High Flight (21 page)

Read High Flight Online

Authors: David Hagberg

The black Cadillac limousine stopped momentarily at the White House east gate, a distance of one thousand feet as the crow flies from an upper-story window in the Hay Adams Hotel on H Street, then proceeded down the drive to the east portico.
“Is it Zagorsky?” the slightly built man standing back from the window asked impatiently. The car pulled up at the White House east entryway. Someone jumped out of the front seat, ran around to the back, and opened the rear door on the passenger side.
“I think so,” Toshiki Korekiyo answered. He watched through the one-thousand-millimeter camera lens set up on a tripod in the middle of the room. The license plate was of the diplomatic series used by the Russian embassy, but they had to be certain. There could be no mistakes.
They'd monitored a greatly increased flow of communications traffic between Moscow and the Russian Embassy on 16th Street over the past forty-eight hours. It had peaked early this morning, then abruptly stopped.
Russian Ambassador to the United States Yanis Yano-vich Zagorsky got out of the limousine at the same time Steven Nichols, the President's appointments secretary, came out of the White House to greet him. Two Marine guards stood at ramrod attention at the door, but there was no one else. No media.
“It's him,” Korekiyo said, not looking up. Zagorsky seemed nervous, ill at ease, as well the bastard should be. Korekiyo, who worked for a special research unit of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry—MITI—didn't know all the details. But he did know that Japan was no longer going to allow itself to be treated as an inferior nation. Its humiliating defeat a half-century ago had been paid for. Time now to go on. First would be the Russians, but there would be other targets.
Zagorsky and Nichols shook hands, then went inside. Korekiyo looked up. “Definitely the Russian ambassador.”
Yozo Hamagachi was already on the telephone waiting for his call to Arimoto Yamagata at the embassy on Massachusetts Avenue to go through. “Who met him?”
“Nichols.”
Hamagachi turned back to the telephone. “He has arrived,” he said, and a moment later he turned again to Korekiyo. “Was he carrying a briefcase? Anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Iie,
he carried nothing.”
 
“Good morning, Mr. President,” Ambassador Zagorsky said when he was ushered into the Oval Office. He crossed to the President's desk. Secretary of State Carter and National Security Adviser Secor stood up, but the President remained seated.
“Mr. Ambassador,” the President said coolly. “Mr. Carter and Mr. Secor will sit in on this.”
“Of course,” Zagorsky said, clearly nervous. They all sat down.
“You have something for me from your government?” the President asked.
“Yes, Mr. President, but not in writing. It was thought
in Moscow that I could open a dialogue with you in order that I might explain our difficult position.”
“I'm listening.”
There was no sign of any warmth or friendship among these three, Zagorsky thought. But he'd warned those idiots at the Kremlin that Yeltsin should have telephoned this President the moment they'd learned about the Tatar incident. They were not here in Washington, so they could not gauge the mood.
“Simply put, something must be done about the Japanese incursion into our waters in the Tatar Strait, and the unprovoked attack on one of our naval vessels. All hands were lost. Many of them boys.”
“From what we understand, your Navy fired the first shot, and that in international waters,” Harold Secor said.
“Those waters are as sensitive to our security as the Gulf of Mexico is to yours,” Zagorsky replied calmly.
“But one of your anti-submarine-warfare helicopters dropped a torpedo on that Japanese submarine before it initiated the attack,” Secor pressed.
“The timing was critical. I have read transcripts of the radio messages and the helicopter.”
“So have we,” the President said. “You fired first.”
A lie? Zagorsky wondered. If not, the President had made a mistake admitting the U.S. had that level of technology in the area. “In response to the submarine's torpedo doors opening preparatory to its attack.”
 
Before the telephone call, Arimoto Yamagata had been thinking about his home in the mountains outside of Tokyo, and about the rock “future” and “hope.” He knew that under the circumstances the Western mind would consider such thinking frivolous, even silly, but it helped bring order to his thoughts. The problem his mentors had sent him to solve was so vast, and so far reaching in its implications, that it strained his abilities to contemplate. But he was truly a disciple of Mishima, and therefore capable of serenity under any condition.
Rising from the tatami where he'd taken the call from
his field officers, he left his quarters and headed to the embassy's secured communications center two floors below. At six feet two he was strikingly tall for a Japanese, and although he had had no plastic surgery, his appearance was Western. He understood that he was handsome in either world, and at forty-three experienced enough to use that knowledge to his advantage.
The Russian ambassador had called on the American president. The timing, he thought, was most interesting.
 
