Debt of Honor jr-6 Read online

  But the carrier was still queen of the sea. Even in her diminished capacity, Johnnie Reb had more striking power than both Indian carriers combined, and Sanchez judged that keeping India from getting too aggressive ought not to be overly taxing. A damned good thing that was the only problem on the horizon, too.

  "That's it," the Air Boss observed as the last EA-6B caught the number-two wire. "Recovery complete. Your people look pretty good, Bud."

  "We have been working at it, Todd." Sanchez rose from his seat and headed below toward his stateroom, where he'd freshen up before meeting first with his squadron commanders, and then with the ops staff to plan the operations for DATELINE PARTNERS. It ought to be a good workup, Sanchez thought. An Atlantic Fleet sailor for most of his career, it would be his first chance to look at the Japanese Navy, and he wondered what his grandfather would have thought of this. Henry Gabriel "Mike" Sanchez had been the CAG on USS Wasp in 1942, taking on the Japanese in the Guadalcanal campaign. He wondered what Big Mike would have thought of the upcoming exercise.

  "Come on, you have to give me something," the lobbyist said. It was a mark of just how grim things were that his employers had told him it was possible they might have to cut back on their expenditures in D.C. That was very unwelcome news. It wasn't just me, the former Congressman from Ohio told himself. He had an office of twenty people to take care of, and they were Americans, too, weren't they? And so he had chosen his target with care.

  This Senator had problems, a real contender in his primary, and another, equally real opponent in the general election. He needed a larger war chest. That made him amenable to reason, perhaps.

  "Roy, I know we've worked together for ten years, but if I vote against TRA, I'm dead, okay? Dead. In the ground, with a wood stake through my heart, back in Chicago teaching bullshit seminars in government operations and selling influence to the highest bidder." Maybe even ending up like you, the Senator didn't say. He didn't have to. The message carried quite clearly.

  It was not a pleasant thought. Almost twelve years on the Hill, and he liked it here. He liked the staff, and the life, and the parking privileges, and the free plane rides back to Illinois, and being treated like he was somebody everywhere he went. Already he was a member of the "Tuesday-Thursday Club," flying back home every Thursday evening for a very long weekend of speeches to the local Elks and Rotary clubs, to be seen at PTA meetings, cutting ribbons for every new post office building he'd managed to scrounge money for, campaigning already, just as hard as he'd done to get this god-damned job in the first place. It was not pleasant to have to go through that again. It would be less pleasant still to do it in the knowledge that it was all a waste of his time. He had to vote for TRA. Didn't Roy know that?

  "I know that, Ernie. But I need something," the lobbyist persisted. It wasn't like working on the Hill. He had a staff of the same size, but this time it wasn't paid for by taxes. Now he actually had to work for it. "I've always been your friend, right?"

  The question wasn't really a question. It was a statement, and it was both an implied threat and a promise. If Senator Greening didn't come over with something, then, maybe, Roy would, quietly at first, have a meeting with one of his opponents. More likely both. Roy, the Senator knew, was quite at ease working both sides of any street. He might well write off Ernest Greening as a lost cause and start currying favor with one or both possible replacements. Seed money, in a manner of speaking, something that would pay off in the long run because the Japs were good at thinking long-term. Everyone knew that. On the other hand, if he coughed up something now…

  "Look, I can't possibly change my vote," Senator Greening said again.

  "What about an amendment? I have an idea that might—"

  "No chance, Roy. You've seen how the committees are working on this. Hell, the chairmen are sitting down right now at Bullfeathers, working out the last details. You have to make it clear to your friends that we've been well and truly rolled on this one."

  "Anything else?" Roy Newton asked, his personal misery not quite showing. My God, to have to go back to Cincinnati, practice law again?

  "Well, nothing on point," Greening said, "but there are a few interesting things going on, on the other side."

