you know, many of the cars assembled in Kentucky are shipped back to
Japan for sale, and in the event of damage or the need for replacement, then
the local supply will immediately be available for use. If we were to substi-
tute the American components which you suggest, this would not be the
case.”
“Seiji, we are talking about a gasoline tank. It is made of-what? Five
pieces of galvanized steel, bent and welded together, with a total internal
capacity of nineteen gallons. There are no moving parts,” the official of the
State Department pointed out, interjecting himself into the process and play-
ing his part as he was paid to do. He’d even done a good job of feigning
exasperation when he’d used his counterpart’s given name.
“Ah, but the steel itself, the formula, the proportions of different materi-
als in the finished alloy, these have been optimized to the precise specifica-
tions required by the manufacturer-”
“Which are standardized all over the world.”
“Sadly, this is not the case. Our specifications are most exacting, far more
so than those of others, and, I regret to say, more exacting than those of the
Deerfield Auto Parts Company. For that reason, we must sadly decline your
request.” Which put an end to this phase of the negotiations. The Japanese
negotiator leaned hack in his, chair, resplendent in his Brooks Brothers suit
and Pierre Cardin tie, trying not to gloat too obviously. He had a lot of prac-
tice in doing so, and was good at it: it was his deck of cards. Besides, the
game was just getting easier, not harder.
“That is most disappointing,” the representative of the U.S. Department
of Commerce said. He hadn’t expected otherwise, of course, and flipped the
page to go on to the next item on the agenda of the Domestic Content
Negotiations. It was like a Greek play, he told himself, some cross between a
Sophoclean tragedy and a comedy by Aristophanes. You knew exactly what
was going to happen before you even started. In this he was right, but in a
way he couldn’t know.
The meat of the play had been determined months earlier, long before the
negotiations had stumbled upon the issue, and in retrospect sober minds
would certainly have called it an accident, just one more of the odd coinci-
dences that shape the fate of nations and their leaders. As with most such
events, it had begun with a simple error that had occurred despite the most
careful of precautions. A bad electrical wire, of all things, had reduced the
available current into a dip tank, thus reducing the charge in the hot liquid
into which the steel sheets were dipped. That in turn had reduced the galva-
nizing process, and the steel sheets were in fact given merely a thin patina,
while they appeared to be fully coated. The non-galvanized sheets were
piled up on pallets, wrapped with steel bands for stability, and covered with
plastic. The error would be further compounded in the finishing and assem-
bly process.
The plant where it had happened was not part of the assembler. As with
American firms, the big auto-assembly companies-which designed the
cars and put their trademarks on them-bought most of the components
from smaller parts-supply companies. In Japan the relationship between the
bigger fish and the smaller ones was both stable and cutthroat: stable insofar
as the business between the two sets of companies was generally one of long
standing; cutthroat insofar as the demands of the assemblers were dictato-
rial, for there was always the threat that they would move their business to
someone else, though this possibility was rarely raised openly. Only oblique
references, usually a kindly comment on the state of affairs at another,
smaller firm, a reference to the bright children of the owner of such a firm, or
how the representative of the assembler had seen him at a ball game or bath-
house the previous week. The nature of the reference was less important than
the content of the message, and that content always came through loud and
clear. As a result, the little parts-companies were not the showcases of Japa-
nese heavy industry that other nationalities had come to see and respect on
worldwide television. The workers didn’t wear company coveralls, didn’t
eat alongside management in plush cafeterias, didn’t work in spotless, su-
perbly organized assembly plants. The pay for these workers was also some-
thing other than the highly adequate wage structure of the assembly workers,
and though the lifelong employment covenant was becoming fiction even
for the elite workers, it had never existed at all for the others.
At one of the nondescript metal-working shops, the bundles of not-quite-
gulvunized steel were unwrapped, and the individual sheets fed by hand to
culling machines. There the square sheets were mechanically sliced, and the
edges trimmed-the surplus material was gathered and returned to the steel
mill for recycling-so that each piece matched the size determined by the
design, invariably to tolerances less than a millimeter, even for this fairly
crude component which the owner’s eyes would probably never behold. The
larger cut pieces moved on to another machine for heating and bending, then
were welded into an oval cylinder. Immediately thereafter the oval-cut end
pieces were matched up and welded into place as well, by a machine process
that required only one workman to supervise. Pre-cut holes in one side were
matched up with the pipe that would terminate at the filler cap-there was
another in the bottom for the line leading to the engine. Before leaving the
jobber, the tanks were spray-coated with a wax-and-epoxy-based formula
that would protect the steel against rust. The formula was supposed to bond
with the steel, creating a firm union of disparate materials that would forever
protect the gas tank against corrosion and resultant fuel leakage. An elegant
and fairly typical piece of superb Japanese engineering, only in this case it
didn’t work because of the bad electrical cable at the steel plant. The coating
never really attached itself to the steel, though it had sufficient internal stiff-
ness to hold its shape long enough for visual inspection to be performed, and
immediately afterwards the gas tanks proceeded by roller-conveyor to the
boxing shop at the end of the small-parts plant. There the tanks were tucked
into cardboard boxes fabricated by yet another jobber and sent by truck to a
warehouse where half of the tanks were placed aboard other trucks for deliv-
ery to the assembly plant, and the other half went into identically sized cargo
containers which were loaded aboard a ship for transport to the United
States. There the tanks would be attached to a nearly identical automobile at
a plant owned by the same international conglomerate, though this plant was
located in the hills of Kentucky, not the Kwanto Plain outside of Tokyo.
All this had taken place months before the item had come onto the agenda
of the Domestic Content Negotiations. Thousands of automobiles had been
assembled and shipped with defective fuel tanks, and all had slipped through
the usually excellent quality-assurance procedures at the assembly plants
separated by six thousand miles of land and sea. In the case of those assem-
bled in Japan, the cars had been loaded aboard some of the ugliest ships ever
made, slab-sided auto-carriers which had the riding characteristics of barges
as they plodded through the autumnal storms of the North Pacific Ocean.
The sea-salt in the air reached through the ships’ ventilation systems to the
autos. That wasn’t too bad until one of the ships drove through a front, and
cold air changed rapidly to warm, and the instant change in relative humidity
interacted with that of the air within various fuel tanks, causing salt-heavy
moisture to form on the exterior of the steel, inside the defective coating.
There the salt immediately started working on the unprotected mild steel of
the tank, rusting and weakening the thin metal that contained 92-octane gas-
oline.
Whatever his other faults, Corp met his death with dignity, Ryan saw. He
had just finished watching a tape segment that CNN had judged unsuitable
for its regular news broadcast. After a speech whose translation Ryan had on
two sheets of paper in his lap, the noose was placed over his head and the
trap was sprung. The CNN camera crew focused in on the body as it jerked
to a stop, closing an entry on his country’s ledger. Mohammed Abdul Corp.
Bully, killer, drug-runner. Dead.
“I just hope we haven’t created a martyr,” Brett Hanson said, breaking
the silence in Ryan’s office.
“Mr. Secretary,” Ryan said, turning his head to see his guest reading
through a translation of Corp’s last words. “Martyrs all share a single char-
acteristic.”
“What’s that, Ryan?”
“They’re all dead.” Jack paused for effect. “This guy didn’t die for God
or his country. He died for committing crimes. They didn’t hang him for