“Excuse me, but are you suggesting that we simply forget about that ship and her crew?” Zagorsky decided it was time to strike back.
“We do not want an escalation of the situation out there,” the President said. So far left unspoken was the upcoming economic summit talks between the U.S. and Japan, but the President was obviously speaking with care. “I'm told that your navy continues to place warships into the strait, and some if not all of those vessels are armed with nuclear weapons. Nobody wants to see further bloodshed.”
“Is it correct that two of your attack submarines are currently trying to catch up with that Japanese submarine?” Secor asked directly.
That was news to Zagorsky, but it wasn't surprising. He could understand what they were thinking in Moscow. If they allowed the Japanese to go unpunished, their entire far eastern border would be weakened. From that narrow viewpoint pursuing the
Samisho
made sense. But stepping back and looking at it from an international platform, nothing but an immense danger could be seen.
“Certain of our naval units are engaged in an exercise in the strait. But as to their exact deployment at this moment I have no direct word.”
“Oh, come off it, Yanis,” the President replied sharply. “You came over here this morning to tell us that you're going to retaliate for the sinking of your ship, and that we're not supposed to take such an act as a declaration of war on Japan or anyone else.”
“There has not been so much as an apology.”
“Has your ambassador to Japan called on the Prime Minister?”
“I don't know,” Zagorsky answered. Damn those fools in the Kremlin!
“Hell, we know what this will do to the posture of your eastern defense forces. You might even lose absolute control over the strait. I'd sell them Sakhalin Island, if they want it that bad. You can use the hard cash, and they can rename the place.”
Zagorsky could hardly believe what he was hearing. The President had never talked to him this way. It was almost as if they were two men sitting around a table, playing cards and drinking vodka together, but in a dangerous alliance.
“What would you tell the mothers of those boys, Mr. President?”
“I would say that they gave their lives to help secure a lasting peace.”
Zagorsky looked at the President for a long moment, then lowered his eyes. “Chamberlain,” he muttered. “Am I to leave this office with a piece of paper in hand—‘Peace in our time'—that I can wave toward Moscow?”
“Japan is not Nazi Germany, and this is not 1938,” the President shot back. “Russia would be better off if it took care of its internal problems without seeking trouble outside its borders.”
“I had hoped to open a dialogue with you, Mr. President …”
“Tell Mr. Yeltsin to pull your naval vessels out of the Tatar Strait for now, and I expect that the Japanese government will issue an apology. Our sources tell us that the act was not ordered by Tokyo, nor has it been condoned by the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force.”
“A renegade submarine captain?”
“A mistake. Once that boat returns to its home port the incident will be fully investigated.”
“What if my government decides to proceed?” Zagorsky asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.
“We would regret that,” the President said. “And we would be forced to respond.” He eyed the Russian ambassador coldly. “Your country currently enjoys a Most Favored Nation trading status with us that would be affected. Certainly the export of technologies would be interrupted, as would the flow of business developmental capital.”
“I see,” Zagorsky said, heavily. There was no mistaking what the President was referring to. Yemlin had discussed it at length with him. “I will convey your position to my government at once.” He got to his feet. “Thank you, Mr. President, for your frankness this morning.”
“We've been friends for only a short while now. Let's not return to the old days.”
“No, Mr. President. Let's not.”
 
Yamagata graduated from Harvard Law School in 1978, so he understood Americans and the Western mind as well as any Japanese. From the beginning of his career, which had been guided by a mentor his father had arranged for, he'd worked ostensibly as a liaison between Japanese and American, Australian, Canadian, and British corporations. In actuality, his position with MITI was cover for his real work as a spy. He'd gone after industrial secrets—design and product as well as corporate strategies and intents. But there'd been times when he'd entered the much more dangerous political arena. Such as now.
In the early days, the trade war, as it was considered, had been primarily one of keeping up with technologies. The only real hurt anyone suffered was fiscal. Now that had changed. With the sinking of a Russian naval vessel in the Tatar Strait they could never go back.
He spoke from a soundproof booth on a secure line to Tokyo so that no one—not the Americans or the Japanese—could monitor his call. The number was direct.
“Ohay
go-zai-ma-su, Kamiya-dono,
”he said. “Traffic to the Russian embassy slowed down about seven hours
ago, and the ambassador called on the White House, just as you suspected would happen.”
The call was not being recorded, nor did Yamagata make any notes, he simply listened as his mentor spoke, committing the old man's very precise instructions to his excellent memory. When the call was ended, Yamagata sat back and closed his eyes, trying to bring up an image of his home and its peaceful garden, but it was a full minute before he could clear his thoughts.
 
State Department spokesperson Warner MacAndrew entered the media briefing room at 3:00 P.M., and went directly to the podium in front of the floor-to-ceiling map of the world. A hush fell over the crowded room as he opened a buff-colored folder.
“First I'm going to read a short statement, and then I'll open it for questions,” MacAndrew said. His red hair and freckled complexion seemed even more intense than usual this afternoon, which happened when something big was in the wind. Most of the press corps could read the seriousness of what was coming from the color of his face.
“Five days ago an apparent incident between what is believed to have been a Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force submarine and a Russian Krivak-class frigate in the Tatar Strait, fifty miles off the coast of Siberia, resulted in the sinking of the Russian naval vessel with a loss of all hands. In response to that incident the Japanese issued the following: ‘The government of Japan deeply regrets the recent incident in the Tatar Strait off the island of Karafuto allegedly involving a vessel of the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Force and one of the Russian Federal Navy in which there may have been a loss of life and property. Every effort is being made to quickly and fully investigate the matter to determine culpability.'”

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