the day the Fed would announce a quarter-point increase in the discount
rate-just a temporary one, they told people, off the record and not for attri-
bution. The Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, however, viewed
the entire development as good in the long term. It would bo myopic on (heir
part, but then that condition was worldwide at the moment.
Even before that decision was made, other men were discussing the long
term as well. It required the largest hot tub in the bathhouse, which was then
closed for the evening to its other well-heeled customers. The regular staff
was dismissed. The clients would be served by personal assistants who, it
turned out, kept their distance as well. In fact, even the normal ablutions
were dispensed with. After the most cursory of greetings, the men removed
their jackets and ties and sat around on the floor, unwilling to waste time
with the usual preliminaries.
‘ ‘It will be even worse tomorrow,” a banker noted. That was all he had to
say.
Yamata looked around the room. It was all he could do not to laugh. The
signs had been clear as much as five years before, when the first major auto
company had quietly discontinued its lifetime-employment policy. The free
ride of Japanese business had actually ended then, for those who had the wit
to pay attention. The rest of them had thought all the reverses to be merely
temporary “irregularities,” their favorite term for it, but their myopia had
worked entirely in Yamata’s favor. The shock value of what was happening
now was his best friend. Disappointingly, but not surprisingly, only a hand-
ful of those in the room had seen it for what it was. In the main, those were
Yamata-san’s closest allies.
Which was not to say that he or they had been immune to the adversity
that had taken the national unemployment rate to almost 5 percent, merely
that they had mitigated their damage by carefully considered measures.
Those measures were enough, however, to make their originators appear to
be models of perspicacity.
“There is an adage from the American Revolution,” one of their number
noted dryly. He had a reputation as something of an intellectual.’ ‘From their
Benjamin Franklin, I believe. We can either hang together or we will surely
hang separately. If we do not stand together now, my friends, we will all be
destroyed. One at a time or all at once, it will not matter.”
“And our country with us,” the banker added, earning Yamata’s grati-
tude.
“Remember when they needed us?” Yamata asked. “They needed our
bases to checkmate the Russians, to support the Koreans, to service their
ships. Well, my friends, what do they need us for now?”
“Yes, and we need them,” Matsuda noted.
“Very good, Kozo,” Yamata responded acidly. “We need them so much
that we will ruin our national economy, destroy our people and our culture,
and reduce our nation to being their vassal-again!”
“Yamata-san, there is no time for that,” another corporate chairman
chided gently. “What you proposed in our last meeting, it was very bold and
very dangerous.”
” It was I who requested this meeting,” Matsuda pointed out with dignity.
“Your pardon, Kozo.” Yamata inclined his head by way of apology.
“These are difficult times, Raizo,” Matsuda replied, accepting it gra-
ciously. Then he added, “I find myself leaning toward your direction.”
Yamata took a very deep breath, angry at himself for misreading the
man’s intent. Kozo is right. These are difficult times. “Please, my friend,
share your thoughts with us.”
“We need the Americans … or we need something else.” Every head in
the room except for one looked down. Yamata read their faces, and taking a
moment to control his excitement, he realized that he saw what he wished to
see. It wasn’t a wish or an illusion. It was really there. “It is a grave thing
which we must consider now, a great gamble. And yet it is a gamble which I
fear we must undertake.”
“Can we really do it?” a very desperate banker asked.
“Yes,” Yamata said. “We can do it. There is an element of risk, of
course. I do not discount that, but there is much in our favor.” He outlined
the facts briefly. Surprisingly, there was no opposition to his views this time.
There were questions, numerous ones, endless ones, all of which he was pre-
pared to answer, but no one really objected this time. Some had to be con-
cerned, even terrified, but the simple fact, he realized, was that they were
more terrified by what they knew would happen in the morning, and the
next, and the next. They saw the end of their way of life, their perks, their
personal prestige, and that frightened them worse than anything else. Then-
country owed them for all they had done, for the long climb up the corporate
ladders, for all their work and diligence, for all the good decisions they
had made. And so the decision was made-not with enthusiasm-but made
even so.
Mancuso’s first job of the morning was to look over the op-orders. Asheville
and Charlotte would have to discontinue their wonderfully useful work,
tracking whales in the Gulf of Alaska, to join up for Exercise DATELINE
PARTNERS, along with John Stennis, Enterprise, and the usual cast of thou-
sands. The exercise had been planned months in advance, of course. It was a
fortunate accident that the script for the event was not entirely divorced from
what this half of PacFleet was working up for. On the twenty-seventh, two
weeks after the conclusion of PARTNERS, Stennis and Big-E would deploy
southwest for the IO, with a single courtesy stop in Singapore, to relieve Ike
and Abe.
“You know, they have us outnumbered now,” Commander (Captain
selectee) Wally Chambers observed. A few months earlier he’d relinquished
command of USS Key Wext. and Mancuso had asked lor him to In- his opera-
tions officer. The transfer from Groton, where Chambers had exacted an-
other staff job, to Honolulu had not exactly been a crushing blow (o the
officer’s ego. Ten years earlier, Wally would have been up for u boomer
command, or maybe a tender, or maybe a squadron. But the boomers were
all gone, there were only three tenders operating, and the squadron billets
were filled. That put Chambers in a holding pattern until his “major com-
mand” ticket could be punched, and until then Mancuso wanted him back. It
was not an uncommon failing of naval officers to dip into their own former
wardrooms.
Admiral Mancuso looked up, not so much in surprise as in realization.
Wally was right. The Japanese Navy had twenty-eight submarines, conven-
lionally powered boats called SSKs, and he only had nineteen.
“How many are up and running?” Bart asked, wondering what their
overhaul/availability cycle was like.
“Twenty-two, according to what I saw yesterday. Hell, Admiral, they’re
committing ten to the exercise, including all the Harushios. From what I
gather from Fleet Intel, they’re working up real hard for us, too.” Chambers
leaned back and stroked his mustache. It was new, because Chambers had a
baby face and he thought a commanding officer should look older than
twelve. The problem was, it itched.
“Everybody tells me they’re pretty good,” ComSubPac noted.
“You haven’t had a ride yet?” Sub-Ops asked. The Admiral shook his
head.
“Scheduled for next summer.”
“Well, they better be pretty good,” Chambers thought. Five of Man-
cuso’s subs were tasked to the exercise. Three would be in close to the car-
rier battle group, with Asheville and Charlotte conducting independent
operations, which weren’t really independent at all. They’d be playing a
game with four Japanese subs five hundred miles northwest of Kure Atoll,
pretending to do hunter-killer operations against a submarine-barrier patrol.
The exercise was fairly similar to what they expected to do in the Indian
Ocean. The Japanese Navy, essentially a defensive collection of destroyers
and frigates and diesel subs, would try to withstand an advance of a two-
carrier battle group. Their job was to die gloriously-something the Japa-
nese were historically good at, Mancuso told himself with a wispy
smile-but also to try to make a good show of it. They’d be as clever as they
could, trying to sneak their tin cans in close enough to launch their Harpoon
surface-to-surface missiles, and surely their newer destroyers had a fair
chance of surviving. The Kongos especially were fine platforms, the Japa-
nese counterpart to the American Arleigh Burke class, with the Aegis radar/
missile system. Expensive ships, they all had battleship names from World
War II. The original Kongo had fallen prey to an American submarine, Sea-
lion II, if Mancuso remembered properly. That was also the name of one of
the few new American submarines assigned to Atlantic Fleet. Mancuso
didn’t have a Seawolf-class under his command yet. In any case, the aviators
would have to find a way to deal with an Aegis ship, and that wasn’t some-