‘ T was young and dumb then.” / smoked, too, he remembered. Such good
things for concentration and alertness. But most submarines didn’t allow
people to smoke at all. Amazing that some crews hadn’t mutinied. What was
the Navy coming to. “See what I told you about my software?”
“You telling us that even you can be replaced by a computer?”
The contractor’s head turned. “You know, Mr. Chambers, as you get
older you have to watch the coffee intake.”
” You two going at it again?” Admiral Mancuso rejoined them after shav-
ing in the nearby head.
“I think Jonesy was planning to hit Banzai Beach this afternoon.” Cap-
tain Chambers chuckled, sipping at his decaf. “He’s getting bored with the
exercise.”
“They do take a while,” SubPac confirmed.
“Hey, guys, we’re validating my product, aren’t we’.'”
“If you want some insider information, yeah, I’m going to recommend
you get the contract.” Not the least reason for which was thai Jones had
underbid IBM by a good 20 percent.
“Next step, I just hired two guys from Woods Hole. That never occurred
to the suits at Big Blue.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re going to decode whale talk, now that we can hear it so much bet-
ter. Greenpeace is going to love us. The submarine mission for the next dec-
ade: making the seas safe for our fellow mammals. We can also track those
Jap bastards who hunt them.”
“What do you mean?” Chambers asked.
“You want funding? I have an idea that’ll keep it for you.”
“What’s that, Jonesy?” Mancuso asked.
“The Woods Hole guys think they have the alarm calls for three species
identified: for humpback, fins, and seis. They got them by listening in with
hydrophones while they were hanging out with whalers. I can program that
for active-it’s in the freq range we transmit on. So what we can do is have
subs trail along with the whalers and broadcast the call, and guess what? The
whalers won’t find shit. No whale in his right mind will get within twenty
miles of another whale screaming that he’s being mugged. Not much soli-
darity in the cetacean community.”
“You turning tree-hugger on us?” Chambers wondered. But he thought
about it and nodded slowly.
‘ ‘All those people have to tell their friends in Congress is that we’re doing
good scientific work. Okay? Not that they love us, not that they approve of
our power plants, just that we’re doing good work. What I’m giving you
guys is a mission for the next ten years.” Jones was also giving his company
work for at least that long, but that was beside the point. Mancuso and the
submarine community needed the work. “Besides, I used to enjoy listening
to them when we were on Dallas.”
“Signal from Asheville,” a communications specialist reported from the
door. “They have acquired their target.”
“Well, they’re pretty good,” Jones said, looking down at the plot. “But
we’re still the big kid on the block.”
Air Force One floated into the usual soft landing at Sheremetyevo Airport
one minute early. There was a collective sigh as the thrust-reversers cut in,
slowing the heavy aircraft rapidly. Soon everyone started hearing the click
of seat belts coming off.
“What woke you up so early?” Cathy asked her husband.
“Political stuff at home. I guess I can tell you now.” Ryan explained on,
(hen remembered he had the fax still folded in his pocket. He handed il over,
cautioning his wife that it wasn’t all true.
“I always thought he was slimy.” She handed it back.
“Oh, don’t you remember when he was the Conscience of Congress?”
Jack asked quietly.
“Maybe he was, but I never thought he had one of his own.”
‘ ‘Just remember-”
‘ ‘If anybody asks, I’m a surgeon here to meet with my Russian colleagues
and do a little sightseeing.” Which was entirely true. The state trip would
make considerable demands on Ryan’s time in his capacity as a senior Presi-
dential advisor. But it wasn’t all that different from a normal family vacation
either. Their tastes in sightseeing overlapped, but didn’t entirely coincide,
and Cathy knew that her husband loathed shopping in any form. It was
something odd about men in general and her husband in particular.
The aircraft turned onto the taxiway, and things started to happen. Presi-
dent and Mrs. Durling emerged from their compartment, all ready to present
themselves as the embodiment of their country. People remained seated to
let them pass, aided by the intimidating presence of both Secret Service and
Air Force security people.
“Hell of a job,” Ryan breathed, watching the President put on his happy
face, and knowing that it was at least partially a lie. He had to do so many
things, and make each appear as though it were the only thing he had to do.
He had to compartmentalize everything, when on one task to pretend that the
others didn’t exist. Maybe like Cathy and her patients. Wasn’t that an inter-
esting thought? They heard band music when the door opened, the local ver-
sion of “Ruffles and Flourishes.”
”I guess we can get up now.”
The protocol was already established. People hunched at the windows to
watch the President reach the bottom of the steps, shake hands with the new
Russian President and the U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Republic. The
rest of the official party then went down the steps, while the press deplaned
from the after door.
It was very different from Ryan’s last trip to Moscow. The airport was the
same, but the time of day, the weather, and the whole atmosphere could not
have been more different. It only took one face to make that clear, that of
Sergey Nikolayevich Golovko, chairman of the Russian Foreign Intelli-
gence Service, who stood behind the front rank of dignitaries. In the old days
he would not have shown his face at all, but now his blue eyes were aimed
right at Ryan, and they twinkled with mirth as Jack led his wife down the
stairs and to their place at the bottom.
The initial signs were a little scary, as was not unusual when political factors
interfered with economic forces. Organized labor was flexing its muscles,
and doing it cleverly for the first time in years. In cars and their associated
components alone, it was possible that hundreds of thousands ol jobs would
be coming back to the fold. The arithmetic was straightforward: nearly
ninety billion dollars of products had arrived from overseas in the last year
und would now have to be produced domestically. Sitting down with their
management counterparts, labor came to the collective decision that the only
thing missing was the government’s word that TRA would not be a paper
tiger, soon to be cast away in the name of international amity. To get that
assurance, however, they had to work Congress. So the lobbying was al-
ready under way, backed by the realization that the election cycle was com-
ing up. Congress could not do one thing with one hand and something else
with the other. Promises were made, and action taken, and for once both
crossed party lines. The media were already commenting on how well it was
working.
It wasn’t just a matter of hiring employees. There would have to be a huge
increase in capacity. Old plants and those operating under their capacity
would need to be upgraded and so preliminary orders were put in for tooling
and materials. The instant surge came as something of a surprise despite all
the warnings, because despite their expertise even the most astute observers
had not seen the bill for the revolution it really was.
But the blip on the statistical reports was unmistakable. The Federal Re-
serve kept all manner of measuring criteria on the American economy, and
one of them was orders for such things as steel and machine tools. The pe-
riod during which TRA had traveled through Congress and to the White
House had seen a jump so large as to be off the graph paper. Then the gover-
nors saw a vast leap in short-term borrowing, largely from auto-related in-
dustries that had to finance their purchases from various specialty suppliers.
The rise in orders was inflationary, and inflation was already a long-standing
concern. The rise in borrowing would deplete the supply of money that
could be borrowed. That had to be stopped, and quickly. The governors de-
cided that instead of the quarter-point rise in the discount rate that they had
already approved, and word of which had already leaked, the jump would be
a full half-point, to be announced at close of business the following day.
Commander Ugaki was in the control room of his submarine, as usual chain-
smoking and drinking copious amounts of tea that occasioned hourly trips to
his cabin and its private head, not to mention hacking coughs that were ex-
acerbated by the dehumidified air (kept unusually dry to protect onboard