Debt of Honor

27—Piling On

Everything was running behind, at maximum speed, largely in circles, getting nowhere at amazing speed. A city both accustomed to and dedicated to the prevention of leaks, Washington and its collection of officials were too busy with four simultaneous crises to respond effectively to any of them. None of that was unusual, a fact that would have been depressing to those who ought to be dealing with it, a digression for which, of course, they didn't have time. The only good news, Ryan thought, is that the biggest story hadn't quite leaked. Yet.

"Scott, who're your best people for Japan?"

Adler was still a smoker or had bought a pack on his way over from Foggy Bottom. It required all of Ryan's diminishing self-control not to ask for one, but neither could he tell his guest not to light up. They all had to deal with stress in their own ways. The fact that Adler's had once been Ryan's was just one more inconvenience in a weekend that had gone to hell faster than he'd thought possible.

"I can put a working group together. Who runs it?"

"You do," Jack answered.

"What will Brett say?"

"He'll say, 'Yes, sir,' when the President tells him," Ryan replied, too tired to be polite.

"They have us by the balls, Jack."

"How many potential hostages?" Ryan asked. It wasn't just the residual military people. There had to be thousands of tourists, businessmen, reporters, students…

"We have no way of finding out, Jack. None," Adler admitted. "The good news is that we have no indications of adverse treatment. It's not 1941, at least I don't think so."

"If that starts…" Most Americans had forgotten the manner of treatment accorded foreign prisoners. Ryan was not one of them. "Then we start going crazy. They have to know that."

"They know us a lot better than they did back then. So much interaction. Besides, we have tons of their people over here, too."

"Don't forget, Scott, that their culture is fundamentally different from ours. Their religion is different. Their view of man's place in nature is different. The value they place on human life is different," the National Security Advisor said darkly.

"This isn't a place for racism, Jack," Adler observed narrowly.

"Those are all facts. I didn't say they're inferior to us. I said that we're not going to make the mistake of thinking they're motivated in the same way we are—okay?"

"That's fair, I suppose," the Deputy Secretary of State conceded.

"So I want people who really understand their culture in here to advise me. I want people who think like they do." The trick would be finding space for them, but there were offices downstairs whose occupants could move out, albeit kicking and screaming about how important protocol and political polling were.

"I can find a few," Adler promised.

"What are we hearing from the embassies?"

"Nobody knows much of anything. One interesting development in Korea, though."

"What's that?"

"The defense attache in Seoul went to see some friends about getting some bases moved up in alert level. They said no. That's the first time the ROKs ever said no to us. I guess their government is still trying to figure all this out."

"It's too early to start that, anyway."

"Are we going to do anything?"

Ryan shook his head. "I don't know yet." Then his phone buzzed.

"NMCC on the STU, Dr. Ryan."

"Ryan," Jack said, lifting the phone. "Yes, put him through. Shit," he breathed so quietly that Adler hardly caught it. "Admiral, I'll be back to you later today."

"Now what?"

"The Indians," Ryan told him.

"I call the meeting to order," Mark Gant said, tapping the table with his pen. Only two more than half of the seats were filled, but that was a quorum. "George, you have the floor."

The looks on all the faces troubled George Winston. At one level the men and women who determined policy for the Columbus Group were physically exhausted. At another they were panicked. It was the third that caused him the most pain: the degree of hope they showed at his presence, as though he were Jesus come to clean out the temple. It wasn't supposed to be this way. No one man was supposed to have that sort of power. The American economy was too vast. Too many people depended on it. Most of all, it was too complex for one man or even twenty to comprehend it all. That was the problem with the models that everyone depended on. Sooner or later it came down to trying to gauge and measure and regulate something that simply was. It existed. It worked. It functioned. People needed it, but nobody really knew how it worked. The Marxists' illusion that they did know had been their fundamental flaw. The Soviets had spent three generations trying to command an economy to work instead of just letting it go on its own, and had ended up beggars in the world's richest nation. And it was not so different here. Instead of controlling it, they tried to live off it, but in both cases you had to have the illusion that you understood it. And nobody did, except in the broadest sense.

