Jack Ryan 8 - Debt of Honor (56 page)

“Somebody's worried about security,” Chavez said.

“Yevgeniy Pavlovich, I know your English is good. You need not practice it on me.”

“Excuse me. The Japanese are concerned with a riot, Vanya? Except for that one incident, there hasn't been much hooliganism…” His voice trailed off. There were two squads of fully armed infantrymen arrayed around the building. That seemed very odd indeed. Over here, Ding thought, one or two police officers seemed enough to—

“Yob'tvoyu mat.”

Clark
was proud of the lad just then. Foul as the imprecation was, it was also just what a Russian would have said. The reason for it was also clear. The guards around the embassy perimeter were looking in as much as they were looking out, and the Marines were nowhere to be seen.

“Ivan Sergeyevich, something seems very odd.”

“Indeed it does, Yevgeniy Pavlovich,” John Clark said evenly. He didn't let the car slow down, and hoped the troops on the sidewalk wouldn't notice the two gaijin driving by and take down their license number. It might be a good time to change rental cars.

“The name is Arima, first name Tokikichi, sir, Lieutenant General, age fifty-three.” The Army sergeant was an intelligence specialist. “Graduated their
National
Defense
Academy
, worked his way up the line as an infantryman, good marks all the way. He's airborne qualified. Took the senior course at
Carlisle
Barracks eight years ago, did just fine. 'Politically astute,' the form sheet says. Well connected. He's Commanding General of their Eastern Army, a rough equivalent of a corps organization in the U.S. Army, but not as heavy in corps-level assets, especially artillery. That's two infantry divisions, First and Twelfth, their First Airborne Brigade, First Engineer Brigade, Second Anti-Air Group, and other administrative attachments.”

The sergeant handed over the folder, complete with a pair of photos. The enemy has a face now,
Jackson
thought. At least one face.
Jackson
examined it for a few seconds and closed the folder back. It was about to go to Condition F
RANTIC
in the Pentagon. The first of the Joint Chiefs was in the parking lot, and he was the lucky son of a bitch to give them the news, such as it was.
Jackson
assembled his documents and headed off to the Tank, a pleasant room, actually, located on the outside of the building's E-Ring.

Chet Nomuri had spent the day meeting at irregular hours with three of his contacts, learning not very much except that something very strange was afoot, though nobody knew what. His best course of action, he decided, was to head back to the bathhouse and hope Kazuo Taoka would turn up. He finally did, by which time Nomuri had spent so much time soaking in the blisteringly hot water that his body felt like pasta that had been in the pot for about a month.

“You must have had a day like I did,” he managed to say with a crooked smile.

“How was yours?” Kazuo asked, his smile tired but enthusiastic.

“There is a pretty girl at a certain bar. Three months I've worked on her. We had a vigorous afternoon.” Nomuri reached below the surface of the water, feigning agony in an obvious way. “It may never work again.”

“I wish that American girl was still around,” Taoka said, settling in the tub with a prolonged Ahhhhh. “I am ready for someone like her now.”

“She's gone?” Nomuri asked innocently.

“Dead,” the salaryman said, easily controlling his sense of loss.

“What happened?”

“They were going to send her home. Yamata sent Kaneda, his security man, to tidy things up. But it seems she used narcotics, and she was found dead of an overdose. A great pity,” Taoka observed, as if he were describing the demise of a neighbor's cat. “But there are more where she came from.”

Nomuri just nodded with weary impassivity, remarking to himself that this was a side of the man he hadn't seen before. Kazuo was a fairly typical Japanese salaryman. He'd joined his company right out of college, starting off in a position little removed from clerkship. After serving five years, he'd been sent off to a business school, which in this country was the intellectual equivalent of
Parris Island
, with a touch of
Buchenwald
. There was just something outrageous about how this country operated. He expected that things would be different. It was a foreign land, after all, and every country was different, which was fundamentally a good thing.
America
was the proof of that.
America
essentially lived off the diversity that arrived at her shores, each ethnic community adding something to the national pot, creating an often boiling but always creative and lively national mix. But now he truly understood why people came to the
U.S.
, especially people from this country.

