Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (53 page)

“Whoa!” the Major observed when a hundred pounds of Composition-Four went off. The noise was impressive, even from half a mile, and there followed the tower of flame from the ignition of the solid-fuel rocket motor. That part of the ceremony had been tricky. They’d had to make sure that the thing would burn from the top only. Otherwise the missile might have tried to fly out of the silo, and
that
would just not have done at all. In fact the whole exercise was unnecessarily complicated and dangerous. The cold wind drove the toxic exhaust smoke to the east, and by the time it got to anything important, it would just be a bad smell, which was pretty much what you could say about the political conditions that had occasioned the existence of the burning rocket motor, wasn’t it? There was a certain awe to it, though. The world’s largest firework, burning backwards for about three minutes before there was nothing left but smoke. A sergeant activated the silo fire-suppression system, which actually worked, rather to the Major’s surprise.

“You know, we had a drawing to see who’d get to do this. I won,” the officer said, getting to his feet.

“I was just ordered to come. I am glad I did. Is it safe now?”

“I think so. Come on, Valentin. We have one more job to do, don’t we?”

Both men got into an HMMWV, the current incarnation of the Army jeep, and the Major started it up, heading for the silo from upwind. Now it was just a hole in the ground, generating steam. A CNN crew followed, still giving a live feed as the vehicle bumped across the uneven prairie. Their vehicle stopped two hundred yards away, somewhat to their annoyance, while the two officers dismounted their vehicle, carrying gas masks against the possibility that there was still enough smoke to be a health concern. There wasn’t. Just the nasty smell. The American officer waved the TV crew in and waited for them to get ready. That took two minutes.

“Ready!” the unit director said.

“Are we in agreement that the silo and missile are destroyed?”

“Yes, we are,” the Russian replied with a salute. Then he reached behind his back and pulled two crystal glasses from his pockets. “Would you hold these please, Comrade Major?”

Next came a bottle of Georgian champagne. The Russian popped the cork with a wide grin and filled both glasses.

“I teach you Russian tradition now. First you drink,” he said. The TV crew loved it.

“I think I know that part.” The American downed the champagne. “And now?”

“The glasses may never be used for a lesser purpose. Now you must do as I do.” With that the Russian turned and poised himself to hurl his glass into the empty hole. The American laughed and did the same.

“Now!” With that, both glasses disappeared into the last American Minuteman silo. They disappeared in the steam, but both could hear them shatter against the scorched concrete walls.

“Fortunately, I have two more glasses,” Valentin said, producing them.

“Son of a bitch,” Ryan breathed. It turned out that the American at the Russian silo had had a similar idea, and was now explaining what “Miller time!” meant. Unfortunately, aluminum cans didn’t break when thrown.

“Overly theatrical,” his wife thought.

“It isn’t exactly Shakespeare, but if t‘were done when t’were done, then at least it’s done, honey.” Then they heard the corks popping off amid the sounds of applause.

“Is the five-billion-dollars part true?”

“Yep.”

“So, Ivan Emmetovich, we can be truly friends now?” Golovko asked, bringing glasses. “We finally meet, Caroline,” he said graciously to Cathy.

“Sergey and I go way back,” Jack explained, taking the glass and toasting his host.

“To the time I had a gun to your head,” the Russian observed. Ryan wondered if it were an historical reference ... or a toast to the event?

“What?”
Cathy asked, almost choking on her drink.

“You never told her?”

“Jesus, Sergey!”

“What are you two talking about?”

“Dr. Ryan, once upon a time your husband and I had a ... professional disagreement that ended up with myself holding a pistol in his face. I never told you, Jack, that the gun wasn’t loaded.”

“Well, I wasn’t going anywhere anyway, was I?”

“What
are
you two talking about? Is this some inside joke?” Cathy demanded.

“Yeah, honey, that’s about right. How is Andrey Il’ich doing?”

“He is well. In fact, if you would like to see him, it can be arranged.”

Jack nodded. “I’d like that.”

“Excuse me, but who exactly are you?”

