raged, but more of it was approaching panic. If the Americans were serious,
then …
No, they couldn’t be.
“But what about the possibility of a trade war?” Jim Lehrer asked that
Trent person.
‘ ‘Jim, I’ve been saying for years that we’ve been in a trade war with Japan
for a generation. What we’ve just done is to level the playing field for every-
one.”
“But if this situation goes further, won’t American interests be hurt?”
“Jim, what are those interests? Are American business interests worth
burning up little children?” Trent shot back at once.
Matsuda cringed when he heard that. The image was just too striking for a
man whose earliest childhood memory was of the early morning of March
lo, 1945. Not even three years old, his mother carrying him from his house
looking back and seeing the towering flames caused by Curtis LeMay’s 21 st
Bomber Command. For years he’d awakened screaming in the night, and for
all his adult life he’d been a committed pacifist. He’d studied history,
learned how and why the war had begun, how America had pushed his ante-
cedents into a corner from which there had been only a single escape-and
that a false one. Perhaps Yamata was right, he thought, perhaps the entire
affair had been of America’s making. First, force Japan into a war, then
crush them in an effort to forestall the natural ascendancy of a nation des-
tined to challenge American power. For all that, he had never been able to
understand how the zaibatsu of the time, members of the Black Dragon Soci-
ety, had not been able to find a clever way out, for wasn’t war just too dread-
ful an option? Wasn’t peace, however humiliating, to be preferred to the
awful destruction that came with war?
It was different now. Now he was one of them, and now he saw what lay
in the abyss of not going to war. Were they so wrong then, he asked himself,
no longer hearing the TV or his translator. They’d sought real economic sta-
bility for their country: the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.
The history books of his youth had called it all a lie, but was it?
For his country’s economy to function, it needed resources, raw materials,
but Japan had virtually none except coal, and that polluted the air. Japan
needed iron, bauxite, petroleum, needed almost everything to be shipped in,
in order to be transformed into finished goods that could be shipped out.
They needed cash to pay for the raw materials, and that cash came from the
buyers of the finished products. If America, his country’s largest and most
important trading partner, suddenly stopped trading, that cash flow would
stop. Almost sixty billion dollars.
There would be various adjustments, of course. Today on the international
money markets, the yen would plummet against the dollar and every other
hard currency in the world. That would make Japanese products less expen-
sive everywhere-
But Europe would follow suit. He was sure of that. Trade regulations al-
ready stiffer than the Americans’ would become tougher still, and that trad-
ing surplus would also decline, and at the same time the value of the yen
would fall all the more. It would take more cash to buy the resources without
which his country would enter total collapse. Like falling from a precipice,
the downward acceleration would merely grow faster and faster, and the
only consolation of the moment was that he would not be there to see the end
of it, for long before that happened, this office would no longer be his. He’d
be disgraced, with all the rest of his colleagues. Some would choose death,
perhaps, but not so many. That was something for TV now, the ancient tradi-
tions that had grown from a culture rich in pride but poor in everything else.
Life was too comfortable to give it up so easily-or was it? What lay ten
years in his country’s future? A return to poverty … or … something else?
The decision would partly be his, Matsuda told himself, because the gov-
ernment of his country was really an extension of the collective will of him-
self and his peers. He looked down at the shaking hands in his lap. He
thanked his two employees, and sent them on their way with a gracious nod
before he was able to lift his hands to the surface of his desk and reach for a
telephone.
Clark thought of it as a “forever flight,” and even though KAL had up-
graded them to first-class, it really hadn’t helped much; not even the charm-
ing Korean flight attendants in lovely traditional dress could make the
process much better than it was. He’d seen two of the three movies-on
other flights-and the third wasn’t all that interesting. The sky-news radio
channel had held his interest for the forty minutes required to update him on
the happenings of the world, but after that it became repetitive, and his mem-
ory was too finely trained to need that. The KAL magazine was only good
for thirty minutes-even that was a stretch-and he was current on the
American news journals. What remained was crushing boredom. At least
Ding had his course material to divert him. He was currently reading through
the Masseys’ classic Dreadnought, about how international relations had
broken down a century earlier because the various European nations-more
properly their leaders-had failed to make the leap of imagination required
to keep the peace. Clark remembered having read it soon after publication.
“They just can’t make it, can they?” he asked his partner after an hour of
reading over his shoulder. Ding read slowly, taking in every word one at a
time. Well, it was study material, wasn’t it?
“Not real smart, John.” Chavez looked up from his pages of notes and
stretched, which was easier for his small frame than it was for Clark’s.’ ‘Pro-
fessor Alpher wants me to identify three or four crucial fault-points for my
thesis, bad decisions, that sort of thing. More to it than that, y’know? What
they had to do was, well, like step outside themselves and look back and see
what it was all about, but the dumb fucks didn’t know how to do that. They
couldn’t be objective. The other part is, they didn’t think anything all the
way through. They had all those great tactical ideas, but they never really
looked at where things were leading them. You know, I can identify the
goofs for the doc, wrap it up real nice just like she wants, but it’s gonna be
bullshit, John. The problem wasn’t the decisions. The problem was the peo-
ple making them. They just weren’t big enough for what they were doing.
They just didn’t see far enough, and that’s what the peons were paying them
10 do, y’know?” Chavez rubbed his eyes, grateful for the distraction. He’d
been reading and studying for eleven hours, with only brief breaks for meals
and head calls. “I need to run a few miles,” he grumped, also weary from
the night.
John checked his watch. “Forty minutes out. We’ve already started our
descent.”
“You suppose the big shots are any different today?” Ding asked tiredly.
Clark laughed. “My boy, what’s the one thing in life that never
changes?”
The young officer smiled. “Yeah, and the other one is, people like us are
always caught in the open when they blow it.” He rose and walked to the
head to wash his face. Looking in the mirror, he was glad that they’d spend a
day at an Agency safe house. He’d need to wash up and shave and unwind
before putting on his mission identity. And maybe make some start notes for
his thesis.
Clark looked out the window and saw a Korean landscape lit up with the
pink, feathery light of a breaking dawn. The lad was turning intellectual on
him. That was enough for a weary, eyes-closed grin with his face turned to
the plastic window. The kid was smart enough, but what would happen
when Ding wrote the dumb fucks didn’t know how into his master’s thesis?
He was talking about Gladstone and Bismarck, after all. That got him laugh-
ing so hard that he started coughing in the airliner-dry air. He opened his
eyes to see his partner emerge from the first-class head. Ding almost bumped
into one of the flight attendants, and though he smiled politely at her and
stepped aside to let her pass, he didn’t track her with his eyes, Clark noticed,
didn’t do what men usually did with someone so young and attractive.
Clearly his mind was set on another female form.
Damn, this is getting serious.
Murray nearly exploded: “We can’t do that now! God damn it, Bill, we’ve
got everything lined up, the information’s going to leak sure as hell, and
that’s not even fair to Kealty, much less our witnesses.”