American company that invented it. Their engineers really know how to sup-
port their stuff, too. They’re in practically every month with a software up-
grade.”
“Where’s the company located?” Jack asked.
“Someplace in California.”
“Then it’s an American product, Cathy.”
”But not all the parts are,” his wife pointed out.
‘ ‘Look, the law allows for special exceptions to be made for uniquely val-
uable things that-”
“The government’s going to make the rules, right?”
“True,” Jack conceded. “Wait a minute. You told me their docs-”
‘ ‘I never said they were dumb, just that they need to think more creatively.
You know,” she added, “just like the government does.”
“I told the President this wasn’t all that great an idea. He says the law will
be in full force just a few months.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.”
finds and Tides
“I’ve never seen anything like this.”
“But your country made thousands of them,” the PR director objected.
‘ ‘That is true,” Klerk agreed,’ ‘but the factories were not open to the pub-
lic, and not even to Soviet journalists.”
Chavez was doing the photography work, and was putting on quite a
show, John Clark noted without a smile, dancing around the workers in their
white coveralls and hard hats, turning, twisting, squatting, his Nikon pressed
against his face, changing rolls every few minutes, and along the way getting
a few hundred frames of the missile production line. They were 88-19 mis-
sile bodies, sure as hell. Clark knew the specifications, and had seen enough
photos at Langley to know what they looked like-and enough to spot some
local modifications. On the Russian models the exterior was usually green.
Everything the Soviet Union had built for military use had to be camou-
flaged, even missiles inside of transport containers sitting in the bottom of
concrete silos were the same pea-soup green that they liked to paint on tanks.
But not these. The paint had weight, and there was no point in expending
fuel to drive the few kilograms of paint to suborbital speed, and so these
missile bodies were bright, shiny steel. The fittings and joints looked far
more refined than he would have expected on a Russian production line.
“You’ve modified our original design, haven’t you?”
“Correct.” The PR guy smiled. “The basic design was excellent. Our
engineers were very impressed, but we have different standards, and better
materials. You have a good eye, Mr. Klerk. Not too long ago an American
NASA engineer made the same observation.” The man paused. “What sort
of Russian name is Klerk?”
“It’s not Russian,” Clark said, continuing to scribble his notes. “My
grandfather was English, a Communist. His name was Clark. In the 19208 he
came to Russia to be part of the new experiment.” An embarrassed grin. “I
suppose he’s disappointed, wherever he is.”
‘ ‘And your colleague?”
“Chekov? He’s from the Crimea. The Tartar blood really shows, doesn’t
it? So how many of these will you build?”
Chavez was at the top end of the missile body at the end of the line. A few
of the assembly workers were casting annoyed glances his way, and he took
that to mean that he was doing his job of imitating an intrusive, pain-in-the-
ass journalist right. Aside from that the job was pretty easy. The assembly
bay of the factory was brightly lit to assist the workers in their tasks, and
though he’d used his light meter for show, the camera’s own monitoring
chip told him that he had all the illumination he needed. This Nikon F-20
was one badass camera. Ding switched rolls. He was using ASA-64 color
slide film-Fuji film, of course-because it had better color saturation,
whatever that meant.
In due course, Mr. C shook hands with the factory representative and they
all headed toward the door. Chavez-Chekov-twisted the lens off the cam-
era body and stowed everything away in his bag. Friendly smiles and bows
sent them on their way. Ding slid a CD into the player and turned the sound
way up. It made conversation difficult, but John was always a stickler for the
rules. And he was right. There was no knowing if someone might have
bugged their rental car. Chavez leaned his head over to the right so that he
wouldn’t have to scream his question.
“John, is it always this easy?”
Clark wanted to smile, but didn’t. He’d reactivated yet another member of
THISTLE a few hours earlier, who had insisted that he and Ding look at the
assembly floor.
“You know, I used to go into Russia, back when you needed more than a
passport and American Express.”
“Doing what?”
“Mainly getting people out. Sometimes recovering data packs. Couple of
times I emplaced cute little gadgets. Talk about lonely, talk about scary.”
Clark shook his head. Only his wife knew that he colored his hair, just a
little, because he didn’t like gray there. “You have any idea what we would
have paid to get into . . . Plesetsk, I think, is where they made those things,
the Chelomei Design Bureau.”
“They really wanted us to see that stuff.”
“Sure as hell,” Clark agreed.
“What do I do with the photos?”
John almost said to toss them, but it was data, and they were working on
company time. He had to draft and send a story to Interfax to maintain his
cover-he wondered if anyone would print it. Wouldn’t that be a gas, he
thought with a shako of the head. All they were doing, really, was circling in
a holding pattern, waiting for the word and the opportunity to meet Kimberly
Norton. The film and a copy of his story, he decided, would find their way
into the diplomatic bag. If nothing else, it was good practice for Ding-and
for himself, Clark admitted.
“Turn that damned noise down,” he said, and they switched to Russian.
Good language practice.
“I miss the winters at home,” Chekov observed.
“I don’t,” Klerk answered.’ ‘Where did you ever acquire the taste for that
awful American music?” he asked with a growl.
“Voice of America,” came the reply. Then the voice laughed.
“Yevgeniy Pavlovich, you have no respect. My ears can’t tolerate that
damned noise. Don’t you have something else to play?”
“Anything would be an improvement,” the technician observed to him-
self, as he adjusted his headphones and shook his head to clear them of the
damned gaijin noise. Worse still, his own son listened to the same trash.
Despite all the denials that had gone back and forth over the past few weeks,
the reality of it was finally plain for all to see. The huge, ugly car-carriers
swinging at anchor in several different harbors were silent witnesses on
every TV news broadcast on NHK. The Japanese car companies owned a
total of a hundred nineteen of them, not counting foreign-flag ships operat-
ing under charter that were now heading back to their own home ports. Ships
that never stayed still any longer than it took to load another cargo of autos
now sat like icebergs, clogging anchorages. There was no sense in loading
and dispatching them. Those awaiting pier space in American ports would
take weeks to unload. The crews took the opportunity to do programmed
maintenance, but they knew that when those make-work tasks were done,
they would truly be out of business.
The effect snowballed rapidly. There was little point in manufacturing au-
tomobiles that could not be shipped. There was literally no place to keep
them. As soon as the huge holding lots at the ports were filled, and the train-
cars on their sidetracks, and the lots at the assembly plants, there was simply
no choice. Fully a half-dozen TV crews were on hand when the line supervi-
sor at the Nissan plant reached up and pressed a button. That button rang
bells all up and down the line. Ordinarily used because of a problem in the
assembly process, this time it meant that the line was stopped. From the be-
ginning, where the frames were placed on the moving chain-belt, to the end,
where a navy-blue car sat with its door open, awaiting a driver to take it out
of the building, workers stood still, looking at one another. They’d told
themselves that this could never happen. Reality to them was showing up for
work, performing their functions, attaching parts, testing, checking off-
very rarely finding a problem-and repeating the processes for endless
numbing but well-compensated hours, and at this moment it was as if the
world had ceased to rotate. They’d known, after a fashion. The newspapers
and TV broadcasts, the rumors that had raced up and down the line far more
quickly than the cars ever had, the bulletins from management. Despite all
that, they now stood around as if stunned by a hard blow to the face.
On the floor of their national stock exchange, the traders were holding
small portable televisions, a new kind from Sony that folded up and fit in the