Jack Ryan 8 - Debt of Honor (84 page)

“I don't buy it,” the Colonel said.

“Sir, it looks to me like they were tracking you. They were sweeping you at double the rate that I can explain by the rotation of their dome. Their radar is completely electronic. They can steer their beams, and they were steering their beams.” The sergeant's voice was reasonable and respectful, even though the officer who'd led the first probe was showing a little too much pride and not quite enough willingness to listen. He'd heard a little of what he was just told, but now he just shrugged it off.

“Okay, maybe they did get a few hits. We were broadside—aspect to them. Next time we'll deploy the patrol line farther out and do a direct penetration. That cuts our RCS by quite a bit. We have to tickle their line to see how they react.”

Better you than me, pal, the sergeant thought. He looked out the window. Elmendorf Air Force Base was in
Alaska
and subject to dreadful winter weather—the worst enemy of any man-made machine. As a result the B-1s were all in hangars, which hid them from the satellite that
Japan
might or might not have operating. Still, nobody was sure about that.

“Colonel, I'm just a sergeant who diddles with O-scopes, but I'd be careful about that. I don't know enough about this radar to tell you for sure how good it is. My gut tells me it's pretty damned good.”

“We'll be careful,” the Colonel promised. “Tomorrow night we'll have a better set of tapes for you.”

“Roger that, sir.” Better you than me, pal, he thought again.

USS Pasadena had joined the north end of the patrol line west of Midway. It was possible for the submarines to report in with their satellite radios without revealing their positions except to PacFlt SubOps.

“Not much of a line,” Jones observed, looking at the chart. He'd just come over to confer on what SOSUS had on Japanese naval movements, which was at the moment not much. The best news available was that SOSUS, even with Jones's improved tracking software, wasn't getting anything on the line of
Olympia
,
Helena
,
Honolulu
,
Chicago
, and now
Pasadena
. “We used to have more boats than that just to cover the Gap.”

“That's all the SSNs we have available, Ron,” Chambers replied. “And, yeah, it ain't much. But if they forward-deploy their diesel boats, they'd better be real careful.”
Washington
had given them that much by way of orders. An eastward move of Japanese warships would not tolerated, and the elimination of one of their submarines would be approved, probably. It was just that the boat holding the contact had to call it in first for political approval. Mancuso and Chambers hadn't told Jones that. There was little sense in dealing with his temper again.

“We have a bunch of SSNs in storage—”

“Seventeen on the West Coast, to be exact,” Chambers said. “Minimum six months to reactivate them, not countin' getting the crews spun up.”

Mancuso looked up. “Wait a minute. What about my 726s?”

Jones turned. “I thought they were deactivated.”

SubPac shook his head. “The environmental people wouldn't let me. They all have caretaker crews aboard.”

“All five of them,” Chambers said quietly. “
Nevada
,
Tennessee
,
West Virginia
,
Pennsylvania
, and
Maryland
. That's worth calling
Washington
about, sir.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jones agreed. The 726-class, more commonly known by the name of the lead ship,
Ohio
, which was now high-quality razor blades, was far slower than the smaller 688-class of fast-attack boats, a lot less maneuverable and ten knots slower, but they were also quiet. More than that, they defined what quiet was.

“Wally, think we can scratch up crews for them?”

“I don't see why not, Admiral. We could have them moving in a week…ten days max, if we can get the right people.”

“Well, that's something I can do.” Mancuso lifted the phone for
Washington
.

The business day started in
Central Europe
at
ten o'clock
local time, which was
nine o'clock
in
London
, and a dark
four o'clock
in
New York
. That made it six in the evening in
Tokyo
after what had been at first an exciting week, then a dull one, which had allowed people to contemplate their brilliance at the killing they had made.

Currency traders in the Japanese capital were surprised when things started quite normally. Markets came up on-line much as a business might open its doors for customers waiting outside for a long-awaited sale. It had been announced that it would happen that way. It was just that nobody here had really believed it. As one man they phoned their supervisors for instructions, surprising them with the news from
Berlin
and the other European centers.

