It wasn’t hard to guess what SecDef was thinking now. This brilliant bureau-
crat, so confident in his vision and his judgment, had just run hard into the
flat, unforgiving wall called reality.
“The economic problem,” President Durling said, much to SecDef’s re-
lief.
“The hard part is the banks. They’re going to be running scared until we
rectify the DTC situation. So many banks now make trades that they don’t
know what their own reserves are. People are going to try to cash in their
mutual-fund holdings controlled by those banks. The Fed Chairman has al-
ready started jawboning them.”
“Saying what?” Jack asked.
“Saying they had an unlimited line of credit. Saying that the money sup-
ply will be enough for their needs. Saying that they can loan all the money
(hey want.”
“Inflationary,” van Damm observed. “That’s very dangerous.”
“Not really,” Ryan said. “In the short term inflation is like a bad cold,
you take aspirin and chicken soup for it. What happened Friday is like
a heart attack. You treat that first. If the banks don’t open for business as
usual. .. Confidence is the big issue. Buzz is right.”
Not for the first time, Roger Durling blessed the fact that Ryan’s first de-
parture from government had taken him back into the financial sector.
“And the markets?” the President asked SecTreas.
“Closed. I’ve talked to all of the exchanges. Until the DTC records are
re-created, there will be no organized trading.”
“What does that mean?” Hanson asked. Ryan noticed that the Defense
Secretary wasn’t saying anything. Ordinarily such a confident guy, too, Jack
thought, quick to render an opinion. In other circumstances he would have
found the man’s newly found reticence very welcome indeed.
“You don’t have to trade stocks on the floor of the NYSE,” Fiedler ex-
plained. “You can do it in the country-club men’s room if you want.”
“And people will,” Ryan added. “Not many, but some.”
“Will it matter? What about foreign exchanges?” Durling asked. “They
trade our stocks all over the world.”
“Not enough liquidity overseas,” Fiedler answered. “Oh, there’s some,
but the New York exchanges make the benchmarks that everybody uses, and
without those nobody knows what the values are.”
“They have records of the tickers, don’t they?” van Damm asked.
“Yes, but the records are compromised, and you don’t gamble millions
on faulty information. Okay, it’s not really a bad thing that the information
on DTC leaked. It gives us a cover story that we can use for a day or two,”
Ryan thought. “People can relate to the fact that a system fault had knocked
stuff down. It’ll hold them off from a total panic for a while. How long to fix
the records?”
“They still don’t know,” Fiedler admitted. “They’re still trying to as-
semble the records.”
“We probably have until Wednesday, then.” Ryan rubbed his eyes. He
wanted to get up and pace, just get his blood circulating, but only the Presi-
dent did that in the Oval Office.
“I had a conference call with all the exchange heads. They’re calling ev-
eryone in to work, like for a normal day. They have orders to shuffle around
and look busy for the TV cameras.”
“Nice idea, Buzz,” the President managed to say first. Ryan gave Sec-
Treas a thumbs-up.
“We have to come up with some sort of solution fast,” Fiedler went on.
“Jack’s probably right. By late Wednesday it’s a real panic, and I can’t tell
you what’ll happen,” he ended soberly. But the news wasn’t all that bad for
this evening. There was a little breathing space, and there were other breaths
to be taken.
“Next,” van Damm said, handling this one for the Boss, “Ed Kealty is
going to go quietly. He’s working out a deal with Justice. So that political
monkey is off our backs. Of course’ ‘-the Chief of Staff looked at the Presi-
dent-“then we have to fill that post soon.”
“It’ll wait,” Durling said. “Brett. . . India.”
“Ambassador Williams has been hearing some ominous things. The
Navy’s analysis is probably right. It appears that the Indians may be seri-
ously contemplating a move on Sri Lanka.”
“Great timing,” Ryan heard, looking down, then he spoke.
