Debt Of Honor by Clancy, Tom

The calls would be cataloged for topic and opinion, become part of every

member’s morning briefing information, and in most cases just as quickly

forgotten.

Other calls went to more senior staff members, and in many cases to the

members themselves. These came from local businessmen, mostly manufac-

turers whose products either competed directly in the marketplace with those

from overseas, or, in a smaller number of cases, who had tried to do business

in Japan and found the going difficult. These calls were not always heeded,

but they were rarely ignored.

It was now a top story again on every news service, having briefly faded

into the normal old-news obscurity. For today’s newscasts family photo-

graphs were shown of the police officer, and his wife, and their three chil-

dren, and also of Nora Dunn and Amy Rice, followed by a brief taped

interview of the heroic truck driver, and distant views of Jessica Denton,

orphan, writhing in pain from her burns inside a laminar room, being treated

by nurses who wept as they debrided her charred face and arms. Now law-

yers were sitting with all of the involved families, coaching them on what to

tell the cameras and preparing dangerously modest statements of their own

while visions of contingency fees danced in their heads. News crews asked

for the reaction of family members, friends, and neighbors, and in the angry

grief of people who had suffered a sudden and bitter loss, others saw either

common anger or an opportunity to take advantage of the situation.

But most telling of all was the story of the fuel tank itself. The preliminary

NTSB finding had been leaked moments after its existence had been an-

iiounced on the floor of the House. It was just loo good to pass up. The

American auto companies supplied their own engineers to explain the scien-

tific side of the matter, each of them noting with barely concealed glee that it

was a simple example of poor quality-control on a very simple automobile

component, that the Japanese weren’t as sharp as everyone thought after all:

“Look, Tom, people have been galvanizing steel for over a century,” a mid-

level Ford engineer explained to NEC ‘ ‘Nightly News.” “Garbage cans are

made out of this stuff.”

“Garbage cans?” the anchor inquired with a blank look, since his were

made from plastic.

‘ ‘They’ve hammered us on quality control for years, told us that we’re not

good enough, not safe enough, not careful enough to enter their auto mar-

ket-and now we see that they’re not so smart after all. That’s the bottom

line, Tom,” the engineer went on, feeling his oats. “The gas tanks on those

two Crestas had less structural integrity than a garbage can made with 18905

technology. And that’s why those five people burned to death.”

That incidental remark proved the label for the entire event. The next

morning five galvanized steel trash cans were found stacked at the entrance

to the Cresta Plant in Kentucky, along with a sign that read, WHY DON’T YOU

TRY THESE? A CNN crew picked it up, having been tipped off beforehand,

and by noon that was their headline story. It was all a matter of perception. It

would take weeks to determine what had really gone wrong, but by that time

perception and the reactions to it would have long since overtaken reality.

The Master of MV Nissan Courier hadn’t received any notice at all. His was

a surpassingly ugly ship that looked for all the world as though she had

begun life as a solid rectangular block of steel, then had its bow scooped out

with a large spoon for conversion into something that could move at sea.

Top-heavy and cursed with a huge sail area that often made her the plaything

of even the gentlest winds, she required four Moran tugboats to dock at the

Dundalk Marine Terminal in the Port of Baltimore. Once the city’s first air-

port, the large, flat expanse was a natural receiving point for automobiles.

The ship’s captain controlled the complex and tricky evolution of coming

alongside, only then to notice that the enormous carpark was unusually full.

That was odd, he thought. The last Nissan ship had come in the previous

Thursday, and ordinarily the lot should have been half empty by now, mak-

ing room for his cargo. Looking farther, he saw only three car-trailers wait-

ing to load their own cargo for transport to the nearest distributor; normally

they were lined up like taxis at a train station.

‘ ‘I guess they weren’t kidding,” the Chesapeake Bay pilot observed. He’d

boarded the Courier at the Virginia Capes and had caught the TV news on

the pilot ship that anchored there. He shook his head and made his way to the

accommodation ladder. He’d let the shipping agent give \\w word to the

Master.

The shipping agent did just that, climbing up the ladder, then to the

hridge. The storage lot had room for about two hundred additional cars, cer-

tainly not more than that, and as yet he had no instructions from the line’s

management on what to tell the captain to do. Ordinarily the ship would be

in port for no more than twenty-four hours, the time required to unload the

cars, refuel and revictual the ship for her return journey most of the way

across the world, where the same routine would be followed in reverse, this

lime loading cars into the empty ship for yet another voyage to America. The

ships of this fleet were on a boring but remorseless schedule whose dates

were as fixed as the stars of the night sky.

“What do you mean?” the Master asked.

1’ Every car has to be safety inspected.” The shipping agent waved toward

the terminal. “See for yourself.”

The Master did just that, lifting his Nikon binoculars to see agents from

Ihe Bureau of Customs, six of them, using a hydraulic jack to lift up a new

car so that one of their number could crawl under it for some reason or other

while others made notations on various official forms on their clipboards.

Certainly they didn’t seem to be in much of a hurry. Through the glasses he

could see their bodies rock back in forth in what had to be mirth, instead of

working as diligently as government employees ought. That was the reason

he didn’t make the connection with the odd instances on which he’d seen

Japanese customs inspectors doing similar but much more stringent inspec-

tions of American, German, or Swedish cars on the docks of his home port

of Yokohama.

“But we could be here for days!” the Master blurted out.

“Maybe a week,” the agent said optimistically.

“But there’s only space for one ship here! Nissan Voyager is due here in

seventy hours.”

“I can’t help that.”

“But my schedule-” There was genuine horror in the Master’s voice.

“I can’t help that either,” the shipping agent observed patiently to a man

whose predictable world had just disintegrated.

“How can we help?” Seiji Nagumo asked.

“What do you mean?” the Commerce Department official replied.

“This terrible incident.” And Nagumo was genuinely horrified. Japan’s

historical construction of wood-and-paper had long since been replaced by

more substantial buildings, but its legacy was a deep cultural dread of fire. A

citizen who allowed a fire to start on his property and then to spread to the

property of another still faced criminal sanctions, not mere civil liability. He

fell a very real sense of shame thai a product manufactured in his country

had caused such a horrid end. “1 have not yet had an official communique

from my government, but I tell you for myself, this is terrible beyond words.

I assure you that we will launch our own investigation.”

“It’s a little late for that, Seiji. As you will recall, we discussed this very

issue-”

“Yes, that is true, I admit it, but you must understand that even if we had

reached an agreement, the materials in question would still have been in the

pipeline-it would not have made a difference to these people.”

It was an altogether pleasant moment for the American trade-negotiator.

The deaths in Tennessee, well, that was too bad, but he’d been putting up

with this bastard’s arrogance for three years now, and the current situation,

for all its tragedy, was a sweet one.

“Seiji-san, as I said, it’s a little late for that. I suppose we will be happy to

have some degree of cooperation from your people, but we have our own job

to do. After all, I’m sure you’ll understand that the duty to protect the lives

and safety of American citizens is properly the job of the American govern-

ment. Clearly we have been remiss in that duty, and we must make up for our

own unfortunate failings.”

“What we can do, Robert, is to subsidize the operation. I have been told