“Honey,” Jack said. “This is Sergey Nikolayevich Golovko, Chairman of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.”

“KGB? You know each other?”

“Not KGB, madam. We are much smaller now. Your husband and I have been ... competitors for years now.”

“Okay, and who won?” she asked.

Both men had the same thought, but Golovko said it first: “Both of us, of course. Now, if you will permit, let me introduce you to my wife, Yelena. She is a pediatrician.” That was something CIA had never bothered to find out, Jack realized.

He turned to look at the two presidents, enjoying the moment despite being surrounded by newsies. It was the first time he’d actually been to an event like this, but he was sure they weren’t always this chummy. Perhaps it was the final release of all that tension, the realization that, yes, Virginia, it really was over. He saw people bringing in yet more champagne. It was pretty good stuff, and he fully intended to have his share of it. CNN would soon tire of the party, but these people would not. All the uniforms, and politicians, and spies, and diplomats. Hell, maybe they would all really be friends.

19

Strike Two, 1-800-RUN

Though the overall timing was fortuitous, the plan for exploiting the chance was exquisite, the product of years of study and modeling and simulation. In fact the operation had already begun when six major commercial banks in Hong Kong started going short on U.S. Treasury bonds. These had been bought a few weeks earlier, part of a complex exchange for yen holdings done as a classic hedge against monetary fluctuations. The banks themselves were about to undergo a trauma—a change in ownership of the very ground upon which they stood—and the two factors made their massive purchases seem an entirely ordinary move to maximize their liquidity and flexibility at the same time. In liquidating the bonds, they were just cashing in, albeit in a large way, on the relative change in values of dollar and yen. They would realize a 17 percent profit from the move, in fact, then buy yen, which, currency experts all over the world were now saying, had reached a hard floor and would soon rebound. Still, two hundred ninety
billion
dollars of U.S. bonds were on the market briefly, and undervalued at that. They were soon snapped up by European banks. The Hong Kong bankers made the proper electronic entries, and the transaction was concluded. Next they wired the fact to Beijing, uneasily happy to show that they had followed orders and demonstrated obeisance to their soon-to-be political masters. So much the better, all thought, that they had taken a profit on the deal.

In Japan the transaction was noted. Fourteen hours off the local time of New York City, still the world’s foremost trading center, it was not terribly unusual for Tokyo traders to work hours usually associated with night watchmen, and in any case the wire services that communicated financial information never ceased transmitting data. It would have surprised some people to learn that the people in the trading offices were very senior indeed, and that a special room had been established on the top floor of a major office building during the last week. Called the War Room by its current occupants, it had telephone lines leading to every city in the world with major trading activities and computer displays to show what was happening in all of them.

Other Asian banks went next, repeating the same procedure as in Hong Kong, and the people in the War Room watched their machines. Just after noon, New York time, Friday, which was 2:03 A.M. on Saturday in Tokyo, they saw another three hundred million dollars of U.S. bonds dumped into the market, these at a price even more attractive than that just offered in Hong Kong, and these, also, were rapidly bought by other European bankers for whom the working day and week were just coming to an end. As yet nothing grossly unusual had happened. Only then did the Japanese banks make their move, well covered by the activity of others. The Tokyo banks as well started selling off their U.S. Treasuries, clearly taking action to firm up the yen, it appeared. In the process, however, the entire world’s ready surplus-dollar capacity had been used up in a period of minutes. It could be written off as a mere coincidence, but the currency traders—at least those not at lunch in New York—were now alerted to the fact that any further trading on those notes would be unsettling, however unlikely that might be, what with the known strength of the dollar.

The state dinner was reflective of traditional Russian hospitality, made all the more intense by the fact that it celebrated the end of two generations of nuclear terror. The Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church intoned a long and dignified invocation. Himself twice the victim of political imprisonment, his invitation to rejoice was heartfelt, moving a few to tears, which were soon banished by the start of the feast. There was soup, and caviar, and fowl, and fine beef; and huge quantities of alcohol which, for just this once, everyone felt free to imbibe. The real work of the trip was done. There really were no secrets left to hide. Tomorrow was Saturday, and everyone would have the chance to sleep late.