“The Navy wants operational instructions. We have a two-carrier battle
force maneuvering around. If it’s time to bump heads, they need to know
what they are free to do.” He had to say that because of his promise to
Robby Jackson, but he knew what the answer would be. That pot wasn’t
boiling quite yet.
“We’ve got a lot on the plate. We’ll defer that one for now,” the Presi-
dent said. “Brett, have Dave Williams meet with their Prime Minister and
make it clear to her that the United States does not look kindly upon aggres-
sive acts anywhere in the world. No bluster. Just a clear statement, and have
him wait fora reply.”
“We haven’t talked to them that way in a long time,” Hanson warned.
“It’s time to do so now, Brett,” Durling pointed out quietly.
“Yes, Mr. President.”
And now, Ryan thought, the one we’ve all been waiting for. Eyes turned to
Ihe Secretary of Defense. He spoke mechanically, hardly looking up from
his notes.
“The two carriers will be back at Pearl Harbor by Friday. There are two
graving docks for repairs, but to get the ships fully mission-capable will re-
quire months. The two submarines are dead, you know that. The Japanese
fleet is retiring back to the Marianas. There has been no additional hostile
contact of any kind between fleet units.
“We estimate about three divisions have been air-ferried to the Marianas.
One on Saipan, most of two others on Guam. They have air facilities that we
built and maintained …” His voice droned on, giving details that Ryan
already knew, towards a conclusion that the National Security Advisor al-
ready feared.
Everything was too small in size. America’s navy was half what it had
been only ten years before. There remained the ability to sea-lift only one
full division of troops capable of forced-entry assault. Only one, and that
required moving all the Atlantic Fleet ships through Panama and recalling
others from the oceans of the world as well. To land such troops required
support, but the average U.S. Navy frigate had one 3-inch gun. Destroyers
and cruisers had but two 5-inch guns each, a far cry from the assembled
battleships and cruisers that had been necessary to take the Marianas back in
1944. Carriers, none immediately available, the closest two in the Indian
Ocean, and those together did not match the Japanese air strength on Guam
and Saipan today, Ryan thought, for the first time feeling anger over the
affair. It had taken him long enough to get over the disbelief, Jack told him-
self.
“I don’t think we can do it,” SecDef concluded, and it was a judgment
that no one in the room was prepared to dispute. They were too weary for
recriminations. President Durling thanked everyone for the advice and
headed upstairs for his bedroom, hoping to get a little sleep before facing the
media in the morning.
He took the stairs instead of the elevator, thinking along the way as Secret
Service agents at the top and bottom of the stairs watched. A shame for his
presidency to end this way. Though he’d never really desired it, he’d done
his best, and his best, only a few days earlier, hadn’t been all that bad.
Transmissions
The United 747-400 touched down at Moscow’s Scheremetyevo Airport
thirty minutes early. The Atlantic jetstream was still blowing hard. A diplo-
matic courier was first off, helped that way by a flight attendant. He flashed
his diplomatic passport at the end of the jetway, where a customs officer
pointed him toward an American embassy official who shook his hand and
led him down the concourse.
”Come with me. We even have an escort into town.” The man smiled at
the lunacy of the event.
“I don’t know you,” the courier said suspiciously, slowing down. Ordi-
narily his personality and his diplomatic bag were inviolable, but everything
about this trip had been unusual, and his curiosity was thoroughly aroused.
“There’s a laptop computer in your bag. There’s yellow tape around it.
It’s the only thing you’re carrying,” said the chief of CIA Station Moscow,
which was why the courier didn’t know him.’ ‘The code word for your trip is
STEAMROLLER.”
‘ ‘Fair enough.” The courier nodded on their way down the terminal corri-
dor. An embassy car was waiting-it was a stretched Lincoln, and looked to
be the Ambassador’s personal wheels. Next came a lead car which, once off
the airport grounds, lit off a rotating light, the quicker to proceed downtown.
On the whole it struck the courier as a mistake. Better to have used a Russian
car for this. Which raised a couple of bigger questions. Why the hell had he
been rousted at zero notice from his home to ferry a goddamned portable