Japan
demanded much of its citizens—or more properly, its culture did. The boss was always right. A good employee was one who did as he was told. To advance you had to kiss a lot of ass, sing the company song, exercise like somebody in goddamned boot camp every morning, showing up an hour early to show how sincere you were. The amazing part was that anything creative happened here at all. Probably the best of them fought their way to the top despite all this, or perhaps were smart enough to disguise their inner feelings until they got to a position of real authority, but by the time they got there they must have accumulated enough inner rage to make Hitler look like a pansy. Along the way they bled those feelings off with drinking binges and sexual orgies of the sort he'd heard about in this very hot tub. The stories about jaunts to
Thailand
and
Taiwan
and most recently the
Marianas
were especially interesting, stuff that would have made his college chums at UCLA blush. Those things were all symptoms of a society that cultivated psychological repression, whose warm and gentle facade of good manners was like a dam holding back all manner of repressed rage and frustration. That dam occasionally leaked, mostly in an orderly, controlled way, but the strain on the dam was unchanging, and one result of that strain was a way of

looking at others, especially gaijin, in a manner that insulted Nomuri's American-cultivated egalitarian outlook. It would not be long, he realized, before he started hating this place. That would be unhealthy and unprofessional, the CIA officer thought, remembering the repeated lessons from the Farm: a good field spook identified closely with the culture he attacked. But he was sliding in the other direction, and the irony was that the deepest reason for his growing antipathy was that his roots sprang from this very country.

“You really want more like her?” Nomuri asked, eyes closed.

“Oh, yes. Fucking Americans will soon be our national sport.” Taoka chuckled.

“We had a fine time of it the past two days. And I was there to see it all happen,” his voice concluded in awe. It had all paid off. Twenty years of toeing the line had brought its reward, to have been there in the War Room, listening to it all, following it all, seeing history written before his eyes. The salaryman had made his mark, and most importantly of all, he'd been noticed. By Yamata-san himself.

“So what great deeds have happened while I was performing my own, eh?” Nomuri asked, opening his eyes and giving off a leering smile.

“We just went to war with
America
, and we've won!” Taoka proclaimed.

“War?
Nan
ja?
We accomplished a takeover of General Motors, did we?”

“A real war, my friend. We crippled their Pacific Fleet and the
Marianas
Islands
are Japanese again.”

“My friend, you cannot tolerate too much alcohol,” Nomuri thought, really believing what he'd just said to the blowhard.

“I have not had a drink in four days!” Taoka protested. “What I told you is true!”

“Kazuo,” Chet said patiently as though to a bright child, “You tell stories with a skill and style better than any man I have ever mot. Your descriptions of women make my loins swell as though I were there myself.” Nomuri smiled. “But you exaggerate.”

“Not this time, my friend, truly,” Taoka said, really wanting his friend to believe him, and so he started giving details.

Nomuri had no real military training. Most of his knowledge of such affairs came from reading books and watching movies. His instructions for operating in
Japan
had nothing to do with gathering information on the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, but rather with trade and foreign-affairs matters. But Kazuo Taoka was a fine storyteller, with a keen eye for detail, and it took only three minutes before Nomuri had to close his eyes again, a smile fixed on his lips. Both actions were the result of his training in
Yorktown
,
Virginia
, as was that of his memory, which struggled now to record every single word while another part of his consciousness wondered how the hell he was going to get the information out. His other reaction was one that Taoka could neither see nor hear, a quintessential Americanism, spoken within the confines of the CIA officer's mind: You motherfuckers!

“Okay, J
UMPER
is up and pretty much put together,” Helen d'Agustino said. “J
ASMINE
”—the code name for Anne Durling—“will be in another cabin. SecState and SecTreas are up and having their coffee. Arnie van Damm is probably in better shape than anybody aboard. Showtime. How about the fighters?”

“They'll join up in about twenty minutes. We went with the F-15's out of Otis. Better range, they'll follow us all the way down. I'm really being paranoid on that, ain't I?”

Daga's eyes gave off a coldly professional smile. “You know what I've always liked about you, Dr. Ryan?”

“What's that?”

“I don't have to explain security to you like I do with everybody else. You think just like I do.” It was a lot for a Secret Service agent to say. “The President is waiting, sir.” She led him down the stairs.