At the most basic level it all came down to needs and time. People had needs. Food and shelter were the first two of those. So other people grew the food and built the houses. Both required time to do, and since time was the most precious commodity known to man, you had to compensate people for it. Take a car-people needed transportation, too. When you bought a car, you paid people for the time of assembly, for the time required to fabricate all the components; ultimately you were paying miners for the time required to dig the iron ore and bauxite from the ground. That part was simple enough. The complexity began with all of the potential options. You could drive more than one kind of car. Each supplier of goods and services involved in the car had the option to get what he needed from a variety of sources, and since time was precious, the person who used his time most efficiently got a further reward. That was called competition, and competition was a never-ending race of everyone against everyone else. Fundamentally, every business, and in a sense every single person in the American economy, was in competition with every other. Everyone was a worker. Everyone was also a consumer. Everyone provided something for others to use. Everyone selected products and services from the vast menu that the economy offered. That was the basic idea.

The true complexity came from all the possible interactions. Who bought what from whom. Who became more efficient, the better to make use of their time, benefiting both the consumers and themselves at once. With everyone in the game, it was like a huge mob, with everyone talking to everyone else. You simply could not keep track of all the conversations. And yet Wall Street held the illusion that it could, that its computer models could predict in broad terms what would happen on a daily basis. It was not possible. You could analyze individual companies, get a idea of what they were doing right and wrong. To a limited degree, from one or a few such analyses you could see trends and profit by them. But the use of computers and modeling techniques had gone too far, extrapolating farther and farther away from baseline reality, and while it had worked, after a fashion, for years, that had only magnified the illusion. With the collapse three days earlier, the illusion was shattered, and now they had nothing to cling to. Nothing but me, George Winston thought, reading their faces.

The former president of the Columbus Group knew his limitations. He knew the degree to which he understood the system, and knew roughly where that understanding ended. He knew that nobody could quite make the whole thing work, and that train of thought took him almost as far as he needed to go on this dark night in New York.

"This looks like a place without a leader. Tomorrow, what happens?" he asked, and all the "rocket scientists" averted their eyes from his, looking down at the table, or in some cases sharing a glance with the person who happened to be across it. Only three days before, someone would have spoken, offered an opinion with some greater or lesser degree of confidence. But not now, because nobody knew. Nobody had the first idea. And nobody spoke up.

"You have a president. Is he telling you anything?" Winston asked next.

Heads shook.

It was Mark Gant, of course, who posed the question, as Winston had known he would.

"Ladies and gentlemen, it is the board of directors which selects our president and managing director, isn't it? We need a leader now."

"George," another man asked. "Are you back?"

"Either that or I'm doing the goddamnedest out-of-body trip you people have ever seen." It wasn't much of a joke, but it did generate smiles, the beginning of a little enthusiasm for something.

"In that case, I submit the motion that we declare the position of president and managing director to be vacant."

"Second."

"There is a motion on the floor," Mark Gant said, rather more strongly.

"Those in favor?"

There was a chorus of "ayes."

"Oppose?"

Nothing.

"The motion carries. The presidency of the Columbus Group is now vacant. Is there a further motion from the floor?"

"I nominate George Winston to be our managing director and president," another voice said.

"Second."

"Those in favor?" Gant asked. This vote was identical except in its growing enthusiasm.

"George, welcome back." There was a faint smattering of applause.

"Okay." Winston stood. It was his again. His next comment was desultory: "Somebody needs to tell Yamata." He started pacing the room.

"Now, first thing: I want to see everything we have on Friday's transactions. Before we can start thinking about how to fix the son of a bitch, we need to know how it got broke. It's going to be a long week, folks, but we have people out there that we have to protect."

The first task would be hard enough, he knew. Winston didn't know if anyone could fix it, but they had to start with examining what had gone so badly wrong. He knew he was close to something. He had the itchy feeling that went with the almost-enough information to move on a particular issue. Part of it was instinct, something he both depended on and distrusted until he could make the itch go away with hard facts. There was something else, however, and he didn't know what it was. He did know that he needed to find it.

Even good news could be ominous. General Arima was spending a good deal of time on TV, and he was doing well at it. The latest news was that any citizen who wanted to leave Saipan would be granted free air fare to Tokyo for later transit back to the States. Mainly what he said was that nothing important had changed.

"My ass," Pete Burroughs growled at the smiling face on the tube.

"You know, I just don't believe this," Oreza said, back up after five hours of sleep.

