left. Therefore something else, probably their B-iB bomber, the intelligence
people estimated. And the B-iB was a bomber, whose purpose was far more
sinister than the collection of electronic signals. So the Americans were
thinking of Japan as an enemy whose defenses would have to be penetrated
for the purpose of delivering death, an idea new to neither side in this war-
if war it was, the cooler heads added. But what else could it be? the majority
of the analysts asked, setting the tone of the night’s missions.
Three £-7675 were again up and operating, again with two of them active
and one waiting in the ambush role. This time the radars were turned up in
power, and the parameters for the signal-processing software were electroni-
cally altered to allow for easier tracking of stealthy targets at long range. It
was physics they depended on. The size of the antenna combined with the
power of the signal and the frequency of the electronic waves made it possi-
ble to get hits on almost anything. That was both the good news and the bad
news, the operators thought, as they received all manner of signals now.
There was one change, however. When they thought they had a weak return
from a moving object at long range, they started directing their fighters in
that direction. The Eagles never got within a hundred miles. The return sijj
nals always seemed to lade out when the £-767 switched frequency from
longwave acquisition to shortwave tracking, and thai didn’t bode well for the
Ku-band needed for actual targeting. It did show them that the Americans
were still probing, and that perhaps they knew they were being tracked. And,
everyone thought, if nothing else it was good training for the fighters. If this
were truly a war, all the participants told themselves, then it was becoming
more and more real.
“I don’t buy it,” the Colonel said.
“Sir, it looks to me like they were tracking you. They were sweeping you
at double the rate that I can explain by the rotation of their dome. Their radar
is completely electronic. They can steer their beams, and they were steering
their beams.” The sergeant’s voice was reasonable and respectful, even
though the officer who’d led the first probe was showing a little too much
pride and not quite enough willingness to listen. He’d heard a little of what
he was just told, but now he just shrugged it off.
“Okay, maybe they did get a few hits. We were broadside-aspect to them.
Next time we’ll deploy the patrol line farther out and do a direct penetration.
That cuts our RCS by quite a bit. We have to tickle their line to see how they
react.”
Better you than me, pal, the sergeant thought. He looked out the window.
Elmendorf Air Force Base was in Alaska and subject to dreadful winter
weather-the worst enemy of any man-made machine. As a result the B-is
were all in hangars, which hid them from the satellite that Japan might or
might not have operating. Still, nobody was sure about that.
“Colonel, I’m just a sergeant who diddles with O-scopes, but I’d be care-
ful about that. I don’t know enough about this radar to tell you for sure how
good it is. My gut tells me it’s pretty damned good.”
“We’ll be careful,” the Colonel promised. “Tomorrow night we’ll have
a better set of tapes for you.”
” Roger that, sir.” Better you than me, pal, he thought again.
USS Pasadena had joined the north end of the patrol line west of Midway. It
was possible for the submarines to report in with their satellite radios with-
out revealing their positions except to PacFlt SubOps.
“Not much of a line,” Jones observed, looking at the chart. He’d just
come over to confer on what SOSUS had on Japanese naval movements,
which was at the moment not much. The best news available was that
SOSUS, even with Jones’s improved tracking software, wasn’t getting any-
thing on the line of Olympia, Helena, Honolulu, Chicago, and now
Pasadena. ‘ ‘We used to have more boats than that just to cover the Gap.”
“That’s all the SSNs we have available, Ron,” Chambers replied. “And,
yeah, it ain’t much. But if they forward-deploy their diesel boats, they’d bet-
ter be real careful.” Washington had given them that much by way of orders.
An eastward move of Japanese warships would not tx- lulct.iinl ,in
proval. Mancuso and Chambers hadn’t told Jones thai. Then- was liillr M-IIM-
in dealing with his temper again.
“We have a bunch of SSNs in storage-”
“Seventeen on the West Coast, to be exact,” Chambers said. “Minimum
six months to reactivate them, not countin’ getting the crews spun up.”
Mancuso looked up. “Wait a minute. What about my 726*?”
Jones turned. “I thought they were deactivated.”
SubPac shook his head. “The environmental people wouldn’t let me.
They all have caretaker crews aboard.”
“All five of them,” Chambers said quietly. “Nevada, Tennessee, West
Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland. That’s worth calling Washington
about, sir.”
“Oh, yeah,” Jones agreed. The 726-class, more commonly known by the
name of the lead ship, Ohio, which was now high-quality razor blades, was
far slower than the smaller 688-class of fast-attack boats, a lot less maneu-
verable and ten knots slower, but they were also quiet. More than that, they
defined what quiet was.
“Wally, think we can scratch up crews for them?”
“I don’t see why not, Admiral. We could have them moving in a
week … ten days max, if we can get the right people.”
“Well, that’s something I can do.” Mancuso lifted the phone for Wash-
ington.
The business day started in Central Europe at ten o’clock local time, which
was nine o’clock in London, and a dark four o’clock in New York. That
made it six in the evening in Tokyo after what had been at first an exciting
week, then a dull one, which had allowed people to contemplate their bril-
liance at the killing they had made.
Currency traders in the Japanese capital were surprised when things
started quite normally. Markets came up on-line much as a business might
open its doors for customers waiting outside for a long-awaited sale. It had
been announced that it would happen that way. It was just that nobody here
had really believed it. As one man they phoned their supervisors for instruc-
tions, surprising them with the news from Berlin and the other European
centers.
At the New York FBI office, machines wired into the international trading
network showed exactly the same display as those on every other continent.
The Fed Chairman and Secretary Fiedler watched. Both men had phones to
their ears, linked into an encrypted conference line with their European
counterparts.
The Bundesbank made the first move, trading five hundred billion yen for
the current equivalent in dollars to the Bank of Hong Kong, a very cautious
transaction to test the waters. Hong Kong handled it as a matter of course,
seeing a marginal advantage in the German mistake. The Bundesbank was
foolish enough to expect that the reopening of the New York equities mar-
kets would bolster the dollar. The transaction was executed, Fiedler saw. He
turned to the Fed Chairman and winked. The next move was by the Swiss,
and this one was a trillion yen for Hong Kong’s remaining holding in U.S.
Treasuries. That transaction, too, went through the wires in less than a min-
ute. The next one was more direct. The Bern Commercial Bank took Swiss
francs back from a Japanese bank, trading yen holdings for them, another
dubious move occasioned by a phone call from the Swiss government.
The opening of European stock markets saw other moves. Banks and
other institutions that had made a strategic move to buy up Japanese equities
as a counterbalance to Japanese acquisitions in European markets now
started selling them off, immediately converting the yen holdings to other
currencies. That was when the first alarm light went on in Tokyo. The Euro-
peans’ actions might have appeared to be mere profit-taking, but the cur-
rency conversions bespoke a belief that the yen was going to fall and fall
hard, and it was a Friday night in Tokyo, and their trading floors were closed
except for the currency traders and others working the European markets.
“They should be getting nervous now,” Fiedler observed.
“I would,” Jean-Jacques said in Paris. What nobody quite wanted to say
was that the First World Economic War had just begun in earnest. There was
an excitement to it, even though it ran contrary to all their instincts and expe-
rience.
“You know, I don’t have a model to predict this,” Gant said, twenty feet
away from the two government officials. The European action, helpful as it