Statements like this never amounted to much, and only C-SPAN carried
them at all, though the network newsies were always there with cameras in
case the airplane blew up on takeoff. Concluding his remarks, Durling took
his wife, Anne, by the arm and walked to the stairs, where a sergeant saluted.
At the door of the aircraft, the President and the First Lady turned to give a
final wave as though already on the campaign trail-in a very real way this
trip was part of that almost-continuous process-then went inside. C-SPAN
switched back to the floor of the House, where various junior members were
giving brief speeches under special orders. The President would be in the air
for eleven hours, Newton knew, more time than he needed.
It was time to go to work.
The ancient adage was true enough, he thought, arranging his notes. If
more than one person knew it, it wasn’t a secret at all. Even less so if you
both knew part of it and also knew who knew the rest, because then you
could sit down over dinner and let on that you knew, and the other person
would think that you knew it all, and would then tell you the parts you hadn’t
learned quite yet. The right smiles, nods, grunts, and a few carefully selected
words would keep your source going until it was all there in plain sight.
Newton supposed it was not terribly different for spies. Perhaps he would
have been a good one, but it didn’t pay any better than his stint in Con-
gress-not even as well, in fact-and he’d long since decided to apply his
talent to something that could make him a decent living,
The rest of the game was a lot easier. You had to select the right person to
give the information to, and that choice was made merely by reading the
local papers carefully. Every reporter had a hot-button item, something for
which he or she had a genuinely passionate interest, and for that reason re-
porters were no different from anyone else. If you knew what buttons to
push, you could manipulate anyone. What a pity it hadn’t quite worked with
the people in his district, Newton thought, lifting the phone and punching the
buttons.
“Libby Holtzman.”
“Hi, Libby, this is Roy. How are things?”
“A little slow,” she allowed, wondering if her husband, Bob, would get
anything good on the Moscow trip with the presidential party.
“How about dinner?” He knew that her husband was away.
“What about?” she asked. She knew it wasn’t a tryst or something simi-
larly foolish. Newton was a player, and usually had something interesting to
tell.
“It’ll be worth your time,” he promised. “Jockey Club, seven-thirty?”
“I’ll be there.”
Newton smiled. It was all fair play, wasn’t it? He’d lost his congressional
seat on the strength of an accusation about influence-peddling. It hadn’t been
strong enough to have merited prosecution (someone else had influenced
that), but it had been enough, barely, to persuade 50.7 percent of the voters
in that off-year election that someone else should have the chance to repre-
sent them. In a presidential-election year, Newton thought, he would almost
certainly have eked out a win, but congressional seats once lost are almost
never regained.
It could have been much worse. This life wasn’t so bad, was it? He’d kept
the same house, kept his kids in the same school, then moved them on to
good colleges, kept his membership in the same country club. He just had a
different constituency now, no ethics laws to trouble his mind about-not
that they ever had, really-and it sure as hell paid a lot better, didn’t it?
DATIJ.INI: PARTNERS was being run out via computer-satellite relay three
of them, in fact. The Japanese Navy was linking all of its data to its llcct-
operations center in Yokohama. The U.S. Navy did the same into Heel-Ops
at Pearl Harbor. Both headquarters offices used a third link to swap their
own pictures. The umpires who scored the exercise in both locations thus
had access to everything, but the individual fleet commanders did not. The
purpose of the game was to give both sides realistic battle training, for which
reason cheating was not encouraged-“cheating” was a concept by turns
foreign and integral with the fighting of wars, of course.
Pacific Fleet’s type commanders, the admirals in charge of the surface,
air, submarine, and service forces, respectively, watched from their chairs as
the game unfolded, each wondering how his underlings would perform.
“Sato’s no dummy, is he?” Commander Chambers noted.
“The boy’s got some beautiful moves,” Dr. Jones opined, A senior con-
tractor with his own “special-access” clearance, he’d been allowed into the
center on Mancuso’s parole. “But it isn’t going to help him up north.”