"I do. Check out that knoll southeast of here."

Portagee rubbed his heavy beard and looked. Half a mile away, on a hilltop recently cleared for another tourist hotel (the island had run out of beach space), about eighty men were setting up a Patriot missile battery. The billboard radars were already erected, and as he watched, the first of four boxy containers was rolled into place.

"So what are we going to do about this?" the engineer asked.

"Hey, I drive boats, remember?"

"You used to wear a uniform, didn't you?"

"Coast Guard," Oreza said. "Ain't never killed nobody. And that stuff"—he pointed to the missile site—"hell, you probably know more about it than I do."

"They make 'em in Massachusetts. Raytheon, I think. My company makes some chips for it." Which was the extent of Burroughs's knowledge.

"They're planning to stay, aren't they?"

"Yeah." Oreza got his binoculars and started looking out windows again. He could see six road junctions. All were manned by what looked like ten men or so—a squad; he knew that term—with a mixture of the Toyola Land Cruisers and some jeeps. Though many had holsters on their pistol belts, no long guns were in evidence now, as though they didn't want to make it look like some South American junta from the old days. Every vehicle that passed—they didn't stop any that he saw—received a friendly wave. PR.

Oreza thought, Good PR.

"Some kind of fuckin' love-in," the master chief said. And that would not have been possible unless they were confident as hell. Even the missile crew on the next hill over, he thought. They weren't rushing. They were doing their jobs in an orderly, professional way, and that was fine, but if you expected to use the things, you moved more snappily. There was a difference between peacetime and wartime activity, however much you said that training was supposed to eliminate the difference between the two. He turned his attention back to the nearest crossroads. The soldiers there were not the least bit tense. They looked and acted like soldiers, but their heads weren't scanning the way they ought to on unfriendly ground.

It might have been good news. No mass arrests and detainments, the usual handmaiden of invasions. No overt display of force beyond mere presence. You would hardly know that they were here, except that they were sure as hell here, Portagee told himself. And they planned to stay. And they didn't think anybody was going to dispute that. And he sure as hell was in no position to change their view on anything.

"Okay, here are the first overheads," Jackson said. "We haven't had much time to go over them, but—"

"But we will," Ryan completed the sentence. "I'm a carded National Intelligence Officer, remember? I can handle the raw."

"Am I cleared for this?" Adler asked.

"You are now." Ryan switched on his desk light, and Robby dialed the combination on his attache case. "When's the next pass over Japan?"

"Right about now, but there's cloud cover over most of the islands."

"Nuke hunt?" Adler asked. Admiral Jackson handled the answer.

"You bet your ass, sir." He laid out the first photo of Saipan. There were two car-carriers at the quay. The adjacent parking lot was spotted with orderly rows of military vehicles, most of them trucks.

"Best guess?" Ryan asked.

"An augmented division." His pen touched a cluster of vehicles. "This is a Patriot battery. Towed artillery. This looks like a big air-defense radar that's broken down for transport. There's a twelve-hundred-foot hill on this rock. It'll see a good long way, and the visual horizon from up there is a good fifty miles." Another photo. "The airports. Those are five F-15 fighters, and if you look here, we caught two of their F-3's in the air coming in on final."

"F-3?" Adler asked.

"The production version of the FS-X," Jackson explained. "Fairly capable, but really a reworked F-16. The Eagles are for air defense. This little puppy is a good attack bird."

"We need more passes," Ryan said in a voice suddenly grave. Somehow it was real now. Really real, as he liked to say, metaphysically real. It was no longer the results of analysis or verbal reports. Now he had photographic proof. His country was sure as hell at war.

Jackson nodded. "Mainly we need pros to go over these overheads, but, yeah, we'll be getting four passes a day, weather permitting, and we need to examine every square inch of this rock, and Tinian, and Rota, and Guam, and all the little rocks."

"Jesus, Robby, can we do it?" Jack asked. The question, though posed in the simplest terms, had implications that even he could not yet appreciate. Admiral Jackson was slow to lift his eyes from the overhead photos, and his voice suddenly lost its rage as the naval officer's professional judgment clicked in.

"I don't know yet." He paused, then posed a question of his own. "Will we try?"

"I don't know that, either," the National Security Advisor told him.

"Robby?"

"Yeah, Jack?"

