Debt of Honor

But the time was not yet right. He could see that. His allies were many, but there were not enough of them, and those who opposed him were too fixed in their thinking to be persuaded. They saw his point, but not as clearly as he did, and until they changed their way of thinking, he could do no more than what he was doing now, offering counsel, setting the stage. A man of surpassing patience, Yamata-san smiled politely and ground his teeth, with the frustration of the moment.

'You know, I think I'm starting to get the hang of this place,' Ryan said as he took his place in the leather chair to the President's left.

'I said that once,' Durling announced. 'It cost me three tenths of a point of unemployment, a fight with House Ways and Means, and ten real points of approval rating.' Though his voice was grave, he smiled when he said it.

'So what's so hot that you're interrupting my lunch?'

Jack didn't make him wait, though his news was important enough to merit a dramatic reply: 'We have our agreement with the Russians and Ukrainians on the last of the birds.'

'Starting when?' Durling asked, leaning forward over his desk and ignoring his salad.

'How does next Monday grab you?' Ryan asked with a grin. 'They went for what Scott said. There've been so many of these START procedures that they want just to kill the last ones quietly and announce that they're gone, once and for all. Our inspectors are already over there, and theirs are over here, and they'll just go and do it.'

'I like it,' Durling replied.

'Exactly forty years, boss,' Ryan said with some passion, 'practically my whole life since they deployed the SS-6 and we deployed Atlas, ugly damned things with an ugly damned purpose, and helping to make them go away—well, Mr. President, now I owe you one. It's going to be your mark, sir, but I can tell my grandchildren that I was around when it happened.' That Adler's proposal to the Russians and Ukrainians had been Ryan's initiative might end up as a footnote, but probably not.

'Our grandchildren either won't care or they'll ask what the big deal was,' Arnie van Damm observed, deadpan.

'True,' Ryan conceded. Trust Arnie to put a neutral spin on things.

'Now tell me the bad news,' Durling ordered.

'Five billion,' Jack said, unsurprised by the hurt expression he got in return. 'It's worth it, sir. It really is.'

'Tell me why.'

'Mr. President, since I was in grammar school our country has lived with the threat of nuclear weapons on ballistic launchers aimed at the United States. Inside of six weeks, the last of them could be gone.'

'They're already aimed—'

'Yes, sir, we have ours aimed at the Sargasso Sea, and so do they, an error that you can fix by opening an inspection port and changing a printed-circuit card in the guidance system. To do that takes ten minutes from the moment you open the access door into the missile silo and requires a screwdriver and a flashlight.' Actually, that was true only for the Soviet—Russian! Ryan corrected himself for the thousandth time— missiles. The remaining American birds took longer to retarget due to their greater sophistication. Such were the vagaries of engineering science.

'All gone, sir, gone forever,' Ryan said. 'I'm the hard-nosed hawk here, remember? We can sell this to the Hill. It's worth the price and more.'

'You make a good case, as always,' van Damm announced from his chair.

'Where will OMB find the money, Arnie?' President Durling asked.

Now it was Ryan's turn to cringe.

'Defense, where else?'

'Before we get too enthusiastic about that, we've gone too far already.'

'What will we save by eliminating our last missiles?' van Damm asked.

'It'll cost us money,' Jack replied. 'We're already paying an arm and a leg to dismantle the missile subs, and the environmentalists—'

'Those wonderful people,' Durling observed.

'—but it's a one-time expense.'

Eyes turned to the chief of staff. His political judgment was impeccable. The weathered face weighed the factors and turned to Ryan. 'It's worth the hassle. There will be a hassle on the Hill, boss,' he told the President, 'but a year from now you'll be telling the American people how you put an end to the sword of—'

'Damocles,' Ryan said.

'Catholic schools.' Arnie chuckled. 'The sword that's hung over America for a generation. The papers'll like it, and you just know that CNN will make a big deal about it, one of their hour-long special-report gigs, with lots of good pictures and inaccurate commentary.'

'Don't like that, Jack?' Durling asked, smiling broadly now.

'Mr. President, I'm not a politician, okay? Isn't it sufficient to the moment that we're dismantling the last two hundred ICBMs in the world?'

Well, that wasn't exactly true, was it? Let's not wax too poetic, Jack. There are still the Chinese, Brits, and French. But the latter two would fall into line, wouldn't they? And the Chinese could be made to see the light through trade negotiations, and besides, what enemies did they have left to worry about?

'Only if people see and understand, Jack.' Durling turned to van Damm.

Both of them ignored Jack's not-quite-spoken additional concerns. 'Get the media office working on this. We do the formal announcement in Moscow, Jack?'

Ryan nodded. 'That was the deal, sir.' There would be more to it, careful leaks, unconfirmed at first. Congressional briefings to generate more. Quiet calls to various TV networks and trusted reporters who would be in exactly the right places at exactly the right times—difficult because of the ten-hour difference between Moscow and the last American ICBM fields—to record for history the end of the nightmare. The actual elimination process was rather messy, which was why American tree-huggers had such a problem with it. In the case of the Russian birds, the warheads were removed for dismantlement, the missiles drained of their liquid fuels and stripped of valuable and/or classified electronic components, and then one hundred kilograms of high explosives were used to blast open the top of the silo, which in due course would be filled with dirt and leveled off. The American procedure was different because all the U.S. missiles used solid fuels. In their case, the missile bodies were transported to Utah, where they were opened at both ends; then the rocket motors were ignited and allowed to burn out like the world's largest highway flares, creating clouds of toxic exhaust that might snuff out the lives of some wild birds. In America the silos would also be blasted open—a United States Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that the national-security implications of the international arms-control treaty superseded four environmental-protection statutes, despite many legal briefs and protests to the contrary. The final blast would be highly dramatic, all the more so because its force would be about one ten-millionth of what the silo had once represented. Some numbers, and some concepts, Jack reflected, were simply too vast to be appreciated—even by people like himself.

The legend of Damocles had to do with a courtier in the circle of King Dionysius of Sicily, who had waxed eloquent on the good fortune of his king. To make a point in the cruel and heavy-handed way of 'great' men, Dionysius had invited his courtier, Damocles, to a sumptuous banquet and sat him in a comfortable place directly under a sword, which in turn was suspended from the ceiling by a thread. The purpose was to demonstrate that the King's own good fortune was as tenuous as the safety of his guest.

It was the same with America. Everything it had was still under the nuclear sword, a fact made graphically clear to Ryan in Denver not too long before, and for that reason his personal mission since returning to government service had been to put the end to the tale, once and for all.

'You want to handle the press briefings?'

'Yes, Mr. President,' Jack replied, surprised and grateful for Durling's stunning generosity.

' 'Northern Resource Area'?' the Chinese Defense Minister asked. He added dryly, 'Interesting way of putting it.'

'So what do you think?' Zhang Han San asked from his side of the table. He was fresh from another meeting with Yamata.

'In the abstract, it's strategically possible. I leave the economic estimates to others,' the Marshal replied, ever the cautious one despite the quantity of mao-tai he'd consumed this evening.

'The Russians have been employing three Japanese survey firms. Amazing, isn't it? Eastern Siberia has hardly