though he knew that it was a lie. He'd never forgotten the looks on their faces, and though it was not widely known, every month or so now, in the dark of night, he'd walk down to the Vietnam Memorial, where he knew the exact location of every name of every man who had died under his command, and he visited those names one by one, to tell them that, yes, it really had mattered somehow, that in the great scheme of events their deaths had contributed to something, and that the world had changed for the better, too late for them, but not too late for their fellow citizens. President Durling thought of one other thing: nobody had ever taken land away from America.
Perhaps it all came down to that.
'Brett, you will commence negotiations immediately. Make it clear that the current situation in the Western Pacific is in no way acceptable to the United States government. We will settle for nothing less than a complete restoration of the Mariana Islands to their antebellum condition. Nothing less,' Durling repeated.
'Yes, Mr. President.'
'I want plans and options for the removal of Japanese forces from those islands should negotiations fail,' JUMPER told the Secretary of Defense. The latter nodded but his face told the tale. SecDef didn't think it could be done. Admiral Chandraskatta thought it had taken long enough, but he was patient, and he knew that he could afford to be. What will happen now? he wondered.
It could have gone more quickly. He'd been a little slow in his methods and plans, trying to learn the thought patterns of his adversary, Rear Admiral Michael Dubro. He was a clever foe, skilled at maneuvering, and because he was clever, he'd been quick to think that his own foe was stupid. It had been obvious for a week that the American formation lay to the southwest, and by moving south, he'd cajoled Dubro into moving north, then east. Had his assessment been wrong, then the American fleet would still have had to go to the same spot, east of Dondra Head, forcing the fleet oilers to cut the corner.
Sooner or later they would pass under the eyes of his air patrols, and, finally, they had. Now all he had to do was follow them, and Dubro couldn't divert them except to the east. And that meant diverting his entire fleet to the east, away from Sri Lanka, opening the way for his navy's amphibious division to load its cargo of soldiers and armored vehicles. The only alternative was for the Americans to confront his fleet and offer battle.
But they wouldn't do that—would they? No. The only sensible thing for America to do was to recall Dubro and his two carriers to Pearl Harbor, there to await the political decision on whether or not to confront Japan. They had divided their fleet, violating the dictum of Alfred Thayer Mahan, which Chandraskatta had learned at the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, along with his classmate, Yusuo Sato, not so many years before, and he remembered the theoretical discussions they'd had on walks along the seawall, watching the yachts and wondering how small navies could defeat big ones.
