Debt of Honor

'What is it?'

'Dr. Ryan, I need to see the President right away.'

'Cathy, could you stay here for a second.' To the embassy official: 'Follow me.'

'Oh, Jack…' his wife griped.

'You have it on paper?' Ryan asked, holding his hand out.

'Here, sir.' Ryan took the fax sheets and read them while walking across the room.

'Holy shit. Come on.' President Durling was still chatting with President Grushavoy when Ryan appeared with the junior man in his wake.

'Some party, Jack,' Roger Durling observed pleasantly. Then his face changed. 'Trouble?'

Ryan nodded, adopting his Advisor's face. 'We need Brett and Buzz, Mr. President, right now.'

'There they are.' The SPY-1D radar on Mutsu painted the forward edge of the American formation on the raster screen. Rear Admiral—Shoho—Sato looked at his operations officer with an impassive expression that meant nothing to the rest of the bridge crew but quite a bit to the Captain—Issa—who knew what Exercise DATELINE PARTNERS was really all about. Now it was time to discuss the matter with the destroyer's commanding officer. The two formations were 140 nautical miles apart and would rendezvous in the late afternoon, the two officers thought, wondering how Mutsu's CO would react to the news. Not that he had much choice in the matter.

Ten minutes later, a Socho, or chief petty officer, went out on deck to check out the Mark 68 torpedo launcher on the port side. First opening the inspection hatch on the base of the mount, he ran an electronic diagnostic test on all three 'fish' in the three-tube launcher. Satisfied, he secured the hatch, and one by one opened the aft hatches on each individual tube, removing the propeller locks from each Mark 50 torpedo. The Socho was a twenty-year veteran of the sea, and completed the task in under ten minutes. Then he lifted his tools and walked over to the starboard side to repeat it for the identical launcher on the other side of his destroyer. He had no idea why he had been ordered to perform the tasks, and hadn't asked.

Another ten minutes and Mutsu went to flight quarters. Modified from her original plans, the destroyer now sported a telescoping hangar that allowed her to embark a single SH-60J antisubmarine helicopter that was also useful for surveillance work. The crew had to be roused from sleep and their aircraft preflighted, which required almost forty minutes, but then it lifted off, first sweeping around the formation, then moving forward, its surface-scanning radar examining the American formation that was still heading west at eighteen knots. The radar picture was downlinked to flagship Mutsu.

'These will be the two carriers, three thousand meters apart,' the CO said, tapping the display screen.

'You have your orders, Captain,' Sato said.

'Hai,' Mutsu's commander replied, keeping his feelings to himself.

'What the hell happened?' Durling asked. They had assembled in a corner, with Russian and American security personnel to keep others away.

'It looks like there was a major conniption on the Street,' Ryan replied, having had the most time to consider the event. It wasn't exactly a penetrating analysis.

'Cause?' Fiedler asked.

'No reason for it that I know about,' Jack said, looking around for the coffee he'd ordered. He needed some, and the other three men needed it even more.

'Jack, you have the most recent trading experience,' Secretary of the Treasury Fiedler observed.

'Start-ups, IPOs, not really working the Street, Buzz.' The National Security Advisor paused, gesturing to the fax sheets. 'It's not as though we have a lot to go on. Somebody got nervous on T-Bills, most likely guess right now is that somebody was cashing in on relative changes between the dollar and the yen, and things got a little out of hand.'

'A little?' Brett Hanson interjected, just to let people know he was here.

'Look, the Dow took a big fall, down to a hard floor, and there are two days for people to regroup. It's happened before. We're flying back tomorrow night, right?'

'We need to do something now,' Fiedler said. 'Some sort of statement.'

'Something neutral and reassuring,' Ryan suggested. 'The market's like an airplane. It'll pretty much fly itself if you leave it alone. This has happened before, remember?'

Secretary Bosley Fiedler—'Buzz' went back to Little League baseball—was an academic. He'd written books on the American financial system without ever having actually played in it. The good news was that he knew how to take a broad, historical view on economics. His professional reputation was that of an expert on monetary policy. The bad news, Ryan saw now, was that Fiedler had never been a trader, or even thought that much about it, and consequently lacked the confidence that a real player would have had with this situation, which explained why he had immediately asked Ryan for an opinion. Well, that was a good sign, wasn't it? He knew what he didn't know. No wonder everybody said he was smart.

'We put in speed bumps and other safeguards as a result of the last time. This event blew right through them. In less than three hours,' SecTreas added uneasily, wondering, as an academic would, why good theoretical measures had failed to work as expected.

'True. It'll be interesting to see why. Remember, Buzz, it has happened before.'

'Statement,' the President said, giving a one-word order.

Fiedler nodded, thinking for a moment before speaking. 'Okay, we say that the system is fundamentally sound. We have all manner of automated safeguards. There is no underlying problem with the market or with the American economy. Hell, we're growing, aren't we? And TRA is going to generate at least half a million manufacturing jobs in the coming year. That's a hard number, Mr. President. That's what I'll say for now.'

'Defer anything else until we get back?' Durling asked.

'That's my advice,' Fiedler confirmed. Ryan nodded agreement.

'Okay, get hold of Tish and put it out right away.'

There was an unusual number of charter flights, but Saipan International Airport wasn't all that busy an airport despite its long runways, and increased business made for increased fees. Besides, it was a weekend. Probably some sort of association, the tower chief thought as the first of the 747's out of Tokyo began its final approach. Of late Saipan had become a much more popular place for Japanese businessmen. A recent court decision had struck down the constitutional provision prohibiting foreign ownership of land and now allowed them to buy up parcels. In fact, the island was more than half foreign-owned now, a source of annoyance to many of the native Chamorros people, but not so great an annoyance as to prevent many of them from taking the money and moving off the land. It was bad enough already. On any given weekend, the number of Japanese on Saipan outnumbered the citizens, and typically treated the owners of the island like…natives.

'Must be a bunch going to Guam, too,' the radar operator noted, examining the line of traffic heading farther south.

'Weekend. Golf and fishing,' the senior tower controller observed, looking forward to the end of his shift. The Japs—he didn't like them very much—were not going to Thailand as much for their sex trips. Too many had come home with nasty gifts from that country. Well, they did spend money here—a lot of it—and for the privilege of doing it for this weekend they'd boarded their jumbo-jets at about two in the morning…

The first JAL 747 charter touched down at 0430 local time, slowing and turning at the end of the runway in time for the next one to complete its final approach. Captain Torajiro Sato turned right onto the taxiway and looked around for anything unusual. He didn't expect it, but on a mission like this—Mission? he asked himself. That was a word he hadn't used since his F-86 days in the Air Self-Defense Force. If he'd stayed, he would have been a Sho by now, perhaps even commanding his country's entire Air Force. Wouldn't that have been grand? Instead—instead he'd left that service and started with Japan Air Lines, at the time a place of far greater respect. He'd hated that fact then, and now hoped that it would change for all time. It would be an Air Force now, even if someone lesser than he was actually in command. He was still a fighter pilot at heart. You didn't have much chance to do anything exciting in a 747. He'd been through one serious inflight emergency eight years before, a partial hydraulic failure, and handled it so skillfully that he hadn't bothered telling the passengers. No one outside the flight deck had even noticed. His feat was now a routine part of the simulator training for 747 captains. Beyond that frantic but satisfying moment, he strove for precision. He was something of a legend in an airline known worldwide for its excellence. He could read weather charts like a fortune-teller, pick the precise tar-strip on a runway where his main gear would touch, and had never once been more that three minutes off an arrival time.