Jack Ryan 8 - Debt of Honor (40 page)

“You're not going to say anything directly about the case,” van Damm went on, giving the President advice in the form of an order.

“I know, I know. I can't say anything on the facts of the matter because I can't allow myself to interfere with the proceedings or Kealty's defense, except to say that any citizen is innocent until the facts demonstrate otherwise;
America
is founded on…and all that stuff. Tish, write it up. I'll deliver it on the airplane before we land, and then maybe we can do what we're supposed to be doing. Anything else?” Durling asked.

“Secretary Hanson reports that everything is set up. No surprises,” Ryan said, finally getting to his own briefing. “Secretary Fiedler has the monetary-support agreement ready for initialing, too. On that end, sir, it's going to be a nice, smooth visit,”

“How reassuring that is,” the President observed dryly. “Okay, let me get cleaned up.” Air Force One or not, traveling in such close proximity to others was rarely comfortable. Presidential privacy was a tenuous commodity under the best of circumstances, but at least in the White House you had real walls between yourself and others. Not here. An Air Force sergeant strained at his leash to lay out Durling's clothing and shaving things. The man had already spent two hours turning the Presidential shoes from black leather into chrome, and it would have been ungracious to push the guy off. People were so damned eager to show their loyalty. Except for the ones you needed to, Durling thought as he entered the small washroom.

“We got more of 'em.”

Sanchez emerged from the head adjacent to CIC to see people gathered around the central plotting table. There were now three groups of the diamond shapes that denoted enemy surface ships.
Charlotte
, moreover, had position on a “V” shape that meant an enemy submarine, and
Asheville
supposedly had a good sniff also. Best of all, the joint patrol line of S-3 Viking ASW aircraft two hundred miles in advance of the battle group had identified what appeared to be a patrol line of other submarines. Two had been caught snorting, one on SOSUS and one by sonobuoys, and, using a line defined by those two positions, two others had been found. Now they even had a predictable interval between boats for the aircraft to concentrate on.

“Sunset tomorrow?” the CAG asked.

“They like the rising sun, don't they? Let's catch 'em at dinner, then.”

“Fine with me.” Sanchez lifted the phone at his place to alert his wing operations officer.

“Takes long enough,” Jones murmured.

“I seem to remember when you were able to stand watches for a real long time,” Wally Chambers told the civilian.

“I was young and dumb then.” I smoked, too, he remembered. Such good things for concentration and alertness. But most submarines didn't allow people to smoke at all. Amazing that some crews hadn't mutinied. What was the Navy coming to. “See what I told you about my software?”

“You telling us that even you can be replaced by a computer?”

The contractor's head turned. “You know, Mr. Chambers, as you get older you have to watch the coffee intake.”

“You two going at it again?” Admiral Mancuso rejoined them after shaving in the nearby head.

“I think Jonesy was planning to hit
Banzai
Beach
this afternoon.” Captain Chambers chuckled, sipping at his decaf. “He's getting bored with the exercise.”

“They do take a while,” SubPac confirmed.

“Hey, guys, we're validating my product, aren't we?”

“If you want some insider information, yeah, I'm going to recommend you get the contract.” Not the least reason for which was that Jones had underbid IBM by a good 20 percent.

“Next step, I just hired two guys from Woods Hole. That never occurred to the suits at Big Blue.”

“What do you mean?”

“We're going to decode whale talk, now that we can hear it so much better. Greenpeace is going to love us. The submarine mission for the next decade: making the seas safe for our fellow mammals. We can also track those Jap bastards who hunt them.”

“What do you mean?” Chambers asked.

“You want funding? I have an idea that'll keep it for you.”

“What's that, Jonesy?” Mancuso asked.