  "What's that?" Newton asked. Just what I need, he thought. Some of the usual damned gossip. It had been fun while he'd served his six terms, but not—

  "Possible impeachment hearings against Ed Kealty."

  "You're kidding," the lobbyist breathed, his thoughts stopped dead in their tracks. "Don't tell me, he got caught with his zipper down again?"

  "Rape," Greening replied. "No shit, rape. The FBI's been working the case for some time now. You know Dan Murray?"

  "Shaw's lapdog?"

  The Senator nodded. "That's the one. He briefed House Judiciary, but then this trade flap blew up and the President put it on hold. Kealty himself doesn't know yet, at least not as of last Friday-that's how tight this one is—but my senior legislative aide is engaged to Sam Fellows' chief of staff, and it really is too good to keep quiet, isn't it?"

  The old Washington story, Newton thought with a smirk. If two people know it, it's not a secret.

  "How serious?"

  "From what I hear, Ed Kealty's in very deep shit. Murray made his position very clear. He wants to put Eddie-boy behind bars. There's a death involved."

  "Lisa Beringer!" If there was anything a politician was good at, it was remembering names.

  Greening nodded. "I see your memory hasn't failed you."

  Newton almost whistled, but as a former Member, he was supposed to take such things phlegmatically. "No wonder he wants this one under wraps. The front page isn't big enough, is it?"

  "That is the problem. It wouldn't affect passage of the bill—well, probably not—but who needs the complications? TRA, the Moscow trip, too. So-smart money, it's announced when he gets back from Russia."

  "He's hanging Kealty out."

  "Roger never has liked him. He brought Ed on board for his legislative savvy, remember? The President needed somebody who knew the system.

  Well, what good will he be now, even if he's cleared? Also, a major liability for the campaign. It makes good political sense," Greening pointed out, "to toss him overboard right now, doesn't it? At least, as soon as the other stuff is taken care of."

  That's interesting, Newton thought, quiet for a few seconds. We can't stop TRA. On the other hand, what if we can curse Durlings presidency? That could give us a new Administration in one big hurry, and with the right sort of guidance, a new Administration…

  "Okay, Ernie, that's something."

  12—Formalities

  There had to be speeches. Worse, there had to be a lot of speeches. For something of this magnitude, each of the 435 members from each of the 435 districts had to have his or her time in front of the cameras.

  A representative from North Carolina had brought in Will Snyder, his hands still bandaged, and made sure he had a front-row seat in the gallery. That gave her the ability to point to her constituent, praise his courage to the heavens, laud organized labor for the nobility of its unionized members, and introduce a resolution to give Snyder official congressional recognition for his heroic act.

  Next, a member from eastern Tennessee rendered a similar panegyric to his state's highway police and the scientific resources of Oak Ridge National Laboratory—there would be many favors handed out as a result of this legislation, and ORNL would get a few more million. The Congressional Budget Office was already estimating the tax revenue to be realized from increased American auto production, and members were salivating over that like Pavlov's dogs for their bell.

  A member from Kentucky went to great pains to make it clear that the Cresta was largely an American-made automobile, would be even more so with the additional U.S. parts to be included in the design (that had already been settled in a desperate but necessarily unsuccessful accommodation effort by the corporate management), and that he hoped none would blame the worker
s of his district for the tragedy caused, after all, by non-American parts. The Kentucky Cresta plant, he reminded them, was the most efficient car factory in the world, and a model, he rhapsodized, of the way America and Japan could and should cooperate! And he would support this bill only because it was a way to make that cooperation more likely. That straddled the fence rather admirably, his fellow members thought.

  And so it went. The people who edited Roll Call, the local journal that covered the Hill, were wondering if anyone would dare to vote against TRA.

  "Look," Roy Newton told his main client. "You're going to take a beating, okay? Nobody can change that. Call it bad luck if you want, but shit happens."

