Mission orders are on the way. Be prepared to stay at sea for ninety days.”
‘ ‘Aye aye, sir.” Claggett heard the line go dead. A moment later he lifted
his phone and called for his department heads and chiefs to meet in the ward-
room. The meeting had not yet started when the phone rang again. It was a
call from Group asking for Claggett’s precise manpower needs.
“Your house has a fine view. Is it for sale?”
Oreza shook his head. “No, it’s not,” he told the man at the door.
“Perhaps you would think about it. You are a fisherman, yes?”
“Yes, sir, I am. I have a charter boat-”
“Yes, I know.” The man looked around, clearly admiring the size and
location of what was really a fairly ordinary tract house by American stan-
dards. Manuel and Isabel Oreza had bought it five years earlier, just barely
beating the real-estate boom on Saipan. “I would pay much for this,” the
man said.
“But then where would I live?” Portagee asked.
“Over a million American dollars,” the man persisted.
Strangely enough, Oreza felt a flash of anger at the offer. He still had a
mortgage, after all, and paid the bill every month-actually his wife did, but
that was beside the point. The typical American monthly ritual of pulling the
ticket out of the book, filling out the check, tucking both in the preprinted
envelope, and dropping it in the mail on the first day of the month-the en-
tire procedure was proof to them that they did indeed own their first house
after thirty-plus years of being government-service tumbleweeds. The house
was theirs.
“Sir, this house is mine, okay? I live here. I like it here.”
The man was as friendly and polite as he could be, in addition to being a
pushy son of a bitch. He handed over a card. “I know. Please excuse my
intrusion. I would like to hear from you after you have had a chance to con-
sider my oiler.” And with that he walked to the next house in the develop-
ment.
“What the hell?” Ore/a whispered, closing the door.
“What was that all about?” Pete Burroughs asked.
“He wants to pay me a million bucks for the house.”
“Nice view,” Burroughs observed. “On the California coast this would
go for a nice price. But not that much. You wouldn’t believe what Japanese
real-estate prices are.”
“A million bucks?” And that was just his opening offer, Oreza reminded
himself. The man had his Toyota Land Cruiser parked in the cul-de-sac, and
was clearly walking from one house to another, seeing what he could buy.
‘ ‘Oh, he’d turn it over for a lot more, or maybe if he was smart, just rent
it.”
“But then where would we live?”
“You wouldn’t,” Burroughs replied. “How much you want to bet they
give you a first-class ticket stateside at the settlement. Think about it,” the
engineer suggested.
“Well, that’s interesting,” Robby Jackson thought. “Anything else happen-
ing?”
“The ‘cans we saw before are gone now. Things are settling back down
to-hell, they are normal now except for all the soldiers around.”
“Any trouble?”
“No, sir, nothing. Same food ships coming in, same tankers, same every-
thing. Air traffic has slowed down a lot. The soldiers are sort of dug in, but
they’re being careful how they do it. Not much visible anymore. There’s still
a lot of bush country on the island. I guess they’re all hid in there. I ain’t
been goin’ lookin’, y’know?” Jackson heard him say.
“That’s fine. Just stay cool, Master Chief. Good report. Let me get back
to work.”
“Okay, Admiral.”
Jackson made his notes. He really should have turned this stuff over to
somebody else, but Chief Oreza would want a familiar voice on the other
end of the circuit, and everything was taped for the intelligence guys any-
way.
But he had others things to do, too. The Air Force would be running an-
other probe of Japanese air defenses tonight. The SSN patrol line would
move west another hundred miles, and people would gather a lot of intelli-
gence information, mainly from satellites. Enterprise would make Pearl
Harbor today. There were two complete carrier air wings at Barbers Point
Naval Air Station, but no carriers to put them on. The Army’s 251)1 Infantry
Division (Light) was still based at Schofield Barracks a few miles away, but
there were no ships to put them on, either. The same was true of the l-‘irsl
Marine Division al Camp I’ciullelon. California. The lasl time America had
struck ul the Mariana Islands, Operation FORAUI:R, 15 June 1944, he’d trou-
bled himself to find out. there had been 535 ships, 127,571 troops. The com-
bined ships of the entire U.S. Navy and every merchant ship flying the Stars
and Stripes did not begin to approach the first number; the Army and Ma-
rines combined would have been hard pressed to find enough light-infantry
troops to meet the second. Admiral Ray Spruance’s Fifth Fleet-which no
longer existed-had consisted of no less than fifteen fast carriers. PacFlt
now had none. Five divisions had been tasked to the mission of retaking the
islands, supported by over a thousand tactical aircraft, battleships, cruisers,
destroyers. . . .
And you’re the lucky son of a bitch who has to come up with a plan to take
the Marianas back. With what?
We can’t deal with them force-on-force, Jackson told himself. They did
hold the islands, and their weapons, mainly American-designed, were formi-
dable. The worst complication was the quantity of civilians. The “na-
tives”-all of them American citizens-numbered almost fifty thousand,
most of whom lived on Saipan, and any plan that took many of those lives in
the name of liberation would be a weight his conscience was unready to
bear. It was a whole new kind of war, with a whole new set of rules, few of
which he had figured out yet. But the central issues were the same. The
enemy has taken something of ours, and we have to take it back or America
was no longer a great power. Jackson hadn’t spent his entire adult life in
uniform so that he could be around when that bit of history got written. Be-
sides, what would he say to Master Chief Manuel Oreza?
We can’t do it force-on-force. America no longer had the ability to move a
large army except from one base to another. There was really no large army
to move, and no large navy to move it. There were no useful advance bases
to support an invasion. Or were there? America still owned most of the is-
lands in the Western Pacific, and every one had an airstrip of one kind or
other. Airplanes flew farther now, and could refuel in midair. Ships could
stay at sea almost indefinitely, a skill invented by the U.S. Navy eighty years
earlier and made more convenient still by the advent of nuclear power. Most
importantly, weapons technology had improved. You didn’t need a bludg-
eon anymore. There were rapiers now. And overhead imagery. Saipan.
That’s where the issue would be decided. Saipan was the key to the island
chain. Jackson lifted his phone.
“Ryan.”
“Robby. Jack, how free a hand do we have?”
“We can’t kill many people. It’s not 1945 anymore,” the National Secu-
rity Advisor told him. ‘ ‘And they have nuclear missiles.”
“Yeah, well, we’re looking for those, so they tell me, and I know thal’s
our first target if we can find them. What if we can’t?”
“We have to,” Ryan replied. Have to? he wondered. His best intelligence
estimate was that the command-and-control over those missiles was in the
hands of Hiroshi Goto, a man of limited intelligence and genuine antipathy
to America. A more fundamental issue was that he had no confidence at all
in America’s ability to predict the man’s actions. What might seem irrational
to Ryan could seem reasonable to Goto-and to whoever else he depended
upon for advice, probably Raizo Yamata, who had begun the entire business
and whose personal motivations were simply unknown. “Robby, we have to
lake them out of play, and to do that, yeah, you have a free hand. I’ll clear
that with NCA,” he added, meaning National Command Authority, the dry
Pentagon term for the President.
“Nukes?” Jackson asked. It was his profession to think in such terms,
Ryan knew, however horrid the word and its implications were.
“Rob, we don’t want to do that unless there’s no choice at all, but you are
authorized to consider and plan for the possibility.”
“I just had a call from our friend on Saipan. It seems somebody wants to
pay top dollar for his house.”
“We think they may try to stage elections-a referendum on sovereignty.
If they can move people off the island, then, well, it makes them some
points, doesn’t it?”
“We don’t want that to happen, do we?”