“The Woods Hole guys think they have the alarm calls for three species identified: for humpback, fins, and seis. They got them by listening in with hydrophones while they were hanging out with whalers. I can program that for active—it's in the freq range we transmit on. So what we can do is have subs trail along with the whalers and broadcast the call, and guess what? The whalers won't find shit. No whale in his right mind will get within twenty miles of another whale screaming that he's being mugged. Not much solidarity in the cetacean community.”

“You turning tree-hugger on us?” Chambers wondered. But he thought about it and nodded slowly.

“All those people have to tell their friends in Congress is that we're doing good scientific work. Okay? Not that they love us, not that they approve of our power plants, just that we're doing good work. What I'm giving you guys is a mission for the next ten years.” Jones was also giving his company work for at least that long, but that was beside the point. Mancuso and the submarine community needed the work. “Besides, I used to enjoy listening to them when we were on
Dallas
.”

“Signal from
Asheville
,” a communications specialist reported from the door.

“They have acquired their target.”

“Well, they're pretty good,” Jones said, looking down at the plot. “But we're still the big kid on the block.”

Air Force One floated into the usual soft landing at
Sheremetyevo
Airport
one minute early. There was a collective sigh as the thrust-reversers cut in, slowing the heavy aircraft rapidly. Soon everyone started hearing the click of seat belts coming off.

“What woke you up so early?” Cathy asked her husband.

“Political stuff at home. I guess I can tell you now.” Ryan explained on, then remembered he had the fax still folded in his pocket. He handed it over, cautioning his wife that it wasn't all true.

“I always thought he was slimy.” She handed it back.

“Oh, don't you remember when he was the Conscience of Congress?” Jack asked quietly.

“Maybe he was, but I never thought he had one of his own.”

“Just remember—”

“If anybody asks, I'm a surgeon here to meet with my Russian colleagues and do a little sightseeing.” Which was entirely true. The state trip would make considerable demands on Ryan's time in his capacity as a senior Presidential advisor. But it wasn't all that different from a normal family vacation either. Their tastes in sightseeing overlapped, but didn't entirely coincide, and Cathy knew that her husband loathed shopping in any form. It was something odd about men in general and her husband in particular.

The aircraft turned onto the taxiway, and things started to happen. President and Mrs. Durling emerged from their compartment, all ready to present themselves as the embodiment of their country. People remained seated to let them pass, aided by the intimidating presence of both Secret Service and Air Force security people.

“Hell of a job,” Ryan breathed, watching the President put on his happy face, and knowing that it was at least partially a lie. He had to do so many things, and make each appear as though it were the only thing he had to do. He had to compartmentalize everything, when on one task to pretend that the others didn't exist. Maybe like Cathy and her patients. Wasn't that an interesting thought? They heard band music when the door opened, the local version of “Ruffles and Flourishes.”

“I guess we can get up now.”

The protocol was already established. People hunched at the windows to watch the President reach the bottom of the steps, shake hands with the new Russian President and the U.S. Ambassador to the
Russian
Republic
. The rest of the official party then went down the steps, while the press deplaned from the after door.

It was very different from Ryan's last trip to
Moscow
. The airport was the same, but the time of day, the weather, and the whole atmosphere could not have been more different. It only took one face to make that clear, that of Sergey Nikolayevich Golovko, chairman of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, who stood behind the front rank of dignitaries. In the old days he would not have shown his face at all, but now his blue eyes were aimed right at Ryan, and they twinkled with mirth as Jack led his wife down the stairs and to their place at the bottom.

The initial signs were a little scary, as was not unusual when political factors interfered with economic forces. Organized labor was flexing its muscles, and doing it cleverly for the first time in years. In cars and their associated components alone, it was possible that hundreds of thousands of jobs would be coming back to the fold. The arithmetic was straightforward: nearly ninety billion dollars of products had arrived from overseas in the last year and would now have to be produced domestically. Sitting down with their management counterparts, labor came to the collective decision that the only thing missing was the government's word that TRA would not be a paper tiger, soon to be cast away in the name of international amity. To get that assurance, however, they had to work Congress. So the lobbying was already under way, backed by the realization that the election cycle was coming up. Congress could not do one thing with one hand and something else with the other. Promises were made, and action taken, and for once both crossed party lines. The media were already commenting on how well it was working.