"Before we decide to try, we have to know if we can."

Admiral Jackson nodded. "Aye aye."

He'd been awake most of the night listening to his partner's snoring. What was it about this guy? Chavez asked himself groggily. How the hell could he sleep? Outside, the sun was up, and the overwhelming sounds of Tokyo in the morning beat their way through windows and walls, and still John was sleeping. Well, Ding thought, he was an old guy and maybe he needed his rest. Then the most startling event of their entire stay in the country happened. The phone rang. That caused John's eyes to snap open, but Ding got the phone first.

"Tovarorischiy," a voice said. "All this time in-country and you haven't called me?"

"Who is this?" Chavez asked. As carefully as he'd studied his Russian, hearing it on the phone here and now made the language sound like Martian. It wasn't hard for him to make his voice seem sleepy. It was hard, a moment later, to keep his eyeballs in their sockets.

A jolly laugh that had to be heartfelt echoed down the phone line. "Yevgeniy Pavlovich, who else would it be? Scrape the stubble from your face and join me for breakfast. I'm downstairs."

Domingo Chavez felt his heart stop. Not just miss a beat, he would have sworn it stopped until he willed it to start working again, and when it did, it went off at warp-factor-three. "Give us a few minutes."

"Ivan Sergeyevich had too much to drink again, da"" the voice asked with another laugh. "Tell him he grows too old for that foolishness. Very well, I will have some tea and wait."

All the while dark's eyes were fixed on his, or for the first few seconds, anyway. Then they started sweeping the room for dangers that had to be around, so pale his partner's face had become. Domingo was not one to get frightened easily, John knew, but whatever he'd heard on the phone had almost panicked the kid.

Well. John rose and switched on the TV. If there were danger outside the door, it was too late. The window offered no escape. The corridor outside could well be jammed full of armed police, and his first order of business was to head for the bathroom. Clark looked in the mirror as the water ran from the flushing toilet. Chavez was there before the handle came back up.

"Whoever was on the phone called me 'Yevgeniy.' He's waiting downstairs, he says."

"What did he sound like?" Clark asked.

"Russian, right accent, right syntax." The toilet stopped running, and they couldn't speak anymore for a while.

Shit, Clark thought, looking in the mirror for an answer, but finding only two very confused faces. Well. The intelligence officer started washing up and thinking over possibilities. Think. If it had been the Japanese police, would they have bothered to…? No. Not likely. Everyone regarded spies as dangerous in addition to being loathsome, a curious legacy of James Bond movies. Intelligence officers were about as likely to start a firefight as they were to sprout wings and fly. Their most important physical skills were running and hiding, but nobody ever seemed to grasp that, and if the local cops were on to them, then…then he would have awakened to a pistol in his face. And he hadn't, had he? Okay. No immediate danger. Probably.

Chavez watched in no small amazement as Clark took his time washing his hands and face, shaving carefully, and brushing his teeth before he relinquished the bathroom. He even smiled when he was done, because that expression was necessary to the tone of his voice.

"Yevgeniy Pavlovich, we must appear kulturny for our friend, no? It's been so many months." Five minutes later they were out the door.

Acting skills are no less important to intelligence officers than to those who work the legitimate theater, for like the stage, in the spy business there are rarely opportunities for retakes. Major Boris Il'ych Scherenko was the deputy rezident of RVS Station Tokyo, awakened four hours earlier by a seemingly innocuous call from the embassy. Covered as Cultural Attache, he'd most recently been busy arranging the final details for a tour of Japan by the St. Petersburg Ballet. For fifteen years an officer of the First Chief (Foreign) Directorate of the KGB, he now fulfilled the same function for his newer and smaller agency. His job was even more important now, Scherenko thought. Since his nation was far less able to deal with external threats, it needed good intelligence more than ever. Perhaps that was the reason for this lunacy. Or maybe the people in Moscow had gone completely mad.

There was no telling. At least the tea was good.

Awaiting him in the embassy had been an enciphered message from Moscow Center-that hadn't changed—with names and detailed descriptions. It made identification easy. Easier than understanding the orders he had.

"Vanya!" Scherenko nearly ran over, seizing the older man's hand for a hearty handshake, but forgoing the kiss that Russians are known for. That was partly to avoid offending Japanese sensibilities and partly because the American might slug him, passionless people that they were. Madness or not, it was a moment to savor. These were two senior CIA officers, and tweaking their noses in public was not without its humor. "It's been so long!"

