island home, but informal rules were established and so far none was being violated.
This was good for the CO of USS Pasadena, whose sonar and tracking parties were trying to keep tabs on both sides, all the while hoping that a shooting war wouldn't start with them in the middle. Getting killed by mistake seemed such a tawdry end.
'Torpedo in the water, bearing two-seven-four!' was the next call from the sonar compartment. Heads turned and ears perked up at once.
'Stay cool,' the captain ordered quietly. 'Sonar, Conn, I need more than that!' That statement was not quiet.
'Same bearing as contact Sierra Four-Two, a Luda II-class 'can, sir, probably launched from there.'
'Four-Two is bearing two-seven-four, range thirty thousand yards,' a petty officer in the tracking party interjected at once.
'Sounds like one of their new homers, sir, six blades, turning at high speed, bearing is changing north to south, definite side aspect on the fish.'
'Very well,' the captain said, allowing himself to stay as calm as he pretended to be.
'Could be targeted on Sierra-Fifteen, sir.' That contact was an old Ming-class submarine, a Chinese copy of the old Russian Romeo-class, a clunker whose design dated from the 1950s which had snorted less than an hour before to recharge batteries.
'He's at two-six-one, range about the same.' That came from the officer in charge of the tracking party. The senior chief at his left nodded agreement.
The captain closed his eyes and allowed himself a breath. He'd heard the stories about the Good Old Days of the Cold War, when people like Bart Mancuso had gone Up North into the Barents Sea and, occasionally, found themselves right in the middle of a live-fire ShootEx of the Soviet navy—perhaps mistaken for practice targets, even. A fine opportunity to figure out how good Soviet weapons really were, they joked now, sitting in their offices. Now he knew what they'd really felt at the time. Fortunately, his private head was a mere twenty feet away, if it came to that…
'Transient, transient, mechanical transient bearing two-six-one, sounds like a noisemaker, probably released by contact Sierra-Fifteen. The torpedo bearing is now two-six-seven, estimated speed four-four knots, bearing continues to change north to south,' sonar reported next. 'Hold it—another torpedo in the water bearing two-five- five!'
'No contact on that bearing, could be a helo launch,' the senior chief said.
He'd have to discuss one of those sea stories with Man-cuso when he got back to Pearl, the captain thought.
'Same acoustical signature, sir, another homing fish, drifting north, could also be targeted on Sierra- Fifteen.'
'Bracketed the poor bastard.' This came from the XO.
'It's dark topside, isn't it?' the captain thought suddenly. Sometimes it was easy to lose track.
'Sure is, sir.' From the XO again.
'Have we seen them do night helo ops this week?'
'No, sir. Intel says they don't like to fly off their 'cans at night.'
'That just changed, didn't it? Let's see. Raise the ESM mast.'
'Raise the ESM, aye.' A sailor pulled the proper handle and the reed-thin electronics-sensor antenna hissed up on hydraulic power. Pasadena was running at periscope depth, her long sonar «tail» streamed out behind her as the submarine stayed roughly on what they hoped was the borderline between the two enemy fleets. It was the safest place to be until such time as real shooting started.
'Looking for—'
'Got it, sir, a Ku-band emitter at bearing two-five-four, aircraft type, frequency and pulse-repetition rate like that new French one. Wow, lots of radars turning, sir, take a while to classify them.'
'French Dauphin helos on some of their frigates, sir,' the XO observed.
'Doing night ops,' the captain emphasized. That was unexpected. Helicopters were expensive, and landing on tin cans at night was always dicey. The Chinese navy was training up to do something.
THINGS COULD BE slippery in Washington. The nation's capital invariably panics at the report of a single snowflake despite the realization that a blizzard might do little more than fill the potholes in the street, if only people would plow the snow that way. But there was more to it than that. As soldiers once followed flags onto a battlefield, so senior Washington officials follow leaders or ideologies, but near the top it got slippery. A lower- or middle-level bureaucrat might just sit at his post and ignore his sitting department Secretary's identity, but the higher one went, the closer one came to something akin to decision or policy making. In such positions, one actually had to do things, or tell others to do things, from time to time, other than what someone else had already written down. One regularly went in and out of top-floor offices and became identified with whoever might be there, ultimately all the way to the President's office in the West Wing, and though access to the top meant power of a sort, and prestige, and an autographed photo on the office wall to tell your visitors how important you were, if something happened to the other person in the photo, then the photo and its signature might become a liability rather than an asset. The ultimate risk lay in changing from an insider, always welcome, to an outsider, if not quite always shunned, then forced to earn one's way back inside, a prospect not attractive to those who had spent so much time getting there in the first place.
The most obvious defense, of course, was to be networked, to have a circle of friends and associates which didn't have to be deep so much as broad, and include people in all parts of the political spectrum. You had to be known by a sufficiently wide number of fellow insiders so that no matter what happened at the very top there was always a safe platform just below, a safety net of sorts. The net was close enough to the top that the people in it had the upward access without the risk of falling off. With care, those at the top positions enjoyed its protection, too, always able to slide in and out of appropriate postings, to and from other offices not too far away—usually less than a mile—to await the next opportunity, and so even though out, to remain in the Network, to retain the access, and also rent out that access to those who needed it. In that sense, nothing had changed since the pharaonic court in the ancient Nile city of Thebes, where knowing a nobleman who had access to Pharaoh gave one a power which translated into both money and the pure joy of being important enough to bow and scrape for profit.
But in Washington as in Thebes, being too close to the wrong leader's court meant you ran the risk of becoming tarnished, especially when the Pharaoh didn't play ball (actually jackals and hounds in the Middle Kingdom) with the system.
And President Ryan didn't. It was as though a foreigner had usurped the throne, not necessarily a bad man, but a different man who didn't assemble people from the Establishment. They'd waited patiently for him to come to them, as all Presidents did, to seek their wisdom and counsel, to give access and get it in return, as courtiers had for centuries. They handled things for a busy chief, doling out justice, seeing to it that things were done in the same old way, which had to be the right way, since all of their number agreed with it while serving and being served by it.
But the old system hadn't so much been destroyed as ignored, and that befuddled the thousands of members of the Great Network. They held their cocktail parties and discussed the new President over Perrier and pate, smiling tolerantly at his new ideas and waiting for him to see the light. But it had been quite a while now since that awful night, and it hadn't happened yet. Networked people still working inside as appointees of the Fowler-Durling administration came to the parties and reported that they didn't understand what was going on. Senior lobbyists tried to make appointments through the office of the President, only to be told that the President was extremely tied up, and didn't have time.
Didn't have time?
Didn't have time for them?
It was as though Pharaoh had told all the nobles and courtiers to go home and tend their estates up and down the river kingdom, and that was no fun—to live in the provinces… with the… common folk?
Worse, the new Senate, or a large part of it, was following the President's example. Worst of all, many, if not most, were curt with them. A new senator from Indiana was reported to have a kitchen timer on his desk and to twist it to a mere five minutes for lobbyists, and to none at all for people talking to him about the absurd ideas for rewriting the tax code. Worst of all, he even lacked the courtesy to have his executive secretary deflect appointment requests. He'd actually told the chief of a powerful Washington law firm—a man who'd only wanted to
