Debt of Honor Read online

  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 DATELINE PARTNERS 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.

  “Two-seven-zero,” he said quietly.

  “Yeah.”

  “What you got, Junior?” the CO asked.

  “Just a sniff, sir, on the sixty-hertz line.” Thirty seconds later: “Firming up.”

  Kennedy stood behind the two watch-standers. There were now two dotted lines, one in the sixty-hertz frequency portion of the display, another on a higher-frequency band. The electric motors on the Japanese Harushio-class submarine used sixty-cycle A/C electrical current. An irregular series of dots, yellow on the dark screen, started cascading down in a column under the “60” frequency heading like droplets falling in slow motion from a leaky faucet, hence the appellation “waterfall display.” Junior Laval let it grow for a few more seconds to see if it might be random and decided that it was probably not.

  “Sir, I think we might want to start a track now. Designate this contact Sierra-One, possible submerged contact, bearing settling down on two-seven-four, strength is weak.”

  Kennedy relayed the information to the fire-control tracking party fifteen feet away. Another technician activated the ray-path analyzer, a high-end Hewlett-Packard minicomputer programmed to examine the possible paths through the water that the identified acoustical signal might have followed. Though widely known to exist, the high-speed software for this piece of kit was still one of the Navy’s most closely held secrets, a product, Kennedy remembered, of Sonosystems, a Groton-based company run by one of Frenchy Laval’s top protégés. The computer chewed on the input data for perhaps a thousand microseconds and displayed its reply.

  “Sir, it’s direct path. My initial range estimate is between eight and twelve thousand yards.”

  “Set it up,” the approach officer told the petty officer on the fire-control director.

  “This one ain’t no humpback,” Laval reported three minutes later. “I have three lines on the guy now, classify Sierra-One as a definite submarine contact, operating on his electric motors.” Junior told himself that Laval père had made his rep stalking HEN-class Russian subs, which were about as hard to track as an earthquake. He adjusted his headphones. “Bearing steady at two-seven-four, getting hints of a blade rate on the guy.”

  “Solution light,” the lead fire-controlman reported. “I have a valid solution for tube three on target Sierra-One.”

  “Left ten-degrees rudder, come to new course one-eight-zero,” Kennedy ordered next to get a crossbearing, from which would come a better range-gate on the target, and also data on the sub’s course and speed. “Let’s slow her down, turns for five knots.”

  The stalk was always the fun part.

  “If you do that, you’re cutting your own throat with a dull knife,” Anne Quinlan said in her customarily direct way.

  Kealty was sitting in his office. Ordinarily the number-two man in any organization would be in charge when number-one was away, but the miracle of modern communications meant that Roger could do everything he needed to do at midnight over Antarctica if he had to. Including putting out a press statement from his aircraft in Moscow that he was hanging his Vice President out to dry.

  Kealty’s first instinct was to proclaim to the entire world that he knew he had the confidence of his President. That would hint broadly that the news stories were true, and muddy the waters sufficiently to give him room to maneuver, the thing he needed most of all.

  “What we need to know, Ed,” his chief of staff pointed out, not for the first time, “is who the hell started this.” That was the one thing the story had left out, clever people that reporters were. She couldn’t ask him how many of the women in his office he’d visited with his charms. For one thing he probably didn’t remember, and for another, the h
ard part would be identifying those he hadn’t.

  “Whoever it was, it was somebody close to Lisa,” another staffer observed. That insight made light bulbs flash inside every head in the office.

  “Barbara.”

  “Good guess,” the “Chief”—which was how Quinlan liked to be identified—thought. “We need to confirm that, and we need to settle her down some.”

  “Woman scorned,” Kealty murmured.

  “Ed, I don’t want to hear any of that, okay?” the Chief warned. “When the hell are you going to learn that ‘no’ doesn’t mean ‘maybe later’? Okay, I’ll go see Barbara myself, and maybe we can talk her out of this, but, goddammit, this is the last time, okay?”