Ryan bumped into his wife on the way forward. Pretty as ever, she was not suffering from the previous night despite her husband's warning, and on seeing Jack she almost made a joke that it was he who'd had the problem. “What's the matter?”

“Business, Cathy.”

“Bad?”

Her husband just nodded and went forward, past a Secret Service agent and an armed Air Force security policeman. The two convertible couches had been made up. President Durling was sitting down in suit pants and white shirt. His tie and jacket were not in evidence at this time. A silver pot of coffee was on the low table. Ryan could see out the windows on both sides of the nose cabin. They were flying a thousand feet or so above fleecy cumulus clouds.

“I hear you've been up all night, Jack,” Durling said.

“Since before
Iceland
, whenever that was, Mr. President,” Ryan told him. He hadn't washed, hadn't shaved, and his hair probably looked like Cathy's after a long procedure under a surgical cap. Worse still was the look in his eyes as he prepared to deliver grimmer news than he'd ever spoken.

“You look like hell. What's the problem?”

“Mr. President, based on information received over the last few hours, I believe that the
United States of America
is at war with
Japan
.”

“What you need is a good chief to run this for you,” Jones observed.

“Ron, one more of those, and I'll toss you in the brig, okay? You've thrown enough weight around for one day,” Mancuso replied in a weary voice. “Those people were under my command, remember?”

“Have I been that much of a jerk?”

     “Yeah, Jonesy, you have.” Chambers handled that answer. “Maybe Seaton needed to be brought up short once, but you overdid it big-time. And now we need solutions, not smartass bullshit.”

Jones nodded but kept his own counsel. “Very well, sir. What assets do we have?”

“Best estimate, they have eighteen boats deployable. Two are in overhaul status and are probably unavailable for months at least,” Chambers replied, doing the enemy first. “With
Charlotte
and
Asheville
out of the game, we have a total of seventeen. Four of those are in yard-overhaul and unavailable. Four more are in bobtail-refits alongside the pier here or in 'Dago. Another four are in the IO. Maybe we can shake those loose, maybe we can't. That leaves five. Three of those are with the carriers for the 'exercise,' one's right down below at the pier. The last one's at sea up in the
Gulf of Alaska
doing workups. That has a new CO-what, just three weeks since he relieved?”

“Correct.” Mancuso nodded. “He's just learning the job.”

“Jesus, the cupboard's that bare?” Jones was now regretting his comment on having a good chief around. The mighty United States Pacific Fleet, as recently as five years ago the most powerful naval force in the history of civilization, was now a frigate navy.

“Five of us, eighteen of them, and they're all spun-up to speed. They've been running ops for the last couple of months.” Chambers looked at the wall chart and frowned. “That's one big fuckin' ocean, Jonesy.” It was the way he added the last statement that worried the contractor.

“The four in refits?”

“That order's out. 'Expedite readiness for sea.' And that brings the number to nine, in a couple of weeks, if we're lucky.”

“Mr. Chambers, sir?”

Chambers turned back. “Yeah, Petty Officer Jones?”

“Remember when we used to head up north, all alone, tracking four or five of the bad guys at once?”

The operations officer nodded soberly, almost nostalgically. His reply was quiet. “Long time ago, Jonesy. We're dealing with SSKs now, on their home turf and—”

“Did you trade your balls in to get that fourth stripe on your shoulder?” Chambers turned around in an instant rage.

“You listen to me, boy, I—” But Ron Jones just snarled back.

“ 'I,' hell, you, used to be a kickass officer! I trusted you to know what to do with the data I gave you, just like I trusted him—” Jones pointed to Admiral Mancuso. “When I sailed with you guys, we were the class of the whole fuckin' world. And if you did your job right as a CO, and if you've been doing your job right as a type-commander, Bart, then those kids out there still are. Goddamn it! When I tossed my bag down the hatch on
Dallas
the first time, I trusted you guys to know your damned job. Was I wrong, gentlemen? Remember the motto on
Dallas
?
'First in Harm's Way'! What the hell's the matter here?” The question hung in the air for several seconds. Chambers was too angry to take it in. SubPac was not.