  It was his tone that surprised the other man. Newton was almost being insolent. He wasn't apologizing at all for his gross failure to change things, as he was paid to do, as he had promised that he could do when he'd first been hired to lobby for Japan, Inc. It was unseemly for a hireling to speak in this way to his benefactor, but there was no understanding Americans, you gave them money to do a job, and they—

  "But there are other things going on, and if you have the patience to take a longer view"—long view had already been tried, and Newton was grateful for the fact that his client had good-enough language skills to catch the difference—"there are other options to be considered."

  "And what might those be?" Binichi Murakami asked acidly. He was upset enough to allow his anger to show for once. It was just too much. He'd come to Washington in the hope that he could personally speak out against this disastrous bill, but instead had found himself besieged with reporters whose questions had only made clear the futility of his mission. And for that reason he'd been away from home for weeks, despite all sorts of entreaties to return to Japan for some urgent meetings with his friend Kozo Matsuda.

  "Governments change," Newton replied, explaining on for a minute or so.

  "Such a trivial thing as that?"

  "You know, someday it's going to happen in your country. You're kidding yourself if you think otherwise." Newton didn't understand how they could fail to grasp something so obvious. Surely their marketing people told them how many cars were bought in America by women. Not to mention the best lady's shaver in the world. Hell, one of Murakami's subsidiaries made it. So much of their marketing effort was aimed at attracting women customers, and yet they pretended that the same factors would never come to be in their own country. It was, Newton thought, a particularly strange blind spot.

  "It really could ruin Durling?" The President was clearly getting all sorts of political capital from TRA.

  "Sure, if it's managed properly. He's holding up a major criminal investigation, isn't he?"

  "No, from what you said, he's asked to delay it for—"

  "For political reasons, Binichi." Newton did not often first-name his client. The guy didn't like it. Stuffed shirt. But he paid very well, didn't he?

  "Binichi. you don't want to get caught playing with a criminal mailer, especially for political reasons. Expeciallv where the abuse of women is involved. It's an eccentricity of the American political system," he explained patiently.

  "We can't meddle with that, can we?" It was an ill-considered question. He'd never quite meddled at this level before, that was all.

  "What do you think you pay me for?"

  Murakami leaned back and lit up a cigarette. He was the only person allowed to smoke in this office. "How would we go about it?"

  "Give me a few days to work on that? For the moment, take the next flight home. You're just hurting yourself by being here, okay?" Newton paused. "You also need to understand, this is the most complicated project I've ever done for you. Dangerous, too," the lobbyist added.

  Mercenary! Murakami raged behind eyes that were again impassive and thoughtful. Well, at least he was effective at it.

  "One of my colleagues is in New York. I plan to see him and then fly home from New York."

  "Fine. Just keep a real low profile, okay?"

  Murakami stood and walked to the outer office, where an aide and a bodyguard waited. He was a physically imposing man, tall for a Japanese at five-ten, with jet-black hair and a youthful face that belied his fifty-seven years.

  He also had a better-than-average track record for doing business in America, which made the current situation all the more offensive to him. He had never purchased less than a hundred million dollars' worth of American products in any year for the past decade, and he had occasionally spoken out, quietly, for allowing America greater access to his country's food market. The son and grandson of farmers, it appalled him that so many of his countrymen would want to do that sort of work. It was so damnably inefficient, after all, and the Americans, for all their laziness, were genuine artists at growing things. What a pity they didn't know how to plant a decent garden, which was Murakami's other passion in life.

  The office building was on Sixteenth Street, only a few blocks from the White House, and, stepping out on the sidewalk he could look down and see the imposing building. Not Osaka Castle, but it radiated power.

  "You Jap cocksucker!"

  Murakami turned to see the face, angry and white, a working-class man by the look of him, and was so startled that he didn't have time to take offense. His bodyguard moved quickly to interpose himself between his boss and the American.

  "You're gonna get yours, asshole!" the American said. He started to walk away.

  "Wait. What have I done to harm you?" Murakami asked, still too surprised to be angry.

