Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (82 page)

“Show me other bank stocks,” Winston ordered.

“Well, Chemical went next,” Gant told him, pulling up that track as well. “Then Manny-Hanny, and then others, too. Anyway, we saw it coming, and we jumped into metals and the gold stocks. You know, when the dust settles, it’s going to turn out that we did okay. Not great, but pretty okay,” Gant said, calling up his executive program for overall transactions, wanting to show something he’d done right. “I took the money from a quick flip on Silicon Alchemy and laid this put on GM and—”

Winston patted him on the shoulder. “Save that for later, Mark. I can see it was a good play.”

“Anyway, we were ahead of the trends all the way. Yeah, we got a little hurt when the calls came in and we had to dump a lot of solid things, but that happened to everybody—”

“You don’t see it, do you?”

“See what, George?”

“We
were
the trend.”

Mark Gant blinked his eyes, and Winston could tell.

He didn’t see it.

29

Written Records

The presentation went very well, and at the end of it Cathy Ryan was handed an exquisitely wrapped box by the Professor of Ophthalmic Surgery from Chiba University, who led the Japanese delegation. Unwrapping it, she found a scarf of watered blue silk, embroidered with gold thread. It looked to be more than a hundred years old.

“The blue goes so well with your eyes, Professor Ryan,” her colleague said with a smile of genuine admiration. “I fear it is not a sufficiently valuable gift for what I have learned from you today. I have hundreds of diabetic patients at my hospital. With this technique we can hope to restore sight for most of them. A magnificent breakthrough, Professor.” He bowed, formally and with clear respect.

“Well, the lasers come from your country,” Cathy replied. She wasn’t sure what emotion she was supposed to have. The gift was stunning. The man was as sincere as he could be, and his country might be at war with hers. But why wasn’t it on the news? If there were a war, why was this foreigner not under arrest? Was she supposed to be gracious to him as a learned colleague or hostile to him as an enemy? What the hell was going on? She looked over at Andrea Price, who just leaned against the back wall and smiled, her arms crossed across her chest.

“And you have taught us how to use them more efficiently. A stunning piece of applied research.” The Japanese professor turned to the others and raised his hands. The assembled multitude applauded, and a blushing Caroline Ryan started thinking that she just might get the Lasker statuette for her mantelpiece after all. Everyone shook her hand before leaving for the bus that waited to take them back to the Stouffer’s on Pratt Street.

“Can I see it?” Special Agent Price asked after all were gone and the door safely closed. Cathy handed the scarf over. “Lovely. You’ll have to buy a new dress to go with it.”

“So there never was anything to worry about,” Dr. Ryan observed. Interestingly, once she’d gotten fifteen seconds into her lecture, she’d forgotten about it anyway. Wasn’t that interesting?

“No, like I told you, I didn’t expect anything.” Price handed the scarf back, not without some reluctance. The little professor was right, she thought. It did go nicely with her eyes. “Jack Ryan’s wife” was all she’d heard, and then some. “How long have you been doing this?”

“Retinal surgery?” Cathy closed her notebook. “I started off working the front end of the eye, right up to the time little Jack was born. Then I had an idea about how the retina is attached naturally and how we might reattach bad ones. Then we started looking at how to fix blood vessels. Bernie let me run with it, and I got a research grant from NIH to play with, and one thing led to another ...”

“And now you’re the best in the world at this,” Price concluded the story.

“Until somebody with better hands comes along and learns how to do it, yes.” Cathy smiled. “I suppose I am, for a few more months, anyway.”

“So how’s the champ?” Bernie Katz asked, entering the room and seeing Price for the first time. The pass on her coat puzzled him. “Do I know you?”

“Andrea Price.” The agent gave Katz a quick and thorough visual check before shaking hands. He actually found it flattering until she added, “Secret Service.”

“Where were the cops like you when I was a kid?” the surgeon asked gallantly.

“Bernie was one of my first mentors here. He’s department chairman now,” Cathy explained.

“About to be overtaken in prestige by my colleague. I come bearing good news. I have a spy on the Lasker Committee. You’re in the finals, Cathy.”