The younger one, Scherenko saw, was doing his best to conceal his feelings, but not quite well enough. KGB/RVS didn't know anything about him. But his agency did know the name John Clark. It was only a name and a cursory description that could have fit a Caucasian male of any nationality. One hundred eighty-five to one hundred ninety centimeters. Ninety kilos. Dark hair. Fit. To that Scherenko added, blue eyes, a firm grip. Steady nerve.

Very steady nerve, the Major thought.

"Indeed it has. How is your family, my friend?"

Add excellent Russian to that, Scherenko thought, catching the accent of St. Petersburg. As he cataloged the physical characteristics of the American, he saw two sets of eyes, one blue, one black, doing the same to him. "Natalia misses you. Come! I am hungry! Breakfast!" He led the other two back to his corner booth.

"CLARK, JOHN (none?)", the thin file in Moscow was headed. A name so nondescript that other cover names were unknown and perhaps never assigned. Field officer, paramilitary type, believed to perform special covert functions. More than two (2) Intelligence Stars for courage and/or proficiency in field operations. Brief stint as a Security and Protective Officer, during which time no one had troubled himself to get a photo, Scherenko thought. Typical. Staring at him across the table now, he saw a man relaxed and at ease with the old friend he'd met for the first time perhaps as much as two minutes earlier. Well, he'd always known that CIA had good people working for them.

"We can talk here," Scherenko said more quietly, sticking to Russian.

"Is that so…?"

"Scherenko, Boris Il'ych, Major, deputy rezident," he said, finally introducing himself. Next he nodded to each of his guests. "You are John Clark—and Domingo Chavez."

"And this is the fucking Twilight Zone," Ding muttered.

" 'Plum blossoms bloom, and pleasure women buy new scarves in a brothel room.' Not exactly Pushkin, is it? Not even Pasternak. Arrogant little barbarians." He'd been in Japan for three years. He'd arrived expecting to find a pleasant, interesting place to do business. He'd come to dislike many aspects of Japanese culture, mainly the assumed local superiority to everything else in the world, particularly offensive to a Russian who felt exactly the same way.

"Would you like to tell us what this is all about, Comrade Major?" Clark asked.

Scherenko spoke calmly now. The humor of the event was now behind them all, not that the Americans had ever appreciated it. "Your Maria Patricia Foleyeva placed a call to our Sergey Nikolayevich Golovko, asking for our assistance. I know that you are running another officer here in Tokyo, but not his name. I am further instructed to tell you, Comrade Klerk, that your wife and daughters are fine. Your younger daughter made the dean's list at her university again, and is now a good candidate for admission to medical school. If you require further proof of my bona-fides, I'm afraid I cannot help you." The Major noted a thin expression of pleasure on the younger man's face and wondered what that was all about.

Well, that settles that, John thought. Almost. "Well, Boris, you sure as hell know how to get a man's attention. Now, maybe you can tell us what the hell is going on."

"We didn't see it either," Scherenko began, going over all the high points. It turned out that his data was somewhat better than what Clark had gotten from Chet Nomuri, but did not include quite everything. Intelligence was like that. You never had the full picture, and the parts left out were always important.

"How do you know we can operate safely?"

"You know that I cannot—"

"Boris Il'ych, my life is in your hands. You know I have a wife and two daughters. My life is important to me, and to them," John said reasonably, making himself appear all the more formidable to the pro across the table. It wasn't about fear. John knew that he was a capable field spook, and Scherenko gave the same impression. "Trust" was a concept both central to and alien from intelligence operations. You had to trust your people, and yet you could never trust them all the way in a business where dualisms were a way of life.

"Your cover works better for you than you think. The Japanese think that you are Russians. Because of that, they will not trouble you. We can see to that," the deputy rezident told them confidently.

"For how long?" Clark asked rather astutely, Scherenko thought.

"Yes, there is always that question, isn't there?"

"How do we communicate?" John asked.

"I understand that you require a high-quality telephone circuit." He handed a card under the table. "All of Tokyo is now fiberoptic. We have several similar lines to Moscow. Your special communications gear is being flown there as we speak. I understand it is excellent. I would like to see it," Boris said with a raised eyebrow.

