Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

“NMCC on the STU, Dr. Ryan.”

“Ryan,” Jack said, lifting the phone. “Yes, put him through. Shit,” he

breathed so quietly that Adler hardly caught it.’ ‘Admiral, I’ll be back to you

later today.”

“Now what?”

“The Indians,” Ryan told him.

“I call the meeting to order,” Mark Gant said, tapping the table with his pen.

Only two more than half of the seats were filled, but that was a quorum.

“George, you have the floor.”

The looks on all the faces troubled George Winston. At one level the men

and women who determined policy for the Columbus Group were physically

exhausted. At another they were panicked. It was the third that caused him

the most pain: the degree of hope they showed at his presence, as though he

were Jesus come to clean out the temple. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

No one man was supposed to have that sort of power. The American econ-

omy was too vast. Too many people depended on it. Most of all, it was too

complex for one man or even twenty to comprehend it all. That was the

problem with the models that everyone depended on. Sooner or later it came

down to trying to gauge and measure and regulate something that simply

was. It existed. It worked. It functioned. People needed it, but nobody really

knew how it worked. The Marxists’ illusion that they did know had been

their fundamental flaw. The Soviets had spent three generations trying to

command an economy to work instead of just letting it go on its own, and

had ended up beggars in the world’s richest nation. And it was not so differ-

ent here. Instead of controlling it, they tried to live off it, but in both cases

you had to have the illusion that you understood it. And nobody did, except

in the broadest sense.

At the most basic level it all came down to needs and time. People had

needs. Food and shelter were the first two of those. So other people grew the

food and built the houses. Both required time to do, and since time was the

most precious commodity known to man, you had to compensate people for

it. Take a car-people needed transportation, too. When you bought a car,

you paid people for the time of assembly, for the time required to fabricate

all the components; ultimately you were paying miners for the time required

to dig the iron ore and bauxite from the ground. That part was simple

enough. The complexity began with all of the potential options. You could

drive more than one kind of car. Each supplier of goods and services in-

volved in the car had the option to get what he needed from a variety of

sources, and since time was precious, the person who used his time most

efficiently got a further reward. That was called competition, and competi-

tion was a never-ending race of everyone against everyone else. Fundamen-

tally, every business, and in a sense every single person in the American

economy, was in competition with every other. Everyone was a worker. Ev-

eryone was also a consumer. Everyone provided something for others to use.

Everyone selected products and services from the vast menu that the econ-

omy offered. That was the basic idea.

The true complexity came from all the possible interactions. Who bought

what from whom. Who became more efficient, the better to make use of

their time, benefiting both the consumers and themselves at once. With ev-

eryone in the game, it was like a huge mob, with everyone talking to every-

one else. You simply could not keep track of all the conversations.

And yet Wall Street held the illusion that it could, that its computer mod-

els could predict in broad terms what would happen on a daily hasis It was

not possible. You could analyze individual companies, get a k-i-l lot whai

Ihcy were doing right and wrong. To a limited degree, from one or a li-w

such analyses you could see trends and profit by them. Hut tin- UM- ol oun

putcrs and modeling techniques had gone too far, extrapolating laitliu ami

farther away from baseline reality, and while it had worked, alter a Cushion.

lor years, that had only magnified the illusion. With the collapse throe days

curlier, the illusion was shattered, and now they had nothing to cling to.

Nothing but me, George Winston thought, reading their faces.

The former president of the Columbus Group knew his limitations. He

knew the degree to which he understood the system, and knew roughly

where that understanding ended. He knew that nobody could quite make the

whole thing work, and that train of thought took him almost as far as he

needed to go on this dark night in New York.

“This looks like a place without a leader. Tomorrow, what happens?” he

asked, and all the “rocket scientists” averted their eyes from his, looking

down at the table, or in some cases sharing a glance with the person who

happened to be across it. Only three days before, someone would have spo-

ken, offered an opinion with some greater or lesser degree of confidence.

But not now, because nobody knew. Nobody had the first idea. And nobody

spoke up.

“You have a president. Is he telling you anything?” Winston asked next.

Heads shook.

It was Mark Gant, of course, who posed the question, as Winston had

known he would.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it is the board of directors which selects our pres-

ident and managing director, isn’t it? We need a leader now.”

“George,” another man asked. “Are you back?”

“Either that or I’m doing the goddamnedest out-of-body trip you people

have ever seen.” It wasn’t much of a joke, but it did generate smiles, the

beginning of a little enthusiasm for something.

“In that case, I submit the motion that we declare the position of president

and managing director to be vacant.”

“Second.”

“There is a motion on the floor,” Mark Gant said, rather more strongly.

“Those in favor?”

There was a chorus of ‘

“Oppose?”

Nothing.

“The motion carries. The presidency of the Columbus Group is now va-

cant. Is there a further motion from the floor?”

‘ ‘I nominate George Winston to be our managing director and president,”

another voice said.

ayes.

“Second.”

‘ ‘Those in favor?” Gant asked. This vote was identical except in its grow-

ing enthusiasm.

“George, welcome back.” There was a faint smattering of applause.

“Okay.” Winston stood. It was his again. His next comment was desul-

tory: “Somebody needs to tell Yamata.” He started pacing the room.

“Now, first thing: I want to see everything we have on Friday’s transac-

tions. Before we can start thinking about how to fix the son of a bitch, we

need to know how it got broke. It’s going to be a long week, folks, but we

have people out there that we have to protect.”

The first task would be hard enough, he knew. Winston didn’t know if

anyone could fix it, but they had to start with examining what had gone so

badly wrong. He knew he was close to something. He had the itchy feeling

that went with the almost-enough information to move on a particular issue.

Part of it was instinct, something he both depended on and distrusted until he

could make the itch go away with hard facts. There was something else,

however, and he didn’t know what it was. He did know that he needed to

find it.

Even good news could be ominous. General Arima was spending a good

deal of time on TV, and he was doing well at it. The latest news was that any

citizen who wanted to leave Saipan would be granted free air fare to Tokyo

for later transit back to the States. Mainly what he said was that nothing

important had changed.

“My ass,” Pete Burroughs growled at the smiling face on the tube.

“You know, I just don’t believe this,” Oreza said, back up after five

hours of sleep.

“I do. Check out that knoll southeast of here.”

Portagee rubbed his heavy beard and looked. Half a mile away, on a hill-

top recently cleared for another tourist hotel (the island had run out of beach

space), about eighty men were setting up a Patriot missile battery. The bill-

board radars were already erected, and as he watched, the first of four boxy

containers was rolled into place.

“So what are we going to do about this?” the engineer asked.

“Hey, I drive boats, remember?”

“You used to wear a uniform, didn’t you?”

“Coast Guard,” Oreza said. “Ain’t never killed nobody. And that

stuff”-he pointed to the missile site-“hell, you probably know more

about it than I do.”

“They make ’em in Massachusetts. Raytheon, I think. My company

makes some chips for it.” Which was the extent of Burroughs’s knowledge.

“They’re planning to stay, aren’t they?”