“You, too, Cathy?” Jack asked. His wife was not normally a heavy drinker, but tonight she was knocking it back.

“This champagne is wonderful.” It was her first state dinner overseas. She’d had a good day of her own with local ophthalmic surgeons, and had invited two of the best, full professors both, to come to the Wilmer Institute and acquaint themselves with her specialty area. Cathy was in the running for a Lasker Award for her work with laser surgery, the product of eleven years of clinical research, and the reason she had not accepted a department chairmanship twice offered by University of Virginia. Her big paper announcing the breakthrough would soon be published in
NEJM,
and for her as well, this night and this trip were the culmination of many things.

“You’re going to pay for it tomorrow,” her husband warned. Jack was going easier on all the drinks, though he had already exceeded his normal nightly limit, which was one. It was the toasts that would do everyone in, he knew, having been through Russian banquets before. It was just a cultural thing. The Russians could drink most Irishmen under any table, something he’d once learned the hard way, but most of the American party either hadn’t learned that lesson or simply didn’t care this night. The National Security Advisor shook his head. They’d sure as hell learn it tomorrow morning. The main course arrived just then, and deep red wine filled the glasses.

“Oh, God, my dress is going to split wide open!”

“That should add to the official entertainment,” her husband observed, earning a glare from across the table.

“You are far too skinny,” Golovko observed, sitting next to her and giving voice to another Russian prejudice.

“So how old are your children?” Yelena Golovko asked. Also thin by Russian standards, she was a professor of pediatrics, and a very pleasant dinner companion.

“An American custom,” Jack replied, pulling out his wallet and showing the pictures. “Olivia—I call her Sally. This is little Jack, and this is our newest.”

“Your son favors you, but the girls are the image of their mother.”

Jack grinned. “A good thing, too.”

The great trading firms are just that, but it’s a mystery to the average stockholder just how they trade. Wall Street was a vast collection of misnomers, beginning with the street itself, which is the approximate width of a back alley in most American residential areas, and even the sidewalks seem overly narrow for the degree of traffic they serve. When purchase orders came in to a major house, like the largest of them, Merrill Lynch, the traders did not go looking, physically or electronically, for someone willing to sell that particular issue. Rather, every day the company itself bought measured holdings of issues deemed likely to trade, and then awaited consumer interest in them. Buying in fairly large blocks made for some degree of volume discounting, and the sales, generally, were at a somewhat higher price. In this way the trading houses made money on what bookies called a “middle” position, typically about one eighth of a point. A point was a dollar, and thus an eighth of a point was twelve and a half cents. Seemingly a tiny margin of profit for a stock whose share value could be anything up to hundreds of dollars in the case of some blue chips, it was a margin repeated on many issues on a daily basis, compounded over time to a huge potential profit if things went well. But they didn’t always go well, and it was also possible for the houses to lose vast sums in a market that fell more rapidly than their estimates. There were many aphorisms warning of this. On the Hong Kong market, a large and active one, it was said that the market “went up like an escalator and down like an elevator,” but the most basic saying was hammered into the mind of every new “rocket scientist” on the huge computer-trading floor of Merrill Lynch headquarters on the Lower West Side: “Never assume that there is a buyer for what you want to sell.” But everyone did assume that, of course, because there always was, at least as far back as the collective memory of the firm went, and that was pretty far.

Most of the trading was not to individual investors, however. Since the 1960s, mutual funds had gradually assumed control of the market. Called “institutions” and grouped under that title with banks, insurance companies, and pension-fund managers, there were actually far more such “institutions” than there were stock issues on the New York Stock Exchange, rather like having hunters outnumbering the game, and the institutions controlled pools of money so vast as to defy comprehension. They were so powerful that to a large extent their policies could actually have a large effect on individual issues and even, briefly, the entire market, and in many cases the “institutions” were controlled by a small number of people—in many cases, just one.