"It's just a ROM chip, man," Chavez told him. "I couldn't even tell you which one it is."

"Clever," Scherenko thought.

"How serious are they?" the younger man asked him.

"They appear to have moved a total of three divisions to the Marianas. Their navy has attacked yours." Scherenko gave what details he knew. "I should tell you that our estimate is that you will face great difficulties in taking your islands back."

"How great? "Clark asked.

The Russian shrugged, not without sympathy. "Moscow believes it unlikely. Your capabilities are almost as puny as ours have become."

And that's why this is happening, Clark decided on the spot. That was why he had a new friend in a foreign land. He'd told Chavez, practically on their first meeting, a quote from Henry Kissinger: "Even paranoids have enemies." He sometimes wondered why the Russians didn't print that on their money, rather like America's Epluribus unum. The hell of it was, they had a lot of history to back that one up. And so, for that matter, did America.

"Keep talking."

"We have their government intelligence organs thoroughly penetrated, also their military, but THISTLE is a commercial network, and I gather you have developed better data than I have. I'm not sure what that means."

Which wasn't strictly true, but Scherenko was distinguishing between what he knew and what he thought; and, like a good spook, giving voice only to the former for now.

"So we both have a lot of work to do."

Scherenko nodded. "Feel free to come to the chancery."

"Let me know when the communications gear gets to Moscow." Clark could have gone on, but held back. He wouldn't be completely sure until he got the proper electronic acknowledgment. So strange, he thought, that he needed it, but if Scherenko was telling the truth about his degree of penetration in the Japanese government, then he could have been "flipped" himself. And old habits died especially hard in this business. The one comforting thing was that his interlocutor knew that he was holding back, and didn't appear to mind for the moment.

"I will."

It didn't take many people to crowd the Oval Office. The premier power room in what Ryan still hoped was the world's most powerful nation was smaller than the office he'd occupied during his return to the investment business—and in fact smaller than his corner office in the West Wing, Jack realized for the first time.

They were all tired. Brett Hanson was especially haggard. Only Arnie van Damm looked approximately normal, but, then, Arnie always looked as though he were coming off a bender. Buzz Fiedler looked to be in something close to despair. The Secretary of Defense was the worst of all, however. It was he who had supervised the downsizing of the American military, who had told Congress almost on a weekly basis that our capabilities were far in excess of our needs. Ryan remembered the testimony on TV, the internal memos that dated back several years, the almost desperate objections by the uniformed chiefs of staff which they had faithfully not leaked to the media. It wasn't hard to guess what SecDef was thinking now. This brilliant bureaucrat, so confident in his vision and his judgment, had just run hard into the flat, unforgiving wall called reality.

"The economic problem," President Durling said, much to SecDef's relief.

"The hard part is the banks. They're going to be running scared until we rectify the DTC situation. So many banks now make trades that they don't know what their own reserves are. People are going to try to cash in their mutual-fund holdings controlled by those banks. The Fed Chairman has already started jawboning them."

"Saying what?" Jack asked.

"Saying they had an unlimited line of credit. Saying that the money supply will be enough for their needs. Saying that they can loan all the money they want."

"Inflationary," van Damm observed. "That's very dangerous."

"Not really," Ryan said. "In the short term inflation is like a bad cold, you take aspirin and chicken soup for it. What happened Friday is like a heart attack. You treat that first. If the banks don't open for business as usual…Confidence is the big issue. Buzz is right."

Not for the first time, Roger Durling blessed the fact that Ryan's first departure from government had taken him back into the financial sector.

"And the markets?" the President asked SecTreas.

"Closed. I've talked to all of the exchanges. Until the DTC records are re-created, there will be no organized trading."

"What does that mean?" Hanson asked. Ryan noticed that the Defense Secretary wasn't saying anything. Ordinarily such a confident guy, too, Jack thought, quick to render an opinion. In other circumstances he would have found the man's newly found reticence very welcome indeed.

"You don't have to trade stocks on the floor of the NYSE," Fiedler explained. "You can do it in the country-club men's room if you want."

"And people will," Ryan added. "Not many, but some."

"Will it matter? What about foreign exchanges?" Durling asked. "They trade our stocks all over the world."