  18

  Easter Egg

  “Is this where the dresser was?” Ryan asked.

  “I keep forgetting how well informed you are,” Golovko observed, just to flatter his guest, since the story was actually widely known.

  Jack grinned, still feeling more than a little of Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass. There was a completely ordinary door in the wall now, but until the time of Yuri Andropov, a large wooden clothes cabinet had covered it, for in the time of Beriya and the rest, the entrance to the office of Chairman of the KGB had to be hidden. There was no door off the main corridor, and none visible even in the anteroom. The melodrama of it had to have been absurd, Ryan thought, even to Lavrentiy Beriya, whose morbid fear of assassination—though hardly unreasonable—had dreamed up this obtuse security measure. It hadn’t helped him avoid death at the hands of men who’d hated him even more than they’d feared him. Still and all, wasn’t it bizarre enough just for the President’s National Security Advisor to enter the office of the Chairman of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service? Beriya’s ashes must have been stirring up somewhere, Ryan thought, in whatever sewer they’d dropped the urn. He turned to look at his host, his mind imagining the oak bureau still, and halfway wishing they’d kept the old name of KGB, Committee for State Security, just for tradition’s sake.

  “Sergey Nikolay’ch, has the world really changed so much in the past—God, only ten years?”

  “Not even that, my friend.” Golovko waved Jack to a comfortable leather chair that dated back to the building’s previous incarnation as home office of the Rossiya Insurance Company. “And yet we have so far to go.”

  Business, Jack thought. Well, Sergey had never been bashful about that. Ryan remembered looking into the wrong end of a pistol in this man’s hand. But that had all taken place before the so-called end of history.

  “I’m doing everything I can, Sergey. We got you the five billion for the missiles. That was a nice scam you ran on us, by the way.” Ryan checked his watch. The ceremony was scheduled for the evening. One Minuteman-III and one SS-19 left—if you didn’t count the SS-19s in Japan that had been reconfigured to launch satellites.

  “We have many problems, Jack.”

  “Fewer than a year ago,” Ryan observed, wondering what the next request would be. “I know you advise President Grushavoy on more than just intelligence matters. Come on, Sergey, things are getting better. You know that.”

  “Nobody ever told us that democracy would be so hard.”

  “It’s hard for us, too, pal. We rediscover it every day.”

  “The frustration is that we know we have everything we need to make our country prosperous. The problem is in making everything work. Yes, I advise my president on many things—”

  “Sergey, if you’re not one of the best-informed people in your country, I would be very surprised.”

  “Hmm, yes. Well, we are surveying eastern Siberia, so many things, so many resources. We have to hire Japanese to do it for us, but what they are finding ...” His voice trailed off.

  “You’re building up to something, Sergey. What is it?”

  “We think they do not tell us everything. We dug up some surveys done in the early thirties. They were in archives in the Ministry of the Interior. A deposit of gadolinium in an unlikely place. At the time there were few uses for that metal, and it was forgotten until some of my people did a detailed search of old data. Gadolinium now has many uses, and one of their survey teams camped within a few kilometers of the deposit. We know it’s real. The thirties team brought back samples for assay. But it was not included in their last report.”

  “And?” Jack asked.

  “And I find it curious that they lied to us on this,” Golovko observed, taking his time. You didn’t build up to a play like this all that quickly.

  “How are you paying them for the work?”

  “The agreement is that they will assist us in the exploitation of many of the things they find for us. The terms are generous.”

  “Why would they lie?” Ryan inquired.

  Golovko shook his head. “I do not know. It might be important to find out. You are a student of history, are you not?”

