“Dear God.” Not since Scorpion had the U.S. Navy lost a sub, and he’d
been in high school then. Mancuso shook his head clear. There was work to
be done. “Those two carriers are probably out of business, mister.”
“Oh?” Oddly enough, Lieutenant Copps hadn’t heard that yet.
“Call the P-3s. I have work to do.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
Mancuso didn’t have to look at anything. The water in that part of the
Pacific Ocean was three miles deep, and no fleet submarine ever made could
survive at a third of that depth. If there were an emergency, and if there were
any survivors, any rescue would have to happen within hours, else the cold
surface water would kill them.
‘ ‘Ron, we just got a signal. Asheville might be down.”
”Down?” That word was not one any submariner wanted to hear, even if
it was a gentler expression than sunk. “Frenchy’s kid . . .”
“And a hundred twenty others.”
“What can I do, Skipper?”
“Head over to SOSUS and look at the data.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Jones hustled out the door while SubPac lifted his phone
and started punching buttons. He already knew that it was an exercise in
futility. All PacFlt submarines now carried the AN/BST-3 emergency trans-
mitters aboard, set to detach from their ships if they passed through crush
depth or if the quartermaster of the watch neglected to wind the unit’s clock-
work mechanism. The latter possibility, however, was unlikely. Before the
explosive bolts went, the BST made the most godawful noise to chide the
neglectful enlisted man . . . Asheville was almost certainly dead, and yet he
had to follow through in the hope of a miracle. Maybe a few crewmen had
gotten off.
Despite Mancuso’s advice, the carrier group did get the call. A frigate, USS
Gary, went at once to maximum sustainable speed and sprinted north toward
the area of the beacon, responding as required by the laws of man and the
sea. In ninety minutes she’d be able to launch her own helicopter for a sur-
face search and further serve as a base for other helos to continue the rescue
operation if necessary. John Stennis turned slowly into the wind and
managed to launch a single 8-3 Viking ASW aircraft, whose onboard instru-
ments were likely to be useful for a surface search. The Viking was overhead
in less than an hour. There was nothing to be seen on radar except for a
Japanese coast-guard cutter, heading in for the beacon, ahout ten miles out.
Contact was established, and the white cutter verified its notice ol the emer-
gency radio and intentions to search for survivors. The Viking circled the
transmitter. There was a slick of diesel oil to mark the ship’s grave, and a
few bits of floating debris, but repeated low passes and four sets ol eyes
failed to spot anything to be rescued.
The “Navy Blue” prefix on a signal denoted information that would be of
interest to the entire fleet, perhaps sensitive in nature, less often highly clas-
sified; in this case it was something too big to be kept a secret. Two of
Pacific Fleet’s four aircraft carriers were out of business for a long time. The
other two, Eisenhower and Lincoln, were in the IO, and were likely to re-
main there. Ships know few secrets, and even before Admiral Dubro got his
copy of the dispatch, word was already filtering through his flagship. No
chief swore more vilely than the battle-force commander, who already had
enough to worry about. The same response greeted the signals personnel
who informed the senior naval officers on Pentagon duty.
Like most intelligence officers in a foreign land in time of danger, Clark and
Chavez didn’t have a clue. If they had, they would probably have caught the
first plane anywhere. Spies have never been popular with anyone, and the
Geneva Protocols merely affirmed a rule for time of war, mandating their
death as soon after apprehension as was convenient, usually by firing squad.
Peacetime rules were a little more civilized, but generally with the same
end result. It wasn’t something CIA emphasized in its recruiting interviews.
The international rules of espionage allowed for this unhappy fact by giving
as many field intelligence officers as possible diplomatic covers, along with
which came immunity from harm. Those were called “legal” agents, pro-
tected by international treaty as though they really were the diplomats their
passports said they were. Clark and Chavez were “illegals,” and not so pro-
tected-in fact, John Clark had never once been given a “legal” cover. The
importance of this became clear when they left their cheap hotel for a meet-
ing with Isamu Kimura.
It was a pleasant afternoon made less so by the looks they got as gaijin; no
longer a mixture of curiosity and distaste, now there was genuine hostility.
The atmosphere had changed materially since their arrival here, though re-
markably things immediately became more cordial when they identified
themselves as Russians, which prompted Ding to speculate on how they
might make their cover identity more obvious to passersby. Unfortunately
civilian clothing did not offer that option, and so they had to live with the
looks, generally feeling the way a wealthy American might in a high-crime
neighborhood.
Kimura was waiting at the agreed-upon place, an inexpensive drinking
establishment. He already had a few drinks in him.
“Good afternoon,” Clark said pleasantly in English. A beat. “Something
wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Kimura said when the drinks came. There were many
ways of speaking that phrase. This way indicated that he knew something.
‘ ‘There is a meeting of the ministers today. Goto called it. It’s been going on
for hours. A friend of mine in the Defense Agency hasn’t left his office since
Thursday night.”
“Da-so?”
“You haven’t seen it, have you? The way Goto has been speaking about
America.” The MITI official finished off the last of his drink and raised his
hand to order another. Service, typically, was fast.
They could have said that they’d seen the first speech, but instead
“Klerk” asked for Kimura’s read on the situation.
“I don’t know,” the man replied, saying the same thing again while his
eyes and tone told a somewhat different story. “I’ve never seen anything
like this. The-what is the word?-rhetoric. At my ministry we have been
waiting for instructions all week. We need to restart the trade talks with
America, to reach an understanding, but we have no instructions. Our people
in Washington are doing nothing. Goto has spent most of his time with De-
fense, constant meetings, and with his zaibatsu friends. It’s not the way
things are here at all.”
“My friend,” Clark said with a smile, his drink now untouched after a
single sip, “you speak as though there is something serious in the air.”
‘ ‘You don’t understand. There is nothing in the air. Whatever is going on,
MITI is not a part of it.”
“And?”
‘ ‘MITI is part of everything here. My Minister is there now, finally, but he
hasn’t told us anything.” Kimura paused. Didn’t these two know anything?
“Who do you think makes our foreign policy here? Those dolts in the For-
eign Ministry? They report to us. And the Defense Agency, who cares what
they think about anything? We are the ones who shape our country’s poli-
cies. We work with the zaibatsu, we coordinate, we … represent business in
our relations with other countries and their markets, we make the position
papers for the Prime Minister to give out. That’s why I entered the ministry
in the first place.”
“But not now?” Clark asked.
“Now? Goto is meeting with them himself, and spends the rest of his time
with people who don’t matter, and only now is my Minister called in-well,
yesterday,” Kimura corrected himself. “And he’s still there.”
The man seemed awfully rattled, Chave/. told himself, ovi-r whal seemed
to be little more than some bureaucratic turf-fighting. The Ministry <»| Inter-national Trade and Industry was being outmaneuvered by someone else. So?"You are upset that the industry leaders meet directly with your PrimeMinister," he asked."So much, and so long, yes. They're supposed to work through us, butGoto has always been Yamata's lapdog." Kimura shrugged. "Perhaps theywant to make policy directly now, but how can they do that without us?"Without me, the man means, Chavez thought with a smile. Dumb-ass bu-reaucrat. CIA was full of them, too.It wasn't all the way thought through, but such things never were. Most ofthe tourists who came to Saipan were Japanese, but not quite all of them. ThePacific island was a good place for a lot of things. One of them was deep-seafishing, and the waters here were not as crowded as those around Florida andthe Gulf of California. Pete Burroughs was sunburned, exhausted, and thor-oughly satisfied with an eleven-hour day at sea. It was just the perfect thing,