enough to excite interest in auto stocks, and that excited interest in machine
MWI’tl/K
.VM
tools. By 12:05:30. the Dow was up live points. Hardly a hiccup alter the
11vi–hundred-point plummet seven days before, but it looked like Everest on
.1 dear day from the floor of the NYSE.
“I don’t believe this,” Mark Gant observed, several blocks away in the Ja-
vits Federal Office Building.
“Where the hell is it written down that computers are always right?”
(ieorge Winston inquired with another forced grin. He had his own worries.
Buying up Citibank was not without dangers, but his move, he saw, had the
proper effect on the issue. When it had moved up three points, he initiated a
slow sell-off to cash in, as other fund managers moved in to follow the trend.
Well, that was predictable, wasn’t it? The herd just needed a leader. Show
I hem a trend and wait for them to follow, and if it was contrarian, so much
the better.
“First impression-it’s working,” the Fed Chairman told his European
col leagues. All the theories said it should, but theories seemed thin at mo-
ments like this. Both he and Secretary Fiedler were watching Winston,
now leaning back in his chair, chewing on a pen and talking calmly into a
phone. They could hear what he was saying. At least his voice was calm,
though his body was that of a man in a fight, every muscle tense. But after
another five minutes they saw him stretch tense muscles and smile and
turn and say something to Gant, who merely shook his head in wonder-
ment as he watched his computer screen do things that it didn’t believe
possible.
“Well, how about that,” Ryan said.
“Is it good?” President Durling asked.
“Let’s put it this way: if I were you I’d give your speechwriter a dozen
long-stemmed red roses and tell her to plan on working here another four
years or so.”
“It’s way too early for that, Jack,” the President replied somewhat
crossly.
Ryan nodded. “Yes, sir, I know. What I mean to tell you is, you did it.
The markets may-hell, will fluctuate the rest of the day, but they’re not
going to free-fall like we initially expected. It’s about confidence, Boss. You
restored it, and that’s a fact.”
“And the rest of it?”
“They’ve got a chance to back down. We’ll know by the end of the
day.”
“And if they don’t?”
The National Security Advisor thought about that. “Then we have to fig-
urc a way to fight them without hurling them too badly. We have to find their
nukes and we have to settle this thing down before it really gets out of con-
trol.”
“Is that possible?”
Ryan pointed to the screen. “We didn’t think this was possible, did we?”
Consequences
It happened in Idaho, in a community outside Mountain Home Air Force
Base. A staff sergeant based there had flown out to Andersen Air Force Base
on Guam to work on the approach-control radars. His wife had delivered a
baby a week after his departure, and she attempted to call him that evening to
tell him about his new daughter, only to learn that the phones were out due to
a storm. Only twenty years old and not well educated, she’d accepted the
news with disappointment. The military comm links were busy, an officer
had told her, convincingly enough that she’d gone home with tears in her
eyes. A day later she’d talked to her mother and surprised her with the news
that her husband didn’t know about his daughter yet. Even in time of war,
her mother thought, such news always got through-and what storm could
possibly be worse than fighting a war?
So she called the local TV station and asked for the weatherman, a saga-
cious man of fifty who was excellent at predicting the tornadoes that
churned through the region every spring, and, it was widely thought, saved
five or ten lives each year with his instant analysis of which way the funnel
clouds moved.
The weatherman in turn was the kind who enjoyed being stopped in the
local supermarkets with friendly comments, and took the inquiry as yet an-
other compliment for his professional expertise, and besides, he’d never
checked out the Pacific Ocean before. But it was easy enough. He linked into
the NOAA satellite system and used a computer to go backwards in time to
see what sort of storm had hammered those islands. The time of year was
wrong for a typhoon, he knew, but it was the middle of an ocean, and storms
happened there all the time.
DM ( I. A INI Y
But not this year and not this time. The satellite photos showed a few
wispy clouds, but otherwise fair weather. For a few minutes he wondered if
the Pacific Ocean, like Arkansas, was subject to fair-weather gales, but, no,
that wasn’t likely, since those adiabatic storms resulted mainly from varia-
tions in temperature and land elevation, whereas an ocean was both flat and
moderate. He checked with a colleague who had been a Navy meteorologist
to confirm it, and found himself left only with a mystery. Thinking that per-
haps the information he had was wrong, he consulted his telephone book and
dialed 011-671-555-1212, since a directory-assistance call was toll-free. He
got a recording that told him that there had been a storm. Except there had
not been a storm. Was he the first guy to figure that out?
His next move was to walk across the office to the news department.
Within minutes an inquiry went out on one of the wire services.
“Ryan.”
“Bob Holtzman, Jack. I have a question for you.”
“I hope it’s not about Wall Street,” Jack replied in as unguarded a voice
as he could muster.
”No, it’s about Guam. Why are the phone lines out?”
“Bob, did you ask the phone company that?” Ryan tried.
“Yeah. They say there was a storm that took a lot of lines down. Except
for a couple of things. One, there wasn’t any storm. Two, there’s an undersea
cable and a satellite link. Three, a week is a long time. What’s going on?”
the reporter asked.
“How many people are asking?”
“Right now, just me and a TV station in Little Rock that put a request up
on the AP wire. Another thirty minutes and it’s going to be a lot more. What
gives? Some sort of-”
“Bob, why don’t you come on down here,” Ryan suggested. Well, it’s
not as though you expected this to last forever, Jack told himself. Then he
called Scott Adler’s office. But why couldn’t it have waited one more day?
Yukon was fueling her second set of ships. The urgency of the moment
meant that the fleet oiler was taking on two escorts at a time, one on either
beam, while her helicopter transferred various parts and other supplies
around the formation, about half of them aircraft components to restore Ike’s
aircraft to full-mission status. The sun would set in another thirty minutes,
and the underway-replenishment operations would continue under cover of
darkness. Dubro’s battle force had darted east, the better to distance itself
from the Indian formation, and again had gone to EMCON, with all radars
off, and a deceptive placement of their surveillance aircraft. But they’d lost
1)1′. BT OF HONOR 537
track of the two Indian carriers, and while the Hitwkcye* pmhnl i miliou
Dubro sweated.
“Lookouts report unknown aircraft inbound nl I wo two live.” n inlkri
called.
The Admiral swore quietly, lifted his binoculars, and turned lo ilte
southwest. There. Two Sea Harriers. Playing it smart, loo, he »«w. ‘I1w>
were at five thousand feet or so, tucked into the neat two-plunc clement
used for tactical combat and air shows, flying straight and level, carelul
not to overfly any ship directly. Before they had passed over the first mi)?.
of escorts, a pair of Tomcats were above and behind them, ready to Hike
them out in a matter of seconds if they showed hostile intent. But hostile
intent meant loosing a weapon first, and in this day and age a loosed
weapon most probably meant a hit, whatever happened to the launch air-
craft. The Harriers flew overhead one time only. They seemed to be carry-
ing extra fuel tanks and maybe a reconnaissance pod, but no weapons, this
time. Admiral Chandraskatta was no fool, but then Dubro had never made
that assumption. His adversary had played a patient game, sticking to his
own mission and biding his time, and learning from every trick the Ameri-
cans had shown him. None of this was of much comfort to the battle-force
commander.
“Follow them back?” Commander Harrison asked dispassionately.
Mike Dubro shook his head. “Pull one of the Hummers in close and track
by radar.”
When the hell would Washington realize he had an imminent confronta-
tion brewing?
“Mr. Ambassador,” Scott Adler said, folding up the note an aide had just