  It was one of the things that each respected about the other. Ryan might have written off Golovko’s concerns as yet another example of Russian paranoia—sometimes he thought that the entire concept had been invented in this country—but that would have been unfair. Russia had fought Japan under the Czar in 1904-1905 and lost, along the way giving the Japanese Navy a landmark victory at the Battle of the Tsushima Strait. That war had gone a long way toward destroying the Romanovs and to elevating Japan to world-power status, which had led to their involvement in two world wars. It had also inflicted a bleeding sore on the Russian psyche that Stalin had remembered well enough to recover the lost territories. The Japanese had also been involved in post-World War I efforts to topple the Bolsheviks. They’d put a sizable army into Siberia, and hadn’t been all that enthusiastic about withdrawing it. The same thing had happened again, in 1938 and 1939, with more serious consequences this time, first at the hands of Marshal Blyukher, and then a guy named Zhukov. Yes, there was much history between Russia and Japan.

  “In this day and age, Sergey?” Ryan asked with a wry expression.

  “You know, Jack, as bright a chap as you are, you are still an American, and your experience with invasions is far less serious than ours. Are we panicked about this? No, of course not. Is it something worthy of close attention? Yes, Ivan Emmetovich, it is.”

  He was clearly building up to something, and with all the time he’d taken, it had to be something big, Ryan thought. Time to find out what it was: “Well, Sergey Nikolay’ ch, I suppose I can understand your concern, but there isn’t very much I can—” Golovko cut him off with a single word.

  “THISTLE.”

  “Lyalin’s old network. What about it?”

  “You have recently reactivated it.” The Chairman of RVS saw that Ryan had the good grace to blink in surprise. A bright, serious man, Ryan, but still not really someone who would have made a good field officer. His emotions were just too open. Perhaps, Sergey thought, he should read a book on Ireland, the better to understand the player in the ancient leather chair. Ryan had strengths and weaknesses, neither of which he completely understood.

  “What gives you that idea?” the American asked as innocently as he could, knowing that he’d reacted, again, baited by this clever old pro. He saw Golovko smile at his discomfort and wondered if the liberalization of this country had allowed people to develop a better sense of humor. Before Golovko would just have stared impassively.

  “Jack, we are professionals, are we not? I know this. How I know it is my concern.”

  “I don’t know what cards you’re holding, my friend, but before you go any further, we need to decide if this is a friendly game or not.”

  “As you know, the real Japanese counterintelligence agency is the Public Safety Investigation Division of their Justice Ministry.” The expositional statement was as clear as it had to be, and was probably truthful. It also defined the terms of the discourse. This was a friendly game. Golovko had just revealed a secret of his own, though not a surprising one.

  You had to admire the Russians. Their expertise in the espi
onage business was world-class. No, Ryan corrected himself. They were the class of the world. What better way to run agents in any foreign country than first to establish a network within the country’s counterintelligence services? There was still the lingering suspicion that they had in fact controlled MI-5, Britain’s Security Service, for some years, and their deep and thorough penetration of CIA’s own internal-security arm was still an embarrassment to America.

  “Make your play,” Ryan said. Check to the dealer ...

  “You have two field officers in Japan covered as Russian journalists. They are reactivating the network. They are very good, and very careful, but one of their contacts is compromised by PSID. That can happen to anyone,” Golovko observed fairly. He didn’t even gloat, Jack saw. Well, he was too professional for that, and it was a fairly friendly game by most standards. The other side of the statement was as clear as it could be: with a simple gesture Sergey was in a position to burn Clark and Chavez, creating yet another international incident between two countries that had enough problems to settle. That was why Golovko didn’t gloat. He didn’t have to.

  Ryan nodded. “Okay, pal. I just folded. Tell me what you want.”

  “We would like to know why Japan is lying to us, and anything else that in Mrs. Foley’s opinion might be of interest to us. In return we are in a position to protect the network for you.” He didn’t add, for the time being.

  “How much do they know?” Jack asked, considering the spoken offer. Golovko was suggesting that Russia cover an American intelligence operation. It was something new, totally unprecedented. They put a very high value on the information that might be developed. High as hell, Jack thought. Why?