At the New York FBI office, machines wired into the international trading network showed exactly the same display as those on every other continent. The Fed Chairman and Secretary Fiedler watched. Both men had phones to their ears, linked into an encrypted conference line with their European counterparts.

The Bundesbank made the first move, trading five hundred billion yen for the current equivalent in dollars to the Bank of Hong Kong, a very cautious transaction to test the waters.
Hong Kong
handled it as a matter of course, seeing a marginal advantage in the German mistake. The Bundesbank was foolish enough to expect that the reopening of the
New York
equities markets would bolster the dollar. The transaction was executed, Fiedler saw. He turned to the Fed Chairman and winked. The next move was by the Swiss, and this one was a trillion yen for
Hong Kong
's remaining holding in U.S. Treasuries. That transaction, too, went through the wires in less than a minute. The next one was more direct. The Bern Commercial Bank took Swiss francs back from a Japanese bank, trading yen holdings for them, another dubious move occasioned by a phone call from the Swiss government.

The opening of European stock markets saw other moves. Banks and other institutions that had made a strategic move to buy up Japanese equities as a counterbalance to Japanese acquisitions in European markets now started selling them off, immediately converting the yen holdings to other currencies. That was when the first alarm light went on in
Tokyo
. The Europeans' actions might have appeared to be mere profit-taking, but the currency conversions bespoke a belief that the yen was going to fall and fall hard, and it was a Friday night in
Tokyo
, and their trading floors were closed except for the currency traders and others working the European markets.

“They should be getting nervous now,” Fiedler observed.

“I would,” Jean-Jacques said in
Paris
. What nobody quite wanted to say was that the First World Economic War had just begun in earnest. There was an excitement to it, even though it ran contrary to all their instincts and experience.

“You know, I don't have a model to predict this,” Gant said, twenty feet away from the two government officials. The European action, helpful as it was, confounded all computer models and preconceptions.

“Well, pilgrim, that's why we've got brains and guts,” George Winston responded deadpan.

“But what are our markets going to do?”

Winston grinned. “Sure as hell we're going to find out in, oh, about seven and a half hours. And you don't even have to shell out for the E-Ticket. Where's your sense of adventure?”

“I'm glad somebody's happy about this.”

There were worldwide rules for currency trading. Trading stopped once a currency had fallen a certain amount, but not this time. The floor under the yen was yanked out by every European government, trading didn't stop, and the yen resumed its fall.

“They can't do that!” someone said in
Tokyo
. But they were doing it, and he reached for a phone, knowing even then what his instructions would be. The yen was being attacked. They had to defend it, and the only way was to trade the foreign-currency holdings they already owned in order to firm the yen holdings back home and out of the playing field of international speculation. Worst of all, there was no reason for this action. The yen was strong, especially against the American dollar. Soon it would replace it as the world's benchmark currency, especially if the American financial markets were foolish enough to reopen later in the day. The Europeans were making a sucker bet of such magnitude as to defy qualification, and since it didn't make sense, all the Japanese traders could do was to apply their own experience to the situation and act accordingly. The irony of the moment would have been delicious, had they been able to appreciate it. Their actions were virtually automatic. Francs, French and Swiss, British pounds, German D-marks, Dutch guilders, and Danish kroner were disbursed in vast quantities to purchase yen, whose relative value, everyone in
Tokyo
was sure, could only appreciate, especially if the Europeans pegged their currencies to the dollar.