“What’s a Lasker?” Price asked.

“There’s one step up from a Lasker Prize,” Bernie told her. “You have to go to Stockholm to collect it.”

“Bernie, I’ll never have one of those. A Lasker is hard enough.”

“So keep researching, girl!” Katz hugged her and left.

I want it, I want it, I want it!
Cathy told herself silently. She didn’t have to give voice to the words. It was plain for Special Agent Price to see. Damn, didn’t this beat guarding politicians?

“Can I watch one of your procedures?”

“If you want. Anyway, come on.” Cathy led her back to her office, not minding her at all now. On the way they walked through the clinic, then one of the labs. In the middle of a corridor, Dr. Ryan stopped dead in her tracks, reached into her pocket, and pulled out a small notebook.

“Did I miss something?” Price asked. She knew she was talking too much, but it took time to learn the habits of your protectees. She also read Cathy Ryan as the type who didn’t like being protected, and so needed to be made comfortable about it.

“You’ll have to get used to me,” Professor Ryan said, smiling as she scribbled a few notes. “Whenever I have an idea, I write it down right away.”

“Don’t trust your memory?”

“Never. You can’t trust your memory with things that affect live patients. One of the first things they teach you in medical school.” Cathy shook her head as she finished up. “Not in this business. Too many opportunities to screw up. If you don’t write it down, then it never happened.”

That sounded like a good lesson to remember, Andrea Price told herself, following her principal down the corridor. The code name, SURGEON, was perfect for her. Precise, smart, thorough. She might even have made a good agent except for her evident discomfort around guns.

It was already a regular routine, and in many ways that was not new. For a generation, the Japanese Air Self-Defense Force had responded to Russian fighter activity out of the forward base at Dolinsk Sokol—at first in cooperation with the USAF—and one of the regular tracks taken by the Soviet Air Force had earned the name “Tokyo Express,” probably an unknowing reference to a term invented in 1942 by the United States Marines on Guadalcanal.

For security reasons the E-767s were based with the 6th Air Wing at Komatsu, near Tokyo, but the two F-15Js that operated under the control of the E-767 now aloft over the town of Nemuro at the northeast tip of the island of Hokkaido were actually based on the Home Island at Chitose. These were a hundred miles offshore, and each carried eight missiles, four each of heat-seekers and radar-homers. All were warshots now, requiring only a target.

It was after midnight, local time. The pilots were well rested and alert, comfortably strapped into their ejection seats, their sharp eyes scanning the darkness while fingers made delicate course-corrections on the sticks. Their own targeting radars were switched off, and though their aircraft still flashed with anticollision strobe lights, those were easily switched off should the necessity arise, making them visually nonexistent.

“Eagle One-Five,” the digital radio told the element leader, “check out commercial traffic fifty kilometers zero-three-five your position, course two-one-five, angels three-six.”

“Roger, Kami,” the pilot replied on keying his radio. Kami, the call sign for the orbiting surveillance aircraft, was a word with many meanings, most of them supernatural like “soul” or “spirit.” And so they had rapidly become the modern manifestation of the spirits guarding their country, with the F-15Js as the strong arms that gave power to the will of those spirits. On command, the two fighters came right, climbing on a shallow, fuel-efficient slope for five minutes until they were at thirty-seven thousand feet, cruising outbound from their country at five hundred knots, their radars still off, but now they received a digital feed from the Kami that appeared on their own sets, one more of the new innovations and something the Americans didn’t have. The element leader alternated his eyes up and down. A pity, he thought, that the hand-off display didn’t integrate with his head-up display. Maybe the next modification would do that.

“There,” he said over his low-power radio.

“I have it,” his wingman acknowledged.

Both fighters turned to the left now, descending slowly behind what appeared to be an Air Canada 767-ER. Yes, the floodlit tail showed the maple-leaf logo of that airline. Probably the regular transpolar flight out of Toronto International into Narita. The timing was about right. They approached from almost directly astern—not quite exactly, lest an overly quick overtake result in a ramming—and the buffet told them that they were in the wake turbulence of a “heavy,” a wide-bodied commercial transport. The flight leader closed until he could see the line of cabin lights, and the huge engine under each wing, and the stubby nose of the Boeing product. He keyed his radio again.