“Oh?” SubPac turned and smiled. “You know something I don’t?”
“The sonar departments on Charlotte and Asheville are damned good,
Skipper. My people worked with them to set up the new tracking software,
remember?”
“The CO’s aren’t bad either,” Mancuso pointed out.
Jones nodded agreement. “You bet, sir. They know how to listen, just like
you did.”
“God,” Chambers breathed, looking down at the new four-ring shoulder
boards and imagining he could feel the added weight. “Admiral, you ever
wonder how we would have made it without Jonesy here?”
“We had Chief Laval with us, remember?” Mancuso said.
“Frenchy’s son is the lead sonarman on Asheville, Mr. Chambers.” For
Jones, Mancuso would always be “skipper” and Chambers would always
be a lieutenant. Neither officer objected. It was one of the rules of the naval
service that bonded officers and (in this case, former) enlisted personnel.
“I didn’t know that,” SubPac admitted.
“Just joined up with her. He was on Tennessee before. Very sharp kid,
made first-class three years out of his A-school.”
“That’s faster than you did it,” Chambers observed. “Is he that good?”
“Sure as hell. I’m trying to recruit him for my business. He got married
last year, has a kid on the way. It shouldn’t be too hard to bribe him out into
civilian life.”
“Thanks a lot, Jonesy,” Mancuso growled. “I oughta kick your ass outa
here.”
“Oh, come on, Skipper. When’s the last time we got together for some
real fun?” In addition to which, Jones’s new whale-hunting software had
been incorporated in what was left of the Pacific SOSUS system. “About
time for an update.”
The fact that both sides had observers in the other’s headquarters was
something of a complication, largely because there were assets and capabili-
ties in both cases that were not strictly speaking shared. In this case, SOSUS-
generated traces that might or might not be the Japanese submarine force
northwest of Kure were actually better than what appeared on the main plot-
ting board. The real traces were given to Mancuso and Chambers. Each side
had two submarines. Neither American boat showed up on the traces, but the
Japanese boats were conventionally powered, and had to go periodically to
snorkeling depth in order to run their diesels and recharge their batteries.
Though the Japanese submarines had their own version of the American
Prairie-Masker systems, Jones’s new software had gone a long way to defeat
that countermeasure. Mancuso and the rest retired to the SubPac plotting
room to examine the newest data.
“Okay, Jonesy, tell me what you see,” Mancuso ordered, looking at the
paper printouts from the underwater hydrophones that littered the bottom of
the Pacific.
The data was displayed both electronically on TV-type displays and on
fan-fold paper of the sort once used for computer printouts for more detailed
analysis. For work like this, the latter was preferred, and there were two sets.
One of them had already been marked up by the oceanographic technicians
of the local SOSUS detachment. To make this a double-blind analysis, and
to see if Jones still knew how, Mancuso kept separate the set already
analyzed by his people.
Still short of forty, Jones had gray already in his thick dark hair, though he
chewed gum now instead of smoking. The intensity was still there, Mancuso
saw. Dr. Ron Jones flipped pages like an accountant on the trail of embezzle-
ment, his finger tracing down the vertical lines on which frequencies were
recorded.
“We assume that they’ll snort every eight hours or so?” he asked.
“That’s the smart thing, to keep their batteries fully charged,” Chambers
agreed with a nod.
“What time are they operating on?” Jones asked. Typically, American
submarines at sea adjusted their clocks to Greenwich Mean Time-recently
changed to “Universal Time” with the diminution of the Royal Navy,
whose power had once allowed the prime meridian to be defined by the Brit-
ish.
“I presume Tokyo,” Mancuso replied. “That’s us minus five.”
“So we start looking for patterns, midnight and even hours their time.”
There were five of the wide-folded sheets. Jones flipped one complete set at
a time, noting the time references in the margins. It took him ten minutes.