There was an element of nervousness to it, but they did it, acting on the orders of their superiors, who were even now leaving their homes and catching cars or trains to the various commercial office buildings in which world trading was conducted. Equities were traded off in
Europe
as well, with the local currencies converted to yen. The expectation again was that when the American collapse resumed, the European currencies would fall, and with them the values of stock issues. Then
Japan
could reacquire even larger quantities of European stocks. The European moves were a sad case of misplaced loyalty, or confidence, or something, the people in
Tokyo
thought, but sad or not, it worked in their favor. And that was just fine. By
noon
London
time a massive movement had taken place. Individual investors and smaller institutions, seeing what everyone else had done, had moved in—foolishly, the Japanese knew.
Noon
London
time was seven in the morning on
America
's East Coast.

“My fellow Americans,” President Durling said at exactly
7:05 A.M.
on every TV network. “On Wednesday night I told you that today American financial markets are going to reopen…”

“Here it goes,” Kozo Matsuda said, just back in his office and watching CNN. “He's going to say that they can't, and
Europe
is going to panic. Splendid,” he told his aides, turning back to the TV. The American president was smiling and confident. Well, a politician had to know how to act, the better to lie to his citizens.

"The problems which the market experienced last week came from a deliberate assault on the American economy. Nothing like this has ever happened before, and I am going to walk you through what happened, how it was done, and why it was done. We've spent an entire week accumulating this information, and even now Treasury Secretary Fiedler and the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board are in
New York
, working with the heads of the great American financial institutions to set things aright.

"I am also pleased to report that we have had the time to consult with our friends in
Europe
, and that our historic allies have chosen to stand with us as faithfully in this time of difficulty as they have in other times.

“So what really happened last Friday?” Roger Durling asked.

Matsuda sat his drink down on his desk when he saw the first chart appear on the screen.

Jack watched him go through it. The trick as always was to make a complex story simple, and that task had involved two professors of economics, half of Fiedler's personal staff, and a governor of the Securities and Exchange Commission, all working in coordination with the President's best speech-writer. Even so, it took twenty-five minutes, six flip charts, and would require a number of government spokesmen talking who were even now on background to reporters whose briefings had started at
6:30
.

"I told you Wednesday night that nothing—nothing of consequence had happened to us. Not one piece of property has been affected. Not one farm has lost anything. Each of you is the same person you were a week ago, with the same abilities, the same home, the same job, the same family and friends. What happened last Friday was an attack not on our country itself, but on our national confidence.

“Our confidence is a harder and tougher target than people realize, and that is something we're going to prove today.”

Most of the people in the trading business were en route to their offices and missed the speech, but their employers had all taped it, and there were also printed copies on every desk and at every computer terminal. The trading day would not start until
noon
, moreover, and there were strategy sessions to be held everywhere, though nobody really had much idea of what to do. The most obvious response to the situation was indeed so obvious that no one knew whether or not to try it.

“They're doing it to us,” Matsuda said, watching his screens. “What can we do to stop it?”

“It depends on what their stock market does,” his senior technical trader replied, not knowing what else to say and not knowing what to expect, either.

•     •     •

“Do you think it'll work, Jack?” Durling asked. He had two speeches sitting in folders on his desk, and didn't know which he would be giving in the evening.

The National Security Advisor shrugged. “Don't know. It gives them a way out. Whether or not they make use of it is up to them.”

“So now we just get to sit and wait?”

“That's about it, Mr. President.”

The second session was held in the State Department. Secretary Hanson huddled with Scott Adler, who then met with his negotiating team and waited. The Japanese delegation arrived at
9:45
.

“Good morning,” Adler said pleasantly.

“A pleasure to see you again,” the Ambassador replied, taking his hand, but not as confidently as on the day before. Not surprisingly, he had not had time to receive detailed instructions from
Tokyo
. Adler had halfway expected a request for a postponement of the session, but, no, that would have been too obvious a sign of weakness, and so the Ambassador, a skilled and experienced diplomat, was in the most precarious of diplomatic positions—he was forced to represent his government with nothing more to fall back on than his wits and his knowledge. Adler walked him to his seat, then returned to his side of the table. Since
America
was the host today,
Japan
got to speak first. Adler had placed a side bet with the Secretary as to the Ambassador's opening statement.