"Not enough liquidity overseas," Fiedler answered. "Oh, there's some, but the New York exchanges make the benchmarks that everybody uses, and without those nobody knows what the values are."

"They have records of the tickers, don't they?" van Damm asked.

"Yes, but the records are compromised, and you don't gamble millions on faulty information. Okay, it's not really a bad thing that the information on DTC leaked. It gives us a cover story that we can use for a day or two," Ryan thought. "People can relate to the fact that a system fault had knocked stuff down. It'll hold them off from a total panic for a while. How long to fix the records?"

"They still don't know," Fiedler admitted. "They're still trying to assemble the records."

"We probably have until Wednesday, then." Ryan rubbed his eyes. He wanted to get up and pace, just get his blood circulating, but only the President did that in the Oval Office.

"I had a conference call with all the exchange heads. They're calling everyone in to work, like for a normal day. They have orders to shuffle around and look busy for the TV cameras."

"Nice idea, Buzz," the President managed to say first. Ryan gave SecTreas a thumbs-up.

"We have to come up with some sort of solution fast," Fiedler went on.

"Jack's probably right. By late Wednesday it's a real panic, and I can't tell you what'll happen," he ended soberly. But the news wasn't all that bad for this evening. There was a little breathing space, and there were other breaths to be taken.

"Next," van Damm said, handling this one for the Boss, "Ed Kealty is going to go quietly. He's working out a deal with Justice. So that political monkey is off our backs. Of course"—the Chief of Staff looked at the President—"then we have to fill that post soon."

"It'll wait," Durling said. "Brett…India."

"Ambassador Williams has been hearing some ominous things. The Navy's analysis is probably right. It appears that the Indians may be seriously contemplating a move on Sri Lanka."

"Great timing," Ryan heard, looking down, then he spoke. "The Navy wants operational instructions. We have a two-carrier battle force maneuvering around. If it's time to bump heads, they need to know what they are free to do." He had to say that because of his promise to Robby Jackson, but he knew what the answer would be. That pot wasn't boiling quite yet.

"We've got a lot on the plate. We'll defer that one for now," the President said. "Brett, have Dave Williams meet with their Prime Minister and make it clear to her that the United States does not look kindly upon aggressive acts anywhere in the world. No bluster. Just a clear statement, and have him wait for a reply."

"We haven't talked to them that way in a long time," Hanson warned.

"It's time to do so now, Brett," Durling pointed out quietly.

"Yes, Mr. President."

And now, Ryan thought, the one we've all been waiting for. Eyes turned to the Secretary of Defense. He spoke mechanically, hardly looking up from his notes.

"The two carriers will be back at Pearl Harbor by Friday. There are two graving docks for repairs, but to get the ships fully mission-capable will require months. The two submarines are dead, you know that. The Japanese fleet is retiring back to the Marianas. There has been no additional hostile contact of any kind between fleet units.

"We estimate about three divisions have been air-ferried to the Marianas. One on Saipan, most of two others on Guam. They have air facilities that we built and maintained…" His voice droned on, giving details that Ryan already knew, towards a conclusion that the National Security Advisor already feared.

Everything was too small in size. America's navy was half what it had been only ten years before. There remained the ability to sea-lift only one full division of troops capable of forced-entry assault. Only one, and that required moving all the Atlantic Fleet ships through Panama and recalling others from the oceans of the world as well. To land such troops required support, but the average U.S. Navy frigate had one 3-inch gun. Destroyers and cruisers had but two 5-inch guns each, a far cry from the assembled battleships and cruisers that had been necessary to take the Marianas back in 1944. Carriers, none immediately available, the closest two in the Indian Ocean, and those together did not match the Japanese air strength on Guam and Saipan today, Ryan thought, for the first time feeling anger over the affair. It had taken him long enough to get over the disbelief, Jack told himself.

"I don't think we can do it," SecDef concluded, and it was a judgment that no one in the room was prepared to dispute. They were too weary for recriminations. President Durling thanked everyone for the advice and headed upstairs for his bedroom, hoping to get a little sleep before facing the media in the morning.

He took the stairs instead of the elevator, thinking along the way as Secret Service agents at the top and bottom of the stairs watched. A shame for his presidency to end this way. Though he'd never really desired it, he'd done his best, and his best, only a few days earlier, hadn't been all that bad.