It wasn't just a matter of hiring employees. There would have to be a huge increase in capacity. Old plants and those operating under their capacity would need to be upgraded and so preliminary orders were put in for tooling and materials. The instant surge came as something of a surprise despite all the warnings, because despite their expertise even the most astute observers had not seen the bill for the revolution it really was.

But the blip on the statistical reports was unmistakable. The Federal Reserve kept all manner of measuring criteria on the American economy, and one of them was orders for such things as steel and machine tools. The period during which TRA had traveled through Congress and to the White House had seen a jump so large as to be off the graph paper. Then the governors saw a vast leap in short-term borrowing, largely from auto-related industries that had to finance their purchases from various specialty suppliers. The rise in orders was inflationary, and inflation was already a long-standing concern. The rise in borrowing would deplete the supply of money that could be borrowed. That had to be stopped, and quickly. The governors decided that instead of the quarter-point rise in the discount rate that they had already approved, and word of which had already leaked, the jump would be a full half-point, to be announced at close of business the following day.

Commander Ugaki was in the control room of his submarine, as usual chain-smoking and drinking copious amounts of tea that occasioned hourly trips to his cabin and its private head, not to mention hacking coughs that were exacerbated by the dehumidified air (kept unusually dry to protect onboard electronic systems). He knew they had to be out there, at least one, perhaps two American submarines—
Charlotte
and
Asheville
, his intelligence briefs had told him—but it wasn't the boats he feared. It was the crews. The American submarine force had been reduced drastically in size, but evidently not in quality. He'd expected to detect his adversary for D
ATELINE
P
ARTNERS
hours before. Perhaps, Ugaki told himself, they hadn't even had a sniff of him yet, but he wasn't sure of that, and over the past thirty-six hours he'd come fully to the realization that this was no longer a game, not since he'd received the code phrase “Climb Mount Niitaka.” How confident he had been a week earlier, but now he was at sea and underwater. The transition from theory to reality was striking.

“Anything?” he asked his sonar officer, getting a headshake for an answer.

Ordinarily, an American sub on an exercise like this was “augmented,” meaning that a sound source was switched on, which increased the amount of radiated noise she put in the water. Done to simulate the task of detecting a Russian submarine, it was in one way arrogant and in another way very clever of the Americans. They so rarely played against allies or even their own forces at the level of their true capabilities that they had learned to operate under a handicap—like a runner with weighted shoes. As a result, when they played a game without the handicap, they were formidable indeed.

Well, so am I! Ugaki told himself. Hadn't he grown up tracking Russian subs like the Americans? Hadn't he gotten in close of a Russian Akula? Patience. The true samurai is patient. This was not a task for a merchant, after all.

“It is like tracking whales, isn't it?” Commander Steve Kennedy observed.

“Pretty close,” Sonarman 1/c Jacques Yves Laval, Jr., replied quietly, watching his display and rubbing his ears, sweaty from the headphones.

“You feel cheated?”

“My dad got to play the real game. All I ever heard growing up, sir, was what he could tell me about going up north and stalking the big boys on their own turf.” Frenchy
Laval
was a name well known in the submarine community, a great sonarman who had trained other great sonarmen. Now retired as a master chief, his son carried on the tradition.

The hell of it was, tracking whales had turned out to be good training. They were stealthy creatures, not because they sought to avoid detection, but simply because they moved with great efficiency, and the submarines had found that moving in close enough to count and identify the members of individual pods or families was at least diverting if not exactly exciting. For the sonarmen anyway, Kennedy thought. Not much for weapons department…

Laval
's eyes focused on the waterfall display. He settled more squarely into his chair and reached for a grease pencil, tapping the third-class next to him.