  Had he known America better, the industrialist might have recognized that the man was one of Washington's homeless, and like most of them, a man with a problem. In this case, he was an alcoholic who had lost both his job and his family to drink, and his only contact with reality came from disjointed conversations with people similarly afflicted. Because of that, whatever outrages he held were artificially magnified. His plastic cup was full of an inexpensive beer, and because he remembered once working in the Chrysler assembly plant in Newark, Delaware, he decided that he didn't need the beer as much as he needed to be angry about losing his job, whenever that had been…And so, forgetting that his own difficulties had brought him to this low station in life, he turned and tossed the beer all over the three men in front of him, then moved on without a word, feeling so good about what he'd done that he didn't mind losing his drink.

  The bodyguard started to move after him. In Japan he would have been able to hammer the bakayaro to the ground. A policeman would be summoned, and this fool would be detained, but the bodyguard knew he was on unfamiliar ground, and held back, then turned to see if perhaps this had been a setup to distract him from a more serious attack. He saw his employer standing erect, his face first frozen in shock, then outrage, as his expensive English-made coat dripped with half a liter of cheap, tasteless American beer. Without a word, Murakami got into the waiting car, which headed off to Washington National Airport. The bodyguard, similarly humiliated, took his seat in the front of the car.

  A man who had won everything in his life on merit, who remembered life on a postage-stamp of a vegetable farm, who had studied harder than anyone else to get ahead, to win a place at Tokyo University, who had started at the bottom and worked his way to the top, Murakami had often had his doubts and criticisms of America, but he had deemed himself a fair and rational actor on trade issues. As so often happens in life, however, it was an irrelevancy that would change his mind.

  They are barbarians, he told himself, boarding his chartered jet for the flight to New York.

  "The Prime Minister is going to fall," Ryan told the President about the same time, a few blocks away.

  "How sure are we of that?"

  "Sure as we can be," Jack replied, taking his seat. "We have a couple of field officers working on something over there, and that's what they're hearing from people."

  "State hasn't said that yet," Durling objected somewhat innocently.

  "Mr. President, come on now," Ryan said, holding a folder in h
is lap.

  "You know this is going to have some serious ramifications. You know Koga is sitting on a coalition made up of six different factions, and it won't take much to blow that apart on him." And us, Jack didn't add.

  "Okay. So what?" Durling observed, having had his polling data updated again this very day.

  "So the guy most likely to replace him is Hiroshi Goto. He doesn't like us very much. Never has."

  "He talks big and tough," the President said, "but the one time I met him he looked like a typical blusterer. Weak, vain, not much substance to him."

  "And something else." Ryan filled the President in on one of the spinoffs of Operation SANDAL WOOD.

  Under other circumstances Roger Durling might have smiled, but he had

  Ed Kealty sitting less than a hundred feet from him.

  "Jack, how hard is it for a guy not to fuck around behind his wife's back?"

  "Pretty easy in my case," Jack answered. "I'm married to a surgeon, remember?"

  The President laughed, then turned serious.

  "It's something we can use on the son of a bitch, isn't it?"

  "Yes, sir." Ryan didn't have to add, but only with the greatest possible care, that on top of the Oak Ridge incident, it could well ignite a firestorm of public indignation. Niccolo Machiavelli himself had warned against this sort of thing.

  "What are we planning to do about this Norton girl?" Durling asked.

  "Clark and Chavez—"

  "The guys who bagged Corp, right?"

  "Yes, sir. They're over there right now. I want them to meet the girl and offer her a free ride home."

  "Debrief once she gets back?"

  Ryan nodded. "Yes, sir."

  Durling smiled. "I like it. Good work."

  "Mr. President, we're getting what we want, probably even a little more than what we really wanted," Jack cautioned. "The Chinese general Sun Tzu once wrote that you always leave your enemy a way out—you don't press a beaten enemy too hard."