“Kami, Eagle One-Five.”

“Eagle.”

“Positive identification, Air Canada Seven-Six-Seven Echo Romeo, inbound at indicated course and speed.” Interestingly, the drill for the BARCAP—Barrier Combat Air Patrol—was to use English. That was the international language of aviation. All their pilots spoke it, and it worked better for important communications.

“Roger.” And on further command, the fighters broke off to their programmed patrol area. The Canadian pilot of the airliner would never know that two armed fighters had closed to within three hundred meters of his aircraft—but then he had no reason to expect that any would, because the world was at peace, at least this part of it.

For their part, the fighter-drivers accepted their new duties phlegmatically along with the modification in their daily patterns of existence. For the indefinite future no less than two fighters would hold this patrol station, with two more back at Chitose at plus-five alert, and another four at plus-thirty. Their wing commander was pressing for permission to increase his alert-status further still, for despite what Tokyo said, their nation
was
at war, and that was what he’d told his people. The Americans were formidable adversaries, he’d said in his first lecture to his pilots and senior ground-staff. Clever ones, devious, and dangerously aggressive. Worst of all, at their best they were utterly unpredictable, the reverse of the Japanese who, he’d gone on, tended to be highly predictable. Perhaps that was why he’d been posted to this command, the pilots thought. If things went further, the first contact with hostile American forces would be here. He wanted to be ready for it, despite the huge price of money, fuel, and fatigue that attended it. The pilots thoroughly approved. War was a serious business, and though new to it, they didn’t shrink from its responsibilities.

The time factor would soon become his greatest frustration, Ryan thought. Tokyo was fourteen hours ahead of Washington. It was dark there now, and the next day, and whatever clever idea he might come up with would have to wait hours until implementation. The same was true in the IO, but at least he had direct comms to Admiral Dubro’s battle force. Getting word to Clark and Chavez meant going via Moscow, and then farther either by contact via RVS officer in Tokyo—not something to be done too frequently—or by reverse-modem message whenever Clark lit up his computer for a dispatch to the Interfax News Agency. There would necessarily be a time lag in anything he did, and that could get people killed.

It was about information. It always was, always would be. The real trick was in finding out what was going on. What was the other side doing? What were they thinking?

What is it that they want to accomplish?
he asked himself.

War was always about economics, one of the few things that Marx had gotten right. It was just greed, really, as he’d told the President, an armed robbery writ large. At the nation-state level, the terms were couched in terms such as Manifest Destiny or
Lebensraum
or other political slogans to grab the attention and ardor of the masses, but that’s what it came down to:
They have it. We want it. Let’s get it.

And yet the Mariana Islands weren’t worth it. They were simply not worth the political or economic cost. This affair would ipso facto cost Japan her most lucrative trading partner. There could be no recovery from this, not for years. The market positions so carefully established and exploited since the 1960s would be obliterated by something politely termed public resentment but far more deeply felt than that. For what possible reason could a country so married to the idea of business turn its back on practical considerations?

But war is never rational, Jack. You told the President that yourself.

“So tell me, what the hell are they thinking?” he commanded, instantly regretting the profanity.

They were in a basement conference room. For the first meeting of the working group, Scott Adler was absent, off with Secretary Hanson. There were two National Intelligence Officers, and four people from State, and they looked as puzzled and bemused as he did, Ryan thought. Wasn’t that just great. For several seconds nothing happened. Hardly unexpected, Jack thought. It was always a matter of clinical interest for him when he asked for real opinions from a group of bureaucrats: who would say what?

“They’re mad and they’re scared.” It was Chris Cook, one of the commercial guys from State. He’d done two tours at the embassy in Tokyo, spoke the language passably well, and had run point on several rounds of the trade negotiations, always taking back seat to senior men and women, but usually the guy who did the real work. That was how things were, and Jack remembered resenting that others sometimes got the credit for his ideas. He nodded at the comment, seeing that the others around the table did the same, grateful that someone else had taken the initiative.